Great, more RTO mandates.

Because these data centers put enormous pressure on local utilities, pay 0 dollars back into the local economy, and get tax breaks. Often they are facilitated by backroom deals with local politicians. This plays both into anxieties surrounding AI and general corruption.

I think this is largely overstated.

Despite tax breaks and infrastructure requirements, these data centers still represent a massive windfall for the cities where they are built.

The problem is most people don't feel a personal connection to an increase in city revenue. Most cities are not going to pass it along as a tax cut - they're going to disperse it into parks and roads and schools and salaries.

Add to that that they are (at least perceived to be) supporting AI, which the majority of people do not want, and data centers are physical faceless embodiments of big tech corporations, which people are increasingly against.

Files became an implementation detail.

It's mobile devices not having user-facing files as first-class citizens. The mobile era started just as Dropbox started to solve a computer era problem. Bad timing.

I'd argue Dropbox became as big as they are thanks to mobile taking off.

In a computer only world there are myriads of other solutions, elegant or not.

Most work computers were permanently plugged into network shared folders, and would have over the VPN access for on the road salesmen etc.

Home users mostly didn't care about cloud storage or shareable folders, those who did could get away with ftp (basically supported everywhere, like straight in explorer windows)

Dropbox flourished because most people got a second device, always connected, but with no decent file management. Many of us used Dropbox not even for sync but just to properly handle files.

They were a transitional technology.

>The mobile era started just as Dropbox started to solve a computer era problem.

I still can't wrap my head around how people find their files in the non-filesystem world. Whenever I need to work with files I take out my laptop.

Even before mo lies people would say “I saved it in word”. Even if it was written to a floppy or usb drive.

They didn’t have the concept of files

The average computer user in 2000 was far more computer literate than the average one in 2010, and things have gone downhill ever since.

So it's not just me. I'm glad, I feel weird that I have to save links to every Google doc and every internal confluence page because there's no proper search across these.

Especially in a filesystem I know where I placed something, but not always the title, so even if the search function was ok, which it mostly isn't, having to know the wording used for the title is really inconvenient.

Is this still the case? I have a "Files" app on my iPhone that shows me files and folders stored on my device, I can save/load files from most apps (that have a concept of files) and it's even integrated with iCloud so when I save a file to my phone's Downloads, I can access it from my Mac (and vice-versa).

I don't know about Android but on iOS I feel like we've had a simple and ubiquitous user-facing file system for a while. I use it all the time.

I suppose it might not be top of mind for most users because it wasn't there for so long.

Android literally has the Linux file system, although without root only the "home" directory is accessible. But within there is a Downloads folder, Documents folder, and all the other folders you'd expect from a home directory

With root you have access to the entire linux-style system directory

Android does, on iDevices it is still a kind of afterthought.

That's why one cannot "use" a mobile device wirhout references to the mothers of Google and Apple "engineers".

Because we value leadership over craftsmanship. Ever since people like Ford showed that it was not individual skills but optimized systems that make the biggest corporate machines with the most potential for profit, we have prioritized one over the other.

Does it do anything novel? Looks the same as any other basic stock ticker app. Most of the popular ones are made by companies with massive marketing budgets.

We had a private network on campus circa 2010. Streaming was up and coming but not huge. Gnutella was great on the gigabit intranet. You could download entire HD movies in minutes where conventional torrents may be hours.

Gnutella is a mild obsession for me. The way that the protocol was designed and also the way that it saw a mainstream adoption has always fascinated me. For anyone reading this thread who is curious, I wrote a functional client this year for fun: https://github.com/RickCarlino/gnutella-bun-client/

It took a ton of work to keep the network clean. I did the gnutella.wego site back in the day. Gnutella was made when napster had 50 users and we all told him he was fcked. So gnutella was made to not use servers. Justin gave napster the code for song length and such to integrate with Napster.

I remember the early gnutella releases and we'd use the search history as a chatroom for the first like 24 hours before it got too saturated ;)

Have you blogged about this or written it down? I would love to hear more about this piece of history and it seems that the history is slowly fading.

Napster came along to the nullsoft channel one day and shared the app he was working on. We all played with it and offered suggestions. Told him he was be sued out of existence. From that came gnutella and waste. Something was spun out with me and friends as infrasearch and sold to sun. Wilson Sonsini did a good thing on peer-to-peer back in the day too. They were our lawyers. Sucked us dry.

Oh man infrasearch. With Gene Kan right? Was trying to revive xcf at Berkeley with some friends.

Yes, Gene, Justin, Shawn all somewhat knew one another. Street raced and hung out online. I started infrasearch with Gene. He also did an open source shoutcast server.

Bleh AI card art. One of the best part of card games is the ability to showcase high quality illustrators.

Thank you for the feedback. Long-term I'd like to able to hire designers, but for demo purposes it wasn't feasible.

I would rather see MS Paint art like Slay the Spire than ai slop art. I think you could have done ai art for a demo but it's so obviously ai, it immediately turned me off. And may turn others off too.

I build stuff that people use every day (judging by the flood of tickets I'll get if I ship a bug), but my public github profile looks like a ghost account. 99% of what I build is proprietary, and is either in a private or self hosted repo.

I'm not sure scanning public GitHub is a great way to identify "do nothing" developers.

Hosting and public are different. This measure is like saying unless you are painting public murals you haven't made real art. The take is just so wrong it's hard to know where to start.

Prompt engineering is mostly structured thought. Can you write a lab report? Can you describe the who, what, when, where, and why of a problem and its solution?

You can get it to work with one off commands or specific instructions, but I think that will be seen as hacks, red flags, prompt smells in the long term.

If I could do those things, I wouldn't be using an LLM to write for me, now would I?

You don’t let the LLM write prise for you, you get it to translate natural language into code somewhat coherently.

In this instance I'm assuming most of the "goblin" references were in prose rather than in source code, so the goal of this particular prompt edit was directed toward making the prose better.

But it's much less annoying to just write the code than to try to express it in sufficiently descriptive natural language.

Converse for me so ymmv.

skill issue

Where ya headed?