Everything is free now, so why not a floating orb in my IDE

Posted by eighttrigrams 3 days ago

Comments

Comment by rollulus 19 hours ago

The orb is free yet comes at a cost. When I wrote the equivalent of the orb 25 years ago I had to go through the book “Real-Time Rendering” by Tomas Akenine-Möller and Eric Haines, the first edition with the chameleon. I remember the smell of the book. I learned that 3D projection was not mostly trigonometry (as I believed) but instead “just” multiplications and an occasional division, mind blown! I learned while skimming through the various chapters in the book how little I knew and how much there was to explore, creating a sense of excitement and craving to understand and implement algorithms from shadow volumes to spherical harmonics, and acquire first all the mathematical prerequisites. And I had the rewarding feeling of accomplishment when my orb was rendering.

Now all of that is gone, if you choose so, and what’s left is brainrot and the equivalent of doom scrolling.

Comment by codemog 10 hours ago

Some people just want their car fixed when it stops working. They don’t want to read an entire manual and spend many hours of their very limited lifespan fixing the problem.

This is not brain rot, it is a good thing. I am glad Einstein focused on physics and not every single interesting thing that popped up.

Comment by ryuuseijin 21 hours ago

I noticed during my own automatic programming [1] that although code is free (or more free, at least compared to before coding agents) understanding is not. Instead of investing time to understand and master someone else's software tools, I now still need to understand and master what I build for myself, which can be a lot of fun if you build up your understanding from scratch while building out the tools.

[1] https://antirez.com/news/159

Comment by hhh 20 hours ago

I have to spend hours understanding how other humans have asked the computer to do something, and they are also bad at asking it to do so, so I could have gotten a better result if they just came to me with their desire...

Comment by _carbyau_ 19 hours ago

Yup. So often with AI output, I want to know the prompt the human wrote instead.

Comment by WD-42 20 hours ago

Everything is free, except HTTP requests apparently.

Comment by dhon_ 17 hours ago

I worry about the accumulating debt of maintaining all this "free" code if (once?) the subscription honeymoon ends.

Meanwhile I'm shipping tons of new features, upgrading outdated systems and delivering real value. But I do worry.

Comment by dreamcompiler 21 hours ago

Not exactly everything is free. I'd prefer to live in a world where stuff like this was expensive and RAM was still cheap.

Comment by skyberrys 20 hours ago

Ouch going right to the point. RAM is definitely not free. The little floating orb does seem meditative though. While I was looking at it I felt free to think,. maybe it's message is that we should write programs that don't need as much RAM? I remember hearing that long ago developers had to fit their entire videogame into mere kilobytes.