The review of the Grand Canyon annoyed me the most:
```
Can you hike in the Grand Canyon? Yes, technically. You can walk along the rim, but the view won’t change; same damn canyon on one side, same damn parking lot on the other. There are trails that go down into the canyon, but they’re a trap
```
So you can't even hike there, except of course for the hike that you can do.
"They are featureless steep inclines formed into endless switchbacks, and when they finally end, there’s nothing to do except go back up"
That is what hiking is! Granted, usually you hike up and then back down. And I wouldn't call the hike down into the canyon "featureless". Honestly, it sounds like this person just doesn't really like hiking, which if fine it's not for everyone, but that is just what there is to do in most national parks.
Mr Back is already a very public figure in the bitcoin/crypto community who is the face of a public company. This isn't some rando who nobody has ever heard of before.
> Because in this particular case it endangers subject's life.
This seems like a stretch. Mr Back is already a well-known wealthy person who (presumably) owns lots of crypto. I think it's a stretch to think this article significantly increase the danger to his life.
I mean, yeah? We can wag our fingers about what people find interesting but it is what it is. Bitcoin is an important technology in the world, and people are interested in who the inventor is. You may think it doesn't matter, but clearly a lot of people disagree.
This one is challenging I think because the article itself is so thin. The evidence seems really shaky.
That said, clearly a lot of people really do seem to care who Satoshi is, so it doesn't seem like its out of the question for a newspaper to print an article claiming to answer that question.
> Do they just not care about the ethical implications?
Did Satoshi not care about the ethical implications of creating bitcoin? Mr Back may not be Satoshi, but he's also made a career driving the adoption of bitcoin and bitcoin itself has enabled many, many terrible crimes. It seems like special pleading to argue that Mr Back is not responsible for any of the consequence of bitcoin in the world, and also that the NY Times is morally responsible if someone harms Mr Back because they think he is Satoshi. Either we have an ethical responsibility to consider the consequences of our actions or we don't.
> Did Satoshi not care about the ethical implications of creating bitcoin? Mr Back may not be Satoshi, but he's also made a career driving the adoption of bitcoin and bitcoin itself has enabled many, many terrible crimes.
Nobody seems to be angry at the inventor of coins and bills, though.
> I agree there's a sort of "who cares" aspect to the piece
Sure, rationally I agree, but clearly a lot of people do care. It may not matter in any substantive way who Satoshi is but people still care.
> There is no artistic intent to interpret
Is that the case? Obviously there is no artistic intent as bitcoin is not art, but it's not clear to me why the intent of an artist is important but the intent of a technologist is not.
I think they are saying what you want them to say. In the past they got a bunch of AI slop and now they are getting a lot of legit bug reports. The implication being that the AI got better at finding (and writing reports of) real bugs.
Here's mine. It's not big or important (at all!) but I think it is a perfectly valid app that might be useful to some people. It's entirely vibe-coded including code, art and sounds. Only the idea was mine.
This is horrible. Children of that age should not be glued to a computer screen. If handing your kids over to the care of a bot is your idea of parenthood, I'm sure glad I'm not your kid.
The exact point of the app is to be as un-sticky as possible. I deliberately used calm colours, slow transitions, and a simple gameplay routine with a limited shelflife, after seeing how other apps for kids were designed like fruit machines.
If you simply think that children should never be exposed to screens, then I can sympathise with that point of view, but I think it's better to introduce them in a thoughtful and limited way.
Your last sentence is unnecessarily overblown and inflammatory, and adds nothing useful to the discussion.
Yes and no [0]. There's no chance I'm the only one. And no, it's not a chatbot or automation tool or anything else that's "selling shovels", it's an end product. I've had multiple people reach out to me organically with how much it has helped them, reviews are very good and so on.
But really, you don't even need this counterexample because it's trivial. It's like a C fanatic saying "No useful software can be made using Python", and then asking for a counterexample. Take all useful small applications created. Here's one, Maccy [1]. There's zero reason every line of its code has to have been written by hand rather than prompted. Maybe some of it in fact was. It's a nifty little app, does its job well.
Are you saying Maccy was vibe-coded or that it was written in Python? I don't think either are true. I've definitely been using it (you're right, it's great!) since before vibe-coding was a thing. And looking at the GitHub it seems to be 100% in Swift.
> It's like a C fanatic saying "No useful software can be made using Python", and then asking for a counterexample
At which point you could provide them many, many counterexamples?
I like AI coding assistants as much as the next red-blooded SWE and find them incredibly useful and a genuine productivity booster, but I think the claims of 10/100/1000x productivity boosts are unsupported by evidence AFAICT. And I certainly know I'm not 10x as productive nor do any of my teammates who have embraced AI seem to be 10x more productive.
I wrote my own note sharing app using free Claude. It's self-hosted, allows for non-simultaneous editing by multiple users (uses locks), it has no passwords on users, it shows all notes in a list. Very simple app, over all. It's one Go file and one HTML file. I like it, it's exactly what I want for sharing notes like shopping and todo lists with my partner.
The AI wouldn't have been able to do it by itself, but I wouldn't have been arsed to do it alone either.
Current, a brand-new handcoded RSS reader for i(Pad)OS/macOS is one of the best apps I've ever used. Seriously. I gladly purchased it and use it every day now (with Feedbin as the backend).
This will obviously depend on which implementation you use. Using the rust arrow-rs crate you at least get panics when you overflow max buffer sizes. But one of my enduring annoyances with arrow is that they use signed integer types for buffer offsets and the like. I understand why it has to be that way since it's intended to be cross-language and not all languages have unsigned integer types. But it does lead to lots of very weird bugs when you are working in a native language and casting back and forth from signed to unsigned types. I spent a very frustrating day tracking down this one in particular https://github.com/apache/datafusion/issues/15967
The review of the Grand Canyon annoyed me the most:
``` Can you hike in the Grand Canyon? Yes, technically. You can walk along the rim, but the view won’t change; same damn canyon on one side, same damn parking lot on the other. There are trails that go down into the canyon, but they’re a trap ```
So you can't even hike there, except of course for the hike that you can do.
"They are featureless steep inclines formed into endless switchbacks, and when they finally end, there’s nothing to do except go back up"
That is what hiking is! Granted, usually you hike up and then back down. And I wouldn't call the hike down into the canyon "featureless". Honestly, it sounds like this person just doesn't really like hiking, which if fine it's not for everyone, but that is just what there is to do in most national parks.
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