Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

Post by threethirtytwo » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #245

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an absurd statement. There are many complex undertakings in sport where even the very best get better with practice and can't tell you why. In fact, the ones who think they can tell you why are the one's to be most skeptical of. You are just making stuff up or regurgitating material from a pop science book.

They can't tell you (not everyone is eloquent), but they sure know why. Struggling to put something in word is not the same as not knowing.

Post by baggy_trough » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 3:10 PM UTC

lowsong wrote: post #308

baggy_trough wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population. Increases from here means only a small percentage of the richest people can afford it. This is an absurd claim. There are many things the majority of the population spends money on that cost more than this.

I'm going to take your comment at face value, and I'm also going to assume that you're US-based. You need to take a step back and look at the economic reality of the majority of Americans today. Many live paycheck-to-paycheck, even those with "middle class" incomes. For many a $200 one-off bill is debilitating, yet alone a recurring subscription. If you don't know that, you have a dangerously narrow view of the econo…

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

csallen wrote: post #171

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That list cherry picks all the successful cases where the technology improved while ignoring the many, many others where it didn't and the technology improved no further. That's dishonest. It isn't even a good job of cherry picking: we never got mainstream supersonic passenger aircraft after the Concorde because aerospace technology hasn't advanced far enough to make it economically viable and the decrease in progres…

You're not factoring in the list of constraints I provided. There's no broad social acceptance of supersonic flight because it creates incredibly loud sonic booms that the public doesn't want to deal with. And despite that, it's still a bad counterexample, as companies continue to innovate in this area e.g. Boom Supersonic. At best you can say, "It's taking longer than expected," but my point was never that it will h…

Post by zellyn » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

lalitmaganti wrote: post #218

zellyn wrote: post #123

Does SQLite not have a lemon parser generated for its SQL? When I ported pikchr (also from the SQLite project) to Go, I first ported lemon, then the grammar, then supporting code. I always meant to do the same for its SQL parser, but pikchr grammar is orders of magnitude simpler.

When I refer to "extracting sources from the SQLite codebase" a big part of that was indeed referring to compiling Lemon and executing it against a custom implementation of parse.y [1]. The problem comes from how SQLite's upstream parse.y works. Becuase it doesn't actually generate the parse tree, instead generating the bytecode directly, the intepretation of any node labelled "id" or "nm" is buried inside the source…

Post by grey-area » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:13 PM UTC

csallen wrote: post #219

mjr00 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's all very true, but what you're missing is that the proportion of codebases that need this is shrinking relative to the total number of codebases. There's an incredible proliferation of very small, bespoke, simple, AI-coded apps, that are nonetheless quite useful. Most are being created by people who have never written a line of code in their life, who will do no maintenance, and who will not give two craps h…

This is where I get into much more speculative land, but I think people are underestimating the degree to which AI assistant apps are going to eat much of the traditional software industry. The same way smart phones ate so many individual tools, calculators, stop watches, iPods, etc. It takes a long time for humanity to adjust to a new technology. First, the technology needs to improve for years. Then it needs to be…