First, OCD may require professional help if you can't manage it rationally.
With that being said, managing personal projects is simpler than "management" which involves human interations.
In short, start with a basic pen, paper or notepad-like software. Update it as shortcomings appear. Managing is like designing data structures or databases: it involves "reads" and "writes" (I actually mean "search and read" and "search and write", to be percise), starts simply, and is designed around use cases.
I've applied this to cooking. I used to struggle finding spices in a deep drawer. I realized they were organized like a stack, making it difficult to reach the ones at the back. I moved them to a wider drawer. The frequent used ones shuffles to the front, whereas the less used are left in the back. And with time, I memorized their rough locations.
This process mirrored data structure design: starting with a minimal structure (linked list), moving to a more complex one when it becomes slow (search trees), and further improving it when it gets imbalanced (AVL tree). You'll not going to invent red–black tree in the first place - even copy it from the text book is a pain.
This perspective can be applied to anything - digital data, paper systems, or physical spaces. 'Reads' and 'writes' costs are determined by the system you use. System efficiency depends on its use case and time as costs are "amortized".
A few examples:
Diary: Easy to write, harder to read. Low overhead makes it enjoyable to write.
Dictionary: Takes longer to write, quicker to read. The large audience justifies the high writing cost for well-organized indexes.
Research notes: Balanced read-write (citations and knowledge graph). Constantly evolving knowledge even makes folders inadequate, hence the popularity of software like Obsidian and systems like Zettelkastens. But such systems take efforts to build so most people adopt instead of developing their own.
RDBMS: Balanced read-write but difficult to develop.
Kafka-ish DB: Designed for high-speed writing. RDBMS is too slow for its use case due to constant indexing.
Your system will depend on your use case, which will emerge over time.
This is like DeepFloyd but probably combined with OpenAI's strength in NLP field.
I remember Ilya Sutskever often mentioned how multimodal is important in multiple interviews. ControlNet can produce more impressive results for sure, but the model being able to have strong understanding of multimodals like language and light and space as a unified modal will push the industry forward towards the goal of AGI.
If you do some "real world pizza making" instead of toying, that function would be like at least 1k lines, including how you carefully shape the dough, how to handle exceptions when you tear some holes, and how you should observe and rotate in the oven by how much, how you should redo it if the roller blade just didn't cut through properly, so on and so forth. Of course it's better to have top-down overview like prepare -> bake -> box otherwise the readers will surely lose themselves in details without figuring out what is happening.
People in the game industry told me their horror story of helping designers with a Lua script that they were writing over the years. And it turned out the "Lua script" was a single file, with 100k+ lines, that bearly had several functions in it. That would be SO linear.
> This is definitely a characteristic of Chinese culture urban "planning" (operative term is the quotes).
> You can see the same "ad hoc"-ratic development "philosophy" at work in Chinese cities today.
First, it was 4000 years ago when the Chinese culture was completely different.
Other than that, it's still not entirely accurate. If anything, the planning is very diverse or bumps between extremes in China. You can check out Beijing or any historically important town with walls on the map. Most of those cities are carefully designed in square shape, and every important building is facing towards the south. Things are intentionally majestic. Form over practically sometimes.
Most of the examples you have mentioned are southern cities, which are probably heavily influenced by the Suzhou garden design. The most famous Suzhou garden is the Humble Administrator's Garden [0]. The idea of the garden is to use a lot of obstacles and irregular shapes to segment zones. In terms of practicality, it creates more "rooms" instead of wasting space with empty squares. In terms of aesthetics, it creates discoverability where every turn provides a different scene. But most importantly, it's carefully non-majestical to not offend the emperor - the holy ruler of the absolute monarchy (who can easily execute any a whole clan at will without justification). You can also feel the uneasiness even in the garden's name itself.
But indeed, a lot of Chinese cultured towns are chaotic by nature. My personal take is regions like Europe and Japan with feudal backgrounds are sufficiently decentralized with proper hierarchy, making every piece of land plan things for themselves, the lords, the church, and the guilds can design and interact back and forth. However, China is purely top-down and lacks organizations between the imperial court and individual levels (the feudal system was brutally wiped out 2000 years ago and made very few unsuccessfully comebacks). Any non-imperial organizations like mansions guides are highly discouraged as those are seen as potential threats. Chinese society in modern terms is a "flat organizational structure", and its people are just individuals (clans and families are often forced apart, and shuffled between lands). As a result, we can see towns as official projects are built in orthodox ways, which are the rest are littered with ad-hocness.
Actually, in the South, there were also quite some fortresses that were well-designed and typically resided in difficult terrains such as Tulou [1] (man, they look like Apple Park). Because they were large clans living in remote provinces, the imperial court had a hard time dealing with them so often the court didn't bother.
> In my experience, the one exception is Hong Kong
As a guy who spends most of my time living in Beijing, my first impression of Hong Kong is its chaotic (in a good way, I love it). You probably know Hong Kong is the most important reference for those cyberpunk concept artworks. Singapore, IMO, is more well thought out beforehand in terms of urban planning.
Why take issue with it? My experience is accurate, maybe your experience is different. They can both co-exist, right? Or is there only "1 true way"?
> But indeed, a lot of Chinese cultured towns are chaotic by nature.
See we agree? :) I told you I was right. Thanks for sharing your perspective, anyway! I learned something about the background, it's good to know! :)
> First, it was 4000 years ago when the Chinese culture was completely different.
I'm saying, in this way, it wasn't.
> ... Things are intentionally majestic. ...
The majesty you mention accounts for imperial buildings, right? Those are indeed well designed. But that is not how "the people" live. It is not the culture overall. It is a testament and symbol to an ideal and a governing system. But outside of these glorious compounds, it's Chinese culture's inherent urban chaos, not the Emperor's aesthetics, that reigns. No?
A point you seem to support in ...
> ... it's carefully non-majestical ...
This is very interesting. Thank you for that education. It has added to my knowledge and perspective! Very interesting.
Also, but I wouldn't really consider Shanghai a southern city, would you? I think there are plenty of undeniably northern cities that would be chaotic: there's so many, pick one--Tianjin? The downtown and main places are gorgeous for sure, but what about the suburban places, the crowded developments and residential skyscrapers, is the urban design of the streets around these places highly ordered? How about the subway? I don't know. My bet is no, tho, based on my extensive experience in Chinese cities--but in truth, I really do need to collect additional experience with more of the very many mainland cities I have yet to visit!
> ... But indeed, a lot of Chinese cultured towns are chaotic by nature ...
I think to be honest there you need to say cities not towns, to not artificially misrepresent that this ad-hoc chaoticness is only a provincial thing, not something seen in the bit cites, when in my experience it very much is so! It permeates the very fabric of Chinese culture (rich fabric to be sure, but this thread cannot be denied). You seem to provide extensive additional support for this idea by your invocation of the deliberately a-majestic Suzhou Garden, and the non-threateningly 'flat org chart' of Chinese society, both very illuminating for me to hear (but also reinforcing of my aforementioned contemplation upon my extensive experience).
Yeah. I was trying to explain why the chaotic parts are there and there are quite some notable exceptions.
> I think to be honest there you need to say cities not towns
TBH I was very hesitant to pick the word town or city or any others because in my mind it was the generic "城/Cheng" in Chinese. I find the nouns are often culturally specific as cities, castles, churches, and towns are European-oriented and more specific than "Cheng".
> Also, but I wouldn't really consider Shanghai a southern city, would you?
It's a southern city. Geographically speaking, China was divided by the Yangtze and the Yellow River into three 1/3 parts. Shanghai is located on the Yangtze so it's in the South. The south/north divider is the Qin Mountain range and Huai River line [0]. That's the line where the culture, climate, and pretty much everything differs drastically.
> pick one--Tianjin
Well, that's a sophisticated example that I happen to know about (I just realized there's even a wiki but in Chinese [1]):
- Almost every taxi driver in Beijing who has been to Tianjin told me how they got so frustrated with the road system. It's not hard to guess, since the roads are around the river and not as perpendicular as Beijing.
- But the old Tianjin was a squared town before the Western countries moved in. The town resides to the west of the river, exactly within today's north, east, south, and west roads (Dong, Xi, Nan, and Bei Malu). In the center it's the drum tower. Outside there were walls and moans and all that.
- So it didn't appear to be particularly chaotic to me at that time, at least there were quite some designs as you can see. And it wasn't nearly as important historically until the West started to settle in China. At least compared to Xi'an, Luoyang, Kaifeng, Zhengzhou, etc.,
- Later, the Western countries set up settlements along the river both on the east and west banks. The city started to grow. That's where the messy road system comes from.
> but what about the suburban places
But yeah, many suburban areas are a mess. While I kind of agree there is some chaotic nature, most culture does that without professional modern urban planning departments. Slums are very, very common outside the first world. Back in the old days in Europe, slums were also easy to be seen outside cities and castles.
Another factor is Tianjin was way messier decades ago. In 1976, there was a great earthquake and Mao died. A lot of the buildings were destroyed or damaged, and a lot of people would then rebuild their houses without proper knowledge and skills. Most of those were lost in the cultural revolution. People would randomly put together bunker-like stuff in random places and call it home. The same situation happened in Beijing - you can find Hutongs in Beijing are very chaotic, which should have been less so before the cultural revolution. Here's a video about the Beijing side of the story [2].
> It permeates the very fabric of Chinese culture
Honestly, I'm not very sure of it. On one hand, it's indeed chaotic as we can often see. There are also Chabuduo (good enough) and Meibanfa (there's nothing can be done) cultures. On the other hand, the Chinese also like to pursue regularity such as a lot of things have to be made in the shape of squares and circles. Numbers in designs and shapes have to be "stable" as 4 and 8. Those are not just for nobles, normal people do care and sometimes OCD about that, too.
I don't know man, if anything, Chinese culture is full of contradictions and confusion as always :)
> It’s just that they produce some of the least intuitive code imaginable.
I agree because I have seen this a lot.
> JavaScript has many missing features. This is not one of them.
While I do agree that abusing Observable might leads to messy code, it's very valuable in highly interactive apps. It provides proper abstraction/algebra which letting you tackle problems like tripple click, which might be extremely tedious to solve otherwise.
And interactivity is one of the natrual thing modern browser should empower developer to achieve (at least for non-die-hard no-JS person).
> But we already have them via the ReadableStream and TransformStream APIs.
I do appreciate that you appreciate simplicity and this sentiment in general. But I feel similar sentiments that led JavaScript to stagnent for a long time (ES6 is just ES4 but more than a decade later).
People like Douglas Crockford found the parity in JavaScript and Lisp, and summarized the beauty in his works. While his book is one of my favorite programming book, the sentiment (JavaScript don't need features because of closure, Lisp-like and all that) was so popular at time, which probably contributes to the stagnant.
(Microsoft and friends was probably happy about this that the web wasn't taking over so fast and they can shit everybody with IE6 for years, and then the mobile and their walled gardens were taking over. In other word, the web had even greater potential in between IE6 and mobile era)
People could really try re-implement their React apps without modern tooling to feel the pain: No ES6 module and abuse closure then cat the all files into one giant ball, only to mess up the order and dependencies. Or without reactivity, updating states everywhere which leads to confusing bugs that making apps out of sync., etc
There are some minor restrictions in the license terms, probably making it OSS incompatible. One is using the model or its derivates to tune or train other models.
It's obvious that people would flood Google with generated content. But it's hard to tell if it would kill Google or somehow make Google works better. There's certain dynamics to the game and nobody can say for sure.
As for why it might not make Google worse, just think about YouTube algorithms:
1. One good video is substantially better than hundreds of bad videos, or thousands even.
2. Clickbait works in terms of getting people to click on your video, but if you don't deliver what the clickbait promised people would leave and it would hurt your stats.
3. Generating large amounts of videos may be profitable because it's like collecting peanuts with automation, but that would never reach the mainstream audience like Mr. Beast.
This is because the algorithm promotes videos that are frequently clicked and fully watched. Generated or not, the content must be good enough to be watched through, in order to please the algorithm.
You see, there are a lot of bootleg versions of Stackoverflow, but many of them are terrible. Some of them get ranked because they're still helpful (to the 80% majority of programmers, probably not for the HN elites). We can imagine there would certainly LLM generated versions of those, but very likely with better quality. Generated or not, it's still an arms race to generate more helpful and higher quality content to get traffic.
Also, HN people have been complaining about how the quality of Google degrade over time. It might be Google's fault, but I believe there's another important factor that hurts search engines as a whole - There are too many walled gardens nowadays: Instagram, Discord, and now Twitter, etc. Value information is hiding behind those, which would certainly make search engines less helpful over time.
For example, when I play not very popular video games I wish there are wikis or guides for that. In the old days, I know I can find most of the information in several forums and check the top posts. Now I need to go through Discord and scroll through casual chats and wonder if I missed something.
With LLMs, people would likely be draining that information from walled gardens and compiling them into helpful insights.
Again, there are a lot of dynamics, and it's hard to tell how things would turn out. Maybe it would kill Google and possibly the old Web, maybe it would make the Web great again.
> Clickbait works in terms of getting people to click on your video, but if you don't deliver what the clickbait promised people would leave and it would hurt your stats.
This is an interesting take. Google can only "reward" videos that people watch for longer because they own the site. That is, they can tell when people leave. For a good chunk of sites, they still can because of Google's ad market share, but for a really sizeable chunk of sites that isn't the case. For like 80% of users, they also still can because they own Chrome.
I'm not sure I like the idea of allowing Google to reward sites that use their ads or browser monopoly in their search algorithm.
Even if I’m not using Chrome, if I search for a term and the first link isn’t helpful, I would quickly go back to the search results and click another link. Google should be able to get a signal from that
Yes, they get the signal. Let me remind you, Google want you to see more ads so the sooner you find your information the less time you linger around. If they use that signal, their best interest is to bury your optimal result further down.
Unfortunately the worst of the worst clickbait is the ads. Google is never going to do anything about those. Hell, worse videos probably have better click through rates because people will click anything to get out of such a video.
Plus, I've never once seen enshittification reward better quality. I highly doubt this will be the first time.
I think it makes it worse. There is only so much it can index.
I was searching a municipal website that had a bunch of pdfs. Instead of downloading them I'll I figured I'd sure the "site:__" to look through them. It didn't work. It seemed to index only 3 of those files. sigh.
One of the appeals of using "chat bot" is you get an answer without all the ad crap the web delivers. I think thats the appeal of stackoverflow and Redit.. Using AI to make the web worse is something...
I thought Moore's Law was dead long ago. I don't understand why some people still bring it up from time to time.
I remember reading in a magazine when I was a kid that Pentium 4 Extreme failed to reach 4.0 GHz in 2003 or 2004.
Since then, it took Intel quite some years to hit 4.0 GHz. Instead, the industry shifted to multi-core CPU, starting with the Core 2 series.
Does multi-core CPU count? I would say it's a bit of a stretch. It's more about horizontal scaling, where multi-CPU or even cluster also work in similar ways - there's no hard limit on how many CPUs you can add as long as you can cool them down. You can also make it much larger and sparse then put it in a large box to deal with the heating problem.
P.S. From the perspective of programming paradigm, people would then find "share nothing" and "message passing" is the way to harness concurrent and multi-core programming, after getting burned again and again with shared memory. These disciplines of not sharing RAM would further make multi-core more like programming on multi-CPU or clusters.
What you are talking about is Dennard scaling, which had transistors being able to go faster as they got smaller.
We still have Moore's law, which gives us more transistors. We just can't use them all at the same time and the individual transistors aren't getting faster (much).
For a while, we were able to use those extra transistors to wring out more performance out of sequential instruction streams by creating ever more complex out-of-order execution engines to figure out parallelism dynamically at run time. That also appears to have run its course.
Now we can use those extra transistors to add more cores, more cache and more specialised execution engines.
GJS and SICP inspired me to love programming - before that, I only knew the rigid and cold C++ "Pyramid". Lisp is more dynamic and "organic" to me. (And I like his Babylonian wizard costume more than a Harry Potter one!)
The past decades were dull for me in terms of programming languages, compared to the era of Scheme and Prolog. But the computing industry advanced steadily: multi-core programming, map-reduce clusters, CUDA, etc. And these led to these crazy generative neural networks we see today.
I recall GJS gave several talks on this "We Don't Know How to Compute". I can't find the source and I skimmed this video and couldn't find it, but I remember he talked about how Gecko (or Lizard I'm not sure) could be transplanted with extra arms and still function. It strikes me as how much we don't know about computing, if we view biology and other things as computation.
Now, with the AI hype, these frontiers seem open again to exploration. For example, you can give AI agents goals and tools and let them act on their own, it's still clunky but it works and it's improving fast every single day. It's just that we haven't figure out the patterns, implications and best practices yet. Exciting times!
Even those React rich text editors don't support React Native.
It's just way too hard to solve this problem for medium-sized teams.