Imagine you ask someone "Can you hand me the butter please? That would be very kind." and they respond "Why does everyone in the world want to have all the butter that ever existed in this very instant?!", and then you ask them what they do for a living while chewing on your dry bread, and they say oh, I write software for pacemakers.
I imagine this stuff is probably really good at iterative changes to improve objective benchmarks like CPU or RAM use. I'm thinking of little contained optimizations that you can understand in and of themselves, that you maybe have done yourself before in other places, found really quickly and applied uniformly. Stuff you can confirm to be what you expect it to be by mostly just scanning. Low hanging fruit for sure, but something where you can actually know what is a fruit and what is crap, and only keep the fruit, and develop some confidence in the process, if that makes sense?
Or trying to reduce complexity, increasing readability and coherence of variable names (the opposite of code golf if you will), while staying within a certain limit of performance regression (e.g. "make this code as nice as you can while making it at most 0.5% slower").
Making the stuff millions of people have been using for decades better, in a way that also makes it better for humans when they read the code. Surely that's possible, some people are probably doing it but it doesn't go viral as much, because it's too mundane.
And of course, making new stuff is more exciting. I mean, you could hit on something with a vibe coded thing, and then know it's now worth to make a non-sloppy version, but you won't get much fame for making ffmpeg twice as fast by prompting an LLM. Though on the other hand, it's like a safe investment (if not in "fame", then in "improving the stuff we all have to use daily"), because you know ffmpeg and many many other things will still be around, whereas a vibe coded thing that wasn't special will be 100% forgotten the next day, or have just the one user forever.
> We are focusing on the small details and hiding the misery in the world. Look at the smoker and we miss global warming, war, and the crap we eat--not the bad guys but smoking. I smoke and they talk about cancer, I eat and they talk about cholesterol, I make love, it's AIDS. Before AIDS and cholesterol and cancer there's the pleasure of making love and eating and smoking. I have to die someday, so if the thing that gave me pleasure all of my life kills me instead of me going under a truck, that's fine. Besides, why should I live so that when I die I give fresh meat to the worms? I hope that I am rotted and they don't want to eat me. F@#$ck the worms.
-- Marjane Satrapi
Maybe a love so great you cannot go on without it is better than no such love. I wish her nothing but peace, but this such a tragic loss for the world. 56 :(
Also, fuck sadness. It's a healthy human thing, sure, but so is giving it the middle finger. Take care, all of you, and maybe smile at a person who needs it today, just because fuck sadness.
So what I'm hearing is very sturdy, christmas tree shaped turbines (long blades at the bottom, getting shorter as you go up), on a very heavy central shaft ending in a spike that gets driven deep into the ground by dropping them from great height with planes (there probably needs to be a thruster stage on top that accelerates them beyond mere free fall) into the path of tornadoes. No clue what to do with the energy, but that seems like a minor detail.
Another way to look at it is that naked emperors and snake tongues are leaving a LOT of passion and talent on the table. And customers (we all are, to someone) are similarly yearning for some basic progress, too. How did we get so good at failing to make anything out of that? How can we change it?
And there is no money cushion anyone [0] can leave to future generations that could offset just leaving it to the worst of the worst, the "synergy" of the insane running the asylum with no counter efforts, like pulling all cooling rods in a reactor.
In that story the sorcerer saves the day. There is no such person in our story, and no group that play its role, and if we don't step up -- all of us, all of "them", everybody -- everything will be "awash", and nobody will "win" anything worth talking about, not on any timescales beyond what I would consider very short term.
Because it's also bullshit. "People who read" prefer static sites and not prefer any kind of interactivity is just fetishizing intelligence. Readers don't give a fuck if your site is coded in react or static, most of them dont even know web technology statistically. Projection at its peak
Anyone who thinks their preferences translate to their viewers is not being honest with themselves. Developers care if your site is static or not, general visitors and web users do not. There is a reason why static sites are not the norm. You're trying to shoehorn your opinion and generalize it when in reality that's not the true. Thanks for mockery!
So we've gone from "anyone who expresses this preference is a snob" to "actually what matters is the preferences of some imaginary audience, who I can also speak for"
In a way, we're doing the same maneuver to avoid discussing the subject, deflecting to base insults involving psychoanalysis of the speaker based on their stated position rather than object-level engagement with the position per se. I agree that it's not a move that seems to invite meaningful discussion. Seems worth considering if that's a priority you have
yall, the line is referencing codegen & docsgen & slopgen; people are putting shit into the ether that neither them nor anyone else is going to read but will just be imbibed by some other agent for some random purpose no one strictly knows.
It’s so strange that the Claude-ness leaks out even when it’s prompted to use this tone. The underlying flavour shines through clearly. I’m sure you could get it to shake it with enough prompting
You don't need cookie banners unless you want to track the user before they opted in on their own (maybe in the "website settings"). That's why countless websites have none.
The browser would only have to ask once, and then it would still just be "one browser setting", except you'd be notified it exists, as soon as it exits. So what's the point here, other than trotting out the same old stuff nut about cookie banners?
On update, "this is the thing, and that thing is enabled by default, is that okay? Otherwise, click no, then it gets turned off. If you change your mind later, it's under settings -> thing"
It's not complicated, and blaming laws that enforce human rights to avoid the most basic craftsmanship is suspicious.
Is it the case that "countless websites have none"? Some websites, especially small ones operated outside of the EU, simply don't care about their obligations under European law. But in my experience it's extremely rare for European websites not to feature a cookie banner. It's not like it's just corporations: the official websites of the European Commission (https://commission.europa.eu/), the presidency of France (https://www.elysee.fr/), the chancellorship of Germany (https://www.bundeskanzler.de/bk-de/), etc. all have one.
The issue might be that a lot of websites are run by marketing and communications teams, that all have KPIs and metrics, which they need to track (sometimes for no good reason). Some of this could be done without cookies, but that requires an active operations team which can support it, but because these sites a managed solely by non-technical people they don't know what to ask for, they just know that if you slap on the snippet og JavaScript, they get the metrics they "need".
Github is probably the largest site that does not have a cookie banner, because they don't need on. If Github doesn't need a cookie banner, then maybe the EU commission could work on removing theirs as well.
> Some websites, especially small ones operated outside of the EU, simply don't care about their obligations under European law. What about lobster.rs?
Such as HN? Honest question, for all I know they're breaking EU law and nobody cares. Or maybe they don't.
Anyway, pouet.net doesn't have one. It links to a ton of group sites, many European, try to count the ones that don't have a cookie banner.
For fun, I did a quick and dirty test on the HN front page at the time of this comment, out of 30 links, I counted 11 cookie banners. Let's say I missed a few (a bunch of the ones I counted were a small bar at the top or the bottom, easy to miss, not even sure if they blocked the page), let's say it's 20 out of 30. One third of all websites is still a huuuuuuge amount of websites.
I took privacy seriously before I "had to". So for me, nothing changed. Why would it? You can have a link in the footer to opt into tracking. If actually "value consent" and all that. It's a complete non-issue for most sites that have banners, they could just stop being creeps and it'd be fine. But they don't want to stop, they want to annoy users as much as legally possible and then funnel the annoyance at the laws protecting those users against them.
"Have you heard about this new thing, you have to wear something around your ankle and can't be a school teacher and stuff like that? Yeah it's really insane, how will children learn anything, ever again?"
"Wait, what are you even talking about? Have you done something?"
Of course there's corner cases, of course this can also be a hassle for sites that aren't "creeps". But generally? The same generic false claims, over and over? Just no.
HN used to be non-compliant, but does seem to have fixed it, I'm not seeing any cookies in a browser where I'm not logged in.
pouet.net is tracking me. On my first visit they deposited a cookie named POUETSESS4 with a 1 year expiry and a persistent hash identifier in my browser.
I checked a few outbound links from that site to European domains, and it does seem to be about 50/50 on whether they have similar problems, which is much better than any rate I've seen elsewhere. Good on this community for having a lot of folks who care about privacy and roll their own web frameworks. But I doubt it's the case that the other 50% or the parent site intended to secretly track me; they just ended up with a dependency on some tracking framework by accident, and they're too small to get in trouble for it.
> they just ended up with a dependency on some tracking framework by accident, and they're too small to get in trouble for it.
I'd say it's simply not in the spirit of the law. I.e. that cookie could be used to track you, but isn't. Sure, they could be secretly selling your info, but they could also be secretly storing your IP and anything else to fingerprint you. That would also be illegal, and no way you could know from the outside. So why are there not constant raids all over Europe, all the time?
As I said, I do think it's because that law isn't enforced to just waste time on BS. If I walk across a red light in the middle of the night [0], where there's a car every 5 minutes, and do it carefully after looking left, right, left again, and you run up to cops parked nearby who saw that, and insist they do something, they'll laugh at you. If you insist and freak out, you have a bigger chance to get in trouble than I do. But that's not some sinister law that everyone breaks and that is enforced selectively, it really is for what it says on the tin, what a reasonable person would abide by it for.
[0] Or put a session cookie I never use except for logged in users, and without any PII, because the site was written in 2000 and it's fine.
> If I walk across a red light in the middle of the night [0], where there's a car every 5 minutes, and do it carefully after looking left, right, left again, and you run up to cops parked nearby who saw that, and insist they do something, they'll laugh at you
The US, and that's also besides the point. Why does stuff like this get bickered about, instead of simply showing the vast damages caused by this terrible law? I read FUD about it all the time, I don't know a single case of an actual problem it caused.
HN explicitly breaks EU law. You can ask them to delete your comments because of GDPR, and they will tell you they don't follow European law so they won't so that.
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