Even funnier is ghuntley going around giving talks, posting on x etc saying “if you don’t learn this stuff you’re gonna be left behind”. I think this was around when he made the first Ralph blog post?

Which of course couldn’t be true. Any “prompt skill” is going to be commodified. Thats the entire premise AI companies are trying to sell.

100% agree with this, tooling is no longer an advantage.

The only thing I say to myself on this, given how Ralph took months to be notice (and taskmaster is still flying somehow under the radar comparatively speaking), is that people are drowning with the volume of new features / tools. It’s what you do with these tools that matters at the end of the day and shift goes more on GTM, marketing etc. rather than uniqueness of software. Most important thing: find clients :) Anyway interesting times!

I am musing with the idea that other than dipping a toe in, investing a lot of time in this stuff is a waste (for this reason) and a better use is get deeper human domain experience in XYZ.

Once, long ago, I was a fledgling C programmer working on the TinyMUCK game server. My mentor had released the 2.0 version with MUF, and I had implemented the port to SunOS (where a dereferenced NULL pointer does not return 0, but SIGSEGV: that was a lot of fun to debug!)

Later on I was working with another fellow to kind of bring the codebase up-to-date, and we found it necessary to implement a new database dump format (the database was normally 100% in RAM and then "dumped out" to a flat file for checkpoints and shutdowns.)

So I made the database changes, and then I christened the format "Christina Applegate TinyMUCK Dump Format" because she was the girl/woman of my dreams at that point in time (prior to Melissa Joan Hart taking over).

It is unclear if she ever found out about this particular usage. But last time I checked, this codebase was still extant, and so, someone somewhere may still be running a TinyMUCK server that utilizes a unique format dedicated to Christina Applegate herself.

Haha nice find ! also interestingly the loop they have via the plugin, is not really the concept intended since it doesn’t persist across sessions

The “astro-turfing” term is new to me, what does that mean?

No affiliation with taskmaster, I am simply a user, happy for you to check my GitHub to see the usage

When people say Macs are a great computer, are they astro-turfing?

When they say "just switch from Windows to Linux", are they astro-turfing Linux?