- Buy the biggest LG C -series OLED TV you can afford and/or fit (WebOS, no Android TV crapola to deal with)

- Never connect it to the internet, LG wants to add all kinds of AI crap to it.

- Set it to Filmmaker Mode[0] to disable all of the "improvements" it tries to do to the image

- Buy an Apple TV

Done.

The ATV can turn the TV on and off and adjust the volume. You won't need the TV remote for anything after that.

I still use my 10 year old Apple TV 4k daily and it works like new, no slowdown, every single relevant streaming platform supports it with a dedicated app. It even got every single tvOS release until this fall.

[0] https://filmmakermode.com/ - also a good idea to do this to relative's TVs.

Compared to that, their hardware, SaaS, and other ventures are just 20% side projects.

It also takes more time for humans to build prototypes and PoCs than doing the same with an agent. Iteration speed and time-to-market matters more and more (case in point: mobile games).

What it boils down to is that the future of coding is more about creating the mold where the code is poured in and knowing how exact of a mold is "good enough" for the problem at hand.

When the mold is done, you let the agent pour in the code in any format you like. It can create a Swift version, Rust version and a web assembly version in "half a soda" as you put it =)

The people for whom the only enjoyment in programming was molding the perfect item from scratch will still be needed, but less and less as we get better and faster in defining the molds for the agent to pour the code in.

Before I had to dig specs of an application out of a client's mind and try to form them into software with a full-ass team. Now we can pretty much "just" give them Claude and teach them to describe what they want and iterate to get something that maybe resembles an MVP but in more cases is just an interactive UI spec we can use as a reference to build the actual tool.

The kind that works, but everyone who knows why has left the company. The whole codebase is written in a way that makes automated testing either impossible or so time-consuming that the client will never pay for the required refactoring.

There is way too much code in the world we never were able to rewrite due to real-world concerns. There were people who had the skill, but a part of that skill came with knowing the risks of doing major refactoring to a money-generating system that is ancient, but still works.

Anecdote: I had to work with a system where the original coder (long gone) had rewritten Linked Lists with their custom solution that worked normally except the first X items were the sum, average and mean of the data. Fun times.

And if not today, it will have one soon.

It's surprisingly easy to do that shit properly when budgets and time aren't an issue.

But, for example, I did replace IRCCloud with my own custom setup. Been daily driving it for ... three months now? Took me two to three evenings to get an MVP and 3 months of iterating while using it to get it Just The Way I Like It.

I was also a paying customer of Hazel[0] for two major versions, I didn't use the majority of features so I made my own that does the things from Hazel I needed plus a few extra things that nobody else is going to care about but make my life easier.

All of these are just for me, they are open source with a permissive license, but I have zero intention of making a "community" for any of them or trying to make them into commercial offerings.

They do what I want and if someone likes them as-is, they're free to use them. If they need something else - that's why we can fork repositories =)

[0] https://www.noodlesoft.com

At that scale there are cases where it's worth it to create an AI assisted bespoke version. I've done two of these at $dayjob and a bunch for my own purposes. Either replacing subscription software or highly specialized versions of pay-once software.

It's here already, but not at a global scale.

You can pick any application you pay for, but only use 10% of the features of, and create a bespoke version that only has that 10% in it. It'll take you a day to get an MVP and maybe a week or two for it to be "good enough".

Anyone can do work on their own car. It's not especially hard.

But a professional working on their own car knows tricks and has tools / ways of working that a regular person doesn't have access to.

You can tell the difference in the result if you know where to look.

Sometimes it matters: the way you change some components matters - and while you're there with half the engine bay cleared, you can fix a few other things that usually fail in this specific model.

Sometimes it doesn't: oil change is hard to fuck up, but not impossible.

The the things I've made with agents aren't hard to do for anyone, but I can claim that I can pick up any of my projects 6 months from now and confidently add features without worrying about stuff breaking or the agent doing crazy crap - because I build the limits into my projects by default.

Or during a sales meeting, an experienced engineer can have a quick prototype done to show the client.

Do you expect future attempts to be worse or better?

Yes there are alternatives, but people resist change when they need to learn new workflows.

- most of the jank of IRC is client-side and can be fixed on the clients, IRCv3 protocol changes are nice, but not essential for a good experience.

- bots can make channels more engaging, just posting the titles of URLs pasted on the channels so even people without fancy rich clients can see what's behind a YouTube link or Reddit share url without clicking it open makes the experience more "discord/slack-like"

- IRC bots and clients are super fun and easy first projects for any language, you get to do permanently open sockets to multiple destinations (multi-server of course), asynchronous stuff and text handling.

I went with IRCCloud for the longest time myself until early this year, due to the November Revolution of AI models getting super good, I figured out I can build my own IRCCloud just the way I like it with the price of a single Claude Pro subscription.

And so I did. I think I had an MVP running in a week (evenings on my free time) and over the summer I cancelled my IRCCloud subscription and I'm fully using my own system.

Now I have a TUI, Web UI, native Swift client (with iOS, but haven't tested it yet) and a Tauri client for Linux - all sharing a common backend that I run on a VPS 24/7.

Gas is 0% recyclable.

This was a cool way to destroy a bunch of material while still being useful. It's a cool ad and they can sell the smelted stuff as whatever trinkets.

Could you do it faster? =)

- Looks cool

- They managed to efficiently dismantle a bunch of robots

- Our robot overlords know what's waiting for them if they get uppity =)

Also they're selling the molten metal.