Someone is still needed to decide what the AI should do, and to harness and manage it. A CTO can do that with existing skills, and the resulting organization should converge quickly on near-zero need or want for human SWEs.
So goes the thinking, anyway. It's why my couple decades of experience and I still occasionally get to hear from rando cold recruiters desperate to sell someone a "pivot to AI," probably thinking they can lowball me by holding my mortgage over my head in order to screw three times the work out of me that they'd pay for.
I would invite you to notice your interlocutor's assumptions, especially as revealed in his prior comment. Look at how he misunderstands the situation:
> If you wanted to convince everybody about a vast universe of secret business and your expertise in it...
> Like if I wanted to convince people that In’N’Out has a secret menu...
You are discussing business. He is understanding you to be attempting to "mog" him, because he cannot adopt a perspective wherein the conversation represents anything other than a vacuous social challenge or "brodown."
I looked up “mogging” and I’d think “my assumptions about stuff are valid because I’m a lawyer and don’t know what you do” would count more as mogging than “that doesn’t quite sound right, this is a conversation about something specific and not your general cleverness” but I’ve got a Benny Hill archive to get through
Those are not assumptions on your interlocutor's part. You've embarrassed yourself quite badly, I'm afraid. I know you don't understand how, but that doesn't change the fact of it.
:( you are right. This isn’t the first time I’ve lost an argument because hours into a discussion somebody introduced “what if a billion dollars” or “magic amulet” or “ブルマの母” etc
A billion dollars is just an example. I could have said a million. When someone says "a high price" that's unspecified, you can use your imagination to hazard a guess at what that might be. Such a figure might seem unreasonable or unrealistic to you, but deals are done between companies under terms most individuals wouldn't come close to considering.
The only reason I mentioned being an attorney was because someone in the thread above accused me of not understanding SLAs. I don't ordinarily bring it up unless we're talking about law or contracts and I feel the need to defend myself or correct misunderstandings. I don't try to use it to browbeat anyone into submission, although I do believe that respect for others' lived experiences and education is relatively uncommon here on HN.
I also don't care for my words to be misconstrued to mean something I didn't say. I rarely speak in absolutes because I've learned over time that there are very few absolutes in the world. Thus, I include qualifying language in nearly everything I write. So when someone accuses me of making claims of certainty that I didn't make, I can get pretty defensive about that.
I appreciate your kindness. While I’ve got you, did you know that the Benny Hill show started in 1955 and a good chunk of what aired from then to 1969 was lost? There are a lot of fans that don’t even realize that what is sometimes labeled as season 1 is season 15! Crazy stuff!
I had not known that! In a similar vein, there exists an Alice in Wonderland-themed Muppet Show episode, starring Brooke Shields, which has had to be left out of home video releases due to so far unresolvable music licensing issues. Not quite totally lost, but somewhat hard to find!
You're quite abjectly wrong, though. Text adventures were heavily advertised, in their illustrious and very brief moment of sunshine, as 'accepting English input' (cf. Maher, The Digital Antiquarian), which by definition constitutes NLP. They were just extremely bad at it, hence their accompaniment by a constant stream of excuses like the one you just made. (You must have had to dust it off first! That one is older than me.)
Our understanding of what makes for a fun game has evolved significantly since the 1980s. Designers of text adventures today generally agree that structured, non-natural input is a good thing and reduces frustration in the end. I can't think of any prominent text adventure designer who still pretends the parser understands English. There are also no widely used text adventure development systems that even strive to understand English in their parsers.[1]
I would understand your joke if it was made in the 1980s, but today it only shows a very old misunderstanding of the genre. (One might say you must have had to dust that misunderstanding off first!)
[1]: The systems that do strive to understand English – usually through LLMs – generally do not result in very satisfying games. They are primarily made by AI enthusiasts rather than text adventure designers.
Now you're defending games from the 70s and 80s on the basis of technology and design attitudes from today.
Your profile says you are a quantitative analyst. (I take this as reliable, since it does not also call you a rhetorician or humorist.) The fetish for logic puzzles thus checks out, but I admit I had thought the denumeration of time among the arts of number. Or had you mistaken Graham Nelson, Emily Short, and allies for Infocom alumnae?
I can second the issue with the automatic color selection; with my background photo it cashes out to an illegible black on black, and there's no (obvious) option to change the theme or override the computed colors.
It seems like it would be relatively straightforward to honor the user's light mode/dark mode setting, and the WCAG accessibility guidelines [1] do a good job of both discussing the importance of luminance contrast to legibility, and providing resources and advice toward programmatically selecting text vs. background colors to ensure everything stays readable.
(I did go ahead and purchase a subscription, since I was one of the people who asked for the option. I'll keep an eye out over the coming weeks for updates! Considering the immediate and extensive interest in boringBar that's been very much evident today, I'm really looking forward to seeing where development goes on this. Congratulations on your successful Show HN!)
Hey. I'm seeing this issue with some other users as well and I'm trying to reproduce this - do you have the reduce transparency accessibility option enabled by any chance?
Show me a side-dockable vertical taskbar, circa Win XP thru 7 style - and a lifetime license for 10 years' worth of the subscription, which you may no longer even support by then - and you will have closed a sale.
Have a look at my app (https://lawand.io/taskbar/) it's matches your criteria except that it doesn't have an option to go vertical but this has been requested and will probably be added at some point. It's free for the foreseeable future so you can take your time to try it
Little late through the door on this one, my guy. I bought OP's perpetual license and helped root-cause a bug yesterday. I do respect the hustle, though.
The invention you describe, by making possible cargo transport without dependency on either a supply of fuel or the vagaries of weather, would revolutionize the global economy to an extent little short of utopian.
You might want to pick a better example the next time you advance this argument, is what I mean to say.
So goes the thinking, anyway. It's why my couple decades of experience and I still occasionally get to hear from rando cold recruiters desperate to sell someone a "pivot to AI," probably thinking they can lowball me by holding my mortgage over my head in order to screw three times the work out of me that they'd pay for.
I was in this business too long.
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