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apsurd

3,161 karma · joined September 30, 2008

Los Angeles, CA

jade@nom.city

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apsurd··on LARP – Revenue infrastructure for serious founders
The moving of money across time is 100% central to money's value. Passing digital money around to cook the books is moving money... fraudulently. So yeah, they're not the same unless you're goaling on the semantic purity of the word "move".
apsurd··on How to read more books
self-evident quality
apsurd··on Parental device use and the adolescent-caregiver attachment bond
+1 as adults we intellectualize way too much what kids are reasoning… they aren’t reasoning! they aren’t fully developed. it’s literally not that deep to them.

every year that passes, the idea of the only personal time one has is in the bathroom on the toilet hits harder and harder. there’s a whole back catalog of jokes about this; hiding in the bathroom, talking extra long. yep, checks out.

apsurd··on AI changes the economics of software rewrites
this post is no good. It's a continual rehash of what's going on in the industry. That's how all social media is, it's entirely time sensitive, keep saying the the same things and be the one to say it so the discussion happens on your "content".

OP is playing the game. The post literally says "from LinkedIn" so if you look, he has 500+ connections and 1400 followers. That's not nothing. Good for him, all advice points to this new attention economy we live in.

I'm a bit aged out of all this. And I rode the 2010s wave so I can't give any advice in good conscience. I can only say that I see you and there's a whole world of silent majorities out there with no follow count and no broetry with our name on it. (search for that word in this thread, just learned it, it's great!)

apsurd··on AI changes the economics of software rewrites
I don't think that holds. Internal docs for bespoke frameworks, with examples, are effective at steering AI. The main thing is that both the API and the docs are well written. Easier said than done, but you can ask AI how to write effective documentation for AI.
apsurd··on AI changes the economics of software rewrites
again with these linkedin "articles".

    · 
every sentence stands on its own because it's the most insightful soundbite of wisdom every constructed.

    · 
Aphorisms for the collective upgrade of consciousness.

    · 
delivered one tweet at a time.

    · 
(this comment adds to the discussion ironically by demonstrating how ridiculous it is to have to derive signal from this format. Please do what you need on Linkedin but take some semblance of effort to honor this community. Or don't. sigh)
apsurd··on I think I have LLM burnout
This is valid in the other direction as well. Principle engineers, CTOs, with legitimately earned authority end up using that authority to 100x their output onto the team as if it was a Godsend unlock.

It's not. There is no one person that has universally good taste. Also, we're not in your head, no matter how much better of a coder or whatever. We're not in your head and it's all terribly painful to navigate.

apsurd··on Chatto is now open source
You're convincing me to side with this ori_b here.

I knee-jerked downvoted their initial take because it reads as ineffective. boycotts just concentrate the energy of the other side even more. If anything we need more participation across the spectrum to shape what isn't going away.

But reading the discussion, deliberate advocacy and taking a stance counts too. Um yeah, there is a problem with profiting from real-estate-go-up willful-ignorance.

apsurd··on Open Source Barware: free, local-first bar inventory software (GPLv3)
it’s easy to agree with your point on the surface, but then we’d be handwaving a lot of negative subtle signaling. I think because HN is mostly developers on the inside we have to assume that a non-Technical audience might see it differently. That is of course true but one very realistic problem I see is that a vibe coded app with made up testimonials, figures, facts pretty much made-up everything is indistinguishable from an actual company. And we put this entirely on the customer to discern. That’s a terrible precedent, no different from posting falsehood on Facebook.

edit: OK I wrote this before I even opened the page and now that I seen i the entire persona is made up. Or it’s seeded in reality and then AI fills in the 80% to round it out, except it’s on the audience to trust. Sad.

apsurd··on FAANG Simulator
from a business standpoint, PMF was never about the underlying software. It’s a developer’s wet dream to toil away in a garage toward some Technical ideal, and then have the world applaud their genius and shower them with money.

Now to be fair, there are windows of time where that really did happen for some few. As a craftsman developer, I have the same wet dream. The problem is I know it’s just a dream now that I’m older.

So what AI has done is condense the frame in which a developer can spend years toiling away in the belief that they just need to keep going. Now the feedback loop is more instantly connected to reality and the reality is most all this stuff nobody wants or needs. starting a business now is ironically about all the business bits and that’s just rather annoying for builders like the HN crowd, myself included. This is more cathartic than anything. What do I know about entrepreneurial success?

apsurd··on FAANG Simulator
it cannot be discussed or else it becomes the flow.
apsurd··on Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
i’m not the parent, but you’re using college and learning interchangeably in the discussion. Learning is indisputably causal and necessary and valuable toward a better life and better earning and employment opportunities. what’s in debate is whether college as the mechanism for learning still holds up with regard to various parameters. it’s not obvious and the problem is there’s tremendous inertia biasing the status quo.

On if college was accessible and free would that change the equation: yes of course. I’d recommend anyone go to college that can, (i didn’t) but it wouldn’t because it’s the best way to learn a topic, and id recommend it with the transparency that it won’t make or break the rest of your life and you can learn whatever you want whenever you want for the rest of your life so take the long view here.

apsurd··on Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected
Zuck is a world class operator. He’s led one of the top richest companies of all time.

I think the world is worse for it but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The list is just to refute the idea that it was one weird trick that gave him the keys to the planet.

and it’s not about him being first or coding it himself, it’s that it happened with him at the helm. that’s just how it goes.

apsurd··on Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected
also: face tagging in photos, the fb app platform and the like button pioneered concepts that we take for granted today. also, how product is done internally, growth metrics, all borne from facebook.

The like button is an ingenious and insidious invention. It compelled every other external web property to willingly load fb sdk. It’s mind blowing how effective it is.

I am morally against Facebook, but anyone that says zucky was lucky, as a tech person, likely just sour grapes.

apsurd··on Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected
corporate espionage at global scale to get ahead of existential threats is some pretty insightful leadership, it’s all a matter of what team you’re rooting for.
apsurd··on Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
the distinction is specific to the economic value calculation.

it’d be disingenuous to assume the conversation is about anything other than the economic trade off. That said, wholly agree that if school was about learning, it’s great for advancing and curating an environment for learning as its own value.

fwiw in high school, authority figures justified college as a way to counteract the failure scenario of dead-end jobs. success looked like a good paying job and opportunities to do what you’d like like vacations and raise a family. Maybe thats the right framing for the rank and file public school, but it’s why I didn’t even apply to college, let alone attend.

edit: it is objectively economically more valuable to hold a degree, the data is clear. my issue is that it’s reverse causality as is always the issue with data signals.

when you go back to the scenario of what to tell a public school kid, going to college actually works as a negative motivation tool, because the majority of kids won’t go to college so you’re basically telling them their economic value is shit before they are even grown. I don’t believe in that.

apsurd··on Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
Same experience. "Is school worth it" is divisive because it speaks to people's investment and value system. I too have a full and successful career in software without any degree largely for the same reason you mentioned: I learned the hard way and continued to show up.

Earned experience is objectively valuable. The problem is people don't want to be fools so "working hard" looks suspect when you see plenty of people do well because of network and social aspects.

When it comes to school, there's obvious value in the social/status/network aspects and debatable value in the actual content, but what I find most discussion worthy is how one's background shapes mentality toward "putting in the work" when there's no explicit reward for said work.

The simple difference is that school promises you results. One at least leaves with a paper that's supposed to be worth something. Doing anything else, provides no such guarantees.

apsurd··on Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
causality direction violation. is it because of the degree that people get jobs or is it because everybody tells everyone that they need a degree that they get a degree to permit themselves to apply to get the job?

the productive takeaway is that of course its safer to come with a degree but it’s hardly proof that one needs the degree. Nobody is going to risk their or their kids livelihood on being the variant for the a/b test though.

apsurd··on Synthesis is harder than analysis
Yes, this is documented in Bloom's Taxonomy for learning/education. Creating is the highest level of understanding.

    Remember – Recall facts, definitions, formulas (memorization).
    Understand – Explain ideas in your own words.
    Apply – Use knowledge to solve problems or perform tasks.
    Analyze – Break information into parts and identify relationships.
    Evaluate – Judge, critique, or justify decisions.
    Create – Synthesize ideas to produce something new.
apsurd··on The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker
point 3 means basically optimize for not retaining wealth? =\
apsurd··on Factories are just rooms
You'd be missing the point though. The foundational point. All things have their origin story.

(both things are true, yes reality is infinitely more complex and no you're probably not going to be the next President or cure cancer, but that's not the lesson one ought to instill. And I do believe there is a scaffolded way to do it. All things are possible... to explore. The feedback loop of fidelity of lessons, comes incrementally, after.)

apsurd··on Show HN: Updated my landing page with Fable (retro pixel style)
yeah clearly a manufactured excuse to get attention on the project. This is YC HN after all, can't knock it but I also can't bring myself to upvote either.
apsurd··on Show HN: Updated my landing page with Fable (retro pixel style)
yeah weird, retro pixel is clearly the 8-bit game vibe, but this seems to mean.. square corners?
apsurd··on Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things
I don’t think meaning is as malleable as implied. Yes, meaning is entirely subjective, but it’s not boundlessly so. The reason history is a guide is because the needs were more directly connected to the whole maslov’s hierarchy thing. Survival is more justifiably meaningful than “being famous”. I don’t think seeking attention is at all justifiably meaningful in regards to this proposed future attention economy.

“Man’s search for meaning” is arguably the most visceral human framed definition of meaning. Let’s just say it’s not about attention and the Metaverse.

apsurd··on Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things
I've read Sapiens. And I liked it. It's very insightful. But that perception is a perception so I don't understand the distinction you're making.

Human advancement is a story we tell ourselves. Agree. That it in any way looks like a straight line is just not true. If nothing else, it looks coherent after the fact... because it's an extremely lossy story our limited brains can comprehend. But it's not reality. No entity in the known Universe "comprehends" the march of progress. They weren't there when it started. So I just don't know what we're talking about anymore.

apsurd··on Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things
no because we have no way to understand the full consequence chain of any stated goal. We see this time and time again in all complex system goals; unintended consequences.

So RSI toward what prompted goal? Then, how can you be so sure that reaching that goal looks like the straight line you envision?

edit: more accurately, it's about incentives. We generally understand that encoding a goal in a complex system is about aligning incentives. So now it's the incentives that are proxies for intended outcomes. But as mentioned, we have a growing body of evidence for just how bad we are at aligning incentives with intended outcomes. And it makes sense because complex systems are not a straight line.

apsurd··on Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things
it doesn’t have to be that deep or specific.

all things decay on a curve. pretty much all things in life are not modeled by a straight line.

so you’re saying no theres still more UP. sure, but that’s a tale as old as time. when where and how much in how long is the reality piece.

apsurd··on Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things
but you’re just on the other end doing the same thing.

one end is luddites nothing to see here, and the other end is omg humanity is cooked because programming is solved! and consciousness is coding so -> gg

yes there’s a wide surface of emergent behavior we haven’t fully explored, but why do you get the pass to draw a straight line to a conclusion? the naysayers are doing the same thing.

apsurd··on Please stop the AI confidence theater
from a coding perspective, it’s about actual value creation. the llms cost money. The subscriptions are a great value subsidized by the frontier model companies.

llms ability to output usable code is insane, I agree. It changed the industry and the shape of what the job means. But the ability to code 10 X more output doesn’t magically create more value. In fact, I am personally skeptical and I’m planning on the first few years of growing pains. These LLMs make the job hard harder, make coordination and collaboration harder. There’s going to be a lot of churn. I quit my last job over the AI mandates.

apsurd··on Show HN: GolemUI – Declarative Form Engine
I too am immediately fatigued by the insta-landing pages people pump out. react-create-app or whatever. no thought whatsoever because "design is a solved problem".

pause for sighing.

Ok that said, I mean it makes sense, people aren't good at all things, and getting a project to the finish line is laudable. Let's not flippantly dismiss the project because it uses trendy purple.

For what it's worth, I would absolutely dismiss a project if the text content was entirely AI. But the design, well, I'm confident 90% launched projects use some JS SPA template thing. It's the state of the industry.

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