jskulski

Congrats! The launch is a stellar example of focusing on key functionality and cutting everything else. Core tech is amazing.

I played writing an intro for some documentation I'm creating, and it was amazing. It felt very conversational, very different than traditional dictation software.

1. I have the same question as others, what's the privacy policy? Where is this being used? I'd like to expend for work but their first question is where the content is going.

2. And straying from focusing on core functionality, do you have a vision of a code specific version of this? Do you feel like a specialized model/tool is needed or do you believe this can take care of it.

Currently, I tried asking it to write out `def func():[newline]pass` and then correcting it but didn't get very far:

> "Just my funk. Oh no the word death try type the letters DEF FU. Okay, no let's stop."

Overall, great work!

Agreed. He reads his own audiobook and it’s incredible. I keep going back to it.

(Not OP) I’d find value in this if you were considering publishing a guide.

Been working on a pi400 eink solar powered cyberdeck but haven’t done anything with cell connection yet.

So could follow long for that and for the blackberry.

Ive built a couple systems that would have been datomic’s bread and butter.

Each time the company was more comfortable with mainstream dbs, so we ended going with something like you’re talking about, built on top of a db. A couple of the projects were because a mainstream dbs wouldn’t scale.

The systems definitely worked, but it was also a lot of implementation complexity on an other wise simple business prop: “store this data as facts”

Yeah Sean Evan’s is an amazing interviewer. Some mix between the depth of Nardwaur and the pleasantness of Jess Thorne.

The questions earlier in the series felt more “real”, where I get a sense of promotion now. It was always about the promotion (that was the “prize” in the first episodes), but the questions feel shaped to promote spots for plugs.

Still one of the best interview shows running. The wings give every sense of urgency and gravity. It’s the perfect comic relief to the weight or depth of the question, the focus on the heat disarms the guest of their routine answers and reveals a lot about the person.

I generally will use vcr[0] or something similar to record requests and then I write tests and code against that.

3rd parties go down, it happens. In general a system that is dependent on a third party should have some non exceptional behavior when that happens.

So if I’m not setup with vcr, and 3rd party is down- I would on the behavior for what happens when it’s down.

[0] https://github.com/vcr/vcr

We may not be able to observed it, and maybe can’t. Just like time slowing down would be imperceptible to the person on the spaceship nearing light speed. It takes the mathematics

Or if I’m lucky enough to have the time to watch the moon move slowly, it feels natural to my senses to say it’s moving across the sky. The moon feels like it’s moving around me. But I can stretch my brain and imagine the reality.

Sometimes math arrives first. We have the new maths (or an problem in current math), and that points to some possibility. Because it’s not observable, ignoring our senses is a requirement to develop that in the model and measurements and experiments. Eventually we are able to observe it.

I’m not familiar with history of astronomy. Would it be the case where the observations that lead to heliocentric thought we nuanced and had to build on more obvious perceptions that things aren’t adding up? Was the wobble of Venus part of that?

And you’re right, old models are useful and remain relevant a lot! The model of time moving linearly will likely always be the most useful model for navigating our daily choices (if we have any at all!)

I like the breakdown and agree with your general line of reasoning.

I’m confuse though why you don’t just say refactor. This just reads like you redefined “refactor” to be adding layers and “defactor” to removing layers.

Textbook refactoring, changing a program internally without changing it external. It’s up to the refactorer to choose what to apply.

Applying a refactor is not only adding FactorBeanProxies. It can, and must be, used to remove parts as often as adding them.

> What have they ever built?

While I agree that reading code and learning is essential, I don’t think this line of criticism is fair.

I mean like most programmers I’d imagine their years and years of industry work isn’t public. I mean what have I ever built?

Fowler was CTO of ThoughWorks for years and afaik they do really good and deep work, their content is quality. Bob Martin had a similar track record with 8th light, and as an organization is interesting.

That said, I think lumping them together is misguided. I’ve read a lot of both. To me unky bob is can be a divisive gatekeeper who wants to be right, while mFowler is boon to the industry, literally writing the book on refactoring. He has well reasoned and measured arguments.

I mean I think while formulating your own voice is important and essential, it’s also essential to learn from others and pass down knowledge. For some reason, I think our industry sees it as a threat.

Unky bob is a divisive gatekeeper who I suppose did years of industry work? I guess?

To lump Fowler in with unky bob, I just don’t see it.

I mean Fowler I think t started thoughtworks.

Don’t buy product that helps you focus, instead spend more money on a different product and tune that constantly to maybe help you focus? (This method doesn’t work for me)

People’s brains, environments and situations are different. It’s a limiting prescriptive to think that everyone works like yours.

Brains are different and fortunately we can all work towards our own solution.

Very cool, not GP but also thanks for pointing me to this board. I’m just getting into hardware stuff but have an e-ink project in mind.

Crazy, I was watching some some smalltalk 80 demos this weekend. And was like I bet you could ship a js image that does some of this. Someone must be working on it.

I don’t know if that’s your teams inspiration but there’s a a lot of overlap.

Interesting idea and good execution.

My thought would be it feels like it is helps enable “careless” PMs, rather than make better stories.

I added a simple user story “I want to be able to check our prices against competitor prices”

Imo, a reasonable and simple business ask, but technically complicated (dirty and old data, low user fault tolerance, heuristically matching).

In chatGPT fashion, it confidently provides a series of acceptance criteria that fills out the story, but is either questionable or redundant.

“The tool should be able to compare prices of our products against our competitors' prices. The tool should be able to display the results in a clear and concise manner. The tool should be able to be accessed from the administrator dashboard. The tool should be able to be used on both desktop and mobile devices.”

A PM/team could go through and audit. It would be a useful exercise, but a team who would do that likely wouldn’t need this tool. Maybe consider fashioning the UI to idea generation?

As it is now, this feels like a careless PM would copy and paste this without checking.

SHADOW DOM

Acknowledging that I don’t know the business or context, “remote does not work for eng” is a bad take.

Haha yeah I feel like SQLite is a very _told_ story on HN. Great story and tech for real, inspirational but also very trendy right now!

Im not sure if it’s future proofing exactly, but I’m placing my bets on Nix powered development systems.

The conceptual clarity combined with sparse documentation, rough edged user land, and the army of edge cases give me flashes of Docker in 2013/14.

It’s a pain to use but the promise is there. When setup and working, Nix seems like _the_ way forward for reproducible builds and dev environments at any 20+ dev team.

I work in dev experience at a larger tech company. I work on many different REPLs, often jumping into unfamiliar projects- in my first three months I’ve worked on go, python, node, terraform, k8s, etc.

With nix I’m able to clone a repo in an ecosystem I don’t use, create a couple files (flake.nix + .envrc) and reliably create a working, isolated dev environment that works and doesn’t mess my other projects… gaming changing.

(Plus I took the plunge after system issues to move to a VM running NixOS, defined in my dotfile repo.)

The language is difficult, the documentation needs to get there, the amount of breaking or confusing api are big hurdles. I think some simple wrapper like https://devenv.sh may be what gets the industry on board.

A company I worked at was in the business of classified ads in the early two thousands.

“We” started selling typeset ads at some point to customers unbeknownst to the tiny fresh grad three person tech team.

So we did what we had to do which was to run open office headless on a Linux box under our bosses desk.

It would accept type setting parameters, and we would simulate one key press at a time. We would send the print command keyboard shortcut and keys to print to a pdf and retrieve the files with rsync.

We didn’t know any better and I’m still proud of that.

Great read, thanks!

After an initial small investment, I was able to take notes.

Then it was keeping my todos on projects at work, getting a list, etc. Then I could add source blocks and execute them.

Now it’s a literate and repl driven engine that is nearly a daily driver. I love the workflow because I build up the code and tests as I’m playing and tweaking it. The feedback loop is very strong. Plenty of maintenance cost though.

Not a consumer grade solution, but Org mode handles this with some setup and browser extensions

My answer is I would. I enjoy the process and at this point, is my most reliable way to the flow state. I am more motivated by the process and the learning of making than I am about finished products.

I have a couple of projects that I day dream about but are an unrealistic size for me while working:

1. Turning my emacs configuration into a electron app is a project that nobody needs but I want to build.

2. As much as I can, bring a lisp REPL experience to the python world. (or maybe I could just use clojure for the other projects.)

3. Apps and software for accessibility (including tools for the neurodivergent)

And I'd continue to spend time prototyping software to learn how it works and building developer tools.

Curious about other's choices, what would you choose?

Had they talked about releasing the source code? I would love to see the machine behind DF. I think about it all the time.

Either is a complete mess that no one else can understand, or they nailed the abstractions and it is infinitely extendable. I’m really curious to see how they implemented a system that provides such depth and subtlety.

Yes. I no longer use vim (plugins aren’t fun to mess around with for me, feel like I’m just always catching up to functionality in more complete tools) but I use vim mode in all my other editors/IDEs (pycharm, emacs, vs code)

For actual, non-semantic text editing, the speed of vim muscle memory can’t be beat.

As cool as I think this technology is, it’s on the backs of artists who have spent years finding their voice and training themselves.

Please be forward thinking and community minded.

Strong agree. Pete Holmes has a great bit about how google makes 'knowing' and 'not knowing' are the same thing.

"You don't know something now? Wait 2 seconds and you will know it. There's not time for mystery and wonder."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ

Team Rdio right here. A truly great app for music lovers that arrived when the age of apps felt like a bright utopia ahead of us. I truly miss it.

I got about a decade of scattered print debugging tools that I’m packaging into a tool.

I prefer debuggers and imaged based REPL environments, but that doesn’t mean I get to work in them. Always fall back on print debugging and loggers at some point, so I’ve built a lot of helpers in various language that help this sort of thing: introspection of variables and source code, time stamps and traceable uuids and tools for easy viewing.

This was like watching someone cast a spell. Thanks for sharing!

One issue is there are competing forks for mac and it’s not clear which to chose.

In general, emacs locks up on me in OS X but not so in linux. I don’t have more info than that, but I find I have to restart emacs more than pycharm