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Craft software that makes people feel something

rapha.land

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Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#41

Post by jesse__ »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #17

Kinda tangential but in the advent of AI I feel like there won’t be a niche for “handcrafted software”. When quartz watches came up the makers of mechanical watches struggled. Quartz watches are cheaper, more accurate in many cases and servicing is usually restricted to replacing a battery. However some people appreciate a good mechanical watch (and the status symbol aspect of course) and nowadays the mechanical watc…

This is a bad analogy.

> more accurate in many cases

It's laughable that LLMs can be considered more accurate than human operators at the macro level. Sure, if I ask a search bot the date Notre Dame was built, it'll get it right more often than me, but if I ask it to write even a simple heap memory allocator, it's going to vomit all over itself.

> Nobody [...] will ever care if the software was written by people or a bot, as long as it works

Yeah.. wake me up when LLMs can produce even nominally complex pieces software that are on-par with human quality. For anything outside of basic web apps, we're a long way off.

Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#42

Post by mirashii »

mghackerlady wrote: post #36
pedrozieg wrote: post #15

There’s something refreshing about explicitly saying “this editor exists to delight me, and that’s enough”. The default script now is that every side project should either be open-sourced or turned into a SaaS, even if that pressure is exactly what kills the weirdness that made it interesting in the first place. Some of the best tools I’ve used felt like they started as someone’s private playground that only later go…

I'm very much for people open-sourcing their projects in terms of releasing the source code. Just don't accept patches or whatever, keep the repos closed

Unfortunately, and I think to great overall harm, GitHub does not let you disable many of the collaboration features. I was just having a discussion today with someone who would be fine open sourcing their code, but is uninterested in any contributions, questions, or community interaction. Since GitHub won’t allow that, their options are to host it somewhere themselves where nobody will see it, or just don’t publish it, which is ultimately what happened.

Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#46

Post by queuebert »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Love how the mouse trail effect is using O(1) memory no matter how fast you move the mouse so it won't blow up your browser.

Genuine question: What else would it do? The mouse trail is a history of coordinates, so that should be linear, right?

Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#47

Post by [deleted] »

jesse__ wrote: post #39

> created solely for myself; I never had the intention of making it [...] mainstream This is a habit I picked up from two people I respect greatly as programmers; Casey Muratori and Jonathan Blow. Those guys both built their own little lands; Jon went as far as building a new language, a 3D game engine in that language, and has multiple game titles in-flight in the engine. I have a handful of projects that are simila…

[deleted]

Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#48

Post by mcny »

logicchains wrote: post #38
mghackerlady wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel bad for the poor souls that are forced to work on software like that. It surely can't be fun

They might be sadists having the time of their lives. There are few better opportunities in life to get away consequence free with causing pain to a huge amount of people, than working on Microsoft Teams. Not only get away with it consequence free; they're even getting paid for it!

I have not met a single softie who defended the decision to make ctrl shift c the shortcut to start a call in a group chat when ctrl shift v is paste unformatted.

Especially given that the teams client doesn't allow disabling or editing keyboard shortcut.

Microsoft employees may be lazy but unlike Facebook employees (I refuse to call it meta), I don't think they are evil.

Re: Craft software that makes people feel something

#49

Post by devinprater »

Emacs and Emacspeak make me feel something. A lot of something. This kind of "playground" feeling where I can dive into a manual that's just sitting right there. The the entire Emacs is a manual. C-h m and boom, all keyboard commands for that mode are right, feaking, there. No hidden bullcrap, no patchwork HTML tables to drudge through, nothing. And if something doesn't work with Emacspeak, I can Codex it into working. Maybe. Enough to get what I want done, done.
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