@gurupanguji

Bookmarked: Re: Adding Thousands of Lines to Your Codebase Is… · brennan.day

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 01:36:08 +0000

BKB rightly points out that lines of code isn’t a metric to be proud of. However, I find that to be an easy strawman to dismantle.

Generating the app is “free” now, sure. Knowing what the app is for still isn’t. Friction used to sit between “idea” and “shipped product,” forcing you to sit with a problem and understand it.

I worry that anyone that is used to programming and is skeptical about AI might be missing a potential point here.

The product needs to be safe, it needs to take care of privacy and prompting isn’t a guarantee for this all to happen. Shipping something without fully understanding what you are shipping is a risk. However, the flip side of the narrative is something that we should be serious of as well - the most secure stance is to not ship anything.

I myself am trying to look past the peacocking to look at what people are sharing and consider where they are drawing boundaries for themselves, where are they drawing the balance between programming as a means to an end.

With that grace, I truly believe that everyone is genuinely trying to find the right balance when using these tools. To me this wild west that we have is a necessary part of finding the boundaries, which themselves are fast changing.

Source: brennan.day

Bookmarked: AI should kill cross-platform platforms

Mon, 09 Nov 2026 23:28:37 +0000

In this world, if writing native apps gives a better experience and AI coding agents make it easy to implement what you want across all platforms, then you may as well write native.

Matt makes a similar argument to my own that cross platform solutions serve(d) a different purpose.

Using coding agents to deliver first class native apps is a worthwhile goal, especially if you are indie.

p.s. I don’t think it needs to be LIMITED to Indie developers, although problems with scale are still problems with scale.

Source: birchtree.me

Mon, 09 Nov 2026 14:30:00 +0000

Apps are getting way too big. That’s three quarters of a Gigabyte. For an email client? Digging into it more, the iOS (phone) app alone is still around 300 MB, with another 60MB for framework; 160MB for localizations and 100MB of assets, fonts and icons. Just insane.

Happy Diwali

Mon, 09 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Happy Diwali from our family to yours. Diwali is the celebration of light’s win over darkness. It’s also a moment to cleanse yourself of the past and then look forward to a new year and a year of prosperity. It’s hopeful and it feels timely. Here’s to a delightful new year of adventures.

Bookmarked: Trevor Noah on AI – GeekWire

Sun, 08 Nov 2026 22:34:30 +0000

AI has reached what he calls “work intelligence”: it can do the jobs we invented, but we keep inventing new ones. Salt and ice used to be precious. Now restaurants hand them out for free. What we value changes, and in Trevor’s view, we’re expendable only if we define being human by the tasks we value today.

There’s something poetic when you see thoughts put into words that were rattling in your brain. I think Trevor Noah just did that for me.

“There is no job that will last forever. There is nothing that won’t be displaced. The question is, how long is the following distance between the two things?”

This is both reality and imho, an optimistic take on humanity. And that’s squarely where I fall. Idk where that optimism comes from when I see dear friends being let go from their jobs. However, if you squint and look at where the fortunate land, you can see that things are different. And different, in a time of a change, is good.

My optimism also comes from observing the children of today - they are growing up in an age where they don’t face the cost of the following distance. As a result, they won’t treat whatever technology this turns out to be as anything but normal.

That, in turn, will let them wield these as tools to be used. I can only hope that I will be around to see what incredible things they will accomplish with it.

Source: www.geekwire.com

Bookmarked: /blog/03-03-2026 ~ vulpine.zone

Sun, 08 Nov 2026 14:32:46 +0000

Enter: IRC, Internet Relay Chat.

I had my first experience with IRC sometime in 2020 or 2021. I forget exactly how I had heard about it to be honest, but I do remember freenode being the first server I joined (and Weechat, a TUI IRC client, being my client of choice :P). I had a ton of fun and actually made friends?? Sadly I happened to join just months before everything fell apart though, LOL. I stopped using IRC when freenode went offline.

Around the time Discord made their age verfication announcement, I was reminded of IRC’s existence when @whitequark@treehouse.systems posted about IRCv3 on Mastodon, and thought I’d give it another go. I connected to Libera.Chat, joined a few channels, and…

…it is awesome.

Let’s mark today - Nov 8, 2026 - as the day that I felt old on the internet as someone discovered IRC in “2020 or 2021.”

However, all I want to say is - Welcome!

And now your watch begins!

Source: vulpine.zone

Bookmarked: Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM | The Verge

Fri, 06 Nov 2026 00:15:24 +0000

Discord is finally giving up on Electron, the cross-platform framework that lets developers build desktop apps using web technologies. Electron web apps are notoriously heavy on system resources, and Discord is now moving its desktop app fully to Rust — a modern programming language designed for speed and memory safety.

Electron was a solution when developer time was the resource bottleneck and you wanted to leverage that as much as possible. Rust + native UI elements are an interesting solution for (what I think is) a notoriously unreadable programming language that gives you speed, type and memory safety.

Bonus is that you only need to manage UI on the appropriate platforms.

Oh and in a world where RAM is dear, this is a good news for consumers if this trend continues. In fact, I urge every software maker to be better with resource efficiency.

Genuinely excited to see how this goes.

If this sticks, I am curious how people will start shifting their computer preferences.

Zed is one of the first ones that’s gone down this path and I really do enjoy it. They’ve gone one step ahead and also created their own declarative UI programming language similar to SwiftUI. It’s called GPUI.

Going to be an interesting world

Source: www.theverge.com

Wed, 04 Nov 2026 19:58:56 +0000

Every day morning, en route to school, I used to watch people clean their home’s front door area. They sprinkle some water, catch the dust down, then sweep, and then put kolam.

I had always considered it a metaphor for hope and optimism. It didn’t matter what happened yday. Today is a new day. It shall be approached with good intent. It starts with an activity that makes myself and my community better - cleaning my home. It is a task that I control, I own and I can do my dharma.

When you take a step back, the exercise seems futile given how much dust is there in India.

Yet, that daily practice - it is such a hopeful start.

Bookmarked: Ferrari Has a Driver Problem | Jacen Sekai

Wed, 04 Nov 2026 14:43:59 +0000

Hamilton’s response, as it’s been all year, was to slam the team and demand “serious talks” post-race.

I flagged Hamilton’s attitude toward Ferrari back in September in the aftermath of the Italian GP. Regarding another clash with Leclerc, Hamilton claimed not to be interested in arguing and fighting about the team in public while doing exactly that, claiming that “here there are no rules.”

The problem with Hamilton’s comments all season is that they don’t come off as “I want what’s best for the team.” They sound a lot like “We need to work together as long as working together is to my benefit.” Hamilton doesn’t want a Ferrari 1-2. He wants a Ferrari 1-2 with him as the 1. Leclerc is well within his right to fight for results; he doesn’t have to pull over and accept 2nd just because Hamilton says so.

Hamilton has come into a team with an established no. 1 driver and wants all attention and resources to be shifted to him. That’s not how it works.

Leclerc is also willing to take responsibility for his actions. He acknowledged in Italy that he pushed things too far in the incident with Hamilton. As for Hamilton, he seems flatly uninterested in taking responsibility for anything in his control. In the Singapore GP, where he overruled his team and made a strategy call that ultimately lost him any kind of a good result, his apology seemed very half-hearted and insincere.

At the end of the day, Ferrari has done this to themselves, making a big signing of a driver with a big ego who has historically screwed over his teammates for the sake of his own success. Hamilton did this to himself, moving away from a team that has moved heaven and earth for him and expecting his new bosses to do the same. Truly two entities that deserve each other.

Preach!

Source: jacen.moe

Bookmarked: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Reviews - Metacritic

Wed, 04 Nov 2026 14:30:10 +0000

Score of 96.

I am excited for both this and GTA VI. November and December 2026 is looking hopeful for many reasons.

Source: www.metacritic.com

Bookmarked: I discovered a sound that leaks your exact location (and it's everywhere) - YouTube

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 13:57:53 +0000

This is wild! And so cool! Youtuber colsto uses the doppler curves of flights in the background of videos to determine the accurate geolocation in videos. Just… wild!

Source: YouTube

Bookmarked: Three Dots – Rands in Repose

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 01:16:16 +0000

Google would greatly prefer if you didn’t click on X because the moment you do, you’ve left Google and they’ve mostly lost their ability to present you with advertising. You read that right: the reason you go to Google is to find other high-quality stuff that they don’t want you to actually see. My favorite attempt was AMP, Accelerated Mobile Pages, where publishers built lightweight copies of their content, and Google served them from their own servers. Yes, you were promised a traffic advantage, but you lose control over design, ads, and analytics.

I highly recommend you read the whole article before reading my comments.

rands makes three claims - three dots, if you will ;)

Claim 1: Google is incentivized to lock users on their properties because it can monetize their attention.

Claim 2: AI generated answers reduce visits to the original sources, undermining (current) internet economics.

Claim 3: Human generated knowledge on the web is very valuable; a world without the current creative internet is poor-er.

IMHO, the third claim is compelling; the second has substantial evidence; and the first I humbly disagree with.

More critically, I don’t think Claim 1 is a requirement for Claim 2 or Claim 3 to be true.

Nota bene: I am a Xoogler.

tl;dr- I disagree with Rands because Google’s incentives are very material to serve your need as the highest priority. Google will generate far more money (and optionality) by serving your need as well as possible and ensure that you maintain a search habit than any short term ad load by holding you hostage. In addition, alternatives truly are a click away.

Consider any of the metrics that Google search (in)famously optimizes for - click through rate, meaningful clickthroughs (where the user doesn’t come back to google), search preference, market search etc. They are all need based for a reason. Google truly believe(d/s) that doing the right thing by the user will earn them a chance to also make money the right way. It’s to build a durable habit for the user.

This because Google doesn’t monetize your attention. It needs your attention but it actually monetizes your intent. Your attention’s marginal utility is low.

We also need to accept that this is what users want. Rands takes umbrage with Google but I’d argue that if Google didn’t do this, users would have happily shifted to a search engine that did. Google’s getting the boot here only because it was so pivotal in creating the previous market that helped the web stay viable.

Google is a convenient villain even though it doesn’t monetize attention (modulo YouTube), and would need to myopically make an active choice to sabotage its standing with its users. This is entirely possible, but unlikely.

But, what of the human creation, and connection?

I posit that human creativity and open sharing was never motivated by commercial success. To wit, the world has more written thoughts than ever before - even if some are still within siloes that are getting closed.

I posit that people will still write to think, will share more freely even if every single LLM slurps it all up to serve answers to people. And that’s the beauty of the web. It was never static. It is intended to be a repository of the thoughts and creations of humans - and soon - bots. That central repo came before monetization, and Google and will stay post monetization and Google.

We just have to go through the hard period and come out of it.

Source: randsinrepose.com

Bookmarked: Chat Is the Future - Roger Wong

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 19:27:19 +0000

The Long Case Against Chat

In January 2023, Austin Z. Henley wrote:

Expecting users to primarily interact with software in natural language is lazy.

Henley rightly argued that chat puts the onus on the user of figuring what to ask and how to ask it. Good interfaces guide people and help them discover what’s possible. He doubted that natural language should be the primary interface.

That same year, Amelia Wattenberger wrote:

Good tools make it clear how they should be used. And more importantly, how they should not be used. If we think about a good pair of gloves, it’s immediately obvious how we should use them. They’re hand-shaped! We put them on our hands. And the specific material tells us more: metal mesh gloves are for preventing physical harm, rubber gloves are for preventing chemical harm, and leather gloves are for looking cool on a motorcycle.

A blank text field doesn’t give the user a lot to go on. Wattenberger suggests that a chatbox with some additional affordances could help: dropdown menus for settings, or sliders for parameters to shape the response.

In January 2024, Elliot Smith predicted that chat would eventually occupy a narrower role:

Chat is unlikely to disappear but it’ll likely be for power users, much like the command line is today.

By 2025, Allen Pike was arguing that “chatting with the underlying LLM should be more of a debug interface—a fallback mode—and not the primary UX.” And at the time I agreed.

I’d already been arguing for a hybrid in my experiments with prompt-to-code tools. Starting with a prompt was useful, but once a design appeared, I wanted direct manipulation. At the time, apps like Lovable were very much prompting-only, unless you knew how to edit the code. As a designer, I wanted to click on some text and change its size.

I still agree with Wattenberger about the need for controls. But I’m having a harder time seeing plain language as a fallback or something mainly for power users. Pasting a grocery list into Amazon feels like a better way to shop. Just cut out the tedious middle part of searching, comparing, and adding to my cart. Just show me the outcomes. Increasingly, it’s the way I want to do all things on my computer.

Like Roger, I’ve also bet against chat being the primary interface for many while continuing to prefer to use it as the primary interaction. How has it been so durable? And how have these tools gotten ever more wider adoption?

My current hypothesis to answer, “(Why) is it different this time?”, is - LLMs are good at gleaning intent from our words. Independent of whether they are a verbal mashup - voice to text / short curt grammatically incorrect taps with the fingers - LLMs, especially within the context of other services - for example - Roger’s example of Alexa and Shopping - are really good at converting input into intent.

That’s different from the previous implementations of these - that needed specific trigger phrases and verbs and incantations to make the service work. Put another way - I am willing to be wrong in my own prediction in the past that chatbots / text isn’t going to be the interface for all.

Source: rogerwong.me

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 19:18:49 +0000

Isn’t it a weird twist of fate that one of life’s cruelest paradox is that the more you want something, the more you are likely to get in your own way and the likelier outcome is that you are unlikely to satisfy that want?

I had a clear example of this recently - out of nowhere - I got a chance to try out for a really interesting gig. I never really wanted this gig until I got the opportunity. And I prepared hard - but as expected - I also wanted it bad. And sure enough, I tripped up at the moment and didn’t end up getting it.

I was bummed, of course.

But, in retrospection, what I really wanted was to show up and be validated that I am going to get it.

Anyway… ever more relevant.

Get excited about the process, not the outcome. The want of the outcome will trip you up. And the more you want, the likelier the outcome is no!

Bookmarked: OpenAI is finally merging ChatGPT's Chat and Work tabs | TechCrunch

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 19:12:06 +0000

“This will enable you to move from exploring an idea to having ChatGPT carry it through, all in one place. You can bring in your files and plugins and ask ChatGPT to build a website, create a presentation, or do things for you on the web, while reviewing and guiding its work. Codex will remain a separate experience in the ChatGPT desktop app,” the email said.

OpenAI also said with this transition, both ChatGPT and Codex will draw tokens from the same allowance pool. It said this change won’t impact most users, but based on usage and model, some folks might need to wait for resets more frequently.

Chat versus Tasks is not a meaningful distinction if maintained as those names. p.s. I think Gemini is next.

However, as someone who pays for all this, the biggest loss is that they are all going to start consuming tokens from the same bucket. Now, I understand that this was likely given Claude went down this path already.

I am curious how Gemini will navigate this though given the antigravity bucket is currently diff from the Gemini app bucket. Anyway, more of the same - tokens are still getting more expensive. The good news is that intelligence is becoming cheaper. For example, you don’t need to burn Opus 5.5 / GPT Astra / Argon tokens all the time.

One can expect some users to be more token efficient. However, for a LOT more, they are just going to have a worse user experience unless token budgets also increase with these moves. I sure hope it does.

Source: techcrunch.com

Bookmarked: Beyond Good and Evil | Project Gutenberg

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 23:15:02 +0000

“I am affected, not because you have deceived me, but because I can no longer believe in you.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Source: www.gutenberg.org

Bookmarked: Keychron Orca : r/ErgoMechKeyboards

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 16:11:37 +0000

I am fascinated that Keychron is entering the split ergo keyboard space and that too with a trackball and what looks like a scroll wheel on the left side?

Keychron github has more details.

Source: www.reddit.com

Bookmarked: The Friction I Don't Want to Lose | George Rodier

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 14:48:09 +0000

However, there is good reason to fight those tendencies. Tokens don’t appear to be getting cheaper anytime soon. Continually encountering friction, learning, and gaining experience will at the very least give you the advantage in a future if tokens are no longer subsidized to you. And if you do have unlimited reign of tokens, that gained experience gives you the power to come up with better solutions, introduce friction, and fight slop-level outcomes. So it may be worth it to take a step back from an LLM output at different points in time, talk to other humans, invest in a course from a content educator, or maybe think about that hard problem as your falling asleep and dream about it through the night.

I agree with the author - learning how to learn is a useful skill. I must admit that I am not a conscious learner i.e. I still don’t know the exact process on how I learn. However, I do know that I learn by tinkering and doing.

As a result LLMs have been a great boon for me to do and learn.

Creation is often about repetition and having fun and that first thing that you attempt to create is often a copy / something that’s inspired you and then you embracing the various constraints to create it.

The author seems to be of the opinion that coding agents are not a constraint and hence the learning is limited. I can certainly see that angle of thinking. I think there is a counter angle: LLMs =unblock something that prevented creation in the first place and there is learning that happens.

To me, learning is a mindset - it’s the openness and curiosity that attempts to dig into the process of creation and repeat and have fun doing it. So, respectfully, if you want to use tools to help you through that process, imho, don’t let other people’s opinions, block you!

Source: georgerodier.com

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 14:26:18 +0000

It sure seems like we are, and are likely to continue to be, in the messy middle of the AI written / not debate. The only path is to stay true to yourself, no matter which side you’d prefer to be.

Sat, 31 Oct 2026 23:02:25 +0000

Looks like bluebubbles server had an update after a LONG time.