The amount of permutations of words you can say along with the permutations of drawings you can add to the sticker is a gigantic number. That is a big enough state space for people to express creativity.
The entire point of being creative is that you actually MAKE it yourself, not that you tell the slop machine to make it for you. This is, quite frankly, the complete and total opposite of creativity. This is pure consumption disguised as creativity, wrapped up in a nice $99 box that will probably be e-waste in a couple years when the company goes under.
Is writing a book not creative if you use an existing font? There are both creative aspects like choosing words or choosing a font and non creative aspects like rendering the font.
You and I both know this is a disingenuous argument. You're not saying "Hey, Stickerbox. Choose a nice font for me." You're saying: "Hey, Stickerbox, write the entire book for me."
I stick by the og definition, in that when vibe coding I don't look at the code. I don't care about the code. When I said "vibe test it" I meant test the result of the vibe coding session.
Here's a recent example where I used this pattern: I was working on a (micro) service that implements a chat based assistant. I designed it a bit differently than the traditional "chat bot" that's prevalent right now. I used a "chat room" approach, where everyone (user, search, LLM, etc) writes in a queue, and different processes trigger on different message types. After I finished, I had tested it with both unit tests and scripted integration tests, with some "happy path" scenarios.
But I also wanted to see it work "live" in a browser. So, instead of waiting for the frontend team to implement it, I started a new session, and used a prompt alongt he lines of "Based on this repo, create a one page frontend that uses all the relevant endpoints and interfaces". The "agent" read through all the relevant files, and produced (0 shot) an interface where everything was wired correctly, and I could test it, and watch the logs in real-time on my machine. I never looked at the code, because the artifact was not important for me, the important thing was the fact that I had it, 5 minutes later.
Fun fact, it did allow me to find a timing bug. I had implemented message merging, so the LLM gets several messages at once, when a user types\n like\n this\n and basically adds new messages while the others are processing. But I had a weird timing bug, where a message would be marked as "processing", a user would type a message, and the compacting algo would all act "at the same time", and some messages would be "lost" (unprocessed by the correct entity). I didn't see that from the integration tests, because sometimes just playing around with it reveals such weird interactions. For me being able to play around with the service in ~5 minutes was worth it, and I couldn't care less about the artifact of the frontend. A dedicated team will handle that, eventually.
This is one of the things I've seen it be very useful for: putting together one-off tools or visualizations. I'm not going to maintain these, although I might check them into version control for historical reference.
I recently ran across a package in my team's codebase that has a bunch of interrelated DB tables, and we didn't already have a nice doc explaining how everything fits together - so I asked the AI to make me a detailed README.md for the package. I'm currently reviewing that, removing a bunch of nonsense I didn't ask for, and I'm going to run it by my team. It's actually pretty good to start with because the code and DB models are well documented, just piecemeal all over the place, and half of what the AI is doing is just collating all that info and putting it in one doc.
Not yet maybe... Once we factor in the environmental damage that generative AI, and all the data centers being built to power it, will inevitably cause - I think it will become increasingly difficult to make the assertion you just did.
You're entering a bridge and there's a road sign before it with a pictogram of a truck and a plaque below that reads "10t max".
According to the logic of your argument, it's perfectly okay to drive a 360t BelAZ 75710 loaded to its full 450t capacity over that bridge just because it's a truck too.
Could you please stop posting flamebait and breaking the site guidelines? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, including this dreadful thread from a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45781981. I realize the other person was doing it also, but you (<-- I don't mean you personally, but all of us) need to follow the rules regardless of what other people are doing.
Comments like what your account has been posting are not what this site is for, and destroy what it is for, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
It seems pretty clear to me that they're trying to develop AGI humanoid assistants/workers without the messy and expensive real world hardware. Basically approaching the problem from the other end than a company like Tesla that built a robot and are now trying to figure out how to make a computer drive it without needing constant hand holding.
Making the world (or even the internet) a better place, definitely doesn't even seem to register on the priority scale for YC startups. I personally don't need to spend any time wondering how this plays out.
These folks get $500k to run an experiment. I love that for them, experiments are great, and if someone else will pay for it, also great. YC can afford it based on their capital available for investment. But what they build will have no moat, so it can be copied in the future if traction is found, with a license that prohibits commercial use. My first thought is a directed donation to the EFF for a clone, but there are likely other paths to success (yt-dlp is incredibly effective at empowering people to rip content from 1000+ media storage systems, and runs on free open source dev time and a handful of contributions). The last crucial component is cheap local models for inference for this, remains to be solved for, but the trajectory is clear that local, efficient models will come. For people who can pay, a config dialog to specify your LLM provider and their API endpoint probably works too, but won't scale for the masses imho. Worst case, they fold or are aqui-hired, but will have taught us something on someone else's dime. Could be worse, right?
User owned and controlled inference in their compute context is what beats enshittification, it is equalizing Big Tech power asymmetry against users, or at least keeps it in check. And so, I wish this team much luck, and await their results from their experiment. Many thanks to YC for funding them.
Frankly, this wouldn't be possible without the investment/cloud credits. And that is a shame because I think this is something that should exist in the world (even if I'm not the one building it). We're trying to make the most of the system.
I'm honestly not certain myself how we'll monetize this, but I have had a lot of fun building it and using it myself, and seeing how others use it. As you said, if we continue down this path without success, then worst case, what we built will still exist.
Re: local models, I am a big proponent, but they aren't there yet. This task is non-trivial. Try taking raw HTML from a webpage (minified, bundled, abstracted variable names, no comments, etc.) and using it as a basis to make useful edits. It's tough, and very impressive that any model can actually do it reasonably well. It tentatively looks like we're starting to reach a plateau for general models and open-weight is catching up, but I know the big labs/companies are aggressively capturing massive data and squeezing everything they can out of RL for more task-specific tuning. I hope open-weights can continue to compete!
I participated in a few hackathons early in my career. I quickly realized that I wasn't benefitting at all from participating in them. In fact, they were a great way to fall behind in the work I actually needed to get done. Those organizing the hackathons on the other hand...
I'm not at all surprised that people are trying to program young teenage minds to think hackathons are a good pathway to advancing one's tech skills / career. Nor am I surprised to hear all of the sketchy behavior surrounding this organization and their leadership. It all fits very nicely together.
Hackathons can be fun. And I think that people should try and do one or two when they are in college (ideally run by a university, not a shady 3rd party). The microsoft puzzle challenge (idk if that still exists) is also great. These are fun, give you a bit of networking, probably wont get you a job. Your university work gets you a job.
Still waiting to see that large, impressive, complex, open-source project that was created through vibe coding / vibe engineering / whatever gimmicky phrase they come up with next!
If "large and impressive" means "has grown to that size via many contributions from lots of random developers", then I'd agree.
I don't think there is much doubt AI can produce split out a lot of code, that mostly works. It's not too hard to imagine that one day an can AI produce so much code that it's considered a "large, complex project". A single mind dedicated to a task can do remarkable things, be it human or silicon. Another mind reading what they have done, and understanding it is another thing entirely.
All long term, large projects I'm familiar have been developed over a long time by many contributors, and as a consequence there has been far more reading and understanding going on than writing new code. This almost becomes self evident when you look at large open source projects, because the code quality is so high. Everything is split into modules a single mind can pick up relatively quickly and work on in isolation. Hell, even complier error messages become self explanatory essays over time.
Or to put it another way, no open source project is a ball of mud. Balls of mud can only be maintained by the person who wrote them, who get away with it because they have most of the details stored in their context window, courtesy of writing it. Balls of mud are common in proprietary code (I've worked on a few). They are produced by a single small group were paid to labour away for years at one task. And now if this post it to be believed, AI vibe coded projects are also a source of balls of mud. Given current AI's are notoriously bad at modifying even well structured projects, they won't be maintainable by anyone.
Not the OP, but as an individual who has programmed in Nim on and off for a decade, I feel qualified to answer. The similarities are definitely only skin-deep, and Nim is just as complex, if not more complex than Python.
Nim is much closer to Pascal / Modula / Oberon than Python. The whole - ease/simplicity of Python and speed of C is mostly marketing jargon that the Nim community has been using as long as I've been aware of the project.
It's too bad that the BDFL of Nim (Araq / Andreas) treats the language like his personal compiler development playground. This has led to a hard fork of the compiler, many experienced and frustrated developers leaving the community and language behind, and an extremely fragmented ecosystem.
He is also very difficult to work with and isn't very welcoming to newcomers. The community "leaders" / moderation team is also full of abrasive individuals with fragile egos.
> language like his personal compiler development playground
re personal compiler development playground: I don't see this for Nim 2. Nimony/Nim3 is more of a "playground", but rightfully so: he is creating a new major version of the language and aiming to improve the architecture of the compiler.
> He is also very difficult to work with and isn't very welcoming to newcomers
I don't have full context on the drama behind the fork, but I don't see Araq not being very "welcoming". Araq replies on the forums very consistently, replying to new-comer questions, which one might consider as "simple questions". Araq will state his personal & honest opinions, which may come off as abrasive or "un-welcoming" in your opinion. I don't agree with everything he says but that's OK.
From what I can tell the fork seems to be due to differences in direction of the language and w.r.t working together: differences in communication styles. But again, I don't know.
Personally, I see no reason to use the fork (Nimskull) over Nim, nor would I ever see any individual or company picking up Nimskull unless they were very deeply familiar with Nim (this is a small population of people). From a skim of the Nimskull repo, there is no website (there is a copy of the Nim manual), no forums (just some chatrooms), no clear documentation on the future direction, no documentation on differences for someone not familiar with Nim, etc. - why would anyone pick up Nimskull unless they knew Nim well? Please take this as constructive criticism. e.g. if any feature of the language/compiler/tooling is "better" or planned to be better: highlight it, summarize the long GitHub issue/projects discussions in a blog, etc.
> re personal compiler development playground: I don't see this for Nim 2. Nimony/Nim3 is more of a "playground", but rightfully so: he is creating a new major version of the language and aiming to improve the architecture of the compiler.
Araq likes to work on the shiny flashy things he finds fun / interesting to work on. I'm not going to fault him for that, but things like atomics on Windows are still broken. People have been complaining about the stdlib and documentation + lack of a formal specification for at least a decade.
> From what I can tell the fork seems to be due to differences in direction of the language and w.r.t working together: differences in communication styles. But again, I don't know.
There was quite a bit of drama that caused the hard fork to materialize. Differences in communication styles is definitely describing the drama that unfolded, extremely mildly. I don't work on the fork or use it, but some of the more talented compiler developers who were previously contributing to Nim, left Nim to go work on Nimskull.
> Araq will state his personal & honest opinions, which may come off as abrasive or "un-welcoming" in your opinion. I don't agree with everything he says but that's OK.
Nope. This is a sop, an equivalent to the non-apology "I'm sorry you took what I said so badly".
Aggression masquerading as "honesty" has no place in any organisation that wants to be taken seriously.
It's most certainly not "OK" when Andreas' personal opinions are expressed in ad-hominem attacks.
Nim unfortunately has a toxic Dictator at the top, and his subordinates defend his behaviours. While this continues nobody should take Nim seriously.
> Nim unfortunately has a toxic Dictator at the top
Araq has opinions that he defends, but you can and absolutely should try to sway or change them. I see this all the time on Discord and Forum. And I see people win over just as much as them losing.
I don't have a strong opinion if this is healthy or not, but it's probably why I would be a bad BDFL =). All in all, I don't think dictatorship is a right word here.
My conversation with Andreas on a public forum featured ad-hominem attacks from Andreas which continued in a private email exchange between us. The man is closed-minded and had zero interest in discussion beyond aggressive insults. You're welcome to contact me privately if you'd like to read the exchange.
>Nim unfortunately has a toxic Dictator at the top, and his subordinates defend his behaviours. While this continues nobody should take Nim seriously.
I can mention just exactly the same pattern with one widespreaded OS that anyone is taking seriously.
And I know one very popular and often mentioned systems programming language with "community" driven design process with inclusive and stuff which is in some kind of stagnation without BDFL (async fragmented ecosystem without C++ burden of 40 years of legacy).
Why do you think that "welcoming" is a must for successful IT projeсt?
Do you think aggression is a must for any successful project? Or can you entertain the possibility that projects might progress even further and faster without it?
You point to Linux but assume that Linus' infamous foul behaviour has been beneficial. This is a very basic confusion of correlation and causation.
You suggest that being "welcoming" is antithetical to "success" without defining "success".
> He is also very difficult to work with and isn't very welcoming to newcomers.
This hasn't been my experience at all.
When I first tried Nim, years ago, I came across an inconsistency in a database connector in the standard library after only a couple of weeks. I pinged him to ask if I was understanding it correctly and confirm it was a bug. He agreed it should be updated, so I put together a pull request. It was reviewed quickly, we went back and forth a couple of times over some details, he asked me to include some documentation updates, and it was merged without issue in a couple of days in total.
Given that I came to the language as a complete newcomer and had commits to the standard library less than three weeks later with the BDFL's approval, I simply can't agree that he's difficult to work with or not welcoming.
> The community "leaders" / moderation team is also full of abrasive individuals with fragile egos.
I certainly hope this isn't the case any longer. As one of the moderators I feel the current group is very patient and welcoming. At least that's what we're trying for, no one is perfect so I'm certain you can find counter examples. But as a whole I think we're doing pretty well. If you have any specific complaints we would love to hear them. They can be left anonymously in our community feedback form, or you can find we anywhere in the community for a chat.
It makes sense you feel that way, as you're one of the moderators. I feel quite differently. Thanks for the offer, but there's a reason why Nim hemorrhages users as fast as it gains them, and a big reason for that, IMO, is the toxic community which definitely includes the moderation team.
It's cheap to hide behind a pseudonym here and complain as you do. Given the time scales you mention and how you are complaining, I have a theory under what nick you were present in the Nim community though.
If I'm correct, I find your complaints especially about our moderators especially unfair. Arguably the only drama with moderators was in the context of Dom and you know that.
I really don't see where any of the current moderators can be described as "toxic", but you'll just say "you're one of them" anyway, so why do I even bother...
FWIW, I agree that Araq is an abrasive character and probably not a great community leader for an open source project.
But I disagree with your take on the moderation team. I don't know if you have specific names to call out, but PMunch, miran and the rest of the team have been nothing but welcoming, in my experience.
Of course, I'm heavily biased, but also very interested in mediating any such issues. I obviously can't, or wouldn't want to, force you to report anything. But it would be very appreciated if you, or anyone else reading this with similar experiences, could report it here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ZWa2GONAM825IxFt8ZOdfn_XeJy...
> He is also very difficult to work with and isn't very welcoming to newcomers.
That's a charitable way to describe him. In our one direct interaction, he was condescending to the point of insult. (I believe he was incorrect as well, but even if he was always correct, I would consider it wrong to treat someone badly.) After browsing the Nim forum and issue tracker, I found that this was routine behavior for him.
Nim has some nice features, but I don't want to depend on anything that's subject to the whims of a personality like that, and I certainly don't want to interact with him again.
You're right - I probably am being too charitable in my description of him. To his credit, he's gotten better over the years, but I still check in on the forums and find examples of this behavior. Andreas could be the most talented compiler developer in the world, but as long as community members are being treated poorly for asking questions, the language will continue to languish in relative obscurity.
Unfortunately this has been my experience. Andreas was extremely abrasive towards me personally, and views he expressed to me regarding climate change were bizarre and aggressive. His behaviour led me to ditch Nim and explore Go instead, and I couldn't be happier. Sadly Nim is a permanent no-go for me.
If someone stumbles upon this comment, don't be quick to discard the Nim language. Please do your own research and make your own opinion on the matter.
I believe this and many of comments by tinfoilhatter under this post are not in good faith and in the most charitable interpretation written by a uninformed person or are severely outdated.
> Thanks for the offer, but there's a reason why Nim hemorrhages users as fast as it gains them, and a big reason for that, IMO, is the toxic community which definitely includes the moderation team.
I have to challenge this, because for the last couple years, there have been almost no incidents or drama. Moderation was almost exclusively dealing with spam messages. I think, on the forum, a couple posts were closed because of heated or offtopic discussions. But in all cases, participants were agreeing with the decision of mods (you can see them leaving a 'like' on mod's message).
> There was quite a bit of drama that caused the hard fork to materialize. Differences in communication styles is definitely describing the drama that unfolded, extremely mildly. I don't work on the fork or use it, but some of the more talented compiler developers who were previously contributing to Nim, left Nim to go work on Nimskull.
I know that some of people that left were also the ones causing problems with moderation and being toxic. I don't want anyone to draw strong conclusions, but Nim community was much healthier and friendly after the fork people and certain moderator leaving the project.
> He is also very difficult to work with and isn't very welcoming to newcomers. The community "leaders" / moderation team is also full of abrasive individuals with fragile egos.
This is just false. You can see Araq answering the noob questions on the forum all the time. He might be not the best person to do that, because his answers on the short side. I believe, noobs often need more context, examples and explanations than he's providing. But it's thought and effort that counts. Some people even hate when you treat them as complete beginner and try to nourture them common CS knowledge.
> I have to challenge this, because for the last couple years, there have been almost no incidents or drama. Moderation was almost exclusively dealing with spam messages. I think, on the forum, a couple posts were closed because of heated or offtopic discussions. But in all cases, participants were agreeing with the decision of mods (you can see them leaving a 'like' on mod's message).
> I know that some of people that left were also the ones causing problems with moderation and being toxic. I don't want anyone to draw strong conclusions, but Nim community was much healthier and friendly after the fork people and certain moderator leaving the project.
What definition of the words toxic, healthy, and friendly are you using?
> This is just false. You can see Araq answering the noob questions on the forum all the time. He might be not the best person to do that, because his answers on the short side. I believe, noobs often need more context, examples and explanations than he's providing. But it's thought and effort that counts. Some people even hate when you treat them as complete beginner and try to nourture them common CS knowledge.
Maybe if he's not the best person to do that, he shouldn't be doing it? You seem to just be playing devil's advocate here, instead of offering any real example that contradicts my claims.
> I’m sure there’s a lot of context I’m missing. But what is the story behind this?
There was a falling out between the Nim core development team and several volunteer compiler developers. The former seemed to be paying more attention to their personal projects, while still desiring to maintain their positions of control and authority over Nim and its direction. The latter group grew increasingly frustrated, the situation became extremely toxic, and ultimately Nim lost several talented compiler developers to the hard fork.
I believe the goal of being incompatible with Nim resulted from the developers involved in the hard fork feeling like the Nim development team had done a poor job of designing certain portions of the language and compiler. I'm pretty sure they ditched the C++ backend, and made some substantial changes to the langauge to bring it more inline with their ideals.
I'm not involved in the development of either project, so a much better source of information would be the Nimskull project's developers themselves and the core Nim development team.
Last non-bot commit was over 2 weeks ago, and it seems to be mostly 1 account working on it. I don't think it looks active enough to be the big schism it's made out to be?
Nim itself has very few core developers. Comparing the number of developers involved in a hard fork to the number of Nim developers is silly, in my opinion at least.
The project has 21.5k commits authored, most of them oriented at replacing the existing compiler backend with a CPS-oriented one. Nim 3.0 is replacing the backend with one that is focused on CPS. There is no doubt that the developers responsible for the hard fork of Nim inspired Nim 3.0.
Yes, it very much is the big schism it's made out to be. I don't know what kind of activity level you expect, when the Nim language itself has few core developers working on it.
Then offer specifics that contradict mine? It should be easy if all I'm doing is being a contrarian. There are at least a few comments in reply to this post that have echoed my experiences regarding unpleasant interactions with Nim's leadership and community.
I'd like nothing more than for Nim to succeed as a modern systems programming language. Unfortunately, giant egos and personalities constantly get in the way of that goal. There's certainly something holding Nim back from achieving widespread adoption, and if you want to suggest it's me and some sort of concerted effort to toss shade at the language and its evangelists, then that is your perrogative. It certainly isn't moving the language forward.
Actually, that’s not far from the truth. The reasons are:
Lack of contribution. If someone isn’t doing actual programming work, doesn’t have time management to maintain libraries, or isn’t contributing successful applications, it’s hard to take constant criticism seriously.
Only showing up to complain. Some people disappear for months and then reappear only to complain about design decisions, like "Why were multimethods removed in v3?" or "Why isn’t the pragma syntax like Python’s?" That tends to lead to the assumption that the language is "someone’s toy" just because features change or it’s not a drop-in Python replacement.
Focusing on gossip instead of technical merit. Complaining that a moderator was unfriendly is missing the point. Moderators change over time. The question should be whether the language and the ecosystem are valuable to you, not whether you personally get along with every individual on the forum.
Are you suggesting that the reason Nim isn't successful is everyone else's fault, and that the Nim development team and community aren't responsible for its trajectory?
I'm sorry, but not many people are going to want to use a programming language when they're mocked or insulted for simply asking questions. Nor are many people going to want to use a language where the core development team focuses on shiny new things over fixing and documenting what already exists.
Those are the main criticisms I've lobbed at Nim, and I think both are completely fair.
Actually, now that I remember you, you’re the same guy from r/nim, right? How much time have you spent repeating the same talking points? You’ve already made around 15% of the comments in this thread, calling yourself “qualified to answer”, etc. Maybe take a step back.
You keep accusing others of having "large egos", but that kind of criticism says more about you than anyone else, it comes off as projection. And honestly, multiple people have already tried engaging with you in good faith. When someone is this locked into their narrative, there’s just no productive conversation left to have.
> Actually, now that I remember you, you’re the same guy from r/nim, right?
No, actually, I'm not. I don't use reddit nor have I ever posted anything in r/nim.
> How much time have you spent repeating the same talking points?
Considering I haven't posted about Nim on HN or any other forum in at least a couple of years, not much.
> You’ve already made around 15% of the comments in this thread, calling yourself “qualified to answer”, etc.
Right, because you and others have replied to the TWO comments I left. Typically when people reply to comments, the commenter replies back. I feel qualified to talk about Nim because I have written tens of thousands of loc in Nim, and have followed the project for over a decade.
> You keep accusing others of having "large egos", but that kind of criticism says more about you than anyone else, it comes off as projection. And honestly, multiple people have already tried engaging with you in good faith. When someone is this locked into their narrative, there’s just no productive conversation left to have.
I said members of the moderation team / "leaders" in the community had large egos. I made that comment once.
I don't use Github, and no, sorry, I will not spend time digging up old posts for you on Nim's buggy forums. You're another example of a hostile and abrasive member of the Nim community apparently. There are other folks in this thread that have echoed similar sentiments to mine, in their replies, and also apparently at least one person on reddit. I hope you have a nice day.
I guess accusing someone of being someone they are not, then accusing them of lying, then demanding they dig up old forum posts for you to prove a point that other individuals have echoed, isn't considered being hostile or abrasive to you?
By all means, believe whatever you want regarding the health of the Nim community. Just don't expect me to share your sentiments.
I don't think you even need to wear a tinfoil hat to reach this conclusion. Knowing about the origins of the modern outcome-based education systems in the West (we borrowed from the Prussian education system which replaced the classical education system based on the Trivium and Quadrivium) I would assert that your claim is spot on.
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