For what it's worth, AI has been running major market, corporate radio stations for at least 20 years now. When I left the industry they already had AudioVault or Prophet or some other systems that would pull all the songs and distribute them across the playlist based on various algorithms set by the corporate HQ. Things like how many times the same artist could be played during the day, and during which parts of the day... specific songs would get bumped up percentage wise... you couldn't play 2 female artists back-to-back... and so on. Someone at HQ would input the songs and criteria, but the rest was 95% algorithmically created.
The program director would literally hit a button and it would create the playlist for the week. The traffic department (ads) would have all the commercials also automatically placed within the list. Then there'd be a document to send to the on-air talent that showed what song was just played and what was coming up, and how long the break needed to be, and sometimes a script. At the time, quite a few got faxed to people and some did get emails... and the "DJ" would record their bits, set to the exact timing, and send them over an ISDN line. There was also some rudimentary STT (Dragon?) that transcribed the audio and was computer analyzed to make sure no cursing happened.
The PD would do some spot-checking, but I doubt he personally examined all 120+ hours of programming. And this was 2005.
I guess having a human voice did make it "feel" better? And the DJs did have some breaks that were unscripted, so their personality could come through. Even the best AI voices still don't have that.
Looking at the code (https://github.com/davmlaw/uBlock/commit/fa2de61ae69927591db...), there's not much I would do differently writing by hand. It breaks some formatting/style conventions from the rest of the file, which I would probably flag in an organizational code review... but otherwise the logic is solid.
So is this "slop" simply because it's written by an LLM, even if the output is solid? Would it NOT be slop if it was worse code, but written fully manually? Honestly, I'm not sure I know the answer.
This is an under-appreciated aspect of Flash's popularity, and probably a reason why Animate didn't have the same appeal. A kid could get a "free" cracked copy and make fun things.... and maybe not help Adobe/Macromedia's bottom-line, it DID help the general ecosystem.
Rive seems fine, but monthly subscriptions need to die in a fire. I'm not going to pay $10/month to allow me to build some stupid animation idea I have every few months. There are a few, like GameMaker, that do one-time pricing... but even that doesn't scratch the same itch Flash did for me.
> constantly point out what they perceive as problems with...
Yeah, screw those people. I count myself as lucky that I've only worked with 1 person who was seriously CRITICAL of the way other's worked... beyond just code quality. However, I always enjoyed a good discussion about the various differences in how people worked, as long as they could accept there's no "right" way. That's what the article brought up for me, and I wonder how much that happens these days.
One of my fondest memories was sitting around with a few other devs after work, and one had started learning Go pretty soon after its public release... and he would show us some new, cool thing he was playing around with. Of course those kind of organic things stopped with remote work, and I wonder how much THAT has played into the loss of identity?
Klondike solitaire game using Godot. The goal is to better understand Godot's inner workings, and not using any LLMs... outside of whatever Google searches automatically popup when I have questions.
Secondarily, decompiling the DuckTails Gameboy ROM with PHP... then seeing about using PHP to create a GameBoy game. For no reason than to see if it can be done.
Exactly. I had a manager who said "Standup with start exactly on time", and stuck to it. And after a couple of meetings with some people coming in a minute or two late and realizing he was for real... everyone started showing up on time.
I've seen a few other comments also talk about PHP becoming more complex. However, I have "simple" code built using 5.3 and it works perfectly fine in 8. So I guess it CAN be complex, but doesn't really need to be. The biggest changes I would make to that code are fixing the multiple 'switch' and 'if/else' blocks to an anonymous function or some mapping... but it's not required.
It feels like it's taking a solved problem and formalizing it, with a bit of automation. I've used MCPs that were just fancy document search, and this should replace those.
This is an interesting thought. I also wonder if Houston is "helped" by the fact that they're a blue city in a red state... that kind of ideological conflict of governance requires unique and localized solutions. Whereas SF is blue city in a blue state, so it creates a "too many cooks in the kitchen" situation.
A (so far) simple AI assistant to provide help if you're moving with your pets to a different country. I've got a vector db with some US travel documents embedded, parse the question/prompt, and add the relevant context to a standard LLM request.
It also parses the question/prompt and stores move and pet details, so later questions will have context.
Eventually, the idea is to have a full tracker and reminder system... so deadlines, appointments, and documentation can be stored and referenced in a single place.
This post (aside from the title) is fairly nuanced, with the reality that "let an LLM do all the things" is going to be fraught with problems... but "let an LLM do some very specific things that saves me an hour or so from boilerplate code or tests" is very nice. Of course, I doubt a blog post titled "Sometimes AI is ok, sometimes it's not" would get the clicks.
Remember FriendFeed? It was unironically a pretty cool thing. Subscribe to RSS feeds, displayed in a Twitter-like timeline, and could comment and share and follow people and see their feeds... and all of that had their own RSS feeds.
The current FeedLand gets close, and is nice for reading, but there's not a huge "social" aspect to it.
There are (or at least WERE) entire divisions dedicated to reading every letter of the contract and terms of service, and usually creating 20 page documents seeking clarification for a specific phrase. They absolutely know what they're getting into.
The program director would literally hit a button and it would create the playlist for the week. The traffic department (ads) would have all the commercials also automatically placed within the list. Then there'd be a document to send to the on-air talent that showed what song was just played and what was coming up, and how long the break needed to be, and sometimes a script. At the time, quite a few got faxed to people and some did get emails... and the "DJ" would record their bits, set to the exact timing, and send them over an ISDN line. There was also some rudimentary STT (Dragon?) that transcribed the audio and was computer analyzed to make sure no cursing happened.
The PD would do some spot-checking, but I doubt he personally examined all 120+ hours of programming. And this was 2005.
I guess having a human voice did make it "feel" better? And the DJs did have some breaks that were unscripted, so their personality could come through. Even the best AI voices still don't have that.