My programming language: http://github.com/titzer/virgil My newest Wasm engine: http://github.com/titzer/wizard-engine
- titzerThis is a nice use case. It really shows how miserably bad the state of the art in UI testing is. A separation between the application logic and its user interactions would help a lot with being able to test them without the actual UI elements. But that's not what most frameworks give you, nor how most apps are designed.
- > The battle on X is lost. Get over it. What we need is a new social paradigm where everyone is happy despite the lack of X.
Where have I heard this before?
- > If you use our servers for illegal activity, law enforcement can still investigate. They just can't start with "who owns this account" because we can't answer that question.
You're going to have a tussle with law enforcement, and you're going to lose. Your service will last < 2 years because you will not be able to afford the lawyers you need to defend against even one muscle move by the government.
Good luck!
- As someone who publishes regularly, has organized conferences and seen this from multiple angles, publishers add marginal value to the publication process and it is no longer worth what they charge--to the point that I think their existence is parasitic on the process. They're usually paid from a combination of conference budget (subsidized by ACM, but usually a break-even prospect with enough attendees) and the author fees.
For several conferences I have been involved with, the publishers' duties included the princely tasks of nagging authors for copyright forms, counting pages, running some shell scripts over the LaTeX, and nagging about bad margins, improperly capitalized section headers, and captions being incorrectly above figures.
Frankly, in the digital age, the "publishers" are vestigial and subtractive from the Scientific process.
- I mean, I've vibe-coded a few useful single-file HTML tools, but checking in 10kloc at 3am into the production database...by the CTO...omg.
- That's...idiotic.
- From what I understand, midi messages can have timestamps into the future, but that implies buffering on the receiver end. Do most MIDI instruments not support enough buffering to overcome lag? Because in sequencing, the future is pretty-well known.
- Suno's stem extraction is miserable. MIDI transcription is totally fubar'd.
- And for the record, I could write a multi-page rant about how Suno is not actually what I want; its shitty UI (which will no doubt change soon) and crappy reinvention of the DAW is absolutely underpowered for tweaking and composing songs how I want. We should instead be integrating these new music creation models into both professional tools and also making the AI tools less of a push-button one-stop shop, but giving better control rather than just meakly pawing in the direction of what you want with prompts.
- > Did you just complain...only to post an AI generated song about it?
Yeah, I absolutely did. Only I wrote the lyrics and AI augmented my skills by giving it a voice. I actually put significant effort into that one; I spent a couple hours tweaking it and increasing its cohesion and punchiness, iterating with ideas and feedback from various tools.
I used the computer like a bicycle for my mind, the way it was intended.
- > Does anybody actually work with H100s and the like?
They don't. The expectation the cloud develops in people is that magic computers just appear. They're living at a virtualized layer where all the nitty gritty of real machines going down and needing to be serviced all the time is handled by unseen minions (sorry SREs and DC staff) and cluster management and provisioning software.
The reality is that datacenters in space is mind-boggling stupid, just from the infeasibility of maintenance alone.
- It's been driving me nuts for at least a decade. I can't remember which MacOS update it was, but when they reorganized the settings to better align with iOS, it absolutely infuriated me. Nothing will hit my thunder button like taking my skills and knowledge away. I thought I might swear off Mac forever. I've been avoiding upgrading from 13 now. In the past couple of updates, the settings for displays is completely different for no reason. That's a dialog that one doesn't use very often, except for example, when giving a presentation. It's pretty jarring to plug in on stage in front of dozens or even hundreds of people and suddenly you have to figure out a completely unfamiliar and unintuitive way of setting up mirroring.
I blame GUIs. They disempower users and put them at mercy of UX "experts" who just rearrange the deck chairs when they get bored and then tell themselves how important they are.
- > Most old people in particular (sorry mom) have given up and resigned themselves to drift wherever their computing devices take them, because under the guise of convenience, everything is so hostile that there is no point trying to learn things, and dark patterns are everywhere. Not being in control of course makes people endlessy frustrated, but at the same time trying to wrestle control from the parasites is an uphill battle that they expect to lose, with more frustration as a result.
I'm pretty cynical, but one ray of hope is that AI-assisted coding tools have really brought down the skill requirement for doing some daunting programming tasks. E.g. in my case, I have long avoided doing much web or UI programming because there's just so much to learn and so many deep rabbit holes to go down. But with AI tools I can get off the ground in seconds or minutes and all that gruddy HTML/JavaScript/CSS with bazillions of APIs that I could go spend time studying and tinkering with have already been digested by the AI. It spits out some crap that does the thing I mostly want. ChatGPT 5+ is pretty good at navigating all the Web APIs so it was able to generate some WebAudio mini apps to start working with. The code looks like crap, so I hit it with a stick and get it to reorganize the code a little and write some comments, and then I can dive in and do the rest myself. It's a starting point, a prototype. It got me over the activation energy hump, and now I'm not so reluctant to actually try things out.
But like I said, I'm cynical. Right now the AI tools haven't been overly enshittified to the point they only serve their masters. Pretty soon they will be, and in ways we can't yet imagine.
- I don't know how to square "populism" with the metric asston of propaganda coming from people whose job is literally to know better but instead chose to feed people bad information and amplify stupidity. This ain't grass roots populism...at all.
- If we limited individual wealth to $999 million--just outright capped it, and enforced that--it would not impact these people in the slightest.
What it would impact is how easily these people could influence the political system and get themselves out of trouble.
At $400 billion net worth, Elon Musk could retire one hundred thousand times. He literally wrote multi-million dollar checks to various politicians and ran an illegal pay-for-votes scheme in Pennsylvania. And he'll face zero consequences for it.
- > But out in the real world, you could encounter a Shelby Cobra sports car, Bell AH-1 Cobra chopper, USS Cobra (SP-626) patrol boat, Colt Cobra handgun, etc.
In this example, you added "chopper", "patrol boat", and "handgun" to disambiguate them. There wouldn't have been enough context to do so otherwise, which IMHO is more aligned with the point the author was making.
If you were in the middle of a conversation about helicopters with people who knew lots of helicopter models, just saying "Cobra" would probably be fine. But in the software world, there are far too many obscure and new tools that are not at all clear without context. And the context just always happens to be all the dang things. A cutesy name could be any dang thing.
> It's a bad sign when all of the examples in an article don't even agree with the author's point.
I think you're just being selective because you disagree. A better example was:
> “We’re using Viper for configuration management, which feeds into Cobra for the CLI, and then Melody handles our WebSocket connections, Casbin manages permissions, all through Asynq for our job queue.”
If we want to cherry pick, your comment has:
> When you open your medicine cabinet
You used the term "medicine cabinet", a term that is not only descriptive, but not branded or jargon. It's standard and doesn't need something new. It's common usage and doesn't need to be disrupted by someone overly proud of a basic thing they made. You didn't call it Wapsooie, a "playful" take on WPSU (Wall-mounted pharmaceutical storage unit) or a MMC (Materia medica cabinet), or a whole host of other cutesy names or even acronyms that you might eventually get to if you were talking about medicine cabinets all day long, or designing or building them.
I mostly agree with the author. Software tools think they're so hilarious. I mean, the Virgil compiler is named "Aeneas" internally. Yet the cli command is "v3c"--Virgil III compiler.
- I lol'd at the hardware "patch" that kept the software from crashing--removing all but the alpha-numeric keys (!?). Holy cow, you had time to collect thousands of hours of neurotraces but couldn't sanitize the inputs to remove a stray [? That sounds...funky.
- It's commercialization in general that distorts things, and you're probably right that SEO without advertising might actually have been worse? But then again, the online advertising market is a whole evolved thing that maybe...doesn't need to be...as big as it is? E.g. I don't see structurally how the economy requires spending hundreds of billions of dollars on advertising to function.
- You had to call a shop that you suspected had the thing and ask them? Sorry for the mocking tone, but yes, I did that too in the 90s. And then they might hold it for you! Or they could order it over the phone for you.
Sometimes you could also talk to people in a shop about what you were really trying to accomplish and they'd give you advice on what you might need or how you could do it.
- Obviously specifics make a huge difference here so it's hard to generalize, but generally, finding the market is not a new problem. In the current business environment, the entire ecosystem is rigged against you, forcing you to advertise. Consumers are so inundated with advertising that almost have no energy leftover, or any expectation that they need to go out and search. Worse, search is distorted in all the wrong ways because of the exact same incentives. Your competitors (or even poorly-fitting tangentially-related products) are stealing discovery from you by capturing searches through advertising. They can't even get to you because a wall of SEO stands between them and you.