srhtftw

Approaching an AI version of https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Shoe_Event_Horizon

All I want from a phone is to make and receive phone calls from people I know. I don't want texting. I don't want photos. I don't want apps. I have a dumb Consumer Cellular Link II burner phone if I need to receive an SMS.

I had high hopes for the PinePhone but the one I got can't even reliably make or receive calls so it sits in my desk drawer.

Will someone please sell me a simple phone that works without any smart crap?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

For me use or mention of AI is a signal the manufacturer either doesn't care about quality or doesn't know or care that it's no longer special. It's plastic.

So many "best practices" are truly repugnant like ...list of things

I have my own love/hate relationship with many of the things you list and I currently share many of your preferences. However I didn't always see things that way. Best practices start as informal approaches to address the problems of the day. After achieving a modicum of success they'll get enshrined by others as languages, features and cultural artifacts giving rise to new problems.

I find the broad tendency of unthinking "best practicification" more troubling than any particular "best practice".

Take OOP as an example. Stroustrup's early C++ presentations argued OOP meant more than "slow graphics" since people at the time were struggling to build graphical user interfaces for machines without much memory. The idea of melding state and behavior made it easier at the time to build complex user interfaces with imperative languages. But OOP isn't a silver bullet. Many attempts to apply the OOP ideas to other domains met with failure.

Fortunately we now have more powerful machines and better tools available to us.

This was fun. A kind of engineering MBTI¹.

I'm +3 Abstract, +2 Human-Friendly - https://pastebin.com/Y7t4ys3J

At the end I would have liked to see how each answer contributed to the final score, perhaps plotted on the final graph.

It would also be interesting to see how many others took the test and how my answers compared to theirs.

¹- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

I prefer to believe otherwise. In the words of the Desiderata¹

You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

¹- https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html

As for me I've seen LLM based AI produce bland summaries¹ for a few years. Occasionally they generate something funny². But they cannot yet write anything I would spend my time or money to read.

I'm still needed here, annoyingly.

Indeed you are. Indeed you are.

¹- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34647947

²- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168595

I use SourceHut¹ to serve git for a few private projects.

I wanted to use their pages service as well to serve an SPA but their https://srht.site/limitations prevent SPAs from contacting external services I need. I get why they do that but I need my SPA to let users login to their databases and there's simply no way to do that while adhering to SourceHut's policy.

Fortunately pico.sh², codeberg³ and GitLab⁴ (not GitHub) don't have that restriction. I experimented with each of them last year. All of them worked reasonably well. Eventually I settled on GitLab which had the nicest CI/CD of the three at the time.

¹- https://sr.ht

²- https://pico.sh

³- https://codeberg.org

⁴- https://gitlab.com

Many will cheer the likely disappearance of political fundraising texts and robocalls around election season. But not all “unknown sender” messages are created equal.

Sorry but I do not pay for cellular service in order to receive unsolicited texts.

My daily driver is a dumb Consumer Cellular Link II (which uses a castrated Android under the covers). It's turned off most of the time. I don't use or want apps on it. My laptop satisfies those needs. My texting is limited to rendezvous with my family. A silent ringtone effectively blocks all unknown callers but I can't easily block unknown texts.

Apple is doing the right thing here if this feature works as described. Although I won't be switching any smartphone, I would immediately upgrade to a dumb phone that segregated texts this way and I hope to have that option in the future.

I do not know you, nor did I know your uncle. Nevertheless he was an influence on you and I'm sorry for your loss. May you walk in his light.

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2012...

Kagi makes me want to learn Crystal¹

¹ https://crystal-lang.org

Yes this shift to React is really annoying. Github also stopped working on older browsers.

My leisure laptop is an older macbook with firefox 78.15.0esr and a little over a year ago I stopped being able to view github files and issue discussions with it. I can still view READMEs most of the time but now I have to use chromium or another computer to actually read code without cloning the repo.

I know they could easily generate JS for older browsers if they cared to set the esbuild target.

For what it's worth the Tree component¹ of Palantir's blueprint.js React library was useful to me.

¹ https://blueprintjs.com/docs/#core/components/tree

  Seek patience and passion in equal amounts.
  Patience alone will not build the temple.
  Passion alone will destroy its walls.

  - Maya Angelou

I want to like zed. I keep trying it. ... Ultimately though none of the rendering speed improvements or collaboration ideas make a difference to me.

I feel this way as well. I've tried to incorporate Zed into my workflow a few times but I keep getting blocked by 30 years of experience with Emacs. E.g. I need C-x 2 to split my window. I need C-x C-b to show me all my buffers. I need a dired mode that can behave like any ordinary buffer. Etc. etc.

Sadly the list is quite long and while Zed offers many nice things, none are as essential to me as these.

It took a few days to produce this library -- it would almost certainly have taken me weeks to write it myself.

As mentioned in another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44162965 I think this "few days" is unrealistic given the commit history. I think it would be more accurate to say it allowed you to do something in under one month that may have have taken two. A definite improvement, but not a reduction of weeks to days.

Or is that history inaccurate?

Many tools make lesser developers more productive (to a point) but they fail to improve the productivity of talented professionals. Lots of "no/low" code things come to mind. But here's a tool that made kentonv 2x productive at a task that's clearly in his wheelhouse. It seems under the right conditions it can improve the productivity of developers at the opposite end of the spectrum.

What other tools could do that?

It took me a few days to build the library with AI. ... I estimate it would have taken a few weeks, maybe months to write by hand.

I don't think this is a fair assessment give the summary of the commit history https://pastebin.com/bG0j2ube shows your work started on 2025-02-27 and started trailing off at 2025-03-20 as others joined in. Minor changes continue to present.

That said, this is a pretty ideal use case: implementing a well-known standard on a well-known platform with a clear API spec.

Still, this allowed you to complete in a month what may have taken two. That's a remarkable feat considering the time and value of someone of your caliber.

If we're going to have laws like these, then people who publish their content should have all the rights and responsibilities big players do. Everyone's content should be protected by laws, DRM and encryption.

Organizations profiting from theft and exploitation should be prosecuted as the pirates and criminals they are. If they want to profit from content, let them license it and pay with real money instead of likes and upvotes.

People need to stop impoverishing themselves and their communities by giving away all their personal details. They need to stop giving away what is precious to them to the likes of google, meta and X. If that means a decline of media subsidized by advertising and AI, so be it.

So I hope your prediction is correct. I would love to see stupid laws like these lead us to a world of small community networks protected by encryption and rights laws.

This post’s title is a little cheeky. Brian Eno does not have an explicit theory of democracy that I know of, although he is visibly and emphatically committed to its practice. But Eno’s arguments about the arts tell us important things about how democracy ought work, and what kinds of democratic stability and variety we ought aspire to.

So... clickbait.

My "daily driver" is a dumb Consumer Cellular Link II.

SMS based services are useful to me when traveling without my laptop.

I guess what you are saying is the problem is the company culture ... sucks.

I believe the problem is the way devops is often practiced. I've worked as a developer, a manager and an operator and I've occasionally carried a pager. I think there is value in rotating between those roles at different times since it enables engineers to gain knowledge and insight they often won't get any other way. But assigning engineers to after-hours on-call duties when they're simultaneously responsible for product development "because they built the system" is just a stupid unethical and unsustainable practice that needs to end.

Good companies hire and train engineers to develop, manage and operate systems sustainably.

I believe that too is as the author wrote – like a disheartening number of things in the tech industry, there are no real standards around what on-call responsibilities look like. Each organization is free to set things up in whichever way suits their tastes, and the resulting practices vary widely as a result.

This sounds like a healthy arrangement. Compensate fairly for overtime and those who want it will take it.

This is an excellent article. I've commented before¹ why "on-call" as described is bad because it conflates roles and responsibilities and robs developers of resources, but this goes quite a bit further and explains why it's a bad practice that eventually leads to burnout.

With the exception of companies like PagerDuty, the sooner this practice is ended the better off we'll be.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43400898

Why are you getting paged? Because you built the system.

There are at least two problems with this thinking. The main problem is it's not generally true. The system is created by the entire organization. The people who raise money and allocate capital, the people who set development policies and priorities, the people who design and assemble the components, the people who sell it to customers and negotiate service levels and the people who operate and maintain it all collectively built the system.

Another problem is that it encourages moral hazards. Not paying fair on-call compensation allows unethical managers and sales staff to reap short-term rewards and bonuses by oversubscribing customers, promising more than can be delivered and rushing things to market before they're ready.

If you want happy employees, treat them fairly.

being oncall forces the quality of software to improve.

Only when it's the managers that are on call.

A mere listing of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions, is uncopyrightable.

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf

... aa recipe that creatively explains or depicts how or why to perform a particular activity may be copyrightable. A registration for a recipe may cover the written description or explanation of a process that appears in the work, as well as any photographs or illustrations that are owned by the applicant. However, the registration will not cover the list of ingredients that appear in each recipe, the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting dish itself.

Although I'm not a fauna user, I like studying databases and query languages. I've followed them since Jepsen¹ reviewed FaunaDB 2.5.4 back in 2019.

While their FQL looks useful, I can't imagine using a SaaS-only proprietary query language in this age for anything other than a research proof-of-concept to learn more about my problem before building a real product on an open platform.

Curious that Bob Muglia (ex Snowflake) is on their board. I believe he's also on the board of Relational AI which is another SaaS with an interesting but proprietary query language. Snowflake is a huge success in spite of being proprietary because its SQL isn't hard to learn or use, but I can't say the same about rAI. Makes me wonder how they will turn out.

¹ https://jepsen.io/analyses/faunadb-2.5.4