Every individual programmer having locally-implemented idiosyncratic versions of sed and awk with imperfect reconstruction between sessions sounds like a regression to me

I already treat awk syntax as something idiocratic, so not much would change for me.

The construction workers having lunch on the girder in that famous photo were in fact about four feet above a safety platform; it's a masterpiece of framing and cropping. (Ironically the photographer was standing on a girder out over a hundred stories of nothing).

Although I do use the dead internet, I didn't see much of "fake news" like that...

I'll come clean and say I've still never tried Discord and I feel like I must not be understanding the concept. It really looks like it's IRC but hosted by some commercial company and requiring their client to use and with extremely tenuous privacy guarantees. I figure I must be missing something because I can't understand why that's so popular when IRC is still there.

IRC has many many usability problems which I'm sure you're about to give a "quite trivial curlftpfs" explaination for why they're unimportant - missing messages if you're offline, inconsistent standards for user accounts/authentication, no consensus on how even basic rich text should work much less sending images, inconsistent standards for voice calls that tend to break in the presence of NAT, same thing for file transfers...

I was a heavy IRC user in 2015 before Discord and even though I personally prefer using IRC, it was obvious it would take over the communities I was for a few reasons:

1. People don't understand or want to setup a client that isn't just loading some page in their browser 2. People want to post images and see the images they posted without clicking through a link, in some communities images might be shared more than text. 3. People want a persistent chat history they can easily access from multiple devices/notifications etc 4. Voice chat, many IRC communities would run a tandem mumble server too.

All of these are solvable for a tech-savvy enough IRC user, but Discord gets you all of this out of the box with barely more than an email account.

There are probably more, but these are the biggest reasons why it felt like within a year I was idling in channels by myself. You might not want discord but the friction vs irc was so low that the network effect pretty much killed most of IRC.

It is IRC, but with modern features and no channel splits. It also adds voice chats and video sharing. Trade off is that privacy and commercial platform. On other hand it is very much simpler to use. IRC is a mess of usability really. Discord has much better user experience for new users.

> Discord has much better user experience for new users.

Until you join a server that gives you a whole essay of what you can and cannot do with extra verification. This then requiring you to post in some random channel waiting for the moderator to see your message.

You're then forced to assign roles to yourself to please a bot that will continue to spam you with notifications announcing to the community you've leveled up for every second sentence. Finally, everyone glaring at you in channel or leaving you on read because you're a newbie with a leaf above your username. Each to their own, I guess.

/server irc.someserver.net

/join #hello

/me says Hello

I think I'll stick with that.

At least Discord and IRC are interchangeable in the sake of idling.

it's very easy to make a friend server that has all you basically need: sending messages, images/files and being able to talk with voice channels.

you can also invite a music bot or host your own that will join the voice channel with a song that you requested

Right.... how is that different from IRC other than being controlled by a big company with no exit ability and (again) extremely tenuous privacy promises?

IRC doesn't offer voice/video, which is unimaginable for Discord alternative.

When we get to alternative proposals with functioning calls I'd say having them as voice channels that just exist 24/7 is a big thing too. It's a tiny thing from technical perspective, but makes something like Teams unsuitable alternative for Discord.

In Teams you start a call and everyone phone rings, you distract everyone from whatever they were doing -- you better have a good reason for doing so.

In Discord you just join empty voice channel (on your private server with friends) w/o any particular reason and go on with your day. Maybe someone sees that you're there and joins, maybe not. No need to think of anyone's schedule, you don't annoy people that don't have time right now.

For the text chat, it's different in the way that it lets one make their own 'servers' without having to run the actual hardware server 24/7, free of charge, no need to battle with NATs and weird nonstandard ways of sending images, etc.

The big thing is the voice/videoconferencing channels which are actually optimized insanely well, Discord calls work fine even on crappy connections that Teams and Zoom struggle with.

Simply put it's Skype x MSN Messenger with a global user directory, but with gamers in mind.

Because it's the equivalent to running a private irc server plus logging with forum features, voice comms, image hosting, authentication and bouncers for all your users. With a working client on multiple platforms (unlike IRC and jabber that never really took off on mobile).

I'm largely a stranger to the js world but from the outside it sure looks like projects are sharded so as to maximize npm contribution count

It's a cliché that the first 90% of a software project takes 90% of the time and the last 10% also takes 90% of the time, but it's cliché because it's true. So we've managed to invent a giant plausibility engine that automates the 90% of the process people enjoy leaving just the 90% that people universally hate.

And since the developers who have to do the last 90 % were not involved in the first 90 %, they will have no clue how to do it.

So now the last 90% is the last 99%.

>So we've managed to invent a giant plausibility engine that automates the 90% of the process people enjoy leaving just the 90% that people universally hate.

OK, for me it is the last 10% that is of any interest whatsoever. And I think that has been the case with any developer I've ever worked with I consider to be a good developer.

OK the first 90% can have spots of enjoyment, like a nice gentle Sunday drive stopping off at Dairy Queen, but it's not normally what one would call "interesting".

Sorry, I don't buy it. I'm an ops guy, and devs who say they like the integration stage mean they like making ops play a guessing game and clean up the mess they left us.

I am an AI hater (atleast in some of its current context precisely used for this) and you have worded some things I like to say in a manner I hadn't thought of and I agree with all you said and appreciate what you said man!

Now, I do agree with you and this is why I feel like AI can be good at just prototyping or for internal use cases, want to try out something no idea, sure use it or I have a website which sucks and I can quickly spin up an alternative for person use case, go for it, maybe even publish it to web with open source.

Take feedback from people if they give any and run with it. So in essense, prototyping's pretty cool.

But whenever I wish to monetize or the idea of monetize, I feel like we can take some design ideas or experimentation and then just write them ourselves. My ideology is simple in that I don't want to pay for some service which was written by AI slop, I mean at that point, just share us the prompt.

So at this point, just rewrite the code and actually learn what you are talking about (like I will give an example, I recently prototyped some simple firecracker ssh thing using gliderlabs/ssh golang package, I don't know how the AI code works, its just I built for my own use case, but If I wish to ever (someday) try to monetize it in any sense, rest assured I will try to learn how gliderlabs/ssh works to its core and build it all by my hands)

TLDR: AI's good for prototyping but then once you got the idea/more ideas on top of it, try to rewrite it in your understanding because as others have said the AI code you won't understand and you would spend 99% time on that 1% which AI can't but at that point, why not just rewrite?

Also if you rewrite, I feel like most people will be chill then buying even Anti AI people. Like sure, use AI for prototypes but give me code which I can verify and you wrote/ you understand to its core with 100% pinning of this fact.

If you are really into software projects for sustainability, you are gonna anger a crowd for no reason & have nothing beneficial come out of it.

So I think kind of everybody knows this but still AI gets to production because sustainability isn't the concern.

This is the cause. sustainability just straight up isn't the concern.

if you have VC's which want you to add 100's of features or want you to use AI or have AI integration or something (something I don't think every company should or their creators should be interested in unless necessary) and those VC's are in it only for 3-5 years who might want to dump you or enshitten you short term for their own gains. I can see why sustainability stops being a concern and we get to where we are.

Or another group of people most interested are the startup entrepreneur hustle culture people who have a VC like culture as well where sustainability just doesn't matter

I do hope that I am not blanket naming these groups because sure some might be exceptions but I am just sharing how the incentives aren't aligned and how they would likely end up using AI 90% slop and that's what we end up seeing in evidence for most companies.

I do feel like we need to boost more companies who are in it for the long run/sustainable practices & people/indie businesses who are in it because they are passionate about some project (usually that happens when they face the problem themselves or curiosity in many cases), because we as consumers have an incentive stick as well. Hope some movement can spawn up which can capture this nuance because i am not anti AI completely but not exactly pro either

The preparation sounds more classy when you call it "bisque"

"Choosing" is doing a lot of work in that sentence

These are cool tricks but this seems like an impedence mismatch: why would you use an LLM (a probabilistic source of plausible text) in a situation where you want a deterministic source of text where plausibility is not enough?

You... don't. That's exactly what structured outputs are for! You're offloading any formally defined generation to a tool that better serves the case, leaving the ambiguous part of the task to the model.

Code is an example of a mixed case. Getting any mechanistically parsable output from a model is another. Sure, you can format it after the generation, but you still need the generation to be parsable for that. In many cases, using the required format right away will also provide the context for better replies.

Because of their ability to handle unstructured input well.

Given the data exfil vulnerability a few stories down HN's front page I would be extremely hesitant to ask Claude to process a document someone else produced and sent to me

You'd need to run one model per authority ring with some kind of harness. That rapidly becomes incredibly expensive from a hardware standpoint (particularly since realistically these guys would make the harness itself an agent on a model).

I assume "harness" here just means the glue that feeds one model's output into that of another?

Definitely sounds expensive. Would it even be effective though? The more-privileged rings have to guard against [output from unprivileged rings] rather than [input to unprivileged rings]. Since the former is a function of the latter (in deeply unpredictable ways), it's hard for me to see how this fundamentally plugs the whole.

I'm very open to correction though, because this is not my area.

My instinct was that you would have an outer non-agentic ring that would simply identify passages in the token stream that would initiate tool use, and pass that back to the harness logic and/or user. Basically a dry run. But you might have to run it an arbitrary number of times as tools might be used to modify/append the context.