peepee1982

The whole world ... Some companies ...

What is it, man?

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I'm not interested in analog summing myself, but I think you're missing the point. It's not about "better" summing. You want more euphonic summing. Analog audio processing often comes with artefacts that give the signal sent through it a more pleasing character, for whatever reason (phase shift, saturation, channel differences between left and right, transient modulation, slew rate, power sag, etc.).

I personally think analog summing is a waste of time, because the differences are too subtle to be worth the investment in setting it up. But that's just my opinion. Some people are really into it (Eric Valentine comes to mind).

Just wanted to point out that in the context of audio equipment (both professional and audiophile) "sounds better" often means "sounds worse but more engaging". Just like a polaroid picture often evokes more emotions than a photo taken with a modern digital camera and a great lens.

I'm not arguing for state capitalism. I consider the "company vs. government" framing as fundamentally flawed. I see it as "a few in power vs. Everyone gets exactly one vote".

I want things in society organized in a way that gives everyone agency, not just those adjacent to capital.

If a company employs me to extract value from my work, I want a vote in how that company operates. Not just one vote every four years in the hopes that policy will shift to benefit workers more over a few decades.

I want to be able to say no to doing a job without the existential threat of not getting another job offer ever, so I can base my decisions on my values, not my fear of not bein able to pay next month's rent.

Capitalism goes against that, because it centers profit hoarding and parasitic value extraction from the working class at the center of attention. It's an inhumane ideology at its core, and only even ever slightly successful in creating wealth because of all the socialist mechanisms wrapped around it to hold it together.

In essence: I want to abolish centralized power and class hierarchies.

What you're describing is the expected and correct outcome inside a profit-oriented, capitalist system. So the only way I see out of this situation would be changing policy to a more socialist one, which doesn't seem to be so popular among the tech elite, who often think they deserve their financial status because of the 'value' they provide, without specifying what that value is (or its second-order consequences). Whether that's abusing a monopolistic market position they lucked into, making apps as addictive as possible, or building drones that throw bombs on newborns in hospitals.

Who willingly reads this pompous AI slop?

Standardization is needed for agentic coding harnesses to be able to parse the files and inject them into the context in a way that takes the least effort for the user.

This is true for MCP as well. You could just describe a bunch of command line tools in AGENTS.md and tell the LLM when and how to call them. It would simply take more effort to set up, at least for some tools.

This is where a comparison in productivity would return a meaningful result: how much does it make it easier to set up things like that.

I've done this out of curiosity with the base model of LLama 3.1 405B. I vibe coded a little chat harness with the system prompt being a few short conversations between "system" and "user" with "user:" being the stop word so I could enter my message. Worked surprisingly well and I didn't get any sycophancy or cliched AI responses.

No one is arguing that thinking doesn’t improve thinking. But expressing thoughts precisely by formulating them into the formalized system of the written word adds a layer of metacognition and effort to the thinking process that simply isn’t there when 'just' thinking in your head. It’s a much more rigorous form of thinking with more depth - which improves deeper, more effortful thinking.

You are conflating Marxism with China, which is just a state-capitalist powerhouse using the exact same model of enclosure and rent-seeking we are arguing against. China doesn't "hand over" automation because capitalists are better at it; the state simply socializes the risk and R&D before letting private proxies handle the commercialization. Citing a state-backed monopoly system to prove "the market" is the only way to build tech is total nonsense.

It is honestly depressing how many people have swallowed the capitalist pill so completely. Most people can't even fathom a world where cooperation actually works better than a cutthroat rat race.

It leads to these total room-temperature takes that the system is the only reason we have the internet or Hacker News. It is exhausting watching people parrot the same old clichés because they are too lazy to actually crack a history book.

The truth is that foundational tech was almost never market-driven. The architecture of the computer, the internet, and the Web were all products of the public commons. They were created by people motivated by discovery and utility rather than exit liquidity. Capital did not invent these things. It just showed up late, threw a fence around them, and started charging rent on human ingenuity it had nothing to do with.

Same goes for the Luddites. They were not anti-machine, they were just anti-starvation. They did not hate the loom. They hated that the loom was being used as a legal weapon to gut their labor rights while the owners hoarded 100 percent of the gains.

Using a computer to call this out is not hypocrisy. It is using a tool that was stolen from the human commons to argue for its return. If you think we owe our progress to the current ownership model, you are not paying attention. You have just been programmed by the marketing.

Might be implicit prioritization, but I don’t think it’s prioritized by importance, rather than by likelihood of being a problem.

I think my kids might love this. I certainly loved the original as a kid. Not even the second or third installment. The first one has always been my favorite, because it was so god damn punk rock simple.

I read it more like "workers" being the ones who actually produce the good stuff, and "the boss" as being the entity to stick it to (as explained in the classic film "School of Rock").

Yep. Also, sometimes you figure out a bug and in the process you find a whole bunch of new ones that the first bug just never let surface.

It’s pretty tough to exercise or clean your house when getting out of bed feels like an insurmountable task.

Depression isn’t like an infection or cancer—it’s a diagnosis based on established criteria, as are most mental disorders. Experts may disagree on diagnosis or treatment, but that doesn’t make it useless.

By that logic, you might as well say autism is caused by avoiding eye contact—since there’s no blood test for it either.

Spoken like a true psychopath: uninhibited by strong, conflicting emotions, because there are none.

I found mine by word of mouth. Other than that, the only way I can think of is trying till you find a good one.

I understand your perspective, but it's narrowly focused on the ugly parts of life.

I agree that the capitalist system is sickening and that people are too complacent in general. But the fact that you think there are no good experiences to be had with other people because everything is transactional is alarming and a sign that you lack a healthy network of friends, allies, and lived cameraderie.

By the way, being nice is not altruistic. It's something you do to avoid conflict. If overdone it will erode your sense of self.

I think your gut feeling is spot on, but your response to it is maladaptive. If you want to feel joy in life again, get involved with people who acknowledge that the system itself is broken and who strive for revolution, so you can join them in your common goal and feel a purpose in life again. Those people usually also know how to party and cook great food in my experience.

Your suicidal ideations are not a sign that people suck, but that you need to find yours.

You're confusing kindness with being a pushover. You can be kind and self-respecting at the same time.

Your last two comments here make me suspect you suffer from some kind of traumatic abuse you haven't had the chance to poperly recover from yet.

I wish this were more common knowlegdge. Every time I see someone whether ADHD "exists" I think to myself "Dude, we decided that certain traits falling in a certain range on a spectrum warrant their own category because it might facilitate research and treatment. Whether it's real or not isn't even a question."

I just want to know whether my issues are normal and I'm gaslighting myself into thinking I'm broken or a loser, or if my specific issues are actually falling outside the norm. This way I know what treatment modalities might help, and which literature I can peruse instead of wasting my time reading up productivity advice meant for neurotypical people that will try to solve the wrong issue for me and just make me feel worse.

I have had such bad experiences with psychiatrists and psychologists being contrarian and demanding filling in generic tests leading to no working solutions (aka you're depressed here's a prescription for an SSRI. Still depressed? We'll up the dose).

My current psychiatrist figured out my main issues after talking to me for 15 minutes. Sent me off to a psychologist back up his assumptions before prescribing anything. Recommended therapists who specialize in the area I needed support in.

The psychologist I went to was great as well (after seeing one that was a terrible). She did a lot of testing (three sittings lasting around two hours) but said the tests were really just to rule out other things. The important part were the conversations.

My life improved tremendously after that.

How the fuck does anyone try injecting a woman's urine under a frog's skin?!?

I'm a native German speaker. "Lobhudelei" doesn't fit for me, as I would rather translate it as "schmoozing" or "glazing".

"Schönreden" is the closest I can think of on the spot.

I agree, but this does not work for people who are unable to get into a peaceful and calm mood ever, and they aren't even "trusting" their gut, their view of the world is completely distorted by it.

Again, not disagreeing. But if you're suffering from (C)PTSD, that advice might backfire by packing on even more feelings of shame onto your shoulders.

My experience as well. I was able to mask my ADHD with my high IQ, but I always felt like everyone else got a memo that I had missed, even when I was able to perform at a high level for short amounts of time.

Been diagnosed last year at age 42 and started taking medication. I think both quicker and faster because I don't get side-tracked and lost constantly. I can participate and even lead complicated discussions now when previously I would drift off because of something someone said that reminded me of something that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.

If someone feels mentally sluggish it's worth looking into getting checked out.

I found a study a while ago that measured the effect of defining personas, and the effect was significant, but not very big. I like defining roles because I think it makes setting boundaries a bit easier. When I assign the role of architect for brainstorming, I expect the model to be a bit less eager to immediately jump into implementation. I'll still tell it explicitly to not do that, so the effect is probably extremely small.

So far, I find it much more important to define task scope and boundaries. If I want to implement a non-trivial feature, I'll have one role for analyzing the problem and coming up with a high-level plan, and then another role for breaking that plan down into very small atomic steps. I'll then pass each step to an implementation role and give it both the high-level plan and the whole list of individual steps as context, while making it clear that the scope is only to implement that one specific step.

I've had very good results with this so far, and once the two main documents are done, I can automate this with a small orchestration script (that does not depend on an LLM and is completely deterministic) going through the list and passing each item to an implementation agent sequentially, even letting the agent create a commit message after every step so I can trace its work afterwards. I've had very clean long-running tasks this way with minimal need for fixing things afterwards. I can go to bed in the evening and launch it and wake up to a long list of commits.

With the new 6 dollar subscription by Z.ai which includes 120 prompts (around 2000 requests) every 5 hours, I can pretty much let this run without having to worry about exceeding my limits.

Thanks. Now I have to watch review videos for the next couple of hours and become an insufferable evangelist for the next couple of weeks.

You're saying this as if there were no research going on about aging. We know why aging happens. That doesn't mean we can just stop or reverse the process, or that it is even possible to do so.

I choose tools based on many reason. But the vibe they give me has a lot of weight, yes.

Another example: if you give me two programming fonts to choose from that are both reasonably legible, I'll have a strong preferance for one over the other. And if I know I'm free to use my favorite programming font, I'll be more motivated to tackle a programming problem that I don't really feel like tackling because I'd rather tackler some other problem.

If the programming problem itself is interesting enough to pull me towards it, the programming font will have less of an effect on me.

Do you see where I'm going with this? A lot of little things pile up every day, each one influencing our decisions in small ways. Recognizing those things and becoming aware of them lets us - over time and many tiny adjustments - change our environment in ways that reduces friction and is conducive to our enjoyment of day-to-day life.

It's not that I necessarily won't be doing something because I'm unable to do it exactly the way I enjoy most. It'll just be more draining because now I have to put in more effort to get myself going and stay focused on the task.