Megranium

Funny that you mention SimCity ... I used to play it (mostly the Nintendo SuperNES/SuperFamicom versions) and nuclear power plants would invariably explode at some point. I guess few people talked about climate change back then because the only drawback to the other power plant types was space usage ... reflecting on it, interesting how the assumptions formed the game ...

I guess one resolution would be to distinguish between code and product. The code, as in the material, was always malleable. In some languages you can even change it while it's running.

The product, on the other hand, was not, and that changed with LLMs quite a bit. But the code is not the product.

EDIT: You could even argue, the code itself becomes less malleable, in the clay sense, with LLMs because now you really NEED a tool to make changes, and changing the code by hand becomes much harder. So LLMs shift the malleability from code to product.

I guess then it's based on a personal feeling towards code. To me, even when my skill was more limited, code as a material still felt much more malleable than anything else. If you had asked me, I'd always have compared code to clay, or pencil on paper, rather than wood, stone, or ink.

Also, then, the comparison greatly underestimates clay. Sure, everyone can put a dent in a slab of clay but modifying things controlled takes time, skill and patience, a precise application of force that can easily go wrong so you might need to start over.

So, yeah, I guess my stance towards both code and clay is just very different ... the comparison doesn't make sense to me at all ...

Odd comparison ... code was always malleable, that's the nice thing about it, which I, as a slightly clumsy person, found the most attractive thing about coding.

You can't break anything you can't fix, and you can start out with something crappy that fulfills your needs at the moment and make it better later ... or not, if it continues to serve your purpose.

A stonemason has to buy new stones if they break something, a painter new paint, a woodworker new wood. If you build a crappy guitar you might have to buy new material, taking it apart and improving it might be tough.

With code, none of that has ever been a problem. You can start with something small, make mistakes, improve, all with the same material. You can even undo mistakes without a trace.

I'd say it's this pre-existing malleability of code that enabled LLM-based coding in the first place.

I thought so too but then I discovered the BOSL2 library and all kinds of others ... makes cubes with round edges so much easier :)

https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2/wiki/Tutorial-Rounding_t...

Huh, I've always understood that quote very differently, with emphasis on "premature" ... not as in, "don't optimize" but more as in "don't optimize before you've understood the problem" ... or, as a CS professor of mine said "Make it work first, THEN make it work fast" ...

I guess it's exactly the opposite for me ... I always hated using "normal" language with the computer.

I often quip that I became a programmer specifically to avoid having to use spoken language. I always twitch at the thought of using any voice-based assistant.

Thinking in systems and algorithms is more enjoyable than using human language when it comes to computers IMHO ...

I don't really have nostalgia for that, I prefer the immediacy honestly.

Nowadays people are captured by music differently, as they were captured by music differently before music could be mechanically or digitally reproduced.

Oh I do remember Napster, but that was way after 1993 as well ;)

Either way, that still took ages to download, etc, so, it was less immediate. And somehow, I remember it more as a source for stuff that's already well-known ...

Never was too much into LAN parties though ...

I honestly don't share the nostalgia.

I enjoy having a computer that allows me to create all kinds of things that weren't possible in 1993 ... mash together all kinds of audio, video, text ... put it in a backpack, bring it somewhere, perform on stage, with an 800$ laptop. Amazing.

I'm one of those "Encarta kids" who dug through Encarta for nights on end while the parents were out, and still spend slow Sundays reading random Wikipedia articles.

Having the archives that have been created since 1993, whether Wikipedia, Youtube (to me still one of the most amazing music discovery tools I've ever encountered), Archive.org, Google Scholar, Zenodo, at my fingertips has probably widened my personal horizon beyond imagination. Not sure who I'd be without it.

So even sadder to see it all drown now in AI slop ...

I'm always amazed how Youtube can be so many different things for different people ... It's true that it used to be better a few years back, but people still upload great content even it it's harder to find nowadays.

Also, music ... back in the 90ies, if you were drawn to the obscure side of music, you'd read about it, and could, at best, imagine what it was like, because your local record store didn't have it, the bigger store the next town over didn't have it, and IF anyone could order it was with a non-refundable down payment.

Nowadays, you can probably find it on YT, and that's great IMHO. I my musical horizon would be so much more limited without it.

Also I've learned a lot about guitar repair ...

I've carried my laptop around in so many different bags over the years ... sling bags, tote bags, waterproof messenger backpacks, IKEA backpacks with laptop sleeve compartment, drawstring bags. I usually pick the bag depending on the occasion ...

bike ride in the rain? -> waterproof messenger backpack

downtown stroll to satisfy my inner hipster? -> tote bag etc ...

All I know is that I'm a "single compartment" person ... I've always found that having a separate compartment for everything just comes at excess weight and loss of flexibility.

I'd give the movie prop a try for sure. Still looking for a decent source of Tyvek to take an attempt at making my own bag (it's not super commonly used where I live).

I wouldn't agree with this all-or-nothing view that ignores public transport. Yes, plenty of people want to live in the city, so it's dense, but if you live a bit outside, you can hop on a local train and be in the city in 30 minutes.

Also, Paris is an extreme example. There's plenty of mid-sized cities (400k to 1 million or so) in Europe and presumably elsewhere where you can live in a quiet space, maybe even have access to a garden, and hop on the tram or your bike, and be downtown in 20 minutes, without parking lots.

So, you can definitely have both. These places exist.

Just so I can choose and compare as a consumer, so I can filter just as I can filter by genre.

I really hope we'll get around to make it mandatory to watermark AI-generated content in a way that makes it easy to filter out ...

Heh, I'd just call it practicing ... I mean, it's pretty much a very common way to practice for every serious musician I know (apart from practicing in a group setting, of course).

Unrelated to the topic content-wise, but what's the link format? Like, with the object identifier ...

It might also have to do with how programming was taught to a certain generation? At least from my own experience, when I was at university OOP and UML was all the rage, so we had to specify through diagrams in fancy diagram editors, then generate the code from that, and then still re-write everything by hand because it never really worked out quite that well.

I never touched UML again after university ...

I guess it was at a time when computers weren't ubiquitous as they're today, and an average non-technical person might have never touched one.

In that days, designing on paper was probably just the default mode of working ...

I'd say not all guys enjoy the kind of "guy talk" you're describing ... maybe it's harmless in your experience but it can be quite aggressive, or perceived as such, even if you're not emotionally bothered by it.

It's especially terrible if you have to go along in the workplace because you're talking to your boss and are expected to laugh about his (potentially charged) "funny quips" because "guy talk", amirite? Ugh ..

Hmm in German you could also say "Betriebssicherheit" (safety) vs. "Angriffssicherheit" (security), or at least that always was the translation that made most sense to me personally.

I'd say native speakers of German distinguish it but it depends on the context ... talking about computers, it's typically more about security, while when talking about construction sites, it's typically more about safety.

Hehe totally, even though it's a bit overwhelming ... I've been active in live coding scene for years now (and my little language is on that list), yet I still don't know all of these ...

But I guess there's something for every language and skill level there ...

The Rust audio environment might need help, if you're into that:

https://rust.audio/

Maybe this might be worth a look, too:

https://plugdata.org/

It's a recent attempt to make Pure Data more accessible for less technically inclined users.

And, in passing, basically spearheaded and popularized (amongst others) an entire culture around coding live on stage.

One of the key aspects of the live coding scene was, and still is to a certain degree, to provide a contrast to this kind of perfectionism. To allow people to experiment, and allow or even encourage them to fail, live on stage, rather than playing it safe.

It recently has changed a little with the advancement of more stable and mature live coding systems (there's plenty, really ... even my own is pretty stable by now) and more formats addressing a more general audience.

Personally, though, I'll forever cheer harder for a person hacking together a sampler in plain C in 9 minutes than a "stable" performance.

I'd find it sad to see the live coding scene totally going down the Apple road, from a vibrant, proudly amateurish scene to one that is "professionalized", stable, but profoundly bland.

Well, to do my part in scaring potential expats away, air pollution and noise pollution (it's LOUD) are pretty bad here and you might find lead pipes and asbestos in your building. If you live in a bajo (ground floor) in the old town, expect cockroaches the size of mice (they are quick). Depending on where you are, the tap water tastes like the water from a children's swimming pool. Depending on where you live, your barrio might smell like a sewer on certain days (even the expensive ones). Population density is very high, so expect to hear a part of your neighbors' lives, walls are often thin.

Never seen shirtless guys with machetes anywhere, day or night. Crime (apart from pickpocketing) never struck me as a huge problem (not above general big-city levels), neither pre- nor post-Covid, and I don't live in the best part of town for sure. But all the stuff above I personally experienced.

Hmm I don't agree, really, and I live in BCN, for 5 years now. People living here twice as long tell me how bad it was in the early 2000s, and it's nowhere like that today.

There's pickpocketing, sure, but it's not at all the hellhole you describe, seriously. Not sure where you got that from.

It doesn't feel "right", there's resolution issues, and I never got real-time, low-latency sound running in any VM ... so, I'd say yes, by all means.

Well I use Comic Mono as my terminal and code font, even for live coding performances in front of an audience ...

I know that it's controversial, but I really feel using Comic Mono for coding reduces cognitive strain ... I've been using it as my main coding font for a while now.