strix_varius

And? I'm not advocating for buying jeans at Walmart. I'm using it as an illustration of the lower bounds of jeans pricing.

The contrast of your two perspectives kind of illustrates the information void (of quality vs price) in the article.

At Walmart it's common to get jeans (including Levi jeans) for < $20. But how long will they last? I honestly don't know, and even more I don't know how to definitely pay more for better quality.

I can hear the whooshing from over here.

This is a trend, perhaps with most parents, but definitely with fathers and especially with the sorts of hyper focused, contemplative, creativity/engineering-minded fathers who might hang out on hacker news. At least in my anecdotal experience.

What I've found is that as my 2.5 year old gets older it gets easier and easier for me. The ratio of cool shared experiences to frustrating noise gets higher and higher.

We've just had another child, still very much a newborn, and now that I have something for contrast I see how much harder that was. To some degree the frustration and grind of very young kids had faded into the background of my memory.

The older kid helps though as a concrete vision of what we're moving towards.

I think this is an unfair characterization. I also go on business trips - about six a year, one week each.

That leaves 230 days of waking up, getting dressed, and walking to preschool. 322 nights of bath time and reading and tucking in.

The occasional trip for work doesn't negate the steady state effort that fatherhood requires.

I also have been surprised by how fun fatherhood is.

When kids are days, weeks, months old, they're constantly experiencing new things. That's the first tree she ever saw! It's amazing to experience the world through them.

When they're a couple years old, you see them learning and connecting and developing a unique personality. I love it when my two year old picks up on things that I missed, or teaches me something. And it's kind of awesome to be someone's superhero for however long this lasts.

I don't know how it goes after this but so far the trend has been that they get more fun as they grow...

I partially agree with you, but additionally there's a whole set of employees who would be clearly redundant in any given company if that company decided to just use a simple, idiomatic, off the shelf UI system. Or even to implement one but without attempting to reinvent well understood patterns.

One reason so many single-person products are so nice is because that single developer didn't have the time and resources to try to re-think how buttons or drop downs or tabs should work. Instead, they just followed existing patterns.

Meanwhile when you have 3 designers and 5 engineers, with the natural ratio of figma sketch-to-production ready implementation being at least an order of magnitude, the only way to justify the design headcount is to make shit complicated.

I've heard exactly the same response before and I shared your reaction.

The other thing that makes "dogfood" make sense is that sometimes you aren't the direct target audience of the product. So: would you feed this to your own dog?

> the proof is that LLMs _can_ reliably generate (relatively small amounts of) working code from relatively terse descriptions

> Sometimes the interpolated detail is wrong (and indeterministic)

... You consider incorrect, non deterministic results to be "reliable"?

> I feel like you can't really be considered a staff/principal if you can't already tell ahead of time where the perf bottleneck will be just on experience and intuition.

/s right?

What a red flag that would be!

> I guess that's not happening now.

They're still going with their hybrids of course.

I have a Honda Hybrid CR-V and love the drivetrain. We're waiting until Honda moves that drivetrain into the Odyssey (which is the van we want... probably what you have, hah)

It's not though: https://www.wardsauto.com/news/consumers-turn-back-to-ice-EY...

> So an EV is not for you! You just might be one of the unlucky 1% for whom that is true.

Given the data on the trend of EV sales (https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/global...) this is a pretty big claim to make.

I live in an old, pre-automobile neighborhood. Like other such old, walkable, sidewalk-and-park-and-corner-store neighborhoods in the US, it's one of the most attractive parts of my city.

However, almost nobody here could feasibly own a fully electric car. Most houses don't have driveways or garages. People park ad-hoc on the street. Most families own one car, and that car needs to be able to go long distances because it's both the local vehicle and the road tripper.

My wife and I would buy an EV if we could. We know the exact one. But it's not feasible for us, or for our neighbors. Far from being "1%" this situation is quite common. So we have a Honda hybrid instead.

The Toyota strategy from 2022 has aged brilliantly: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/29/toyota-ceo-stands-by-electri...

However, the EV maximalist strategy from the same era has aged like milk.

Try using them to play a twitchy game and you'll notice.

Probably an exaggeration? But I hope that tapping for pause isn't critical for anyone's daily life.

I use wireless headphones and in fact never use this feature (I have it disabled). Too unreliable when there's a large screen with a big pause and skip button within reach.

Urban fantasy is my jam, what's your book?

> Obsolete technologies don't usually get adopted as ways to display wealth.

Is this really true? Mechanical watches. Sailing yachts. Fountain pens. Analog audio...

That sounds like good work & a good outcome. I think there may be one ingredient left though to this:

> You have to write things up.

...and someone has to read it who understands the value you brought by deleting complexity.

It seems like the safety inspector might be closer to a SOX compliance auditor or something... in this metaphor, the engineer who doesn't build something that "catches fire" is just the one who uses sensible materials, includes smoke alarms in the design, and chooses to use passive insulation in the walls instead of electric space heaters on a high-pile rug.

You can't. You can hypothesize about the counterfactual in which you shipped a "steaming pile of complexity," but you definitionally cannot measure something that does not exist.

To add to this, sometimes leadership will assume (or even imply) that there's some laziness involved in not wanting to jump immediately on-board with the complex proposal.

I often end up saying, "I can build this, and I will build this if product insists on it, but first let me suggest an alternative ordering of deliverables that starts with a simple implementation and moves towards this one." In almost every case, that simple implementation is still what's in production years later.

The statistics suggest that being perpetually glued to a phone is negative for your life across essentially every dimension.

You're being pretty defensive / aggressive about what some might call a phone addiction.

Most on HN know the data: healthier people tend to enforce boundaries with their devices. The average person is addicted, yes, but I'm not sure being "the odd one" in an era of actually decreasing literacy and numeracy and attention span is the insult that you seem to think.

Honestly it seems stupid but fine to me. Like if someone random comes up to me on the sidewalk and says hey if OpenAI announces a browser tomorrow, you give me $100. If not I'll give you $1000. Obviously I'm not going to take them up on it, they clearly have inside information.

If you're betting on a prediction market without insider information then you're just... The fool who is soon parted from his money one way or another.

I generally feel like people should be free to do whatever insane stuff they want with their own lives.

> They'll capitulate after the lawyers realize that option is on the table.

Hopefully their lawyers read HN comments so they can negotiate with your deeper understanding of the legal landscape.

When our first child was born, we wanted to share photos with family. So I set up a Google photos album and shared it with parents, aunts, grandparents, etc.

It supports general chat plus comments and reactions linked to posted media. It's exactly what I wish social networks became... Something like the "circles" idea that Google abandoned years ago.

Now with several thousand images and videos and comments we're hitting the limits of what Google seems to have designed for with however shared albums sync.

This community feature though is the only reason I haven't self hosted all this stuff...

The baffling part of the article is all the assertions about how this is unique, novel, not the typical way people are doing this etc.

There are whole products wrapped around this common workflow already (like Augment Intent).

Pop physics influences less of our day-to-day lives though.

Well, yes, definitionally they are doing exactly that.

It just turns out that there's quite a bit of knowledge and understanding baked into the relationships of words to one another.

LLMs are heavily influenced by preceding words. It's very hard for them to backtrack on an earlier branch. This is why all the reasoning models use "stop phrases" like "wait" "however" "hold on..." It's literally just text injected in order to make the auto complete more likely to revise previous bad branches.

The fact that they tried other engines seems to imply that non Flutter options were... Options.

If literally the only option was an embedded flutter view, then there was never more than one viable solution and looking into unity etc was wasted effort.