> I watch engineers pick up design so the thing looks good and feels good, not just runs. The work pulls you into the parts you used to hand to someone else. We’re all stretching wider than we trained for. Whatever the work needs, we learn it.
Even back to the mid-90's I've always approached projects like this -- soup to nuts, all the way from idea to conception to creative ideation to implementation to digital life!
I also used to assume everybody did lol, until I worked long enough professionally to watch the landscape subdivide like a fractal into what we have now.
There's a LOT of bad shit to be said about AI coding, but I also have this feeling that something about it all is rekindling that ancient one-man-band approach that can actually work if you're able to play all the instruments. Really interested to see what comes of it once the breathless hype dies down a little bit.
I almost never reply to replies on something that I wrote in a public forum, because I stand by what I wrote as a complete statement and don't feel the need to defend it further. In this particular case, because the whole topic is about "argument", I found it funny enough to break my own rule.
For what it's worth, I did read your post twice before I replied, just to see if I didn't get it on the first pass. What I took from it, and maybe I'm thick as molasses, was that humans defacto love to argue due to biological imperative, we stratify social value based on the success of arguments, and ultimately promote argument as a contact sport that you can dominate in for personal gain and personal validation. Dominate instead of mediate, which I've found through life experience to come most often from people who are deeply insecure with themselves.
When I came back to the thread, I noticed that the submission title had been updated to Most arguments are about ego, not ideas and saw your replies to my post + siblings, and felt like that new title encapsulated your responses perfectly. You and I simply disagree on the purpose and value of argument.
Persuasive people rarely argue. Persuasive people do not need to be unequivocally right. The most persuasive people do get what they want in the end, but you often don't even realize you've been persuaded.
Argumentative people leverage power if they have it, and data, and sometimes "win", but rarely succeed in persuasion.
And that's just my opinion! Feel free to disagree, I've no interest in an argument LOL
> No philosophical analysis can beat one from a scientific and logical perspective.
I disagree, and offer the world of 2026 as anecdotal evidence lol. Most of what you wrote implies that every person participates in arguments honestly, with full faith, and are both cognitively capable of, and actively willing to, receive, evaluate and ultimately accept the argument as a zero-sum "winner". In reality, illogical appeals to emotion tend to win the day.
This also kind of refuses to acknowledge that a lot of people simply don't feel the need to be right; some people move in silence, others just don't care for the friction, or need the accolades. Still others don't enjoy the company of self-righteous, unbending, argumentative people, or have wildly different perspectives on a topic due to life experiences that are unfathomable to the rest.
I believe that multiple things can often be right simultaneously, and it's exactly that kind of positive sum philosophy that drives the most argumentative and need-to-be-right people completely insane haha. Different strokes for different folks man.
Agreed; typically (especially if a client is involved) I’ve seen creative and dev define and articulate spec and expected behavior, and BA documents it. Then, when it inevitably evolves, BA’s job is to capture the changed spec. The artifact is simply documentation as a client deliverable that’s then often never referenced or used for anything outside of maybe complaining that a feature doesn’t do what the spec claimed, or maybe as context when the client takes their whole project to another vendor to be rebuilt from scratch lol
Also a Brother laser user here (HL-L2340D) -- it's single-function, so not gonna do color, scanning, copying, etc, but it's been a beast for workhorse black and white printing. Unsure about other models, but also worth mentioning that this hunk of junk is more than happy to use generic TN660 toner cartridges from Amazon with no problems, as well as a generic DR630 replacement drum.
Email is still (and IMO always will be) the defacto method of communication for anything professional, regardless of whether it's 1994, 2026 or 2095. I'm not even totally convinced that something else could come along and usurp it; it would have to be something so easy, so ubiquitous, fully-supported across every piece of software and internet that you encounter, while serving as a form of identity and "fixed geography" (think about how email addresses serve similar purposes as postal addresses), trustable, comprehensive, and completely open and free (not as in beer, but as in protocol-level free) ... and even then, the value prop would have to be cheaper, seamless to migrate all existing email-related stuff to, and backwards compatible with / significantly more compelling than email itself, to convince the world to adopt it.
I'd love to see it though, because email really is long in the tooth at this point.
This is super duper cool! I sat there and watched like 10 minutes of a live game and it was just balls, strikes, swing & miss, and foul LOL -- reminded me of that old Simpsons episode where soccer comes to Springfield and nothing happens in the match [0]
Same, Drudge Report was one of the only sites that actually loaded consistently for me that morning. I think BBC may have held up a bit better than US news sites too. I remember the first stories trickling in thought it was like a Cessna or something else small that hit, and by the time TV was live and on the scene, the time delta between what you saw on TV versus what was reported online was comically large. Funny how these days it's really not much different, news sites tend to lag social media by a larger amount than I'd expect for 2026, and it's still publishing the same level of speculation and kind of vague, glossed over details (compared to just watching videos of the event semi-realtime)
I'm on a dual-E5 2667-v4 / 256 GB DDR4 Z640 with a 1080ti that I picked up all the various pieces for (aside from SSDs) for less than $500 total in the first half of 2025 (case, PSU, riser board included). I'm still kind of blown away by what you can find aftermarket / secondhand!
I also had no idea RAM and GPU costs would explode they way they did, just happened to do it the right time. I might try to grab a ~$300 3080 on Ebay and sell the 1080ti, but otherwise it's been a great upgrade -- it sucks electricity like Coca Cola, but otherwise performs fantastic as a workstation, and I'm just gonna drive it til the wheels fall off.
I agree with you completely, but I also have never been able to square the idea of how any of that stuff would still exist if we didn't have jobs.
Sports (in some aspects) needs facilities, gear, arenas, other people to participate with. Building things usually requires materials (unless you're bushcrafting) that requires a fully-functioning supply chain. Video games and shows and films (at the quality level we expect them to be) require herculean efforts from thousands of people each, and massive investments, to go from concept to completion. Travel in and of itself is predicated on the ideas that the hospitality industry exists, infrastructure for flight, rail, bus, car all exist (and are operational), that the very people that are the fabric and heartbeat of the culture you're traveling to experience exist, and are operating restaurants, businesses, etc.
Every leisure activity that we think of occupying our time with instead of a job requires the collective efforts of the rest of society to even exist, and kind of implies that your ability to lead a life of leisure is an anomaly. Some things can arguably be replaced with AI and robots, but the texture and tactility that we crave from most of these activities would be gone. Traveling to Scotland to get a plate of haggis and hang out in a pub just wouldn't be the same if your driverless taxi took you to the unmanned airport full of kiosks and humanoid sentries, to be loaded half-conscious into a metal tube and flown across the planet, ultimately driven to the ends of the Earth and dropped off at a 600 year old crumbling building where you're met by R2-D2 wearing a kilt and a tam o'shanter, talking like Groundskeeper Willie LOL
I suspect it was an intentional choice so that artist names like Jay-Z remain properly separated in the URL, especially in cases of multiple-artist billings (ex. https://www.last.fm/music/Nas+&+Jay-Z)
When I pair Claude and Codex, I use claude-co-commands [0] to drive from Claude and talk to Codex via MCP. Lately I've found Codex has been far more consistent for my specific projects, so I've just been almost entirely inside Codex. YMMV
I personally loathe meetups, and love them. It just depends on what they are and how they're run.
In the mid 90's, CompuServe sponsored a Boy Scouts Explorer Post at their headquarters -- they gave us free accounts and then once a month for an hour or 2, a couple dozen kids ranging from probably 12 to 18 would show up, the adults would be so fucking cool and gracious and welcoming, showing us around the building (server rooms! conference rooms! etc). Each meetup, there would be like an adult-driven presentation about some piece of technology, then one or more of the teens would get to take over the projector and talk about something they're into (writing music in FastTracker, coding, hacking, whatever). One time they gave us a whole computer-version-of-D.A.R.E. "be careful what you're doing online re:hacking/carding/etc" presentation because one of the older kids was getting in and out of trouble with the law (and they were trying to help keep him out of the slammer). Really non-judgmental, just cool older nerds mentoring the next generation. They also did stuff like set up this giant demonstration booth at the fair with a bunch of computers to demo the HOT NEW ONLINE EXPERIENCE WorldsAway [0] lol, and had all of us man the booth and walk the general public through it. The whole thing was just really cool, very 90's, very honest.
Fast forward to early-mid-2010's: every single meetup in adult-life tech world was a thinly-veiled advertisement for either the company sponsoring the space, or the company sponsoring the presentation. Nothing felt organic, everybody had an agenda (evidenced by "speakers" arriving 2 minutes before their scheduled time slot, giving a powerpoint presentation on either their employer's current product or their personal library / A List Apart article / whatever they're promoting for clout, then leaving immediately afterwards). Outside of the organizers doing it for personal visibility and gain, I never understood the point of attending. It wasn't a party. It wasn't a seminar. They focused on the stage and the individual, not the collective. It was never an environment to actually network, or actually learn something novel and exciting, or fish for a job, or (even in the most reductive implementation) an environment to just fuck around and goof off and connect with likeminded strangers through a shared experience LOL - each one was promoted as all of the above though!
Anyways, I personally quit bothering with any kind of meetup years before COVID. I'd prefer the "skate park" equivalent, where its a static, asynchronous place that people show up when they feel like it, do their thing, and let the universe sort out the rest, but there are so many ways to do that stuff online (it's the internet, after all), that it feels like it would be a pretty hard sell to get people to show up in person anymore without offering something truly organic and special.
Anecdata, but of the clips I've seen going around from Woz's speech, there were quite a few comments from people who claimed to have been there for the whole ceremony, most of which said that he was rambling and all over the place lol. Not bad necessarily, just that they felt like he wasn't really all that engaging, they were bored out of their minds, and some barely even knew who he was. Again, internet comments, so take that for what it is, just tossing my own pointless internet comment into the mix!
Just be up front about it; these tools are a simple reality at this point. Own the usage, own the output, take responsibility for the totality of what you’ve birthed into the world. If it’s some one-shotted trinket, don’t pretend it isn’t. If it’s some 5000-commit battle-tested magnum opus that you happened to spend a year driving an LLM to create, own that too. IMO it doesn’t matter if you dug the hole for your Olympic-sized swimming pool by hand with a shovel or using heavy machinery, I’m more interested in the quality of the final product.
Throwback to A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine [0] [1], a 2012 paper describing how to synthesize Sudafed from meth lol
Codex is freakin hot-to-trot to churn out test coverage for every single thing it implements, and some of it is very esoteric and highly prescriptive (regexes for days) BUT .. after a while, it dawned on me that LLM-driven test coverage is less about proving “code correctness” (you’re better off writing those tests yourself alongside them), and more about just trying to ensure that whatever gets bolted on stays bolted on. For better or worse, obviously, since if you bolt on trash, trash you shall have.
I'm only writing this because Devil's advocate and all, but what if you're actually capable of all those things?
Plenty of us here can conceive, design, architect, build, ship and own things from soup to nuts, and feel a lot more invested in the result as a consequence.
If the compensation is good, and it feels less shackled and less bureaucratic, is that necessarily a bad thing?
Even back to the mid-90's I've always approached projects like this -- soup to nuts, all the way from idea to conception to creative ideation to implementation to digital life!
I also used to assume everybody did lol, until I worked long enough professionally to watch the landscape subdivide like a fractal into what we have now.
There's a LOT of bad shit to be said about AI coding, but I also have this feeling that something about it all is rekindling that ancient one-man-band approach that can actually work if you're able to play all the instruments. Really interested to see what comes of it once the breathless hype dies down a little bit.