smallerfish

Site is down, but one thing in particular that needs close attention: db schema. I've found that LLMs make awful normalization decisions; you can limit the fallout somewhat by modularizing database access, bit it still inevitably bleeds over into the object model etc. On AI heavy projects I tend to pause feature development every few days for code & schema review, and subsequent cleanups.

The map is good but you need to spend some time getting rid of all the crap that claude added around it. Make the map the focus, spend some effort thinking about how you want to present additional information, figure out how to tell a better story. People are saying "slop" because it looks like every other AI website out there right now.

Even though I've shilled the book before, it's an opportune thread to repeat the recommendation: if you haven't, read Careless People. For much of her career at Facebook, the author worked for Joel Kaplan, who was VP of Global Public Policy and is now Chief Global Affairs Officer. She's not particularly complimentary.

Agree with you overall, but:

> Unlike the dot-com era, this is a bubble that everyone saw coming.

As far as I recall, the dot-com bubble was widely seen as such prior to it bursting. E.g. Greenspan and Buffet were both quite vocal about the irrationality of the values being assigned to companies.

Everybody in tech should read Careless People, not just to learn details about Meta. I'm sure many of us (myself included) have worked at places where the technical challenge outweighs any concerns about the overall company's mission or effect on the world at large. In Facebook's case they have a lot of blood on their hands.

> A human is just a few chemical reactions, and fairly stable ones at that.

And humans are controllable. Pump the system full of lithium and morphine, and your human becomes much more docile. You don't need to understand the full system in order to constrain it.

Fair, but is it possible you've tried it on a setup that wasn't done particularly well?

Fair - I used one only briefly when they first came out. Are there any serious attempts on desktop that I'm overlooking?

I think he's bang on with his observation that overlapping windows are a relic.

My wife, whose technical level leans her towards wanting to replace her mac mini when a VPN that she'd installed and then disabled left hostile firewall rules in place ("the internet is flaky on this computer"), is jealous of the tiling setup on my desktop (was hyprland; now sway with a custom dwindle layout). I think tiling has an audience beyond nerds, but I think nobody (perhaps with the exception of omarchy) has made a serious attempt at packaging it in a way that's accessible to business/productivity users. KDE's tiling attempts were, at least last time that I checked, somewhat bolted on and half-assed. I wish omarchy success in de-vibing their codebase, but it would be great to have some serious competition in the space.

I stopped using them last year. They were too late to see the AI juggernaut coming and their attempts at responding have been underwhelming. They should have been pouring resources into Fleet from 2022 onwards to make this, but instead it's been a series of missteps. This looks like approximately the right offering, but where's the moat? It seems like just another Cursor/Antigravity.

What are they examples of? Opus 4.8 was much better than the infamous 5, and I find Astra generally competent.

On my home PC I use restic, and (shockingly) I run it manually (via a script). I have a terminal banner that nags me when backup hasn't run in 24 hours, or displays spanish verb tables when it has (so I will notice if the banner doesn't show). I've been burned in the past losing a backup cron, and dead man's snitch seemed overkill for my needs here. And I've also forgotten what backup system was in place on a prior install, and it took me way longer than I liked figuring out how it was setup when I needed to do a restore.

Obviously for production systems automation & monitoring is the way. I kind of like this setup on my own machine though.