I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Dont tell! they'd banish us - you know!
How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell your name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!
Any conversation
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.
one-point-five-shotted a local node app for creating social posts. drawing from static pages (hey this exists) or new blog posts (timely). with copy/paste to x, and one click post to bluesky and mastodon, tag manager and stale/archive/reject/refresh options. An idea and a solution in about 10 minutes. Madness.
de a tapasztalatok szerint a kezelลfelรผlet elfรกradรกsa elลbb-utรณbb magรกval hozza magรกnak a rendszernek az elfรกradรกsรกt, majd lassulรกsรกt, szerintem 1-2 รฉv mรบlva (amikor mรกr senki sem emlรฉkszik majd rรก), forradalmi รบjรญtรกskรฉnt visszahozzรกk a Windows 10 kezelลfelรผletรฉt Windows 12 nรฉven
but according to experience, the fatigue of the user interface will sooner or later lead to the fatigue and then the slowdown of the system itself. I think in 1-2 years (when no one will remember it anymore), they will bring back the Windows 10 user interface as a revolutionary innovation under the name Windows 12.
This #tome about #Tcl/Tk has me re-evaluating my plans to move to the woods to be a carpenter hermit.
Now I want to move to the woods and be a programmer hermit.
Overvalued, maybe. Extremely valuable, yes, though.
For sure. We're well past the point of being able to reasonably claim that the tools have no practical use.
But I share the article's skepticism that LLM-based AI will "produce a fully automated drop-in replacement for most knowledge workers". Which it at this point has to in order to justify these companies' stupendous valuations.
Tomorrow no but there will always be the โhopeโ which is enough for the next 20 years before giving up. Which meanwhile would be replacing larger and larger chunks of the workforce so it wonโt really matter, weโll be adjusting our lives around it as well so we meet in the middle.
Tesla has been overvalued for over a decade with the promise of โfully autonomous carsโ and itโs still not losing its value, despite not meeting that (and probably never will, as the computation necessary to achieve it is bounded by physics).
โฆ
Something with people, bartender maybe, or something with no critical thinking, delivery person, taxi driver and such. Or I go back to being a DJ as I was doing when I was young.
Electrician, plumber or maybe ventilation technician. Or excavator operator maybe. Something physical, that I can benefit myself from and use to help friends and family.
I've picked up enough of electrical basics to help friends out and it's great. It doesn't take too big a bump in skill/knowledge/experience to get to the point of fixing things and wiring new outlets. Hmm... I did have a retired electrician friend to help me get started tho. It kinda feels like "Lego for adults" ๐
Went to a party today, the group was mostly strangers, but they were all sociable and knew the art of small talk rather well, something I rather admire.
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. Iโm glad I read it now, before going totally insane lol. But I disagree that itโs 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 canโt 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.
I read
Still trying to figure out the boundaries of these tools' strengths without outsourcing important thinking, problem-solving, and the collective building-up of a mental model of the systems we're developing.
The shape of LLM tools as toolsโfit for a purpose, ergonomicโis becoming clearer, and human patterns of behavior with them that do more harm than good are also becoming easier to recognize.
Gave this evergarden colorscheme a shot after seeing it on lobsters today. Quite liking it.
โฆ
NIH syndrome? I am guilty of it too. I love implementing things from scratch, you learn a lot by doing so and you get to own the codebase end-to-end, so no surprises and fighting around othersโ choices. It can get exhausting too though, in the end I succumb to using off-the-shelf components because my primary goals move at a higher level.
I don't see much point in trying to build software at a "higher level", like whole products and services. I'm going to go down low and train myself on the fundamentals. Hopefully in time I'll be able to contribute to the foundational bits.
You're right, it does get exhausting. At some point you just want to rebuild everything, which is not possible.