r3trohack3r

Amazing work! This is beautiful!

My philosophy with LLMs is to try to use them to achieve levels of quality and polish that would’ve been previously unreasonable. I hope this project is a demonstration of that.

This philosophy has been growing on me - a coworker framed it as “nuance melts away with LLMs”

I recently wanted to render a 100+ page document in an interactive WYSIWYG editor using a single stroke font and join the letters to form single stroke cursive words that appeared handwritten.

The permutations of rulesets that governed connections between letters (I.e. how does t connect to c, and do you need to lift the pen to make that connection) amplified by the randomness injected into the strokes and line width/angle (handwriting doesn’t have uniform letters or lines!) would have been intractable previously.

But, with an agent harness, I could do 3 or 4 examples of what “right” looked like - give it the ability to generate and screenshot test cases to see the output of its work - and it could grind through a reasonable ruleset for about $20 in spend.

To my surprise, he wrote back in horror to say he hadn’t considered that and pulled the bill immediately. I’m proud of having done that.

Stories like this give me hope - thank you for sharing

This sounds like you’re arguing against an invented boogyman.

For me and my experience, it’s reversed. Someone says some measured statement against a piece of regulation and someone shakes out of the woodwork mumbling something about some horrific thing like slavery.

Arguments of the structure:

“Aha, so you do like regulation, therefore you must like ALL regulation”

Or

“Oh, you oppose this piece of regulation, therefore you must want lord of the flies”

Or

“You only like regulation you like” (which is effectively a tautology)

People can oppose the burden of a body of regulation without opposing a government enforcing contract law.

And when someone says “regulation is bad” - a good faith interpretation of their statement is that they mean we have a large body of bad regulation, not that we should abolish the state and devolve into trading Monero for slaves.

Many options.

Option 1: “we won’t trade humans as slaves at all costs, even if it makes us less competitive in the global market - and we don’t hold that conviction about other things”

Option 2: “We won’t trade slaves - and if we find you trading slaves we will kill you. So we don’t have to worry about competing against slaves in the global marketplace.”

Option 3: “slavery is less efficient than having the same people as market participants - so I don’t consider giving up slaves to be less competitive”

Many more options, and mixtures of any or all of them.

Pretty sure you can oppose slavery and support what GP said without significant cognitive dissonance

There is an old saying that Red Bull is a marketing company that happens to sell energy drinks

Except that’s not the argument being made or the problem being presented. The FCC does exactly what you asked by namesake, regulate communications.

That's despite concerns over thousands or even millions of satellites cluttering our planet's already extremely busy orbit and the environmentally damaging rocket launches that send them up.

The article seems to be arguing that the FCC, whose namesake is exactly what you described, should be doing the namesake of the EPA and the FAA in an attempt to stop Starlink from creating a constellation.

I know the feeling and similarly miss it

I built audile to fill the gap for myself: https://audile.blankenship.io/

It’s not perfect, but it’s still delightful for me. It randomly (Math.random on the catalog) kicks out an album from Deezer’s library.

Under Carr's leadership, Musk's rocket company has effectively been given carte blanche in its efforts to roll out its orbital Starlink broadband service to more Americans

This article is profoundly disturbing. The audacity to think the government has _allowed_ people to voluntarily purchase Internet service from a provider capable of servicing their geography. As if this is an assumption to be broken!

I’m sure glad my government has given me permission to purchase goods and services!

He then reviewed my billing history and account details, confirmed that my service address had never actually changed, and determined that nothing had been moved. As a result, he issued a full refund.

America is European

When I hear this, I think of the philosophy, system of laws, language, etc. in America - and not the percentages we get when we segregate the American population by their ancestors.

I think maybe GP means they have an account that was created in the first year of the site, not a 1 year old account

Not just experienced staff but an entire ecosystem of supporting startups, industry, talent, and infrastructure around the main fabs.

You doing okay man?

I keep my phone in lockdown mode and haven’t noticed too many problems day-to-day.

A few minor inconveniences (webGL doesn’t work, the magic automatic code from SMS keyboard integration is gone, etc.) but overall the phone is still a smart phone.

Two things can be true. The most compelling redirects refocus the conversation on another truth.

Pro tip: if you’re going to try a propoganda - don’t be so transparent on your redirect.

Also, more importantly IMO, the corpus of open source and free software leans _hard_ towards things _programmers_ find interesting/useful.

The further from “I use this everyday to program” you get - the less concentrated/competitive open source and free software solutions are.

All programmers are programmers (this is almost as close to a tautology as you can get). Finding programmers who will write programs as an unpaid hobby to improve their SDLC experience when they program is substantially easier than finding competent UI/UX/icon designers who will do the same. The ecosystem of software under their icons is entirely inaccessible to them - the source being “free” or “open” is irrelevant to them, they can’t program so they can’t modify the system in the same way a programmer can.

My spicy take on this is that the free and open source software ecosystems have failed to deliver on their goals in any meaningful way for non technical people. The world around programs has gotten _objectively worse_ for the common man while the corpus of free and open source software has grown. The world runs on OSS and yet the world’s data is all owned by SaaS companies. Everyone has lost agency over their digital lives but at least we have Automake and emacs.

I can’t say I understand this new current of culture/writing. It’s something like: get angry, turn small acts into grand acts of social defiance, and signal your social ingroup by referencing other things we are angry about.

“Do you remember that JK Rowling lady we all hate because she’s an evil witch? Haha, yeah. Anyways, I’m British and I’m going to keep writing like I’m British.”

Edit: I agree with the thesis. You have a culture; don’t filter it. Differences are beautiful. I’d rather live in a melting pot. Etc. Separately this new communication style is hard to stomach. Ive seen it growing in popularity in the U.S. - seems like there too?

You’re use of “easy” might be being biased by living at the brink after 1000s of years of technology development by our ancestors.

This is slightly different than web fiction. Text generation is arguably the cheapest and most “ready” medium for content production in the current AI wave.

You can speak a world into existence, entirely customized to you’re preferences, and interact with it.

Yeah, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you find a way to pay people a livable wage for the things you want.

Why volunteer? Why not find a way to pay someone for the value of their time at market rate and release the product of their labor under a permissive license?

Arguably, nothing the NSA was doing was illegal.

The Supreme Court disagreed; the surveillance program was illegal.

Dollar value aside, if the argument you’re making is that the land now called NYC would have equivalent or greater value if it were today as it was then - that the subway system, roads, schools, hospitals, restaurants, apartments, etc. have no increased relative value over the undeveloped land - you’re likely to be considered ignorant by most of the inhabitants of the developed world.

The last commit to wrangler was 2 hours ago?

https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-sdk/tree/main/packages...

I fired my DOCSIS provider for starlink. For many consumers the service is fungible.

Starlink shattered this monopoly in my area.

“Mam, you’re son is in a lot of trouble”

“Oh god, what did he do?!”

“He was committing open source code without a license”

I’m not sure I agree with this but maybe I just lack self awareness?

There are large portions of my codebases that are essentially extremely verbose grunt work. My UI stack, IaC YAML, thin CRUD routes, etc.

I know what the code is supposed to look like when it’s done being written, but it’s going to take me for freaking ever to type it all out.

I can just few shot it now in an hour. Plan -> feedback loop -> build -> review loop.

Does it try to do weird stuff? Yeah. And then I’m just like “that’s weird, no, the components should be broken up like XYZ” and then it’s not weird anymore. Occasionally (1% of the time) I just do a quick refactor myself instead of trying to tell the agent harness what to do.

I can get something fairly close to the ballpark of what I would have done but in like single digit percentage of the time.

And the result is that I can spit out a bunch of purpose built tools (personal tools, internal tools for teams, etc.) that I never would have been able to justify building otherwise.