There’s that XKCD about someone learning something new that was just thought to be something everyone knew.

Also you don’t know what you don’t know.

Agree though — coaching and persuasion are a huge part which is why I think a lot of these books seem ‘fluffy’ if all you’re wanting is a collection of facts.

Higher-ups are literally saying “This company WILL use AI, you are required to use AI, now go use it whether you want to or not”.

I wonder if this will change now with the model cost explosions that are happening.

Sure, users don’t care if the code is a mess. At least at first. I mean, they can’t know.

But they DO care when the same bugs exist for years, when new features dry up, when it drains their battery, etc. When technical debt becomes due, users notice in other ways.

Now, whether they care enough or just don’t have a choice is another matter.

Seems like a cool puzzle to solve. I wonder what the engineering and organisation tradeoffs were that lead to it — does it let them reuse a bunch of existing code?

I wrote a TUI library back in the day for Turbo Pascal — it was essentially taking an immediate-mode approach (which in this context is just a fancy way of saying it was procedural haha).

I was lucky that coming out of sedation was actually fantastic, like the only time I can remember feeling that blissfully relaxed was in maybe a few beach holidays I went on as a kid.

General anaesthetic scares me way more.

Though I have heard that there are natural biological functions that depend on the sun such that night owls who are sleeping their natural pattern are STILL predisposed more towards certain physical/mental conditions. Though who knows?

If I have light to anchor my circadian rhythm, I’m happiest waking up around 5:30-6:00 and going straight through, starting to wind down at 8:30.

If I sleep later, I’ll end up shifting more towards naturally waking up around 10:30, going to bed at 11:30 PM and generally feeling not terrible but not great and slightly tired during the entire day.

Luckily the light can be artificial that wakes me up — I use smart bulbs as an alarm.

It’s funny, power use can be really unintuitive. Try convincing someone that using the big air conditioner for heating is more efficient than using that little plug-in bar heater. Or yeah, a power board with 8 tiny wattage wall-warts isn’t using a lot of power.

I could probably run my big fridge overnight off my portable battery generator, but it wouldn’t run my small electric kettle without putting it into a special mode and for nowhere near as long.

But man AI is phenomenal for getting stuff out of your head and working quick.

Incremental games do an amazing job at this (things like Universal Paperclips, A Dark Room, etc); parts of the game are revealed to you as you need them and it's often a fun surprise. I don't think the same thing is directly applicable to productivity apps, but I wonder if something could be taken from the pattern.

This is timely -- I'm coding an app at the moment and had the fleeting thought that "hey I should do a new user onboarding tour thingy" and then remembered that in general I skip them, so I havne't made one :)

I guess because I’m in game dev maybe, but in all my jobs knowing about the underlying stack has either been necessary knowledge or highly regarded.

I can’t think of any time in my career where knowing about the internals of the stack was ever frowned upon or where it’s been anything other than an advantage (especially when hunting bugs). I must have been lucky.

Would be an interesting story.

The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker.

It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing?

The thing that gets me is, we are meant to fundamentally be social creatures, yet we have come to streamline away socialisation any chance we get.

I’m guilty of this too — I much prefer Doordash to having to call up the restaurant like in the old days, for example.

I’ve seen an insane drop in the quality of swipe typing recently as well. To the point where I’ll often go back to regular typing. I’ve made maybe six or more corrections just to this paragraph alone.