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josephwegner
Joined 2,650 karma
Former engineer, current Engineering Manager. At the time I last updated this (2022), I worked at Heroku. Serial giver-upper on startup ideas, and ashamed steward of many half-finished GitHub repos.
Somewhat obsessed with new tech and startups.
http://joewegner.com hn@joewegner.com
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/josephwegner; my proof: https://keybase.io/josephwegner/sigs/xP3iGKl16nYiUESjPW6EhEjh7n5ifhf0ij7Zuotlwx0 ]
- josephwegnerAlong with the hordes of other options people are responding with, I'm a big fan of Perplexity's voice chat. It does back-and-forth well in a way that I missed whenever I tried anything besides ChatGPT.
- This assumes there is no added benefit to being able to reach your kids/be reached by your kids easier than it was historically. While I agree it's probably not as critical as many parents might make it seem, there are tangible benefits. Off the top of my head:
- Before cell phones, we were also in an age of far less mass violence in American schools. I completely empathize with parents wanting their kids to have an emergency contact device, given the relative increase in violence at schools.
- There is a long history of kids being abused, sexually or otherwise, by authority figures in their school. Having a lifeline like a quick text to a parent can easily be the escape hatch from a predator convincing a kid to do something unsafe.
- Give it time. Networks are a garden that grow over time, and moreso if you cater to them. Some of those starving grad students will be VPs in 10 years.
- I will say, there is a Wendy’s near me that is piloting an AI drive-thru experience, and I prefer it 10-to-1 to the human version. It had a clear voice, it didn’t disappear randomly, it understood what I meant the first time (even though I was speaking naturally - I didn’t know at first it was AI), and it asked me for feedback (“what sort of sauce?”) in a very understandable way. Drive-thrus are famously a bad experience - I’m happy to see improvement here.
- Pretty sure they lost to rsync ;)
- See
- Same, actually. I’m feeling much more pro-ollama suddenly!
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- > coding isn’t about the finished product. its a lot like writing
This doesn't seem applicable in most contexts. Yes, when I'm coding for fun or purely for learning the finished product is less relevant... but I'd guess the vast majority of code that is written is for a business that _only_ cares about the product. Code is an implementation detail.
If (and this is a _big_ if) AI-based coding can increase developer velocity even as little as 50%, no sane business is going to let their engineers ignore it just because it's not as fun as artisanal code.
- I become more and more convinced with each of these tweets/blogs/threads that using LLMs well is a skill set akin to using Search well.
It’s been a common mantra - at least in my bubble of technologists - that a good majority of the software engineering skill set is knowing how to search well. Knowing when search is the right tool, how to format a query, how to peruse the results and find the useful ones, what results indicate a bad query you should adjust… these all sort of become second nature the longer you’ve been using Search, but I also have noticed them as an obvious difference between people that are tech-adept vs not.
LLMs seems to have a very similar usability pattern. They’re not always the right tool, and are crippled by bad prompting. Even with good prompting, you need to know how to notice good results vs bad, how to cherry-pick and refine the useful bits, and have a sense for when to start over with a fresh prompt. And none of this is really _hard_ - just like Search, none of us need to go take a course on prompting - IMO folks jusr need to engage with LLMs as a non-perfect tool they are learning how to wield.
The fact that we have to learn a tool doesn’t make it a bad one. The fact that a tool doesn’t always get it 100% on the first try doesn’t make it useless. I strip a lot of screws with my screwdriver, but I don’t blame the screwdriver.
- Thank you. It's too late to edit, but goodness am I embarrassed now. Very sorry, Kasey!
- But I am actually interested in the economics! The author mentions sending her designs out to a factory - I would expect this is astonishingly expensive for a single prototype! Wouldn’t that be thousands of dollars? Is anyone familiar how to get good factory-made parts like this at DIY budgets?
Not that that takes away from the article at all. This project has many merits, and although cost may not be one of them, it’s still interesting!
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