I also left yesterday. I thought the mood was still surprisingly calm, considering that there was already enough smoke in the city to make it look like a foggy winter day and smell heavily of campfire.
Now I am wondering if my return flight from Bordeaux in a few days will actually happen. Currently the airport is still operating, although the surrounding area has been evacuated. It really looks apocalyptic there, though:
> Sitting and thinking for 10 minutes about snowboarding when your knees are blown out is 10 minutes you could have used differently.
10 minutes doesnt sound like much of a loss, even if you do it every day. Maybe it helps you empathize with athletes, or if you get nostalgic/wistful, it helps you explore the range of emotions, which is fine as long as you don't get stuck with them.
Yeah, the prices are actually down a few pp compared to record highs recorded before the war. The war might even exert some downward pressure. It increased the cost of living, thus reducing demand for comparative luxuries like new devices. Laptop and smartphone markets are contracting heavily right now, even for devices with stable prices enabled by long-term RAM procurement.
Jira has had issues like this even before vibe coding was a thing. Over the years, I've had to reload the page so often, I do it almost instinctively now, like some kind of hospitalism.
The piano piece is nice. You might enjoy Lubomyr Melnyk.
I think its a good approach to discover and build upon what feels good. There are plenty of pianists that can play a catalogue of songs, or improvise "flawlessly", but rareness or uniqueness are great qualities for art to have.
I'm not sure how well the same applies to work, though, where fulfilling implicit or explicit standards plays more of a role. A developed "taste" plays a role in doing e.g. a good sysadmin job, but if you're creating something unique here, any successor is likely to have a bad time, no matter how beautiful this creation seemed at the time.
I do agree with the idea that passion can be a big driver in both worlds, it just seems to me that in work there's more to gain if it is harnessed to some degree.
Maybe the game should have a kind of "trigger warning" on its start screen, telling you that it incorporates current news. Not everyone will read the blog, and few people click the "about" button before trying a basic game.
I mean, it only takes a few paragraphs of filler text, hyperbole, "catchy" juxtapositions, and loose logical threads to raise suspicions.
But yeah, I would also like these two minutes of my life back.
Well, as someone who has also generated some text with LLMs, at least I learned that it's still possible to generate truly excruciating stuff with the "right" model and prompt.
As someone who used to be in the writing industry (a whole range of jobs), this take strikes me as a bit starry-eyed. Throw-away snippets, good-enough marketing, generic correspondence, hastily compiled news items, flairful filler text in books etc., all this used to be a huge chunk of the work, in so many places. The average customer had only a limited ability to judge the quality of texts, to put it mildly. Translators and proofreaders already had to prioritize mass over flawless output, back when Google Translate was hilariously bad and spell checkers very limited. Nowadays, even the translation of legal texts in the EU parliament is done by a fraction of the former workforce. Very few of the writers and none of the proofreaders I knew are still in the industry.
Addressing the wider point, yes, there is still a market for great artists and creators, but it's nowhere near large enough to accommodate the many, many people who used to make a modest living, doing these small, okay-ish things, occasionally injecting a bit of love into them, as much as they could under time constraints.
I'm not a native speaker, but to me that quote doesn't necessarily imply an inability of OP to get up the curve. Maybe they just mean that the curve can look flat at the start?
Then again, LLMs are well-suited to translate stuff, a relatively grunt work kind of task, so porting libs to your ecosystem of choice is a lot more feasible now.
Perhaps there is a future where individuals can translate large numbers of libraries, and instead of manually porting future improvements of the original versions to the copies, just rerun the translation as needed.
It's not hard to do this as a human, at least if that human is trained in gathering and transforming written information.
What makes a huge difference here is the ease and speed. I recently did a similar analysis of my HN posts. I have hundreds of posts, and it took like 30 seconds with high quality results. Achieving this quality level would have taken me hours, and I have some relevant experience.
This certainly opens up some new possibilities - good ones like self-understanding, potentially ambiguous ones in areas such as HR, and clearly dystopian ones ...
Yeah. I think the analogy with electrical wiring is quite illuminating. Few software errors have a similar risk profile as faulty wiring. Maybe if a calendar or messenger or such is buggy, that's enough of a nuisance to switch, but I doubt a lot of software is this critical. People already put up with plenty of bugs e.g. in games or social networks. Even with paid software, I'm sometimes surprised how much patience customers have developed when it comes to glaring deficits.
But perhaps the more important filtering is on quantity as opposed to neutrality? Perhaps filtering out a large amount of news, even with some bias, is the lesser evil, as compared to news outlets that depend on stirring the emotions of their readers every single day?
Wikinews used to be okay in this regard, but the German version I used has died down a bit, and the English one is even more centered on the Anglosphere than HN.
Now I am wondering if my return flight from Bordeaux in a few days will actually happen. Currently the airport is still operating, although the surrounding area has been evacuated. It really looks apocalyptic there, though:
https://static.actu.fr/uploads/2026/07/aeroport-bordeaux-fum...