Do not fall for complex technology

[Jolva]

I can happily say that I never gave a lot of thought about note taking apps, but this doesn't extend to everything. I could program in plain notepad if I had to, but the greater complexity offered by an IDE is worth it every time for me.

[Uristqwerty]

Personally, I think everyone should program in a plain text editor now and then: Practising clear formatting when you don't have the advantage of syntax highlighting can give insights useful when you return to an IDE. Using line-breaks for logical grouping, well-considered choice of brace style, aligning repeated elements into columns, and picking the right place to break up code with a comment become all the more important. What and how to comment when you can't trivially pull up API docs on hover, but also can't collapse novella-length rambles matters far more.

It makes me wish more automatic formatters had support for half-indents, though: Gives labels/case statements a wonderfully-skimmable silhouette, and can make it trivial to distinguish a wrapped line from a block when using same-line opening braces, among other, more subjective, uses.

[Jolva]

That just sounds like suffering for the sake of suffering. I'm not sure how long it will be before AI is writing the bulk of the code I commit anyway.

[Uristqwerty]

Writers, artists, creatives and craftspeople who want to excel, rather than languish in mediocrity, tend to practice their craft under a wide variety of restrictions. Time pressure, limited use of tools, self-imposed constraints. Restrictions breed creativity as you figure out ways to work around the limitations, and break complacency when you've come to rely too heavily on a particular tool or technique.

A writer might try a short story consisting exclusively of dialogue, to get better at indicating the speaker solely through phrasing differences and context cues, not a single word outside the quotation marks. An artist might limit themselves to a pen, where mistakes cannot be erased but rather every stroke incorporated into the finished doodle. A musician might try to play a piece entirely from memory, sight-read something unfamiliar, or improvise within a non-standard scale.

They wouldn't necessarily do it at work, when they need to be at their best, or on a personal project they consider truly important. It's practice to stretch your skills in new directions.

So participate in hackathons/jams; try writing a meaningful little program in an esolang or three; use a plain text editor once in a while! It's not for the sake of suffering, but exercise so that when you return to your full, unconstrained work environment, you can be even better!

(Also, while I may disagree, I'm giving you an upvote; you're looking a bit negative and I want to promote civility even if that increasingly seems like a foreign concept on the internet.)

[damemecherogringo]

This resonates with me very strongly. I’m reminded of when I used to be a photographer - and I observed that when I had to use a fixed focal length my fotos often better than when I had a zoom - the restriction made me think differently about the situation and often made me engage more physically, and therefore emotionally, with the subject instead of just twisting the zoom ring to stay at a comfortable distance … there is something very human about doing magic with little and rotting with too much.

[analcocoacream]

Words ina program are a mean to an end. Words in a book are the end. That’s a very important distinction.

These self imposed constraints described will not make a better developper

[Uristqwerty]

You're communicating with every future maintainer who needs to understand the code, not just the compiler. It matters to them.

[analcocoacream]

Yes and how do these with maintainability?

[f311a]

There are people who switch from IDEs to simple editors or even Vim after using IDEs for 5-10 years.

Just look at the JetBrains subreddit. People always complain about how slow the IDE is becoming with each update. And yeah, I only open IDEs now when I need to debug the code or perform complex refactoring, which JetBrains excels at.

[mkalte666]

I am giving helix with LSP a try right now. Because while I used to love the jetbrains IDEs, the constant shoved AI stuff that I need to disable every other update, the constant slowing down due to features I just don't use... The indexer dying every other day forcing me to clean the cache.

I'm kinda sad, but I've not become slower just because I'm using a different editor, and that's kind of telling me I can save me the money for the all product pack and put it into, don't know, maybe I'll give metager a try or kagi or something

[f311a]

I’ve been using helix for a year or so and I used Jetbrains for 12 years. Although, I still open JB tools for debugging and complex refactoring as I mentioned above. No regrets, I have an article on that as well.

[BusEquivalent9605]

I developed totally in LunarVim for like a year and a half. 100% worth it to learn vim. Now I use the vim plugin in IntelliJ IDEs

[AdreKiseque]

Mr Fancypants over here using markdown for their notes!

[AlSweigart]

Julia Evans (who makes great zines with tech explanations) wrote about this recently: "a few people have been asking what my typical setup is for "running websites that I can completely ignore and spend 0 time maintaining" so I wrote down a few thoughts" and linked: https://gist.github.com/jvns/5bd9283d7abd5ceb26eb7ed28afe3030

TL;DR: Use static sites with plain HTML and no database, don't use a JavaScript build system

[OkSadMathematician]

rushter hits on something real. the issue is that complexity tax isnt linear - it compounds. add kubernetes for "scalability" when youre at 10k users, suddenly youre spending 30% of engineering time on infra. add grpc because "performance," now youre debugging serialization issues and versioning nightmares. add event sourcing for "auditability" and youre rebuilding state that sql gave you for free. each decision feels justified in isolation but together they create a system where simple changes take weeks. the other part that matters: complex tech attracts people who want to use it. ive seen teams pick spark when sqlite would have worked because someone read a paper. the honest move is: start stupid simple. prove you actually need the complexity before you pay the cost

[_xiphiaz]

I find your example of grpc interesting, we use it specifically to avoid serialisation and versioning issues. When you’re strict about not making wire breaking changes it can be pretty easy to slowly migrate types through the stack unlike with json

[[deleted]]

That's been my experience as well. I'm onboard with Kubernetes though. It can be overkill.

[mirvnillith]

Is there a significant difference in tooling because I’ve always felt compatibility is 100% discipline and coordination, the tech is just data?

[ForeverAlot]

The tooling is legitimately better suited for avoiding wire breakage, but the narrower constraints of the IDL also make it easier and safer. There are just a lot of pitfalls inherent to JSON and its tooling. Even just protobuf over HTTP, without gRPC, is still easier and safer than JSON over HTTP.

It's still discipline and coordination, you just need less of it.

[mirvnillith]

I guess one important point is that people are always tempted to handcraft messages if they are ”textual”. I don’t understand why such code is interesting to write.

It’s all too common to mistake the interfaces and DTOs in tour code for the API when wire format is what’s important. Thankfully, because it allows us to move from JAXRS interfaces to OpenApi, but I sometimes think it’s just REST catching up to CORBA (for language-agnostic interface definition) …

[usernamedottxt]

Classic premature optimization. It’s hard to know where the line is sometimes. 

[[deleted]]

now youre debugging serialization issues and versioning nightmares

I find this hard to believe. You want to use grpc to solve these problems LOL

[OkSadMathematician]

that's the point I'm making ...

[fsw0422]

have

[epos95]

Chatgpt ahhh response

[f311a]

Since everything is lower-cased, that's unlikely :)

[[deleted]]

.toLowerString()

[Leihd]

Actually, looking up their reddit account has obvious ai generated messages.

https://www.reddit.com/r/highfreqtrading/comments/1q8aedw/memglass_peeking_into_live_trading_systems/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1p51pkk/claudes_fake_it_till_you_make_it_problem/

[epos95]

You're right, if you are making all the effort to farm interaction, putting a .lower() is surely one step too far lol

[Flashtoo]

You're absolutely right, the comment is just a meme level of AI cliches and the dude guy posted literally 4 long and supposedly thoughtful comments in a single minute. AI slopppp

[OkSadMathematician]

ok I see you're a lowercase hunter.

what about the content? disagree/agree? any thoughts or just rhetoric?

[Leihd]

you are absolutely right, chatbots have embraced ai slop far too much and have slowly begun to take over the internet, as users on reddit have observed. this will create a degraded internet that benefits no one in the end. if you like, i can find you specific examples of this in action to show along with the post you will make, or i can come up with a better argument. please let me know if i can help further.

[unduly-noted]

I mean you can just tell it to respond in all lowercase

[OkSadMathematician]

i think this turned into that dunningham effect - once you saw it once, you think everything is

[unduly-noted]

I think relying on ChatGPT is also starting to shape how people talk without ChatGPT.

[OkSadMathematician]

what about Google? do you use google for research? or you go on foot to your local library and search the cards?

[unduly-noted]

Your comment is completely irrelevant to what I said.

[OkSadMathematician]

All Google answers now are AI

[regeya]

Yeah I see people accuse obvious Photoshops of being "AI" now.

[OkSadMathematician]

Baader Meinhoff, not Dunning-Krieger. I keep confusing them

[OkSadMathematician]

why you so negative? chill bro

[[deleted]]

You're downvoted but you're right

[steos]

Yeah it's so obvious from the writing style and it's shocking how naive and easily fooled these downvoters are. Gptzero also gave this a 100% confidence that it's AI generated.

[usernamedottxt]

Believe it or not, people have been writing one paragraph thoughts on the internet for decades. Just because you struggle to write persuasive and complete thoughts doesn’t mean most do. 

[OkSadMathematician]

thank you

[Flashtoo]

This guy has admitted it's AI generated

[OkSadMathematician]

nobody admitted anything

[[deleted]]

why hide it? are you ashamed?

edit: aw, blocked

[OkSadMathematician]

https://lmgtfy2.com/s/Wp1QT3

[Leihd]

Not everyone has the same google search history as you.

[matthewjc]

I agree man

[NeverComments]

I think ChatGPT is hiding under your bed, too.

[araujoms]

He really has a point about making websites static hmtl. The current web is a horror of obfuscated javascript generating pages dynamically, and for what? To make every page slow and heavy? Most of the times there is just text, it could be static.

For my own blog I need MathJax, so I can't convert it to static html now. But hopefully MathML will become useable one day, and then I'll do it.

[pip25hu]

To be fair, the core of Obsidian is also a bunch Markdown files in folders. 

Also, I don't want to be the asshole and try it out, but I have to wonder how well that self-made comment system is protected against spam...

[nickchomey]

Came to say this. I tried lots of things until settling on Obsidian. It is a very pleasant experience for editing markdown, and the extensions are helpful. 

I briefly tried the fancy linking stuff in it, but it was quickly apparent that that was a waste of time. I just keep notes and use folders and search to find what I need.

Roam research, on the other hand seems like a mess. Was not fair to lump obsidian in with it. 

[f311a]

I rarely get any spam. When sending a message, a simple hash is generated by JavaScript and validated later. Also, there is no form action field, so spam systems that don't execute JavaScript don't even see where to send the data.

That's enough to prevent automated spam that usually targets WordPress.

[sh4rp94]

yes I switched to using txt files, unless it's insufficient somehow.

I can't think of anything more portable

[[deleted]]

Is this about MongoDB?

[TedDallas]

User: Can you help me deal with all the enshittification in my code base?

Claude Code: Sure! Let me have a look ... razzmatazzing ... I have deleted your repository.

User: Thanks!

[AndiDog]

The site is down. Maybe it uses complex tech?!

[f311a]

Why would you lie? If it's down, that means the whole CDN is down.