kranner

They fare differently in dusty environments, for one. Airs being sealed do well.

GP mentions concurrent extreme stress and multiple variations of suicidal ideation, along with a prediction of the relief that would bring. Also, that the thoughts stopped once the stress did.

Not sure how they could describe suicidality more clearly. Speaking as someone who has also experienced it due to chronic health conditions that had gotten particularly bad for a while.

Have seen the same thing happen to literary translator friends. Barring the very rare few who broke through to international fame via well-known literary award, the rest were largely sustaining themselves with more mundane business translations and that work is ended.

Excellent resources, thank you. Discussions of Sphotavāda are limited to the non-English Indosphere, largely, but the word itself is also used in high register Hindi to appreciate an unexpected but brilliant off-hand remark. Sort of like the English expression of calling something inspired; it both appreciates the speaker while taking away from their absolute agency.

The Herzbergers' paper: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/BF00202726

I agree with your second paragraph. I'm not blindly pro-AI, merely trying to make the best of a bad situation. I didn't mean to imply "if you don't like AI, then you only cared about the money" at all.

I'm trying to say if you don't want to do the work because you think anyone at all can do the same job with AI, then 1) you're probably underestimating yourself, and 2) maybe you care less about the work than about being on the other side of a moat of knowledge and experience. That moat is still there, and a large part of it is caring about the work.

(Also I agree that AI changes the end product if one doesn't read the code, but I don't agree that we are all necessarily forced by the economics to operate it that way. I still plan how to implement features myself first, without AI; I still read every line of code; and I still sometimes step in and rewrite the AI patch myself. I'm lucky not to have a boss breathing down my neck, I realise; at least that's true for the moment while my savings haven't run out.)

I think you're right. The "because" should have applied to the clause that followed.

I think one aspect of this relates to extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation.

I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist, and I enjoy exploring the problem space and working my way to a good solution. AI is great because it accelerates my abilities in this regard.

If I'd had only extrinsic motivations of credit and money, I can see that AI would affect them negatively. But I'd also have to believe that anyone else could AI-shortcut their way to whatever I make. I don't really believe that TBH. A real solution is extremely nuanced: it addresses many, many edge cases; it is performant in CPU and memory use; its UX steers the user away from incidental complications straight to the solution they're seeking. Being able to attend to all that doesn't seem everyone's cup of tea.

Finally, even if someone just copied whatever I had made, I would still have the satisfaction of knowing I was the original and they the copycat. That's good enough for me.

"What you read and how deeply you read matters almost as much as how you love, work, exercise, vote, practice charity, strive for social justice, cultivate kindness and courtesy, worship if you are capable of worship. The mind is an activity and will decay into dark inertia if not sustained by the sustenance of reading.

The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress. If you live ninety years you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can."

-- Harold Bloom

> The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a little bit every now and then. It seems to be robbing me of my ability to create original prose.

IMHO the fix is to read more books. Obviously I mean human-written books, and specifically with prose that you appreciate.

Unpopular because the difference between FSD and writing is obvious to more people than not, especially people who read for pleasure. Being a person with an actual POV matters more than having perfect grammar or a studied flair.

Someone on Twitter suggested ISO 24495-1, in case ASD-STE100 is a bit too sparse.

Surprised to find no mention of "load-bearing" and "gated" particularly for Claude.

In particular Opus 5 is scaling new heights of incomprehensibility with excessive metaphor-making, especially when it uses an existing word in the prompt or the code comments as a novel metaphor in an unrelated context.

Most of this piece reads like the Claude output I have to read after every prompt, cleaned up with an /elegant-writing skill or something. I'm so used to skimming text in this voice, it's hard to pay attention to this.

I honestly do not understand why people do this for writing that carries their signature, essentially. Do you want people to associate your name with skimmable fluff? We can talk to each other directly, please. The machine is helpful but it doesn't have to mediate every human interaction ever.

On the Mac App Store page [1], I can see the settings panel in a screenshot. In General Settings / Onboarding, there is a toggle switch labelled:

"Show onboarding on first launch", with more text underneath

"Show first-run guide after installation"

I have no choice but to conclude that this app was vibe-coded from snout to tail.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/app/id6776577400

It's a fair assumption being a known potential cause of death. Of course I'm now assuming death is bad.

Edible forms of cannabis raise heart rate and blood pressure substantially as well.

That's also my experience. It's absolutely a letting go rather than a doing; one of Michael Taft's analogies for it is "dropping the ball".

The provisional techniques are great because different techniques click for different people. Once they've seen what it is, it's easier to drop in more directly. If there's any willpower involved, it's more a subtle dropping of discursive mental commentary (especially on the process itself: I've got it - almost there - why can't I get there today - ah so this is what works, etc).

Once you're there, it feels like the most familiar and comfortable place in the world. As one of my teachers said, this is real rest.

Yes this would be one “provisional” method among many, maybe hundreds of techniques but they all seem to lead to the same place as one gets familiar. In Buddhist Vajrayana schools this is called “non-meditation”. The ultimate instruction is to simply do nothing, but this requires a bit of initiation (and paradoxically, concentration) to get right.

Michael Taft has many different guided approaches to this on his channel but there are many other teachers as well, e.g. Adyashanti, Angelo Dillulo, Loch Kelly, Shinzen Young (specifically his Do Nothing and Auto Focus techniques) and expanding the gamut to traditional Vajrayana teachers, Lama Lena, Mingyur Rinpoche, Lama Dawai Gocha, all with accessible online teachings. Also Sayadaw U Tejaniya and Christopher Wallis who are less conventional, so to speak.

Meditation teacher Michael Taft recommends "dropping into awake awareness" whenever you're waiting for a response. [1]

It's the opposite of watching YouTube, pretty much.

[1] https://x.com/OortCloudAtlas/status/2062208343192769004

It would potentially be more business-optimal to ship fewer bugs if everyone else is shipping more bugs. Your development cycle would be costlier, but users would prefer to buy your products over others.

The elegance of the code is not superfluous at all. It correlates with the developer's understanding of both the code and the domain.

Many kinds of software cannot be yeeted 10x faster with AI. Someone has to sit down and understand what the right thing to do is, first.

It also matters how many users you expect to be able to reach. If you're Facebook you can afford to use the first 10,000 users as unpaid QA. If you're an indie shop that's barely getting downloads you really want to make a positive impression on your initial users or you're toast anyway.

Here in India, when I was growing up it was normal to sleep without a cover in the summer (no ACs back then, only ceiling fans and perhaps an evaporation cooler in more luxurious circumstances). I remember when a friend and his cousin from Thailand was visiting and the power had just gone out. The temperature was in the early 40s (Celsius) but the Thai cousin who wanted to take a nap insisted on a thin cotton sheet as a cover. My friend and I were confused and kept telling him it's not a good idea but he couldn't fall asleep without it.

The weather in North India has been very weird this year. Normally it's pleasant in March and starts warming up in April all the way to end June. This year it got June-hot in April but then cooled down again in early May. From running ACs in April to even turning ceiling fans off for a few days in May is unheard of.

That's the temperature at the weather station in shade.

The air temperature is higher in the sun in busy marketplaces from high surface temperature of tarred roads and the thermal island effect of poor Indian urban design. Also on the top floors of buildings it tends to be really bad (roofs are mostly uninsulated).

> While most right-handed individuals do not exhibit this ability unless they experience an extraordinary event, such as an injury to their right hand, left-handed individuals are compelled to learn how to use their right hand in a right-handed world.

As a person with severe hemophilia in the third world, where the condition is very under-treated (no prophylaxis, very little clotting factor and sometimes none), I've grown up facing this issue with the dominant arm being out of commission due to a bleed for days at a time. I gradually learned to do almost everything with the left hand: brush my teeth, shave, eat, shower, type with one hand (autocompleting IDEs help), even drive a stick shift (using the right hand to hold the wheel briefly while shifting, technically illegal I'll admit).

It's not that difficult to adapt. The barriers are mostly mental because it feels awkward at first. There are some dexterity issues but if you don't mind going slowly, you can get by.

Just sharing my experience, not meant to undermine the challenges faced by left-handed individuals in a right-handed world.

Thanks, from the git log I see it was committed 20 minutes before my comment. I was going by the HN title and description and missed those comments.

I think you're conflating the burden of creation with the burden of relevance, suitability, usability and usefulness of the created artifact. The more the person in charge is disengaged, the sloppier the output is likely to be.

For some reason the app supports a separate standalone window mode as well [0]. It's not clear why the developer took the trouble to support two different modes when the menubar mode doesn't seem to add anything (like a live-updating icon for throughput).

Well, I can think of one reason why it wasn't that much more trouble. François Chollet had a nice tweet [1] on why removing human cognitive friction is resulting in needless software complexity.

[0] https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable/blob/main/Sources/...

[1] https://x.com/fchollet/status/2045929951539707957