web-cowboy

I highly recommend donating some amount of your time, expertise, or money to good causes, regardless of your financial situation. Even the smallest amounts compound to amazing results—especially over long stretches over time.

When I was a student I made (very!) modest contributions to clean water projects, microfinance organizations, and the reports I now read as a mature adult are so gratifying.

I also try to keep a "charity" type project in my queue - volunteering my tech skills to help fix/build things for NGOs so fun to look back on.

I'm finding counterexamples of this constantly now that I can have an agent rewrite large sections of my codebase that have been sorely needing it.

- Moving to a newer and more modern test library

- Refactoring my data layer so it's easier to read, based on years of organic changes that need to be baked in and simplified

- Porting some functionality to another language to vastly improve performance

I agree with the overall sentiment, but having an agent at my finger tips who can really crank out large-scale, involved code changes is unclogging quite a few backburnered todos lately for me.

Rough spot in time to be:

- Once print newspapers were no longer a thing, even local news outlets are struggling to stay alive, and are resulting to sensationalism and entertainment as news - Corporate sponsors retain a huge influence in mainstream news (or have outright purchased it and use it for partisan politics). - "Social" media resides in (you guessed it) corporate-owned walled gardens. - Even those willing to speak out are being targeted by federal agencies

Wondering where others are finding great places to learn what's going on, what's actually relevant to me, and what I can actually do about it.

As I think through this, I agree with others mentioning that "deep agents" still sounds a lot like agents+tools. I guess the takeaway for me is:

1. You need a good LLM for base knowledge.

2. You need a good system prompt to guide/focus the LLM (create an agent).

3. If you need some functionality that doesn't make any decisions, create a tool.

4. If the agent + tools flows get too wily, break it down into smaller domains by spawning sub agents with focused prompts and (less?) tools.

This seems like a much more powerful version of what I wanted MCP "prompts" to be - and I'm curious to know if I have that right.

For me, I want to reduce the friction on repeatable tasks. For example, I often need to create a new GraphQL query, which also requires updating the example query collection, creating a basic new integration test, etc. If I had a MCP-accessible prompt, I hoped the agent would realize I have a set of instructions on how to handle this request when I make it.

I wanted Tim Berners-Lee's "Solid" project to be at least a partial foundation for this, but it doesn't seem to be getting traction.

Some way to "self-host" or "own my own data" isn't very possible in a world of complex system administration and cloud providers, GDPR/Privacy, etc.

Maybe solving this problem (via FOSS, hopefully) and giving people their own internet-in-a-kit could be a good way to go?

Are there active projects like this? Is it even feasible?

Anyone know of efforts to fix this space? Looking for a good excuse to quit my well paid corporate job and make a difference. News today is:

- Infotainment - Tribal reinforcement - Irrelevant - Not actionable (and thus, depressing) - Making people think the world is getting worse - Immediate and not well thought out or nuanced

In some ways it's their fault, but on the other hand, the modern reader won't pay for news. Maybe it's largely a business model problem?

It's literally killing people and needs to be disrupted, fixed.

This is just an anecdote, but when I was called up as first-time juror, I was surprised how much the police and the prosecuting attorney were pushing for something that just wasn't there.

Incentives are everything, and these groups of people get paid to put people in jail. And it shows.

I want this exact same thing (for many of the same reasons), but for gaming.

- Toxic people can finally be identified and penalized - Better matchmaking (less "smurfing", less streamer accounts going from zero to hero)

I haven't looked too closely at Voice's setup, but does "verified" always have to mean non-private, and non-anonymous?

So we'll be able to play video game adaptations of the locations in the episodes really easily/soon, right? ;)

I can't tell if this data means Utah got better at welcoming females to JS engineering or there's a point where they stop trying around five years. :) As a member of the JS community I hope it's the former.

There's also someone killing it that's only been working in JS for three years.

It's a huge increase in pay when you consider how much lower the cost of living is.

Wise words for any project or product that starts in academia but stays there for too long (building for papers and PhDs rather than real customers). Brave to deliver such a cutting critique to this audience too.

As a potential newcomer to Scala, many of these points ring true. Hopefully the community takes a good hard look at itself to see what it can improve.

With some time off this past week I started hunting for things I should be learning. After doing some research on Scala's popularity and trending I came to may of the same conclusions John does.