I agree, though I would prefer to highlight the first half of the first item - transparency. Also, perhaps make Safety an independent principle than combining with Security.
These are a good set of principles for any company (or individual) can follow to guide them how they use AI.
I agree - the content you write about LLMs is informative and realistic, not hyped. I get a lot of value from it, especially because you write mostly as stream of consciousness and explains your approach and/or reasoning. Thank you for doing that.
Congrats — well deserved! I love the game and play it every day; it's actually the first thing I do in the morning. A big fan of Hard mode! My best friend has also started playing it and we share the results with each other.
Just one feedback - on desktop browsers, I can see the list of answered clues below the textbox, but on the phone (Brave or Firefox on Android), I don't see that list. I am not sure if this is a feature or a bug, but it’s a feature I miss when playing on my phone. Seeing those answers gives that little “aha!” moment of satisfaction.
I also made a custom GPT - Bracket GPT [0] that helps in solving the clues when I am stuck. It doesn’t directly give the answers, but offers hints to help nudge you to the solution. It’s a fun companion when you're totally blanking.
This! I love the pure joy of picking both the destination and the path. No pressure, no goal — just the joy of building for its own sake.
These two lines really hit home:
> You don’t have to listen to any other voices here, except that quiet one inside of you that’s gently urging you to do the thing you know you need to do.
> You don’t need to know where it’s going to lead. For that matter, it doesn’t have to lead anywhere. Nothing ever has to come of it.
That freedom is everything. Just creating because it feels right (to me).
I experimented with vibe coding [0] yesterday to build a Pomodoro timer app [1] and had a mixed experience.
The process - instead of typing code, I mostly just talked (voice commands) to an AI coding assistant - in this case, Claude Sonnet 3.7 with GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code and the macOS built-in Dictation app. After each change, I’d check if it was implemented correctly and if it looked good in the app. I’d review the code to see if there are any mistakes. If I want any changes, I will ask AI to fix it and again review the code. The code is open source and available in GitHub [2].
On one hand, it was amazing to see how quickly the ideas in my head were turning into real code. Yes reviewing the code take time, but it is far less than if I were to write all that code myself. On the other hand, it was eye-opening to realize that I need to be diligent about reviewing the code written by AI and ensuring that my code is secure, performant and architecturally stable. There were a few occasions when AI wouldn't realize there is a mistake (at one time, a compile error) and I had to tell it to fix it.
No doubt that AI assisted programming is changing how we build software. It gives you a pretty good starting point, it will take you almost 70-80% there. But a production grade application at scale requires a lot more work on architecture, system design, database, observability and end to end integration.
So I believe we developers need to adapt and understand these concepts deeply. We’ll need to be good at:
- Reading code - Understanding, verifying and correcting the code written by AI
- Systems thinking - understand the big picture and how different components interact with each other
- Guiding the AI system - giving clear instructions about what you want it to do
- Architecture and optimization - Ensuring the underlying structure is solid and performance is good
- Understand the programming language - without this, we wouldn't know when AI makes a mistake
- Designing good experiences - As coding gets easier, it becomes more important and easier to build user-friendly experiences
Without this knowledge, apps built purely through AI prompting will likely be sub-optimal, slow, and hard to maintain. This is an opportunity for us to sharpen the skills and a call to action to adapt to the new reality.
This was super fun! The bracket format is brilliant. It's like going on a treasure hunt, you solve one clue and the next one reveals itself. Well done!
Very true. Filling the time with non-scrolling enjoyable activities, particularly IRL is effective. It's like eating healthy - rather than stressing about what to remove from the plate, think about what you want to add to the plate and enjoy it.
I can totally relate to this feeling of frustration with doom scrolling - I was in the same boat a few months ago, especially with YouTube. Fortunately, I managed to break free from the cycle by tweaking a few settings in YT itself (no special browser extensions needed). These are the changes that helped me:
Main settings that gave me a starting point:
1. Uninstalled YouTube app and now using only the browser version (on mobile and desktop)
2. Turned off Watch History in https://www.youtube.com/feed/history - "Pause watch history" (you can only pause the watch history and YT will periodically remind you to turn it back on. OH yeah, nice try Google!).
3. Turn off AutoPlay (toggle switch on the video player toolbar)
4. Tweak all the settings in https://www.youtube.com/account_playback - disable info cards and video previews (the setting that makes the videos to play when you hover over thumbnails)
After making these changes, your YT homepage and History page will be empty spaces - no videos at all. It is so refreshing! As a bonus, now YouTube shorts show only short-forms content from the channels you subscribed to. So it is more meaningful than some random junk.
Additional habits that helped me:
1. Subscriptions - I subscribed to specific channels that I want to follow - eg: Dave2D, MKBHD, fav cooking channels, NPR etc. and watch their videos via Subscriptions link
2. Topic-specific playlists - save interesting videos that I want to save for later - e.g: 'Health', 'Good recipes' etc.
3. Related videos - When a video is playing, YT shows a bunch of 'related videos' on the right. Most of these videos were not really related to the video, instead they are just trigger content. So I do two things here:
- select the 'Do not recommend channel' from the vertical "..." menu in each video.
- if the related video is genuinely interesting to me, choose the menu option 'Add to watch later'
With these changes, I watch videos in one of three ways only - by searching for specific topics, or selecting from my playlists, or browsing through Subscriptions.
This was a big shift from a "push" to a "pull" model and has effectively stopped my doom scrolling habit in just a couple of weeks. I feel like I am watching YT on my own terms now.
Oddly enough, a big help for me has been not using an adblocker for sites like Youtube. I can only watch so much before I just become enraged by the sheer number of ads in a 20 minute video that I just rage quit the app.
That's an interesting point. I get what you mean. I hate videos that start with an ad. And if the next video also has an ad, I am more likely to give up and go elsewhere. You are right, it is counter-intuitive, but it works.
congrats on your success. rather than fight against the myriad dark patterns employed by youtube, one can also opt to bypass their slimy frontend entirely. for example you can enjoy the same videos with no toxic settings via:
These are a good set of principles for any company (or individual) can follow to guide them how they use AI.