it does seem to be very much bottlenecked by performance, yes. very slow to start up, for example.

I'd argue PayPal was a successful business, not a successful piece of software.

That's kind of the point.

The software only had to be good enough to support the business. It doesn't have to win a Turing Award, and probably wouldn't help the business if it did.

sorry but it's funny that you mention "heart and soul" while sharing some of the most soulless videos i've ever seen.

I'll have you know that in this year's Atlanta 48 Hour Film project (something I've been doing since I was a teen), several teams used AI.

Rewind to just one year prior -- 2024.

AI video was brand-spanking new. We'd only just gotten over the "Will Smith" spaghetti video and the meme-y "Pepperoni Hug Spot" and "Harry Potter by Balenciaga" videos.

I was the only person to attempt to use AI in 2024's competition. It was a time when the tools and infrastructure for video barely existed.

On the debut night, I was resoundingly booed by the audience. It felt surreal. Working all weekend to have an audience of peers jeering at you in a dark theater. The judges gave me an award out of sympathy.

Back then, image-to-video models really were not a thing (Luma launched "Dream Machine v1" shortly after this). I was using Comfy, Blender, Mocap, a full Mocap suit (the itchy kind), and a lot of other hacks to build something with extremely crude tools.

We lost a day of filming and had to scramble to get something done in just 24 hours. No sleep, too much caffeine. Lots of sweat and toil.

The resulting film was a total mess, of course:

https://vimeo.com/955680517/05d9fb0c4f (It's seriously bad - I hate it. It might legitimately be the very first time AI was used in a 48 hour competition.)

That said, it felt very much like a real 48 Hour competition to me. Like a game jam. The crude ingredients, an idea, the clock. The hustle. The corners being cut. It was palpable.

I don't think you can say there isn't soul in this process. The process has so much soul.

Anyway, fast forward to this year. Three teams used AI, including my own. (I don't think I have a link to our film, sadly.)

We all got applause. The audience was full of industry folks, students, and hobbyists. They loved it. And they knew we used AI.

The industry is anxious but curious about the tech. But fundamentally, it's a new tool for the tool box. The real task is storytelling.

> I was resigned to playing under Ibuprofen until I heard of fastDOOM

i don't get the ibuprofen reference ?

Guess: headache from low frame rate?

Indeed.

I legitimately thought it was some DOS compatibility layer or something. Like, you’d have to run Doom that way because of the low framerate natively.

With every interesting word in the dictionary having been used to name products by now, the confusion is understandable.

edit: although ibuprofen is a brand name.

Ibuprofen is the generic name for the drug. There are branded variants like Nurofen if you want to spend more money for no real reason.

it's comically bad. the UI is a mess, the search functionality is broken, you can't resize the window horizontally. it's feels like a hello world first project in a new language type of app.

also - it's such a bummer that they have decided to shit the bed so hard on software at a moment when their hardware lineup is arguably at its pinnacle. like, the hardware has been firing on all cylinders since M1 but the software degradation is making it less and less pleasant to use.

right on the money.

apple’s software is shockingly awful across the board these days.

I had figured since km/h was NN00, the same would be good for mph.

Naw, it's already been false precisioned to hell.

The original would have been "about 1000 metres/second". That got translated to 3600 km/h etc.

Check how much it charges if it was really 800 m/s. Or 1200 m/s.

right, seems like sort of a no brainer that if a minor version bump of an OS completely breaks JDK8, that’s on the OS developer.

> My recommendation is that you don’t look at blog writing as just something people do to work on their “personal brand”. It can definitely help with that, but first and foremost it is a tool that people can use to up their game and take their knowledge and critical thinking to the next level.

These both seem like extremely bleak, unimaginative ways to view writing.

Taking the time to debug your model of reality is bleak and unimaginative?

Wouldn't the world be a better place if everyone did that?

Can you suggest a better use for writing? I love fiction for example, but people becoming less wrong (and by extension, more skillful in the world) seems like one of the most valuable ways for people to spend their time.

As a fellow lover of fiction, I agree that there is nothing offensive or unimaginative about viewing writing as a way to deeply understand and consolidate your knowledge about technical material. I think writing of any kind is about processing information. In the case of fiction or poetry, this may be more about processing your emotions, or a profound life experience, or a cultural heritage, or a set of hypotheticals. Great literature, that stands the test of time better than more pulpy stuff, often tackles something the author and many others need to intellectually process, therefore leaving you with that feeling of revelation you may get after reading a good book.

The post is aimed at an audience of software developers. Tool users, in other words. It seems reasonable to me that tool users would view writing as a means to an end, rather than as an end in itself. It might help to realize that their tool use is itself imaginative. The tool users have co-opted a nominally romantic medium so that it may serve a concrete function. That's imaginative in its way: an imaginative use of tools.

It's "bleak" to want to improve critical thinking?