This seems cool. For going from Markdown to slides I’ve often used Marp: https://marp.app/ — It doesn’t require much specialized syntax, it mostly does the right thing to turn plain Markdown sections into slides. Simple self-hostable HTML output and PDF export options. Already has a VSCode preview plugin, too. I noticed that Claude Code is able to generate Marp slides for you if you ask it, as well.
Best for slides that are just bullet points, full-slide images, and code. Especially code. Less good if you have a lot of images or need to do your own styles or layout.
The BlueSky post has another interesting clue. The pencil sketch on the right. Seems possible a human artist drew the sketch, then had an AI model "colorize" it. And in so doing, maybe the AI model added the 3 genAI tells/artifacts I identified above.
The math of “a decade” seemed wrong to me, since I remembered Docker debuting in 2013 at PyCon US Santa Clara.
Then I found an HN comment I wrote a few years ago that confirmed this:
“[...] I remember that day pretty clearly because in the same lightning talk session, Solomon Hykes introduced the Python community to docker, while still working on dotCloud. This is what I think might have been the earliest public and recorded tech talk on the subject:”
Just being pedantic though. That’s about 13 years ago. The lightning talk is fun as a bit of computing history.
(Edit: as I was digging through the paper, they do cite this YouTube presentation, or a copy of it anyway, in the footnotes. And they refer to a 2013 release. Perhaps there was a multi-year delay between the paper being submitted to ACM with this title and it being published. Again, just being pedantic!)
When I was in high school, I played a lot of UO. It was actually the last computer/video game I ever played regularly, because I convinced myself as a teenager that I was addicted to it and needed to drop it "cold turkey" to focus on academics and extracurriculars.
(A sign of the times for the late-1990s nostalgics: I sold my UO account on eBay for a few thousand dollars and an MTG Mox Pearl. I owned a bunch of virtual real estate, e.g. a UO tower on an island only accessible via moongate. The high bidder "threw in" a Mox Pearl as a kind of informal escrow, to make sure I completed the account transfer after getting paid.)
Before I dropped UO from my life, I discovered UOX. I was learning C++ and UOX was a great way for me to practice my emerging C++ skills.
My clearest memory of feeling the power of programming was when I created a mod for my UOX server that allowed me to drop an unlimited number of interconnected and color-coded moongates all over my server, creating something akin to the feeling of the game "Portal," but long before Valve released "Portal."
It was after having a blast with UOX that I decided to dig into programming much more. Somehow, the UOX server mod made programming feel "real" for me in the way my prior forays into coding simply didn't.
That led to me learning Python -- as a way of toying around with the Slackware Linux server I had in my basement. I left C++ behind, but it was an important stepping stone for me. Now, decades later, learning Python was probably the single most important decision of my life in childhood. (See e.g. https://amontalenti.com/about)
UOX is such a cool project. UO was a really ahead-of-its time internet game, as well. Great memories. Thank you.
If you were utterly confused, like I was, how the iPad Air M4 compares to the iPad Pro M5 and the iPad Pro M4, this 3-column comparison table from Apple's website might help:
It allows people to form a "watch club" around the show, similar to a book club, and have plenty of extra reading materials to understand the different tech eras covered in the show.
I think this show -- combined with the documentary "General Magic" and the book "Fire in the Valley" -- is a great way to be immersed in the techno-optimism of the early tech industry around the time of the desktop PC revolution and early internet.
For me, that sort of techno-optimism has stuck with me even if modern tech has more dystopian elements with which one has to grapple. It is still an amazing industry, all things considered.
p.s. total aside that Apple TV sells a digital "box set" of this show for a pretty low price these days. I am usually not a fan of "buying" a show from a streaming service but might be worth it in this case since it's around $16 USD for every episode across its 4 seasons, Apple has a good track record honoring digital purchases, and watching the show is a commitment.
This partially simulates the experience/UX of the product iA Writer on macOS or iPad, which is my favorite prose editor, but is proprietary software and doesn't work on Linux.
As others mentioned, when in prose writing mode you can also flip on a handful of vim options, I save these as hotkeys in my vimrc. For example, spell checking and line wrapping.
“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”
I'm working on startup #2 and we recently came out of stealth.
PX is a daily developer tool that helps backend engineers go from working code on a laptop to deployed code in a freshly-built cloud cluster -- all within seconds.
Prior to PX, I was the founding CTO of Parse.ly, a real-time web analytics startup that grew to be installed on 12,000+ high-traffic sites and had terabytes of daily analytics data flowing through it. PX stems from my experience as a startup CTO who eventually ran large distributed systems on AWS and GCP.
PX is cloud independent, programming language agnostic, and open source friendly. PX is, in short, the backend development tool that I always wished my team could have. We're having a blast building it and we're excited to give back some power to backend developers so they can wield cloud hardware resources with open source tech, rather than locking in to proprietary cloud APIs.
The current version of the CLI is focused on one-off (or batch) workloads on GCP, but on the immediate roadmap: cron-style scheduled jobs; a v1 of our monitoring/debugging/admin dashboard (already looking good in internal builds!); and, formal support for the other 3 clouds (that is: AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure). We also have a lot more documentation to write and a lot more examples to post, but you have to start somewhere! The launch blog post covers some of the history and inspiration.
As someone who thinks a lot about how best to use one's limited time; is child-free by choice; and, who is also interested in the societal value of good parenting... this article drew me in on a number of counts.
The concept of time dilation explored in the article is fascinating. But I think it's possible the author has some wishful thinking about how experience and memory works. Or perhaps is using a plausible formulation as a reverse justification for his own life choices.
Here is how my childhood memories feel to me. Ages 0-14 are like an opaque tunnel, through which my brain and developing body was shot, like a cannonball, in an instant. I have some fragmentary memories of having gone through that tunnel, but they are mere fragment. My 14 year old self, somehow and miraculously, ended up on the other side of that tunnel healthy and of sound mind.
Age 14 is around where something resembling "the recorded video of my early memory" begins. I have clear memory of various episodes from ages 14-18, and this was also a period of intense individual development for me. This was where all my inclinations, passions, and life goals started to come into focus. That turned into full-blown adult individuation in college, where my goal was to pull away entirely from societal/parental expectations and live my own life. In other words: pretty much everything I associate with my adult character had its seed-like start in my age 14-18 period, exactly the period where I was pulling away from my developmental dependence on my parents.
My childhood before then is a blur. That might be a depressing thought for parents -- that this kind of blurred and fragmentary memory of childhood is possible, given that parents often describe this period as one where they are "making family memories" -- but I don't think I'm the only one. Importantly: this doesn’t make early parenting meaningless. Good parenting is ethically and developmentally important even when it doesn’t leave the child with later-retrievable episodic memories. But I don't think the point of parenting is to create said memories. It's to create a healthy child who can develop and individuate on their own in adulthood.
The article talks a lot about childlike wonder, and seeking that in adulthood. I'm all for that. But what's strange is that OP seems to believe the only place to find that childlike wonder is in parenting of your own children. I am sure parenting can be one such way to regain childlike wonder, but surely not the only one. People can reclaim their childlike wonder in sport, art, hobby, play, and travel, among other things. What's more, I know many parents who haven't the slightest bit of childlike wonder when they interact with their children. Or any other children in their family. So I'm not sure it comes as naturally to everyone as OP seems to think it does.
Two adult thinkers on how adult humans spend their time that have interesting thoughts on childlike play are John Cleese and Alan Watts. Cleese discusses it in the context of creativity in his wonderful lecture, summarized here:
And Watts had this to say about it: "... if you don't have a room in your life for the playful, life's not worth living. 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.' But if the only reason for which Jack plays is that he can work better afterwards, he's not really playing. He's just playing because it's good for him! Well, he's not playing at all! You have to be able to cultivate an attitude to life where you're not trying to get anything out of it. You pick up a pebble on the beach and look at it: beautiful! Don't try and get a sermon out of it."
That's cool. I've wanted to track my movie watch history for awhile but just couldn't find the right software to do it. I really dislike Letterboxd. I also agree with your point that having a software engineering (programming) background makes projects like these a bit easier to prompt for in a direct way.
Digitizing my physical bookshelf was one of the first fun “vibe coding” projects I did with ChatGPT4o in 2024.
First, I took photographs of all my physical books simply by photographing the bookshelves such that the book spines were visible.
Then passed the photographs with a prompt akin to, "These are photographs of bookshelves. Create a table of book title and book author based on the spines of the books in these photographed shelves." ChatGPT4’s vision model handled this no problem with pretty high accuracy.
I then vibe-coded a Python program with ChatGPT4 to use the Google Books API (an API key for that is free) to generate a table, and then a CSV, of: book title, book author, and isbn13. Google Books API lets you look up an ISBN based on other metadata like title and author easily.
Finally, I uploaded the enriched CSV into a free account of https://libib.com. This is a free SaaS that creates a digital bookshelf and it can import books en masse if you have their ISBNs. You can see the result of this here for my bookshelf:
There are some nice titles in there for HN readers! My admin app for Libib (the one at https://libib.com) is more full-featured than the above public website showcases. It's basically software for running small lending libraries. But, in my case, the “lending library” is just my office’s physical bookshelf.
I also added a Libib collection there that is a sync of my Goodreads history, since I read way more Kindle books than physical books these days. That was a similarly vibe-coded project. But easier since Goodreads can export your book collection, including isbn13, to a file.
As for my actual physical bookshelf, it is more a collection of books I either prefer in print, or that are old, or out-of-print, or pre-digital & never-digitized.
I liked the Libib software so much I end up donating to it every year. I originally discovered it because it is used for Recurse Center’s lending library in the Recurse Center space in Brooklyn, NY (https://recurse.com).
Also, Libib has a Android, iPhoneOS, and iPadOS apps -- these are very basic but they do allow you to add new books simply by scanning their ISBN barcode, which is quite handy when I pick up new items.
I did enjoy reading the OP writeup, it’s a fun idea to vibe-code the actual digital bookshelf app, as well!
Best for slides that are just bullet points, full-slide images, and code. Especially code. Less good if you have a lot of images or need to do your own styles or layout.