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> Package managers are now basically a requirement for language adoption. Doing it manually is not a solution, in an automated world.

Absolute nonsense. What does automated world even mean? Even if one could infer reasonably, it's no justification. Appealing to "the real world" in lieu of any further consideration is exactly the kind of mindlessness that has led to the present state of affairs.

Automation of dependency versions was never something we needed it was always a convenience, and even that's a stretch given that dependency hell is abundant in all of these systems, and now we have supply chain attacks. While everyone is welcome to do as they please, I'm going to stick to vendoring my dependencies, statically compiling, and not blindly trusting code I haven't seen before.


> Automation of dependency versions was never something we needed

How do you handle updating dependencies then?


Relax, while mentioning the real world without any criticism for the soundness of the solution is absolute nonsense, some would say idiotic, thinking only in the absolute best solution given your narrow world view is not any better.

While I agree that my view is narrow, the "best solution" in question is what we used to do, and it was fine. There are still many places that manually manage dependencies. Fundamentally automatic software versioning is an under-developed area in need of attention, and technologies like semantic versioning which are ubiquitous are closer to suggestions, and not true indicators of breaking changes. My personal view is that fully automatic dependency version management is an ongoing experiment and should be treated as such.

> What does automated world even mean?

People are trying to automate the act of programming itself, with AI, let alone all the bits and pieces of build processes and maintenance.


Focusing on protocol and decentralisation is putting the cart before the horse. The reason why Twitter, and Reddit in particular work so well is because of sub-communities that form organically. More importantly, discovery was part of the value in using it. It's why every Mastodon community specific to one niche/subject is not very interesting, people are not one single interest, we follow someone we like for one reason, maybe it's they make cool art, then we find out they also make music too, then bam, you discover a new genre of music and the community around it. Decentralisation actively introduces friction into the most rewarding loop of the entire thing. Centralisation isn't the problem, it's just comorbid with shitty governance.

> The reason why Twitter, and Reddit in particular work so well is because of sub-communities that form organically.

Which sub-communities are on Twitter right now?


There are a lot of small, informal and fuzzy communities around specific interests in Twitter. For example, I routinely run into the same folks talking about some specific areas in PL/FP or in complex systems/resilience engineering. These sub-communities aren't clearly delineated like a subreddit, rather they arise organically through the same set of people following each other or, at least, consistently appearing in each others' feeds and conversations.

It seems like most of Japan.

Japanese is the second most used language on Bluesky

https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...


Japanese Bluesky isn't even close to Twitter yet. No politicians, no actors and actresses, no seiyuu, no utaite, a few mangaka and light novel authors, nobody that talks about trains, though there is the Frieren official account. There's a few Japanese that are just trying to generally meet new people or some that use Blueksy as a 1 way venting valve.

And as usual there are some political Japanese. In fact given how small Japanese Bluesky is the amount of politics is quite shocking given that Japanese tend not to be as vocal about politics on microblogging sites. (2ch on the other hand...)


Bluesky itself is just a politics magnet.

Is the same algorithmic connectivity with Japanese happening on Bluesky as it is on Twitter, or are Bluesky's algorithms just as opaque as Twitter's?

I'm not sure myself, however in atproto you can fetch all the data and do analytics, love it or hate it.

But the en:ja ratio is like 5:1. Real population ratio between us:jp is like 3:1, and on Twitter it's more like 1.5:1 by active user count. This means Bluesky is less popular in Japan than it is in English speaking regions.

yes, and... would be more appropriate than "but"

Our points are not mutually exclusive. Thanks for adding more insight. Is your bsky ratio based on actual users or the data at the link? (which is posts by language) Are there similar content stats for the site formerly known as Twitter?


All the numbers I based above comment were either from that link and/or quickly googlable data, nothing special.

Utaite. Will find barely any anywhere else. Thankfully if you're in one of those sub-communities, you don't ever get recommended anything political or American.

Discord is my goto choice for communities now, but I fear that company is not on a great trajectory either. It's like voting, you're picking for the least evil

- agentic coding developers - micro startup founders - meme lords

Startup punditry is a business niche being capitalised on and it's being regarded in this article like a commune of knowledge. It's mildly insightful entertainment literature, with customers. On a philosophical level it's absolute value is tainted by its existence in the market. Most things are, but it living in the context of entrepreneurial endeavours, it taints it substantially more than most.


I'm quite partial to Zed. Very snappy, and you can turn off all the AI features globally if you like.


Zed is a no go in my book until they learn to respect their users and stop installing third party software* without asking. Completely unacceptable practice, and their reason of "most people will want LSPs to be there without effort" doesn't cut it.

* nodejs specifically, but it wouldn't be ok no matter what the software was. It's my computer, not yours, don't download and run stuff without getting permission.


I get where you're coming from.

But what percentage of users of a document editor would say "don't install pdf stuff on my computer without asking, I don't need to export to pdf"

Installing dependencies for popular features is very much the norm. It's mainstream software.

The same complaint would be made for VSCode and Jetbrains - the most popular IDEs


Zed is fantastic for Rust, C, C++, and similar languages.

I wouldn't bother using it for Web things like HTML, Js, CSS, because it simply isn't better at that than VSCode. Same goes for C# -- as a Microslop technology, you're better off using Microslop tooling.


I don't find Zed much worse for working with webtech either.


Yes, I'm happy with Zed a Sublime replacement, usually for general text-editing.

For coding, I'm still stuck with VSCode and nvim.


> It is much closer to proper engineering.

I would not equate software engineering to "proper" engineering insofar as being uttered in the same sentence as mechanical, chemical, or electrical engineering.

The cost of code is collapsing because web development is not broadly rigorous, robust software was never a priority, and everyone knows it. The people complaining that AI isn't good enough yet don't grasp that neither are many who are in the profession currently.


> The people complaining that AI isn't good enough yet don't grasp that neither are many who are in the profession currently.

I think the externalities are being ignored. Having time and money to train engineers is expensive. Having all the data of your users being stolen is a slap in the wrist.

So replacing those bad worekrs with AI is fine. Unless you remove the incentives to be fast instead of good, then yeah AI can be good enough for some cases.


Indeed, it's like those complaining self-driving cars occasionally crash when their crash rates are up to 90% less than humans . . .


Something that isn't touched on as much is that in the time between old-school native apps and Electron apps is design systems and brand language have become much more prevalent, and implementing native UI often results in compromising design, and brand elements. Most applications used to look more or less the same, nowadays two apps on the same computer can look completely different. No one wants to compromise on design.

This mentality creates a worse experience for end users because all applications have their own conventions and no one wants to be dictated to what good UX is. The best UX in every single instance I've encountered is consistency. Sure, some old UIs were obtuse (90% weren't) but they were obtuse in predictable ways that someone could reasonably navigate. The argument here is between platform consistency and application consistency. Should all apps on the platform look the same, or should the app look the same on all platforms?

edit: grammar


If I look at the Notion and Linear desktop apps, they’re essentially identical in styling and design. They’re often considered the best of today’s web/Electron productivity apps, and they have converged on a style that’s basically what Apple had five years ago.

IMO that’s a fairly strong argument that the branding was always unnecessary, and apps would have been better off built from a common set of UI components following uniform human interface guidelines.


I do notice those things occupying your "essentially," and your "basically." The success of worse designed stuff is a hard thing to argue against, though.


> The best UX in every single instance I've encountered is consistency.

While I agree that consistency is hugely important, I have also seen a lot of cases where it made the UX worse. The reason is that, unfortunately, UX isn't so simple. There isn't a single UX rule that is always true. UX design rules (best practices, guidelines, or principles) are a good starting point, but in a lot of situations multiple rules are conflicting each other. UI/UX design is dealing with tradeoffs most of the time. Good designer will know when breaking a specific rule will actually improve the UX.

Consistency is very important, but sometimes a custom UI element will be the best tool for the job. For example, imagine UI for seat selection in a movie theater ticket booking app. A consistent design would mean using standard controls users are already familiar with, but no standard control will provide high quality UX in this situation (not without heavy modifications).

But I still I agree with you that a lot of bad UX is due to inconsistency. There needs to be a good reason each time consistency broken and often it is broken for the wrong reasons.


  > No one wants to compromise on design.
I, the user, would totally want that.


The user is at the bottom of the stakeholder list.


I can feel my advertiser data being siphoned from my body already!


It's only creepy if you are a creep.


That's exactly right, you've got to be an unmistakable gentleman, which is just the opposite.

As everybody knows that's still often not enough, but why shoot yourself in the foot when you're trying to put your best foot forward?

I'll never forget the day some sophisticated gentlemen came to my school and introduced one of their big hit songs that night.

How there's 5 little words so many single women love to hear, "Hey Girl, What's Your Name?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09w6_q0Chxk

If you look at the lyrics it is a bit straightforward for the 21st century, I think the best approach now is to compress it to only 4 words, "Hi, What's Your Name?".

Even that can be a bit much in the wrong situation, so it can be good to seek out the opposite type of situation :)

You might keep that on your mind but from there let things try to imply the rest of the lyrics, especially the part that goes "Can I Be Your Friend?"


>As everybody knows that's still often not enough, but why shoot yourself in the foot when you're trying to put your best foot forward?

Because the best food forward of a creep is still a creep.


>a creep is still a creep.

Yeah, some people are only up to no good :\

If you can't differentiate yourself from that, it would be something to work on well before you try and be as socially acceptable as the average joe.

For everyone else who's not a creep, maybe you just have to "accept" that everyone in the world just doesn't want to be socially acceptable anyway.


This reminds me of the bio-neural gel packs from Star Trek: Voyager. Wild to think that this could become a reality.


I might agree with you as a knee jerk, but I believe "the medium is the message"[1] and I don't think there's anything particularly meaningful or evocative about shattered glass as opposed to any other planar medium.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message


There is no meaning in converting a conventionally destructive, random, chaotic act into a directed, aesthetic, meaningful one?

The fact he has a portrait of Kamala Harris called “glass ceiling breaker” and one of the victims of the Beirut explosion called #weareunbreakable suggests that you don’t need to dig particularly deep to find meaningful subtext in the choice of material and technique.

If anything it’s maybe a bit on-the-nose.


> If anything it’s maybe a bit on-the-nose.

This is what I was driving at. I should have been more specific to say not particularly meaningful or evocative to me. From the previews I've seen it's all based around shattering and breaking. Where I will give credit, there's one: "Transformation" where natural light is reflected at the shattered glass to portray a face which I find to be fascinating. The rest feel kitschy, it's not quite to my tastes.


Interesting technique, but indeed, painfully kitsch subjects.


> but I believe "the medium is the message"

> I don't think there's anything particularly meaningful or evocative about shattered glass as opposed to any other planar medium

These seem contradictory? If the medium is "uninteresting", then how it can be the focus of interest?


> "What if our AI bullishness continues to be right...and what if that’s actually bearish" - what if pee pee was poo poo

Despite the vulgarity, it is exceptionally illuminating to how much some of these slop pieces are just a mere pretension of rhetoric. I see this pretty consistently with a lot of the material I come across on the job that's gone through the LLM meat-grinder.

Also, the comment made me giggle like a little kid.


What's pretend-rhetoric about it? They're positing agents will prove to be very capable, but that this would ultimately be a bad thing by automating away too much of the economy. You can argue whether that's plausible or not, but it isn't an incoherent or vapid argument.


I suggest you read the annotation if that question isn't just rhetorical. I'm not familiar with Ed, but he has a pretty good take down in here if you can get past his somewhat juvenile writing style.

It is a problem when your doomsday timeline for obsolescence is behind the minute you publish. The memo itself was fantasy doomer porn on day 1.


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