DantesKite

I like:

"Explain in 10 sentences or fewer."

"Give me the gist of what you just said."

"ELI5"

Wonderfully captivating article about a loquacious man that like the rest of us, wrestled with his demons and even sometimes machine elves.

I do find vibe coding fulfilling. Very much so. But not in the way someone who gets into a flow state with coding typically does.

Why? Because I can finally make rapid progress on ideas I've had that would have taken me years to develop by myself. I enjoy the outputs. Only the outputs.

There is genuinely no flow state for me. It is a grinding list of frustrations I handle whenever the agent falls short of my expectations.

It is assembly work in that sense. I am an order of magnitude more productive, but the work itself is not intrinsically enjoyable the way coding used to be.

I am a factory worker churning out features as I monitor the LLM agent and its outputs. There is no craft. Only productivity.

I do not mind because I was never a very competent programmer to begin with, so there is no major loss on my part. This black box produces what I truly want, but I will not pretend it has any meaning for me. It provides no more meaning to me than cranking a lever for hours on end.

But I love seeing my ideas come to life. These distant dreams I had only in my head are suddenly walking and breathing after years of only thinking about them.

About four right now.

I used to have far more, but I learned the habit of bookmarking tabs that I've kept open for a long period of time.

Actually, now that I think about it, this would make for a useful browser extension: have an LLM that automatically asks to bookmark tabs that have been inactive but present for X number of days.

If you could do calculus in high school, you likely have more than enough neural horsepower to build a wide array of commercial products with AI, since it can breakdown, suggest, recommend, and educate you on the conceptual gaps that remain.

The hard part is that you'll have to inefficiently learn about these concepts as you encounter them, as opposed to a more skilled engineer who can already anticipate and use them ahead of time.

In general, increasing GDP per capita has all sorts of positive second and third order effects on net, likely improving the collective welfare of society.

It's a bit far removed from what you might envision as "doing good" though. It's a bit too abstract to feel on an emotional level.

And true, not all acts are equal. The emotional valence of improving ad rates for Meta can't really be compared to saving a child from cancer on a moral scale that most humans intuitively understand. Nor would I demand that you try to do so.

I often find that "making the world a better place" is synonymous with "looking for meaning in my own life".

Having children is usually a good start, if you don't have any already. Making the world a better place for them does wonders for the soul.

Or so I've been told.

Alternatively, if neither children nor economics appeals to you, you can always just donate money to St. Jude's Hospital or another charity. The money you earn would then make the world a better place in a way you can directly feel.

I think Wordle is instructive here in that it has many lessons for how to make a game go viral or become even mildly popular.

For starters, perhaps you should make it also available on the web, if at all possible. That makes it easier to share and discover.

And maybe invest in the ability for users to export the gameplay as video. I could see it spreading more if people post long combos that last for minutes, sped up with music, for example and posting on TikTok, Twitter, etc. Otherwise, even if it's a good game, most people aren't ever going to discover it, except after many months.

Obviously it always helps to make a game more fun and compelling, but I presume you're already aware of that.

It helps to clarify your goals and what it is you want to do with your life, otherwise you’ll always have this ambiguous sense that you’re not progressing in the way that you want.

What do you mean by “productive”? What would progress look like for you? And towards what?

Highly recommend MovieLens if you have eclectic or niche movie tastes. It can be a bit of a nerd-snipe though. One of my favorites activities is rating movies and watching the recommended ratings (what rating it thinks I'll give a movie) update overnight.

It's at the very least, better than average chance at predicting which movies you will like.

If true, sounds like a strong argument for removing minimum wage laws, so as to provide more economic opportunities for people and create a skill ladder they can climb.

The best mental model of MVP I have found is that it is in some sense a science experiment and you’re trying to test a specific hypothesis as efficiently as possible with the resources you have, because you ultimately don’t know what’s going to work.

Yes. It's basically a custom StackOverflow human available to you at all hours of the day.