natnatenathan

And I want a pony

I understand your trepidation sharing this, given how often 'vibe coded' is used derogatorily. I like what you made, thank you.

I cannot relate to this. The past 15 years have made me so tired of connected devices (and subscriptions) that simple products feel like a relief. Side note, I bought a great, magnetic timer for my daughter that we keep on the fridge for just a few dollars.

I don’t care about soldered SSD and RAM - just like nearly all other customers. It sucks yes, but I would rather have that then the hot, slow, short battery thinkpad (with a shitty display) that is my Linux box. Especially for the past few years where the m-series chips were dirt cheap.

it's beautiful, well done!

Kind of. I tried it on a really small project, but I've been reading about it and have seen a few demos and reviews. It is still too 'code focused' for me.

For context, I am a product manager at a big tech company who has been building side apps for fun (and profit) since the days of Palm OS. I am effectively an SDE1 with 20 years experience, who has deep expertise in a lot of obsolete tech (C, Objective-C, Perl) and some exposure to modern stuff (TS, React, Rust, Swift).

In the past year, I've been able to personally drive projects several orders of magnitude than what I could ever build myself. I'm not asking Fable to 1-shot grand theft auto, I am creating steering files, running adversarial reviews, prototyping, automating testing, and building my projects the slow way. Still, I don't write any code, just requirements and prompts and generate the rest. Our internal development teams at my company have arrived at a very similar process (much more sophisticated) by investing heavily in steering files that encode development approaches, harness and other mechanisms to automate best practices. It is getting to the point where our development process are becoming really similar, and many of the SDE do not need to review code for the majority of their deliverables, instead they are working on the framework (harnesses) and auditing. (Of course they still do look at the code because the love coding. But they usually don't need to)

fine, I need an "integrated agent collaboration environment" instead of an integrated development environment. I find value in them all being in the same app because it brings everything I need into a single work flow.

I have found that I need more than this. A document viewer is critical so I can see HTML prototypes, review docs and other output and give feedback contextually inline (through a commenting system). I also need a task lists for my project/ agents so I can see where things are. I created an app like this for myself that is built around an integrated terminal, after I had the epiphany that VS Code (and VIM) were becoming the wrong tool because I am not actually spending time _writing_ the code.

I keep telling people that we are living in the golden age of AI - like the first year or two of google. It is all down hill as these companies push for profit and lock-in.

I just have to add on about how great Fastmail is. They are completely focused on having a stable product, that is relatively simple and cheap. They are not ambitious as a company at all, in the best possible way. They haven't tried to build an office suite. They don't upsell me on any new features. They just deliver a solid, basic product that has been consistently good for more than a decade now. I wish more software and services were like this, I'm tired of everyone hiring an MBA and following the exact same "maximization" business model.

I think you're missing the point. The folks pushing 996 (and willingly working 996) feel like they are in a land rush, and that AI is going to accelerate their ability "take the most amount of land" No one is optimizing for the "9 to 5" oriented engineer.

Part of the point is that you cannot use it without it being online. This is a big difference between the Switch and Switch 2.

The reason I don't want AI integrated into my browser (or really anything else) is that the mental model for big tech moved from "providing value" to "capturing value" about 15 years ago, and I expect they will try to use this integration in an attempt to build a layer between the customer and all downstream services (stores, banks, information) so they can extract some form of tax on every transaction (ads, micro-fees), all while consolidating data about me to create new sources of revenue. I am one of those 'bright minds' who has wasted their talent improving marketing conversion by 0.001% instead of working to cure cancer. (Let's be honest, improvements are way better than 0.001%, I am good at my job).

My personal belief is that we can’t control every thought, but we can make sure we’re in a positive feedback loop instead of a negative one. For example, when I am getting negative, I’ve learned to take a step back and try to figure out why. If I can’t get myself in a better mood, I go to bed early and generally wake up happier. I also try to structure my days to make time for the things that make me happier (exercise, eating well, friends, family, hobbies) and cut out things that make me feel more negative (social media, news, sugar, etc). Not perfect, but it helps.

I don’t understand the appeal of smart home devices. My Honeywell thermostat may not be as optimal as the nest but I’ve had it for thirty years and it just works without thought.

I have found the the secret to a Todo list is to create the habit to keep it up to date and actually use it to prioritize your time. The list tool itself is much less important.

I don’t think this is too niche of a feature. Instead, the issue is that this would decrease the engagement (and profitability) for any customer using it, so they have a disincentive to building it. Same reason that Facebook removed features that helped customers narrow their feeds down to just favorite friends and family.

I came to say this as well. I really like the design and all the fun statistics.

Monetization will come with agents that take action on your behalf (reorder dinner, find and buy a gift for your niece, make dinner reservations). Bots will take a cut of every transaction, and intake ads to steer recommendations.

I feel this exactly. However, I find more fun to create and modify the site vs actually writing articles, so my deployments are probably 5x my actual blog posts. I got into computers because I love to code. I will still be here, writing dumb things for my own fun long after AI is the primary creator of professional coders.

Tim's problem is that he has a bad manager. One of a manager's core jobs is to communicate upwards the value that each team member is providing (or not providing). His job was to ensure that Tim's contribution were reflected and visible.

Don’t forget to make a donation to Asahi, maybe it will be ready in time for your next laptop.

I care a lot about privacy, I think others do as well. We don’t actually have that many choices as much of the privacy issues are difficult to avoid.

We did this, we realized we never really used them. It has made our home feels a bit more peaceful. Our inflection point was the upsells we would get every time we talked to it. “Would you also like to shop for Prime Day?”

Try Asahi Linux

I think you are crazy. The performance difference between MacOS and WSL is like night and day. I was just shopping for a Linux laptop and I have found that the top end models from Microsoft, Lenovo and Dell to be as or more expensive than Apple (with the exception of having user replaceable SSDs). There is nothing in the PC world that compares to Apple Silicon. If the price is too much, look at the refurb or used market where you can get really significant discounts.

You can replace that with a 2TB SSD yourself.

Ha, I worked on that project. That drove a lot of good requirements into Windows that set us up for web based services (eventually)

Tomography or tombography :)

I have always written my own static blog generator, moving from PERL to Ruby and most recently Python. I find the other blog systems are too complicated for what I want. Plus, I think I like writing the generator more than writing actual posts.