Economist Lant Pritchett describes shifts in ideas as silly, controversial, progressive, then obvious.
Also:
"Radio has no future. X-rays are clearly a hoax. The aeroplane is scientifically impossible." - Lord Kelvin
". No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." - CmdrTaco
Any conversation
Putting a slide deck together (outside of work), despite agreeing with Tufte on this matter. I’ll also create a handout that tells the story better than the slides and deliver that, too, but was asked to produce a slide deck, and I think that’s part of the “effort theater.”
Using Beamer for the slides, but not a theme that looks like Beamer because humans have eyes.
I've been on a kick lately of trying to visualize the oscillating clock, and ultimately the effectively arbitrarily complex activity of a computer processor, as modern refinements of the line shaft factory of the 19th century. Of compute as being not much more than profoundly refined "work" delivered by the electrical grid into marvelously complex machines.
Does that, as a metaphor at least, feel as important to you as it has to me of late? We spend so much time in a world abstracted.
Having a little difficulty seeing how long this service will exist. People are terrible. Sooner or later it will be found and ruined.
@fastidiousprofilefollow
"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyersreplied to:
"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyersreplied to:Yup. I have long change my philosophy on things like these: just live the day. :-)
Been working on an old mastodon hosting project I tried to start a few years ago, with a focus on privacy. This is the first big project I've tried to come back to with the help of coding agents and find it invigorating, and gives me the confidence to actually finish the project. Who knows if it will ever make a dollar, but it sure is fun to watch my ideas come to life.
there's no fundamental physical limit that prevents silicon from developing taste and judgement, but language is a lossy compression of reality.
taste comes from experience, from the shadowy mass of episodic memory, which swirls and convects at the boundary of consciousness. the ideas recombine into new ones in the nuclear reactor of the hippocampus.
but no matter how imbued with meaning and expertise is a handmade wardrobe we still get our shit from ikea
Can you learn programming by building with AI?
Better than before5%
About the same0%
Worse than before55%
Depends how you use it40%
If programming is the typing of characters into a text file, it is way worse. I think the key to learning is still doing it rather than reading it. If the question is about system design I think you can, but only if you curious and it becomes a problem that needs to be solved.
Asking "What do you think" is one of my favorite questions to learn at the moment.
I do think there will be what were hard earned lessons about system design, code smell, designing data structures for the hardware you're running on, concurrency golden paths, etc., which are now with agentic dev even harder to learn and internalize. But also if you have an excellent teacher in the form of an actually-good model pair programming with you always, maybe not? Maybe a pair programming AI programming tutor would be a good Zed/vscode extension. Or product.