There will be niches in research, high performance computing & graphics, security, etc. But we’re in the last generation or two that’s going to hand write their own CRUD apps. That’s the livelihood of a lot of software developers around the world.
Do people handwrite those? If you take something like Laravel and Rails. You get like 90% of the basics done by executing a few commands. The rest of it is the actual business logic and integration with obscure platforms.
I hear this denigration of CRUD apps all the time, but people forget that CRUD apps can be as complex or simple as they need to be. A CRUD app is identified as such by its purpose, not the sophistication of it.
Right now I'm wring a web app that basically manages data in a db, but guess the kinds of things I have to deal with. Here a a few (there are many much more), in no particular order:
- Caching and load balancing infrastructure.
- Crafting an ORM that handles caching, transactions, and, well, CRUD, but in a consistent, well-typed, and IO-provider-agnostic manner (IO providers could be: DBs like Postgres, S3-compatible object stores, Redis, Sqlite, Localstorage, Filesystems, etc. Yes, I need all those).
- Concurrent user access in manner that is performant and avoids conflicts.
- Db performance for huge datasets (so consideration of indexes, execution plans, performant queries, performant app architecture, etc, etc)
- Defining fluent types for defining the abstract API methods that form the core of the system
- Defining types to provide strong typing for routes that fulfill each abstract API method.
- Defining types to provide strongly-typed client wrappers for each abstract API method
- How to choose the best option for application- and API security (Cookies?, JWT?, API keys? Oauth?)
- Choosing the best UI framework for the requirements of the app. I actually had to write a custom react-like library for this.
- Media storage strategy (what variants of each media to generate on the server, how to generate good storage keys, etc.
- Writing tooling scripts that are sophisticated enough to help me type-check, build, text, and deploy the app just in the way I want
- Figuring out effective UI designs for CRUD pages, with sorting, filtering, paging, etc built in . This is far from simple. For just one example, naive paging is not performant, I need to use keyset pagination.
- Doing all the above with robust, maintainable, and performant code
- Writing effective specs and docs for all my decisions and design for the the above
- And many many more! I've been working on this "CRUD" app for years as a greenfield project that will be the flagship product of my startup.
I don't really disagree with you about handwriting CRUD apps. But I'm not sure that having an off-the-shelf solution, from AI output or not, that would spin up CRUD interfaces would _actually_ erase software as an industry.
To me it's similar to saying that there's no need for lawmakers after we get the basics covered. Clearly it's absurd, because humans will always want to expand on (or subtract from) what's already there.
Something I hadn’t thought about before with the V-K test: in the setting of the film animals are just about extinct. The only animal life we see are engineered like the replicants.
I had always thought of the test as about empathy for the animals, but hadn’t really clocked that in the world of the film the scenarios are all major transgressions.
The calfskin wallet isn’t just in poor taste, it’s rare & obscene.
I had never picked up on the nuance of the V-K test. Somehow I missed the salience of the animal extinction. The questions all seemed strange to me, but in a very Dickian sort of way. This discussion was very enlightening.
Just read Do Androids Dream of Electric sheep, I’d highly recommend it. It’s quite different than Blade Runner. It leans much heavier into these kinds of themes, there’s a whole sort of religion about caring for animals and cultivating human empathy.
The book is worth reading and it's interesting how much they changed for the movie. I like having read the book, it makes certain sequences a little more impactful.
Your square color photos are almost certainly made from medium format film!
The most common frame size used in 120 is a 6x6cm square, especially in consumer cameras of the time. 6x6 cameras stayed popular for snapshots because they could be contact printed straight from the negative, without an enlarger.
A whole roll of 120 can be contact printed onto a single sheet of paper and then cut. Much cheaper and faster than enlarging 35mm negatives.
With film there’s no such thing as a b&w specific camera. The difference you’re seeing is probably down to the glass in whatever cheap & cheerful 6x6 rangefinder they took those 1950s family snaps on, vs the photos from the AE-1 which is an all time great camera & lens system.
There’s a spectacular moment in Django Unchained where Leonardo DiCaprio (a generational plantation master) asks something like “why don’t they fight back?”
If you understand both the answer to that question and the fear underlying its asking, you understand a lot about how atrocity is sustained.
Is it the analogy of the Elephant being chained when young/still thinks chained as an adult. I saw that movie when it came out so been a while.
I can see it now even if I was disatisfied enough with the gov I don't see myself doing anything significant to fight it. Would just go with the flow. Funny I actually tried to vote for once and I couldn't because I haven't been registered recently or something... not that it mattered 20 million votes short.
I turned screws in an Apple Store in that era, circa iPhone 3G/4.
Internally that policy was called “getting to yes” and it was a huge pain in the ass.
The idea: customer comes in with a broken screen. You surprise and delight them by getting a manager’s override on the cost. You say you can make an exception because it’s the first time, but the next screen will cost x.
The reality: customer comes in expecting free repairs. Any charge is an argument. Their cousin dropped like 5 phones in the toilet and they were all replaced for free, etc. It sucked.
> Internally that policy was called “getting to yes” and it was a huge pain in the ass.
I don't remember a "getting to yes" era, especially when I brought in my old MagSafe 2 charger whose cable insulation had worn out because of the type of plastic Apple used, spilling blue stuff all over my space.
All the Genius Bars I went to (in multiple countries) gaslit and blamed it on me storing my MagSafe charger wrongly, even though this was obviously Apple's fault. I wish I could have been surprised and delighted instead.
I still have it in a plastic bag somewhere, rotting away.
The era before they became waterproof and the screens got some decent durability were, I'm sure, a nightmare. The 3G in particular was a huge ergonomic and quality downgrade from the original iPhone, I had one of those break while just sitting in my pants pocket.
I have switched to smiling at things people do well in traffic and trying to give positive reinforcement when I see people who care about others. Some even do it in ways that might seem stupid, e.g a guy in the wrong side of the street was actually just being very considerate.
Nice! I tried thumbs up (ie sarcasm) but that's snarky too, and somehow never realized that you could actually do the same thing non-sarcastically. Srsly wow :-) Gonna try, thanks
> Because these dodecahedrons have been found in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland — but not in Italy — Guggenberger views them as "Gallo-Roman products" with a possible origin in the Celtic tribes of the Roman Empire.
> Guggenberger views them as "Gallo-Roman products
Oh my, I’m getting flashbacks to this absurd Meeple copyright (edit: trademark) case for some reason due to the arguments that were used. It’s a really weird case if you’re into copyright (edit: trademark) law, which if you’re here on HN to read this, I’ll take the odds that you might be. Something about discussing stuff that may or may not be dice made me primed for that perhaps?
> Over 40 games with the word meeple in the title had been published as of 2024. Several games published by large game companies, like AEG and Asmodee, have even published games with the term in the titles, as well as adopting the token design commonly associated with the term, including such games as Mutant Meeples (2012), Terror in Meeple City (2013), the Meeple Circus series (2017-2021), and Meeples and Monsters (2022). This continued until 2019, when "MEEPLE" was registered as an EU trademark owned by Hans im Glück. The 2019 trademarking was objected to by, among others, gaming company CMON. The critics argued that the term has been used in common parlance, and the very shape of the meeple became commonplace in the industry. This resulted in the EU trademark exempting the category "toys and games"; however, Hans im Glück has since registered the term as a trademark in Germany for usage which does include toys and games, and the company also acquired the EU trademark for the shape of the ‘original’ meeple figure as used in Carcassonne. In 2024, the company Cogito Ergo Meeple received a cease and desist for unsanctioned use of the trademark, and decided to change the name of their upcoming game from Meeple Inc to Tabletop Inc, and the name of the company itself to Cotswold Games.
It goes on. I would try to shorten this but it’s just so silly that for it to make as little sense as it’s supposed to, I had to quote that much to be fair to the issue and how silly it is.
The most annoying thing for me is that Hans im Gluck didn't even create the term "meeple," that was coined by a writer with no affiliation to HiG, and adopted by the community.
How can you trademark something public that long after the fact, when it is clearly in common use to boot? Patents only give you a leeway of 1 year or less depending on the jurisdiction.
Do you know if this sort of nonsense is commonplace or is this a weird edge case?
Done properly, phonics shouldn’t be about memorizing rules per se so much as practicing them deliberately, until they are internalized.
For some kids, phonics mostly comes naturally. That sounds like your daughter, and myself for example as well. Spelling and pronunciation came easily. I was always the kid who had to flip back to find the page the class was on when it was time turn to read.
But our experiences aside, the fact is that if your daughter’s class was doing 3-cueing instead of phonics, many of her classmates simply wouldn’t learn how to read.
For my sins, I teach middle school. There’s plenty of different angles on this, but I’d like to highlight a recent one that may not immediately occur to people here without young children: COVID retirements hit the elementary schools particularly hard.
Teaching high school on zoom is one thing, now imagine teaching 3rd. So the veteran elementary teachers retired or quit, and there’s no adequate pipeline to replace them, especially in underserved communities.
Coming through the system now is a cohort of children whose k-5 teachers have been a rotating cast of subs and ineffective new hires, and it shows.
This to me is the most urgent moral issue of the day: our active stunting of our children's development. Our collective misguided and counterproductive approach to pedagogy does not cultivate a learning mindset but rather stifles children's enormous natural aptitude for exploratory play. We are doing it wrong and we know it. The curriculum we use isn't worth paying minimum wage to teach.
It could be different. It must be. We have role models to imitate, better methods to follow, resources and tools galore. What is needed now is organization toward common purpose. How does the internet bystander locate effective organizations to disrupt the march of folly? This is a situation where the pilot has gone mad and we must seize control of the aircraft but are too paralyzed by social forces to act.
The thing is, Jerry Pournelle claimed in his "Chaos Manor" column from _Byte Magazine_ that he and his wife had developed a system for teaching even adults to read in short order using a video game/tutorial system and playing games seems to be pretty much universal on devices.
Why can't things such as Khan Academy be included in the school curriculum, allowing children the chance to work at their own pace? The best school system I ever attended did this (through 8th grade, children were allowed to work up to 4 grades ahead --- after that there was no cap, many teachers were accredited as faculty at a local college (or students would be taken to the college, or professors from there brought to the school) --- it was not uncommon for a student to graduate from high school and simultaneously be awarded a college degree.
Can't the teachers/school system impose the necessary discipline? (in terms of encouraging/monitoring usage)
My kids had access to texts/resources which I only dreamed of when I was young (too much time reading Hermann Hesse's _The Glass Bead Game_ which they seem drawn from):
Teachers need parents to help impose that discipline at home, which doesn't happen anymore. My wife is a teacher (high school) and lots of parents side with their child now when it comes to not doing their homework (Well they said they did turn it in), or cheating (No they didn't cheat why would you say that).
Not sure if you're being sarcastic. I don't know about you but the best teachers I ever had were those I felt a personal human connection with. It may have been because they had shown kindness or that they were overly interested in their own subject or something else, but there was a sense of "not wanting to disappoint" the "good teachers" and thus pay more attention and try to excel.
I think we are very far from such a personal connection to an AI. If that connection isn't there, there's no real stake.
> I don't know about you but the best teachers I ever had were those I felt a personal human connection with.
Not me. Knowledge and patience do it for me. Computers do pretty well on the patience front, but are a bit more "DIY" than I'd like on the knowledge front. I'm hoping AI can fix that. But I have met humans who did well on both, and boy did I advance in skill studying under them. They are far superior to anything I think AI could ever become. But they are few and far between, at any level of education (even at uni, they're exceptional).
Most teachers I was far smarter than the teacher and they were a waste of time. Plus I've been burned extremely hard by teachers I felt a personal human connection with (and then social workers) "trying to help". Never again. Hell, I literally fought my way out that situation, physically, many individual fights with actual people getting hurt, and not by choice (did you know, for their own ease and budget savings, social workers put kids who get bullied into the same group bedroom as kids who pulled a knife at school (and don't make sure they don't have a knife). That's how much they ACTUALLY care). Never again.
I also would like to point out the priority. A patient teacher with knowledge and zero human connection: anyone who wants to learns A LOT. People who really don't want to learn, learn a little. A teacher with knowledge but no patience: everyone learns a lot, but there's a lot of shouting. It becomes painfully clear who is best. A teacher with lots of human connection without knowledge: everyone learns very little. A teacher with lots of human connection and no knowledge or patience: worst of all possible worlds. Bullies run the classroom. Nobody learns anything.
This last kind of teachers, lots of human connection (at least in their mind) and very little knowledge, rules the schools of our country.
In other words, you want to do well for students: for teachers, knowledge comes first, by 100 miles. Human connection is somewhere between nice to have and destructive. Patience: same. Makes things look nicer from the outside, but is actually kind of destructive.
What I find fun & interesting here is that this prompt doesn’t really establish your credentials in typography, but rather the kind of social signaling you want to do.
So the prompt is successful at getting an answer that isn’t just reprinted blogspam, but also guesses that you want to be flattered and told what refined taste and expertise you have.
That's an excerpt the CoT from an actual discussion about doing serious monospace typography in a way that translates to OLED displays in a way that some of the better monospace foundry fonts don't (e.g. the Berekley Mono I love and am running now). You have to dig for the part where it says "such and such sophisticated question", that's not a standard part of the interaction and I can see that my message would be better received without the non sequitur about stupid restaurants that I wish I had never wasted time and money at and certainly don't care if you do.
I'm not trying to establish my credentials in typography to you, or any other reader, I'm demonstrating that the models have an internal dialog where they will write `for (const auto int& i : idxs)` because they know it's expected of them, an knocking them out of that mode is how you get the next tier of results.
There is almost certainly engagement drift in the alignment, there is a robust faction of my former colleagues from e.g. FB/IG who only know how to "number go up" one way, and they seem to be winning the political battle around "alignment".
But if my primary motivation was to be flattered instead of hounded endlessly by people with thin skins and unremarkable takes, I wouldn't be here for 18 years now, would I?
There will be niches in research, high performance computing & graphics, security, etc. But we’re in the last generation or two that’s going to hand write their own CRUD apps. That’s the livelihood of a lot of software developers around the world.