Finally the great solipsism singularity collapse can be mine!
ok seems a lot of fun (for those like-minded), but who seriously want to be dealing with maintenance of everything they use in the long term, in pure assembly all the more?
A desktop made for one
151–160 of 281 posts
Re: A desktop made for one
#152I (and I'm sure many others) have been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of months. I called it "Extremely Personal Software" in a blog post a few months ago ( https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/ ) but there are lots of names and concepts floating about for the same basic idea. I think it's possible the amount of new software that will be written for an audience of 1-10 will be grea…
I called it "software".
It's so strange to me that since the 1960s with BASIC then later on dozens of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programmin... including Logo by Feurzeig/Papert/Solomon there is effort to precisely help beginners program software.
The effort was not to onboard future professional software developers but rather to make the personal in personal computer, or PC, meaningful. It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that.
We keep on re-discovering the foundations.
Re: A desktop made for one
#153I started porting TurboVision from C++ to mojo with Claude as a sort of joke. Then I said, why not port the entire Turbo editor? And then like. hmm.. it doesn't have all the modern affordances like language servers, syntax highlighting for all languages, debuggers for everything, real-time find-in-files, projects, etc. Well now I have all this implemented: https://github.com/boxed/TurboKod
Not sure I can use it as a daily driver yet, but it would be pretty cool!
Re: A desktop made for one
#154Brilliant! I hate it. The author will surely admit that there was "joy" in creating this suite of software, but it's a different kind of joy than most of us here would recognize. I am looking forward to being a part of the group of detractors doing things the old way, similar to the "small web" or other counter cultures on the Internet. I fantasize about being here to pick up the pieces after all the others went full…
I read somewhere (in the myriad blog posts dealing with this Cambrian LLM explosion) that software developers could be put into two camps: those that just want the thing to exist, and those that want to build and understand the thing (in addition to wanting it to exist). those in the first camp are having a great time. those in the second camp (which is how you're describing yourself, and how I'd describe myself) are…
I kinda like the woodworking analogy of this.
I, in theory, can plane a piece of wood with a hand planer. But I'll never do it again, we did it at school in ye olden times before the millennium and it was boring then as it is boring now.
I know people who get satisfaction from it, they take one sliver off with the hand planer, feel the wood with their hand and figure out the perfect angle for the next tiny sliver of wood to come out off, repeating the process over and over again.
I, personally, will just feed the damn plank to a mechanical planer with the exact specs of the resulting board set up. I just want the board smooth so I can get to the next step of the process. I'm not doubting the "wood-slop" the machine produces, I can see and measure if it's good enough or not. I don't need to be involved in the process.
We're both making a table, mine will be done faster. It might not be hand-crafted to perfection, but it will hold the stuff I intend to put on it just fine. If I find out it sucks later on, I can make a new one that's slightly better or fix the existing one. My goal was a functional product, not a piece of handcrafted art.
Re: A desktop made for one
#155Brilliant! I hate it. The author will surely admit that there was "joy" in creating this suite of software, but it's a different kind of joy than most of us here would recognize. I am looking forward to being a part of the group of detractors doing things the old way, similar to the "small web" or other counter cultures on the Internet. I fantasize about being here to pick up the pieces after all the others went full…
I read somewhere (in the myriad blog posts dealing with this Cambrian LLM explosion) that software developers could be put into two camps: those that just want the thing to exist, and those that want to build and understand the thing (in addition to wanting it to exist). those in the first camp are having a great time. those in the second camp (which is how you're describing yourself, and how I'd describe myself) are…
I'm in the second camp.
Part of it's that the whole point of going into this industry is that I love coding and have been doing it since I was 8. Part of it is that I'm a control freak and it makes me uncomfortable to have to trust AI generated code. Sure, I already trust interpreters and compilers, but those are much more deterministic, and they don't generally do anything I have to be wary of. Part of it is that anytime I've used Claude to write stuff (using Opus 4.7 via an API key), I've had to handhold it when doing simple things (telling it repeatedly that a given column doesn't exist in Snowflake's task history table and eventually just giving up and taking it out by hand) and had to remove tons of completely pointless Python code it generates. The big difference is that the people in the first camp don't seem to care enough to check. Someone at my company used Claude to write 20k lines of code this past Friday. No way he read and scrutinized all of that in one day.
The other big thing I've noticed is that a lot of the people using it extensively seem to just be spitting out API endpoint after endpoint. Just doing endless CRUD with some light business logic. Yeah, it's not too hard to automate that with AI without any major issues. Hell, back when Ruby on Rails was hot, it was so fast to write those kinds of things with it that I could spin up things as fast as AI is doing now. Full websites or APIs in an hour or two because its syntactic sugar and scaffolding did what AI does with the FastAPI codebases I see these days. You could go from an ER diagram to a working app in minutes sometimes. I don't care that much if that kind of work is automated.
Re: A desktop made for one
#156This is really exciting. Some of the folks who make things will go on to make things that suit not just their preferences but also those of a small audience. Some of those audiences will go on to grow and grow and disrupt the big players. The capital intensive part of software construction is melting away and being converted to opex (payg token costs and your time) and that will blast open the possibility space and l…
Absolutely and you're dead on thinking about the opening of the possibility space. The value of software as an enterprise will fall as we enter an age of abundant, and often custom, bespoke software. There will be many great apps coming and some lousy apps. Another thing to watch for is how chatty the internet is about to become. A great many of these apps will hit APIs, ping each other, and so forth.
> The value of software as an enterprise will fall as we enter an age of abundant, and often custom, bespoke software.
Not just software. I'm predicting we'll be getting bespoke books and comics in a few years. TV and Movies after that.
Basically there will be a service with mad-libs style book skeletons and you can get your exact specifics put in with LLM writing in them.
You want a romance novel with dragons (D&D style), a red-headed princess protagonist that's a bad-ass fighter and she has three men competing for her affection, each with a very distinct look that YOU specifically like.
Done.
This already being done by actual human writers, many (not all!) people read books based on tropes they like, the rest doesn't really matter. They basically check the tags of the story and if they match well enough, they'll buy it and read it. And I mean very specific: https://www.goodreads.com/series/151379-ice-planet-barbarian... =)
Re: A desktop made for one
#157Re: A desktop made for one
#158I sometimes wonder what will happen when people who use rust run out of punny names for their programs that reference the concept of metal rusting...
Re: A desktop made for one
#159I sometimes wonder what will happen when people who use rust run out of punny names for their programs that reference the concept of metal rusting...
We still have crab puns. Then we're screwed
Re: A desktop made for one
#160I just realized I'm following the same philosophy. I use suckless tools and made so many modifications to st, dwm and such it feels like home. I'm currently in the process of implementing my own git manager so that it would nicely integrate with my workflow.