I really tried to get into the vibe coding thing - just describe the thing I need in human language and let the agent figure it out. It was incredible at first. Then I realized that I am spending a lot of time writing clarifications because the agent either forgot or misinterpreted something. Then I realized that I am waiting an awful long time for each agent step to complete just to write another correction or clarification. Then I realized that this constant start-stop process is literally melting my brain and making me unable to do any real work myself. It's basically having the same effect as scrolling any other algorithmic feed. Now I am back to programming myself and only bouncing the boring bits off of ChatGPT.

> Then I realized that this constant start-stop process is literally melting my brain and making me unable to do any real work myself. It's basically having the same effect as scrolling any other algorithmic feed

Yes, it’s extremely soul sucking. With the added disadvantage of not teaching me anything.

I felt this way too until I decided that my goal isn't to know things, it's to ship things.

I felt this way too until I decided that my goal isn't to ship things, it's to ship, support and improve existing things.

If your job is not to know things, just to prompt an agent to ship things, why would you have a job in a year?

Sounds very depressing.

One thing that helps is to write an AGENTS.md file that encodes the knowledge and tricks you have of the codebase, like running a single test (faster feedback cycles), common coding patterns, examples, etc.

I went full meta and sketched out a file, then had an expensive LLM go through the codebase and write such a file. I don't know if it's any good though, I only really use coding assistants to write unit tests.

One trick I have tried is asking the LLM to output a specification of the thing we are in the middle of building. A commenter above said humans struggle with writing good requirements - LLMs have trouble following good requirements - ALL of them - often forgetting important things while scrambling to address your latest concern.

Getting it to output a spec lets me correct the spec, reload the browser tab to speed things up, or move to a different AI.

I don't have much experience with it either, but what has worked so far is breaking down the problem into very small steps I can verify easily.

At this point it's easier to just write the code. If my prompt is to be longer than the code produced, why bother with explaining that to LLM?

The delta between "make a small requirement that you can check and verify" vs "create the code yourself" is pretty big. A well crafted sentence can sometimes still be hours of work.

Implicitly you appear to be saying that we need to reach that point before action is taken?

We need to have a reason to take aution before we take action, sure.

This is an incredibly niche product in Europe, so far I’ve seen no evidence that the current state of affairs isn’t perfectly fine.

No need to fix things that aren’t broken, or don’t even look to be trending in that direction.

The question seems legit to me.. Otherwise worded it's essentially whether there's correlation between both. Without evidence it's more difficult to justify regulation. At the end of the day a pickup is adjacent to a midsize van. To me, both seem like you're essentially getting hit by a wall...

The difference is visibility, with a van you can often see as close as 1,5 m in front of you due to the short hood. The problem is a lot of the newer trucks and SUVs are so tall that a full child (or 5) just disappear in front the car.

I upvoted but I was not taught this! I have had to slowly figure it out on my own. Writing things down is kind of like augmenting your brain. It's a memory that does not forget. When working through a problem, writing it down tends to point out the holes in your understanding. A corner case is never lost or forgotten when written down, it just stares at you until you write down a solution. The next step after realizing this is to develop the discipline to write things down and to organize your environment so it's effortless to write things down.

Same, I had to learn this the hard way. In fact, I find that many (younger me included) are arrogant about *not* wanting to deal with writing due to it feeling like waste of time. But after maintaining codebases for 5+ years, you begin to appreciate younger you explaining wtf you were thinking.

And now, being at a point in my career where I have opinions on many things and discuss them with peers, I slowly realized writing about it was actually helping me more than anything.

Using something like confluence religiously in a team is a big boon. Write docs about everything. Write to get decisions done, to plan, to celebrate, to retrospect, to architect, to help oncall. Everything! Doesnt need to be beautiful prose - just needs to be famn useful and ideally easy/quick to read.

"Eating sugar" and "reasonable amounts of sugar in your diet" are two very different things.

Sure, but like literally anything else, the dose makes the poison.

As a EU citizen, I don't care? People are not swayed by political ads. They're swayed by influencers who push political agendas covertly.

I would think this is naive to imagine that targeted ads do not have influence when used in large numbers. There is a reason why this market exists.

I am happy this law has an effect and potentially opens the doors to other players.

I think this comes from a us perspective in most of Europe political ads consist of a portrait image of the politician and a slogan that gets penetrated to death. We don't have attack ads here most of the time we don't even have ads that transport a message besides this is Dude A from Party A.

I can actually give a very specific real life example of political ads working because I have a friend who was part of the campaign. In Ohio there was a constitutional amendment on the ballot to legalize abortion. The orgs that spent millions of dollars getting it on the ballot were constantly polling to figure where they stand in terms of it passing. As a just in case they made a "break glass" ad campaign which talked about a 10 year old rape victim that had to be driven across state lines to get an abortion. At the 11th hour a few days before the vote they realized it wasn't going to pass. So they took that ad and blasted it across the state, you legitimately couldn't watch TV for more than 30 minutes and not see it at least twice. It covered every streaming service, youtube, facebook ads, tv. The polls went from 48-49% to almost 60% in favor and it passed.

Political ads definitely do sway people. Especially the shit-flinging ads are effective.

The ones where a political figure lays out the bare basics of their programmes don't make a lot of impact, but the shittier the party and the more manipulative their advertising, the more these ads have an effect.

The influencer problem is even bigger, of course.

Then why are they paying for them? They can literally see the exact CPC and CPA / CPM ratios that justify their spending

Ads influence people a lot. In particular the elderly generation.

My cousin says there should be a maximum voting age. She says if people can't vote for the first 18 years of their life, why should they be able to vote for the last 18 years (e.g. if retired or older than 65)?

I disagree, of course. I don't talk to this cousin anymore. Personally I think the very elderly contain the wisdom for future generations, and make the best decisions because of all that wisdom, so they should really be in charge of everything.

The elderly will die before they see the consequence of them voting in another conservative party that reduces climate goals and investments in public infrastructure. Young people have to deal with the fallout for much longer

What is your general opinion on the wisdom and decision-making of politicians and heads of state that are above the age of 80?

Anyone who is 81 or older is elderly, therefore they have a lot of wisdom, therefore their decisions are the best. My opinion completely aligns with this logic with no deviation.

Agreed. As a Frenchman, I can testify that the same logic allows anyone to take perfectly dreary 2022 Napa valley wine, and turn it to a beautiful 1942 Saint-Emilion. You just need to age it 80 years.

And the younger generation are influenced by influencers, which are also ads.

You are not immune to propaganda

I don't disagree but I feel like having spent a couple of decades filtering bad Linux advice on sketchy forums has honestly built up some resilience.

I agree, we should ban influencers from accepting any money from parties or other political actors (think tanks, foreign nations...). We can't and shouldn't ban them from expressing their honest opinions, but we should keep the debate genuine.

Influencers are a big problem indeed. The rules should be tightened quickly. Ads do work too, I'm afraid, so this is good

> People are not swayed by political ads.

That just means you are getting swayed, you just dont know it.

> People are not swayed by political ads

sure

Right? Who is that naive?

How come you think that said influencers are not paid?

As a world citizen, you're projecting. Most people are indeed swayed by political ads, as the numbers clearly bear out.

That's because you are a HN user, which selects for above average intelligence people (yes, even the webdevs). You are not the type of person who sways election results. Ads work. You don't need carefully crafted subliminal messages, you could write "vote for me" everywhere and it would have a noticeable effect on the election results

> That's because you are a HN user, which selects for above average intelligence people

This forum became a parody of itself

You may not like the way he put it, but he is correct.

Up to and including the snark at web devs. Every engineer I've met who thinks the web is somehow an easier form of software engineering couldn't write software worth a damn in general, let alone make a website. Universally incurious and dumb.

First-home buyers aren't the ones causing prices to go up.

New households absolutely are. Whether they choose to rent or buy is secondary.

It's REITs buying up housing for rental that drives up the pricing. There are serious social consequences to financializing basic needs.

> It's REITs buying up housing for rental that drives up the pricing

Almost certainly not. Institutional investors are too little of the market. And every time someone has seriously investigated this hypothesis, the evidence has been lacking.

Yeah, this is just an algorithmic feed - or, at least, the first attempts. After a while you'll stop asking questions yourself and just scroll the feed, just like you do on every other platform.

What's Microsoft thinking here? We got Windows on our kids' laptops and it's a pain to do anything with every time, just an amalgamation of decades worth of UIs held together with duct tape, looks terrible and performs even worse than it looks. When I'm thinking of the next big upgrade, Windows isn't even on the list of options anymore, and that's not even an ideological statement in any way.

I have been asking myself this question repeatedly for the last few months. Windows 11 offers absolutely nothing of substance over Windows 10 and more often than not manages to be less pleasant to use. The Office 365 eco system is a complete disaster of half implemented ideas, most of which can be described as would be pretty useful if it actually worked as advertised(power automate), wasn't abandoned in a half complete state(loosp), or if they implemented simple feature requests that the userbase is asking for(sharepoint). To top it all off they seem to be working tirelessly to ruin the products that actually work and are in demand, every couple of months they threaten to force users to switch to the 'modern' Outlook despite the fact that it still lacks a lot of features that are the very reason businesses still use Outlook in the first place.

Windows 11 has round corners.

This. The best feature ever. Microsoft might not be able to draw shadows, scrollbars, window borders but they sure know how to round corners. Wanna exit word by pressing exit in the menu (i.e. clean exit). No way. You must press the "X" on the upper right window corner and hope that the corners rounding Microsoft engineers handle the "WndClose" message gracefully.

Someone wanted to make it kid-safe. Except they didn't notice that they are designing a software UI and not a wooden cupboard.

Aha, that's why they choose Tim Burton's movies as an inspiration for the UI colours. /s

Security knobs that Windows 10 lacks, better support for containers, WSL features, and DirectX 12 capabilities.

Granted, not everyone cares about them.

I find I no longer integrate new apps/technology flows into my life because they either won't be supported or will be enshitified/weaponized against me. The future kind of sucks. My smart home is barely hanging on to turning my lights on at dusk (something photo-sensors for lights just did without issue from the 90s on). Android just broke my phone, I can no longer just say 'hey android, play the news' and have it play headlines from real new organization that I specify. Instead it grabs news from I don't know where and gives me Google Gemini approved summaries (that Google states may or may not be accurate).

>My smart home is barely hanging on to turning my lights on at dusk (something photo-sensors for lights just did without issue from the 90s on).

Presumably, you were already well aware just how much new technology and apps tend towards hostility and enshittification, given what you describe.. So why in the world would you have wired up your very home to be a "smart" home? Did you really expect the technology for such a juicy trove of user data so easily, parasitically collected through manipulation to ever have a chance in hell of not being just as awful as anything else?

Recently I locked into my old Windows computer after not having done so in about a year and noticed a weird brown symbol prominently in the task bar. It was a promotion for world chocolate day...

Classic! So true!

Microsoft has spent the past two decades repositioning Windows from a flagship operating system into primarily a delivery vehicle for cloud services, subscriptions, and integrated apps. They are just not interested in providing the user with an OS anymore. For them it's a necessary evil nothing more.

Simply put the economics are behind a locked down click and drool style operating system with a manufacture controlled store that takes 30% of all gross.

The faster we can kill the Apple and Google store monopolies the faster we'll go back to having operating systems/phones that we can at least do something with.

We still have Linux for now, but as we know signed bootloaders present a very large risk.

I miss usable operating systems that don't feel like they were built for cavemen while people who know how to use them get to click more and more "Additional properties" buttons/links to get to actual useful settings.

> We still have Linux for now, but as we know signed bootloaders present a very large risk.

Thankfully there is a fair number of Linux-first companies now, so I'm not that worried. It's a real business case now. Years ago there were none, you couldn't even buy a laptop without Windows.

I think at Microsoft they know they can do whatever they want with Windows and nothing will change.

In corporate, no manager cares about the operating system their employees use. Unless there's a significant drop in productivity by using Windows, no one will bother with the cost of switching to another OS.

In the private sector, most people buy their computers straight off the shelf, i.e. with Windows. Here at HN, we're tech enthusiasts, but out there those who know what "Debian with GNOME" means are very few, and the rest will at most complain a little about how Windows has become, but then they'll just continue to use it.

The rest of the world, outside HN and similar techy online communities, largely doesn't know Linux exists. They know Windows and Mac. Macs are expensive and unfamiliar. Windows machines are cheap and can be bought at Walmart.

They're also currently nakedly taking bribes from hardware manufacturers to force upgrades to Windows 11, creating a wave of completely unnecessary hardware purchases. I'm trying to figure out how to help a nontechnical parent run a bypass install to avoid throwing a perfectly fine laptop in the garbage.

It's so necessary to the functioning of Windows 11 that it can be bypassed and Windows 11 works fine. Sure...

Windows exists to perpetuate the next promotion cycle of people working inside of Windows.

Remember Microsoft Edge? Remember Microsoft Teams? Remember Dev Home? Remember Copilot? Yeah it's the same thing everytime.

How are corporations not people?

Who runs them if not people?

Corporations are made of people, they aren't people, which is quite different.

Why it's different?

Decisions are still made by people. Even if Excel is used to calculate the decision trajectory, even if the trajectory is enforced by some law inside the corporation, it's still people who decide that they continue following the road, and it's still people who implement the decision.

Because when corporations are seen as people, it is anthropomorphism.

If you don't intend to answer, why comment at all?

Some people have English comprehension problems, thus my previous answer.

So you're just a troll, meh.

I cannot help when people cannot understand basic English expressions.

My kid won't need a laptop for a few more years but i've been using linux and i'm planning on making them use linux. The privacy implications and learning potential could be worth it from an early age.

I have done this, and in many ways it has been one of the best parenting decisions I've made. My oldest is a better CLI user now than most engineers I work with, and it came almost entirely from him exploring the system and getting excited about all the cool things he can do. It also made it super easy for me to teach him more self-service things, everything from looking at system logs to see why the xbox controller or even the USB keyboard isn't working, to learning how the software stack is assembled.

For my other kids that don't care about that sort of stuff, even they have become very capable computer users. It's been easy for them to learn Windows and ChromeOS at school. I already see the same pattern of diving deeper developing with my youngest too.

One of the most rewarding things I've experienced as a parent is seeing the hacker spirit still very much alive.

Great way to create future technologist or someone who will seamless use powertools to amplify whatever else they choose to do in life.

Still this is the crux of the linux experience and why I still don't main it - having to read logs to understand why an Xbox controller doesn't work.

Or a million other things like this. Sure it keeps getting better, by a lot. But the number of rough edge cases still is an issue every time I try out lonux again after lots of people tell me "Today Linux is different" - they always tell me and I always find, no it's still a thing you will still need to go spelunking in tech wizardry to do things that mostly just works on some other mainstream OS, like macos or even windows.

The little things are still the problem agreed.

For example, I have an AMD Radeon 6600 RX. Works great under Windows. Under Linux - and I've tried multiple distros - it's entirely unusable. The screen just flashes. I don't understand.

Make sure they have at least a passing familiarity with Windows and it's apps because like it or not Windows is still the default in the school and working world so they'll have to work with that stuff to some degree. Otherwise go for it.

Side note how's open office compatibility these days? Last time I tried it yeeears ago there were still compatibility problems that would have made group projects hard.

As a long term *nix user(FreeBSD and Linux) forced to use Windows for work,

I observe that every few years Windows is completely changed. It’s a total hodgepodge of decades of crap. That’s the only thing you need to know.

Purely anecdata, but my kids only use Linux at home and hadn't used anything else until they got (Windows and ChromeOS) computers at school, and they were able to get going quite easily. Honestly I think learning to use a mouse and keyboard is the hardest part since most of these kids grew up using tablets and phones as their first "computers."

Office compatibility still kind of sucks. It's very usable, but still quite a few papercuts. In my kids case though, Google Docs pretty much solves that problem so it's largely been a non-issue.

>Side note how's open office compatibility these days? Last time I tried it yeeears ago there were still compatibility problems that would have made group projects hard.

While Open Office still exists (and is being actively supported), LibreOffice (forked from OpenOffice fifteen years ago) gets more frequent updates, is more broadly used, and is widely preferred over OpenOffice these days.

I use it and it's a nice replacement for the Microsoft Office suite. In fact, I have Microsoft Office and prefer LibreOffice over it.

I suggest giving LibreOffice[0] a look. Many of the compatibility issues have been resolved and it works nicely.

[0] https://www.libreoffice.org/

LibreOffice is definitely a better choice than OpenOffice.

For using Teams, I'd recommend just using the web client. I did try installing the Microsoft native client for Linux, but all it seemed to do was open an empty window (i.e. not drawn in, so it showed what was under where it appeared) and wasn't at all functional. The web client seems to work, though I don't use it very often.

> Open Office still exists (and is being actively supported)

Actively supported is a stretch. Look at these commits.

https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commits/trunk/

Yeah, academically I know that but OpenOffice was king back when I needed it so I forget and default to calling it by the old prefork name.

Since then I've mostly been at a job where Office is provided and rarely have need of it at home.

> Make sure they have at least a passing familiarity with Windows and it's apps because like it or not Windows is still the default in the school and working world so they'll have to work with that stuff to some degree

Don't bother. I would have said that I was "familiar with Windows", I used 3.11, NT 4.0, XP, Vista, and 10 to a lesser extent and my wife needed help with her work laptop. Honestly Windows 11 is significantly different and apparently hostile enough that I couldn't find anything.

When I was in college a few years ago everyone did group projects in Google Docs, so Libreoffice compatibility was a moot point

Absolutely. My kid just finished an engineering degree from a well respected institution. Early on in the intro programming classes, about half of his class was unfamiliar with file system structures. Chromebooks and iPads in school and at home meant they had never really encountered them.

There were plenty of other "techy" things that older generations take for granted but kids aren't learning about unless parents show them because they are hidden behind modern OS/software interfaces and usually locked down to prevent discovery.

anecdote time: I have a Desktop and Laptop running Win11. Over the last month I noticed that when typing in notepad.exe, IT DROPS ABOUT 5% OF CHARACTERS TYPED!!!! On both my computers. How on earth Microsoft could F-Up Notepad (of all things) so badly that it fails at the ONE THING it's supposed to do, I have no idea. At the same time, I notice there is now Copilot integrated with Notepad.... coincidence?

Don't worry. Copilot is just summarizing what you wrote. /s

Windows feels more like an adware / advertising driven OS every day.

It's not there for me, it's for Microsoft to have a vehicle to point the OS AT ME.

When you're in Windows, the OS operates you. It is the user and you are the used.

Install Linux, they would come out wiser and perhaps even learn how to code.

Windows should be considered mental health hazard.

I completely agree with your latter point after being a windows dev on and off since windows 3.0. It’s been one hell of a rollercoaster.

Thinking? Plan?

Only thing going on is maximising capital extraction from the moat they created. End users no longer matter as long as the numbers keep going up.

I recently learned that Tiktok has a thing called "Streak Pets". Imagine taking a dopamine addiction-inducing activity and imagine gamifying that to maximize engagement in that activity. Imagine the brainstorming sessions at Tiktok where they navigate around the glaring issue of the fried brain circuitry of their own users.

mind-blowing. like tamagochis for the modern age.

Oops, one of the dependencies is a C++ library that doesn't compile on your less-than-five-years old arch.