An example from last week:

Me: Do this.

AI: OK.

Me: Not quite, you didn’t take this into account. But I made the same mistake while learning so I can pull it back on track.

AI: OK

…

40 minutes go by. The simplest, smallest bit of code is almost right.

Me: Alright, abstract it into a Sass mixin.

AI: OK.

At which point I just give up and hand code the thing in 10 minutes.

It would be neat if AI worked. It doesn’t.

I actively don’t use AI because the results are unreliable or ugly. I’m just not against AI in principle. It’s funny that my position is considered contemptible by people who regularly use AI but are hard hardliners against it on moral grounds.

Remember when everything wasn’t a religious war? Actually, I don’t. It was always like this and it’s always going to be like this. Just one forever crusade after another.

I don't do much with crypto/NFTs/AI, because I don't find any of it useful yet. But I get so much "with us or against us" heat for not being zealously against the the idea of them. It was NFTs, NFTs, NFTs at the table for months until it became AI, AI, AI. My preference is to talk about something else while playing board games.

One thing I've found when talking to non-technical board gamers about AI is that while they’re 100% against using AI to generate art or game design, when you ask them about using AI tools to build software or websites the response is almost always something like "Programmers are expensive, I can't afford that. If I can use AI to cut programmers out of the process I'm going to do it."

A minority are conflicted about this position.

When I talk to technical people at game nights we almost never talk about tech. The one time our programmers all played RoboRally the night kind of died because it felt too close to work for a Saturday night.

If GW was going to use AI they would probably start with sprue layouts. Maybe the AI could number the bits in sane way? I would be for that.

Donate to the F/OSS projects that you used to make it big.

I didn’t ascribe a motive to anyone. Their reasons are their own and it only makes sense that the people who stay in these fights do it because it’s part of their jobs.

There are people who, for whatever reason, keep debates going over small points of disagreement and prevent issues from being settled. Sometimes for years. Right?

The older I get, the more likely I am to recognize and route around or ignore interminable debates. Especially if it’s not for a company, project, or initiative under my direct control.

Remember, the question at the top of this thread was essentially “What happened to ‘masonry’?” Well, there were quibbles over the descriptors.

I don’t care about quibbles. “masonry”, “grid-lanes”, “grid-masonry”, pick one, they’re equivalent. I don’t like it when quibbles block progress.

Sometimes people and companies do want to block things. You’d have to ask them why. Like I said earlier:

> I don't have an incentive to build consensus within a group of people who fundamentally disagree that the thing I need should exist.

Pick your battles… Actually, no, it’s usually better to ignore the fights and just get what you need to get done so you can move on.

It got to the point where I believed that subgrid was dead. FF implemented it but absolutely no one else did, for years.

Is it our fault for tuning out of the debate? Yep. But tactics were employed to achieve that exact outcome. I'm fine admitting that I tuned out. But it was a battle of attrition waged by people who were fine holding up progress indefinitely.

Is that how you want decisions to be made?

Ultimately I'm not too concerned what you call the masonry feature. However the debate over what to call it was an extreme case of bikeshedding. I would have rather given up the fight over semantics to resolve the non-issues and ship the feature years ago. As it stands we're still years away from actually being able to use the feature in production.

I've stopped waiting for companies, committees, or projects to change course. I don't have an incentive to build consensus within a group of people who fundamentally disagree that the thing I need should exist. Why bother? I have an incentive to spend my time building features that users will use.

Masonry or grid-lanes, who cares? I’m just glad masonry (the feature, Baseline 20XX) and subgrid (Baseline 2023) are finally here.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yikbSQ6tvlE

I was using 64-bit snowflake pks (timestamp+sequence+random+datacenter+node) previously and made the switch to UUID7 for sortable, user-facing, pks. I'm more than fine letting the DB handle a 128-bit int vs over a 64-bit int if it means not having make sure that the latest version of my snowflake function has made it to every db or that my snowflake server never hiccups, ever.

Most of the data that's going to be keyed with a uuid7 is getting served straight out of Redis anyway.

I started out trying to get to five "hands on keyboard" coding hours a day, five days a week, and realized that it was unrealistic after the first few years.

Four hours of coding time, five days a week works for me. If I'm a little under I work Saturdays, if I'm a little over I take off early on Friday. Unless I'm sick I put in 20 hours of coding a week. You would not believe how nice this way of working is.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038963

Points: 2

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Apple devs are constantly attacking people on Twitter for complaining about Safari bugs but the front-end workflow is a waterfall because of Safari. You get your code working in every other browser and then rewrite it to work around all of the Safari issues.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45590074

Points: 1

# Comments: 0