Carmack's comments and the comments in the thread entirely surprise me.
256kbit/s was pretty much the standard ADSL speed 20 years ago. I remember thinking it was lucky some of my friends had 512kbit/s and 1500kbit/s was considered extremely fortunate.
Even still calls over Skype worked fine, you could run IRC or MSN Messenger while loading flash games or downloading MP3s. You could definitely play games like Starcraft, Age of Empires, Quake, UT2004, etc. on a 256k ADSL line. Those plans were also about 8x the price of this plan, not even adjusting for inflation.
Not only that, those lines were typically only 64k upload speed. The usefulness of a 500kbit/s up/down line is incredibly high. I think the only reason it might seem less useful now is that web services are not typically optimised to be usable on dial-up speeds like they were 20 years ago.
With the right setup and having feeds/content download asynchronously rather than "on-demand", 500kbit/s is still plenty of internet by today's standards.
The Dancing Baby gif, which was abnormally large, and went viral via email in 1996, is around 220 KB. At this speed, it would load in 3.5 seconds. And being 4 seconds long, it could stream.
No even that was fine and common. Massive blocks of ads, analytics, etc werent the norm though and i for one miss a time we wouldnt conceive of introducing it.
Does it mean that they can be stored at room temperature, in humid conditions, etc? ie. requiring no HVAC/dehumidifiers or whatever else might be needed to reliably store archive media?
On the idea of replacing ones self with a shell script, I think there's nothing stopping people (and it should probably be encouraged) with replacing ones use of an LLM with an LLM generated "shell script".
Using an LLM to count how many Rs are in the word strawberry is silly. Using it to write a script to reliably determine how many <LETTER> are in <WORD> is not so silly.
The same goes for many repeated task you'd have an LLM naively perform.
I think that is essentially what the article is getting at, but it's got very little to do with MCP. Perhaps the author has more familiarity with "slop" MCP tools than I do.
Hmm kinda makes sense to keep them separate because the agents perform differently, right?
You might want to tell Claude not to write so many comments but you might want to tell Gemini not to reach for Kotlin so much, or something.
A unified approach might be nice, but using the same prompt for all of the LLM "coding tools" is probably not going to be as nice as having prompts tailored for each specific tool.
The entire article, probably quite intentionally, seems to overuse semicolons (in my opinion). I say this as a semicolon enjoyer, but I think the overuse of semicolons in this article leads the reader to a bit of semicolon fatigue by the end of it.
Gas Town is from the creator of beads.
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