marbletiles's comments

marbletiles | 10 days ago | on: Shall I implement it? No

The human in the loop here said “no”, though. Not sure where you’d expect another layer of HITL to resolve this.

marbletiles | 1 month ago | on: Acme Weather

This team really have been thinking about weather a lot, and it makes me very curious about what they’ve created this time.

It’s that depth of thought and expertise that feels missing from most of the vibe-coded launches we’ve seen recently. I actually wouldn’t mind if Acme had vibe coded parts, but I bet they didn’t.

marbletiles | 3 months ago | on: Is it a bubble?

This doesn't feel like good-faith. There are leagues of difference between "what you typed out" when that's in a highly structured compiler-specific codified syntax *expressly designed* as the input to a compiler that produces computer programs, and "what you typed out" when that's an English-language prompt, sometimes vague and extremely high-level

That difference - and the assumed delta in difficulty, training and therefore cost involved - is why the latter case is newsworthy.

marbletiles | 3 months ago | on: Google's new 'Aluminium OS' project brings Android to PC

Because we exist within a market, where the choices of others end up affecting us - if the market "votes" for a competing thing, that might affect the market for the things you care about.

Your car analogy isn't great, but we see a similar dynamic playing out with EV vs combustion, and we did with film-vs-digital cameras. "Don't buy a digital camera if you like film" sure didn't help the film photographers.

marbletiles | 4 months ago | on: TextEdit and the relief of simple software

This is like "HTML isn't code" again. For non-technical readers, there is their own language, and there is "code" - a bespoke language used solely to instruct machines. If you can't type to the machine in your own language (eg like you can to a chatbot) then you're using code. "The machine" is the device on the desk.

"ls" is code. You type it into the machine's keyboard, and it understands your code and performs that instruction. The statement is not "radically" wrong, it's an oversimplification that both communicates correctly to the lay reader, and to the proficient reader who understands the nuances and why they're irrelevant here.

marbletiles | 5 months ago | on: Benefits of choosing email over messaging

> Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people

People who are known at time of sending. A slack message can be searched by those joining the team much (much) later, those who move teams, in-house search bots, etc. Mailing lists bridge this gap to some extent, but then you're really not just using email, you're using some kind of external collaboration service. Which undermines the point of "just email".

marbletiles | 7 months ago | on: Robots.txt is a suicide note (2011)

Not sure the emotive language is warranted. Message appears to be “if you use robots.txt AND archive sites honor it AND you are dumb enough to delete your data without a backup THEN you won’t have a way to recover and you’ll be sorry”.

It also presumes that dealing with automated traffic is a solved problem, which with the volumes of LLM scraping going on, is simply not true for more hobbyist setups.

marbletiles | 9 months ago | on: Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

> Instead of tapping buttons to bold text or create headers, users could type *bold* or # Header directly into their notes.

Which will be more keystrokes, not fewer – it's faster to get to the formatting buttons than it is the punctuation keyboard on iOS, and even on Mac the shortcut commands are often faster too.

Notes was a fanastic example of a rich-text environment, but if Markdown input helps the die-hards that is great, so long as I don't have to ever see, use or be aware of it.

marbletiles | 9 months ago | on: When will M&S take online orders again?

I’m not following your logic. The co-op is designed for everyone to care _more_ because they are part-owners and because the organisation is set up for a larger good than simple profit-making.

In practice the distinction has long been lost both for employees and members (customers), but the intent of the organisational structure was not for nobody to care; quite the opposite

marbletiles | 10 months ago | on: Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

It’s not weird at all; in other circumstances we call it a bonus.

You get baseline security by trading away the unlimited upside, but you are still incentivised to produce your best work by knowing if you help create a huge success you’ll get additional compensation for it.

marbletiles | 1 year ago | on: MacBASIC

Are any of those late betas available anywhere? Would love to see what that was like
page 1