This reads a little like the “flight of ideas” that come with stimulants; epic to the person that writes them, but non-sensical to others.
Readit NewsWhoever writes the tool that can Actually Make a legitimate microsoft office powerpoint slide from text will make a lot of money.
From what I have seen most of these tools need to do more user research on how powerpoint slides actually look like in practice.
There's a lot of "you're doing it wrong, show don't tell, just keep the basics on the slide" but the people that use powerpoint to make $$$ make incredibly dense powerpoint materials that serve as reference documents, not presentation guides (i.e. they are intended as leave-behind documents that people can read in advance)
Presentations are also quite hard because:
1. It must "compile to" Powerpoint (it must compile to powerpoint because your end users will want to make direct edits and those end users will NOT be comfortable in markdown and in general will be very averse to change) 2. Powerpoint has no layout engine 3. Powerpoint presentations are in fact a beautiful medium in which VISUAL LAYOUT HAS SEMANTIC MEANING (powerpoint is like medieval art where larger is more important)
If anyone wants to help me build an engine that can get an LLM to ACTUALLY make powerpoints please let me know. I am sure this is a lot harder than you think it is.
The value in a presentation tool is that it can create a variety of presentations. The future of presentations will be variety (possibly via AI) to convey information in both optimal and creative ways.
This was a strange game. I could only move the black pieces, and I could take the opponent’s king. What next?
Also, the skull button seemed to do a lot of damage and shake things up.
fredo2025 commented on Requirements change until they don't buttondown.com/hillelwayn... · Posted by u/azhenley
I feel like Wayne is taking the Agile Maxim “requirements always change” too literally. Agile doesn’t mean "every requirement always changes forever”.
In most live production environments today, requirements do keep changing — security, compliance, customer behavior, scaling — even when teams think they're done.
Agile isn’t making an empirical prediction ("all requirements will mutate endlessly"); it’s a philosophical posture toward uncertainty
Wayne misses this interpretative nuance.
I agree with Wayne that the needs of the user don’t seem to end, even if your project or contract completes. Either the need is to keep maintaining it, put a twist on it, radically change it, or abandon it for something else.
I don’t agree on testing. It’s been a long time since I bought into that, and even tests for uncertain behavior to have confidence is a form of tech debt, as the developer that follows you must make a decision whether to maintain the test or to delete it; its value doesn’t usually last. An exception would be verifying expected behavior of a library or service that must stay consistent, but that is not the job of most developers.
If an entire nation trips offline then every generator station disconnects itself from the grid and the grid itself snaps apart into islands. To bring it back you have to disconnect consumer loads and then re-energize a small set of plants that have dedicated black start capability. Thermal plants require energy to start up and renewables require external sources of inertia for frequency stabilization, so this usually requires turning on a small diesel generator that creates enough power to bootstrap a bigger generator and so on up until there's enough electricity to start the plant itself. With that back online the power from it can be used to re-energize other plants that lack black start capability in a chain until you have a series of isolated islands. Those islands then have to be synchronized and reconnected, whilst simultaneously bringing load online in large blocks.
The whole thing is planned for, but you can't really rehearse for it. During a black start the grid is highly unstable. If something goes wrong then it can trip out again during the restart, sending you back to the beginning. It's especially likely if the original blackout caused undetected equipment damage, or if it was caused by such damage.
In the UK contingency planning assumes a black start could take up to 72 hours, although if things go well it would be faster. It's one reason it's a good idea to always have some cash at home.
Edit: There's a press release about a 2016 black start drill in Spain/Portugal here: https://www.ree.es/en/press-office/press-release/2016/11/spa...
> have some cash at home
For maybe the first 24 hours at a grocery store, and then not so sure. Would your neighbors sell you supplies and food? Maybe not? And so many places now depend on cashless transactions and doubtful they have pen, paper, lockbox, and safe as a contingency plan.