I've written a small persistent agent wrapper for agent.py. I'm impressed with how well it works. I feel like a CEO issuing global memos to all my agents after reading their status reports.
Any conversation
(Opinion) People don’t like generative AI because it made the {insert creativity} too easy. Saw the HN post on ‘AI music banned from top 40 chart in Australia’ and people had very strong opinions in both directions.
The hot take: If you’re ok with someone’s creativity being outsourced to others, then you should be ok with AI doing the same.
If “AI made this and I call it mine” is bad but “someone overseas on fivver made this and I call it mine” and it’s suddenly ok, time to self reflect.
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My hot take: from the moment you use technology, be it an instrument, a synthesizer, a DAW, and now AI, it is still your idea, your effort, your time spent, and that makes it yours. Others can do the same if they choose. The same way someone chooses a classic guitar over a synthesizer, one can choose an AI over (insert ancient way of doing things).
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You’re rolling the dice whenever you are searching for a sample or a preset in a synthesizer. Eventually it’s what “sounds good”, so still the effort is your judgement and the time spent finding that “dice roll” that sounded well.
I am not a musician, so I lack the jargon to properly explain what I mean.
I used AI for creative writing (nothing too fancy, TTRPG). There, the broader the dice roll, the more generic and uninteresting the results. Slop, if you will. It was surprisingly good to build up on ideas I had however.
I imagine muisic also has building blocks. Melodies, instruments, mixing, etc. AI can perhaps be used in a similar fashion there.
I heard a perspective I sort of like: if AI is a tool then acceptable AI use is, more or less, defined as "when my audience no longer notices or cares". It's dynamic like that. Bad photoshop is detectable and annoying, so are overusing presets. Your artistry needs to expand to meet the tool.
I don't know if I 100% like that or agree. At the same time, it's a pretty straightforward line, a practical take.
Reading Slow Productivity by Cal Newport, discovered via onboarding content in mymind mymind.com
This is a pretty neat site. I remember having vague ideas about something somewhat close to this but doing nothing with them.
I gotta confess, I vibe codet a Kirigami-based application and I liked it. I am a anti AI person, and cannot wait for the bubble to burst. Yet I see it can empower people that do not know a tech stack, and get good enough results out of it. However i also see, it makes you lazy (and frustrates as soon as it gets somewhat complicated). It seems it is being adopted everywhere. This is scary... if it becomes necessary, will you be able to find a job where they don't require you to use AI?
Wrote a short essay on overreliance on metaphor in our "understanding" of the brain
But maybe we'd all be a little saner if we remembered what we're actually doing: building tools to make our lives and the lives of others easier.
This resonated a lot. I’m glad I read it now, before going totally insane lol. But I disagree that it’s just a glorified spreadsheet. The UI/UX matters, how you present the data, how they can change and so on, all of those things play a role. The good thing with AI is iteration is cheaper than ever, so you can experiment and process the results quickly. But yeah sometimes I just do things here because I just have to be doing something, I can’t leave it alone.
Agreed. The "just" makes the statement sound dismissive, but I do agree with the underlying sentiment that most software boils down to CRUD apps that help people organize information and complete tasks more efficiently. I think the path to developer enlightenment is realizing this truth without despairing over it.