purpleflashing

I never understood the argument of "fashion over function" with regard to pockets on women's clothes. Among other things (protecting from elements and so on), aethetics is also a function of clothing. I don't have pockets on most of my dresses (or I have tiny pockets on jeans, pants, etc) not because there are no dresses with pockets (there are a lot and I do own some of those) but because they're often ugly and and I don't want to wear ugly clothes. Pockets distort the silhuette and don't hold shape well with ton of materials such as silk or thin cotton.

I tried to answer all the questions and it placed me in the extreme doom category while I would place myself closer to the center because I do not hold any particuarly strong opinions and I struggled to answer coherently some questions (e.g. I don't "expect" anything of the future or AI, I don't think "good future" is something I can conceptualize, same for "harm" on the level of society, etc.)

Not at the level that children at schools have. Once you have the skills, you can use tracing to "research" other people's techniques but that's not something that you would be taught as you are developing the core skills because it's useless for that.

Edit: I can also see the use of tracing with very small children or beginner adults with poor motorics to develop muscle control, to learn how to control the line weight and variation. It is really ineffecient when learning how to see and understand the 3D forms, though.

I'm not following -- what does it have to do with your teacher being non tech-savvy? A tech-savvy art teacher would also tell you not to trace. Tracing doesn't really help you develop your drawing skills, any reasonable art teacher would be against that.

Finally a thread to traumadump my anxieties!

I have been trying to learn programming unsuccessfully for many years (I still ocasionally get a burst of energy, try something, then eventually abandon it halfway). In the end, I just accept that I don't have the kind of thinking that makes this effort enjoyable and I cannot achieve anything good.

But, to be fair, LLMs also don't solve any problems for me in any meaningful way. I have to do a little bit of very simple coding at work and I would say that I struggle with LLMs as much as I do when I try to solve them by myself. The code works in a moment but when it gets extended, it breaks, I spend a lot of time troubleshooting. Last week I had to rewrite the code myself as my attempt to prompt fixes with LLMs just kept adding bugs -- I can't say my rewrite is any good (I need to traverse graphs and I don't know how to do it properly so I just used whatever algorithm I found in a book lol), it will probably break the next week when I need to change it or add something but I hope at least I'll be able to fix it faster as I have roughly an idea what's happening.

I haven't measured how much time I spend on things with or without LLMs but the subjective experience is pretty poor -- I work in an "engineering-heavy" company, the constant feeling of not understanding my own work among people who have master things that are 10x more complex is pretty depressing. When I program something poorly, I can at least explain what I did and what my idea was, even it was a bad one, waking up to build failures and spending an entire day relearning my own project is not good, man.

As for the obvious argument -- "you're using it wrong" -- I might be? I did try to learn prompting and I don't think I do any obviously stupid stuff like specifying a persona. At this point I feel half-insane as a frequent sentiment is that non-programmers can generate code for functioning software with LLMs, perhaps it's low quality code but it works. Except for me -- a non-programmer who fumbles it every day! I don't even need anything complicated -- they're Python extensions for a Sphinx project!

People do it for the pleasure of figuring out obscure stuff. The point is dealing with that old unsupported tech as much as the games themselves.

I'd say that everything post Hard to Be a God had either a streak of disillusionment or something like anxiety over, idk, incomprehensability of the universe and progress, but early works were pretty uplifitng.

"Noon 22nd Century" was very optimistic and inspiring, I really liked it as a kid and dreamt of becoming like the scientists in these stories. Even something like "Far Rainbow" had a grim plot but an uplifting sentiment regarding the nature of human spirit so to say? The tragedy happened but people faced it with strength and honor, so to speak.

Early works set in the Noon Universe[0] by brothers Strugatsky were pretty optimistic in spirit.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon_Universe

> Or are we counting like the games kids made in a computer lab somewhere.

We don't have to count amateur projects but the commercial releases in the US is not the entirety of the gaming history. There are other countries with their own rich gaming histories and other platforms (e.g. browser, mobile) that don't get the same attention as American releases for PC or popular consoles.

I cannot play a single game from my childhood, they were early flash games "for girls" and they were not in English. Nobody archived those.

I share the sentiment as a gamer but according to preservationists the majority of games have already been lost to history.

What are the examples of artfully crafted software? What software can never be made with LLMs?

Not a loaded question but a genuine one.

Google is terrible these days, I agree.

This is really neat, thank you for sharing.

I have, and it has never been good for my purposes. In English, I just can't find things I need, in Russian, I find things I wish to never see again, tbh.

What is your experience with it?

Edit: The best search for my purposes historically has been on Pinterest. Unfortunately, not anymore. I normally search for visual artifacts (photos, art, schematics, etc), out of all search engines Google is still the only one that is somewhat functional for me in this regard.

I tried DDG, Kagi, Yandex. None of them worked for me.

Sure. The models are still not open source and should not be called open source.

As I said, for non-technical people, software en masse has always been difficult to learn and use.

I don’t think it’s getting “worse” or that it was “good” back in my day.

I am adjacent to UX as a field, and, IMO, it’s in deep crisis itself. I don’t know when or how “ergonomics” in tech became “how to sit in front of a computer” and “design” became “creating visual assets” but even people who work in the field often reduce their jobs to simplified and corporate-optimized simulacras. I am less confident about what’s happening in academia but based on my casual browsing, it’s not better.

You need good experts to do proper research, and those haven’t been able to learn, practice, or improve their craft in any serious manner for a while.

As a non-technical person compared to the rest of HN, I think this has always been the problem of software made for non-technical audiences. The design was driven by programmers’ heuristics and trends in technology stack (e.g. if a company can hire a lot of JS devs bc JS is trending, they will choose JS even regardless of whether JS is the best choice for the problem).

There was a brief stint of UX, ergonomics and HMI getting traction in enterprise, and, imo, the biggest technological achievements in consumer software has been in the realm of UX in twenty first century. But it lost its importance, I suppose, as you don’t need to make good software to make money off consumers.

Whatever capabilities AI gives to programmers in terms of speed of development, etc, doesn’t change the fundamental behavior —- commercial software is not developed for humans. It is developed for investors, markets, around operational needs, based on CEOs whims, developers’ personal itches, relying on approximation of human experience that gets regurgitated through layers of commercial processes of product managers, UX researchers (who, if present at all, often don’t get invited to the conversation until there are buttons to move in a GUI of an already existing product). Where human experience is considered, it’s from the perspective of our natural weaknesses with the goal to exploit them to maximize profits. Hence why 21st century tech gave us all the dark patterns, feeds, social media, LLM chatbots, etc.

Even when I talk to individual engineers who are committed to creating something good, wholesome, something that they can be proud of -— many think and reason about the problem in a way that sounds like they are trying to engineer human experience the same way one would engineer instructions for machines.

It will never get better, IMO. AI only exemplifies what already exists.

There platforms like this. I subscribe to Nebula, for example.

Can you share how AI helps here?

I am learning a bit of 3D modeling in Blender so I can mod games that I like (just for private use), I do get stuck sometimes on the silliest things and Blender docs don’t help, but neither did LLMs tbf when I tried to troubleshoot issues with them. I wonder how I can make it a bit less tedious.

I see. Well, I already outlined why I thought the situation was happening — if you were trying to teach, I think you did it poorly and oscillated in your messaging from “this just works for me, personally” to “this my unorthodox method of teaching/explaining conjunctions in Japanese” (it’s clear even in comments here that you had to clarify multiple times your goals to different users).

Perhaps I am wrong but I personally don’t believe good teaching would get rejected by people (not organizations — this does happen) because of dogma. Being taught/explained something well is a very visceral experience, dogma can’t override it.

The other problem (people mistaking your personal experience for something else) could be improved by changes in your writing and messaging, and this is what I attempted to advise, I suppose. The writing will likely still be misinterpreted to a degree if what you’re saying about dogmatic thinking in the community is true, but, well, that’s the nature of communication — like with teaching, it involves working with particularities of other minds, simply being correct, methodical and rigorous in how you present arguments/topics can still result in failed communication.

Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable conversation. I apologize again if I came off negative or if my criticism was misplaced. Certainly wasn’t my intention. I genuinely enjoy many of the raised topics and was just interested in talking about them.

P.s. I would love read your failed experiences learning the language you mentioned in the blog and the comments here and what/how the traditional methods failed for you, if you ever decide to write about that, btw. I think it is a very beautiful moment when something one struggles with finally “clicks” —- I am fascinated by it and how it happens for different people.

I did, I didn’t have a problem understanding your goals as I said in one of the comments in the beginning:

> I understand you were writing about your own process of filling the gaps (btw, I also find it easier, or at least more fun, to understand the basics of grammar before memorizing all the specific forms)

(you focused on the fact that you also aimed to teach and we discussed that aspect a little bit), but a lot of people in the comments didn’t understand the goal of your post — why do you think it happened?

>I wouldn’t blink an eye to that

And I said that, in my opinion, this is where your post failed to communicate what you intended to communicate and you have a crowd of “aktshually, this is wrong” in the comments.

Seriously, without any snark intended, if you intend to write more about language learning, try sticking to strictly “this is where I struggled, this was my heuristic and this was the gap that I had, and this is how I solved it for myself”.

Bad teaching elicits negative response, so don’t mislead people into thinking you will teach them anything. If they learn because your heuristic works for them, they will.

I might be wrong, of course, but I believe (and hope) that you will have a lot more empathetic and friendly response.

You didn’t hit a nerve, I just like talking about communication and learning.

No, that’s just rigorous writing. Rigorous pedagogical approach implies helping other minds to solve problems and obstacles with acquiring knowledge. Your approach results in coincidental learning because you don’t care about the mind of your learners and their problems, you care about your own.

I do suggest to experiment with your writing — try writing only about your own journey (and nothing else!), try sitting down with another person, multiple people, and teaching them the same thing. Try writing a post for them and them only after the session and see whether there are any differences.

A good teacher is not the one who proclaims themselves to be one.

Good luck!

As I said in the comment above, I do enjoy it as well, what I am pushing back is calling it pedagogical approach or teaching.

If you taught, you know that you and your mind don’t matter much in the process of teaching, your student’s mind is in the center.

Talking about something based on your own experience into an abstract void and hoping that some lurker’s mental model matches yours is not a rigorous pedagogical approach.

Well, if it’s teaching, it’s not very good then as you don’t seem to know much about your supposed students struggles with learning this concept. You only know your own.

E.g. the visualization you’re proud of — what problem does it solve for your potential learners? Do they actually have this problem? Not your assumption of the problem but you actually seeing them experiencing this problem and offering them visualization and seeing how it helps them to close the gap? If yes, why do you think your approach failed for HN audience?

Someone learning from your journey is not you teaching them.

Teaching is a very particular skillset and craft, especially teaching languages. It should be grounded in a teacher’s own experience learning something as it helps them to empathize with the learner but simply talking about how you learned something is not teaching.

You don’t explain conjunction in such details as as well and it is not universally present feature in all the languages though.

Writing about learning languages is tricky because you cannot write for a universal audience, you have to write for speakers of a particular language (I suppose English in this case, since the article is in English), you’re also lucky if you know whether they have ever learned any other foreign language, and what particular education system they’re coming from (some education systems teach basics of linguistics and its terminology, some don’t — a language teacher might find themselves having a class full of people who have never learned what a clause, subject, object, or conjunction are, who don’t have the mental model to operate with these categories).

I don’t speak any Japanese and your explanation was understandable to me (even if there were some redundancies) but I think the negative reaction in the comments is just because of mismatch of your mental model of a language and people’s mental models.

I understand you were writing about your own process of filling the gaps (btw, I also find it easier, or at least more fun, to understand the basics of grammar before memorizing all the specific forms), but I think it’s not very clear from the article as some in the comments seemed to expect to learn from it, rather than learn about how you solved a particular obstacle in your learning.

I hope I am not coming off as bashing you or your writing. I now regret writing my original comment now that I read all the other replies — it looks like I am your work calling the article redundant, I am sorry for that. I hope you continue writing about your learning path — language learning is fascinating, and the more information we share about how we learn, the easier it is for everyone. And Japanese is a very beautiful language! Kudos to you for tackling it.

As an unrelated tangent, I love seeing it when the “thinking” in a native language leaks into the writing in another, I find it so endearing and intriguing. My French colleagues sometimes produce the weirdest English sentences (perfectly understandable just unusually phrased), that alone occasionally sparks my interest on picking up a bit of French — I just want to learn how different the grammar and sentence construction is!

Obviously, it applies to other languages, I’ve just been working a lot with French. Well, and my own language often leaks into English, of course.

I wonder what the author’s native language is as they seem to struggle with the concept of alternation.

For me, the first half of the article could be removed and the learning could simply start with “there are two types of verbs in Japanese (+ some irregular verbs), one type conjugates without alternation in the root, the other with”. That’s enough to get the mental model but my native languages have alternation to begin with so it’s an intuitive concept.