Great write up, will be curious to see if Astro sticks around. It seems like all the static site gens last a few years then fade away - Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, etc.
Me too! The closer my framework is to raw HTML, JavaScript (really TypeScript nowadays), and CSS, the less lock-in I feel. Those 3 languages are continue to get better year over year. And we are get better framework abstractions every few years too. Astro feels like it hit the sweet spot, but maybe there is more to come.
This feels right, I can’t think of any consumer product where AI is providing value today.
I assume, like me, most consumers have been saturated with AI, tried it a few times, and found it doesn’t deliver on simplifying/improving anything. They tried it, it hasn’t helped and they’ve adjusted their mindset accordingly.
It's interesting because this may precipitate an AI winter. Everyone is burnt out on sub-standard AI, even if it's improving, most folks have already passed on it. I think it may have been a mistake to popularize what is effectively a beta version so soon, especially with all of the controversy it has created.
Two categories currently saturating consumers: ambiguous AI product advertisements on social media feeds and companies offering AI chatbots instead of a human for customer service or support.
Oh hey that’s my Floppy8! Never woken up to find my stuff on HN before! So cool!
I actually just released a video earlier this week about the progression of my SD card based cartridges[0] which started with the floppy cartridges for this. If you like the Floppy8 you’ll probably enjoy seeing the dozen iterations I went through after this blog post haha
I’m mostly a YouTuber not a blogger so I have a bunch of other projects on my channel[1] in a similar vein which you might enjoy as well.
Heh, was just about to post that this design ended up having issues with chafing between the sdcard read and the sdcard and that the new design (for the reader part at least) addressed this. I love the new version and have been contemplating making one myself. Very nice videos and description, so thank you for sharing your projects
How did you find the servo to eject the cartridge? You mentioned occasional jams, is that because of the style of cog, or the lack of pressure from the servo? I wonder if there is some tensing or alignment issues from the plastic cog..
Fun fact about Hanafuda - you can still buy Hanafuda cards from a specific Japanese manufacturer who has been printing them for over 100 years and the more fun part is that that manufacturer is Nintendo! They still print traditional decks along with ones using newer IP like Mario and Kirby themes.
I own one of the original style decks and it's beautiful. Koi-Koi, played with a Hanafuda deck, is a great poker-style game that makes you feel very smart for knowing how to play even though the rules are pretty simple.
There definitely are but, perhaps by definition, items soft enough to dampen sound are often easily damaged so they aren’t great fits for most commercial locations.
They are also out of vogue as was mentioned, unless you’re a coffee shop then these “cozy” items just aren’t as common right now.
This is a really good discussion of density in different forms. I’ve always thought mobile UIs could have a density renaissance, would love to see folks questioning some assumptions of these devices - especially when the trend with LLMs is “wait a long time for a potentially incredibly wrong output” it feels like we’re going the wrong way.
When we first released our Chat+RAG feature, users had to wait up to 20 seconds for the response to show. (with only a loading animation).
And then we fake-streamed the response (so you're still, technically, waiting 20 seconds for first token, but now you're also waiting maybe 10 additional seconds for the stream of text to be "typed")...
And, to my enormous surprise, it felt faster to users.
(Of course after several iterations, it's actually much faster now, but the effect still applies: streaming feels faster than getting results right away)
This is the unspoken secret of all these mods. They’re built to be built, not played, so if there are subtle instabilities introduced which may impact practical gameplay they will likely never be discovered because the final creation just sits unused on a shelf.
To the same end, when you hire human beings anticipate them standing up for what they believe in and occasionally inconveniencing your immoral business practices. Humans on both sides, opinions and your right to voice them on both sides.
The thing with masterpieces is that they don’t hold that status because they can’t be replicated, they hold it because they were novel, innovative, and unrivaled at the time of their creation.
> The training of painters in past centuries regularly involved copying old master drawings and paintings. To that end, most museums happily allowed students into their buildings for that purpose (some still do). But the practice was not limited to students. Even fully trained old masters copied older masters.
> The practice of copying and recreating paintings by the Old Masters at the Louvre goes back to when the museum first opened in 1793, when any artist could turn up and use a freely available easel to copy a masterpiece.
> ...
> Not all artists copied works to improve their skills. Some took up the practice professionally, since the demand for copies of masterpieces in the Louvre was high throughout the nineteenth century.
> ...
> These days only 250 copyists are permitted to install themselves in front of the museum’s art works, and a two-year waiting list shows that there are plenty of hopefuls waiting in the wings to take up a palette and brush.
> Those granted access have up to three months to work on their copy.
That this exists as a pedagogical exercise does not disprove the original point in any way.
Source: I spent a lot of time in the library copying sketches of the renaissance masters as a kid.
AI is the pencil, not the artist. As cool and capable as large models are they are not even remotely close to replacing self directed human intent. If you do not understand this you do not understand art.
I don't believe there's some magical quality to human intelligence, just that the things we are making today with AI are still orders of magnitude short of the real thing, and that there are still very difficult open questions in that gap.
There are certain jobs that we consider artists, but are very close to someone entering a text to a prompt. Consider a director for theater/film. They are prompting their "tools" (to be reductive) to produce the art they want, and have to sometimes accept when they just can't get the results they want from their tool.
I've kept considering the term hand crafted when reading this thread about what is considered valued art or not as that's what applies to this gemstone TFA directly. Then it went to the painters with brush strokes, and that too keeps the hand crafted idea. That's when I jumped to directors. To step further away from art, and switch it to sportsball. While current managers might have once been a player, now, they are essentially entering text into prompts to get their "tools" to provide the result they are looking for with varying degrees of success. The managers/coaches can't kick/throw the ball themselves to get the results. They just have to get their "tool" to perform better by constantly tweaking the text entered into the prompt. Hell, now I'm thinking parents are constantly tweaking their prompts to get their kids to do something.
Okay, at this point, I'm convinced we're all just part of the matrix.
> Consider a director for theater/film. They are prompting their "tools" (to be reductive) to produce the art they want, and have to sometimes accept when they just can't get the results they want from their tool.
Bluntly, it's clear you have no personal understanding of such productions and did not understand the most important point of my comment and how different it is from piloting a generative model.
Bluntly? You clearly have no idea who I am or what my work experience is like. I have no idea what your response has to do with anything, but I hope you feel better for getting it off your chest.
Humans working on a creative team are not automatons given commands, and this is a pretty basic understanding even if you are super impressed by what large models can do.
I am not super impressed by what LLMs can do, and think the current hype wave is ridiculous. I find them slightly more useful than NFTs.
But if you can't see how a director trying to use phrases like "I see what you're doing, and it's interesting. But let's try saying the actual lines a few more times, and then we'll let you play with it some more", or "okay, that was great. let's do it one more time", or "this time with more energy/angrier/etc", or "that was great everyone! this time, we're going to do the same thing but with..." or any other variations of director speak isn't like a user tweaking their prompt while looking for something entirely different or keeping parts of it while looking to change a different part.
If you can't see how that kind of feedback loop is similar to using a GPT, then you're really being obtuse as it's as blatant as the nose on your face
