Before AI was a thing, I tried a few times to post a question on reddit. Something like "Any recommendations for solving X? I've already tried Y, and it didn't work because of Z".
Most of the responses were to try Y, even though I clearly stated I had already tried that.
The others were telling me I was wrong about Z (I wasn't), or silly for even wanting X.
I don't consider AI in its current state a significant downgrade. But it seems inevitable that it will get worse.
Just last week, I was with one of my kids trying to kill some time before an appointment. I noticed a toy store in a strip mall, and I asked him if he wanted to check it out. His response was, "What's a toy store?"
We did check it out, and he was pretty disappointed. Even though it was advertised as a STEM-oriented store, half of it was stress balls and jigsaw puzzles.
2001 set tech jobs back a few years. 2008 wasn't nearly as bad for tech because as money got tight, there was an impetus for companies to invest in tech to cut costs. I think a similar thing might be unfolding now with non-tech companies investing in AI to streamline processes.
I use Cloudflare for a lot of my side projects. It's a pleasure to use, and I manage to stay under the free tier. It does feel like they should be bigger in the cloud space, but I imagine the major players get a lot of revenue from VMs, which is a space Cloudflare has avoided.
I too had construx. I probably used them more than Lego because they were better suited for large structures. It's a shame they don't make them any more.
Regardless of the debate of whether climate change has intensified hurricanes, it seems odd to blame hurricanes for being a vector for spreading the bugs. Wouldn't the bugs have spread via wind even if it wasn't climate change induced hurricane winds?
It reminds me a bit of one of the reasons Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes didn't catch on. It's difficult to make rectangular furniture work efficiently in a non-rectangular space. Likewise, it's difficult to efficiently use a non-rectangular window on a rectangular monitor.
I'm currently working on an app that needs offline support, and I wish I had something like this when I started.
One of our requirements though is to be able to completely host in our own infrastructure. I know this is open source, but it would be nice if there was a simple path to self hosting.
I gave up on inbox zero a long time ago, so it isn't the emails themselves that bother me as much as the notifications that I get through my phone and smartwatch.
I now run each notification through an LLM and give it instructions on what to filter out. I accidentally disabled it recently and was startled at the flood of notifications--like when you browse the internet without an ad blocker and forget how bad it is.
Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.
Pentium marketing was next level. You could buy plushies of Intel workers in bunny suits. The first IMAX movie I went to was called "The Journey Inside", and it was basically a big ad for the Pentium.
I always wondered if some of that was to offset the negative publicity from the FDIV bug in the early Pentiums.
These rules apply equally well to system architecture. I've been trying to talk our team out of premature optimization (redis cluster) and fancy algorithms (bloom filters) to compensate for poor data structures (database schema) before we know if performance is going to be a problem.
Even knowing with 100% certainty that performance will be subpar, requirements change often enough that it's often not worth the cost of adding architectural complexity too early.
I owe much of my career to an SSD. I had a work laptop that I upgraded myself with an 80GB Intel SSD, which was pretty exotic at the time. It was so fast at grepping through code that I could answer colleagues’ questions about the code in nearly real time. It was like having a superpower.
The first time I got a photo scanner, I was blown away that I could see myself on a screen. I eventually got a digital camera, and the novelty started to wear off. Now I can make myself the lead in a blockbuster movie, but that feels boring.
I found that writing rules was tricky when I didn't know exactly what content would be in a spam/promo notification. I ended up having claude code up a filter that asks an AI to review the notification first, which seems to be working well.
Thanks for making it open source. I've been wanting something like that for a while, but I'd been putting it off since I didn't want to learn the underpinnings of the notification service.
I got one of these for my kid a few years ago. He liked to browse Spotify on my phone, and I thought it would be a good screenless alternative. But honestly it just sat in a drawer, and I didn't have the patience to maintain and sync playlists to it.
It's easy to be nostalgic for the iPod era, but having to sync music is something I'm fine keeping in the past.
Most of the responses were to try Y, even though I clearly stated I had already tried that.
The others were telling me I was wrong about Z (I wasn't), or silly for even wanting X.
I don't consider AI in its current state a significant downgrade. But it seems inevitable that it will get worse.