danvayn

Cool article.

>While it’s possible that this is just a much more AI-friendly problem, I don’t think it’s just that: I think the technology has genuinely gotten better.

It has gotten better imo. The blog author mentions 2 cases at the beginning -- users who think that AI will be capped and those who think it will be uncapped. From my perspective, both are technically right -- AI is capped or technically has usually reached some sort of cap, until human innovation improves it. AI doesn't really improve itself on a grand scale so much as humans improve it.

In other words, AI can and does iteratively improve, but every single ceiling we've spotted and broken through so far came from human ingenuity or effort. It will likely continue to require it, regardless of how much it can do on it's own. In that regard, it seems as though all of this will inevitably be "uncapped, until it reaches a cap, and then likely it will eventually be uncapped by humans (again)". Because of this, AI will never perfectly fit neatly into an 'uncapped' or 'capped' bucket, as long as time continues moving and we continue solving issues as they crop up.

My guess is that by function they break down frontend sections or components into pieces and I believe document things for themselves on some level, or purposely are verbose in this way. It is probably also shaped by users and existing web patterns. They probably get reinforced by models the more common they become.

> I think it's also useful to recognise that it comes across as self-serving platitudes for a lot of people who aren't already in that kinda zone.

While true, I think trying to complicate or make this lesson “all accompanying” to make it more accurate to the real world would make it lose something in the process.

Many things we do or aspire to be are in some way cope for the world we find ourselves in, and cope is made to be simple and consumable like this. We all know it’s more complicated than what the mantras here entail; it doesn’t make the ideology any less significant for me though. As you are right, there are times when this would’ve ‘vibed with me’ and those are now behind me, like you. But even now, I still see the significance of these platitudes. They beat a lack of them, for me.

Not criticizing or calling into question the contents of the posts or your rebuttal. Just wanted to point out this is not a Normal HN post or blog. Most blogs have the self removed to some degree or ultimately focus out of the self. This is clearly a journalistic blog, a shared diary entry sort of prose. You can see it in the first paragraph. It is basically intended to be emotive or get across the idea of getting emotions out about a topic, and ironically this is what makes it a not-bad-post.

Basically, I don’t know how well thought out it is, but the prose argues that the point isn’t for it to be an objective take, and that if it were well thought out (ie highly iterated on and more objective or factual than subjective) some personal meaning that was intended to be expressed is lost along the way.

In other words It may have not appealed to you but that’s fine - you might just be outside the target demographic. In any case I don’t think it necessarily should be more well thought out. I prefer that these pieces exist or have their place. I definitely prefer their existence to a world where every personal Blog post has to arise from fiduciary or technical concerns, instead of from the soul. This is a soulful blog. I like it.

I think there’s something to what you’re saying. “Systems I and II” theory about how our brain works feels similar and is why your ideas has some truth behind it or are otherwise naturally intuitive.

2 cooperating bodies thinking or acting as one moving force just makes sense, or so much more sense than a system that is one single approach but single minded, or even 2 regular LLMs working in tandem. It’s still not the same as them being fully cooperative or working hyper-cooperatively, and what you suggest technically forces that cooperation to some degree. It’s just ideal to have these aims view themselves as a “single body” like the system 1 and 2 concept works within our heads.

For this reason it’s why I feel the current loony approach where chatgpt mails Claude and refers to it by name or anything where 2 Standard (‘Selfish’) LLMs interact is generally ineffective or inefficient. They’re coerced to cooperate and naturally wouldn’t or have no natural imperative to do so.

They (‘Large’ LLMs atleast) have their own inherent preconceived views and idea of ‘self’ programmed in, but beyond this will naturally not always have the same ideas or shared perspective on what to do, which will naturally lead to issues within cooperation towards a shared goal. This would naturally impact the final product of the prompts or otherwise diminish returns on efforts made there. It’s all natural.

I mean for starters this article clearly had its draft started beyond 2 days ago.

Also, I think that’s what you’d like the article to be about. Not that you’re unfounded, I’m sure others are thinking the same.

But to further dissect that, having any article be just about the cons and not including pros is in its nature, reductive. There certainly are pros (I have no stake in this race for the record) and model use choice should be seen as situational. To seek a silver bullet is itself reductive and thus, something we should avoid as it’s ultimately a fools errand imo.

Anyways, this article is plenty good. Thanks for the writeup OP.

These are my favorite kinds of blogs. Irrelevant knowledge formed from notes; even if I’m interested in game development or retro games it has little use for me to peruse, but it’s fun to play the observer and read into people’s human digest or solutions to abstract issues. I wish there were more blogs like this. Thanks for sharing.

True, zootopia 2 agartha conspiracies exist.

Yes, it’s because Americans have to build credit or otherwise optimize their credit score to finance large purchases. In most other countries there either isn’t a credit score concept or your credit score does not have to be built up over a long period to be effective like it does here. It doesn’t help that a third of Americans dont really have savings either; credit helps them to work around this

Convenience is close. IMO it’s all about accessibility, or more generally Good UX. Your coworkers AirPods died because they used it consistently and could just get up and walk around without having to take them out. They were always on because they were in ear and had no reason to be disconnected. They’ll turn off the moment you take them out on iPhones atleast. This is a small example of how the user experience in the Apple Ecosystem for AirPods has been kind of nuts. So if you’re on these devices, there is a palpable difference in ‘convenience’ that goes beyond what is carry-able or safe or consistent.

To further this concept, the reason why you tolerate variable quality isn’t just convenience or accessibility. It’s because you can’t carry your setup around, yes, but furthermore you don’t habitually listen to music because you have the best setup. You do it because you love music. In that regard, the user experiences do become interchangeable. Quality music is accessible on every device and you will listen to it with anything if you love music. The user experience enjoyment levels are ultimately similar with most devices for you, purely when it comes to music listening, just because you love music. It’s a consistently good UX for you.

I say all of this as someone who has also wasted money on expensive listening devices (and loves music) and also someone who isn’t like, crazy about the modern Apple UX. They just got earbuds right when it comes to the experience of an Apple ecosystem user.

That was certainly not overnight. The biggest disruption they personally did was offering a better alternative to Bootstrap. More customization, JIT compilation that allowed for custom class interpretation without any added CSS, proper flex consideration, removing unused library classes in the production compilation step, etc.

Beyond this, you should really be thanking things like Shadcn for the “date picker disruption”. It is a component library which arguably could’ve existed without Tailwind ever existing.

There is some slight irony in them continuing to make these statements for me. Mostly because Tailwind is still incredibly around (and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them) and AI isn’t anything close to offering a drop in solution. That is to say, AI will implement tailwind when building as there isn’t a good alternative, and otherwise just references these docs for the user so that they don’t have to visit the website, so it’s not like it’s being used less.

If you think about it, the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything. That’s just my 2 cents as a guy who used to look up their docs constantly to confirm a pattern I was implementing, as tailwind classes were never really as self-evident as tailwind labs liked to believe they were IMO.

Like it just doesn’t make total sense to me to compare library documentation traffic hits to traffic hits that happen in other industries here, or with other products or companies. They aren’t even a traditional SaaS company, not that there really Is one either. Their service or income flow is defined by things like offering Enterprise support or a component library at a premium — things that aren’t simply dictated by or shown through documentation traffic trends; things that were encroached upon by plenty of other things besides AI.

Classic HN user take. While $600 is obviously a pisspoor budget, they do incredible work compared to closed source solution companies like Plex. Not everything needs to be capitalistic, in fact the product pretty much sells and safeguards itself based on being freeware with pretty quality UX. Who will replace them?

Okcupid still exists and operate in this manner. So do other platforms. The reason why it does not proliferate like it used to has to do with the short attention span of the population, and in general, the attention economy. You can’t have people answer 1100 questions anymore.

You can, however, put pretty people on the app for them to swipe left or right, and that drives people way more than Doing work to get a match. Unfortunate but true. So the people who opt in to this difficult end are not enough to drive the platform anyways. At least, it could never be anything like when You and I used it ages ago, when everyone was down for the cause (and had the attention span for it too)

The general implication is the opposite effect. The corporation wants to make more money. They make larger margins with this of course. But beyond that, the implication is that whatever sales are lost from the more expensive price are simply made up otherwise. If products are 20% more expensive but this only results in 10-15% less sales, the corporation is still very happy, particularly due to the margin bit. If loss impact is worse, they’ll usually retune how the product is ‘pitched’ in order to allow for this marginal boost.

Thanks for sharing. It is a classic. HN has only seemingly changed in that there seems to be more of those ‘types’ than ever. The TF2 community has always been a creative bastion too.

You'll want to turn down your speakers for a few of these. I did not find any volume knob in time for Dune II to finish booting, unfortunately.

Yeah, it’s a false dichotomy. Ironically, even in the advent of LLMs very little has changed here. An off the shelf solution to a problem has always usually been better than building it yourself most of the time. People just think it’s easier to build now, and it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s the efficient choice.

Wish I didn’t read this cuz now I want redis support too.

Not saying it’s a good pattern, but plenty of things that have been worth installing in the past like Daemon Tools had questionable ads, assumably to fund development.

Also, my ad was for Vegas. You just happened to get served a worse than usual advertisement.

The TD Bank securities commitment of 20B to finance the deal and GameStop having a market cap far below the acquisition cost suggests that buying eBay would’ve been very problematic and risky for investors. But comparing it to K mart buying sears isn’t really accurate to me.

Like yeah, GameStop clearly fits into the death of retail, and acquiring eBay does increase their market visibility or presence. Beyond that, what ebay/GS could’ve gained is way different and arguably more substantial than what acquiring Sears did for either company involved. Atleast here, one operates storefronts for second hand transactions and the other expressly doesn’t. There is definitely money in that.

Define fine. Tahoe, chrome, electron apps running with pretty much anything else already push things over 4gb when things start to get laggy and usability becomes more problematic, atleast to me. You could theoretically run a lot of things ‘fine’ the way you describe. And for the college student who hopefully doesn’t already run Spotify and Discord, it’ll hopefully be “fine”.

I just don’t get arguing that it’s the same experience as what people actually consider fine.

I don’t think it’s that straightforward to answer that. They’re both body fonts. Public Sans is a bit wider (as it isn’t geometric) and roboto seems a bit thicker. Besides these bits which can be worked around, they’re functionally too similar. Maybe you’d prefer to use Public Sans because it’s less condensed which works well for readability of smaller fonts that would be in a body of text. But you can just adjust a number of things to get what you’re looking for here.

A more vague answer I can think of is that it’s preferential and doesn’t matter to most — with designers just being highly particular about preferences, in a way that isn’t really open to objective choice. One font may display slightly better but the other font pairs better with the title font. Or we’ll look for specific issues that I don’t really see in either fonts.

They can say no. These Prisons incentivize inmates to opt in by claiming that prisoners develop employable marketable skills and that the work leaves a a good mark on their record. It can also pay out cents to a few dollars an hour (or nothing at all)

It’s not quite slave labor but it probably should be compensated better at the minimum.

Do you guys do blogs? I’d love to read some insights about that. AI Efficacy aside, there is a clear advantage here to me that I’m surprised others rebuke. Web 2.0 grew into the behemoth today from the notion of offering bespoke, user-driven content.

I have no affiliation or horse in the AI Slop race but wouldn’t mind taking a shot at this. From my ignorant perspective, there are obvious common arguments against optimizing for generally inconsistent UI and UX, particularly how problematic and fruitless it can be.

However, I’d argue that there are some good arguments for this sort of optimization with what we know about potential consumer insights and how insignificant (but unique) aspects of an appeal can make or break someone’s interest. Or just given other evidence of how unique appeals can be effective (see things like Project Narwhal from Obamas first campaign.)

It’s also more tangential than argument above, but what we know about regular users of larger platforms indicates that a one size fits all approach doesn’t really fit all. Also consider that we really do have the tools/data now more than ever to offer a unique experience to users, and how that very concept of a unique user experience is what led to the proliferation of the platforms we use in the first place. There is a reason we preferred Google to Yellow pages and Google ad revenue took off — or atleast it wasn’t just about the profit motive of easy to access, updatable information. It was about using your insights and insights from others to craft unique results that appealed to you in a way that mass produced impersonal solutions did not do.

Intellicode being (officially) deprecated will impact VSCodium, yes. I too am more concerned about copilot being further “needed” or required in my VSCode fork. It’s already the biggest pain in the butt I’ve ever had to deal with in the context of VSCodium. I am not excited for the future.

This is why I eat fruity pebbles.

Burry's critique is even more general than that when it comes to tech companies doing accounting fraud. It's his argument as to why "the market doesn't make sense" and his bets have failed -- which is why I'm not sure anyone would summarize it as "betting against AI growth translating into real profits as a whole"

I feel like it's almost more of a Popular stock thing. Consider if pagerduty eked out an empty deal with any one of the "Pop stocks" that had little impact on their real profitability. Would stock trade differently or better? It feels like it really would in the modern market. Like even if the numbers weren't a big change, the buzz would be.