t-writescode

But then you end up in a state, 2 years down the line, where every single person that works in that code base haaaates it and adding any new functionality takes weeks or months.

Compare that to clean, organized code where patterns and extensibility are established. I’ve seen product manager surprised at how fast a new feature was added when everything is laid out well.

Young people cringe too much. Personality is good. Why does everyone want to find themselves on a safe, but boring, ranking system?

(I know why. It’s way safer and we’re in dangerous times. Conservative personalities grow in times of pain. It still makes me sad.)

And by making it so that an employee can safely quit at any time without losing their ability to, you know, not get blasted by insane surprise bills - e.g. healthcare.

You have to have enough liquid to be able to invest.

If basic needs aren’t being sufficiently eased, there’s no money left to invest.

And much of the time, that friend is the online friend.

Goodness, how is that being tolerated? I guess it can’t be stopped without a lot of political capital; but 16k lines of code is HUGE, and I cannot imagine that it’s actually 16k lines of value - I’ve written whole new subsystems of a product in fewer lines. Are these all written in an exceptionally verbose language like Go or Java? Are they VERY well documented? Are they doing things they shouldn’t be doing???

> Ditto for stuff that's simple. A JSON endpoint that runs a SQL query and returns some JSON? If it works and a glance at the tests looks OK then I trust my agents wrote it properly.

That is *exactly* the sort of area I *wouldn’t* blindly trust AI, there’s a huge security boundary there. What if the AI is doing string concatenation with user-provided data???

Are you intentionally invoking the same style of argument of Ancient Aliens and rejecting all public - that is, *in the open* work that thousands of scientists have done over the last 50 years and instead preferring to create a scenario where we invented everything 50 years ago and are slow-trickling it into the world?

Like, Independence Day style?

The only way one can claim that the middle class isn’t shrinking is to have a floating definition of the middle class.

If you lock it in any way to something like “home ownership and simple vacations once a year” (which was absolutely possible in the 90s), it has plummeted.

I struggle to imagine that all 50 years have been wholly blocked from all international research students. That seems highly implausible.

Edit: for a comparison, it took the Soviet Union 4 years to have their own Atom Bomb after the US dropped two.

The patent system is very strong evidence that there are shortcuts. So many that we have laws designed to protect and incentivize version 1.

Sure, there’s some hard lessons along the way; but far, far, far fewer than figuring it out in the first place.

And this misplaced assumption about how China won’t be able to innovate when standing on the shoulders of giants (with you saying ‘are always going to catch up’) looks only at the last 100 years and forgets the millenia before it. The West is not magically superior.

Within the last, like, ... 3 months, I think.

It scares me how much of this is true - people truly weren't doing all of this before; but like ... some of us (like myself) were, and we were trying to push other people to write good code like that - code that helped everyone else's future velocity be faster - including our own on the next MR and the next one after that.

I'm glad you're doing all those right things; but, really, some of us were already doing most of, if not all of that. And some of us (like myself) were doing it very quickly, too, since we'd been doing it that way over a decade and constantly getting faster.

This is what I've seen. There has been a middle-ground though, that I've seen. I was using Jetbrains' AI Assistant, or whatever it's called, during an interview for the (nearly) first time, and I only used it as auto-complete, but it was consistently, surprisingly, very accurate. I literally did write it faster. I scanned the literal next line, in the context of what I was writing, with all that context in my brain, and I saw what it wrote and went "yeah, that looks good". I'm a very fast typist (~> 100 wpm) and I still found it beneficial for writing out work fast. Further, since everything is still in my mental context and I can evaluate it at the same time, I feel like I can trust that type of code more.

But maybe that's just me.

Yeah, passthrough is pretty icky, for sure. I just take the headset off. It’s not good enough for passthrough.

Well, there’s probably several reasons:

  1) because they’re not doing those others spheres of work
  2) because they don’t think about the work
     nor how tired they are afterwards
  3) they’re proselytizing AI work as the future and
     that conflicts with that vision
  4) the other shoe hasn’t dropped
  5) they really don’t see it
  6) some people genuinely hate programming and this
     helps them skip that.

I’m sure others as well.

I think you deeply underestimate the value of good advertising and the charisma of the ones doing it - especially when they're sharing their story more than trying to sell you something.

Weirdly, the experience with Virtual Desktop on the Quest 3 is fast, high resolution, clean, and all that wireless on WiFi 7.

The most incredible tech on the planet is just a useless, Rube Goldberg machine without an application for the tech.

VR has lots of uses, but it takes someone outside the field who wouldn’t have given it a go otherwise to see another use and go “hey guys, you can do THIS too!”

I'm not a lawyer; but I believe that even if they take payment through BTC, etc, they're going to need to take sales tax, etc, based on the location that their subscriber is ... which means they need to handle the tax hell that comes with it, so they'll find themselves better off with a Merchant of Record that can handle that for them ... which is almost certainly proprietary because ... it's a big mess.

That’s exactly right. Finding ways to get paid for your work, and all the very complicated way taxes interact with it all, unless you’re going all-in on ads, is a messy problem that people will happily centralize for.

And for the less technical people, we have 30+ years of solving this problem with different websites that each went in and out of vogue, from groceries and MySpace, through Facebook and now Medium and Substack.

Your perspective locks in on a worldview where spirit / soul and body are intertwined and impossible to separate. There are positions that treat spirit and body as separate things, and I suspect the person you're speaking to has that perspective.

All these other responders. Goodness. It’s a clock. It’s a fun little project they made *FOR FUN!*.

Did everyone forget that hackers and engineers like to have fun? Seriously.

Someone at Open Sauce this year made a friggin CRT-based VR headset. Why? Why not.

Did we forget where we came from? Does everything have to be optimal?

Would you feel weird with someone saying 100 miles North of Miami, 100 miles Sourth of Orlando, 100 miles west of Huston, 100 miles South of Chicago?

Oh that's really very clean, yeah. It's almost literally exactly what's in the text editor, just with a more friendly-for-mouse UX. They did very well.

How is this different fro Prometheus and its associated time series db? that looks like exactly how prom works, give or take. (and some of the negatives around stats that come with it, e.g. p95 calculation)

Education is often best achieved through spaced repetition and cross-discipline integration, especially with the intent of connecting something with someone’s personal life to sink it deeper.

A single news article ever, or 1000 news articles that don’t impact “you specifically” are less effective than measured repetition across multiple fronts.

Could also be a problem of the form of P=NP. Validating might be very easy, but writing might be hard. Like the traveling salesman problem. It’s very easy to tell whether a specific path takes N units of time, but it’s hard to figure out if there’s any path, among all possible paths, that takes N units of time.

You can feel it, too. In particular when you’re used to smoother.

It’s like going from 240Hz back to 60Hz, or even 240Hz to 120. People can tell.

Far lower. I assumed most companies aren’t even doing that, especially with the options I was given. I was a 1 or a 2 for most things, and a few 4s as appropriate.