Fr0styMatt88

We aren’t even being given a choice nor being consulted for our judgement.

Higher-ups are literally saying “This company WILL use AI, you are required to use AI, now go use it whether you want to or not”.

I wonder if this will change now with the model cost explosions that are happening.

I generally agree with you, except for one thing.

Sure, users don’t care if the code is a mess. At least at first. I mean, they can’t know.

But they DO care when the same bugs exist for years, when new features dry up, when it drains their battery, etc. When technical debt becomes due, users notice in other ways.

Now, whether they care enough or just don’t have a choice is another matter.

So I’m wondering what ‘rasterizing’ literally means in this case. I imagine it’s just creating a 2D map of elements at a very low (probably character) resolution, then diffing that against the last generated map to come up with an optimal ANSI sequence to send to the terminal, would that be right?

Seems like a cool puzzle to solve. I wonder what the engineering and organisation tradeoffs were that lead to it — does it let them reuse a bunch of existing code?

I wrote a TUI library back in the day for Turbo Pascal — it was essentially taking an immediate-mode approach (which in this context is just a fancy way of saying it was procedural haha).

Also fun, Google purchased movies over the years getting moved to Youtube and then seemingly losing all surround sound content and coming through as 2-channel only (Android TV).

Had a few eye surgeries (vitrectomies) under sedation, no pain but lots of flashing lights and lots of kaleidoscope patterns. It was pretty wild.

I was lucky that coming out of sedation was actually fantastic, like the only time I can remember feeling that blissfully relaxed was in maybe a few beach holidays I went on as a kid.

General anaesthetic scares me way more.

I actually think it would have done well if it was just like those button boxes / Stream Deck / etc. Like a row of transparent function keys with screens, but then that would have been a flexibility tradeoff.

Even at the time I remember it was widely cited that the SIM eject tool was a test for their new manufacturing process.

What I’m curious about is what lead to larks ‘winning’ in the sense that there’s this massive prejudice against night owls.

Though I have heard that there are natural biological functions that depend on the sun such that night owls who are sleeping their natural pattern are STILL predisposed more towards certain physical/mental conditions. Though who knows?

I _wish_ I could nap after hearing all the benefits, but for me it’s either doze off for five minutes and wake up feeling blah, or lie there for 10 minutes, MAYBE go to sleep for a bit and wake up feeling horrible.

If I have light to anchor my circadian rhythm, I’m happiest waking up around 5:30-6:00 and going straight through, starting to wind down at 8:30.

If I sleep later, I’ll end up shifting more towards naturally waking up around 10:30, going to bed at 11:30 PM and generally feeling not terrible but not great and slightly tired during the entire day.

Luckily the light can be artificial that wakes me up — I use smart bulbs as an alarm.

Have you tried the screen zoom in accessibility settings? The responsiveness is great with the trackpad gestures.

From a quick Google that kinda makes sense, it’s just the strong, _sustained_ power draw that gives them issues. So I’d say fundamental AND inverter design — imagine pushing 2kW continuously through an inverter.

It’s funny, power use can be really unintuitive. Try convincing someone that using the big air conditioner for heating is more efficient than using that little plug-in bar heater. Or yeah, a power board with 8 tiny wattage wall-warts isn’t using a lot of power.

I could probably run my big fridge overnight off my portable battery generator, but it wouldn’t run my small electric kettle without putting it into a special mode and for nowhere near as long.

Yeah it’s when you go off the happy path that it gets difficult. Like there’s a weird behaviour in your vibe-coded app that you don’t quite know how to describe succinctly and you end up in some back-and-forth.

But man AI is phenomenal for getting stuff out of your head and working quick.

I feel the exact same way about tutorials in games that try and be comprehensive and show you everything.

Incremental games do an amazing job at this (things like Universal Paperclips, A Dark Room, etc); parts of the game are revealed to you as you need them and it's often a fun surprise. I don't think the same thing is directly applicable to productivity apps, but I wonder if something could be taken from the pattern.

This is timely -- I'm coding an app at the moment and had the fleeting thought that "hey I should do a new user onboarding tour thingy" and then remembered that in general I skip them, so I havne't made one :)

Thank you, I was starting to wonder.

I guess because I’m in game dev maybe, but in all my jobs knowing about the underlying stack has either been necessary knowledge or highly regarded.

I can’t think of any time in my career where knowing about the internals of the stack was ever frowned upon or where it’s been anything other than an advantage (especially when hunting bugs). I must have been lucky.

How did it get in? Isn’t Linus known for being rightfully fussy about what makes it into the kernel?

Would be an interesting story.

hahaha took me a bit to get what you meant.... Yep I've been reading LLM output a lot lately lol

I feel like it’s something more fundamental and broad than that. We slowly remove excuses to talk to other people.

The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker.

It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing?

The thing that gets me is, we are meant to fundamentally be social creatures, yet we have come to streamline away socialisation any chance we get.

I’m guilty of this too — I much prefer Doordash to having to call up the restaurant like in the old days, for example.

It’s really really inconsistent. Sometimes select all is available, sometimes not. Sometimes the handles don’t work. Selecting text in a scrollable region is fiddly, etc.

I’ve seen an insane drop in the quality of swipe typing recently as well. To the point where I’ll often go back to regular typing. I’ve made maybe six or more corrections just to this paragraph alone.

Will drop this here in case you’re not aware of it (but I’m guessing you probably are), sorry if a bit off-topic.

I’m low-vision and made great use of Microsoft Soundscape until it got discontinued. I’d been waiting for an alternative for ages and didn’t realise one actually got released and is on the app store!

VoiceVista:

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/voicevista/id6450388413

I mean I would hope at least one person actually reviews the code before it goes out, but yeah we all know what hope does :)

This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is hardware might start producing better software.

There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.

Curious as an outsider what you mean with US politics? Seems like Apple has a pretty strong stance when it comes to things like privacy that pushes back on some things (that could be smoke and mirrors though I guess).

For me at least I always remember it being referred to as 16-bit, in all the gaming and computer magazines etc. Part of the 16-bit home computers; I remember the Atari ST being referred to that way as well.

I don’t remember seeing references to 32-bit until the 386/486 days on the home computer side and Sega 32X on the console side.

How does it compare to Blender’s VSE? I’ve used both for different tiny projects but I’m interested to hear from anyone using them more in-depth.

I’m thinking there’s probably degrees to it. Like there is some stuff I absolutely want to hand craft, but then other stuff I don’t mind so much.

One of the interesting discussions at work (I’m in gamedev) has been about tooling and where AI fits in there.

Previously you’d spend sometimes significant time writing a tool, then polishing it up and giving it to the team (think things like editor extensions that make your workflow easier).

But AI can make this kind of bespoke tool dev so cheap now that it’s possible for every single dev to have their own tool that matches the way they work exactly. At that point, do you really need to spend the long 80% effort of polishing and getting it ready for mass consumption?

Stuff like that is interesting. I still can’t imagine never looking at the AI-generated code, but I’ve seen people take the approach of “I’m not interested in the code, only in what the thing does. If it’s wrong, I ask the agent to fix it”.

That’s pretty fair, I’m currently in the “trying to get over the feeling that it’s cheating” phase and also just haven’t formed the habit yet of reaching for AI as a tool in my toolbox; particularly in things like pre-review AI-assisted code review, which I’ve found really useful but sometimes don’t think of doing when I could.

That in itself feels like second-system syndrome but instead of playing out over a single software project it’s the large-scale version playing out over the entire industry.

Good point and I’m exactly at the same point as you with this. Working on letting go of the idea (and to be honest just the habit) that it’s somehow ‘cheating’ at the moment.

It’s so strange. I think there’s a few different groups:

- Shills or people with a financial incentive

- Software devs that either never really liked the craft to begin with or who have become jaded over time and are kind of sick of it.

- New people that are actually experiencing real, maybe over-excitement about being able to build stuff for the first time.

Forgetting the first group as that one is obvious.

I’ve encountered a heap of group 2. They’re the ones sick of learning new things, for whatever reason. Software work has become a grind for them and vibe coding is actually a relief.

Group 3 I think are mostly the non-coders who are genuinely feeling that rush of being able to will their ideas into existence on a computer. I think AI-assisted coding could actually be a great on-ramp here and we should be careful not to shit on them for it.

This is great!