I agree they have no understanding of math, science or technology. But I disagree with your assessment of motivations to get "better paying jobs", most people who went into journalism I knew were in brownstones right out of college. They didn't need the money, they inherited it, it was the lifestyle they were after.. that's why we get the journalism we do..
They're not after money. They're motivated by prestige which CAN be money (ew, tacky) but is actually measured by access to key figures, your name being in the right places with the right people, and the cocktail party circuit.
My wife was a reporter in DC and she was at the White House Correspondents Dinner and everything. Living in those circles is surreal. The namedropping is a whole other level. When I realized I was doing it too (with some legit impressive names at the time), I gtfo. I'd rather be evaluated by what I've done or can do vs who I know or knows me.
> I learned essentially nothing about building vector search. I wanted the feature more than I wanted to know how to build the feature
Opus/Anthropic is hands down the best in my experience. But using it feels like intellectual fast food (they all are), I hate the fact that I can build something like a neatly presentable one off spa tool (ty Simon) when I'm barely paying attention. it feels unsatisfying to use.
EDIT: because I'm rambling, I like "AI" as much as the next guy, probably more because I was there before it turned into LLMs"R"US, but I also like(d) the practice of sitting around listening to music solving problems with Scala. I don't know why we've decided to make work less fun..
I sort of disagree. It's somewhat like having hypercard again. You can build fun UI things and make machines do what you want them to do. You can care about the parts you want to care about and not sweat about the parts you don't want to learn in detail (yet). And Claude and codex make great guides/Sherpas.
There are just too many parts involved to do anything. For example today I built a simple data collection app to use on my phone that involves inventories with photos for a tedious workflow I have to do. I knew what I wanted but didn't know how to even choose which tools to bother learn. And just even trying things to see if an approach works or not without spending hours learning one thing or another or wading through the hell of web search is really great.
Things I learned today that I figure everyone else must know: if you want to take a photo from a webapp I guess you need https. So I decided to try mTLS (knew it existed but never had the time) so asked Claude to write me a short tutorial about setting it up, creating keys, importing them (including a cool single line trick of spinning up a python server and downloading the keys on my phone rather than find a USB stick or whatever). And then helping me figure out a path out of the suffering of Chrome and Firefox hating self-signed CA. But at least I figured out how to make Firefox happy. But it would insist on prompting me for the certificate for every htmx request. But chatting with Claude I learn caddy is pretty cool, it's go. Claude suggests an auth boxcar when I balk at adding auth and user management to my app because I think the webserver should handle all this shit (wtf is a boxcar? Claude clues me in). I tell Claude to use go or rust to build the boxcar because Jesus Christ "yay" build another service just to get a good damn customized CRUD app on my phone that can take a picture. Claude picks go which is fine by me. (Incidentally I can't write go, but I can read it and it's on my "to be learned" agenda and go seems safer than a pile of python for this simple thing) The boxcar was fine but Claude was struggling with getting headers to work in the caddy config. So while Claude is working on that I do a quick Google about whether caddy can have extensions because there has to be a better way to "if someone has authenticated successfully, give them a cookie that will last an hour so they don't have to mash the confirm about using the certificate for every goddamn htmx request" than spin up a web service. Interrupt Claude and suggest an extension instead of a boxcar. Claude's on board so we ditch the boxcar. Have Claude and codex evaluate the extension for security. They find important issues about things a jerk might do, fix them. So successful mTLS connections transition to session cookies. So my dumb CRUD tool doesn't have to worry about auth. Which it didn't have to do anyway except browsers say so etc because my phone is literally only able to access the server via VPN anyway.
Other things I have learned today that only wasted 5min of Claude's time rather than hours of mine: Firefox camera access can't control flash, focus or zoom. So call out to the native app instead.
This is all quite fun and the tool I'm building is going to really make my own life better.
>only wasted 5min of Claude's time rather than hours of mine
I mean will you (we) retain all that it did after a few months go by? You may say we don't need to, but that sounds a little shallow given we're both on HN. Do you remember Gatsby's criticism of "Summer People"?
I don't even remember things I did two years ago unless I leave good breadcrumbs and documentation. I don't think it's particularly worse than pulling in some dependency or framework from GitHub that will be completely different next year anyway. And Google's prone to change anything in Android anyway. Mobile or web seems like a foundation of quicksand, it's not anything I care about. The real takeaway is I can be productive without wasting my time on all the damn churn by just-in-time learning aided by these tools.
I'm pretty sure I will remember how easy and correct it was to modify Caddy vs the months of putzing around building Rube Goldberg constellations of services crap that I did last year for a different thing and that even Claude wanted to do. I've done the whole wading through outdated blog posts and trying to read documentation on other projects that I was doing. Learning five different projects and having to maintain seven services running in docker just so that I can use a tool to capture photos and store them in a webapp that can only be used if connected to my own VPN is insane and it's why I am not a web developer. I will 100% remember what 200 lines of golang does after looking at it again. The 1000 lines of JavaScript that were and backend auth crap that no longer exists: good riddance.
And no I don't trust my memory about what Gatsby said about Summer people without looking it up. I read Gatsby 30 years ago.
Dunno, I think it's quite reasonable to class electricity as a natural monopoly. What's less reasonable is regulatory capture. Landline telephones were insanely reliable in their heyday because they were required to be so. PG&E is reckless because they're allowed to be reckless.
Edit: For non-Americans, landline telephones were highly regulated up until '82 with AT&T having a government sanctioned monopoly.
Sure, and I would be lying if the libertarian bacon-wrapping of what I said was more than an litmus test and karma play, but the concept of good governance on a company like PG&E is so far out of the realm of possibility since citizen's united (and the public warping of perspective to agree with it) I don't see a very reasonable path forward to getting these (lovely, sweet, pure-hearted, well-meaning, community-oriented, positive, hard-working) people under control.
Rather than get another utility involved, I'd rather see far more incentives for installing home storage and ideally solar as well, especially for rental properties. Nothing's more resilient than a distributed grid.
Or, to play Devil's advocate, people called in the rabid dog because they felt they had been sold down the river starting in the 1970s. The hollowed out industrial towns weren't good places to grow up, and when they did manage to go to college and play by the rules the ladders were already in a fast retreat up the walls..
How are you measuring productivity these days Simon? Do you have a boss that has certain expectations? If you don't hit those are you going to lose your house?
In this case the "writing system" is the set of typos that would occur when someone with an English and Korean keyboard layout forgets to switch off English and keystrokes what they expect would be the Korean. "Midjourney" is "alemwjsl" in that typo writing system
Yeah, I think it's an uncommon word. It's not a concept that would come up for most American English speakers, unless you're in a community that uses a language with another writing system (I think I first encountered it in a synagogue with Hebrew) or you're learning such a language.
I think I've maybe occasionally seen "translit." in text used to mark that the following is transliterated, but I could see that being easily glossed over.
I don't think so, but I grew up before cell phones and AI so I had to learn how to read. I'll leave the explanation for the rest who skip over the guillemet at the beginning like I did.
Can you share why it was non-trivial? I'm curious about how folks are evaluating the quality of their solutions when the project space is non trivial and unfamiliar
It's a real, complete, social media client app. Not a huge project. But the default app was clearly written by multiple devs, each with their own ideas. One goal was to be cleaner and more orthogonal, among other goals.
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