Crippling doubt can happen. Blind confidence has its own hazards. You only need to be confident that you can proceed, in spite of having provisional, incomplete knowledge. "But if you grip to your beliefs too tightly, you will not recognise The Truth when it comes knocking on your door." (forget who said that)

There is a related tradition of making conjectures about things that you can not prove, and being known for having made such conjectures. Conjectures along with definitions and problem statements are incredibly important in mathematics. But usually they are introduced in the context of some other publishable work.

I could imagine appliances that take that into account. e.g. an airconditioner that works harder during the cheaper periods. I wonder whether any retailers pass through the 5 minute pricing variation? Should be easy enough to monitor the price and adjust my AC via the infra red remote protocol.

1. It's obvious that you are a big fan of Cranelift. I'd be interested to hear more about your experience in practical terms. For example could you share any insight about use cases where it is best suited, and where it might be better to look elsewhere? Did you hit any pain points? What was its killer feature for NoiseLang?

2. You wrote: "My favorite trick is in the RNG. Generating random numbers is a serial dependency chain, so instead of fighting that, the kernel runs four independent streams at once and lets the out-of-order core overlap them. This trick ended up beating a hand-written SIMD kernel!" What does this mean exactly? you just ran a scalar kernel 4-wide using SIMD instructions? or you interleaved 4 scalar copies of the same algorithm? did you generate the code or just duplicate the streams by hand?

Brings to mind The Show's "ugly MySpace" episode: https://archive.org/details/zefrank-theshow-083

It would be nice if everyone prioritised, and was capable of, shipping polished products. But more likely the apps you're bemoaning come from folks who are not product designers. Even prior to genAI there were plenty of developers (myself included) who had patchy competence in some subset of {copywriting, documentation information architecture, visual design, identity, UI/UX, ...}. I know good developers for whom UI coherence is "not their problem," although they know well enough that it needs to be someone's problem. "Programmer art" is also a thing. I would argue that the non-coding parts of many open-source projects are what lets them down, and when it is good it is usually documentation that impresses me the most. But I think Ze Frank's view might be that, given the sudden drop in barriers to entry, it is amazing that everyone is having a go and trying to express themselves.

I have been thinking about this too. Is it not as simple as installing Claude in the VM and connecting via an SSH terminal, or if you want a GUI use VSCode with the Remote SSH extension, which will give you the file browser UI etc. Presumably you can extensions in the VSCode Claude/whatever chat extensions in the VM too.

The phenomenon is not restricted to this century. Orwell's book published in 1949 includes many prescient examples. Witgenstein's contribution, at a minimum, is that he named the paradigm, thus raising awareness, and perhaps leading to an increase in intentional engagement with these practices.

I think it's fairly well understood that vocal users aren't necessarily representative. The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.

You need to build your own model of who your users are to provide a basis for interpreting user requests: is the support request signal or noise? if the request is coming from someone in your target market, and expressing a pain point, that's potentially an important signal. If the request is to charge only 20% of your current price, that's only useful if you're prepared to consider restructuring your offering (receiving many such emails might signal an opportunity for a budget product with specific feature subset) -- otherwise: "Thanks for your email, we don't have any plans to change our price right now." move on.

By the way, I'm impressed that this is even a conversation for a developer selling through the App Store. I always felt that Apple killed the ability to maintain customer relationships by injecting themselves into the process. Never published on the Mac App store myself.