AI is bad at figuring out what to do, but fantastic at actually doing it.
I’ve totally transformed how I write code from writing it to myself to writing detailed instructions and having the AI do it.
It’s so much faster and less cognitively demanding. It frees me up to focus on the business logic or the next change I want to make. Or to go grab a coffee.
It will make a mess but if you drop a console.log into the browser debug console to show the AI what it should be looking for after it spent 3 hours failing to help understand and debug the problem, it will do 1 week of work in 2 hours.
I've noticed this too. The latest cursor version has a @browser command which will launch a browser with playwright, and call tools to inspect the html and inject JavaScript to debug in real-time.
When it has access to the right tools, it does a decent job, especially for fixing CSS issues.
But when it can't see the artifacts it's debugging, it starts guessing, confident that it knows the root cause.
A recent example: I was building up a html element out of the DOM and exporting to PNG using html2canvas. The element was being rendered correctly in the DOM, but the exported image was incorrect, and it spent 2 hours spinning it's wheels and repeating the same fixes over and over.
I would say from my experience there's a high variability in AI's ability to actually write code unless you're just writing a lot of scripts and basic UI components.
The AI version of that Kent Beck mantra is probably "Make the change tedious but trivial (warning: this may be hard). Then make the AI do the tedious and trivial change."
AI's advantage is that it has infinite stamina, so if your
can make your hard problem a marathon of easy problems it becomes doable.
You might want to ask ChatGPT what that is referencing. Specifically, Steve Jobs telling everyone it was their fault that Apple put the antenna right where people hold their phones and it was their fault they had bad reception.
The issue is really that LLMs are impossible to deterministically control, and no one has any real advice on how to deterministically get what you want from them.
I recognized the reference. I just don’t think it applies here.
The iPhone antenna issue was a design flaw. It’s not reasonable to tell people to hold a phone in a certain way. Most phones are built without a similar flaw.
LLMs are of course nondeterministic. That doesn’t mean they can’t be useful tools. And there isn’t a clear solution similar to how there was a clear solution to the iPhone problem.
It can still fuck it up. And you need to actually read the code. But still a time saver for certain trivial tasks. Like if I'm going to scrape a web page as a cron job I can pretty much just tell it here's the URL, here's the XPath for the elements I want, and it'll take it from there. Read over the few dozen lines of code, run it and we're done in a few minutes.
He has. He’s notably been burned a few times, one of the worst of which was 2021
TSLA. Iirc he was early but not wrong, with the 2022 collapse of all things ARKK related crashing and burning.
He's been bearish for the last n years. His Twitter handle is Cassandra because he tries to warn people about impending doom, but nobody listens. He gave up at one point because he tweeted SELL and then everything was fine.
tl;dr he's a perma bear.
I actually don't think he's wrong, but one thing I've learned is that it's not enough to recognize a bubble. Almost everyone sees the markets are, as they say, frothy. But you need to see if there's a needle nearby. Without that you're just trying to get lucky.
Puts especially are really hard because they expire. They limit your loss compared to shorts, but you need to time it perfectly.
Well his 10 year performance is 255%. Which does not include his bet in 2005-08. Buffett has only done 154% in that time. So rumours of his demise are greatly exaggerated.
That doesn’t change the fact that he keeps making these doomsday predictions that don’t come true.
Also, his returns aren’t really impressive compared to VTI, which has had an annualized return of 14.04% over the past 10 years according to Vanguard. That works out to 372% total returns in that period.
It’s easy to make money when even the broadest US index fund is up by that much.
Well, the thing is that that kind of hardware chips quickly decrease in value. It's not like the billions spend in past bubbles like the 2000s where internet infrastructure was build (copper, fibre) or even during 1950s where transport infrastructure (roads) were build.
Data centers are massive infrastructural investments similar to roads and rails. They are not just a bunch of chips duct taped together, but large buildings with huge power and networking requirements.
Power companies are even constructing or recommissioning power plants specifically to meet the needs of these data centers.
All of these investments have significant benefits over a long period of time. You can keep on upgrading GPUs as needed once you have the data center built.
They are clearly quite profitable as well, even if the chips inside are quickly depreciating assets. AWS and Azure make massive profits for Amazon and Microsoft.
Well paid engineers congregate in CA because that's where the companies that hire well paid engineers congregate, and they (mostly) want those well paid engineers to come to the office every couple of days. I don't know how you could get the causality so completely backwards on this.
Anecdotal evidence: I moved to CA twice as an engineer.
Once to get my masters after college. Stayed for 13 years. Left during COVID.
Second time to raise kids.
Our reasons include weather, intellectual atmosphere, safety (in many regards), schools, and job opportunities.
The geo area sandwiched between Berkeley and Stanford is only rivaled by Boston. You think Stanford and Berkeley are in the Bay because they’re told to?
And I would also question: what’s the point of living in US if you’re not in California? Once you decide to not live in CA, a bunch of other countries rank better than other US states. Such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
If I were to not live in CA, even the imperial units would quickly become annoying.
I think you're wrong. The concentration is for a host of reasons. Witness the large number of cities and countries that have tried to create a local Silicon Valley competitor unsuccessfully over the last 25 years.
The data centers I think prove this point, and disprove yours -- huge spend has gone into data centers, but places like Wenatchee remain stubbornly not Silicon Valley.
Intel has not made Portland into SV. Austin, while a tech hub and one of the US supply chain centers for hardware, is multiple orders of magnitude less productive than SV for tech startups. Productive as in numbers of unicorns, total value creation, however you want to spin it.
In all seriousness, I found those sorting dance videos to be really educationally effective (when coupled with going over the pseudocode) - e.g. https://youtu.be/3San3uKKHgg?si=09EQYJNIkRqvQgWG
I think most people who buy Steam Decks don’t care whatsoever about Linux and would be perfectly fine with not having control over it as long as all their games worked.
I think Steam Decks wouldn't ever have existed without Linux enthusiasts as early adopters of Steam Decks and the few previous iterations of Steam + Linux either playing games on their own machines or on the previous iteration of a Steam Linux computer. If at any point it was all tied up with DRM and that complete loss of control required for anti-cheat it would have just died and not be seen again.
The only way it changes course is an enormous rug pull that removes most of the differentiation between PC and Console gaming and you end up with Steam as a dying product unable to compete with either other modes of PC gaming or the dominant console players. (Sadly that's basically what I expect when gaben retires)
The differentiation of the Steam Deck is the game ecosystem, ability to play your existing PC game library on the go, and low game costs compared to consoles during the frequent sales.
I don't think Linux is a differentiator for the Steam Deck. It's obviously essential as a technical foundation though, similar to how it’s essential to Android phones.
But locking it down with DRM won't affect gamer interest in the platform as long as the games are still cheap, plentiful, and run well.
I can imagine a world where you still have full control most of the time, but when you open a multi player game the system reboots on a clean / verified OS image. Then when you quit it can reboot in to the OS with all of your mods and customisation on.
Targeting ads better. Better sentiment analysis. Custom ads written for each user based on their preferences. Features for their AR glasses. Probably try to take a piece of the Google search pie. Use this AI search to serve ads.
Ads are their product mostly, though they are also trying to get into consumer hardware.
It’s still a ways off, but I’m excited for the possibility of something like Tauri using Servo natively instead of needing host browsers. A pure Rust desktop app stack with only a single browser to target sounds fantastic.
this part is important:
> A pure Rust desktop app stack
I think the parent is imagining a desktop with servo available as a standard lib, in which case you're left with the same complaints as Tauri, not electron; that the system version of Servo might be out of date.
One nice thing about targeting a web engine is that your application could potentially run in browsers too. Lots of Electron applications do this.
Also you get to take advantage of the massive amount of effort that goes into web engines for accessibility, cross-platform consistency, and performance.
Electron is a memory hog, but actually very powerful and productive. There’s a reason why VSCode, Discord, and many others use it.
But yeah, I wouldn’t say no to a native Rust desktop stack similar to Qt. I know there are options at various levels of sophistication that I’m curious about but haven’t explored in depth.
If it runs in a web browser, why bother Electron if you can just install a standalone web app in Chromium-based browsers (or Firefox with PWA extension)? I do this with Slack, Teams, Discord, Gmail and they use less RAM since they reuse a shared web engine.
Some applications benefit from the host integration. VSCode in particular, since it interacts with the terminal and other applications. I'm also assuming 1Password benefits from it as well for full OS integration.
But then they don't need to be made as Electron apps, but rather native apps, which use a fraction of resources. Compare e.g. Sublime Text or Notepad++ with VS Code.
There’s certainly a place for truly native apps, but there are also a lot of reasons companies keep picking Electron. Efficiency is just one consideration.
They could, using Wasm, like Qt, Blazor Hybrid, Uno Platform, Avalonia.FuncUI. Electron is efficient for devs, but inefficient for users, being a memory hog, especially on low end devices.
They could do that today, but do they? I can’t name one app that uses one of those to run in a browser. I can name multiple highly successful apps that use Electron.
I seriously doubt the approach of running a native desktop application in the browser would give you performance or usability as good as running an actual web app.
Plenty of people must find this worthwhile, otherwise sellers wouldn’t be able to find buyers and they’d be forced to reduce price if they want to sell.
Plus, the listed price is often aspirational. Savvy buyers will typically negotiate the price down.
I have to admit that I’m not a savvy buyer and always buy new though. But I know people who do this very successfully.
I’ve totally transformed how I write code from writing it to myself to writing detailed instructions and having the AI do it.
It’s so much faster and less cognitively demanding. It frees me up to focus on the business logic or the next change I want to make. Or to go grab a coffee.
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