Totally agree. Speech is powerful and it will always have its place. It will continue to evolve and become far more useful than it is today. But at its core, it remains a highly lossy medium compared with text, especially when it comes to expressing (and consuming expressions thereof) ideas. Even the best voice memo cannot rival a clear, well-structured email when it comes to explaining something even moderately complicated.

Voice assistants, AI pins, and whatever other speech-based interfaces they come up with next will always be "nice to have", but I don't think anybody should be throwing away their keyboards anytime soon. We may have transformed how we make computers work for us, yet the ways we interact with them are much harder to revolutionize, because they are grounded in the physical, neurological, and habitual constraints of human existence. All of which is to say, when I look at the future, I still see a lot of typing.

I always scaffold for AI. I write the stub classes and interfaces and mock the relations between them by hand, and then ask the agent to fill in the logic. I know that in many cases, AI might come up with a demonstrably “better” architecture than me, but the best architecture is the one that I’m comfortable with, so it’s worse even if it’s better. I need to be able to find the piece of code I’m looking for intuitively and with relative ease. The agent can go as crazy as it likes inside a single, isolated function, but I’m always paranoid about “going too far” and losing control of any flows that span multiple points in the codebase. I often discard code that is perfectly working just because it feels unwieldy and redo it.

I’m not sure if this counts as “vibe coding” per se, but I like that this mentality keeps my workday somewhat similar to how it was for decades. Finding/creating holes that the agent can fill with minimal adult supervision is a completely new routine throughout my day, but I think obsessing over maintainability will pay off, like it always has.

As much as I want to buy into the premise, the article’s tone is so aggressively optimistic it feels like it was written on cocaine.

Although Flash really sucked as a technology, it did inspire a lot of visual artistry on the web. Half of the cool stuff you saw on StumbleUpon was made with Flash by people who weren't proficient with JS/CSS, which weren’t capable enough to achieve the same results anyway.

> This website has been temporarily rate limited

Although being stuck at loading something was reminiscent of my early internet experience in a way, the site’s backend seems to be rate-limited and unable to serve. Will check back later!

got hit by the HN death hug - it's back now!

Do not use Slack.

A few years ago people could not stop talking about how great Slack was. Much better than HipChat, Google Chat, Teams, IRC. I've used all of them, Slack was never better. As much as I dislike Google Chat (or whatever they call it), Slack is worse, only beaten by Teams as the absolute worst.

But Slack was hyped, it was the new shinny. Put all your stuff in Slack it's great. Question that logic and you where told that you just didn't get it. I still don't, it's the single worst piece of software that I'm forced to use.

The business model was always as rocky as everything else coming out of San Francisco/Silicon Valley area in the past 15 years. Why are people surprised?

IRC is fine, for most things. It's free, decentralized, bots are easy to write and you can run your own servers.

I think most people had genuinely different reactions than you, and found Slack to be a better UX. I still do. But yes, it was also a proprietary trap. it can be both. but for many many many people Slack was a much better experience than IRC, they weren't just "tricked" into thinking this.

Well said, it’s a red flag for me if someone both states that they “can’t understand what others like about [thing]” AND then assumes that means they’ve been tricked or they’re stupid or sheep or something else… it’s like, other people having completely reasonable reasons that you just don’t happen to know what they are couldn’t possibly be a possibility.

It’s an ego thing I suspect.

He even got hansmayer's original comment flagged. Truly a champion of the open web we should all be backing!

Correction: the champion of Web 2.0 2.0 - * whatever that means* :)

I didn't flag it.

Tchap looks neat as a Slack alternative, but it seems like it's still only for government workers.

Tchap is just Element/Matrix with some gov specific features.

We use Mattermost at work, and apart from the mobile app being a bit shit, and search being kind of useless, it's easily as good as Slack. In some ways it's better, e.g. you can use proper Markdown in messages instead of Slack's Mrkdwn abomination that doesn't even allow links.

I wish they would improve search though; it's kind of a critical feature in a company.

? I put Slack into non-rich-text-editor mode and use standard markdown link syntax dozens of times a day

Well maybe they've added that in the past 2 years but certainly 2 years ago you could only add links using rich text mode.

search is the #1 feature I use in our corporate slack (huge, huge instance).

without search it's useless.

It has search, it's just very basic. Only searches for exactly what you put etc.

I remember Slack's search being equally crap when I last used it a couple of years ago.

sounds exactly like slacks search, except slack also doesn't find exactly what you put in sometimes... (think the indexing isn't very fast because sometime a day old message is impossible to search for)

slack search has been awesome for me. if you want exact search, put it into quotation marks.

One simple script that automatically connects to your account on the current time frame's server and unifies all into a single timeline will kill the fun.