karaterobot
karaterobot on Hacker News
When we're looking to the actors guilds for direction, you know the future of our industry might be in trouble.
I've been quoting von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design for over a decade, since it is a great summary of why I switched from engineering to product design mid-career. That law is the one that says engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept. I didn't engineer spacecraft, but on web projects I noticed that whoever made the documents furthest upstream had a ridiculous amount of influence over the outcome of the product. Even just being the one taking notes in the first meeting gives you leverage in a process which, despite claims of being agile, is definitively path-dependent most of the time.
I'm sometimes asked to produce meaningless 30-page documents that nobody ever reads. I mean literally nobody, since I can see the history of who has accessed it. Me and a proof-reader, and occasionally someone will open it up to check that it exists. But nobody
reads them, let alone reads them
closely. Not the distant funder who added it as a line-item requirement to their grant (their job is adding line items to grants, not reading documents), nor the actual people involved in the project, who don't have time to read a meaningless document, and don't need to. It's of use to no one, it's just something that must be done because we live in a stupid world.
I've started having AI write those documents. Each one used to take me a full week to produce, now it's maybe one day, including editing. I don't feel bad about it. I'm ecstatic about it, actually; this shouldn't be part of my job, so reducing its footprint in my life is a blessing. Someday, someone will realize that such documents do not need to exist in the first place, but that's not the world we live in right now, and I can't change it. I'm just glad AI exists for this kind of pointless yeoman's work.
Some programmers are engineers, but not all programmers are engineers. A lot of us are plumbers, basically. We connect together things other people have engineered. There's nothing wrong with plumbing; it's an important, honorable profession. It's just a different thing than engineering. And I'm not saying that a really good programmer transforms into an engineer by virtue of being really productive, or smart, or whatever—I'm saying engineering is a specific activity that most of us don't do every day as part of our jobs. So, to the point of this article, I'd like evidence to be gathered from engineers, specifically, and not programmers like me.
I bought all the Affinity programs after ditching Adobe, which I'd used for 20 years or so. I'm a professional designer, and even though most of my work is in Figma these days, it's nice having dedicated bitmap editing and document design applications.
I bought (two different versions of) these apps specifically because they weren't a SaaS suite with a predatory monthly subscription model, and a constant barrage of cross-promotion and integration with their other products.
Now that Figma is public, it's rapidly become another fully enshittified SaaS suite whose only selling point is that there's nothing better out there for now. Affinity is now pivoting in the same direction. What a time to be a designer!
The headline is incorrect, it should say "A Browser That's Anti-Web". Many other browsers are also trying to destroy the web for their own benefit, including some you may have heard of.
The ideal scenario isn't the government forcing a sale of TikTok for political reasons. The ideal is that people stop using TikTok because they realize it's not good for them, but I guess I don't see that happening. Instead we'll just continue scrolling while wondering why we're so unhappy and angry all the time.
I guess I disagree that it's a good thing.
As a developer, I think most documentation is terrible both for developers and non-developers alike. And if you write your documentation so that it is useful to non-developers, it's still useful for developers.
There's no downside to writing accessible documentation, except that it requires a modicum of skill and effort. That's the real reason it's so rare, I think.
I also disagree that developer documentation is like academic papers. The ways they fail are almost opposite: academic papers are overly long and overwritten, because the authors want to be very careful and complete. Developer documentation is too short and hastily written, because they often don't care if it's helpful to anybody else.
The end result may be the same: neither are useful except to a small number of experts: the people who could probably do it themselves already, and thus may not even really need the write up to begin with. But that's a failure, not a feature to be celebrated.
You'd think so, but I've been hosting MM for about 6 years, and it's definitely gotten more user- and admin-hostile in that time. They've restricted really vital improvements to paying customers (basic stuff, like having a functioning search), removed existing features (like video calls) and started shoving in more advertisements and nags to upgrade to a higher tier.
The fact that they've ramped that stuff up so much in the last couple years does not bode well for the future, in my opinion.
My installation isn't associated with a business, it's just a chat board for about 30 people, so there's no question of me being willing to pay $300 a month for the privilege.
I'm sticking with Mattermost because there's no better option, and I've got hundreds of thousands of messages I don't want to lose. However, it isn't like they don't try to extort you just because they're better than Slack about it.
If it turns out the dip is caused by a lag between the implementation of new tariff rules and the implementation of processes to handle them, and that in a short time traffic to the U.S. goes back to essentially its prior levels, what will that mean to the commenters in this thread? All of the hyper-rational, fact-based people in this thread, I mean. Because that seems like the most likely outcome to me.
Jobs, who died in 2011, may very well have had some new or updated opinions himself by now.
> Precisely one reason comes to mind to have ROBOTS.TXT, and it is, incidentally, stupid - to prevent robots from triggering processes on the website that should not be run automatically
Counter-point: I have a blog I don't want to appear on search engines because it has private stuff on it. 25 years ago I added two lines to robots.txt file, and I've never seen it show up on any search engine ever since.
I'm not pretending nobody has indexed my blog and kept a copy of the results. I'm just saying the blog I started in college doesn't show up when you search for my name on Google, which is all I care about.
Check out the first 1 minute of the linked video for answers to both of these questions.
You know, I used to bullseye small thermal exhaust ports in my T16 back home, they're not much smaller than womp rats.
> Hill said that the X300 is the favorite ThinkPad he worked on, not only because of its thinness, but also because it proved that, under Lenovo, he could build an even better product than he had for IBM.
> "There was a giant scare that this Chinese company was going to destroy ThinkPad, and it was going to become cheerful and ruin it and all this kind of stuff," he said.
'As good' can mean different things.
My first two laptops were IBM Thinkpads. In 2000 or so, I was carrying one in my hands down some concrete stairs. I tripped, bounced the laptop down 2-3 stairs, then landed on my knee on top of it. No visible marks, and it booted right up and worked flawlessly for years afterward. This was with a platter hard drive, too. I don't remember the X300, but the current Lenovo Thinkpads don't strike me as being quite as robust as the tanks they used to make.
Does what it says on the label.
I don't think it has to be ADHD. I don't have ADHD, and none of my friends have it that I know of. We all start things we don't finish, though. I was going to post some of the more ridiculous domain names I've purchased for personal projects, before I realized I'd be doxxing myself. Too bad, there are some good ones.
I think in many cases, we fail to finish projects because it's so much easier to start than it is to finish. The first 90% is easy, as the saying goes, but the second 90% is much harder.
And I use the word 'fail' advisedly. I think it's fine to not finish everything you start, but it's not good to never finish anything, ever. Not if your intention was to finish it anyway. I think finishing things is a crucial skill, and we need to practice it in order to get good at it, and we won't do that if we tell ourselves it's about as good to give up as it is to keep going.
ADHD is a real diagnosis, but I'm hesitant to pathologize not finishing projects, since that will end up being an excuse rather than an explanation for a lot of people.
What are some subjects that ChatGPT has given only shallow instruction on?
I'll tell you that I recently found it the best resource on the web for teaching me about the 30 Years War. I was reading a collection of primary source documents, and was able to interview ChatGPT about them.
Last week I used it to learn how to create and use Lehmer codes, and its explanation was perfect, and much easier to understand than, for example, Wikipedia.
I ask it about truck repair stuff all the time, and it is also great at that.
I don't think it's great at literary analysis, but for factual stuff it has only ever blown away my expectations at how useful it is.
It's got to be a good agenda, too. It can't just be "discuss delivery of project X" or "sync on status of feature Y". Those are too generic. The agenda needs to make it clear what the outcome of the meeting is, and who needs to be there.
I'm the only person I know of who writes real agendas for meetings at my company (which is only about 120 people). It's clearly not caught on, but I do it anyway almost as a protest at this point.
It's a reference to Wernher von Braun. I think it's a really pointless thing to say, since it adds nothing to the conversation and just sort of makes an unrelated, uninformative reference. But here we are nonetheless.
I don't think the results of the last two decades of mass information dissemination have been all that great. People didn't trust anything on the internet before GPT, and the internet was already a cacophony of screeching voices too. Smart people were already decoupling from social media, and moving meaningful interaction to enclaves well before ChatGPT became a factor. ChatGPT did not ruin the internet, it was unleashed on a broken internet to begin with.
If, as this article predicts, the result of GPT is that we don't trust information from the internet, and everybody moves away from it, that's great. Traditional journalism was better, as it turns out. Talking mainly to your friends rather than millions of people was better, as it turns out. I'm ready to go back to that, should it come to it.
But it won't. This essay is making a catastrophic prediction that won't come to pass. Whatever the future is, it's going to be something nobody is predicting yet. It'll be better than the doomsayers predict, and worse than what the cheerleaders say. It will be nothing like a simple magnification of the present concern over epistemology.
A lot of people are responding with other technical considerations that may lead you to consider using an SPA pattern. But, note that the article is about responding to the stakeholder's request that it should 'feel like an app', and his point is that you can make it feel like an app without being an SPA. Non-technical stakeholders rarely bring up deep technical considerations, they almost always talk about what something should feel like. So, I think his argument, while unlikely to work on anybody, is valid.
The title made me think this was going to be about the mental consequences of outsourcing writing to AI. In fact, the article is completely about people not
reading documents. Corporate documents to be exact. His examples are from the 00s, so the problem has absolutely nothing to do with AI.
Heck, I, too, have noticed that nobody reads anything: what does that have to do with AI? At least with AI, people could read a summary of his 30 page corporate memo and ask it questions.
I repeat: that people do not read is not a new problem, nor is it made one iota worse by AI.
> The fact is that if you’re worried about privacy, you should be far, far more concerned about all the data that various companies are hoovering up about you based on your online activity.
This tired canard makes me mad. It's not either/or. Be concerned about anyone who is collecting data on you and selling it without your consent.
And in my mind, the reason to delete your data from 23AndMe isn't to protect PII, it's to take an a salable asset away from a company that promised they wouldn't sell it in the first place, then changed their mind.
I didn't find it to be defending the CIA's failures in any way.
The CIA didn't call Trump its adversary, the reviewer of the book did. They also said that Trump was the Agency's adversary, not the other way around. It is also possible to be adversarial against an individual while doing a good job working for them (see for example everyone with a boss they don't like).
I wouldn't read too much about the intentions of the intelligence community into that provocative sentence by an unaffiliated book reviewer.
Typically LLMs don't put spaces between em dashes and the words that surround them—which is the correct orthography, I should point out. Humans often put spaces around them when they shouldn't, like in the example you quoted. I don't know if it's AI or not, but if you ask an AI to use a sentence with an em dash in it, it won't include spaces.
Proving that AI is not just parroting back what it reads on the web, ChatGPT manages to correct my programming mistakes without making me feel bad. If it learned from Substack, I'm glad it learned selectively!
The linked article said the vaccine was still in pre-clinical trials, which means it hasn't been tested on humans yet. Mouse models are a stepping stone toward that. When you hear 'pre-clinical' think 'alpha testing', or 'proof of concept' stage.