I've been struggling to find something that scratches the Reddit itch, in the lineage of Slashdot, then Fark, then Digg. Any recommendations? I don't mean niche communities, there needs to be enough of a mainstream critical mass the makes it _the_ place to go. I don't think it's Lemmy, though maybe it could be.
I really enjoy lemmy with summit client on my phone. Never been on it from my desktop though. Probably a good thing all things considered.
It's got pretty good coverage of most things related to my country and interests, but if you go too far afield/niche theres not many users on many topics
There isn't one unfortunately. Some nerd is ok on Lemmy but you'll never find stuff like knitting or local communities. Not with any people on them anyway.
Having software build software is programming. An agent is software, a human isn't. I can draw a UML diagram, software generates code from that, and software turns it into binary. That still counts as programming I would say, we're just changing the language. Otherwise you would have to say that writing JavaScript is not programming because it's too far removed from Assembly.
It really is the determinism aspect for me. Okay, it’s programming if you sample at temperature 0 with a fixed seed on a fully deterministic inference stack and you have made your prompts the artifact that you iterate on (repo full of natural language that “builds” into the running software it describes with the use of the LLM sampling at temperature 0)
Having animals eat animals is food. An animal is food, a human isn't. I can draw up some hay, animals eat it, and another animal eats it. That still counts as food I would say, we're just changing the organism. Otherwise you would have to say that dogs aren't animals because it's too far removed from plants.
I think this is a category error. Are you trying to say that a human is software? Because humans are definitely animals. If the analogy is "what counts as eating?", then the equivalent is more like saying "my bicycle is an animal because it gets energy from me so therefore it's eating", but this metaphor is quite weak in the first place so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
> That still counts as programming I would say, we're just changing the language.
Anything can be anything it isn't once you start changing the language.
"When at first you don't succeed, redefine success."
> Having software build software is programming. An agent is software, a human isn't. I can draw a UML diagram, software generates code from that, and software turns it into binary.
It's not programming, it's cuckoldry. Articulating the perfect guy, inviting him over and watching him get to do all the stuff you used to enjoy literally makes you a manager.
I went to uni for electronic engineering, and I really enjoyed low-level programming, optimising memory etc. Now I'm a software engineer and I never think about memory because every high-level language has garbage collection. Does that make me a cuck?
Karpathy said it best. To paraphrase: there will be a rift of hate/love between programmers and builders respectively. You simply enjoy the craft a lot more that you enjoy the result of your craft.
There's nothing wrong with that, just as you can enjoy the effort and craftsmanship of hand-knitting a sweater. But some of us are more fulfilled by making nice clothes, and the labour (or delegation thereof) is a means to an end.
That's not really what we're talking about though. Compiling verilog from simulink or whatever is totally different than an agent writing code.
If you design a custom piece of furniture, then hire someone to build it, that's totally fine! But if you then tell everyone "I constructed this cool table," well, that's just not true.
That's because you interpret "I constructed" to mean "I hand-crafted" rather than "I designed". The problem with saying that is all about the intent of the person saying it, as well as what the average person can reasonably interpret it to mean.
This is the difference between "made in China" and "designed in California, assembled in China". People will generally not say "I constructed this table" just as an architect won't say "I built this house", unless you have the context that they're an architect or they're trying to mislead you.
There will come a time where by default we interpret "I built this software" not to mean that you literally wrote the code, unless you say that explicitly, just as when somebody says "I built this computer" we know it means they picked the parts, rather than soldered the boards, which is what it meant in Woz' day.
Thank you. But he was two months shy of his 90th birthday and, except for struggles with osteoarthritis and Parkinson's, he had a good run. I'm sad that he's gone, but it's not like it took anyone by surprise. And I'm glad that his suffering, which towards the end was not insignificant (though he was very stoic about it), is over.
The last week has actually been pretty (ahem) interesting in a lot of ways. I should probably write a blog post about it.
I suspect people will get pretty riled up in the comments. This is fine folks. More people will make their stuff machine-accessible and that's a good thing even if MCP won't last or if it's like VHS -- yes Betamax was better, but VHS pushed home video.
That's what I don't get with AI, isn't it supposed to make us work less? Why do I need to bother making my websites AI friendly now? I thought that was the point of AI, to take something that's already there and extract valuable information.
Same with coding. Now I don't get to write code but I get to review code written by AI. So much fun...
AI is not great at browser use at the moment and it's also quite inelegant to force it to. It's one thing if it reads your nicely marked down blog, it's another for it to do my groceries order by clicking around a clunky site and repeatedly taking screenshots. Not to mention how many tokens are burnt up with what could be a simple REST call.
So to answer your first question, it's less about _reading_ and more about _doing_. The interfaces for humans are not always the best interfaces for machines and vice versa in the doing, because we're no longer dealing with text but dynamic UIs. So we can cut out the middle man.
As for coding, Karpathy said it best: there will be a split between those who love to code and those who love to build. I too enjoyed writing code as a craft, and I'll miss doing it for a living and the recognition for being really fast at it, but I can do so much more than I could before now, genuinely. We'll just have to lean more into our joy of building and hand-code on the side. People still painted even after the camera was invented.
I’m all for making data more machine accessible, but it’s not like there was a shortage of ways to implement that. Hell, if most sites implemented OpenAPI, there’d be no problem to solve.
The choice of whether to make one’s service open to mechanical use is a business decision. Imagine a world in which YouTube could easily be accessed by scripts. Google does not want this; they want quite the opposite.
Yes, when I said Betamax I was actually referring to Swagger/OpenAPI. It's been around for a while but it didn't catch on the way MCP did.
What I'm saying is that the AI hype is making people make that business decision, and that is ultimately a good thing because it means more human accessibility. Not just for people with disabilities, but through interoperability and fewer silos like YouTube.
We’re talking about agents here. (These are, after all, what MCP servers are meant to serve to.) Thus we’re talking about the need for services to be efficiently agent (computer) accessible, not efficiently end-user accessible.
I came to a similar realisation about world news a few years ago and live a much less stressful life now. Especially since most of the news was about the US, and I don't even live there and there's nothing I can do about it. If something really important happens, eventually I find out from friends or family.
Same when it comes to staying on top of tech news -- almost everything is a flash in the pan. I used to bookmark cool new products, never revisit them, and then a year later realise half of the links are now dead.
One thing I realised though is I still need to mindlessly browse an endless feed every once in a while for some downtime. One way or another I'll want to fill that time with something, so it's a question of being mindful what goes in it. So my drugs of choice are Hacker News, and carefully curated YouTube subscriptions.
I currently use Hapi (https://github.com/tiann/hapi/) for this and find it quite handy. I can easily tap into a session on my PC from my phone.
Before that I used Happy (https://happy.engineering/) which is also open source and a lot more sophisticated. It has a voice assistant that can chat with Claude Code on your behalf in the mobile app. However, it wasn't very reliable, and there are other reasons to use Hapi instead (documented in the Hapi repo).
Before that, Omnara (https://www.omnara.com/) a YC company and seemingly a proprietary Happy fork (?) but it never worked properly for me.
Long story short, there are a few of the around, and frankly I really like to use them. Unlike other commenters, I don't find that they wreck my work-life balance. Rather, I can go out and have a walk in the park, only checking in on long-running tasks every once in a while. The diff view is pretty good too. There are many tasks where I'd rather not stare at my PC all day and instead do other things, and these tools allow me to do that.
Also recommend Opencode which has `opencode web` built in. It's really impressive how good opencode web is. It's far more polished than I'd have expected from a free alternative!
What.cd were extreme sticklers for quality! When you applied to get in, they did a live interview on IRC to test your knowledge of ripping, transcoding, and different kinds of compression, how torrents and private trackers work, and their code of conduct. I remember studying for it. They also had ways to make sure you weren't cheating like checking your screen, as well as very aggressive automated checks for VPNs and blocklisted IPs to prevent ban evasion and multiple accounts.
They also had good incentive structures for keeping the bar high -- you could get kicked out for having a bad ratio, so the easiest way to pump your upload up was to fulfil obscure requests for FLACs you could purchase online but were extremely difficult to purchase (if you're lucky it's just an unknown artist on Bandcamp). I discovered a lot of obscure music this way, some that I'm still looking for to this day after it shut down.
Because I cared so much about being part of that private tracker, this is what also prompted me to rent a seedbox for the first time. I paid in Bitcoin out of paranoia (I lived in Germany where the fines for piracy are HEFTY, and they actually do come after you) back when Bitcoin wasn't really worth that much, and later found that that old wallet suddenly had a couple thousand in it instead of the spare change I couldn't move!
I must have joined at a different time because all I needed for me, a total annoying script kiddie leech, just needed an invite code (or link? I forget)
