That would be next-level immersion! You could probably achieve this by rendering the LLM’s response using a handwritten font—maybe even train a model on your own handwriting to make it feel truly personal.
Exactly! There’s something about handwriting that makes it feel more personal—like scribbling notes in the margins of a spellbook. The shift from typing to pen input definitely changes the vibe of interacting with AI.
That’s awesome! Love seeing the reMarkable get more functionality through creative hacks. Just checked out your app—what was the biggest challenge you faced while developing for the reMarkable?
I might be biased because memorydial was complimentary to me ... but they SEEM like a human! Also I'm not all that opposed to robot participation in the scheme of things. Especially if they are nice to me or give good ideas :)
FWiW I mostly read HN at it's deadest time (I'm GMT+8 local time) and I see a lot of mechanical turk comments, especially from new (green coloured) accounts.
I always look for a response (eg: yours) before flagging them as spam bots . . .
This is awkward—I use em-dash all the time on HN! I'm not an LLM (as far as I know); I just like to write neatly when I'm able to, and it's very low friction when you're familiar with your keyboard compose sequences[0]. It's a trivial four keypresses,
AltR(hold) - - -
(The discoverability of these functions is way too low, on GNOME/Linux; I really dislike the direction of modern UX, with its fake simplicity, and infantalization of users. Way more people would be using —'s and friends if they were easily discoverable and prominently hinted in their UX. "It's documented in x.org man pages" is an unacceptable state of affairs for a core GUI workflow).
never knew about the em dash thing, I was just using an AI writing assistant to help fix my shitty grammar and formatting. I think in future ill stick with bad formatting
This is a brilliant use case—handwriting input combined with LLMs makes for a much more natural workflow. I wonder how well it handles messy handwriting and if fine-tuning on personal notes would improve recognition over time.
I did this a few months ago with the Remarkable Paper Pro and Claude. It worked quite well, my handwriting is pretty terrible, and I even had a clunky workflow where I could just write down stuff I wanted to do, and roughly(or specifically) when I wanted to do it, and it was able to generate an ical I could load into my calendar.
Generally if I can read my handwriting then it can! It has no issues with that. Really the problem is more in spacial awareness -- it can't reliably draw an X in a box, let alone play tic-tac-toe or dots-and-boxes.
Probably just knee-jerk downvotes from people who misread the title and assumed you were confused. Honestly, the PS/2 vs PlayStation naming overlap is fair—Sony could’ve picked a more distinct name!
Respectfully, complaining about downvotes is childish (and IIRC against site guidelines). At the point I am reading this, I don't see any indication that (the post you asked about) has been downvoted. Maybe that's because your post influenced others to up-doot it, but I think HN (along with other sites) intentionally fuzz their voting for various reasons.
Moreover, it's just a waste of time to complain about it. Some people aren't going to like the things you say, and it distracts from the topic and introduces noise to try to shine the spotlight on someone disagreeing and philosophizing about their motivations.
Again, I am saying this respectfully and in the interests of how to run an efficient online discussion. I have no horse in the race regarding the PS2 acronym.
I got downvoted too in my original post. I saw it grey, so that means downvotes, but the comment was just saying something trying to help, not even criticizing anything. People that were already young adults (or in their late teens) when the PlayStation 2 came out, and that reads HN today, very possibly know about the IBM PS/2 PC as well.
Anyway, it was just a minor comment, I will stop here
Right? The golden age of game dev—low-level programming, custom hardware tricks, and figuring out how to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the PlayStation. I’d love to see those internal docs and training materials. Probably a treasure trove of lost optimization techniques!
I personally believe that we are in the golden age right now: literally anyone can pickup and make games. Game dev is actually something you can learn on your own and do.
Back in the 90s it was all locked up in licenses, expensive books or a handful of companies.
Now you can open up Unity and make a game in a weekend.
I think Unity is a bad example. WebASM and frameworks built to cooperate with it, such as wasm-4 and raylib are leading the charge in my opinion. As we move forward, not only do we need to stop building our castles in other peoples' kingdoms, but we need to build leaner, smaller, cleaner, and more hackable. Otherwise we'll keep getting stuck, as we have with Java, and Windows XP, and gmail, and...
Sure it's nice to just be able to "import antigravity" as one does with massive, convenient, prebaked infrastructure like Unity, but it's never worth the cost, when the cost always seems to be "everything you've got, and a little more next year".
I think it's a bad example if people strictly focus on their own personal principles, which most people don't really care about.
People who grew up making their first games in BASIC didn't really know or care of the implications of using it, which required DOS. It was the ease of picking it up and make something fun quickly.
Unity might not be perfect but allows anyone to put their first "black rectangle" in seconds, on many various platforms without a thought.
When I started, it was OpenGL/DX C++ madness full of magical incantation which would call graphic APIs just because someone said so and without much support for non-English speakers.
> Most published commercial games were made by a single 14 to 20 year old in few months.
This isn't really true. Yes, some games were made hastily like that, like E.T. for Atari.
Just one cherry-picked example, The Legend of Zelda for NES was made in about 2 years with 9 people in the credits.
Some popular modern indie games with similar team sizes and development schedules include:
Valheim, which went from full time development in 2018 to early access release in 2021 with a team of two.
Stardew Valley's initial development (not an early access game) took four years with a single developer.
Rimworld took one year for an alpha build, and about 5 more years to full release with 2-3 developers.
Minecraft/Infiniminer took about 2 years to reach a release version, with Notch handing off development to Jeb and Mojang only growing to a larger development team post-Microsoft acquisition.
The fidelity, definitely. I think quality is a harder sell. I do think we have more gaming history behind us now to draw from and I think we will be entering a new golden age soon but at the moment gaming feels like it's in a rut.
Focus on building real projects, contributing to open source, and gaining practical experience. Strong problem-solving skills, knowing system design basics, and some cloud familiarity (AWS/Azure/GCP) help. Networking and referrals matter a lot—try to connect with industry folks on LinkedIn or attend meetups. Most importantly, don’t just grind LeetCode—show you can build and ship things.
Very much agree with this. When I am looking at recently graduated candidates, I look for things they have actually built. When they have Open source projects on GitHub, that is incredible. Just throwing any crap up. There isn't sufficient though. Just throwing your school assignments up. There doesn't count either.
My best advice is start writing code to solve problems in your own life. Basically write apps to solve your own problem. A great example currently on hn is an expense tracker. That sort of stuff is great because you can showcase your front end and back-end skills, along with design and refinement. Then maintain that project for a while to show a history, which demonstrates your skill of maintenance. That sort of thing Will get you hired by me as a junior in a heartbeat.
thats exactly what they want, then they put on their sad face and tell congress "we just can't find anybody!" and voila, in rolls the H1B drones who work at 25% off.
The decline of entry-level roles is worrying. Companies are optimizing for immediate productivity but forgetting that juniors grow into seniors. No training, no pipeline, no future talent...
Agreed. Boot camps tried to fill the void. Some were great, some were not, like anything. Most of the boot camp grads I worked with were good juniors with real world experience to bring to the table (designers, writers, etc). But, in general, the disdain boot camps were met with by many engineering orgs spoke volumes for how little value people place on junior engineers. If you won’t train people, and you won’t accept graduates of job training programs, it’s hard to see how you can ever have a sustainable pipeline. Many people would seemingly rather spend billions training AI than training junior engineers. (For the record, I don’t view these two options as exclusive)
I agree that many engineering orgs did not give boot camps proper chance, but I do think it is important to be realistic regarding them. Generally speaking, Someone coming with a computer science degree is going to be a lot more well-rounded with much more breath and depth then someone coming from a boot camp.
It's not really a great comparison though in my experience. Typically, a good boot camp graduate will come away with a better ability to build real apps, but has a serious lacking in understanding algorithms, OS fundamentals, and many other things That important for Back-End development, especially.
I'm not sure what the solution is to the junior engineer crisis, but I don't think the solution is boot camps. Those have a great place, but if anything a junior coming from a boot camp is generally even more Junior than a junior coming from a computer science degree.
My hypothesis is that The computer science degree route is what will be most useful for juniors in the future. In a world where AI can do the basic coding and build the apps, I see the qualities in appreciating overall design and architecture, especially with regards to scalability. There could definitely be boot camps that teach that sort of stuff, but I am not aware of any that exists currently.
Many of the best engineers I have worked with don’t have a computer science or engineering degree. The business we’re in is writing software to support the company. Most of that is stuff they don’t teach in computer science: inter-personal communication, project planning, coordinating, gathering requirements, writing. Learning computer science fundamentals helps but is in no way required to get started. This is a trainable job like any other. Many boot camp grads bring a lot of those skills to the table already.
It just depends on the job at hand. If the engineering is very easy, and most of the work is gathering requirements and coordinating, then it's as you say. This is what Java was invented for, and I've been that person. But it's not the same as being a really good engineer (which I'm not).
You are assuming that you can't learn that stuff on the job. There is nothing in a computer science education that is not available to learn on the job and in reading and experimenting on your own over some years.
By contrast, a not insignificant number of graduates of computer science and engineering programs struggle to excel outside of writing code. That is only a small part of the job.
I'm not assuming that, but I'd argue that learning theory on the job is much harder than learning interpersonal on the job, as being on the job biases in both of those directions.
I agree with everything you said, but I do think there is a difference betwee "required" and "optimal." I worked with a guy who went to boot camp after switching career fields and had absolutely no CS background. After starting the job (and excelling), he started reading text books from a CS degree plan. He learned more about CS in a year than many people with 4-year degrees, and he became a formidable dev. However, most people aren't that dedicated/willing to learn.
> Generally speaking, Someone coming with a computer science degree is going to be a lot more well-rounded with much more breath and depth then someone coming from a boot camp.
In my two decades in the industry I've used my computer science education maybe twice.
Interesting, I use stuff I learned from my computer science frequently, especially regarding algorithms, data structures, and OS fundamentals. Granted I'm much more on the backend/infra side, but those things still come up regularly. Just yesterday I faced an issue regarding the way threads operate that a basic understanding of processes and threads in the OS made a lot easier.
It's nothing that a person can't learn outside of a CS degree of course, but most people won't spend the time to dig into the formal and often abstract principles to really understand how different algorithms perform and how choice of data structure impacts performance. I've reviewed code many times that really should be using a linked list or tree but ends up thrown into a hash because that's basically the only data structure the person knows. Not uncommon is a reply "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" which drives me crazy. It doesn't take much effort to just use the right data structure in the first place if you understand their pros and cons.
I don't think I'd go around telling people that. My education has been very helpful, and knowledge sticks to knowledge your whole career. To think you learned nothing applicable in a 4-year CS program honestly tells me more about you than industry.
It's almost like... there are many different projects developers work on, and you've somehow "specced" into a sub-profession where your undergraduate degree was helpful (whatcha doin' over there, reinventing hash tables? Haha I joke. But seriously. .... Reinventing heaps, right? ;) )
Don't diminish people for arriving at software from a different "angle", or doing different things. We're in a highly intellectual field, and the implication that doing "pure CS" is somehow a higher or more valid form of software development is just ridiculous.
I'm a web developer. I've never written a hash table, heap or bubble sort. I just use tools provided by the platform. But I've found it helpful to understand the tools that I'm using, and can't really imagine any programmer who wouldn't, unless they've never connected the dots between the theoretical knowledge they obtained and the tools they use every day to do their job.
Well, I think you're taking the other poster too literally. They probably mean "I've used the knowledge I gained in my computer science degree, MINUS the knowledge the average developer who doesn't have a CS degree, maybe twice".
As it has always been, at least since I am on the job market, early 1990's.
In the little Iberian Penisula, you would seldom get a training, and being hired as junior without experience in what folks were already doing, was through connections as it usually happens in more "flexible" cultures.
And better have a degree on thee field, either technical school, or higher education.
Trainings? That is for us to do at home instead of watching TV, lets not diminish company profits, someone has to keep their audis, volvos and bmws for management roles.
It is not only due salaries that so many emigrate.
<< Trainings? That is for us to do at home instead of watching TV, lets not diminish company profits, someone has to keep their audis, volvos and bmws for management roles.
The 2nd hand expression of this I heard was along the lines of: you should already have a portfolio of projects to show, github with stars and/or significant FOSS contributions.
I read the article and it made me realize how far we moved from that model. Apart from everything else, my own company's training is generic training intended to check the box..
as an employer, it's not about us being unwilling to hire juniors. it's that juniors these days demand too much salary for their position. especially for a small startup like ours, we can't afford to match FAANG company salaries. if juniors want a chance, they should be ready to accept low salaries.
Every senior developer is still a junior developer depending on the domain at hand. If you want a lateral move into another job, imho it is ok to take a pay cut and become a junior again, e.g. webdev into C++ games. I don't see why people are scared of temporarily taking pay cuts but it has always been the nature of being a dev.
