Last year I finally caved and tried to sign up for instagram. It's tragic but it's almost like a second internet. So many small business and bands only have instagram. So many lil communities post their events only on instagram. I always have to ask friends with instagram to tell me when a brewery is open, when a show starts, etc.

So I tried to sign up (and I already HAVE an active facebook account from high school, with hundreds of friends) and it wanted me to scan my face. I did it, which I regret, only to be told five days later that I am too suspicious. So here I am, still locked out of all this information lmao

While I recognize that, as a business who needs reach, they kind of need to be using these websites where everyone is, I really wonder how difficult it would be to mirror everything they post to some more open and accessible location (a self hosted webpage, anything). I can't blame them for using Instagram/Facebook/whatever, but I can blame them for using nothing but that site. It would almost certainly get very little traffic so it wouldn't need much bandwidth and costs should be low, and it would be a lot more consumer friendly.

People or organizations using Instagram as their only form of online presence don't have the ability to self-host. Instagram is easy and reaches almost everyone they want.

The indieweb circle calls this POSSE: post own site, syndicate elsewhere

Most of the big platforms penalise posts that contain outlinks however.

There’s a whole new genre of blog posts that are just “finally thanks to AI everyone will know how smart I am. Watch in awe as I tell something to do stuff for me”

I’ve also been a little suspicious of the vote counts these days. Pro AI stuff regular hitting like 800 votes. The codex announcement hit like 1500? Like what’s goin on here

It didn’t seem entirely AI generated to me. There were at least a few sentences that an LLM would never write (too many commas).

On a similar note, I have never heard the phrase “higher level abstractions” abstractions so much. Everywhere I look, higher level abstractions. It’s becoming one of those phrases I have an instant reaction to. The word “abstraction” used to mean something, man…

I know everybody just wants to talk about Postgres but it’s still sad to see any sort of engagement with slop. Even though the actual article is essentially irrelevant lol

It’s got that LLM flow to it. Also liberal use of formatting. It’s like it cannot possibly emphasize enough. Tries to make every word hit as hard as possible. Theres no filler, nothing slightly tangential or off topic to add color. Just many vapid points rapid fire, as if they’re the hardest hitting truth of the decade lol

What's making these models so much better on every iteration? Is it new data? Different training methods?

Kinda waiting for them to plateau so I can stop feeling so existential ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

More compute (bigger models, and prediction-time scaling), algorithmic advances, and ever more data (including synthetic).

Remember that all white collar workers are in your position.

That's a good point! Here claude opus wrote a C compiler. Outrageously cool.

Earlier today, I couldn't get opus to replace useEffect-triggered-redux-dispatch nonsense with react-query calls. I already had a very nice react-query wrapper with tons of examples. But it just couldn't make sense of the useEffect rube goldberg machine.

To be fair, it was a pretty horrible mess of useEffects. But just another data point.

Also I was hoping opus would finally be able to handle complex typescript generics, but alas...

> And it's also somewhat egotistical it seems to me. I sense a pattern that many developers care more about doing what they want instead of providing value to others.

I use LLMs a lot. They're ridiculously cool and useful.

But I don't think it's fair to categorize anybody as "egotistical". I enjoy programming for the fun puzzley bits. The big puzzles, and even often the small tedious puzzles. I like wiring all the chunks up together. I like thinking about the best way to expose a component's API with the perfect generic types. That's the part I like.

I don't always like "delivering value" because usually that value is "achieve 1.5% higher SMM (silly marketing metric) by the end of the quarter, because the private equity firm that owns our company is selling it next year and they want to get a good return".