rewgs

Immich is the best self-hosted app I use. Hats off to the developers!

Do tell! Specifically the DAW latency problems. I love the idea of running a DAW in a VM on Proxmox.

GP clearly isn’t talking about 60 year olds who were full stack devs and get on Hacker News.

Yup. For a while I was switching between all three to see which I liked most, and I always end up coming back to Wezterm. The only issue I’ve encountered is that releases on various package managers are routinely broken, but building from source solved that.

Considering we can't even get corporations and the ultra wealthy to pay even _close_ to their fair share of taxes, forgive me if I'm a little skeptical of the idea that a utopia, should it come to pass, will be evenly distributed.

Right there with you. I regularly use Claude for all sorts of tasks, but I am extremely against letting it write loads of code _for_ me. And like you, I find prompting to be a pretty unenjoyable activity, regardless of the task at hand.

AI is _certainly_ not useless and definitely not bad, far from it, but if I could snap my fingers and make it disappear, I'd do so in a heartbeat.

Writing code is my favorite thing to do. Digging into a problem and getting into the flow is my favorite thing ever, and it seems that the world is completely hell-bent on taking this away from me.

I can already hear all the usual responses: "but you can still write code in your spare time," "you were never paid to type anyway," etc etc etc. That's all true, but it doesn't change the fact that writing code in your spare time and being paid to write code for the plurality or even majority of your waking hours are two completely different ways of life. And yeah, there's a lot more to being a software developer than just typing, but the quality of the time spent has completely and utterly changed. It's quickly becoming unrecognizable compare to even just a few short years ago.

I am of the belief that how you spend your days is how you spend your life, and given that so many of our days are now spent doing completely different activities, with a completely different, much "louder" quality to them (I find prompting to be almost _socially_ exhausting, and hate that it more or less completely destroys the ability for oneself to enter a flow state), I think it's completely fair to say that AI has radically changed, or perhaps even ruined, our lives, or at least our livelihoods.

And in my specific case, I already completely changed careers once. Long story short, I was a lifelong musician and well on my way to becoming a successful film/TV/video game composer before I developed hyperacusis. Going through that was horrific. I consider myself extremely lucky to have found a vocation and avocation in programming that, against all odds, I love even _more_ than making music. And once again, I feel that I might just have to change careers. Again.

So yeah. I'm not naive enough to think that it's going to go away. But my life and work were 100% better before it, no question.

There's too much to memorize, and the standards are too varied. When I go to a project site for maintenance and it's a C++ project, I instantly lose energy — because it's just too difficult.

I've been feeling this way about web dev for a while now, and sometimes look at C++ devs with jealousy, wishing that the crazy amount of memorization/varied standards/rough maintenance/high difficulty I experience were only limited to the language that I write.

Perhaps this will end up being the mythical MacBook-like hardware that I can install Linux on (Asahi notwithstanding).

Err, nope, it is 100% Cross Desktop Group: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/

That said, you are correct that it has nothing to do with Windows (and I never said that it did).

I have a Mac, not an XDG desktop. I would only expect and want X applications I run through Xquartz (all zero of them) to follow that.

XDG has nothing to do with X11. XDG stands for "Cross-Desktop Group," and is designed specifically for any Unix or Unix-like operating system, which includes macOS.

"gen 2x2" is Microsoft level bad naming.

Is there a right kind of anthill to sit on?

I'm a lifelong musician, went to music school to study jazz and orchestration, was a professional film composer for 15 years prior to pivoting to programming. I've read quite a few books on the intersection of math and music.

And not once have I ever felt that these so-called intersections were anything other than contrived.

Of course we can interface with music from a mathematical perspective, but that doesn't mean that we should or that there's anything particularly illuminating to gleen from doing so.

Beyond the very basic math (honestly even that's perhaps too strong a word -- just because something is expressed in numbers doesn't make it _math_) of time signatures and some harmonic concepts up to maybe some of Slonimsky's work, doing so is IMO a fool's errand that exists only to fill space on a TEDx stage.

Holy shit, a wild Everett Bogue sighting. I read your blog way back. Hope you’re doing well!

But here's the thing: learning Android dev is nothing like "learning" to use an LLM.

Obviously there are tons of tools and systems building up around LLMs, and I don't intend to minimize that, but at the end of the day, an LLM is more analogous to a tool such as an IDE than a programming language. And I've never seen a job posting that dictated one must have X number of years in Y IDE; if they exist, they're rare, and it's hardly a massive hill to climb.

Sure, there's a continuum with regards to the difficulty of picking up a tool, e.g. learning a new editor is probably easier than learning, say, git. But learning git still has nothing on learning a whole tech stack.

I was very against LLM-assisted programming, but over time my position has softened, and Claude Code has become a regular part of my workflow. I've begun expanding out into the ancilary tools that interact with LLMs, and it's...not at all difficult to pick up. It's nothing like, say, learning iOS development. It's more like learning how to configure Neovim.

In fact, isn't this precisely one of the primary value propositions of LLMs -- that non-technical people can pick up these tools with ease and start doing technical work that they don't understand? If non-technical folks can pick up Claude Code, why would it be even _kind_ of difficult for a developer to?

So, I'm with the post author here: what is there to get left behind _from_?

PCIe cards would indeed be useless for AI unless Apple supports third-party GPUs, but there are certainly some pro creators that would still prefer to have them. I myself work in large-template film/game scoring and while we all love our Mac Studios, they're usually housed in a Sonnet chassis so that we can continue to use PCIe cards. Had Apple kept them in parity with the Studio w/r/t CPU and RAM, the rack-mount version of the Pro would've been a no-brainer.

My theory is that they're going to release a new Mac Pro that's about half the size of the current one. Enough space for some PCIe slots, but otherwise smaller given the enormous amount of wasted space in that thing since moving from Intel to Apple Silicon. Guessing the rack-mount model, should they continue selling it, will be 3 or 4u instead of 5u.

I know everyone thinks they're going to just kill it, but I don't see it. Apple's move under Tim Cook has been to exhaust supplies (see: filling the Intel Mac Pro chassis with air and not updating the CPU), letting people predict its death (see: 2013 -> 2019 Mac Pro silence), and then redesigning it into something people want while utilizing it as an opportunity to segment specs across their SKUs.

The Studio will remain the high-powered creator machine, whereas the Mac Pro will be retooled into an AI beast.

I'm selling one! Email in profile, get in touch.

The article specifically talks about B2B and MDM-like features. The "average consumer" isn't the point here -- rather, governments, defense, high-security corporations, etc.

I always try and keep in mind that we typically think of software as having three versions -- alpha, beta, and release -- but for it's considered even kind of "finished."

In my own work, this often looks like writing the quick and dirty version (alpha), then polishing it (beta), then rewrite it from scratch with all the knowledge you gained along the way.

The trick is to not get caught up on the beta. It's all too tempting to chase perfection too early.

I'm sorry to burst your bubble but it absolutely is. The pro-Suno vs anti-Suno discussions are just as heated as those in programming.

I'm so tired of this kind of design -- that basic dev tool splash page/Tailwind-y/Shadcdn UI thing that's just seemingly everywhere nowadays. It's so basic and tired, like Material Design without any of the little bits of personality that make it decent.

Give me some life and color and personality, damn it.

We are very similar, you and I, and I'm completely with you on all of this.

I don't see enough people talking about this side of things. Couldn't agree more.

Fully disagree. First, I question the value of something merely enduring. But that aside, implicit in what you're saying here is that the "skill of the swing," so to speak, doesn't matter, whereas only the quantity of swings is what matters. Baseball players clearly negate this.

Yup. "The downfall of society begins with the individual."

https://x.com/lillybilly299/status/1865133434839990601

I'm with you. I've said it before, but: LLMs have made clear who does things for the process, and who does things for the result (obviously this is a spectrum, hardly anyone is 100% on either end).

The amount of people who apparently just want the end result and don't care about the process at all has really surprised me. And it makes me unfathomably sad, because (extremely long story short) a lot of my growth in life can be summed up as "learning to love the process" -- staying present, caring about the details, enjoying the journey, etc. I'm convinced that all that is essential to truly loving one's own life, and it hurts and scares me to both know just how common the opposite mindset is and to feel pressured to let go of such a huge part of my identity and dare-I-say soul just to remain "competitive."

Oops, thought it was public but I guess it wasn't. Now it is!

I'm a former film/game composer turned programmer, and you basically just outlined what I hope to be my life's work :p Each and every one of these is a white whale for me, and is something I'm working on in one way or another.

Get in touch if you'd like to chat more about this stuff (my email is in my profile).

I'm back in the midwest visiting my family for the holidays and you couldn't be more right.

It's shocking how quickly my family normalized consuming obvious AI slop short-form videos, one after the other, for hours. It's horrifying.