davnicwil

I agree and I think price might be one example of a more general thing which is just that you want to make the decision - based on price and a whole load of other factors that you can't be bothered to explain or may not even be able to articulate to a third party.

I think it's pretty common to actually not want to delegate and just do simple things yourself. It can be satisfying, aside from any of the practical problems it avoids.

Maybe it's a personality thing, maybe it's a learned behaviour thing, but I'm not sure I've met many people I'd imagine being happy just speaking these sorts of things into a phone and seeing what shows up.

it's funny, I used to think and care about this (or thought I did) back when 1080 was the common thing and 4k was new and exotic, but now I really don't care.

I think what changed was the realisation that even with 4k hardware in theory, what you're actually seeing is so variable based on bandwidth and different services' support for different shows you basically don't know anyway and thus it doesn't really make much sense to care about it.

Besides which, you realise that things that are made to be more enjoyable on 4k, like where that would actually make a difference to how good it is, are probably not that much worth watching anyway outside of demos. Certainly it's not, for example, a factor on which you want to be choosing what series to watch.

The software projects you work on as coursework just give you the shallowest possible mechanical introduction on how to put together working code, and their point is almost always to demostrate some underlying theory like networking or distributed systems or graphics or whatever has been understood. It's not to pretend to produce anything viable in a commercial sense or please any imagined customer or market.

Even the ones that are ostensibly under software engineering courses where you might even work in a group, it's about as far away from working on a real software project in a company with (or without) customers and capital on the line etc as can be imagined. Probably even open source would be a closer approximation / better practice at this.

And all of this is a good thing and is the point. It's a sandbox, for you to play around, mess up, 'waste time' and learn. No company is going to really give you this sandbox in the same way, nor should they. They're paying you, you're not paying them.

I don't understand where the premise comes from that higher education is doing this, or even has it as a goal.

To the extent it is I agree it should obviously be replaced by on the job training, because that will be much much better. But to me this is what's happening now anyway, de facto.

Even you do, say, a computer science degree which is one of the more obviously industry aligned fields you're still not really learning how to build software products or even useful software at all really except in the most mechanical sense.

You're learning a bunch of variously useful theory (in the sense that it could all be useful in principle but you won't know exactly for what and at what time until you're out building things in the world) and no company is ever going to be incentivised to introduce you this in a proper environment conducive to intellectual exploration separate from 'the job', because frankly you'll be long long gone by the time any of it pays off often decades hence.

I'll check out Dagger, sounds interesting.

Yeah I've really been enjoying using AI to write docker/compose config and related ad hoc scripts. It was all pretty understandable anyway, but now you can just set up whatever you can think of in literally minutes, even if you just want a particular configuration as a one off. It's a great era for devops!

I'm a big fan of docker and mainly just want to say thanks for bringing it about.

I remember my first time trying to use a container was about 2015 on a beach cafe's wifi in Bocas del Toro, Panama. You can imagine how it went...

After a brief hiatus though I was back to it and since then it's been a core part of many a local dev stack and even production stack (compose) I've set up. I recall the magic moment for me being when I first realised you could mount src to use all your local native dev tools while completely virtualising everything else, including and especially whatever combo of runtimes and dependencies you need.

It was just a lightbulb moment, like it entirely solves 'works on my machine', setting new people up on a project, it just seems like how software engineering ought to work and once you have experienced it it's difficult to go back.

I'm curious, as its creator are you still using it, or as someone who can clearly look ahead to experimental ways of doing things are you on to the next thing whatever that may be? If so, what is it? :-)

you might be right, but without evidence of this we can't know.

Much less than seeing new software products being shipped, we havn't even seen attempts at them being shipped, or built for that matter, again excluding this sort of meta software around the AI itself like harnesses and tooling.

We could speculate that attempts have been made but not shipped, and the details of why not being revealed, but then we're just back to it being talk with no demonstrable stuff happening in the world that backs it up.

At a certain point the offhand hints at exponentials in the narratives are going to have to come into contact with reality.

There's been this continual allusion to ever-narrowing circles of influence and ever-accelerating capabilities behind the curtain, but in fact things do keep coming out from behind said curtain and while their capability is indeed advancing it doesn't really seem at all like it's accelerating, even, let alone vertical.

Also at what point do we raise the fact that despite the ever narrowing circles of access, nobody within those circles seems to be able to actually do anything with it that's ostensibly what it's sold to do? All they seem to be able to do frankly is build more models and harnesses and tools designed to consume more tokens from the models they build, but not actual directly useful new or innovative software that generates what could be very real revenue.

Eventually when you keep talking about exponentials but not that much seems to be demonstrably changing, the narrative is going to run out of steam.

This is just incredible, I had absolutely no idea of the context of 'a Grand Day Out' being a solo school project.

There's no way I'd imagined it wasn't done in a professional setup by a full team.

A real standout part is how he commuted by bus to the studio for years, to work on it mostly alone. Truly amazing dedication to a passion project.

I haven't watched it in probably 25 years but I'll find it now and appreciate it all the more for knowing this!

> 4 years ago, a program that could create photorealistic pictures, talk to you in any language of the world and solve the hardest math problems that we know, we would have called it AGI.

I keep seeing this idea and I don't understand the reasoning behind it.

I think it could be a bit like saying if you showed someone 500 years ago a smartphone they would likely conclude at first it was magic. But once you had some time to let them use it and tell them how it all worked on a high level they would eventually obviously realise, no, it's not magic.

I guess just in the same way if you presented current LLM tech out of nowhere a few years ago to someone who'd never seen it, I concede they may be likely to imagine it was AGI in that first conversation, depending on their background.

But after using it for a bit and learning what an LLM is etc they'd land exactly where everyone is today - a great technology useful for some things, not AGI, not magic.

I've ridden that design in Italy! I'm not sure they still exist but it was a lovely way to travel (something like Genoa to Pisa I believe).

Double decker trains I just find fun for some reason, and you get slightly better views riding up top over fences and walls and such.

it was a little tongue in cheek, but one concrete example of what I meant is the UK system being on a narrower gague than most of the rest of the world because it was built early and is next to impossible to change, meaning taller double decker trains aren't possible.

It's interesting that escalators generally run slower in the US since their inventor was American: Jesse W. Reno.

It does seem like a bit of a trend in engineering that the first to get there set slower standards that others then copy, speed up and otherwise improve upon. See Britain and trains.

On that note, the very same Jesse W. Reno tried to build a spiral escalator in London in 1906 in Holloway Road tube station, the shaft for which still exists today. It never made it into production aparrently, but goes with the trend.

fair point. It seems to me like more of the ideas now make it through to production though.

To be honest in my opinion car design got so boring in general since about 20 years ago that it's nice to see it mixed up with these hyper futuristic concept designs.

It makes the future feel fun, and feels like a return to adventurous aesthetics for the pure sake of it. At the very least, it's noticably different and interesting. I hope architecture follows suit.

in-product ads, upsells/ads on their own features and new sub ventures like podcasts, audiobooks and show tickets.

> Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists.

To be honest it is worse than this. Spotify over the years just seems to have gotten worse and worse at the one job I want it to do well which is just play the music I already know I want to play, which should be incredibly obvious from my play count and what I've downloaded.

Instead I'm regularly surprised by random noise such as popover in-product ads for extra features I don't care about, and simple AI features I might want like detecting I am in this certain place at this certain time where I usually listen to these albums or playlists so maybe weight them accordingly in a quick access list on the home screen or something aren't, for whatever reason, done.

I mean this doesn't even need LLMs it's just an algorithm, but you see what I mean. Using intelligence in the ways I should obviously care about from the way I use the product, instead of trying to get me to change the way I use it (I won't, I wish there was a way I could just definitively tell them this).

Alas, after years of annoyance with this it's still just about above the bar of useful enough, so I keep paying, and just can't be bothered to invest the time switching to some other service like apple music. So in a sense I'm probably encouraging this behaviour by not churning.

> from the company perspective how do they, for example, have a tool call that gives the customer a discount, without it getting used when it shouldn’t?

I might be misunderstanding your point but I think you're in agreement with the gp, as in they are arguing for a locked down interface behind which the AI sits, narrowed to use within whatever particular operations the user can access, as opposed to a wide open AI interface with access to any operation (in principle).

So in your example there's no way to ask the AI for any old discount because the interface for doing so is locked down to just the discounts you can access, although the AI may be able to apply a discount you didn't ask for dynamically, if allowed, to give the customer a better experience.

Of course both versions can be implemented securely, it's just probably in general a smaller attack surface if you provide a tighter interface first.

the conjugation thing is really interesting and you're right you should just plow through with mistakes, even knowingly.

One thing you notice in kids in their native language is they get the trickier/irregular parts of grammar wrong all the time and repeatedly, as in they are corrected but just carry on making the mistake, I guess until one day finally the right pattern gets learned through sheer brute force of repetition. In the meantime, they're perfectly well understood by everyone anyway.

Obviously as an adult you can somewhat shortcut this because of better understanding of grammar and knowing how to learn, and being quicker to absorb and make the changes, but regardless I think the basic premise still applies - you learn the right way over time just by doing it over and over and over until you can't not remember it is the right way.

And, to be honest, if the wrong way is understood, how practically wrong really is it? (you will always always have tells you are not a native speaker no matter what, some of these can even be charming, I don't know if it should even be a goal to get this to zero at all).

20% growth then 20% again still seems pretty good to me though. I guess compounded that is a 44% increase N3 to A14 which also starts to look much better if you zoom out a bit. I mean 44% more density since a few years ago seems, if not massive, not insignificant, like you will definitely notice it.

I wonder how much of this universal lesson will be rehashed to fit the aftermath of what's currently going on with vibe coding etc.

I think it's pretty likely that in, let's just go for the round number and say 80% of cases, everyone will conclude that just existing well used frameworks / code generator templates where everything's understood and most of the hot paths are well tested is pretty fast to build with (and more importantly, maintain and operate) and was really all we needed for most useful business software.

but when you criticise it you don't feel obliged to point out it's of course useful. This is just obvious unstated.

I agree and I think there is also a more insidious meta aspect: for every comment like this there is the worry that some X multiple more people hold that view but won't say it.

Everyone else also thinks like that and so isn't normally unambiguously critical, so you end up not knowing who really thinks that way and who's just doing it because of the game theory.

It could even be practically nobody. There's no way to tell until the deadlock breaks.

I find it so interesting how many comments about AI start with a disclaimer that of course it's very useful, before pointing out a negative of any sort.

I do it too so it's not a criticism, but I find it kinda interesting culturally. It's a reflection I think of the environment that we've created for ourselves, or has been created for us (or some combo) where somehow you can't point out an unqualified negative of this tech.

This to me is actually one of the clearest bubble signals, just because if it really were as good as all that, it'd be completely redundant to remind everyone of that when criticising it.

I think it might be a sort of weird collective psychological thing where we must not admit what seems pretty clear, just for fear of breaking from norms.

But, of course, yeah it's very useful for some stuff and I use it all the time :-)

In situations like this the answer usually comes by flipping it and assuming they do understand, and asking why it makes sense now.

It's probably just the old 'fake loader' psychology, to be honest. Waiting without knowing when the elevator will arrive is boring/frustrating, where getting into an elevator that moves, even if the wrong direction, feels like progress.

Things are happening, and even if it takes longer ultimately that's a less frustrating state to be in.

Having reflected on this I agree with you.

Yes, it's annoying, and blame does lie with me for it happening because I did let friends know about the launches for this on HN, and the comments that come from that are entirely predictable.

Actually it's annoying on a deeper level for me too: I've realised through the referenced comment links that I thought the account in question was an actual user on the original launch post, where I responded to them with an enthusiastic thanks, but in fact it wasn't real positive feedback just one of my friends trying to help. Which is nice, but not very useful for me. I still don't know which friend this is, by the way :-D

Overall I learned for future to just not do this again at all. It just doesn't help on these launch posts anyway, the amount of interest they need to actually get on the front page and stay there is way above what just a handful of friends upvoting or commenting can do for you. When it happens it always happens because people find the actual thing interesting, so there's no point trying to induce that if it doesn't exist. But it's so easy to feel like you want to do everything possible to help get something out there that, as the parent says in a downstream comment, you've poured your heart and soul into.

And you're right, ultimately it's against the spirit of HN and not how we want this place to work. I'm a long time member of this community, it's my favourite place on the internet to be honest, I want to see its standards maintained, and should be doing my best to do that.

> I find it amusing that people assume the worst for things they understand little about, rather than trying to learn.

I don't know if you intended this to be exclusive of the opposite, but I do often find actually the opposite thing is true. That is people tend to be wildly, inappropriately optimistic for things they don't understand well and more likely to be skeptical in the details of things they do.

I heard some advice recently, I think in an article here on HN, to just use a big company registry where it's not their profit center, indeed may even be netural to loss making, to drive other business.

This makes total sense to me. I'm not saying it solves all problems but it eliminates so many of them, including a meta problem: the risk of new classes of problems being unexpectedly introduced (by say a private equity acquisition or similar).

If domains themselves are the profit center, you are likely in trouble if there's really any incentive for them to make incremental revenue in such a competitive market. Doing 'the right thing' just of course will not factor in if there's really no reputation at stake.

Ha, it's an ambiguous title. Yeah the post is about not using AI in the actual note-taking process.

You will be unsurprised to learn though that I largely haven't used AI to program it.

The main ways I do are documentation/research questions, obviously autocomplete when writing code (which I do, still exclusively in an editor), and some ancillary scripts and tools.

It's 100% intended for use in businesses!

I guess the whole point of it is that it isn't a transcription / automated summary tool :-)

It's a tool for people who want to use their own brain to pick out the key notes and actions in a meeting and get (and create!) a lot of value by doing so - not hand this off to AI.

Obviously some will do that but this tool isn't for them. It's not for everyone.