> carefully putting the needle on the lead in and hearing the subtle pops and scratches
Led Zeppelin III actually used that lead in as part of the music experience, and the original CD pressing didn't capture it. I've heard CD pressings (even the name remains from vinyl) that do capture it, I don't know when that started.
The name comes from the CDs being manufactured by pressing into a master mold to create the pits. Replicated (mass manufactured) audio CDs are pressed not written with a laser like duplicated ones (CD-R/RW).
Isn't Mars red due to oxygenation of the rocks? Is that ancient oxygenation or is there some quantity of oxygen in Mars atmosphere today? Does the atmospheric CO2 sometimes break down (maybe under sunlight) and release some small quantity of O2 or might there be another source? Might something underground be respirating atmospheric CO2?
I read it in Buzz Aldrin's book. He mentioned getting rid of all the samples if that happened. I would think the bigger problem would be moon dust all over their suits, but he didn't describe a plan for that.
He said they thought the odds of that happening were remote though, so I guess they decided to risk it with the suits. Apparently he mentioned the problem to his dad who accidentally told a reporter sitting next to him on a flight leading to a big media cycle about "flaming moon dust" prior to the mission.
Throw all their samples back outside, then very carefully sweep the inside of the LEM and throw the broom & dustpan out too?
In theory, they could have been equipped to partially pressurize the cabin with (say) helium - which would allow some sort of vacuum cleaner to work. But that could have added a fair bit of mass (by the LEM's very tight mass budget standards).
This sort of scenario, which was thought too improbable to plan for, even by an organization as psychotically obsessed with astronaut safety as NASA, is exactly why human spaceflight was important for exploration. Because astronauts could improvise a sensible solution and the tech couldn't.
But you could pour water at the fire from across the room!
Lower gravity is giving the defender an advantage over the elements... at least until it gets low enough for things to start floating, when this flips around. In microgravity, water turns into floating blobs, but fire turns into actual floating fireballs.
Water blobs vs. fireballs. Pretty sure there's a nice videogame idea hiding in there somewhere.
Improvise. Adapt. Overcome or perish. One of the first man in orbit almost died because his suit couldnt fold its arms in vacuum. The enterprise moment where you encounter something new and unforseen must be scary as fuck.
From what you describe, I probably would have charged them a tad more and taken a tad longer to deliver. However they would receive a production-ready application, that properly filters and sanitises and normalizes input, that is robust and resilient and reasonably extensible, and has a logical database format.
Tell me, does this vibe coded app running this business properly handle monetary addition, such as in invoicing or summarizing or deciding how big a check to write to the tax man? Are you sure? No floating point math hiding intermittent bugs?
That's actually a great point. The real problem we have is putting businesses and clients together. And traditional advertising is certainly not the answer.
My point was ~~two~~(edit: three)-fold (which, I guess, reading again is just the same thing said three times slightly differently...sorry!), more along the lines of:
- I don't think they need the extra you would offer them. I'm pretty sure they didn't add anything related to accounting. I also have to admit I'm a bit shocked that you would do all of what I described for "a tad more" than 900€, especially taking "a tad" longer than 3 weeks. To me, that's barely anything. But I guess I'll take your word for it.
- For many things, people no longer need the specialized production-ready work, precisely because they have this powerhouse at the fingertips. They "didn't find you" because it would make little sense to do so. It would take longer (which in some sense is higher risk), be more expensive, inherently be more likely to take even longer to really reach the right requirements (getting the knowledge out of their head and into yours would certainly add some overhead) and, in the end, it will likely really not bring in enough superiority for their use case.
- Because people don't need specialized production work, they won't even think of looking for it -- they already have the tools "at home". Why would I go out to buy a an electric screwdriver if I have a manual screwdriver at home? It's good enough. Sure, some people will try to use the manual one even when they shouldn't, but that's life: some people are better than others at figuring this shit out. I'm (slightly) hoping the AIs themselves will help people realize when they're trying to do something they shouldn't.
I truly believe that, for the most part, software engineering is not under threat. That there are many places where software engineering will continue to be essential. We're not developers and never have been. I think coding "manually" will die out, but not the knowledge of code (at least not for quite some time).
At the same time that I believe this, I also really believe that there is a sort of "new DIY" market (or a new "way of interacting with the machine") where ordinary people will just code things without needing to know how to code. Most of these won't be products, but they will be sufficient, for a sufficiently long time, for their needs. If/when they need more, they'll likely need the help of a software engineer, and that's more than fine.
I'm not saying this is the case with you (it doesn't seem like it is), but I see so much pushback from people who seem....either scared or in denial(?) about this (to me) very obvious new emerging way of interacting with a computer. People ask the computer to do things, and the computer builds programs and integrations between programs that....do the thing! When I was a kid, this would have been amazing, and I'm so excited that it exists now. And of course some of these "ordinary" people will also have this be their gateway into proper software engineering.
When I say friends and family, I mean it: they're all slowly starting to build tiny apps without knowing a single line of code. They often don't look good and have idiosyncrasies, but they're great for them. A friend of mine has a personal assistant with voice + telegram bot that edits their calendar and their notion, all deployed with railway (when they showed this to me I was gobsmacked!). They have ZERO coding experience...and yet...they have built this! I wouldn't use it (too finicky for me), but they swear by it and love it. (I audited the code after they asked me to and didn't find any security issues.)
Just like my dad used to grab a bit of scotch-tape to patch things up around the house, or like my grandpa used to build his toys, and furniture, he can now grab an AI and patch things up in his digital life and workplace -- how can people not see that this is happening? And, worse, why are they so very clearly upset about it and wishing that it just doesn't succeed? Is it job safety? The feeling that their favorite part of the job is being profoundly shaken up (coding)? I guess I can sort of understand and sympathize with feeling scared, but....not with the denial of it.
You know how so many people run their businesses off of excel spreadsheets? Often for way longer than they should, no doubt -- but they do. This is sort of the next step after that for some businesses. But, most of all, I really mean that for people's personal needs, interacting with the computer will involve the computer building some code for them to achieve their goals. Yes, MS is fumbling copilot, but one such integrated AI will eventually succeed, and people will open up their "start menu" / "copilot" / "Claude Cowork" / "whatever" and say "I want to create a library for my comic book collection", and over a couple of prompts (perhaps over a couple of days), their computers will just...build it. They will sometimes use existing solutions, but often they'll just build a good-enough thing that will be almost exactly what this person wants. And that's....awesome. So awesome that we're at a point where computers will enable people to do so much more.
I agree with just about everything you've mentioned.
> getting the knowledge out of their head and into yours
That's creating the spec, which is a significant portion of the work and the time (and thus the budget). Maybe I should suggest to potential clients to bang out a preliminary spec with their favourite AI chatbox before meeting. That could save significant time for both of us, and that's money. And it would force me to articulate exactly what value I add rather than having them press the "Code It For Me" button.
> People ask the computer to do things, and the computer builds programs and integrations between programs that....do the thing!
The computer builds a program that ostensibly does the thing. Under ideal conditions, while under negligible load, with expected inputs and a well-meaning operator. Real world software must consider malformed or malicious input, cyclomatic complexity, resource usage, atomicity, sudden loss of power, the ability to actually restore a backup, floating point math, race conditions, I unnormalized text, security, reproducibility, debuggability, logging, and so many other things.
My career is pivoting from writing software to cleaning up other people's vibe-coded software.
I actually love the vibe-coding movement as it makes custom software available to more people, and also extends my own career as I pivot to clean up the messes.
I have an Asus GX10 that I run Qwen3.5 122B A10B on, and I use it for coding through the Pi coding agent (and my own); I have to put more work in to ensure that the model verifies what it does, but if you do so its quite capable.
It makes using my Claude Pro sub actually feasible: write a plan with it, pick it up with my local model and implement it, now I'm not running out of tokens haha.
Is it worth it from a unit economics POV? Probably not, but I bought this thing to learn how to deploy and serve models with vLLM and SGLang, and to learn how to fine tune and train models with the 128GB of memory it gets to work with. Adding up two 40GB vectors in CUDA was quite fun :)
I also use Z.ai's Lite plan for the moment for GLM-5.1 which is very capable in my experience.
I was using Alibaba's Lite Coding Plan... but they killed it entirely after two months haha, too cheap obviously. Or all the *claw users killed it.
GLM 5.1 is extremely good, and ridiculously cheap on their coding plan. Its far better than Sonnet, and a fifth of the cost at API rates. I don't know if the American providers can compete long-term; what good is it to be more innovative it only buys them a six month lead andthey can't build the data center capacity fast enough for demand? Chinese providers have a huge advantage in electrical grid capacity.
True but Z.ai also just silently raised the price, and the entire Chinese frontier set is having to make profit now... hence Alibaba killing the Lite plan and not letting people sign up to their Pro one either; and why MiniMax has their non-commercial license, etc. etc.
So I agree with you, its better than Sonnet but way cheaper. I do wonder how long that will last though
The Framework Desktop has a Ryzen 395 chip that is able to allocate memory to either the CPU or GPU. I've been able to allocate 100+gb to the GPU, so even big models can run there.
Most recently I used it to develop a script to help me manage email. The implementation included interacting with my provider over JMAP, taking various actions, and implementing an automated unsubscribe flow. It was greenfield, and quite trivial compared to the codebases I normally interact with, but it was definitely useful.
That's great. Ostensibly my system could also allocate some of the 32 GB of system memory to argument the 12 GB VRAM, but I've not been able to get it to load models over 20B. I should spend some more time on it.
To be clear, it's not from the Mozilla Corporation (which develops Firefox), it's from MZLA Technologies (which develops Thunderbird). Both bodies are under the Mozilla Foundation.
reply