I think this is showing the difference between people who like to /make/ things and those that like to make /things/. People that write software because they see a solution for a problem that can be fixed with software seem to benefit the most of LLM technology. It's almost the inverse for the people that write software because they like the process of writing software.

Surely there has to be some level of "getting stuff done"/"achieving a goal" when /making/ things, otherwise you'd be foregoing for-loops because writing each iteration manually is more fun.

I think you misunderstand the perspective of someone who likes writing code. It's not the pressing of keys on the keyboard. It's figuring out which keys to press. Setting aside for the moment that most loops have a dynamic iteration count, typing out the second loop body is not fun if it's the same as the first.

I do code golf for fun. My favorite kind of code to write is code I'll never have to support. LLMs are not sparking joy. I wish I was old enough to retire.

I have a 10-year-old side project that I've dumped tens of thousands of hours into. "Ship the game" was an explicit non-goal of the project for the vast majority of that time.

Sometimes, the journey is the destination.

And sometimes the destination is the destination and the journey is a slog.

I mean, sure. I was just pointing out to the commentor that sometimes "getting stuff done" isn't the point.

If anyone is interested in the cryptography mistake that Sony made I recommend watching the Console Hacking talk at 27c3 by the fail0verflow team: https://youtu.be/DUGGJpn2_zY?t=2096

Interesting to read that the complexity in his music is praised and seen as speaking to the intellect, whereas that is not the case when it comes to complexity in software.

complexity in software is invisibly-preceded with "unnecessary", and usually indicates software that is difficult to maintain or even to verify its behavior. A really cool software architecture can scratch a similar itch as a good fugue, but that's not its typical function nor is it the way we usually engage with software professionally.

Bach's complexity, incidentally, is seldom "for its own sake" - the pieces all fit together beautifully and without extraneous movement. Contrast that with some lesser works by later composers like Liszt, where you often get the sense that a given passage could be reduced or removed without harming the work.

That kind of complexity, which means attention to detail, quality, concordance and consonance between different components, is also praised in software. This is however not what we mostly think of when talking about complexity in software.

Why pay a dominatrix for a flogging when you can just stub your toe

You can execute this in the devtools console:

data.whiteBall.v.x = 5; data.whiteBall.v.y = 5;

data.blackBall.v.y = 5; data.blackBall.v.x = 5;

Wow! Careful Icarus, going too fast makes it go kind of wild and started freezing the site :P

data.whiteBall.v.x = data.whiteBall.v.y = data.blackBall.v.y = data.blackBall.v.x = 10;

Also frameRate() with 120 or higher will make it go a bit faster. But it seems like there is a limit. I'm not familiar with p5.

Who says you’ll have that choice?

There's already more recorded music in existence than you could listen to in a lifetime. There is also a vast amount of music being created today which is not pop music and is not following current pop trends.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

My vinyl player.

soundcloud

I'm working on a new programming language and every point resonates with me on a spiritual level. One thing that helped me a lot was writing more integration tests at the outer edges of the application, opposed to unit tests of individual modules. Usually the logic doesn't change between rewrites, so keeping a somewhat stable interface keeps me from breaking stuff in between grand rewrites.

Susan Kare talked about the backstory in this presentation: https://vimeo.com/97583369#t=493s

A lot more backstories to many design, technical and political aspects of early Macintosh development can be found at https://www.folklore.org/ - it's a real treasure trove for people interested in how the Mac came to be.

I agree, and it is one of those things where buying the printed version makes so much sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_in_the_Valley

TIL there's a book on this, which I didn't know - thanks for the heads up!

No love for Windows 2000? NT kernel with the classic Windows interface. It ran pretty well on Windows 98 machines and was extremely stable.

So long as you didn't play games. 2000 meant abandoning the vast majority of your PC game library, early on.

You could hack around that and get DirectX working, I was doing all my gaming on Windows 2000 back in the day.

Though I think I may have had a proper dos boot disk for some games, hard to remember, it was quite awhile back. :)

You would've needed a DOS boot disk, yes; while Win98SE was fairly great for playing DOS games, 2000 was most certainly not.

I ran Windows 2000 in high school and never had trouble running any of my games. That said, I didn't have any DOS games in my library, which I'm guessing is what you are referring to.

I tried once. Kinda liked it but it was heavy on my built-for-98-se machine and lacked some things a teenager wanted in a computer - like DirectX.

But I've tried anyway. Then I got owned so hard by Nimda that it is still the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of Windows 2000.

Win 2000 Professional was my favorite windows ever.

Fast and light as Windows 98 but more stable than Windows XP.

2000 and original XP are almost identical (IIRC one is NT 5.0 and the other is NT 5.1). IMHO, The reason hackers loved 2000 and not XP is because of the toy-like XP theme - which shows hackers can be shallow too.

Win2K, good memories. Used it for Delphi and some C++ Builder development between 2000 and 2001; pretty solid, probably more than XP (at least until XPSP2) but needed some more horsepower to use it properly.

It looks like they request these permissions: user-top-read, playlist-read-private, playlist-read-collaborative and they also gets your your name, username and profile picture.

Seems a neat way to collect information for their startup. Maybe a Spotify competitor, or a datamarket for selling people's music preferences.

The Pudding is, per the footer on that page, "a digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays". It's been around for a few years already. https://pudding.cool/archives/