I like the fact that it gives animated feedback to emphasize what is happening/being altered. Native components don't always do that very well. Animations are not just artsy fluff, they have real UX value (if done right, of course).
I don't know. At the point in which you have to reinforce visual context with animations, I feel like you've already failed at the part of UX that actually matters. Like there's already been a cascade of structural failure, and now you're trying to put bandaids over it.
The animations, in this case, are not helpful. They distract from what you're trying to do. And components that don't give feedback are bad. It's trivial to have different color palettes for over, click, release, etc.
There is definitely the effect of less or de-growth in the industry, which started before the current AI hype. And now there's the additional effect of companies hoping AI will replace their need for (junior) devs. Nobody knows if or to what degree this will work out (yes, we all have opinions, but no crystal balls), but they are holding back the hiring until they know how all this pans out.
Same here (actually had a voyage 200, but same same I guess). It's actually quite insulting that TI kept (and keeps?) selling waaay outdated hardware at horrendous prices. It's the SAP/Oracle business model applied to school hardware.
> Same here (actually had a voyage 200, but same same I guess).
Not the same, actually! Unlike the TI-83/84 series, the TI-89, -92, and Voyage-200 all used a 68000 CPU, with a completely different (and much better) operating system.
Ah yeah, we all had either TI-89 or v200. Still was already 20-year-old tech at the time we bought it for the price of a mid-range modern phone. It really should have cost a fraction of that.
While I agree on bit about horrible prices, the TI calculators are well suited to their intended task[1] so I will object to the outdated hardware part. Stability is a good thing in the context of classrooms. Why should schools be spending money on replacement hardware, software, and textbooks when the curriculum itself is fundamentally unchanged?[2]
[1] Except the screens on the older models were truly horrible, from a brightness and contrast perspective.
[2] From my recollection, the calculators interfaced with hardware and software from other vendors. Then, of course, there was the vendor lock-in provided by textbook publishers.
I found a funny irony that in the country of free market, a calculator model was enforced nation wide in the schools. Here, in Spain, the teacher would only ask to the kids to get a calculator. They never ask for a concrete model or brand. Perhaps, they will only go ask to not get a programmeble calculator.
I agree that you not need to have more powerful calculator. A cheap Casio or HP calculator it's enough for the 99% of time. I keep using my old Casio from my formative years. It's in an interesting calc. Powerful enough to write formulas and complex calculations, but can't store formulas or programs. Just in the nice spot that allowed it to be used in exams.
You will likely end up in maintenance hell soon. This will likely not be much easier with AI because coding is not the hard/annoying part, it's the fact that you need to dust off every little project every time a tiny fix is needed, and that's a lot of toil in the long run.
Seems to me this would get easier or harder depending on how you write the code. Like if you write the code in something standard and unchanging like POSIX shell scripts or C99 or ES5 javascript, at least the ecosystem won't change out from under you. If you use rust or python or a bunch of node.js dependencies then you might have to edit the project just to keep up with ecosystem changes.
Maybe? I ran across an old pre-LLM project of mine recently, and past me was an asshole and didn't leave a readme for future me. Meanwhile post-LLM projects at least have a readme that the LLM generated for me or my agent to read and pick up context on. Being able to ask an agent what is this repo, what's going on here? Hey just make it do this, instead of toilsomely digging in and doing it tmmyself, seems to say that might not come to pass.
There is, of course, the question of if that's making me dumber. It might be, but there are other brain training things I'm doing outside of that to force my brain to do the thing.
The fact that you're even saying this it is probably an admission that you do think it's making you dumber. Most people I know, who are honest with themselves, have admitted to me that they feel like it's making them dumber or "zombifying" them. This is also well studied already, https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
LLMs are poison for the brain, I'm almost certain of it, at least when used in the way most people are using them. If you drive everywhere because you don't want to walk (but you could), you're obviously going to be physically worse off than if you walked. This is the case with llms, if you have them do all the thinking, planning and action you're going to be cognitively worse off than if you didn't use them.
It's pretty easy to generalize this, but it doesn't match my perception. People who are using llms to do things they could have already done, but faster, probably have atrophying skill sets. People who are using these tools to accomplish significantly more difficult or complex work than they used to are absolutely finding new ways to push themselves. The problems are just much bigger.
The average Joe can easily vibe code apps that took a small startup just a few years ago. If developers are also using AI to build the same simple apps - then yeah. They're not pushing themselves hard enough, and probably not using their brains as much anymore.
I don't see average Joes vibe coding apps that before took a small startup, I see a lot of cheap talk around that idea, but no receipts ... I see some incredibly simple chrome extensions and the such out there, with their api keys hard coded in their client side code lol
My perception is that this guy's response to "I forgot to write a readme" was "I should limit myself to tools that do it for me" instead of instilling discipline about documentation.
"People who are using these tools to accomplish significantly more difficult or complex work than they used to are absolutely finding new ways to push themselves"
hahaha this is a miniscule amount of people.
most people do not care about their job, only to the extent it is a source of income. but they do not care about it anything more than that. and they shouldnt either!
This matches my experience as a statistician who used to begrudgingly write bad code when I had to. LLMs have opened up huge new possibilities for me.
No doubt there's some Gell-Mann amnesia going on, because I regularly have to correct them from doing stuff that's really dumb based on my expertise within my area of specialization. More than once I've managed to extract >3 orders of magnitude performance gains after asking them to justify why their code was so slow. Probably there's still some stupid stuff in there. But it's better than the code I would have written, and I never could have paid for a proper developer to write it.
Socrates was right, honestly. I would not be surprised if humans are more evolutionarily optimized for that sort of communication and thinking. Maybe socrates noticed that writers/readers vs orators/listeners were indeed generally dumber in the way we consider people riddled with short form social media induced brainrot to also be missing some mental capacity.
Widespread literacy is only a few generations old, arguably I guess. Meanwhile we’ve been speaking to eachother for longer than we’ve been humans. Oral information can be kept longer than written information too it seems. Our oldest kept information is not written down, but in folk stories such as aboriginal tales some tens of thousands of years old.
The worrying thing is these are people who nominally seem smart - what we are seeing is 'smart' is not what we think/was. Smart is the ability to identify an object which is harmful and a) be disciplined about its use b) become a better person who doesnt need to expose themselves to said object.
I actually I had one fella who was very distressed - pouring out all his stresses to a bot. Then I reminded him the bot is literally designed to tend to his nees - not to his benefit - but to the provider of the good whom will manipulate said user later on. He then immediately deleted his accounts.
Many are not aware of whats going on around them - this is very concerning.
Sometime a wrong and misleading README done more harm than good.
It is not that rare to see LLM waste hours on a wrong path because a misleading line in README. Even worse, they can't learn. Spawn a subagent and it repeat the same error again
Someone on my team started using an LLM to write all his readme files (he used to not write them at all).
So far, 100% of them have been wrong. I read them, my spidey senses think that what it says doesn’t match his style. I look at the code to find the variables the readme mentions doesn’t exist anywhere in the codebase. I then reach out to him about it, where it says it was written by AI and he will go back and write it for real.
He says it’s better than nothing, but agree with you that it does more harm than good. I wasted my time reading slop. I wasted more time validating the slop. I wasted even more time with a conversation about it. Now he’s spending time re-writing something that he could have written faster and better when he was actually writing the code and it was fresh in his mind. Meanwhile, I’m either blocked waiting for him, or I need to spend my time trying to understand the minutiae of his code so I can integrate it into mine.
yeah I had this happen to me. Except when I go to maintain it, now cursor/claude are good enough to essentially handle it on their own, so it turns out to be very low effort to maintain.
alternatively, you might end up in 'good enough heaven' and not have to touch it for a decade because, you know, it does exactly as you need and you're not google, microsoft, openAI or antrhopic.
I'd bet there's far more 'good enoughs' than anything else out there. One of the reasons microsoft office is constantly churning subscription, etc is because they solved good enough decades ago and need to justify valuations that just don't matter for most of their user's use cases.
Not everyone is a software developer having to churn out the 101th SaaS that's just because some MBA refuses to hire a dev.
The closer I start working with and on AI stuff, the more I start seeing the disconnect between doomsday predictions of what AI will replace vs. what it is actually capable of. Yes, it can do stuff, and yes, it's getting better. But the closer you look the more clear it becomes that the enthusiast vision of completely independent AI systems is unrealistic as of today. Yes, all the tech companies are pushing for exactly this, but reliability and accuracy is all over the place. Plus, many of the technologies that everyone is talking about in the wider public (e.g. image recognition) have been quite well-developed and widely applied for years, before the current LLM boom, but they now get more attention as part of the overall AI hype.
Many indistries are changing, but in most cases the new tools will be more akin to cars that still need drivers, rather than robots who take over the whole job. Yes, jobs might be lost, or shifted to others, but it's not like suddenly 90% of people will have nothing to do. There were similar shifts in the past with new technologies, and we made it past them.
I think a main worry is that, this AI wave is quite different from past technological revolutions in that, this wave is happening so fast, the speed that humans learn new skills and master new jobs would lag more and more behind the speed that machines replace humans in those jobs. Without societal or legal constraints, capital chasing the max efficiency and profit would just replace humans with machines whenever machine cost comes down below humans.
That’s almost certainly going to be the case. For example, I have been extremely negative on tech in the legal sector. Until now. AI as it exists now allows me to do stuff that in the past I would’ve delegated to an associate. Even if we’re nearing a plateau I can see it enabling cutting a team of 4 people to 3 people. (For whatever reason, AI for legal is quite far behind AI for coding in terms of force multiplication. But it’s genuinely useful, unlike almost all previous legal tech.)
The efficiencies mean that firms are just going to cut the size of entry level lawyer classes. History shows that those people aren’t going to get comparable jobs, ever. The pyramid will become narrower, and more and more returns will flow to the folks at the top whose job is less wrangling the law and facts and more dealing with the human factors of client relationships. I see that happening all over the white collar world.
Dropping a non-native person into the midst of a superior technologically and culturally different environment puts them at a disadvantage. How do you legislate on-ramping someone who goes from living in 1926 to 2026? How does a company hire someone who cannot read the native language?
I agree that's the status quo right now. AI does ~80%-90% of the job well but in many cases, users require 99%+ reliability and the work still requires a human. The real scare is that the projection of AI intelligence will reach ASI and then that gap will close or be marginally insignificant.
The vision of independent AI systems will eventually come to fruition, just not today. Not yet.
i think the doomsday scenario is more likely from someone giving AI access to crucial systems and it accidentally making critical mistakes, rather than it outsmarting the system
This has been a recurring theme since the dawn of video games: Everyone talks about graphics (devs and gamers), but ultimately the good and beloved games are the ones with great gameplay.
It was more interesting when there were real tangible improvements. Game graphics has been like smartphones for a good long time now. Performance and feel (low latency and high consistency) still matters though, that is not solved, but it's also never marketed. Quality is not included with a UE license.
And why not accelerate using swing-bys on moons and planets? Of course this gets harder the faster you're already moving, but IIUC Voyager 1 has roughly 0.01% c, and this was launched 50 years ago.
It might help a bit, as you mentioned that Voyager is currently going about ~17km/s, so nearly 0.005% c, so it's already nearly 1/200th of the way there to our target of 1% c.
But then you're at a velocity so far beyond the escape velocity of most bodies you'd need to be skirting stars, then black holes to get anything more, and that's where it dives straight into "sci-fi" rather than anything even close to theoretically possible. How far away even if a body like that? Will this "probe" even survive such an encounter?
So even with that sort of slingshot it's well within the "Estimate Rough Error" of my intial numbers. They're "order of magnitude back-of-the-envelope calculations" of spherical spaceships in an already unrealistically biased to make the numbers smaller vacuum (just reaction mass, no thought of any mass of the engine or spacecraft body itself, or containing the reaction mass itself, or anything like that).
I probably should have stated my assumptions - in that "Can we accelerate a probe" I assumed that:
- The "probe" is a significant size - if we define a "probe" as a "Single Ion" then we already do that at CERN and similar pretty regularly - 1kg was my assumption of "Useful Probe Mass"
- "We" - in that "humans" as we know them today, preferably in the realisic age of civilizations as we know them, or even better within the lifetime of a currently living human.
Also there's different levels of "theoretical". VASIMIR has only ever been shown in lab settings, so still "theoretical" as a propulsion technology. something like Project Orion is "theoretical" in that it's never been built, but likely just an engineering effort. IKAROS showed solar sails are "possible", but so many orders of magnitude away from what would be required it'll still be a significant engineering and development effort to even show the same idea at the required scale is possible. Things like lasers as remote energy sources haven't really got off the drawing board. And then at the extreme we have "theoretical" ideas like fusion rockets, which are more "Not show to be /impossible/" rather than anything we could even start at really building today.
And each step along that "further out into theory" path means more risks, and more changes that method is shown to be less useful than really desired.
Is there a short snd simple explanation for how these planetary slingshots work? To me the gravity that increases the vehicle speed on the way to the planet will decrease the speed on the way away. Thanks!
It mostly works because the object you're sling-shotting with is moving relative to the initial origin of the probe - if you can line it up so the object is moving in the direction you want to accelerate in you can get it to "drag" your probe along a bit.
The end result is the probe isn't moving any "faster" leaving the slingshot object than it arrived from that object's point of view, but it may well be faster from the origin reference frame.
The thing is to remember that the bodies you're launching from, and then slingshotting against, are moving very fast relative to each other already. It's like throwing a bouncy-ball against a moving car - when it bounces off it may be moving faster relative to you than when you threw it, but it's actually a lower velocity relative to the moving car's reference frame.
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