suggests the data mostly comes from railway signalling information, plus a bit of "AI" in some way. I wonder how far apart railway signals usually are, or what the AI is trained on, or anything really vs just looking at a map.
Repeatedly following a fixed algorithm by hand can be relaxing - simple Sudoku problems, Solitaire, simple Rubiks cube solutions, simple crosswords and math problems, word searches, etc.
Meanwhile social games are fun even if they are extremely simple - rules-lite RPGs, Guess Who, Pictionary, etc.
This seems to exist at an intersection of the two. It's interesting that following a mindless algorithm with a group of people sounds so ridiculous and pointless in principle, but it's actually fun. Our brains are somehow wired to find it rewarding.
Extreme luck has the benefit of bringing everyone to the same level regardless of age or background, whereas e.g. chess, Counter-Strike or boxing is much less fun if one person is 10x better than the other. The more skill a game requires, the more it needs separate leagues for differing levels of ability.
Maybe there's also ironic enjoyment in playing a horse-race gambling game when most people playing have likely never watched a real horse race, let alone bet on one.
France, Germany, Sweden, Estonia and India already have government id. However, this being hackernews there will never be a link to a well researched article on the pros and cons of introducing id cards (digital or otherwise), only conspiracy theories and confident declarations that id cards are a surefire symbol of authoritarian states. I don't know what I think, I lack sufficient knowledge to have an opinion. But I still know approximately 10,000x more about UK politics, economics and immigration than 99% of the people commenting here.
The original author submitted it, then when it didn't get traction it looks like two fans of his blog both submitted it around 12 hours later. Whether for internet upvote points or because they personally thought the article particularly great, I don't know.
Personally I generally enjoy the blog and the writing, but not so much this post. It has a very clickbaity title for some results which aren't particularly impressive.
It's hardly original, but my take is that vibe coding works brilliantly for personal projects (or potentially for tiny startups that need to rapidly churn out CRUD boilerplate, API integrations, etc), but terribly for most large commercial systems.
I'm having fun with Claude Code and Vibe Kanban on personal projects, and before that I spent a lot of time with both the Windsurf and Cursor agents. It's making me literally 10x more productive on personal projects, maybe even 50x.
On personal projects:
- no-one but me needs to decide on requirements
- no-one but me needs to make decisions
- no-one but me needs to maintain the code going forward
- much of the time I'm intentionally using languages and frameworks that I am somewhat clueless about, and an LLM providing continuous ideas (even if sometimes entirely silly ones) stops me getting stuck
- I don't mind if there are large chunks of useless or half-working code
On commercial projects:
- every line of code is a massive liability. Every line needs to be reviewed by another engineer, and every developer who joins the project needs to be aware of it, take it into consideration when making changes elsewhere, and potentially debug it if something goes wrong
- senior engineers are almost always hired to work with languages and technologies they are already very familiar with, meaning for many tasks it's often quicker to write out the code by hand (or perhaps with Cursor's auto-complete) than guide an LLM to do it
- much of the time is spent in meetings trying to unearth the real product requirements or providing updates to stakeholders
- much of the time is spent reading old code and working out how to implement things in extremely large and complex systems in a minimally disruptive way
- a lot of time is spent reviewing other people's PRs, and getting infuriated when people (often either very junior or very senior) produce 1000 line PRs consisting of unnecessary changes, excessive boilerplate, half-finished experiments, and things that clearly haven't been tested properly. This was the case long before LLMs, AI just makes it ever more tempting for people to act this way.
- trying to avoid or gently negotiate political games over who is in control of the project, or who gets to makes technical decisions
Yup entirely this. The biggest sign of this is Tommy Robinson, who has blatantly committed outrageous cases of stalking, harassment, and contempt of court, for which he has been convicted. But because his schtick is complaining about Muslims he is then treated as a hero of the US right, gets invited on right-wing talk shows and gets bigged up by Elon Musk. I recently had a guy sit next to me on a plane bring him up as supposed proof of the UK being an authoritarian state.
I go absolutely out of my way to avoid politics nowadays, which makes it all the more frustrating when this nonsense is shoved in my face by idiots on HackerNews or dimwits sitting next to me on the plane.
Black Mirror is the new 1984. Right wing people think "this is a parable of what left-of-centre politics gets you, look how clever I am". Left-of-centre people know that the author of 1984 fought for the socialists in the Spanish Civil War and that the author of Black Mirror is a Guardian journalist.
I like the animations and general appearance, and how snappy it feels. Would prefer if mistakes required a backspace though, and also more than one word at a time. Also unclear if the timer starts when the word is shown or when you start typing.
The Scala community soap-opera was a total shit show. Both of the women involved later ended up in relationships with Travis Brown, another prominent and extremely controversial Scala figure. Travis then entered a long running war against John De Goes and a bunch of other people in the Scala community before rage-quitting.
I don't believe the women entirely made it up, or that Jon Pretty is entirely guilt-free. Likely he is a narcissist who took advantage of his status to pursue sexual relationships where there was a huge imbalance of power. Maybe this strayed into manipulative gaslighting, I don't know. But it also seems entirely plausible that the women in question desired a relationship with a powerful older man and that the relationships were essentially consensual. It's a mess of power, sex, alcohol, a lack of shared social norms, and overlapping social and professional relationships. Quite where the truth lies between "totally non-consensual gaslighting" and "consensual relationship with large imbalance of power" I don't claim to know.
I don't get why he is so determined to stick with Scala. It's just a programming language. The Scala community is forever going to hold extremely negative associations for him. For someone with his level of experience and motivation it presumably wouldn't be too hard to switch to Rust or something. Some people will still reject him out of hand due to his googleable name, but I still feel like he'd be happier and better off leaving.
I just bought my first synth, not very originally a Minilogue XD. A much cheaper mid-life toy then a sports car or pilot's licence! I'm interested in any recommendations for learning resources. Synthorial is often mentioned, and various videos on YouTube, plus just messing around or focusing on general music theory. But I'd love a comprehensive website or blog post series that I could gradually work through.
Interesting, I'll take a look when the rate limit issue is sorted. There are loads of projects springing up around using LLMs for text adventures. My prediction is that at some point soon one of them is going to get good enough to gain mainstream appeal, but we're not there yet. I suppose Death By AI was a breakout AI text hit, but I'm not sure that really counts.
The people behind AI Dungeon have been making AID: Heroes for ages, maybe that will turn out to be great when it's finally released. There's also Friends and Fables that seems to be making rapid progress. And a thousand side projects on GitHub and Steam.
I briefly started my own, hoping to build something more like a traditional visual novel choose-your-own adventure with set paths, dice rolls, and limited AI elements. However, I soon realised that if you show people a large amount of text and only occasional user interaction they rapidly check out. The alpha version is here for the time being: https://prismaticnoun.xyz but I'm unlikely to do any more work on it.
The huge positive publicity boost that Claude Code gained during its unlimited phase was surely easily worth the slight negative publicity it is getting now. This post is just marketing copy by a small competitior that can't afford to do the same thing.
https://vgcgroup.co.uk/news/signalbox-for-train-locations/
suggests the data mostly comes from railway signalling information, plus a bit of "AI" in some way. I wonder how far apart railway signals usually are, or what the AI is trained on, or anything really vs just looking at a map.