Veuxdo

They're all crossed wires.

Friendly reminder that computers are for computing, not advice.

> and no, a $5,000 MacBook Pro is not attainable

In many professions, $5000 for tools is almost nothing.

> They are also experimenting with synthetic data, but this approach has its limitations.

I was really looking forward to using "synthetic data" euphemistically during debates.

You can still sign and notarize your .dmg without distributing it via the app store. Users who download from your website won't see the "unknown developer" warning as long as you do that.

Your second point about your target market is much more salient. Tough call.

What benefit do you hope to realize from distributing via the App Store? They aren't going to handle payments for you. They won't market your app for you.

Author here.

I don't expect you'd see a difference. For the simple case of iterating on a diagram you describe to ChatGPT, 4o is perfectly fine as-is. I can't see how you'd meaningfully improve on it.

However, for the advanced case of generating a diagram from a repo, AI isn't even close. You'd need practically unthinkable improvement for it to be useable.

The consequence, unfortunately, is incremental gains won't help in either case.

Programs that produce diagrams should be (and are) written in a programming language. They accept input, execute, and produce output. Diagrams themselves do not execute and have state (unless they are interactive[0]). There's a difference.

[0] https://app.ilograph.com

Yeah, just about every diagram you see online commits these sins. Probably because companies that create detailed diagrams don't make them public. What's left is mostly diagrams by tech companies (e.g. cloud providers) created specifically to promote the technologies themselves.

You can do it, certainly, but it is overkill. It also limits your potential editors to people who know Python and are willing to install it on their machine. In contrast to Python (or other programming languages), a language like YAML or JSON can be learned in minutes by just about anyone.

> It will be saved as web_service.png on your working directory.

Nice and simple, but unfortunately you lose all accessibility with a .png diagram. Specifically, they're impenetrable to screen readers.

I'm biased, but I think it's a bad decision. Programming languages are for writing, well, programs. Programs execute, accept input, have state, and all manner of other things that just don't apply to diagrams. Diagramming in a programming language is just weird.

Previous discussions:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32652291

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34064921

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39805529

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36224084

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42033790

Edit: looks like submitter is spamming https://news.ycombinator.com/newest with old submissions

Is the name for this kind SEO practice, where a company creates a new domain for a strictly "informational" page like this?

Sometimes. In the face of entrenched competition, you can't be just a little bit better. You have to be a lot better. And in a way that said competition can't easily match (or exceed).

> To address this problem, we built decisioning models that take into account 100’s of datapoints, such as customer and payment metadata as well as internal classifiers of error codes and messages. The models determine the optimal time to retry a payment with current or backup payment methods and when to communicate with a customer.

All well and good, but doesn't Stripe have much, much more data on this? Once they start doing all of the above (assuming they don't already), their data will give them a gigantic advantage. And that's only on top of being built-in.

Feels like automated title moderation.

> Do you post your blog on social media to be found and shared?

It wouldn't do you any good. Social media sites will kill your post if it has a link in it. They don't want you leaving.

> More users online than ever, and able to get their attention too.

Not really. There are some people walking around with giant teddy bears[0], but that is entirely for show.

[0]https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

> On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day.

If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.

Everyone has to worry about being downranked to oblivion, which is the new normal on most SM sites.

I thought fragrances in perfumes couldn't be trademarked because they were functional. But you could trademark fragrances as a nonfunctional component of a product (e.g. Play-doh).

> In fact, they'd likely pay more because then they could reduce investment in detecting bots.

A lot more. Preventing bots from eating up your entire digital advertising budget takes a lot of time and money.

I can all but promise you these "headwinds" that they are facing in terms of negative PR are in fact a net positive. At their stage, any press is good press.

Trademark, but yeah, that was my understanding as well.

I think as a general rule, any shiny new market strategy will perform worse in year 10 than it will in year 1. Law of diminished returns and all. And that's before factoring in any platform enshittification.

> I turn off personalisation wherever possible

Think about it: if the ad auction house knows nothing about you, then you'd expect to only get least-common-denominator ads. Everyone has a butt, after all.

This might be a fine solution for individuals, but of course won't help the ads/publishing industry recover from its current death spiral.

Thanks for the kind words! I appreciate the feedback and understand where you're coming from.

"DLS-based diagramming tools like Terrastruct, mermaid, or graphviz definitely have their perks and are very well established for manual graph curation. But I found the lack of programmatic a bit of a pain point."

Hi, creator of Ilograph[0] here. I agree with this if the DSL doesn't provide an IDE with autocomplete and instant-rendering (which I think applies to the technologies you mentioned).

With auto-complete and instant-rendering, I think a DSL is much preferable to Python (the most common "diagrams-as-code" language). Python is a programming language for writing, well, programs. It feels like complete overkill for creating static diagrams.

[0] https://www.ilograph.com

> Secondly, I get tired just thinking of the process of figuring out how to pay someone somewhere money.

An invoice?