Lately I've been going with 3. No response, people that have something important eventually follow up their lonely hello with their actual question/issue, the rest just forget about it I guess so the conversation never starts.
Yep. This is the way I’ve ended up handling it. I believe it has been established now that these interruptions in flow (context switching) have a cost in terms of time taken to refocus on a task. Minutes vs the few seconds it took to have that focus broken and clicking away into a single word DM.
And thats why you guys are working with computers and not people, cause that's pretty rude. What they are doing is only rude if they are aware that it annoys people. You response is rude nonetheless since it's a version of "that'll teach them" which is a pretty immature way of handling disagreements or conflicts.
A more mature way would be for "first offenders" to politely reply hi and help them with whatever they need and then when everything is done politely point out that asking directly would be better next time, perhaps with a link to some version of nohello.net. With "repeat offenders" sure, go ahead with what you are doing.
> And thats why you guys are working with computers and not people
In my experience, even the comically over the top people-persons will be curt to chatty people if they're swamped with a task that doesn't revolve around verbal ability.
They'll also bounce back to "they won't put down <tool> and talk to me" gossip about the nerds once their deadline pressure is released. But whateves, that's life.
If I were using email as a realtime chat service, sure. I mean personally I probably wouldn't but it's certainly not unreasonable.
Intentionally ignoring people or otherwise being difficult out of spite is immature and disrespectful. That said, I see no reason to sit and wait for a response. Wait until I'm free (if it was urgent he should have specified that), reply "hi", tab out, and the thread goes back on the stack with all the others. No special treatment one way or the other.
Is tab-h-i-CR-tab really so onerous? Personally it doesn't even interrupt my line of thought.
I don't get what this achieves since the whole reason they sent you "hello" is that they want a TCP handshake before they get on with it. So sending hello back just acks the message and they will proceed which is what they wanted.
The annoyance in TFA is that you have to do the handshake at all.
Actually, when you put it like that, sending 'hello' back might be the best thing you could do. They sent you a SYN, you send back and ACK, then the real conversation can begin.
I suddenly no longer agree with TFA. This makes way more sense to me in this light.
In what way is that better than "Hello. How do I do x?" If they never reply, that's of no practical difference from just sending "Hello" and not getting a reply.
In TCP, it's useful because it happens in a different layer of abstraction. Even then, QUIC was developed (partly) because it was realised there's no point waiting for the full SYN / SYN ACK / ACK before starting some of the higher-level exchange (although the early data transfer in QUIC is used for TLS initiation rather than application-level data).
It's better because X might take a while to write correctly, and you might want some assurance that you have the other person's full attention first before you even send that message. It's a commitment mechanism of sorts.
This doesn’t make sense to me. What does it matter if you have their attention first? It’s asynchronous communication. I find it so damn rude to demand my attention first before you begin typing out a long message. Like do you want me to watch the chat bubble animation while you type or something?
Yes, I do. Sometimes people want (more) synchronous communication despite the asynchronous medium. Among other things that helps guarantee a speedy response. A lot of people use asynchronicity as a way to simply avoid answering in a timely fashion, so framing it like this can make sense if you can't afford that.
In addition, seeing the chat bubbles appear moments after you finish your round is a good sign the other person isn't multitasking and letting their own attention get fractured.
I never found it rude to begin with, just not using the medium to its strengths. But this has me realizing maybe it's a deliberate way to eschew those strengths, for some purpose or another.
The relevance of TFA is that this only works if the initiating party is still connected, and to make matters worse there is no ERR_SOCKET_CLOSED returned by most chat clients if that party got distracted before seeing the ACK. Then minutes or hours later they get back "hey sorry, missed your reply, ${QUERY}"
when they could have just included `${QUERY}` in the initial send, or at least `framing(${QUERY})`.
Right, but the problem is that with async communication, you don't need a synchronous ack handshake.
Instead you can pipeline both messages: `[hello][are you coming to lunch with us?]`, and that's more convenient and efficient for the receiver and sender.
The problem that TFA is referring to is that context switching is very expensive for the receiver, so without pipelining, the receiver pays a huge cost just to send back the ack and then again to finally reply to the payload once it is sent. The receiver is asking that you send all messages; it prefers to buffer them.
The problem is that a lone "hi" isn't universally used that way, and doesn't provide enough detail even when it is. I have no problem with messages like "Hi, are you free for a quick chat? I'll be around for the next 20 minutes."
It opens a synchronous channel, setting social expectations for somewhat realtime responses. Most of the time I treat chat like "small email", so this is abhorrent.
> It opens a synchronous channel, setting social expectations for somewhat realtime responses.
But do you see how that is your choice? You can just type "hello", or a longer form of the same, and then go back to work. You can then check back in about an hour to see if they managed to describe what they are looking for.
You can always change yourself, while it is so much harder to change others that it is almost futile. The true source of your distress is not them saying hello, but your understanding of that social expectation of realtime responses.
> You can always change yourself, while it is so much harder to change others that it is almost futile.
This is a defeatist attitude.
Sure, there are some people who will refuse to change no matter what. But many—probably even most—people, if you explain that this is your preferred method of communication when they have a question for you to answer, will at least try to operate that way.
It is not a defeatist attitude. It is a winning attitude.
You told people how you operate and you simply stick to it.
The thing you change about yourself is that you stop caring about the supposed “social expectation” that by writing “hello” they “opened a a synchronous channel“ with “expectations for somewhat realtime responses”.
Now imagine that someone heard that you use messaging asyncronously and yet they still send you a simple “hello” with nothing else. You have two choices here. You can play their game, write a “hello” back and patiently wait as they type out what they need from you. OR you can type to them “hello. long time no see, how can I help you today?” And then immediately forget about them and return back to your work. In due time when you check again your messages (maybe in an hour, maybe in half an hour) you will see if they messaged you. Maybe they will say what they want by then, maybe not.
My point is that while you can tell politely to people the benefits of getting to the point you can’t force them to do so. On the other hand you have full control over your reaction to them not following your prefered communication style.
You can get angry, and waste your time waiting for them. Or you can stay cool, keep on working, and answer them on your schedule and on your terms politely and to the best of your abilities.
If you think what i say is defeatist attitude then probably you are misunderstanding my point. It is not about changing how you communicate, but changing about how much you care about the “expectation of realtime responses”.
I’ll do the same - when I get around to it, which might be an hour or two after it was sent.
If the person on the other end then decides to draw out the small talk with “how are you” etc, it might take a few days for them to get an answer to their actual question, but that’s on them, it doesn’t bother me. I get to messages when I get to them. If they aren’t of substance I don’t care.
it does not, some people don't understand it. I tried every trick and one guy was still sending his hello's because it was the way he communicated. I told him twice, literally, that he cannot just say hello and wait for me to reply, and he apologized and still didn't get it.
the only working option is to ignore such people, you cannot teach people with reasoning, it never works
If I'm feeling grumpy I don't respond, but if I have some patience left in the tank I'll use, "Hi, what's up?" which usually short-circuits the salutations.
My life hack is to ignore it completely and have several unread "hello" Teams messages from Indian dudes I never heard of. If I'm lucky they just never follow up.
Either they then reply AGAIN with "hello" (arghhh), or even worse, there is no reply, and I break asking what they want, and _maybe_ get a reply of "never mind, got it sorted" so I NEVER KNOW.
Mine is to respond immediately with a question that requires a long and technical answer that by the time they've finished writing has completely erased their question from their mind.
The whole "How are you?" ritual is quite possibly the most nonsensical thing about the Anglo cultures. Like, I get that the point is to feign polite interest in the other person. But then by asking this question with the expectation of the same formulaic reply "I'm fine!" (and confusion if the response is something else) - even if the other speaker is emphatically not fine - it literally does the opposite, making it clear that the way they actually feel doesn't matter.
I had a coworker who took this to the extreme. When they'd come up to anyone they'd say, without any pauses in-between: "Hi. How are you? So I wanted to tell you x, y, z [...]", not leaving any time to respond, even with the formulatic "I'm fine.". Really driving home that they're just reciting, without caring one bit how you feel.
Pretty overwhelming to me personally, but I could tell other coworkers were taken aback by it too.
It’s hard to overstate the pervasiveness of WhatsApp in some some countries. Where I’m from work, service hiring, costumer service, etc are all conducted through (and specially for small businesses only though) WhatsApp.
That's very true, in the same way that some countries seem to prefer using Facebook as "websites" for small businesses.
But this doesn't stop people from migrating their private interactions away from WhatsApp/Meta, by using using -as an example- Signal as their replacement app of choice where they can. The frictional cost of keeping WhatsApp for business interaction, and Signal for private interaction is fairly close to zero.
I think it’s more like people want to enjoy the view without having to learn how to climb, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, even if it cheapens the experience somewhat.
The cheapening of the experience is the whole point though. People are robbing themselves of the joy that can only come from putting yourself through hardship in pursuit of a goal.
It’s not a moral judgement, that’s just how humans are wired. The lows make the highs higher.
To continue this metaphor, a while back my girlfriend and I went to Machu Picchu. We were taking a bus to the summit, but there was a landslide near the bottom of the mountain so everybody had to climb most of the way up. This led to it being eerily empty until people started trickling in, which certainly made it a better experience than the normal tourist swarm would have been.
I can imagine AI art having a similar effect (creating a glut of images/logos/whatever that devalues ones made with care) but am hopeful that we'll get better at filtering the cream of the crop. In 5 years tons of things will have AI logos that would have been made by a graphic designer (or simply not made) in the past. That sucks for graphic designers who are out of a job, is good for people who get cheaper logos, and TBD for overall society who now has lots more "custom" logos etc to wade through.
This discussion reminds me of Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire advocating for not building roads in national parks to preserve the experience of true wilderness.
Obviously having roads is a great boon to a park's accessibility, and the ability of people with different mobility needs to appreciate nature. But it also made me thoughtful to imagine the feeling of wonder at seeing bridalveil fall after hiking for days into a roadless yosemite valley; how much more special and impressive it would seem after that journey?
This metaphorical tangent is pretty far removed from the original discussion, but how do you weigh the accessibility of a thing against how that accessibility changes its nature?
> People are robbing themselves of the joy that can only come from putting yourself through hardship in pursuit of a goal.
This is such an old man “I used to walk uphill both ways” take.
Not everybody has the TIME COST to pursue being an expert in art or code or whatever. But if they have an amazing idea and can now use AI to produce the idea then that is a beautiful thing!
For example: Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end. It would die in your head because most people cannot stop their life and dedicate a substantial amount of time, effort, and sacrifice to produce the single cartoon idea.
>Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end.
What's the point in having an idea for a cartoon in your head if an LLM can just write an infinite amount of cartoon ideas in a heartbeat, and probably a better one than you came up with.
Because it's your own? And previously that creativity of yours was hamstrung by your lack of ability in another domain (drawing), that the AI can help you with.
>> Having an idea for a cartoon used to be a dead end
But drawning a cartoon isn't very challenging. Most of my peers could draw someone from South Park in a junior school.
The hardship in making cartoons is the amount of choices you need to make and the amount of knowledge how those choices would impact a viewer.
If you delegate all of that, the cartoon wouldn't be simply blunt, it would be self-contradicting. And we already had a way of making cartoons, that allow your writing to shine through bland animation – since flash, actually. It might actually be even faster then using generative AI
I agree. Toil itself is not valuable or noble. We, as a society, should work towards reducing the training, skill level, and manual effort needed to achieve things. There is no need to artificially gatekeep activities behind needless toil.
This kind of mentality would ban Star Trek replicators, should they be invented one day. "In my day, you had to actually make things, we didn't get to replicate them, so we shouldn't, even if it's possible!"
I disagree re toil. The original idea that brings a creative work into existence is only a tiny part of how that work evolves with every step. For example absolutely no writer starts off writing their final draft. They write & through writing their ideas are clarified & new ideas form, that they did not previously have, all due to the 'toil' of writing the previous drafts. Skipping all the steps that are required to create significant work leads to shallow work born from instant gratification, exactly like the Ghibli slop. It's not 'gatekeeping' that something requires time & effort. All that Ghibli slop is already forgotten, despite saturating social media only a few days ago, because it so shallow. The story & characters & intent is what gives Ghibli films meaning & human resonance.
What cheapens the experience is the insistence of being called a "mountaineer" when a helicopter dropped you at the peak. This goes for "AI artists" and "astronauts" on commercial launches who glom on to unearned titles whose prestige was forged by countless professionals working very hard.
I think people who are using these models and trying to claim they are artists for clout are not a very large group. Have you really seen a significant number of people doing this? Otherwise it just feels like you're nutpicking
Tale as old as time... today's "bakers" are nothing like the bakers of 100 years ago. With their digital temperature gauges, global recipe and ingredient sourcing, cold storage, and more advanced food science.
Today's musicians have far greater access to lessons, recording equipment, inspirational material than 100 years ago.
Mountain biking (80s single speed with no gears, suspension, etc.) versus modern e-bikes with radial tires and hydraulic brakes.
Who cares? Value your own experience as you do. The less we all think about prestige, the more it will go away.
I actually disagree completely. Mastering the piano is different from mastering digital synthesis no doubt, but there are also distinctive commonalities that make and mark a master in both. A disproportionate investment of time or the effortlessness with which one can generate sounds imagined or perceived, as though the machine were a part of one’s own body, are attributes shared by both. Certainly someone could spend thousands of hours mastering different digital synthesis techniques, and I don’t think that’s easier than mastering the piano. There’s a fundamental competitive aspect to things like music that keeps mastery difficult to attain. If it weren’t difficult then it wouldn’t be as valuable and scarce. Once things become common and accessible, they quickly become boring and new genres are invented.
People thought "canned music" (aka prerecorded music) would be the death of music, and art in general
>The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical. Canned drama, canned music, canned vaudeville. We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing. We are not against scientific development of any kind, but it must not come at the expense of art. We are not opposing industrial progress. We are not even opposing mechanical music except where it is used as a profiteering instrument for artistic debasement.
It kinda was the death of music - reasonably-skilled musicians used to make money performing live, and now they can't. The market got eaten up by recordings of really good artists, who, ironically, treat music more as industry than art.
AI generated images are only an extension of what e.g. photography has experienced in the last decades. We’ve had film cameras, then digital cameras, then smartphones, each of these commoditized image creation by a then-unthinkable factor.
It’s an ongoing process, even if this leap seems especially big.
Technological progress does not directly result in posers. As you noted, smartphones allowed anyone to record videos, but I'm yet to see any influencer or YouTuber call themselves a director or cinematographer.
I suspect the wannabees exist in the narrow window when technology has expanded enough for non-professionals, but hasn't seen wide enough adoption that the man on the street will recognize the pretentious self-aggrandizement.
> As you noted, smartphones allowed anyone to record videos,
No, I was talking about photography - and people replacing a digital camera with a smartphone. For most this substitution works very well; and the whole digital camera industry has shrunk significantly[1].
The photography community has been discussing wannabe photographers ever since my uncle bought a dslr and started taking photos at family weddings.
Also look at the production quality that a single person can achieve today.
Go to Amazon and drop a few grand on mics, lights, cameras and lenses. The result is production quality beating any 90s talk show, which would have taken a whole team to do.
Not everyone who engages in AI-assisted creative work is patting themselves on the back and being tone deaf and denigrating people that actually have creative skill... but some certainly are. While I don't support a moral absolutism when it comes to the use of GenAI, I do support putting these idiots in their place.
That thinking is time honoured and never found much traction. For example, pretty much nobody knows how to grow their own food, make their own clothes, carve their own furniture or even drive a manual car. Hordes of tourists circle the globe bringing disrepute to all sorts of time honoured monuments of history's greatest. Skills and challenges which aren't needed get forgotten and are generally not missed.
None of those things you mention have been forgotten. Many people do all of those things not because they have to but because it is incredibly rewarding to learn and grow these skills. Convenience doesn't bring happiness. People will actively seek out challenges even when they seemingly have none.
The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around. We already can't walk in many places because of cars. I don't look forward to the day that similar vehicles can go up mountains. The existence of mass-produced clothing doesn't affect your ability to do your own knitting, though.
I'm replying almost solely to observe that inconvenience also doesn't bring happiness. Happiness is achieved precisely by feeling happy in the setting that you find yourself in. People can train themselves to only feel happy when inconvenienced but that is doing a major disservice to themselves and those immediately around them. But that is something of a tangent and so I have a cover story for why I'm typing!
> The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around.
This is taking the metaphor far too far. Nobody is literally taking mountains away from people.
I think the majority of people still know how to grow their own food. We only passed 50% of the population living in cities a few years ago. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS says 43% of the population is still rural, and I'm guessing about 80% of that 43% (32%) knows how to grow their own food. So do all the people who have moved from the country to the city over the last 40 years.
There's a big gap between "pretty much nobody" and the reality, which is somewhere between one third and two thirds of everybody. You might want to reflect on exactly how your perception diverged so radically from reality.
Do people in cities suffer from not being able to grow their own food and make their own clothes? I don't know for sure, but official statistics claim that, even today, they commit suicide at much higher rates despite having much less material scarcity. Robinsonades have been a popular genre of fiction for centuries, suggesting that people long for that kind of autonomy. Today, we also have zombie apocalypse fiction, RPGs, and preppers.
From another angle, sports consist entirely of skills and challenges which aren't needed and never have been, suggesting that they don't get forgotten. Hobbies also consist of skills and challenges which aren't needed.
Um, no, that quotation means literally the opposite: it is about the climbing, it's not about getting to the top of any particular mountain. What Hillary was getting at is we get satisfaction from learning, training, overcoming difficulties and limitations, and ultimately pushing ourselves to our limits. His limit was Everest, your limit might be Snowdon, but it's climbing it that matters, not just taking the train to the top and taking a selfie.
He's saying that you can substitute any activity that combines danger, skill, and willpower for the mountain. It's literally not about the mountain, it's about how far you push yourself to reach a goal.
Does it though? We are all constrained by the time cost of everything we do. Not everybody with a quick creative spark cares enough to sacrifice opportunities, dedicate time, skip sleep or whatever it may take to gain the skills needed to act on the creative spark. AI empowering the output is a beautiful thing.
We have no right to tell people they have to learn to climb to get to top of the Everest.
I can't draw but I want to create my Art using AI. What I now see is a bunch of people who associate their self worth with a rare talent and don't want others to join the party. I want to resolve the issues around copyright for training, but once this is out of the way I want to draw exclusively through AI because it's the only way I can do it. And I LIKE IT.
I'm a skilled pianist. The funny thing is that I heard similar criticisms about computer music a couple decades ago. "No playing skill needed". Despite knowing how to play, I'd rather do computer music nowadays anyway. Please stop telling me what I can and can't do!
I'm not disagreeing with "let them do it", but the comparison with computer music isn't really fair.
Computer music, as it existed a couple decades ago, still played exactly what you asked it to, and it wasn't filling areas where you underspecified the music with a statistical model of trillions of existing songs. And that's the difference, for me: the ability to underspecify, and have the details be filled in and added in a way that to the audience will be perceived as intentful, but which is not.
Agreed - computer music compared to live music is what, say, Adobe Illustrator is to drawing. Or a Wacom drawing table, but definitely not prompting AI to draw for you.
Whether drawing (writing etc.) through AI counts as drawing (as making art) is a debate we have to resolve in the upcoming future.
It is possible to very critical of something without "not allowing people to do it".
Dismissing the argument that we are losing something in this "democratization of creativity" by fighting a strawman that says you are not allowed to participate instead is a bit lazy
>We have no right to tell people they have to learn to climb to get to top of the Everest.
My, my, you really took the worst example to defend your point. The Everest is now an overcrowded dumping ground full of cadavers, shit and trash, with idiots putting not only themselves but their sherpas and other mountaineers in danger due to their arrogance, lack of ability and shittiness.
>What I now see is a bunch of people who associate their self worth with a rare talent and don't want others to join the party.
What I see is a bunch of people creating digital doubles of existing artists without their consent and using it to make money.
Tangentially, what does enshittification mean now? Quoting Wiktionary, at one point it meant "The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits" (coined by Doctorow), but now people seem to use it to mean... things becoming shit?
> Second: the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.
Guess people here don't talk much about cargo. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that cargo inspired uv. Rust with cargo showed for the first time that tooling _can_ be good, even for systems programming languages.
With good reason honestly. They take all the best practices from existing tooling we had, discard the bad, and make it run blazingly fast.
Ruff for me meant i could turn 4 pre-commit hooks (which you have to configure to be compatible with each other too) into just 1, and i no longer dread the "run Pylint and take a coffee break" moment.
I jumped ship to UV recently. Though i was skeptical at first i don't regret it. It makes dependency management less of a chore, and just something i can quickly do now. Switching from Poetry was easy for me too, only package i had issues with was pytorch, but that just required some different toml syntax.
I’ve seen fishy looking engagement in hn before, but I’m inclined to think uv’s praise is genuine. It reflects the collective relief of seeing an extremely long and painful journey finally come to an end (hopefully).
Redesigns are cool exercises and what you’ve done looks good mostly. It only shows top level comments though, and the text colour is unreadable in dark mode.
You say you’re trying to improve the original design, but it’s not clear to me how what you’ve done is an improvement.
If you really want to learn another language specifically instead of something else, then getting well acquainted with bash and awk wouldn’t be wasted effort.
Especially awk, it's a DSL for quick text manipulation. Simpler than Perl and a better API than Python for that specific use case. It's essentially a filter that applies to a specific region identified by a regex.
When I migrated years ago (mostly to get access to some plugins), nvim gladly swallowed my old configuration with no changes. Then I could change to lua and other modern features at my own pace.
I’ve been using it for around the same time, and never cared much about formatters. Linting is useful but wouldn’t call it essential. But type checking is a non negotiable on any project I lead. It’s not perfect by any means, but beats having to crawl my way through a call stack trying to figure out what the hell a function is expected to take and why it’s getting a None instead.
I have yet to find a single drawback of adopting mypy (or similars) that isn’t completely eclipsed by the benefits.
Funny how the use of the acute accent instead of the macron for long vowels completely changes the “feel” of the written language to me. Makes it look less classy.
Being used to the more traditional "ā"/... for long vowels, I found it very weird when opening the page, I was first wondering if it was actual Latin or an artificial language based on it.
Please don't take it as pedantic, but iirc the acute accent is modern and not a standard feature of classical Latin. While "Európæa" might be used in some modern contexts or to reflect contemporary pronunciation, it wouldn't be common in strict classical Latin texts.
