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tmcw commented on LLMs Are Not Fun   orib.dev/nofun.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
ianbutler · a month ago
To you maybe, to someone else maybe not. It's really hard to pin down a universal framing for existence.

My family eats out at a nice steak restaurant every Christmas no one wants to cook. None of us like to cook.

tmcw · a month ago
Yes, exactly: I'm not saying everyone loves to paint or cook or whatever, but that a lot of people do, and it's weird and bad for the response to this kind of article, in which someone shares that they are losing something they enjoyed, to be some form of "well, not everyone enjoys that."
tmcw commented on LLMs Are Not Fun   orib.dev/nofun.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
jwaldrip · a month ago
Typing is not fun. It robs me of my craft of holding my pencil and feeling it press against the paper with my hand... LLMs are merely a tool to achieve a similar end result. The different aspects of software development are an art. But even with LLMS, I critique and care about the code just as much as if I were writing it line by line myself. I have had more FUN being able to get all of my ideas on paper with LLMs than I have had over years of banging my head against a keyboard going down the rabbit hole on production bugs.
tmcw · a month ago
Unironically this: isn't writing on paper more fun than typing? Isn't painting with real paint and canvas more satisfying than with a stylus and an iPad? Isn't it more fun to make a home-cooked meal for your family than ordering out? Who stomps into the holiday celebration and tells mom that it'd be a lot more efficient to just get catering?

Isn't there something good about being embodied and understanding a medium of expression rather than attempting to translate ideas directly into results as quickly as possible?

tmcw commented on Why is D3 so Verbose?   theheasman.com/short_stor... · Posted by u/TheHeasman
tmcw · 6 months ago
All right, I got nerdsniped into writing a "yes and" sort of thing even though I agree with the gist of this article :) https://macwright.com/2025/08/21/why-d3-is-so-verbose-anothe...
tmcw commented on Show HN: Atlas – GIS and interactive maps in the browser   atlas.co... · Posted by u/vloewe
bozhark · 2 years ago
I have a stupid dream.

I really want a news application that is rendered visually as the Globe. Then a user can drag, zoom, and pan around the world, similar to Google Earth.

The difference being, this news app overlays current trending news stories on the physical location of where it is happening in the world.

Maybe I can manage this idea with this underneath?

tmcw · 2 years ago
tmcw commented on Placemark is going open source and shutting down   macwright.com/2023/11/13/... · Posted by u/Tomte
oooyay · 2 years ago
Can someone shed some light on what happens monetarily to bootstrapped company founders? How many of them are offering personal collateral on loans vs some form of angel investing? I'm finding it hard to square open sourcing something if someone just lost decades of savings or the value in their home, so I'm curious if there's some way they're getting funding for their companies that doesn't ruin them if things like this happen. The tone is also very, "I lost dreams but not my livelihood" in many of these statements and I'm curious how.
tmcw · 2 years ago
I did consulting for the first 8 months of development, and then the company roughly broke even for operational costs since day one. I built most things myself which led to lower costs. My main cost was just rent and health insurance, which in America, self-employed, is both expensive and useless. I had savings from working for a decade in tech and minimized other costs. So, lucky position to be in, but also your average startup's monthly burn is enormous compared to what you can do by being scrappy.
tmcw commented on Placemark is going open source and shutting down   macwright.com/2023/11/13/... · Posted by u/Tomte
orblivion · 2 years ago
Given your setup would it be easy to make a data exporter/importer? That way you could give them the data and shut down before opening the source.
tmcw · 2 years ago
Placemark was built around that idea - all the data is easily exportable & importable in many open formats. It should be straightforward to move to the open source version or other tools.
tmcw commented on Placemark is going open source and shutting down   macwright.com/2023/11/13/... · Posted by u/Tomte
cynicalsecurity · 2 years ago
Looks a bit too ambitious. Was it really necessary to provide collaborative real-time editing? This feature seems way over the top.

I understand every startup wants to have a killer feature which creates unique selling proposition, but this seems like something that probably took way too much effort and wasn't really demanded. But this is only my assumption.

tmcw · 2 years ago
That's a fair assumption. There were some customers who benefited from real-time editing, but it was a big tech bet and led to a design that was harder to scale for larger datasets.
tmcw commented on Placemark is going open source and shutting down   macwright.com/2023/11/13/... · Posted by u/Tomte
xiaq · 2 years ago
The concern may be that there could be undiscovered vulnerabilities in the service and releasing the source before shutdown could make it easier for malicious actors to discover those vulnerabilities and compromise user data.
tmcw · 2 years ago
Yes, that's the rationale. A customer has asked about getting access to the source ahead of time and I'll try to make that work.

u/tmcw

KarmaCake day2226August 26, 2009
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I write over at https://macwright.com/
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