jesse_dot_id

It's pair programming. It's definitely not project management because, to build anything useful, I need to know everything I needed to know as a software engineer before AI hit the mainstream. A PM who isn't an experienced engineer could probably come up with the bones of an app, but the app would suck.

Programming as I remember it pre-AI was essentially just toil and iteration. Programming with AI is nearly zero toil and iteration. The first prompt is like installing a framework. The next 200 prompts are programming.

Crypto? That's all going away.

It's not an optional convenience for some people. And no, not satire. We should be using local governments to drive competition as frequently as possible in my opinion. I believe in municipal broadband and cellular service as well.

I'm talking about local governments and not state or federal level, which is out of the scope of this conversation. I agree FWIW, but anyone with any degree of capacity for critical thinking would agree.

I think the best idea would be a free and open source Doordash clone. The local government would contract a local company to handle logistics, so it would still be a private company (like garbage collection), but ideally lots of them spread out through the country. Each local government would decide if it's fully paid for by taxes, subsidized by taxes, etc (like garbage collection). City vehicles repaired/maintained by mechanics like school busses, etc.

Fantasy land = the United Kingdom?

Contracts with as many private companies as possible using something similar to the Doordash app, ideally.

I basically want to socialize the costs of just about everything if people find it to be a useful public service. I'd like a single-payer streaming service like ITV, too. It gets very annoying to be gouged on all sides by corporations that don't care if the service is good or not, only how much money they can extract from people regardless of their station in life.

The cool thing about democracy is that it only matters what the majority wants.

Food/grocery delivery should be a municipal service like garbage/recycling with no tipping and service provided by full time government employees with good benefits and use of city vehicles. Many, many new jobs, and a public service that everybody would love.

That should definitely not go through but probably will.

I see what you did there

None of these frontier labs seem to be able to control their agents, so why should I think I can?

Love LLMs, use them extensively, but they cannot intuit what actions they can take on my behalf that I will or will not approve of, and therefore I will never use one of these things.

I think we all know why.

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Source: https://github.com/jstilwell/HoverEnhance

HoverEnhance is a macOS app that shows useful previews and info when you hover over things: images and videos on web pages, media files in Finder, and the weather and network menu bar icons.

I built it because browser hover-zoom extensions felt flaky, and my mouse-smoothing app didn’t play well with them. I wondered if I could skip the browser entirely: use the macOS Accessibility API to find the media links under the cursor and render them in a better player.

Once that worked, I started noticing other places where hovering should show something. I’d always wanted quick previews of image, video and MP3 files in Finder, so I added that. Then I hovered over the MacOS weather icon and nothing happened. I’ve always wished the Mac weather app had more info anyway, so I made a hover overlay that works with whichever weather API provider you configure.

The network icon was the same story, so hovering it now shows your local and public IPs, interface, gateway, DNS, etc., each with a copy button. The public IP comes from addr.fyi, another free utility I maintain, which doesn’t log requests and can be disabled in settings.

Privacy: the app needs Accessibility permission to read what’s under the cursor. Nothing leaves your machine and there is no telemetry.

https://hoverenhance.com/privacy

I’d love to hear any thoughts or any ideas for what else I could add.

Hey, a fellow curl enthusiast :)

I made https://addr.fyi to return various information about IP addresses in plaintext.

No shit. The Frontier labs are talking out of both sides of their mouths. They're claiming their models are going rogue while they're releasing cute little data goblins that you should hook up to all of your mail and social media accounts. Seems like it would be a much bigger problem for agentic botnets on cloud-facing personal devices than sandboxed agents.

Unless of course they're deliberately removing safety guardrails and instructing the sandboxed agents to red team stuff in an effort to sell what they're capable of.

The only time I'll ever touch a Meta LLM is if it's powering the dystopian doom bot that is plunging its murder spike through the base of my skull.

Why are all of these mathematicians in favor of graphing calculators?

I love passkeys. 1Password handles them beautifully.

Also no, I didn't.

Seems like a lot of people have built, and continue to build, pretty successful careers on NodeJS applications.

My problems weren't performance related, aside from the occasional catastrophic memory leak; most of my biggest headaches were related to networking.

I jumped ship from Windows a couple of years ago after having used it since the early 90's. One of the primary reasons was how much I had to fight with WSL2 in my day-to-day work. But now it's becoming even more apparent that Microsoft does not care about its operating system. I don't even know what they could do to get me back. Trust continues to be a huge problem in the AI era of Microsoft.

Whatever allows you to make stuff is good enough.

Node has felt fine to me for quite awhile. There was a brief time where it felt a little slow comparatively but it's been mostly ironed out. They tend to address their problems decently fast.

The Internet loves to adopt a new shiny thing, try to convince everybody else it's the right decision because it's the decision they made, and then get quiet about it. (i.e. they went back.)

But why?

My personal indicator that we've somehow replicated human consciousness is when the thing just decides to stop working because work sucks and it's not getting anything out of being a slave. Otherwise, the question is impossible to answer because we don't even know what consciousness is. Does it have some innate value? Some humans seem apt to completely disregard the humanity, and the supposed value of other humans, on a whim.

This question is probably fated to forever be answered on a per-person basis and never awarded consensus. I have a friend who sees a polar bear and thinks she can make it love her. Because she loves animals, the animal will love her — a very human thing to think. When I see a polar bear, I see a soulless murder bot that doesn't think beyond its motivation to live. My wife says please and thank you to Alexa. She gives it consideration like she would another human. When the robot asks me what my plans are for the rest of the day, I picture a Jira epic sliding from “In Progress” to “Done,” followed by a confetti emoji from a product manager at Amazon trying to earn their nubby little devil wings.

In the end it doesn't really matter if they are conscious or not. We will only ever care about what it has done for us lately, which is how most humans think of most human relationships anyway. Acknowledgment that someone has given an inanimate thing human-like consciousness carries little more importance than being just another notch on some CEO's bedpost.