jadero

Not your usual teaser, but still a teaser. “Look at all this techno-marketing. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. By then we’ll have some actual code to look at and toys to play with.”

In fairness, they are providing what looks like a decent overview of their underlying system (Rama) and how they used it to create their mastodon instance.

But I guess it worked :) I bookmarked their page and will check in from time to time. Maybe their toy (prototyping) system will be enough to run a personal instance…

I’m glad I’m old enough to not have to consider living at the population density you suggest. I find the population density of Saskatchewan to be quite enough. I lived in a small city (Saskatoon) for 40 years and the last 10 were flat out miserable. The first 30 were tolerable only because we escaped to nature every weekend.

Tundras aren’t going to be all that liveable just because the temperature is a bit nicer. They’ll still get very dark in the winter. Like 24-hour darkness, in some of it. Some people thrive, some people cope, some people go batshit crazy when daylight hours drop below about 4 hours a day.

That’s actually the easy part. Most tundra is sitting on top of permafrost. I worked on low latitude tundra for one summer and if my experience there is representative, melting permafrost is going to turn a lot of tundra into swampland for a long time.

Even if I’m wrong about the tundra turning into swampland, there isn’t really all that much room. Good luck cramming a few billion people above 55 or 60 degrees latitude.

I think that ChatGPT is probably the wrong tool for what I’m imagining. I’m thinking more in terms of “hypothesis generators” and “theorem testers” that, as far as I know, are not using the methods of ChatGPT in their operation. I think that those kinds of tools and others like them could be used to help clarify requirements before coding even starts.

I think he’s missed a potential benefit of AI.

He seems to be speaking mostly of greenfield development, the creation of something that has never been done before. My experience was always in the field of “computerizing” existing manual processes.

I agree with him regarding the difficulty of gathering requirements and creating specifications that can be turned into code. My experience working as a solo programmer for tiny businesses (max 20 employees) was that very few people can actually articulate what they want and most of those that can don’t actually know what they want. The tiny number of people left miss all the hacks that are already baked into their existing processes to deal with gaps, inconsistencies, and mutually contradictory rules. This must be even worse in greenfield development.

That is not saying anything negative. If it were any other way, then they would have had success hiring their nephew to do the work. :)

Where I think AI could useful during that phase of work is in helping detect those gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictory rules. This would clearly not be the AI that spits out a database schema or a bit of Python code, but would nonetheless be AI.

We have AI systems that are quite good at summarizing the written word and other AI systems that are quite good at logical analysis of properly structured statements. It strikes me that it should be possible to turn the customers’ system descriptions into something that can be checked for gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions. Working iteratively, alone at the start, then with expert assistance, to develop something that can be passed on to the development team.

The earlier the flaws can be discovered and the more frequently that the customer is doing the discovery, the easier those flaws are to address. The most successful and most enjoyable of all my projects were those where I was being hired explicitly to help root out all those flaws in the semi-computerized system they had already constructed (often enough by a nephew!).

I’m not talking about waterfall development, where everything is written in stone before coding starts. Sticking with water flow metaphors, I’m talking about a design and development flow that has fewer eddies, fewer sets of dangerous rapids, and less backtracking to find a different channel.

Yes, I agree. My perception of hobby communities, at least the online ones, is that there is an inordinate amount of time spent trying to figure out how to monetize what used to be seen as a primarily recreational activity.

I know that some of it is self defense, in the sense that some hobbies are expensive enough to stretch a budget to the breaking point.

Some of it is likely due to incomes not keeping up with the cost of living and, of course, some people are budding entrepreneurs.

But it seems to me that there are a lot of people who feel that it’s not reasonable to have a hobby that has no income potential.

I’ve tried to explain this to people before, without success. I’m starting to think that most people have no concept of what it means to be passionate about something, so they go through life with nothing more than pastimes to keep their minds off reality.

For me it’s building boats. I’ve only ever built 2, the last one 20 years ago. But the amount of time and money I spent on magazines and plans both before and after those actual builds dwarfs the time and money it would take to run a lemmy instance. And now I’ve got 3 years and several thousand dollars into building and equipping a shop so I can build another one.

I’ll throw out a few bucks here and there because it feels like the right thing to do, but I actually want hobbyists, people with a passion for it, running the show. After all, that is what made reddit work. All the passionate mods doing their thing as a hobby.

Perhaps, but my personal experience was that Usenet was well on its way to being a dumpster fire of trolls, creeps, and spammers before the Web 2.0 technologies were more than a glimmer in anyone’s eyes.

Everything is about community. Usenet all but disappeared because it got overrun with selfish assholes. It’s not that hard for a community to be killed by its own membership. There are many examples both online and off.

Moderation isn’t the answer, or at least not a complete answer, because Reddit brought to the fore that moderators can be selfish assholes, too. If I understand what’s behind certain recent defederation decisions, those selfish assholes are already here.

Explicit federation (and defederation) is an interesting twist on decentralized, but it is unlikely to be a panacea.

I think we’re all running the Red Queen’s Race. Some of us are forever doomed to run away from the selfish assholes and the selfish assholes are forever doomed to chase us in the hopes of finding a place to showcase themselves. They are not and never will be happy to just be selfish assholes in their own spaces because that would be neither selfish nor asshole-ish.

Yes, and thanks!

Yeah, I’m not a fan of the form of capitalism that’s about selling what they want us to buy instead of what we want to buy, but it seems to be working for pretty much every company out there.

I guess we missed our window of opportunity with Netflix. We moved to the middle of nowhere with no internet or cell service 12 years ago. We’ve had Starlink for nearly 2 years and are just starting to run out of stuff available for free on our Roku. It’s been a couple of decades since I played with, um, other options, but I somehow doubt it’s become more difficult. :)

Former water treatment plant operator. Thanks for living up to your name.

Perhaps, but don’t forget every god has had to learn a few things the hard way.

Many will cherry pick or apply self-serving interpretations of your pronouncements.

Many false prophets will arise.

Many will rail against your very existence and create competing systems.

Eventually, you will be considered archaic and replaced by the gods of the new thing.

Tongue in cheek, obviously, but not too firmly. :j

I don’t have a recommendation, but I understand the desire for excellent keyboard support in a GUI. I switched to Linux after 3 decades on Windows and I really miss doing all the screen navigation from the keyboard. In Windows, the only time I used a mouse was inside things like drawing tools and badly written apps with inadequate or non-standard keyboard support.

Sort of. I think of the Unix philosophy as being like Lego. Here’s a box of goodies, go crazy. Even Ikea still requires user assembly.

Most end users just can’t do much with the first and often even get tripped up by the second. What we need is something in between that a programmer can use to quickly throw something together to user requirements.

Actually, that’s much like what I was doing with Microsoft Access and Visual Basic decades ago. I probably would never have survived in an actual software development shop, but I was kept very busy by a bunch of small businesses that loved the quick turnaround and manageable costs.

Back in the early 1990s, I was teaching a database course. I had a list of real place names that were pretty much guaranteed to break anything the students did to place any constraints on what could be entered into the “city” field of an address. Little did I know…

Well, sure, it’s frustrating. I haven’t looked at lemmy code, so maybe it is a dumpster fire. But I’ve been programming since about 1980, and I still stumble more than I’d like, even when I’m the one who wrote the crap I’m trying to figure out. :)

Absolutely not! I’m not sure anything in any field is so trivially simple that it can be grasped just by looking at it. Getting even minimally competent in anything requires both study and practice.

The good news is that study and practice are skills worth acquiring, because they are useful in any endeavour.

The great news is that study and practice are what’s needed for mastery, too, so once you start your journey, you can can continue as far as you want.

Not dumb, untrained or not yet sufficiently skilled in this particular area. While you bear some responsibility for getting up to speed, I would argue that it is still their issue if they are not providing the necessary resources. With something like lemmy, you are probably on your own for finding and making use of those resources. But I would be surprised to learn that those resources don’t exist. I haven’t looked, but there must be some kind of documentation written by someone and a community of like-minded people. Maybe even some tutorials.

That said, some people will always struggle with certain kinds of abstraction or multiple layers of abstraction. For myself, one thing that I find helpful is to view each layer as an API that I’m targeting or a library that I’m using. In those cases, you never really worry about how things get done in the background.

Do you really have any idea how the keywords that solicit user input work? Not likely. Even if you do, you still completely ignore the fact that you know it while writing a line of code that solicits user input. That is a layer of abstraction that you use regularly without even thinking about it. A good architecture allows the same kind of reasoning about your code.

There are a few possible reasons for that, but the main ones are:

The architecture may be from the rococo (filled with pretty, but ultimately useless and confusing “decorations”) or surrealist (tenuous relationship to reality) schools. This would make it difficult to grasp for anyone but the people involved from the beginning.

The architecture could be perfectly sound, but for some reason, you are having trouble putting it all together. The most common reason for that is a lack of training and documentation.