I'm an independent consultant and frontend engineer helping startups (and a few large organizations) bring new products to market since 2012.
I can help you with:
- Building an MVP of your product to put in front of investors and early adopters.
- Overhauling existing products by adding major new features, fixing performance bottlenecks, or paying off tech debt.
- Helping your team get up to speed with emerging technologies (currently interested in helping with TypeScript, modern React, the Jujutsu VCS, and LLM-driven programming).
- Modernizing legacy products and migrating them off legacy tech stacks.
- Acting as a bridge between your design and engineering teams.
I'm primarily a frontend developer comfortable with vanilla HTML/JS/CSS as well as more complex frameworks (mainly React, but I've worked with others). I enjoy being a heads-down technical contributor to codebases. However, working with early-stage companies has allowed me to dabble in UX design, hiring, mentoring, technical writing, technical workshops, and product design. I enjoy wearing a ton of hats, and prefer to work at orgs that allow me to use the full set of my abilities.
Yes! I'm currently working on a script that modifies a bunch of sensitive files, and this the approach I'm taking to make sure I don't accidentally lose any important data.
I've split the process into three parts:
1. Walk the filesystem, capture the current state of the files, and write out a plan to disk.
2. Make sure the state of the files from step 1 has not changed, then execute the plan. Capture the new state of the files. Additionally, log all operations to disk in a journal.
3. Validate that no data was lost or unexpectedly changed using the captured file state from steps 1 and 2. Manually look at the operations log (or dump it into an LLM) to make sure nothing looks off.
These three steps can be three separate scripts, or three flags to the same script.
Take this with a grain of salt, because numbers from Statcounter are not fully accurate. However, none of those numbers are small. 3.86% of the entire PC market is not something to scoff at.
also, I would bet Linux desktop users are more likely to use an Adblocker or Brave browser, which actually block statcounter! Probably not enough to bump numbers significantly, but maybe 1-2% additional.
There's also the people like me that couldn't historically run certain games well directly on Linux, so we have Windows virtual machines with GPU passthrough. Which would read as me being a Windows user in the Steam stats, but a Linux user in other stats.
The state of gaming has improved drastically since I started doing it that way, though, and I'm considering ditching the VM entirely. Multiplayer games seem to be getting the hint about anticheat exclusion on Linux. ARC Raiders, for example, is a competitive game and runs flawlessly directly on Linux.
Probably. But part of it might also be something else entirely. I'm not saying it is, but how's anybody to tell? Statcounter is just not a good way to research Linux market share. Unfortunately, what they lack in statistics, they seem to make up for in SEO... everybody's landing there.
Last time I looked on stat counter it showed 4 and something percent. That's where I pulled the number from. But it seems they updated it to 3.86 now. It's so over for the Linux community.
Statcounter isn't just "not fully accurate", it's a hot dump of analytics garbage, at least for this purpose. Take your time to reflect on these diagrams - what's happening there? What's the 55% "unknown", and what does that tell you about the quality of those stats? (I've commented on this problem before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472324 )
I've started using Python for many more tasks after I discovered this feature. I'm primarily a JS/TS developer, but the ability to write a "standalone" script that can pull in third-party dependencies without affecting your current project is a massive productivity boost.
> I think maybe we're talking past each other then. I'm saying I don't agree with the argument that music necessarily needs to have a story to be widely consumed in a positive way.
I can imagine that this is true for a lot of people. There are certainly folks out there who see music as an interesting sensory stimulus. This song makes you dance, this one makes you cry, this other one makes you feel nostalgic. To these people, the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel. It's a strange, solipsistic way of engaging with art, but who am I to judge?
I personally don't connect to music—or any other art—that way. The process that goes into making a piece of music is as important to me as the music itself. The people who make that music are even more important. I don't believe in separating art from the artist. In fact, I find the whole idea of separating art and artist to be fundamentally rotten.
Here's an admittedly extreme example, but it's demonstrative of how I personally relate to music. In the wake of the #MeToo movement (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeToo_movement), some of the musicians I used to love as a teenager were outed as sexual predators. When I found out, I scoured my music library and deleted all their work. The music was still the exact same music I fell in love with all those years ago, but I could no longer listen to it without being reminded of the horrible actions of the musicians. Listening to it was triggering.
And so to me, music is not just a series of sounds that make me feel good. There are humans behind those sounds, and I care deeply about those humans. They don't need to be perfect—everyone fucks up from time to time—but they need to demonstrate some level of human decency. And they certainly can't be machines, because machines aren't people.
I love machines. I've spent my life building them, programming them, and caring for them. But machines aren't people, and therefore I don't care about the art they make. Maybe one day machines will be able to make art in the same way humans do: by going out into the world, having experiences, making mistakes, learning, connecting with others, loving and being loved, or being rejected soundly, and understanding deeply what it means to be a living thing in this universe. A generative AI model doesn't do that (yet!) and so I'm utterly uninterested in whatever a generative AI model has to say about anything.
I don't think appreciating art separated from the author is solipsistic, in fact I'd argue the opposite. Needing a human presence to engage with art is very human-centric. Or maybe that's due to your definition of art? I can be stunned by how beautiful a sunset is, the same way that I am by a painting, even if no human had a hand in that sunset. I can appreciate the cleverness of a gull stealing some bread from a duck the same way I can appreciate the cleverness of a specific music being used at a specific point in a movie. I can shiver at the brutality of humanity watching Night and Fog, just like I can shiver at the brutality of a praying mantis, eating alive a roach.
>Maybe one day machines will be able to make art in the same way humans do: by going out into the world, having experiences, making mistakes, learning, connecting with others, loving and being loved, or being rejected soundly, and understanding deeply what it means to be a living thing in this universe.
I think this is a good description of the process of how some art is created, but not all? Some art is a pursuit of "what is beautiful" rather than "what it means to be human" ie a sensory experience, some art is accidental, some art just is. For some art knowing the person behind is important, to me; for some not; for some it adds to the experience; for some it removes from it.
I would also highlight some small contradiction:
>I can imagine that this is true for a lot of people. There are certainly folks out there who see music as an interesting sensory stimulus. This song makes you dance, this one makes you cry, this other one makes you feel nostalgic. To these people, the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel. It's a strange, solipsistic way of engaging with art, but who am I to judge?
>Here's an admittedly extreme example, but it's demonstrative of how I personally relate to music. In the wake of the #MeToo movement (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeToo_movement), some of the musicians I used to love as a teenager were outed as sexual predators. When I found out, I scoured my music library and deleted all their work. The music was still the exact same music I fell in love with all those years ago, but I could no longer listen to it without being reminded of the horrible actions of the musicians. Listening to it was triggering.
That seems to me a case of "the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel".
If the definition of art is that a human must be involved, then fine. AI generated music is not art. But it is everything art is minus the human component? ie, it can be beautiful, ugly, etc, just like how a sunset can be beautiful and a rotting corpse can be ugly.
I've started to "standardize" my own use of Markdown as "whatever works in the apps I use". For me these apps are iA Writer, Obsidian, and Astro's rendering pipeline (which uses the Remark/Rehype ecosystem under the hood).
This sucks for sharing documents with other people, but in practice it's not a problem. 99% of my writing never leaves my notes app or blog. And when it does, I often export it to PDF or Word to make it easy for non-techie people to read (I love Pandoc for this, it's easily one of the favorite tools in my daily toolkit).
> markdown is horrible, horrible format to parse...
I agree entirely. But it's a lovely format to use. Programming as a profession is entirely about making things easier for our users, even if it means making things harder for ourselves.
After all, that's the whole ethos around the web as a platform. Throw some broken HTML soup at a browser and it'll still try its best to render it.
I'm an independent consultant and frontend engineer helping startups (and a few large organizations) bring new products to market since 2012.
I can help you with:
- Building the first MVP of your product to put in front of investors and early adopters
- Overhauling existing products by adding major new features or paying off tech debt
- Helping your team get up to speed with emerging technologies
- Modernizing legacy products and migrating them off legacy tech stacks
- Acting as a bridge between your design and engineering teams
I'm primarily a frontend developer who is comfortable working with vanilla HTML/JS/CSS as well as more complex frameworks (mainly React). I enjoy being a heads-down technical contributor to codebases. However, working with early-stage companies has allowed me to dabble in UX design, hiring, mentoring, technical writing, technical workshops, and product design. I enjoy wearing a ton of hats, and prefer to work at orgs that allow me to use the full set of my abilities.
I enjoy using LLMs, but I do so responsibly. I write regularly at https://ankursethi.com/. I prefer short to medium term contracts (think 4-8 months).
I live in India and a surprising number of people here are using AI.
A lot of public religious imagery is very clearly AI generated, and you can find a lot of it on social media too. "I asked ChatGPT" is a common refrain at family gatherings. A lot of regular non-techie folks (local shopkeepers, the clerk at the gas station, the guy at the vegetable stand) have been editing their WhatsApp profile pictures using generative AI tools.
Some of my lawyer and journalist friends are using ChatGPT heavily, which is concerning. College students too. Bangalore is plastered with ChatGPT ads.
There's even a low-cost ChatGPT plan called ChatGPT Go you can get if you're in India (not sure if this is available in the rest of the world). It costs ₹399/mo or $4.41/mo, but it's completely free for the first year of use.
So yes, I'd say many people outside of tech circles are using AI tools. Even outside of wealthy first-world countries.
Remote: preferred
Willing to relocate: no
Technologies: web platform (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), the React ecosystem, TypeScript, Tailwind, Astro. Good enough at UI/UX design to be dangerous.
Résumé/CV: https://ankursethi.com/work/
Email: contact@ankursethi.com
I'm an independent consultant and frontend engineer helping startups (and a few large organizations) bring new products to market since 2012.
I can help you with:
- Building an MVP of your product to put in front of investors and early adopters.
- Overhauling existing products by adding major new features, fixing performance bottlenecks, or paying off tech debt.
- Helping your team get up to speed with emerging technologies (currently interested in helping with TypeScript, modern React, the Jujutsu VCS, and LLM-driven programming).
- Modernizing legacy products and migrating them off legacy tech stacks.
- Acting as a bridge between your design and engineering teams.
I'm primarily a frontend developer comfortable with vanilla HTML/JS/CSS as well as more complex frameworks (mainly React, but I've worked with others). I enjoy being a heads-down technical contributor to codebases. However, working with early-stage companies has allowed me to dabble in UX design, hiring, mentoring, technical writing, technical workshops, and product design. I enjoy wearing a ton of hats, and prefer to work at orgs that allow me to use the full set of my abilities.
I enjoy using LLMs, but I do so responsibly. I write regularly at https://ankursethi.com/.
I'm currently looking for short to medium term contracts (think 6-8 months).
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