Maybe it's time for physicists to switch to agile? Don't try to solve the theory of the Universe at once; that's the waterfall model. Try to come up with just a single new equation each sprint!
While I consider Uncle Bob a bad programmer, there is some merit to this article. This paragraph was particularly prescient:
>But before you run out of fingers and toes, you have created languages that contain dozens of keywords, hundreds of constraints, a tortuous syntax, and a reference manual that reads like a law book. Indeed, to become an expert in these languages, you must become a language lawyer (a term that was invented during the C++ era.)
And this was written before Swift gained bespoke syntax for async-await, actors, some SwiftUI crap, actor isolation, and maybe other things, honestly, I don't even bother to follow it anymore.
I agree, but i think his point applies more to haskell than, say, kotlin. There is a balance between type strictness and productivity and if you go too far in one direction you get horribly buggy code and if you go too far in the other direction you have a language that is grindingly slow to develop in.
Another thing I dont think a lot of people appreciate either is that types have sharp diminishing returns catching the kind of bugs tests are good at catching and vice versa.
These are the same people who a few years ago made blogposts about their elaborate Notion (or Roam "Research") setups, and how it catalyzed them to... *checks notes* create blogposts about their elaborate Notion setups!
Quite literally, the previous post on this blog is from 2024 talking about what a revolution the Rabbit R1 is. We all know how that turned out. This is why I give every new trendy developer tool a few months to see if it’s really a good thing or just hype.
Maybe that's why these users go crazy over openclaw, they may need or yearn for such a tool. I don't but that doesn't mean there isn't a market for it though.
There isn’t a market. OP wrote that Rabbit R1 post after seeing the release video (according to a comment on this link, their blog post says otherwise) and immediately called it a ”milestone in the evolution of our digital organ”. Their judgement is obviously nonexistent.
Something tells me they never even downloaded OpenClaw before writing this blog post. It’s probably an aspirational vision board type post their life coach told them to write because they kept talking about OepnClaw during their sessions, and the life coach got tired of their BS.
Midwits love this kind of stuff. Movie critics heap praise on forgettable movies to get their names and quotes on the movie poster. Robert Scoble made an entire career in tech bloviation hyping the current thing and got invited to the coolest parties. LinkedIn is a word salad conveyor belt of this kind of useless nonsense.
These people are always swarming the new shiny gadgets thinking it will finally unfuck their miserable life while not noticing that the chase is why they've been miserable this whole time. What they need is 6 month in a cabin in the middle of nowhere without internet
There seem to be a lot of posts like this as of late. I truly can't decide if the authors actually believe what they've written or if it's some preposition of themselves to be included in the hype cycle of AI FOMO or what. It feels very cringe as I read it. As if to say OpenClaw has somehow been such a pivotal change in their life, so monumental, that it's an epiphany that has changed them forever. Maybe it's just the fact that I've been surrounded by automation for many years and also using it with agents or LLMs for the past couple that I just don't feel like this is a true sentiment of what actually exists. It feels placed, it feels targeted and it feels like a huge lie. I guess you could also call it low effort marketing.
I’m working on a product related to “sensemaking”. And I’m using this abstract, academic term on purpose to highlight the emotional experience, rather than “analysis” or “understanding”.
It is a constant lure products and tools have to create the feeling of sensemaking. People want (pejorative) tools that show visualizations or summaries, without thinking about the particular visual/summary artifact is useful, actionable or accurate!
Fascinating. If you're not aware of Jesse Schell's book on game design, even if your work is unrelated to games, I highly recommend taking a look. Would love to hear more about your work / product.
They (or their devs) are not at fault that some people honestly believe you can't be as productive or consistent without a "thought garden" or whatever.
True, but it does have the cottage industry of influencers selling their vault skeleton and template/plugin packs for unlocking maximum productivity… same as notion. And Evernote, to an extent, before that.
Yeah, but so does many other good things. Exercise is generally a good thing, so is decent quality food, meditation, philosophy, healthy relationships, etc. Those are things that also have a cottage industry of influencers who are selling their “thing” about how you should do it. The problem there is the influencers and their culture not the food or working out, etc.
It only becomes problematic if the “good” thing also indulges in the hubris of influencers because they view it as good marketing. Like when an egg farm leans in “orange yolk”
Yeah, after getting burnt out on Evernote I just use basic markdown files for my notes. I never bother with anymore features beyond "write to file" or "grep directory for keywords" because I know I'll personally not benefit from them. The act of writing notes is what is useful to me, retrieving the notes are hardly ever useful.
I don’t know, I’ve been involved in computer science for several decades now and cellular automata hasn’t really lost its charm. Seems like a cool thing to dedicate your life to!
His last 30 years can be summarized as: "Look at these pictures of cellular automata! I predict that the world can be described with cellular automata like these!"
Given that he’s known for priority disputes and legal action over who did what and when, that “well-accomplished” bit should have an asterisk next to it.
He is. But he's also convinced that cellular automata will replace the standard model as the foundation of physics, and that he will therefore be known to history as the third founder of physics after Newton and Einstein.
It's his life. I can certainly look at many other lives and say they are lot of more wasted than his. Heck, he already created Mathematica, if he wanted to go and lay on the beach for the rest of this life, it would still be a lot less wasted than what many other people have accomplished in related domains.
Yeah, I don't like his arrogance, it's very grating to read. And perhaps nothing revolutionary is going to end up as a result of all the play with cellular automata but it's still interesting. Not as a rule, but sometimes discoveries in history are made by wild and wacky directions of research.
In the 1980's TV ads in Uruguay were really simple. Some were just a static bi-colour image of a shoe or a coat, some text, and a voice would say "buy shoes at such shop at such address".
I guess that was at the same time the low point of marketing and also its most honest stage.
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