I'm an experienced software engineer and ceramicist and I enjoyed this essay. I have stuff to say.
There are some wonderful industrial ceramic designs, e.g. Royal Copenhagen. But most of it is cold. Despite that people still become attached to their factory-produced porcelain mugs, because we want our daily objects to be our life-companions. We demand certain qualities that lead to intimacy. Studio pottery is a direct line to these deeper relationships, so when people own studio pottery for the first time they rarely want to go back. It's a red pill moment.
Studio pottery is not a luxury. You can buy a mug from one of the finest potters in the world for £50, and you can buy a beautiful piece for £25-£30. These might bring years of pleasure, and that registers with our customers as fantastic value. So there are plenty of studio potters all over the world who make a living with their craft.
However the product of craft-produced code and AI-produced code are, for a customer, mostly the same. So my fear is that writing code by hand will become little more than a challenging and pleasurable distraction, like a big-brained version of solving sudoku, whereas making pottery will always have a value that outstrips it's factory-produced counterparts.
But I think there is a parallel between clay and code here. There are night-school potters who just love making and getting away from their fucking screens. I have love for every one of these people. And there are those who take it much further, who read the books and design the kilns, who wood-fire in shifts over many days, who study glaze chemistry, who create objects no one has imagined before. And in software there are the line-of-business enterprise coders, and often they're handle turners who would really rather be doing something else but there are those who take it much further, who read the books and language specs, who work on foundational open source tools and study compiler design, who create idioms and paradigms no one has yet conceived of.
All that's very interesting. But for me the commercial side is prosaic and a bit dull. The pleasures of both are the creativity, which is itself a way of re-enchanting my materialist and bewildering late-capitalist way of life.
It is actually very simple to control what you feel, and very much possible. This deterministic idea about our feelings must die quick. Pro-tip, call the psychology department at your local university and they will happily teach you how to control your feelings.
I feel similarly for a different reason. I put my code out there, licensed under the GPL. It is now, through a layer of indirection, being used to construct products that are not under the GPL. That's not what I signed up for.
I know the GPL didn't have a specific clause for AI, and the jury is still out on this specific case (how similar is it to a human doing the same thing?), but I like to imagine, had it been made today, there probably would be a clause covering this usage. Personally I think it's a violation of the spirit of the license.
Quite the opposite, I'm suggesting the palestinians still have a right to their homelands even though europeans have settled, terrorised and displaced them.
Yeah, what about "rocket attacks"? Are they somehow more devastating than the US-israeli armory? If someone spits in front of my feet, then I can have them watch while I beat their family to death?
The comment was about heroin. Were you offered heroin?
Is cocaine and marijuana available from the government too? If not, what relevance is your comment?
Was this the first and only time you were waiting at a bus stop in Switzerland? If so, perhaps a notable story, if not then we'll need more information to conclude how bad this thug problem really is in Switzerland.
I'm trying not to fall for it, but when I try ai to write code it fails more often than not - at least for me. some people claim it does everything but I keep finding major problems. Even when it writes something that works often I can't explain that in 2026 we should be using smart pointers (C++) or what ever the modern thing
It uses math notation to heavily compress the representation while keeping information content relatively preserved (similarly to GlyphLang. Later, LLM can comfortably use it to describe service in detail and answer user's questions about it. Same is applicable to arbitrary information, including source code/logic.
I think the Tailwind case is more complicated than this, but yes - I think it's reasonable to want to contribute something to the common good but fear that the value will disproportionally go to AI companies and shareholders.
What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools?
The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn instead of letting my brain atrophy.
I remember Bear Grills "You vs. Wild" as one of the most well-known interactive shows. It's strange it's never mentioned in articles about interactive Netflix features.
Yeah it's really hard to know how to market ideas well with little experience in the marketing field. Hoping some people out there will have some great advice for us! :)
>They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it
I loved Unity on desktop, and I know many others too. But there was a very loud group of complainers who made them kill it. I still use it on some installations, bit it's obviously breaking more and more.
I’ve been playing Dota 2 for about a few months now, so I’m still very much a beginner and learning the game.
One of the biggest things I’ve noticed during this time is how complex counter mechanics in Dota 2 really are.
It’s not just hero vs hero matchups —
it also includes how entire drafts interact with each other, how item choices can shift the game, and many counters that only apply under very specific conditions.
Because of that, simply looking at win rates or individual matches often doesn’t really explain why something is a counter.
So over the past month or so, I started organizing and documenting these counter relationships in my free time and put together a small website to make them easier to browse. It focuses on things like:
Hero counters and being countered
Situational item counters
Simple draft-phase hints about overall lineup interactions
The counters on the site aren’t based purely on hero matchup win rates.
They’re compiled from player discussions, guides, and shared experiences, and I’ve tried to filter out ideas that are clearly outdated.
The goal is to help explain why a certain hero or item can be effective in specific situations.
That said, since this is mostly a one-person project that I work on outside of my day job, there are still plenty of heroes and scenarios that aren’t covered yet.
Some counter explanations may also be incomplete or open to debate.
I see this more as a learning and discussion tool rather than a source of “correct answers,” so I’d really like to hear other players’ opinions and perspectives.
I’ve put everything here mainly for my own use and for a few friends:
https://dota2.tools/
If you have any suggestions or disagree with something, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
There’s also a Discord link on the site if anyone wants to give feedback or discuss ideas.
Iran has a water crisis, and allegedly the economic situation is so bad that people are starting to wonder if it will soon affect their ability to buy food.
Even the Romans knew that if you wanted to stay in power you had to provide bread and circuses.
Because browsers close some tags automatically. And if your closing tag is wrong, it'll generate empty element instead of being ignored. Without even emitting warning in developer console. So by closing tags you're risking introducing very subtle DOM bugs.
If you want to close tags, make sure that your building or testing pipeline ensures strict validation of produced HTML.
My experience with Opus 4.5 has been pretty okay tests. Every now and then i point out issues so i wouldn’t let it one-shot but with supervision even same agent has been okay.
I agree that extensive modding isn’t required. Just maintaining my claude.md seems to do the trick.
The “anti-AU hype” phrase oversimplifies what’s playing out at the moment. On the tech side, while things are a bit rough around the edges still the tech is very useful and isn’t going away. I honestly don’t see much disagreement there.
The concern mostly comes from the business side… that for all the usefulness on the tech there is no clearly viable path that financially supports everything that’s going on. It’s a nice set of useful features but without products with sufficient revenue flowing in to pay for it all.
That pants a picture of the tech sticking around but a general implosion of the startups and business models betting on making all this work.
The later isn’t really “anti-AI hype” but more folks just calling out the reality that there’s not a lot of evidence and data to support the amount of money invested and committed. And if you’ve been around the tech and business scene a while you’ve seen that movie before and know what comes next.
There are some wonderful industrial ceramic designs, e.g. Royal Copenhagen. But most of it is cold. Despite that people still become attached to their factory-produced porcelain mugs, because we want our daily objects to be our life-companions. We demand certain qualities that lead to intimacy. Studio pottery is a direct line to these deeper relationships, so when people own studio pottery for the first time they rarely want to go back. It's a red pill moment.
Studio pottery is not a luxury. You can buy a mug from one of the finest potters in the world for £50, and you can buy a beautiful piece for £25-£30. These might bring years of pleasure, and that registers with our customers as fantastic value. So there are plenty of studio potters all over the world who make a living with their craft.
However the product of craft-produced code and AI-produced code are, for a customer, mostly the same. So my fear is that writing code by hand will become little more than a challenging and pleasurable distraction, like a big-brained version of solving sudoku, whereas making pottery will always have a value that outstrips it's factory-produced counterparts.
But I think there is a parallel between clay and code here. There are night-school potters who just love making and getting away from their fucking screens. I have love for every one of these people. And there are those who take it much further, who read the books and design the kilns, who wood-fire in shifts over many days, who study glaze chemistry, who create objects no one has imagined before. And in software there are the line-of-business enterprise coders, and often they're handle turners who would really rather be doing something else but there are those who take it much further, who read the books and language specs, who work on foundational open source tools and study compiler design, who create idioms and paradigms no one has yet conceived of.
All that's very interesting. But for me the commercial side is prosaic and a bit dull. The pleasures of both are the creativity, which is itself a way of re-enchanting my materialist and bewildering late-capitalist way of life.