Love it. Especially the random interval. Wondering if anyone has ever proposed doing this whenever you get a text or social media alert. Seems ridiculous I guess but why not?
> Ask AI for an initial version and then refactor it to match your expectations.
> Write the initial version yourself and ask AI to review and improve it.
> Write the critical parts and ask AI to do the rest.
> Write an outline of the code and ask AI to fill the missing parts.
So well put. I'm writing these on a post it note and putting it above my monitor. I held off on using agents to generate code for a long time and finally was forced to really make use of them and this is so in line with my experience.
My biggest surprises have been how much the model doesn't seem to matter (?) when I'm making the prompts appropriately narrow. Also surprised at how hard it is to pair program in something like cursor. If your prompting is even slightly off it seems like it can go from 10xing a build process to making it a complete waste of time with nothing to show but spaghetti code at the end.
Anyway long live the revolution, glad this was so technically on point and not just a no-ai rant (love those too tho).
This is like a masterclass in game design, mobile UI, wasm, character design, game dialogue and interactive paychogeography. I'm gonna show this to my kid's computer club next week. Really fantastic, bravo. Is this seriously a solo developer project??
If anyone knows of similar games / apps / software tools that I could show as examples of solo developer small scope simple UI games I'm always trying to find more..
It's so cool to see this pop up on Hacker News. And also a very cool / smart-seeming trend that could maybe play a role in a more utopian atomized art world. Whatever that means?
My favorite classic suggestion down this rabbit hole that they probably mention (pay walled) is Francis Bacon's full-insano-mode preserved studio. I didn't really get his work until I saw his studio. Fun fact they literally used a painting of his to design the chest-burster in Alien? (I just learned that somehow)
Beautiful documentation and seems like an ambitious productive journey so far.
I might have missed it but would be very curious to know more about what field the writer was / is currently working in and what a potential career switch into tech looks like right now. I transitioned to coding after almost 10 years teaching but that was before the glorious AI revolution began.
Seems like the break-into-tech narrative has changed drastically. Maybe not though, curious what others perceptions are.
I agree with both comments here. I wonder what the plausibility of fully autonomous trucking is in the next 10-30 years...
Is there any saying that exists about overestimating stuff in the near term and long term but underestimating stuff in the midterm? Ie flying car dreams in the 50s etc.
For anybody into prehistoric abstract symbols who hasn't encountered this, "The Signs of All Times 1988" [1] is a super interesting study. Also very readable for the majority of us who are not in the field. Pairs nicely with Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams [2] and any mid-tier Cabernet.
And just my two cents as an under-qualified former art history teacher...
It's fascinating and totally valid to try to analyze these symbols as proto-linguistic, but it can be even more interesting to imagine the cognitive roll these kinda of abstract symbols might have played outside the scope of language as we understand it.
Trying to imaging the structure of the mind and experiencing reality with a complete absence of language can be immensely mind-expanding, even just as a thought experiment. At least it was for me.
> Each case is different, but many voice the same laments: Overheads are killing businesses. Sales are down. It’s no longer fun. Primary pricing is untenable. Major collectors have stopped buying art or significantly reduced their spending. The next generation isn’t there to take over from the old guard. The art world has become bloated, and there isn’t an easy way to cure the malaise.
> “I don’t believe for one second that it’s cyclical,” Belgian collector and art market commentator Alain Servais told me. “It’s structural. The infrastructure is too big. There are too many advisors, too many galleries, too many artists, too many fairs. Everything will need to downsize. In my blunt opinion, blood will flow in the streets before the art market finds a new balance.”
Super exciting to imagine what new structures and ways of making and sharing art might arise in the aftermath of this system. It seems like in a lot of ways the gallery / collector relationship is still running essentially the same way that was established in the 1870s.
Love this resource, really looking forward to perusing the full text.
And to echo what others are saying I have spent the last month experiencing for the first time how not simple throwing a meaningful test suite together is for a ginormous legacy codebase. I was glad the author briefly seemed to acknowledge that but still... the pain...
They said the playwright ui was supposed to make it easy... Just plug it into an LLM they said... It should just take a few days right?
I just want to say this is an amazing resource and I'm planning to share it with my 5yo son's computer club. Would be super interested if anyone has any similar resources.
My impression was that the author was referring to *self-amplifying like a positive feedback loop.
I agree I would have loved more of a hard / concrete definition oriented approach to the whole piece but everything they were saying really resonated at least in terms of my personal experience. I haven't ever come across a writer focusing on this. It was really unexpected / refreshing. It's already is reshaping little moments in my day like hugging my son just now. Very unexpected transcendental value for an HN skim while ignoring a boring zoom standup. The truth is out there.
Agreed, sometimes it seems like there are only two types of roles. Maintaining / updating hot mess legacy code bases for an established company or work 100 hours a week building a new hot mess code base for a startup. Obviously oversimplifying but just my very limited experience scoping out postings and talking to people about current jobs.
Regardless this just made me shudder thinking about the weird little ocean of (now maybe dwindling) random underpaid contract jobs for a few hours a month maintaining ancient Wordpress sites...
Congratulations on #2! (and #1) You're right I think, I share the belief that the new arrivals will remedy the city council / zoning / housing stagnation issues one new development at a time. I'll miss what the Sunset was but a few new condos along 19th etc will make it feel a lot modern.
Glad to see this pop-up. For whatever it's worth I was born in the Sunset (SF) and love the city in spite of all it's problems. My parents were forced out when I got a school on Treasure Island for my 1st grade lottery pick. Went back to SF for college, east coast for grad school where I met my wife from Milwaukee. We have a 5 year old now and I would love to move back to SF and raise my son there. But no matter how many different ways I try to analyze it I just can't come close to justifying the move as beneficial for him or for our marriage. I'd have to work a more intense job to make enough to afford even a quarter of the space we have now. And without knowing our lottery pick in advance I'd have to budget in private school for at least twice the price we're paying for our current STEM-focused private option.
I don't have any personal aversion to working more to pay for more expensive options but the tradeoff of time keeping my relationship with my kid and my marriage healthy is hard to ignore and seems like a really concrete deal-breaker.
We're at the edge of Land Park in Sacramento where my extended family is from. We thought it might be temporary before getting pulled back to the bay for work or schools maybe but the culture here has just been so positive and conducive to family. The public and private schools are excellent with dozens of options, everything is bikable and green, there are literally more museums and restaurants than we can keep up with and the parks / sports options for kids are amazing. And it's swarming with healthy young working / middle class families about half of which are bay area expats. The city obviously has some known issues but I'm continually grateful with the amount of new development going up in every direction and the overall feeling of being a culture / city that supports young cool people having families.
Anyway I'm just surprised and disappointed at how hard it is to justify moving to SF right now as a native who loves it there. Even as someone working in tech / AI with a strong desire to go back. If you have a family, it just seems impossible to make SF make sense right now. I could be missing something of course.
Curious what other SF or Sac tech parents have to say about all this. So much of this has had to be hypothetical on my end because I know so few parents with young kids in SF...