techpression

But it’s at the whim of someone who I think nobody can describe as stable or trustworthy. Starlink the technology is great, Starlink the company has a massive weight attached to it.

The circulation of money in AI is deeply troubling (NVIDIA being one of the worst I believe), either the bubble doesn’t pop and corruption like this is considered legal (self-inflating money amongst friends) or it pops and the financial hurt will be felt for a decade.

That is a load-bearing decision!

Lovely read, if you’ve ever had even remotely similar issues (you think you’re looking at the right places but you’re not) it read like a detective novel.

Gave me a chuckle on my commute, thanks!

That’s fair, it’s just that a lot of the functionality overlaps in very rewarding ways, even if you only use the overlap 5% it’s incredibly frustrating to not have that function when you need it

Do you use Photoshop? The underlying engine which gives support for layers and smart objects is in itself such an amazing piece of tech that nobody seems to get even close to (and I’ve tried them all). The brush engine is fantastic, liquify and the general support for plugins, and heck, just the basic math behind the filters.

Canva and Figma are layout tools, not for pixel editing.

Recreating it would make it faster and cheaper, something that has been driving software for decades.

Same question I ask, it’s free money, why isn’t a million people asking Claude to build it? My guess is the lack of training data and understanding of the problems it solves, but AI was supposed to fix this already?

Happy I can use Claude for more trivial things, but if the AI labs wanted an actual benchmark, Photoshop or Davinci Resolve would be it.

Most CEOs in my feed are convinced that AI makes people the equivalent of entire departments. AI should make your life easier, but instead it’s the opposite for a lot of people in the work force, which makes me really sad.

What motivation? Is it motivation to start Claude Code and let it run when you have no idea what’s going on? Is motivation the same as token spend? Yes, the barrier should definitely be someone who knows how to code when submitting, well, code.

And since the training data seems to be very lacking, no amount of markdown would fix that.

This case is trivially circumvented with device farms, much like described in the post. What real problem are they trying to solve? AI bots reading content? That’s not something Google want to prevent, it’s part of their business model, this would allow them to easily circumvent it for themselves though.

Reminds me of when I as a kid got one of those Delta 7000rpm fan powered cpu coolers, my mom promptly asked what it would cost to make that noise (that was heard in the entire apartment) go away. Got a Zalman (back when they were great) and everything was good.

It was a learning experience, and I think everyone should experience that kind of industrial noise at least once to appreciate how quiet consumer hardware is.

No disagreement from me

It goes for all professions really, people who do it for work and people who care. Apply to any profession, plumbers, doctors, carpenters, cleaners, etc etc. Most of us have experienced both types and I haven’t heard of anyone preferring the ”do it for work” over the ones who care. And like those other professions, in software we accept the worse of the two because finding people who care is both time consuming and often much more expensive.

Good article but it misses, for me, the core aspect of cognitive debt, by not doing the work you don’t learn anything. There is no mitigation for writing code, no amount of reviewing or documentation will fix it, it’s just not how our brains work and how we learn things. We learn by doing, and by repetition, failure makes us repeat it, which is why it’s good to fail sometimes.

Carmack once wrote something I’ve been holding dear ever since, and I’m paraphrasing, ”even if you copy paste code, make sure you write it”. And it actually works, the outcome of just having your brain make your fingers type the code is easily differentiated from just pasting it.

For me this has been a life saver being the only back end developer at the company. I don’t have the energy nor time to think about every possible scenario, especially not the mobile client sending random strings to something that should be parsed as an uuid (has happened more than once). By letting it crash I can have a look at the traces at my own leisure and a lot of them I never fix, because I don’t have to.

The amount of silencing (implementer error, but quite prevalent) of errors I’ve seen in typescript codebases are horrifying. Essentially ”try happy path, catch everything else and return generic error”, the result is is mostly the same for the user, but night and day for me who is trying to fix it.

Noctua is working at the last five percentages of performance AND lifespan. They want their fans to perform (and sound) identical ten years later with daily use. Most people change fans far earlier than that.

It’s kind of refreshing to see really.

It’s getting buggier and buggier, not being able to fill in passwords properly is kind of a glaring omission of a password manager (and that’s on three different computers). They keep adding features but seem to show little interest in fixing bugs. I submitted debug logs, recorded videos etc but it just trickled out in the sand. And as another poster wrote, it all started going bad with the switch to Electron (might be the rust backend that is the problem, I don’t know and frankly don’t care, it just doesn’t work as well as it did before).

Sure, but that’s like saying we’re close att infinite life because we’ve expanded our life expectancy.

I don’t really buy into the ”one part equals another”, we are very quick to make those assumptions but they are usually far from the science fiction promised. Batteries and self driving cars comes to mind, and organic or otherwise crazy storage technologies, all ”very soon” for multiple decades.

It’s very possible that white collar jobs get automated to a large degree and we’ll be nowhere closer to AGI than we were in the 70’s, I would actually bet on that outcome being far more likely.

It doesn’t though, AGI have far greater implications than doing mundane work of today. Actual AGI would self improve, that in itself would change literally every single thing of human civilization, instead we are talking about replacing white collar jobs.

Understanding something and learning something are not the same things.

I think of the four year cycle as one year to whine about the previous (if different) government you took over from, two years of governing and the last as a ”get ready for election”. So in the most optimal scenario you get three ”peaceful” years. It’s very few things that can be done well in three years at ”ruling a country”-scale.

If that happens catching up will be meaningless, everything we know and care about will change. You don’t have to be doomsday about it even, a self improving AI will quickly be more efficient than a human brain, all the data centers will be useless, tech companies will collapse (so will most others), everyone will have an incredible AI resource for the price of a hotdog. There’s no way it wouldn’t leak from whoever made it, either by people or by the AI itself.

So not at all for their work and with a reverse Robin Hood model? That would be terrible for software. The way artists gets paid on streaming is a genius play at catering to the biggest artists and labels and screw over the smaller ones, especially true on Spotify with their freemium model

Easiest way to get rid of dust and other buildup, free flowing water for a few seconds and done. Compared to the Middle Ages of using tooth picks or similar to clean the ports and speakers it’s much nicer. And no, I don’t have my phone in any weird places, just my pocket.

Rugged phones are so far removed from any consumer phone in terms of size and weight the comparison is about as apt as comparing military use laptops with a MacBook.

It’s also very hard to make them resistant to water and dust, I really like that I can wash my iPhone in the sink and don’t have to worry about it getting wet in general. This is a lot harder to achieve with battery doors, especially if they need to be as big as a phone back.

”Any host” of what? That’s such a non-descriptive statement and clearly not true at face value.

Snark aside, this is an actual problem for a lot of developers in varying degrees, not understand anything about the layers below make for terrible layers above in very many situations.

That would be the definition of learning something, yes.