bnug (u/bnug) - Readit News

bnug commented on Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else? · Posted by u/urnicus

dangoor · 4 months ago

This is something I've wondered about. I started out in the green screen era and remember how amazingly quick those UIs were to navigate. I don't see any reason why we couldn't replicate much of that UX and development model, but deliver it to web browsers with graphical capabilities in the parts of the system that need it.

I feel like mouse+keyboard is a step down in speed of use for many tasks, but I do wonder about touch screens. For some things, touch screens can be plenty fast and the UI adapts to the task.

bnug · 4 months ago

Yeah, I was just thinking of a very popular bar that I would go to about 15 years ago that was operated on very simple touch screens with large UI buttons. The bartenders could enter drinks & the tab it goes on very fast. It wasn't flashy, but very simple large buttons that always pop up in the same place very quickly, so they definitely had some muscle-memory going on for navigating it.

bnug commented on Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else? · Posted by u/urnicus

1313ed01 · 4 months ago

I love the system in Autodesk Animator (now: https://github.com/AnimatorPro). Every menu item or button currently on the screen always have a unique initial letter. There is no need to highlight or underline anything. Amazingly this was done without having to use any too obscure labels (but I doubt it would be fun to try to translate it to other languages). Almost every function is two or three single letter key-presses away, and after using the application for a while you will have memorized more and more of those.

Some frequently used functions have their own special single-key shortcuts as well, so instead of having to press C-P (to open the Clip menu and then select Paste) you can just press the ' key, saving the user a key-press every time they do that.

bnug · 4 months ago

Oh yeah - AutoCAD by Autodesk was also like this. Once you memorized the keystrokes, you could fly through your line drawing.

bnug commented on Claude for Excel claude.com/claude-for-exc... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

sally_glance · 4 months ago

Having AI create the spreadsheet you want is totally possible, just like generating bash scripts works well. But to get good results, there needs to be some documentation describing all the hidden relationships and nasty workarounds first.

Don't try to make LLMs generate results or numbers, that's bound to fail in any case. But they're okay to generate a starting point for automations (like Excel sheets with lots of formulas and macros), given they get access to the same context we have in our heads.

bnug · 4 months ago

I like this take. There seems to be an over-focus on 'one-shot' results, but I've found that even the free tools are a significant productivity booster when you focus on generating smaller pieces of code that you can verify. Maybe I'm behind the power curve since I'm not leveraging the full capability of the advanced LLM's, but if the argument is disaster is right around the corner due to potential hallucinations, I think we should consider that you still have to check your work for mission critical systems. That said, I don't really build mission critical systems - I just work in Aerospace Engineering and like building small time saving scripts / macros for other engineers to use. For this use, free LLMs even have been huge for me. Maybe I'm in a very small minority, but I do use Excel & Python nearly every day.

bnug commented on I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform old.reddit.com/r/Entrepre... · Posted by u/bilsbie

dcastonguay · 7 months ago

> At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product.

I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/actionable at turning customer needs into working solutions.”

bnug · 7 months ago

That could be the case, but I work in a mechanical engineering group as the only person on the team who can write code or automate things with it. We're in a large corporation with a sizeable IT support group that builds a decent chunk of the software in-house, and our team views much of it as terrible. So, I've rewritten applications or supplemented the "terrible" but irreplaceable software with tools to make our jobs much easier. I don't think that I'm better than our in-house IT folks at software development but that my perspective as an actual end-user gives me a much better idea of how to meet our own needs. I'm also highly motivated to make it effective, since I'll be using it. So, the title initially resonated with me and didn't see this comment coming. That said, I'm sure your point is valid in many cases as I'm not familiar with formal software development / project management.

bnug commented on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/JustExAWS

mvkel · 7 months ago

> Everyone has full access to all of the available data and information

Ahh, but this is part of the problem. Yes, they have access, but there is -so much- information, it punches through our context window. So we resort to executive summaries, or convince ourselves that something that's relevant is actually not.

At least an LLM can take full view of the context in aggregate and peel out signal. There is value there, but no jobs are being replaced

bnug · 7 months ago

>but no jobs are being replaced

I agree that an LLM is a long way from replacing most any single job held by a human in isolation. However, what I feel is missed in this discussion is that it can significantly reduce the total manpower by making humans more efficient. For instance, the job of a team of 20 can now be done by 15 or maybe even 10 depending on the class of work. I for one believe this will have a significant impact on a large number of jobs.

Not that I'm suggesting anything be "stopped". I find LLM's incredibly useful, and I'm excited about applying them to more and more of the mundane tasks that I'd rather not do in the first place, so I can spend more time solving more interesting problems.

bnug commented on Successful people set constraints rather than chasing goals joanwestenberg.com/smart-... · Posted by u/MaysonL

kqr · 9 months ago

Maybe you're the right person to clear this up. Ages ago I read in a HN comment that the OODA loop is often misunderstood to be a sequence of steps, rather than something more continuous? And that people's explanations of it are very different from what Boyd had in mind. People treat it more as a Shewhart PDSA cycle rather than the integrated, concurrent dynamic process Boyd described it as.

Since then I've avoided reading others' re-explanations of it, and instead tried to find any original writing from Boyd on it, to shape my own understanding of it before corrupting it with others' misunderstandings.

The problem is I have been unable to find any original Boyd writing on it. Could you guide me in the right direction?

bnug · 9 months ago

https://www.coljohnboyd.com/

bnug commented on Hydrothermal explosion at Yellowstone National Park jhnewsandguide.com/the_ho... · Posted by u/jandrewrogers

consf · 2 years ago

Good luck with recognizing bots, but you're mistaken this time

bnug · 2 years ago

Fair enough. Why don't you fill out your profile? I would love to read it as I'm always curious about the backgrounds of people who's behavior or personality I don't understand, and you're essentially vaguely summarizing the topics in all of your posts, which strikes me as different from anything I've experienced.

bnug commented on Hydrothermal explosion at Yellowstone National Park jhnewsandguide.com/the_ho... · Posted by u/jandrewrogers

consf · 2 years ago

The complexity and variability of geothermal features

bnug · 2 years ago

Anyone know how apparent bot posts like this wind up here? Third one I've seen today, now easy to notice after someone pointed it out on another topic.

bnug commented on New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text openai.com/blog/new-ai-cl... · Posted by u/davidbarker

m3affan · 3 years ago

There is work on hidden signatures in generated text, invisible to humans. Only way to move forward.

bnug · 3 years ago

I'd think people would migrate to just re-typing whatever was generated and change some wording along the way to prevent detection.