Having a background in fine art (and also knew Aral many years ago!), this prose resonates heavily with me.
Most of the OP article also resonated with me as I bounce back and forth between learning (consuming, thinking, pulling, integrating new information) to building (creating, planning, doing) every few weeks or months. I find that when I'm feeling distressed or unhappy, I've lingered in one mode or the other a little too long. Unlike the OP, I haven't found these modes to be disrupted by AI at all, in fact it feels like AI is supporting both in ways that I find exhilarating.
I'm not sure OP is missing anything because of AI per se, it might just be that they are ready to move their focus to broader or different problem domains that are separate from typing code into an IDE?
For me, AI has allowed me to probe into areas that I would have shied away from in the past. I feel like I'm being pulled upward into domains that were previously inaccessible.
I use Claude on a daily basis, but still find myself frequently hand-writing code as Claude just doesn't deliver the same results when creating out of whole cloth.
Claude does tend to make my coarse implementations tighter and more robust.
I admittedly did make the transition from software only to robotics ~6 years ago, so the breadth of my ignorance is still quite thrilling.
If you think it's bad now, the early days of the web were absolutely filled with scumbag grifters who made small fortunes hiring contractors and then refusing to pay.
Many of them disappeared in the y2k dot com bust, but then seem to have reappeared in SF after 2008.
In the late 1990's, my second ever Flash app development client stiffed me on a $10k invoice.
He finally figured out 6 months later that he didn't have the source material to make changes and paid the full invoice in order to get it.
So I took precautions with the next client. It was a small agency that was serving a much larger business.
We were on 30 days net payment terms and I submitted the invoice when the project was done.
They didn't pay and within a couple weeks of gentle reminders, they stopped responding.
I smiled.
Exactly 30 days from the due date, I got a panicked call shrieking about their largest client website being down and did I have anything to do with it?!
I asked them what the hell they were talking about, they don't own a website. They never paid for any websites. I happen to own a website and I would be happy to give them access to it if they want to submit a payment.
They started to threaten legal nonsense, and how they had a "no time bombs clause in the contract."
I laughed because my contract had no such clause. If they signed such a contract with the client, that's not my problem.
I told them I wouldn't release the source files until the check cleared my bank, which could be weeks. A cashier's check arrived that morning and their source files were delivered.
By the end of it, the folks at the agency thanked me because that client wasn't planning to pay them and they hired me for other work (which, they had to prepay for).
Of course I don't know about the OP, but I'd bet the company was trying to stiff that contractor on their last check.
It’s incredibly sad to watch Google abandon the values that inspired so much trust and belief that there is a better way to build a company.
Long time Pixel user here who has always believed the story that Apple has the closed, but refined, higher quality experience and Google has the slightly freer, but coarser UX.
I was convinced to make the switch this year and the Apple iPhone 17 Pro + whatever iOS version is, by far the worst phone I’ve ever owned.
Photos are worse, low light is worse, macros are worse, the UI is laggy, buggy and crashes.
The keyboard and autosuggest is shockingly bad.
Incredibly popular apps on iOS (YT, X, etc) are just as bad and often worse.
iMessage is a psyop. The absolute worst messaging app in history with zero desktop access for non-Mac users?!
If you’re on Android, and especially pixel, please know that Apple has completely given up and no longer executes at the level you remember from 10-15 years ago.
The whole software world is shit now. The foundations were stable decades ago. Like Windows kernel, WinAPI, .NET, WPF, Linux kernel. But end user software is so terrible. Windows 11 with ads and unhelpful AI. macOS which is a bit less terrible, but still too bloated. Linux with its eternal changes between X, Wayland, Alsa, Pipewire, Pulseaudio, sysvinit, systemd, and endless choices. Both iOS and Android are terrible. iOS was perfect 10 years ago, it's absolute clownfest now. I would blame AI vibe coders, but it started before. I don't know who to blame. Why can't we just build solid minimal non-bloated OS that will last for decades without major rewrites. We've got so good foundations but so terrible end product.
It is true that this app is more hostile than asking someone to keep it down, but people should beware of either approach, as it's not unusual for the same assholes who are comfortable blasting their audio in public spaces to also be comfortable getting into a fist fight.
I have personally been threatened on multiple occasions because I asked someone to turn down (or turn off) their volume while watching videos on their phone in public.
In one instance, I was in a doctor's office waiting room and a rather large, otherwise normal-looking man (likely in his late fifties) was watching videos at full volume while 4-5 of us were sitting quietly. We were all annoyed by him and exchanging looks, so I politely asked him to mute the video or watch it outside and he stood up and started threatening to fight me in a doctor's office waiting room!
In my anecdotal experience in various tier 2 USA cities (i.e., not NY, SF, LA, etc), Gen-Xers and Boomers seem to be the worst offenders and also surprisingly, the most belligerent when confronted.
If you're going to try either approach (this app, or asking), please do not be surprised if you find yourself in a rapidly escalating confrontation that may quickly result in physical violence.
Sometimes, this calculus is more than worth it, sometimes it's not, but just don't think it can't happen.
Current branch without bloat is to cat .git/HEAD, and if that didn't exist, run git symbolic-ref HEAD. The first is faster and works in the common case where you're in the top of a git repo. In either case, run it through ${branch##*/} to strip down to just the current branch.
I have used this for a long time, never understood how people would put all of git in between them and the next prompt.
Found shmig and it’s been really fantastic.
https://github.com/mbucc/shmig
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