danielvaughn

When I said that the world is more complex than that, I meant that she oversimplified it. To say that the opposite has happened is also an oversimplification.

From what I can remember (of reading the book 25 years ago), it predicted an increasing suspicion and resentment of excellence and competence, coinciding with a rise in socialist sentiments. The net result is that various aspects of society would begin to break down as the total amount of competence in the culture vanishes.

I think she attributed too much of the symptoms merely to socialism; obviously the world is more complex than that. But we've got this train crash, the ongoing issues with Boeing airplanes, several multi-billion dollar public infrastructure projects across America that have stalled and will likely never be completed (like the California high speed rail system), the list goes on.

Ayn Rand gets a lot of hate from the philosophy world, and Atlas Shrugged is definitely not a good novel by any means, but you have to give her credit for basically predicting where we are now from way back in the 50's.

By localizing basic style information and reducing the amount of weird CSS you have to write, you have thus reduced your keystrokes per style. We're talking about the same thing.

Agree the market is weird right now, but on that specific example - TailwindCSS was built around the notion of reducing keystrokes per style (basically). That's not as useful in the age of AI, of course. CSS-Tricks is about learning what modern CSS can do, which is arguably still useful. An uphill battle, for sure, but I think there's still a place for hand written human content on the web, so I plan to support it even if it's just with my clicks.

Very interesting. I think a useful experiment would be to show AI a photograph, then ask it to paint it or draw it.

I was 12 in 96 when I got my first computer - wow does this bring back memories.

For a while I was working on a browser for UI designers, which involved pretty heavy use of LLMs talking to CDP. In my experience, CDP is extremely token consumptive.

Haven't released it yet, but a little website for evaluating AI UI design. They're not actual evals, it's moreso just showing the results of different UI tasks across models, reasoning levels, skills, harnesses, etc.

Right. The only way I'd feel comfortable doing that is if I spent an inordinate amount of time writing very detailed specs, so in terms of labor offset I'm not sure the juice would even be worth the squeeze there. In other words, a sufficiently detailed spec is nearly indistinguishable from code.

What people seem to be wanting is for an agent to infer vast complex data from terse simple data, which I think is probably impossible on a philosophical level. There's real information loss in language, and compute can only make guesses at the end of the day. I really don't see how we bridge that gap.

Yes. I use these models day in and day out, on all sorts of tasks. I cannot believe I hear people say that coding is solved.

I've always loved Tailwind, but at this point I'm not exactly sure why Shopify acquired them.

I had a different experience.

I bought it on day one in 2016, and like everyone else, I was wowed by the planet hopping experience for about an hour or so. Then I put it down and didn't think about it again.

Then I picked it up a few years later, and discovered base building. Had more fun than the first playthrough, but it didn't click. Eventually I hear about something called the Galactic Hub, which is a star system marked by players as a central spot to build their bases. Kind of like a human home in the vast empty universe of NMS.

I get curious about it, and look up instructions on how to get there. I did some quick napkin math and realized it would take literally dozens of hours of grinding - nonstop travel - to get there. However, as it turns out, there's a loophole with black holes. When you enter a black hole, it spits you out into a totally different place in the galaxy. From the players perspective its random, but players got together and figured out that each unique black hole always sends you to the same spot in the galaxy. So they constructed a black hole "highway", along with an app that let you input your desired coordinates, and it would give you the list of black holes that would most optimally get you near your destination.

So I spend an evening playing the game, switching back and forth from the game to my laptop, inputting coordinates and slowly making my way closer and closer to the hub. Eventually I find it, and what was amazing was that it was the first time I'd seen any evidence of another player in the game.

That moment felt utterly magical, because while I was playing a game, I had an actual, real objective that I formed entirely on my own.

So yes, the game is an odd duck, but it can really open up with the right mindset.

Art is a social activity whereby a human uses their creativity to produce an artifact that expresses some aspect of their experience, using non-standard forms of communication. It's a way of signaling to others "do you see what I see? do you feel what I feel?" The beauty of art exists on two layers: the aesthetic quality of the work, and the sense of shared experience among those who consume the art.

We find aesthetic beauty in nature; we do not find artistry.

"We assume creative writing requires uniquely human qualities, such as emotional understanding and lived experience, which leads people to underestimate AI's capabilities."

It's not about the relative "creativity" of it. Art is fundamentally about communication. It's a social activity, whether you're reading a book or listening to music or looking at a painting. Even a mid-average author is going to make something more compelling, on a human level, than extraordinary prose generated by a machine.

AI-generated creative artifacts are as interesting as the fractals in a snowflake. Interesting, sometimes beautiful, but void of human meaning.