met someone at a book club I went to for the first time today and invited them over for an evening bowl, cool to talk tech to another techy especially one familiar with llms at not just a surface level
Any conversation
working on permanent.sh a coding agent for the growing and seemingly permanent underclass of people that are left behind by the unbelievable pace of progress in ai
the big labs are fighting over felonybench (exploitbench) and google deepmind ceo left to work on drug discovery
(Opinion) People donโt like generative AI because it made the {insert creativity} too easy. Saw the HN post on โAI music banned from top 40 chart in Australiaโ and people had very strong opinions in both directions.
The hot take: If youโre ok with someoneโs creativity being outsourced to others, then you should be ok with AI doing the same.
If โAI made this and I call it mineโ is bad but โsomeone overseas on fivver made this and I call it mineโ and itโs 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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Youโre rolling the dice whenever you are searching for a sample or a preset in a synthesizer. Eventually itโs what โsounds goodโ, so still the effort is your judgement and the time spent finding that โdice rollโ 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.
Recently hit 10+ years (cumulative) of being a software engineer. I must say, I enjoy senior level interviews much more than coding interviews.
Developed a Vinboard (my pinboard.in clone) shortcut, works really well. On iOS it lives in Share menu, on macOS in the Dock. Click sends the current browser page (Safari, Chrome, Zed, Firefox) for bookmarking. On the server side Jev decides tags from 60 least recently used; and archival opens a real Chrome to save the whole page for posterity.
Unlimited API limits and direct requests to the database.
Pinboard charges for much less functionality $22/year.
Whatโs the difference between a script-kiddy and a real ? Abstraction. You can program your whole life without learning how to meaningfully abstract problems into simpler pieces that TRULY make the problem easier to understand.
Iโm not talking about design patterns or vs . These tools can help. But to really simplify something for others, you need an intellectual empathy that many simply never figure out.
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.
Uhm, not really. Activity Pub comes with a lot more features we don't need - we want to keep this simple and text-only