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This is why developers reign supreme even in the age of AI. We'd find less ridiculous ways to implement something like this. Technical skills are still extremely inportant.

The most creative things I've done have come from stealing ideas. My longest running project has been sewing. I was tired of buying shirts and them not fitting, so I went out on a journey to reproduce a shirt I owned that fit perfectly. I designed the pattern, made the software to design the pattern, learned how to sew, and a year later I have a perfectly fitting T shirt (with my own adjustments to the original inspiration).

I made a replica of a watch that was too expensive. I made a pair of shoes because the real version was too expensive. I made illustrations based off other art.

I'm an engineer who likes art, not an artist who likes engineering. Stealing ideas, making your process efficient, and creating a great product are all what's important to me... not something like capturing my raw and original emotions in the work.

I like how this combines two kinds of creativity. One is the pure artistic aesthetic creativity of the illustrator, and the other is the engineering creativity of even thinking to hire an illustrator and building the software for it.

People think of creativity in one shape, but it comes in all shapes and sizes.

Yeah, the demos look really cool but you're thrown into them and there's nothing explained as to what you're looking at or why you should care. Funny, an article explaining something like how a camera focus works with a few illustrations would be far more useful than a fancy 3D interactive.

It turns out the more technology you throw at something does not equate to ease of learning.

Gemini already does this and I find it pointless. Little interactives seem innovative in practice but generally don't do anything useful.

Unpopular opinion, but I've used Google Workspace for years and I really like having my email via gmail. SSO and spam filtering and Google Docs. I thought about switching to Amazon Workmail but the price I pay for Workspace is worth it.

That might just be from developers getting a Figma of a FAQ section without final copy, then Meta not doing adequate QA and shipping empty FAQ sections.

The most obvious tell is the "No this. No that." copy which you find everywhere.

This feels a bit hyperbolic to me. AI seems to me to be similar in "revolutionary" terms as the web, which made information widely available for free if you had an internet connection.

Like the author says, AI does help you get there via experimentation.

I wanted to mod a Casio watch with a custom crystal and screen that had not been done before. I needed a 3D model of the crystal for prototyping.

Claude was able to get the specs mostly correct, implement it in my Claude created custom 3D modeling program, and then I was able to understand the modification process with Gemini.

All of which would have taken me months to do before AI (or LLMs for the HN intelligentsia) existed. I was able to get the project done in a few days.

Creativity is also never purely original ideas, creativity is the continuation and connection of many different ideas already existing in the world. We don't think about how we might innovate on the printing press because these aren't things we think about or interact with much in our modern society.

AI + creativity is the new moat. Creative prompting is important, too. Everything is creativity, LLMs are tools just like Flash was.

Margaret Mitchell got me to read a thousand pages of Gone With The Wind because she placed a juicy hook in the first chapter (Ashley) which gave me the motivation to read the entire book to see what happens.

Why more novels do not have central hooks I do not know. Hooks are usually what keep me reading, unless the book has some kind of reason for being interesting otherwise.

And how did we create the law against giving children crystal meth in the first place? At a certain point in time, there was no law against it.

I agree, I should be allowed to give children my amazing crystal meth, it's such an untapped market.

All those smart Stanford grads got to make the world a better place by psychologically damaging millions of children.

Mid 2000s I remember the -ify and -ly startups.

I know what all of these words mean. My point is that these are esoteric words that don't fit into the article's purpose or for the article's audience. The author would have gotten his point across far easier if he were to have first contextualized these words, or defined them himself.

Pedagogy is very important in writing. Without care for the reader, these words come off as performative.

I don't particularly disagree with what the author has written about, but the jargon and complex wording is really annoying to read.

If this were written on a single subject, like engineering philosophy, then fine. But writing a multi-subject article requires simpler language so those who may be familiar with one thing but not the other can understand everything.

I find it hard to trust the intelligence of someone who uses words like "dichotomy", "meta-cognition", and "monocausal determinism" - language like this is purely performative. Let's not be performative, who are you trying to impress with your big words?

Ah right, so it would be far better if the Ocean Cleanup did not exist, technology were to not have been tested for cleaning up ocean plastic, and people would not have known about plastic in the ocean via the Ocean Cleanup's social media?

Right, trust the experts, who appear to be more interested in their own expertise than people at least trying to do something, trying to create better technology, and trying to educate the public on plastic ocean waste.

What's the point of this article again?

Makes me even more excited for Ladybird to be released.

We're developers, we can solve our own problems.

I have a userscript to make it so every click on a YouTube video from the home page requires a 30 second wait. Dramatically decreased my mindless YouTube consumption.

You can write one for all websites to trigger a wait period if you want, or only problematic websites like Reddit or YouTube or Hacker News.

The key is to introduce friction, not to disable it entirely. We're addicts, we need to ween off it or else we go straight back to our drugs.

Axios has had this style for years and years, before ChatGPT came out.

But how can I make Gemini stop using "It's not this, it's that" every other sentence?

I like this article because it feels so pre-AI. This is what people were arguing about on HackerNews back in the day! How so very nostalgic it makes me feel.

But in response to the article: no, vanilla JS is a nightmare to keep your code organized, and battle tested frameworks do quite a good job at that. It's otherwise mostly a waste of time, or an intellectual exercise at most, to build an app with vanilla JS

I've found my reading picked dramatically since I started using LLMs for programming. Waiting for a prompt to finish is a great time to read.

If we are moved emotionally by slop, does it matter? If AI can produce something to make you think and feel, does it matter? It made you think and feel.

This is copying, not stealing. Stealing means taking someone else's ideas, not their final output.

Copying creates trends, where everything looks and feels the same. Stealing an idea and creating something of your own, AKA remixing, is a much more valuable skill.

I have been experimenting with methods of reading books and creating software for these methods.

For example, I was inspired by the activeness of typelit.io when reading - typing out an entire book helped keep my mind from wandering when reading. But typing the whole book is too tedious. I wrote a few scripts to mirror the words on an epub, which does help with focus but isn't quite good enough.

My current epub reader software I use requires you to press a button to reveal the next word. This has dramatically improved my reading comprehension, prevents inadvertent skimming, and keeps my mind from wandering.

I'm still experimenting but for those who have ADHD or are borderline ADHD, it's quite a revelation - I can finally read without my mind wandering.

If it was invariably going to be acquired, Cloudflare is certainly better than Microsoft, Anthropic, or private equity.

If you use the broswer verison of apps you can also inject custom scripts. I have one for Instagram that completely removes the recommendation feed. Works great.

I do judge people for using AI. Especially engineers.

Oh, you're not smart enough to know how to write your own code? You need your hand to be held? You need to write your little prompts because reading documentation is too hard? I'll keep my skills while your brain turns to mush.