sacul

That was great! But here is one place, at least, that needs to be updated for the AI era:

> working demo especially good trick: force big brain make something to actually work to talk about and code to look at that do thing, will help big brain see reality on ground more quickly

One of the best things about AI is that you can have a working prototype almost instantly, which is great for iterating quickly over ideas. But it means this trick simply doesn’t work anymore.

I disagree. As a father of nine children, I submit that the best time to have children is when you’re young. The next best time is now.

Sure, you’ll be poor, and you’ll make lots of mistakes. But how do you know you’ll be able to have children later? And what’s so important now that makes it worth putting off children?

I’m obviously a tiny, insignificant data point as a solo freelance dev, but I watch this space closely and I canceled my Claude Code subscription today.

Very nice! Care to share more technical details? Like others, I'd be curious to know how you're fetching the book covers.

Personally, I dislike skeuomorphic design in digital interfaces. But still... very cool!

Yeah, thanks for asking. My reasoning is this:

That chatbot you're interacting with is not your friend. I take it as a fact (assumption? axiom?) that it can never be your friend. A friend is a human - animals, in some sense, can be friends - who has your best interests at heart. But in fact, that chatbot "is" a megacorp whose interests certainly aren't your interests - often, their interests are at odds with your interests.

Google works hard with branding and marketing to make people feel good about using their products. But, at the end of the day, it's reasonably easy to recognize that when you use their products, you are interacting with a megacorp.

Chatbots blur that line, and there is a huge incentive for the megacorps to make me feel like I'm interacting with a safe, trusted "friend" or even mentor. But... I'm not. In the end, it will always be me interacting with Microsoft or OpenAI or Google or whoever.

There are laws, and then there is culture. The laws for AI and surveillance capitalism need to be in place, and we need lawmakers who are informed and who are advocates for the regular people who need to be protected. But we also need to shift culture around technology use. Just like social customs have come in that put guard rails around smartphone usage, we need to establish social customs around AI.

AI is a super helpful tool, but it should never be treated as a human friend. It might trick us into thinking that its a friend, but it can never be or become a friend.

I think the biggest problem with chatbots is the constant effort to anthropomorphize them. Even seasoned software developers who know better fall into acting like they are interacting with a human.

But a llm is not a human, and I think OpenAI and all the others should make it clear that you are NOT talking to a human. Repeatedly.

I think if society were trained to treat AI as NOT human, things would be better.

The fact that both offer a subscription is not ironic - it simply highlights the central point. In the end, those paying a subscription for thebaffler.com or for salesforce.com are paying for something very similar: they are paying for words and ideas.

People think that building a software program is like building a house. And, I grant, in some ways it is. But in the end, the customer is not paying for anything tangible. He's paying for words and ideas.

I got one of those too, and I got it because I didn’t want to worry about this kind of garbage from HP. It’s also a bonus that I haven’t had to refill the ink in a LONG time.

But oh my. The quality of the printing is terrible.

Cannot overstate the significance and value of documentation.

This is your big mistake: there is no “adding” authority. Authority is always there. I have started to think of it like the conservation of energy: it changes forms, but you can never get rid of it.

No there is consensus, and it is real. But the hierarchies within that group (based on sex, ability, wealth, knowledge, etc) are also there and are also in play.

I'm not sure we can have it both ways. In other words, I'm growing in my conviction that freedom and privacy on the web require increased balkanization.

Neil Postman (of whom I'm a big fan, to put my cards on the table) wrote very helpfully about the concept of "filters" (that may not be his word) in Technopoly, and I've been thinking about the concept a lot ever since. Certain things are inadmissable in court, and that is true because otherwise you'll just have bedlam. The analogy doesn't hold perfectly, but the same thing is true of other situations where people gather together to communicate, whether in person or online.

The other thing that's required to avoid total chaos is authority, and I think it's a common trait to be dismissive of the value and purpose of authority in this context. People have been dismissive about authority since, uh, forever, but I think there's something about the promise of the internet that makes people think we have finally arrived at the point where it is unnecessary. (Think blockchains and crypto, for instance.) But it's not.

The sooner we see that authority isn't a bug but a feature and begin to build for it in our tech tools, the better.

Lightpaper looks like a fantastic markdown editor! But the landing page makes me feel like it isn't getting much love from the developers. The copyright notice at the bottom, for instance, says 2019.

Any idea whether it is still getting updates?

Keep in mind that every culture has blasphemy laws. What you're seeing here is not the removal of blasphemy laws, but the culture's switch from one god to another.