My favorite part of programming is thinking about the whole system before I write a single line of code. How will my data be structured? What does the UI look like? How do I structure the project? What tools do I use? What do I need to take out to make this simpler? Etc.
I think hard about this with a notebook and a pencil and a coffee. And I spend weeks and sometimes months thinking about this. I go deep. And then the actual coding is just the grunt work. I don’t hate it but I don’t love it. I couldn’t care less what language is written in as long as it accomplishes my goal. So AI works great for me in this step.
I think you can still use AI and think deeply. It just depends on your mindset and how you use it.
Most software engineers were not “crafting” before AI. They were writing sloppy code for the sake of profit, getting a pay check, and going home. Which is why AI also outputs the same crappy code.
Rumor has it there were a few elite crafters among the lot. Software wizards who pondered about systems and architecture as they had a $10 espresso macchiato.
How does one go about deployment and backups with a local db? Like let’s say I have a web app hosted on a cloud service like App Engine or Elastic… if I redeploy my web app how do I make sure my current local db does not get get wiped? How are periodic backups handled?
I can think of many hacks to do this, but is there a best practice for this kind of stuff? I’m curious how people do this.
Im sure it was more like, “hey babe, can I get a few millions to go in the studio and experiment/make some art?” And then she was like, “yeah go for it! Make some weird shit.”
If I was in his position I’d probably be doing the same. Why bother with another top hit that pleases the masses.
Fair enough, but I disagree that it's a good question. "Explain it to me like I'm 5" (not even written out in words, just the abbreviation we all know) is not a curious place to come from, it is a desire for the quickest path to the end/payoff.
I took it to mean something like, "I won't understand an abstruse Ph.D.-level explanation of what happened. I need an explanation geared toward the layperson."
In fact, I think that's closer to the essence of ELI5--as opposed to literally explaining something at the 5 year old level.
I suppose you can quibble about using the initialism, ELI, but only if you're advocating for people who might be unfamiliar with its use. Otherwise, I don't understand your complaint.
I don't think that I am. I don't think that they want to be treated like they're 5, but I do think they don't want to put thought into it. We're training ourselves to offload critical thinking and I was surprised to see it driving the conversation here.
It's common, I know what it means. It communicated its intent properly, I think. It's surprising to me that a venture capital finance site would need to clarify the difference between value and wealth, and I would be interested in hearing questions about this, but "ELI5" doesn't even meet the basic criteria for being a question. It asks no questions.
This is probably just pure stupidity, but part of me hopes there is some tech person in there who knew exactly what they were doing. I’d take a job as a tech person in this administration just to sabotage stuff like this.
My main use of HTMX is to hack the Django Admin here and there. It works great for that. I’ve tried to use it in a moderately complex app and it became such a mess so quickly. I’m sticking with React for frontend stuff for now. Works well enough and I’m used to it now.
Come on dude, you are on HN. You probably know that social media is no longer about free speech. It’s a targeted advertising machine that is extremely effective on kids and teenagers. It preys on them so, so efficiently. It’s a technical work of art. A young mind is extremely susceptible to the algorithms on those platforms. Much more than adults are, and adults are already really susceptible. This is what this ban is trying to shield kids from. Not from them talking to each other.
The Social media platforms of today are very clearly harmful to our youth. Just like alcohol and cigarettes are to a developing brain. Why can we ban those and not this?
> It’s a targeted advertising machine that is extremely effective on kids and teenagers. It preys on them so, so efficiently. It’s a technical work of art. A young mind is extremely susceptible to the algorithms on those platforms. Much more than adults are, and adults are already really susceptible.
Sure, but the Australian government's definition of an age-restricted social media platform doesn't mention advertising or algorithms at all. Technically, their definition also covers algorithm-free social media like Mastodon, which I'd argue isn't nearly as harmful.
The framing of social media as something that's inherently bad no matter how you do it is a framing that helps social media giants like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook to continue to "do it" in a way that harms people. I'm sure they love the idea that the ills of social media can be solved by banning their least profitable users while doing nothing to regulate what they do with the others. They're probably thrilled that their healthier algorithm-free competitors haven't even entered the conversation. They want to be the tobacco companies of the future, because making addictive things for adults is incredibly profitable.
Biggest problem of social media is the addictive effects. It’s a dopamine creation machine. Hopefully people will see it like alcohol and cigarettes in the future.
How many degrees of separation is this from adult regulation? Want to provide age information to a site so you can look at porn without any guarantee that information won't be used for additional profit? That's a real thing in the US.
Government assumes zero expected trust reciprocation because they don't have to provide trust reciprocation and can do what they want, and government is comprised of co-opted humans.
Err on the side of sovereign freedom. Arguing about banning this or regulating that is all second principle stuff, and nanny states all strike me as the tail-end of civilization.
I value my kid not being exposed to porn as a child well above your right to privacy while watching it.
The ubiquity of the internet and children’s access to it is something we haven’t reckoned with yet. The differences between pre social media and mobile vs now is immense. The people seeking to capitalize on getting children addicted to something are numerous and well motivated by LTV.
Their incentives and the wellbeing of children are directly at odds. We already regulate things that are addictive for children.
People might give their kids a drink extralegally. Nobody is saying “hey kid, why don’t we watch porn together so you can develop healthier habits.” Nobody is creating a “starter Instagram” with their teenage daughter.
These forms of media are NOT SAFE FOR KIDS. They have observably negative population wide outcomes and are as reasonably banned as lead in pipes.
Oh, I don’t let my children have electronic devices at all.
But schools do. Their friends all have Internet enabled devices in their pockets. The library he goes to has poorly secured devices. The school library does too.
This is what I mean by the ubiquity of the internet. It is functionally impossible to control access to the internet as a parent and allow your children to develop independence.
I do what I can, and have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars at this point to opt in to like minded environments. My oldest at ten is observably different than children at his age and doing great.
His friends that come from poorer families, like the ones that I grew up in, might as well have Roblox as a third parent and suffer from ridiculous behavioral problems. The school curriculum in SFUSD is years behind my curriculum was in Georgia when it was a bottom quintile outcome program.
It does not take much looking to see something is thoroughly wrong. I think a lot of it has to do with the mass experiment of Internet access we’ve run on children.
Funny enough I lived in the Atlanta metro area from 1996 to 2022. I had a house built in Decatur in 2003.
I started dating my now wife in 2011. She lived in Alpharetta. As soon as I met my now step sons who were 9 and 14, my first thought was in going to have to sell my house and move. There is no way in hell they are going to survive Decatur public schools.
We moved to Johns Creek at first and then had a house built in Forsyth County. Yeah this Forsyth County
The attitudes in the burbs of Forsyth changed since then as people came from other places and it grew. But we very much stuck out. My son loved it there and still lives in that area and rents a house nearby where you use to live.
Strangely enough I live in the same general area - right in the middle of Gwinnett. What an odd coincidence that the three of us happened to come across eachother in an HN thread before knowing this.
"It does not take much looking to see something is thoroughly wrong."
Agreed, but observation suggests that it takes much more effort to do something about it—effort that the majority cannot muster or are unwilling to commit to.
"Want to provide age information to a site so you can look at porn without any guarantee that information won't be used for additional profit?"
That's the Orwellian payoff: people self-censoring and frightened to act for rear of retribution or their reputation. It's the authoritarian's ideal approach to control.
Right, it sucks for all. What truly pisses me off is that early on very smart people in Big Tech realized that to make a financial killing they'd have to get in quickly and lock in populations before governments et al realized the negative implications and introduced policy/regulations.
As with addiction or clicking a ratchet forward, they knew that reversing direction would then be nigh on impossible. Society seems to have little or no defense against such threats and I'd bet London to a brick that it'll be repeated with AI.
I was all for this legislation, thinking the positives outweighed the cost, but after reading the list of affected services, I now disagree.
Why didn't they just legislate that all social media apps content must be like Facebook in 2005. No recommendations, chronological timeline only, and you only see posts from users you explicitly added. That would have benefited everyone forever, and not enabled some small subset of apps to collect your govt id or the law to be irrelevant when the next popular social network comes along.
They effectively banned only the popular cigarette brands, instead of regulating nicotine.
If services would argue this would make them all the same, then add a clause where the user can opt in to have an algorithm shove content at them like now if they are over 18.
This way everyone can use the basic service for true socializing, but the harmful stuff is actually regulated out by default.
Too much money etc for this to ever happen, but geez they could have done a lot better.
First they came for Facebook, and I didn't protest, I was not on facebook.
Here's what's going to happen next: Whatsapp/signal/telegram groups will become wildly popular. Which gives the wannabe-fascists the excuse to ban those as well 'for the children'.
We've seen this salami tactic often enough to know the pattern.
You are too modest! You should start your poem denouncing those pesky spam filters than hinders the honest viagra pill salesmen!
Then you could regret your inaction when google downweighted zit-popping videos, and maybe you have reached the point where it becomes reasonable to regret losing Facebook the genocide facilitator.
There is a qualitative distinction between 'I filter for myself what I don't want to see' and 'The State decides what everyone is allowed to see.'
Not too sure about those zit-popping videos. But in my time, we had rotten.com - so I might be immunized to that kind of stuff. Personally, I find a honest zit-popping video no worse than yet another AI voice going on and on about some non-topic, clearly written by AI as well. I don't seek out either, but the zit-popping at least is over after 10 seconds.
But that's Google curating content. State censorship is something else entirely. Once justified "for the children" or "for security", it never stops at the first target. It grows, layer by layer. We’ve watched that pattern repeat for centuries across every medium humans have ever invented.
Facebook, the genocide facilitator? If we are honest, so has the printing press. Let's ban letters, they have facilitated genocide.
The printing press spread enlightenment, propaganda, revolutions, and atrocities. The State tried to control that too. It failed every time. It will fail with the net, for young people and for old ones.
Repression never works long-term, it always creates pressure that eventually breaks the system that produced it. Historically, societies tend to get worse before they correct themselves, because authoritarian overreach generates exactly the instability it claims to prevent.
Jefferson’s warning about the recurring need to renew freedom wasn’t a call for violence - it was an observation about the cyclical nature of power, repression, and reform. Every attempt to restrict communication has eventually collapsed under its own contradictions, and the internet will be no exception.
It's not networked communication that's a problem, it's a company pumping algorithmicly prioritized feeds of content while being run by unscrupulous profit driven people.
Well that’s kind of my point. If we regulated against that kind of content pipeline, we wouldn’t have an excuse for big brother to be demanding we prove our age to access websites.
>"You probably know that social media is no longer about free speech, It’s a targeted advertising machine"
Youtube for one is an advertising machine. On the other hand it is one of the few places where one can find some amazing educational and entertainment content. Prohibiting it I think is a crime.
Besides, lately Politicians stick their noses everywhere. It is just way too much.
Which means they also do no longer benefit from family-grouped Youtube Premium, which means MORE ADS ... which is exactly what we tried to prevent, right?
They already have that. Youtube Kids. And it works horribly because apparently Family Guy counts as "for kids". And that's not even the tip of the iceberg on the problems presented.
Tech is trying to push all these wonderful LLM's on us, telling us how it works like magic. Meanwhile, it can't even follow basic public TV labeling.
Youtube kids is designed for toddlers, and should probably be shut down entirely. What I'm talking about is something designed for 14 year olds where they can still subscribe to channels, have paid ad free, parental controls, etc. But not upload videos or use it in a social media way.
Youtube (regular one) is already designed to be kids-friendly. There are no war images since recent AI moderation rollout. There are a lot of very forbidden words which can lead to ban account. There are a lot of mildly forbidden words which just do not appear in subtitle. You can not say anything bully on comments - it will be removed instantly. I don't consider anything bad in YT except of the whole top of popular bloggers - because they are clearly aimed at low-IQ people. Just don't be a stupid, and your kids will not watch the bloggers. Buy more instruments of all kinds for your kids and they will watch a lot of educational videos explaining different know-hows.
The main target of these bans algorithmic content curation and the addictive nature of such algorithms and the possible harmful content that could be presented. So no?
Interesting. I don't know if you intended it, but algorithm free means no recommendations to me - even no recommended videos alongside existing videos. You want a video? You have to search for something.
I think that is a surprisingly good solution. You can still access educational information, or really whatever videos you want, but you have to actively seek them out rather than ingest whatever is spit out at you.
Search results are pretty much the same thing though. It's a ranked list of recommended videos. It's just based on your text instead of the video you're watching.
I've used plugins like unhook in the past which do exactly this and it's nice. Now I just follow channels via rss and block everything else on the page. Same deal.
Yeah but content curation ( e.g. building your own Alrogrithm TM ) is the only way you get out of the advertisement hell of Youtube. Browsing Youtube on Incognito and your feeds filled with Mr Beast and Tryphobia AI Generated contents.
Don't use recommendations unless showing to YT that your request are always great and just don't click lowball content even once on your first hours of using YT new profile.
we didn't ban cigarettes, we disincentivized them. Why can't we do the same here? regulate the algorithms, not the platform (the platform ultimately being "the internet").
This is just a cat and mouse game where every few years the government will ban whatever the kids like. That's not how you create a high trust society.
In Australia, not that much and we (Australia) passed the point of diminishing returns and moved into the zone of incentivising a criminal black market.
The state of play today is that foreign nationals, Syrians and others, are chasing billions in illicit tobacco revenue, denying that to the Government as income, firebombing and shooting up cars, shops, and families of rivals.
The brutality levels have risen to the point where old school leg breaking Chopper Read era crims are speaking out about going too far, involving families and "breaking code".
It’s not that I have an opinion either way. Having anything that messes with my lungs is something I don’t touch. Not that I’m a health nut. But I have been a gym addict for over 30 years.
I mean, your source there is telling us that cannabis and hallucinogen use are up, vaping (weed and nicotine) is up and smoking is in decline.
Hallucinogens are generally considered not very addictive, they are drugs that people use infrequently and their direct health effects are usually pretty minimal - LSD for instance is a mild stimulant and vasoconstrictor, but that's no real health worry for younger users. There are mental side effects in a minority of users (HPPD etc).
Compare this to tobacco which is well known to be one of the world's most addictive substances and kills fully half of lifetime users, I'd say a society in which people 9% of people used hallucinogens in the last year is preferable to one in which (like the US was in 1965) 42% of people smoke daily.
Cannabis consumption doesn't have to involve your lungs, people consume all sorts of edibles and drinks these days. Vaping cannabis is definitely worse for your health than abstaining from both vaping and smoking, but it doesn't contain the combustion products from burning plant material. Smoking cannabis; well I honestly don't know how that compares to smoking tobacco in terms of health risk, but it is less addictive and users are less likely to be "pack a day" types than they are with cigarettes AFAICT.
Vaping nicotine, similarly, is widely considered worse than not vaping nicotine and users may be more prone to respiratory infections, plus there is often poor quality control on ingredients. But again, tobacco kills half of lifetime users.
So yeah, if I had to choose whether to have higher smoking rates or higher hallucinogen and weed use rates in society, based on expected health outcomes, I'd go with the hallucinogens and weed.
If you want to read about the comparative risks of drug use (including tobacco and alcohol, but written prior to the explosion of vapes) I highly recommend "Drugs without the hot air", a book by Prof. David Nutt, one of the UK's foremost experts on the topic. The general takeaway is that heroin, cocaine, tobacco and alcohol are the worst, and that most other drugs slot in below there somewhere.
It is a targeted advertising machine, that is one of its functions. I also don't think there is anything wrong with that. I don't think the government has any businesses banning speech either. I also don't believe they want to "save the children".
I’ve tried Celery/Procrastinate/Chancy and others in the past. Nothing has really felt “right.” So I always end up using GCPs cloud task jobs and scheduling. It’s just so simple for small to mid size projects.
I’ve been using the same test since Dalle 2. No model has passed it yet.
However, I don’t think 2D animators should feel too safe about their jobs. While these models are bad at creating sprite sheets in one go, there are ways you can use them to create pretty decent sprite sheets.
For example, I’ve had good results by asking for one frame at a time. Also had good results by providing a sprite sheet of a character jumping, and then an image of a new character, and then asking for the same sprite sheet but with the new character.
I think hard about this with a notebook and a pencil and a coffee. And I spend weeks and sometimes months thinking about this. I go deep. And then the actual coding is just the grunt work. I don’t hate it but I don’t love it. I couldn’t care less what language is written in as long as it accomplishes my goal. So AI works great for me in this step.
I think you can still use AI and think deeply. It just depends on your mindset and how you use it.