I just moved to a house with a barely finished basement. White walls, white painted floor, exposed ceiling joists and ductwork painted black. I’m experimenting with cheap projectors and lighting effects (using clamps to attach to the joists as if they were a truss) and furniture on wheels to create a configurable virtual space with full wall projections, sound, and lighting to match (but not overpower) the video. My plan is to make a camera/light platform with a cheap projector, and Raspberry Pi, and directional LED lighting so that I can coordinate all of them over the network. It’s also my office, library, game room and I have some awesome ideas on how to use the space to augment D&D games. But the white concrete floor has got to go - too bright, too cold, too hard, and too loud.
Only if the goal is to run the result and never have to update it or add features. Several of the good test projects I’ve made from scratch with AI (my title at work needs to be “Speaker to Silicon” because I’m usually tasked with experimenting with AI tools) have worked and looked great. Then someone wants a new feature. No problem, it adds it. Then you say, add that feature to this other part of the program, and it does it, but if you don’t look at the code, you realize it re-implemented it, so if you go back in a month and request a change, it only gets applied to the first place it finds. I had to constantly say “DRY! Don’t implement it twice, share the code!”
I haven’t done any serious web coding in years, so when I needed a little web page dashboard, I thought I’d do it 100% vibe coded.
Problem statement: We have four major repos spanning two different Azure DevOps servers/instances/top-level accounts. To check the status of pull requests required a lot of clicks and windows and sometimes re-logging in. So we wanted a dashboard customized to our needs that puts all active pull requests on each repo into a single page, links them to YouTrack, links them to the Azure DevOps pages, auto-refreshes, and flags them by needing attention for approval, merge conflicts, and unresolved comments. And it would use PATs for access that are only stored locally and not in the code or repo.
AI used: I began by describing the project goals to ChatGPT 5 and having it suggest a basic architecture. Then I used the Junie agent in JetBrain’s WebStorm to develop it. I gave it the ChatGPT output and told it to create a Readme and the project guidelines. Then I implemented it step by step (basic page layout, fill with dummy data, add Azure API calls, integrate with YouTrack, add features).
By following this step by step iteration, almost every step was a one-shot success - only once that I remember did it do something “wrong” - but sometimes I caught it being repetitive or inconsistent, so I added a “maximize code reuse and put all configuration in one place” step.
After about 3 hours, some of which was asking it code to my standards or change look and feel, I had a very full featured application. Three different views - the big picture, PRs that need my attention, and active PRs grouped by YouTrack items. I gave it to the team, they loved it and suggested a few new features. Another hour with the Junie Agent and I incorporated all the suggestions. Now we all use it every day.
I purposefully didn’t hand edit a single line of code. I did read the code and suggested improvements, but other than that, I think a user with no programming experience could have done it (particularly if they asked chatGPT on the side, “Now what?”). And it looked a helluva lot better than it would have if I coded it because I’m rusty and lazy.
Overall, it was my biggest success story of AI coding. We’ve been experimenting with AI bug triage, creating utility functions, and adding tests to our primary apps (all .NET Maui) but with a huge code base, it often missing things or makes bad assumptions.
But this level of project was near perfect capability to execution. I don’t know how much my skills helped me manage the project, but I know that I didn’t write the code. And it was kinda fun.
I tried salted licorice. Granted, I don’t really like sweet licorice, or anise, or fennel, or any of the liquors that use that flavoring, but I tolerate them. The salted licorice was the worst thing I’d ever tasted.
So I bought a whole bag of it and ate a piece every day or so. After a week, I wasn’t cringing as much. After two or three weeks I started craving it. By the end of the month, I liked it. I don’t love it, but I did buy another bag when that one was done. And yes I know the health risks, but I’m never going to be eating a bag or two a day.
The weirdest, though, was cilantro. I’m in the genetic group that thinks it tastes soapy. And yet, after trying it enough, I love it.
When I was young I had a weird cognitive bias where I would think that if something tasted curious or different, that it must be good for you in some way.
How to know that an article about licorice is from the US: they include the "black" qualifier. As if there were any other kind! To me (Swedish) the normal/expected qualifier is "sweet" (yes please) or "salty" (oh yes indeed thank you very much).
The concept of "red licorice" [1] is simply ... foreign. :) It's also fun and interesting as a word/food, since it focuses on the texture of a food and re-uses the word, even though the word is tightly coupled to the flavor.
We do have those funny coloured "licorices" in Spain, but anybody with have a brain knows that the real one is black, and the others just happen to share the same shape xD
Having said that, my favourite is that salty stuff you guys have up there in the North.
My rule is that if other human beings eat something for pleasure (and not out of desperation, a dare, or to show off), then I should at least try it a few times as long as I don’t have ethical qualms about it.
Growing up I'd eat plenty of licorice as candy, various kinds. But in my adult life, I just... don't feel like having it. But that goes for most candy, I just don't enjoy it much. Mints on occasion.
It's probably because candy makes my teeth hurt, lol. Likewise, I don't like certain acidic drinks like orange juice or wine, they just don't sit right.
With me, it has been story/novel ideas. The AI is a genuinely useful tool for brainstorming through ideas and giving historical and scientific background. I don’t let it write the stories, but I throw ideas at it and it riffs on the ideas which gives me new ideas and so on. Useful, but you realize it’s 4AM and you’re obsessively plot outlining a trilogy and sketching out characters and inventing a new economy when you connected to ask a personal finance question.
I’ve found it useful, but I recommend a “give me an honest critical evaluation as if you were an editor/agent/publisher” and “Is this derivative of anything?”
What I read suggest "Authors hate this one trick" which is having anything or anyone other than the auteur suggest plot lines or magical words. Nothing kills a novel like a future IPR fight because "you stole my idea" plus it feels deeply uncool.
"I have a great idea for a book:... wheredidhego?" is not that dissimilar to "I asked GPT for a plot idea and now my creativity is on the floor"
Just an anecdote, but back in college, I had an algorithms professor who gave us a classifier problem like the square and triangle boundary problem. His English was poor and nobody understood the problem as he stated it. I got an okay score on it, but never understood it very well.
Anyway, it’s 40 years later and I just read this article and said, “Oh! Now I get it.” A little too late, for Dr. Hippe’s class.
I sometimes wonder how much better my grades in college could have been, or what advanced math I could have picked up which I abandoned, if my professors had had basic English skill. I'm sure they were great scientists, but assigning them to teach was not helping anyone.
WDE! I remember calling the Foy desk one night (this would have been late 80’s) because someone at a party said “It says Crun-chy” in a Paul Lynde voice and we couldn’t remember the name of the rat from Charlotte’s Web (Templeton).
Reminds me of the time I turned myself into a Van de Graff generator at work.
I was a theater projectionist, back when you had 20 minute reels you had to constantly change, while babysitting two high-voltage, water-cooled, carbon arc projectors. Sometimes the film would break and you’d have to splice it. So when the theater got a print in, you had to count and log the number of splices for each reel, then the next theater would do the same and retire the print when it got too spliced up (plus, sometimes if it was the last night of a run, some lazy projectionists would splice it in place with masking tape and then you’d have to fix it). Sometimes you had to splice in new trailers or remove inappropriate ones as well.
Anyway, you counted splices by rapidly winding through the reel with a benchtop motor with a speed control belted to a takeup reel while the source spun freely. Then, while letting the film slide between your fingers, counting each “bump” you felt as it wound through. I was told to ground myself by touching the metal switch plate of the speed control knob with my other hand. One night I forgot and let go until my hair started rising. I’d gone through most of the reel at a very high speed and acquired its charge.
I reached for the switch plate and shot an 8-10” arcing discharge between the plate and my fingers.
Lesson learned, I held the switch plate from then on.
I worked in a casino that had a wool carpet. When the carpet was new it was ridiculous the amount of static that it generated on you. I was wearing steel toe non slip and anti shock shoes too!
I quickly learned to hold my machine keys ring (3 inch wide ring) and tap it to the slot machine frame. Often a three inch violet spark would jump and I could even feel my clothes move. One time I even causing one of the slot machine player tracking system to reboot, it was that or me better it got the hit.
A manager said at a casino they used to work at they would spray fabric softener on the rugs to alleviate static. I don't know if it worked or not.
I lived in an area with extremely dry winters (dew points below -40). My bedroom was carpeted. Some mornings I would reach for the light switch and see a 2" bolt of white pain jump off my finger. It was like a strobe light. I learned to touch light switches with my elbow. Same bolt but less painful to take it on the elbow.
The Daresbury Laboratory in the UK had a giant Van de Graaff generator housed in a high concrete tower. I remember staying on site and waking up in the middle of the night with a really creepy feeling that turned out to be caused by that thing operating.
@idiotsecant is correct. Length of arc correlates to voltage, while most of the potential pain or damage from an arc will correlate more to amperage and/or to duration.
The amperage of static elecricity discharges like this can be quite high, tens of amps is common.
So walking across a carpet and getting a shock can easily be tens of amps at thousands of volts, and we're just totally fine (because it's for a tiny fraction of a second).
Lethality of electricity is multi-dimensional, trying to reduce it to a single quantity does not really work (exposure time and electrical frequency are very important).
Sounds a bit like fuse wire (except the frequency dependence)... There's both a current and a time component. High overloads can be tolerated for a very short time without blowing the fuse, while low overloads can be sustained for longer before the fuse reaches its maximum temperature and breaks.
Yeah, completely automatic DMing just makes it like an open-ended computer game. On the other hand, the AI generated NPC responses are better than I could have come up with quickly, which makes me think co-DMing with an AI partner might be fun, particularly if they get better at remembering the details. That would let the human DM control the flow of the story without worrying that Thug #4 has taken 3hp of damage and is Dazzled. Of course, I most often use Foundry or Roll20 these days and they do a lot of that for you.
I wonder how well it could do for game summaries and recaps?
