jasonkester

Personally, programming computers is one of my favorite things to do, so I'm with you on wanting to keep doing it.

It's just the part where you have to do 2000 hours of it each year for somebody else that I never got along with, so I spent the first 20 years of my career making sure I didn't need to do that.

I "retired" in my 30s from fulltime jobs, and focused on building SaaS products and contracting. That left me not really needing to work at all anymore somewhere in my 40s, though I kept at it a while after that since the companies I was working with were full of fun people.

Now, I dip in and out as I like, picking up the odd contract but mostly doing my own thing. I've been proper, capital R, Retired for the last few years, building a game to keep the brain fed and the skills up.

With luck, I'll also write some code on my dying day. But it'll be on my terms.

You could try throwing in the odd homonym in place of an important word so that people know it must have been written by a human.

But that's silly. If you don't trust a website with your cat photo, don't upload your cat photo the website.

As I said above, the only thing my site does with your cat photo is show it back to you when you ask to look at it. No training. No selling your data to anybody. All I'm doing is storing it because you asked me to, and showing it to the people you ask me to.

You can certainly ask me to stop showing it to people. But please don't get all excited about how your rights have somehow been violated.

The fact is, people click delete buttons without thinking about it. Those people get way more mad when they can't undo that delete than you are now.

Anybody who has ever run a website with customer data can instantly understand why they do it this way. I don't see any malice.

It's simple, really. You have a website where people can upload their cat photos. There's a delete button. People click the delete button, read the "This will really Delete your Thing. It's Permanent. You CAN'T GET IT BACK!" warning, and click the confirm button.

Then you get an angry email (and twitter post, and blog entry, and Reddit mob) saying "I can't believe you deleted my photo without asking. That was my favorite cat photo it was my only copy I'LL SUE YOU!@!!"

So you go into your console and flip the .isActive bit back to 1 on that photo, send off your stock apology, and get on with your day.

To run your business any other way is madness. You're not training or selling or otherwise misusing that cat photo. You just don't want to deal with that hassle every day. So you "delete" things by moving them someplace where they're not public anymore.

It's just what you do...

Somebody suggested tagging posts to specify whether they were things you built vs things you asked an llm to build.

That was just a copy paste of one of the options.

Good idea. I've edited my post to include that.

Frankly, it's surprising that we'd even need to stipulate something like this. It would never occur to me to post to a "show us what you're cooking" thread with: "Look what I asked DoorDash to bring me!", but I guess that's where we are now...

I expect that after enough cycles of it training on it’s own output, it will converge on the One True Paragraph filled to saturation with AI cliches, and will refuse output anything else.

Don’t forget the old “downvote the other comments so mine goes to the top “ trick.

All your best stuff will get downvoted by at least somebody eventually. For some reason, that somebody always gets in early enough that you notice.

It's best not to think of BigCentralThing as your "partner". They're just the big central thing that lists things. They have their own motivations that don't matter to you, so long as they continue to list the things.

I used YouTube as an example earlier. OSM is a good one too. Neither needs to care about you. They only need to care about their own job, which is knowing about their list of things (videos, roads, electronic part numbers, etc.). So long as they continue to do that, and have an easy way to tell them about the things they do care about, you're good.

They're already "putting in the work". Because it's their work to keep the list. That's all they do.

Pretend the SPOT is youtube, for an example. Upload your video there, then drop a link to (any variation of) the url into this text field. A quick import script runs, and now we have the video in our database too. Or at least, a record with a link to it and whatever info we need to pull from it, along with extra fields we need to do whatever our website does.

It still lives in both places, but (assuming other websites also use the same Single Point Of Truth) if the title changes or whatever, everything stays synced up everywhere.

In my concrete example, bleau.info doesn't need to know that a given line has never had an ascent by anybody shorter than 165cm. So I write that down on my copy. But I don't need to track anything else about that line to use it and to link to Boolder, 27 Crags and 8a.nu's pages about it.

I haven't seen this in practice. For my site, roughly 100% of the new additions to our database come from people climbing a route that's in the Big Database that we just don't know about yet.

It's just a matter of dropping a link to that route's page into an importer to scrape it in and have it be usable at our end.

But yeah, for a space where the Big Database didn't often have a record for the things your users want to add, I could see it being more of an issue.

It sounds like the real issue is the "stable ids" one. You need a Single Point of Truth that matches up stretches of waterway with an ID that won't change. You can then sprinkle .isNavigable and such onto your record along with a reference to that magic ID. But yeah, if they don't provide is, they're not a very good point of truth.

I have to deal with this in my little bouldering database as well, since the source I mentioned does in fact change or reuse its IDs every so often. There's already a periodic update that has to happen on any given boulder problem, to pull down changes from the other end. That also needs a way to self-heal if a record at the other end splits off into two pieces, and my ID now points to the wrong half of it.

It's all stuff you have to keep on top of, but your idea of keeping your own table with each record pointing back to OSM seems like the only path that avoids madness. Even it it does take some work to keep those references up to date.