Notices by Jonathan Hogg (jonathanhogg@mastodon.social)

It is the time of year where the bumblebees come out of hibernation in our chimney and the ladybirds come out of hibernation in the frames of the sash windows; we are now continually rescuing them from the house and helping them on their ways…

#Spring

I am endlessly suspicious of "professionals". At what point should you decide that you know what you're doing? Maybe it's a Zen thing: beginner's mind and all that…

Thinking on this some more: I've read a lot of CVs over the years and done a lot of interviews, and the thing I've never been interested in is whether a candidate has X years experience in language A or framework B; I want to know what capacity they have to learn something new. A hobbyist delights in tinkering and understanding things

So someone called me a "hobby programmer" the other day and I was affronted! But now I've thought about it some more, I think I'll take that. I think I've always been a hobby programmer, regardless of the industry I've been in or how much I've been paid to write code

To me, all these people crowing about having written 10k lines of code in a day are idiots. If you need to write that much code in a day, you are manifestly working at the wrong level of abstraction to solve your problem.

I've seen lots of posts in the last couple of days about how quickly one can write lots of code with AI. I feel perplexed by this as I hate large programs. The largest thing I have written in the last decade is Flitter. It's only 30k lines and I believe very strongly that it is. Still. Too. Big. Even there, I wrote it purposely to allow the stuff I write *in* it to be very smol: mostly no more than 100 lines. That is the maximum I want to write in a day.

On the gripping hand, if you're a trained programmer using vibe-coding because of a perceived increase in your productivity, or pressure from management to increase your productivity, I would refer you to my first post in this thread…

We seem to have largely stopped innovating on trying to lower barriers to programming in favour of creating endless new frameworks and libraries for a vanishingly small number of near-identical languages. It is the mid-2020s and people are wringing their hands over Rust as if it was some inexplicable new thing rather than a C-derivative that incorporates decades old type theory. You know what I consider to be genuinely ground-breaking programming tools? VisiCalc, HyperCard and Scratch.

I will say one thing for generative AI: since these tools function by remixing/translating existing information, that vibe programming is so popular demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of our industry in not making this stuff easier. If a giant ball of statistics can mostly knock up a working app in minutes, this shows not that gen-AI is insanely clever, but that most of the work in making an app has always been stupid. We have gatekeeped programming behind vast walls of nonsense.

You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.

My experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.

My new year's resolution is to continue ignoring all technologies that I am told ignoring will result in me being left behind. I embrace the being left behind. I will become a forest witch, speaking to myself in invented programming languages. In the dark I will twist little bits of wire together to make flickering lights that amuse squirrels. I will let the 8-bit soil from which I came reclaim my body.

@anildash I’m generally agnostic about whether people use or like CLIs, but if you meant to be light-hearted then I think you need to go back and look at that line about physical touch again – it is more brutal than you imagine, and particularly unpleasant for many neurodivergent, queer or just shy people who struggled to connect to their peers during a pretty miserable period

@anildash I'm unclear why you take potshots at people who enjoyed (or still enjoy) text adventure games, though? These were often incredible works of art and the language of using them was well understood by those who played. The whole line about "physical touch" is just incredibly mean and directs your ire at the wrong target. It spoils an otherwise great article.

@soulcutter @anildash I imagine that the thinking was somehow that text adventure players have gone on to become AI techbros and so this counts as 'punching up', but in reality most are just ordinary people, so this largely ends up punching down instead

"Nerds not getting laid, amirite?" feels like a lazier take than I had expected from Anil

This is the second time in their life that I’ve remade these heart fairy lights. I love them too much to throw them away ❤️

Last time I swapped the bulbs for LEDs and kept the original 24V AC transformer. This time I’m swapping to 5V DC so I can use an old USB wart

This dial is infuriating! What are these non-standard cooking temperatures like 170? And where is the dot in the middle? 155? What the fuck is that?

Seeking generative/procedural artist beta users! (PLEASE BOOST!)

It’s now 2 years since I open-sourced my pet language, Flitter. I’ve used it for multiple live gigs, interactive installations and video artworks

However, I have no idea if it has value beyond my use. I need people to try it, tell me what they hate and what sucks most in the docs

You need to be comfortable at the CLI, example visuals on the #FlitterLang tag

https://github.com/jonathanhogg/flitter

#ProceduralArt #GenerativeArt

Useful tip: don't install Ubuntu server on a machine with a 4K monitor if you have any eyesight issues…

#HolyShit #TinyFont

Exciting news! I am taking advantage of Manifold’s level-sets to natively support signed distance fields in Flitter.

So I now have an infinite pebble generator…

#Flitter #CreativeCoding #ProceduralArt #GenerativeArt