Ya know, I have to admit feeling something like this. Normally, the amount of stuff I put together in a work day offers a sense of completion or even a bit of a dopamine bump because of a "job well done". With this recent work I've been doing, it's instead felt like I've been spending a multiplier more energy communicating intent instead of doing the work myself; that communication seems to be making me more tired than the work itself. Similar?
I forget where I saw this (a Medium post, somewhere) but someone summed this up as "I didn't sign up for this just to be a tech priest for the machine god".
Someone commented yesterday that managers and other higher-ups are "already ok with non-deterministic outputs", because that's what engineers give them.
As a manager/tech-lead, I've kind of been a tech priest for some time.
Which is why it's so funny to hear seasoned engineers lament the probabilistic nature of AI systems, and how you have to be hand setting code to really think about the problem domain.
They seem to all be ICs that forget that there are abstraction layers above them where all of that happens (and more).
You’re possibly not entering into the flow state anymore.
Flow is effortless. and it is rejuvenating.
I believe:
While communication can be satisfying, it’s not as rejuvenating as resting in our own Being and simply allowing the action to unfold without mental contraction.
Flow states.
When the right level of challenge and capability align and you become intimate with the problem. The boundaries of me and the problem dissolve and creativity springs forth. Emerging satisfied. Nourished.
This is why I think LLMs will make us all a LOT smarter. Raw code made it so we stopped heavily thinking in between but now it's just 100% the most intense thought processes all day long.
It seems pretty obvious that the opposite is true. I know I’ve experienced some serious skill atrophy that I’m now having to actively resist. There’s a lot lost by no longer having to interact with the raw materials of your craft.
Thinking is a skill that is reinforced by reading, designing and writing code. When you outsource your thinking to an LLM your ability to think doesn’t magically improve…it degrades.
Sure my raw coding ability is degraded but my architecting, debugging, and planning have all skyrocketed.
Those always required significantly more though just like before and that's all I do now.
I mean old staff engineers and managers are often not coding at all but they are significantly better designers than a freshgrad that leetcode grinded for 4 years. Isn't that the same argument?
The idea works well with or without direct integration. You can have a cli agent read arbitrary state of any tmux session and have it drive work through it. I use it for everything from dev work to system debugging. It turns out a portable and callable binary with simple parameters is still easier to use for agents than protocols and skills: https://github.com/tikimcfee/gomuxai
Here's a portable binary you drop in a directory to allow agentic cli to cross communicate with other agents, store and read state, or act as the driver of arbitrary tmux sessions in parallel: https://github.com/tikimcfee/gomuxai
Happy to help build said integration with ya, feel free to post an issue, fork, or send me a dm. The tool itself exposes the internal DB as well so others with interest can access logs, context, etc.
In a genuine and everyday real sense, no, your likely thousand dollar device is not usable. The App Store requires an account to download from. Internal services and apps often complain about not being available. You are mostly stuck with whatever built in, non-cloud services the device comes with, which isn't much. Weather and mail fetching come to mind. Maybe some of the simple recording / note taking like apps. A working Apple ID is essentially a requirement to actually use the device you purchase. And yes there will be comments from folks about "ways" you can perhaps sideload or get things running, but to a regular person that simply uses a phone like a standard appliance in their life - they're stuck.
This is all I can think of and it depresses me how exciting the video is about turning more materials into emissions. I get I have no power over these people building this, but I just wish they didn't make it. I don't want the world to keep building more amazing ways to burn things I or my neighbors will eventually have to breathe in.
This might seem a bit silly, but this is probably the first easily accessible and open iOS backup format extraction tool I've seen in many years. Maybe I've missed the good ones, or the hidden ones. But I find it quite fun that I can backup my device and run its output through this exploit analyzer to (a) determine if I have something to worry about and (b) stop fiddling with 3rd party hackaround software for file backup viewing. Cheers to the authors and the team that put this together, helping keep a rather closed OS at least somewhat safer, and sharing the tools to do so.
If I can hijack the thread a bit for a related question -- does anyone know of an easy selfhosted non-macOS server that will periodically pull full backups from iOS devices over Wifi (with the user's authorization on-device)? I think there's a lot of FOSS ground work for doing it on Linux, but hard to find good information about how to put it all together into a reliable automated solution, and sadly I don't really have the energy right now or dozens of hours to put into it.
I might even pay ~$100. I want it on Linux, but if it's under my control and reliable, maybe I could do Windows or macOS. Maybe I should just install iTunes on Windows in a VM...
- Yep, it's annoying to have the current window controls overlayed by the safe area. You can still move it around if you're careful enough, but yes, it's not great.
- The mobile app expects you to download from Github directly for now, because yes, there's no direct file import yet. Not a hard add, but just needs a bit of a different pipe to either copy or access the out of sandbox files.
- Yes, the mobile windowing controls are meant more to allow access to all the demos for now, not for a pretty UI. It's not terrible on iPad since you can use the pencil for more accuracy, but I did have a plan to put the tabbed and sidebar controls back in place for mobile at some point.
- Sorry about the search; if the 'reset' control doesn't do the trick, you might be out of luck for this version. The same fix I need to put in place to work within the current screen's safe area is the same that would keep these windows within viewport. And, ideally, to include a similar 'IDE' view as the desktop to avoid these multi window cases that are inconvenient or broken.
I'll be focusing on a few changes related specifically to mobile UI in the next few builds of this. Touch, for example, has no way to rotate along the y-axis, and there's no way to 'hover' for bookmarking on tap.
This is exactly the use case I'm aiming for! I've done a lot of mentoring, a big part of getting familiar with a code base is building one's mental map for where things are in any kind of relationship to what things are doing. In upcoming versions, I'll be restoring the 'state sharing' control that lets multiple devices share their camera orientations and bookmakers between users in a local P2P state, and maybe eventually some remote server backed way.
In reverse order, I'd say yes, you may want to try at least Xcode 15.4, and preferably 16.0. I've also had issues with older versions of Xcode on the M series, and have had to update begrudgingly across versions over the years.
And, to the 'safe area' issue you're mentioning, I do appreciate the comment. I have a pretty rough version of windowing in the app, and it partially relies on a a full view layer. Ideally I'd take advantage of said safe area, but I'd need to clean up a few things first.
Now that I'm being reminded that this is a first-time user experience, I'll put this on the list!
I'd love to chat with ya. Do you see my email? Feel free to email me! If not, reply here with whatever you'd prefer to chat with and I'll get back to you.
