brokencode

Microsoft has zero vision in the UI space. It’s crazy that there isn’t there a single, obvious solution for developing Windows applications in 2025.

I agree that it seems they’ve made some bad bets and now are bogged down supporting half a dozen different frameworks with different limitations and tradeoffs.

They keep trying to reinvent the wheel, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve ever really meaningfully improved on WPF.

At least there is Avalonia for an open source, cross platform WPF alternative. It seems like the sanest way of making desktop applications with C# currently.

You are right that it’s on a 2 year cycle. Though there is support for 3 years, so you could safely put off an upgrade for up to a year if there are breaking changes one release.

Is upgrading every 3 years really that bad? As far as I know, they typically aren’t removing features or causing disruptive changes in .NET versions.

They did when switching away from .NET Framework, but this was because they had to reimplement many features from scratch to work on other platforms, and certain parts got left behind.

CS programs teach fundamentals, though not necessarily the most popular tools in the industry. Those skills help regardless of whatever specific tools you end up using. I don’t think it’s a waste of time.

I pay for the subscription and don’t see any ads. It comes with YouTube Music. It’s great.

YouTube is 20 years old now. Either the encrapification is very slow or they landed on a decent ad model.

Plus there is a subscription that eliminates ads. I think it’s a great experience for users. Many creators also seem to do well too.

I think this should be the model for a new generation of search. Obviously there will be ads/sponsored results. But there should be a subscription option to eliminate the ads.

The key part here will be monetization for content creators. People are no longer clicking links, so how do they get revenue?

I think direct payments from AI companies to content creators will be necessary or the whole internet will implode.

Just because they have a plan, doesn’t mean they have a clue. Their reasoning for this could be as simple as “government bad”.

Just look at the wild abandon with which DOGE has gone about its cuts. They literally fired the experts who inspect our nuclear arsenal, then had to scramble to hire them back because you know.. it’s literally nuclear bombs we’re talking about.

Usually you try to build something, realize it’s slow, then do a combination of searching for possible solutions, trying them, and profiling again and again to gain this knowledge.

Experience is the best teacher.

Most popular business books are like this. They have an idea that could fit in like a single chapter, but have to write a whole book about it to get paid, so they pad it with numerous anecdotes and their entire life’s story.

I wish there were more reliable ways to monetize for authors between clickbait and published book. I know there are many paid Substacks and newsletters out there, some of which are really great. But I feel like you need a lot of luck or self promotion skills for this to work.

Certainly an interesting result, but remember that a single paper doesn’t prove anything. This will no doubt be something studied very extensively and change over time as tools develop.

Personally, I find the current tools don’t work great for large existing codebases and complex tasks. But I’ve found they can help me quickly make small scripts to save me time.

I know, it’s not the most glamorous application, but it’s what I find useful today. And I have confidence the tools will continue to improve. They hardly even existed a few years ago.

Yes, it would not be sane to depend on implementation details of something like this.

But the sad reality is that many developers (myself included earlier in my career) will do insane things to fix a critical bug or performance problem when faced with a tight deadline.

So ironic that you post this on Hacker News, where there are regularly articles and blog posts about lessons from the industry, both good and bad, that would be helpful to competitors. This industry isn’t exactly Coke guarding its secret recipe.

I find it even more sad when people come out of the woodwork on every LLM post to tell us that our positive experiences using LLMs are imagined and we just haven’t realized how bad they are yet.

Interestingly, devs felt that it sped them up even though it slowed them down in the study.

So even if it’s not an actual productivity booster on individual tasks, perhaps it still could reduce cognitive load and possibly burnout in the long term.

Either way, it’s a tool that devs should feel free to use or not use according to their preferences.

It’s only a hard dependency if you don’t know and never learn how to program.

For developers who read and understand the code being generated, the tool could go away and it would only slow you down, not block progress.

And even if you don’t, it really isn’t a hard dependency on a particular tool. There are multiple competing tools and models to choose from, so if you can’t make progress with one, switch to another. There isn’t much lock-in to any specific tool.

Scent is decomposable. There are many different scent receptors, but finite.

Hearing is quite similar in that there are numerous different length hairs in the ear drum that can sense different frequencies of sound.

It’s not a wild claim, though maybe your interpretation is wild.

I never said Perplexity individually is challenging Google, but rather as part of a group of apps including ChatGPT, which you conveniently left out of your quote.

Yup, any day now people will suddenly realize that LLMs suck and you were right all along. Any day now..

I think the thing people hate about that is the lack of effort and attention to detail. It’s an incredible enabler for laziness if misused.

If somebody writes a design or a report, you expect that they’ve put in the time and effort to make sure it is correct and well thought out.

If you then find the person actually just had ChatGPT generate it and didn’t put any effort into editing it and checking for correctness, then that is very infuriating.

They are essentially farming out the process of creating the document to AI and farming out the process of reviewing it to their colleagues. So what is their job then, exactly?

These are tools, not a replacement for human thought and work. Maybe someday we can just have ChatGPT serve as an engineer or a lawyer, but certainly not today.

> “most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume”

That is a such a wild claim. People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever. It and other AI apps like Perplexity are now beginning to challenge Google’s search dominance.

Sure, probably not a lot of people would go out and buy a novel or collection of poetry written by ChatGPT. But that doesn’t mean the output is unpleasant to consume. It pretty undeniably produces clear and readable summaries and explanations.

If that were the case, people would watch classic movies, read novels, etc.

No, I’m pretty sure social media has seriously hurt the average person’s attention span.

The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.

I mean, that’s what I’m saying too. I think AI companies will have to pay for content to be competitive in the market. Either that or I guess they could write their own content.

Yes, the government needs to force them to stop stealing first. Similar to how the government stops contractors from going to Home Depot and stealing all the two by fours.

The government doesn’t force contractors to buy wood, it only stops them from stealing it. It’s the profit incentive that leads contractors to buy wood.

I didn’t downvote you, but I do disagree.

Yes, the AI companies are stealing. This is an area where the legal system needs to catch up.

Once it does, AI companies should have to negotiate contracts with publishers in order to legally use their content. Otherwise they should be open to lawsuits for copyright violations.

This is quite different from Pirate Bay, which is not run by a law abiding company with customers. Unless OpenAI wants to go underground and sell their services on the black market, they will have to play by the rules.

Could somebody downvoting this explain why? Shouldn’t AI companies pay for the content they train their models on and summarize?

All I can say is that it’s really sad how politicized science has become. Oil company propaganda has really done a number on some people.

I am not familiar with UK’s debt situation and am not disputing that they may need to balance the budget.

But I don’t think the 0.08% line item for scientific research is where I’d start.

Science is already deeply underfunded despite a disproportionately large impact on society in my opinion.

This ARIA program’s budget is apparently only about 800 million pounds, which is a tiny fraction of UK’s overall budget of over a trillion pounds.

These types of highly speculative projects are inherently risky, making them unappealing for profit-driven investors. That’s why it’s important for non-profit organizations and governments to fund them.

Scientific breakthroughs don’t happen in a vacuum. They are the product of dedicated research requiring years of consistent funding.

You are using the nuke example as a straw man since the negative impact is clear, but most technology is not so clear cut. We have machines that can do the work of 1,000,000 men, for example. The magnitude of technological advance alone doesn’t inherently mean something is good or bad.

AI is a large leap forward in capability and will likely have significant impacts on society. But it’s far from clear that it will have disproportionate negative impacts like a nuke. More likely it will have benefits and downsides similar to numerous other modern technologies.

AI feels particularly disruptive now because it’s new and we don’t know how it will affect society yet.

But people surely felt the same way about gunpowder, the steam engine, electricity, cars, phones, planes, nukes, etc.

Or look at specific professions that software has negatively affected in recent decades. Not a lot of people use travel agents anymore, for example.

I’m not saying that the negative effects are good. But that’s just the nature of technological advancement. It’s up to society to adapt and help out those who have been most negatively affected.

Every new technology is a greater force multiplier, with potential to be used for good or evil. That’s literally the point of technological advancement. Even nuclear bomb technology has a more positive side in nuclear reactors, radiotherapy, etc.