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Drew_

676 karma · joined February 14, 2015

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Drew_··on Attention is all you have
> When I noticed, I cut news out completely. Mood massively improved, and two decades later, I still don't regret a thing.

You seem extremely active on HN, so this story sounds pretty exaggerated.

Drew_··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
I don’t think it really matters whether we’re talking about an agent or “pure LLM”. All of an agents decisions are powered by tokens generated from an LLM. If the LLM was trained on stories of AI sentience, it will have some tendency to reproduce them. Training for alignment can help avoid that, but the probability isn’t 0.
Drew_··on “It works better in the app”
But all of those problems with 3rd party libraries also do exist in native iOS development?
Drew_··on How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
In my org, you’re not allowed to do work like this without the title.
Drew_··on Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results
I get the same feeling with this sort of thing. I did try Kagi and stuck with it for the last year. It's pretty good, but not without it's faults.

- Out of the box, search result quality is comparable to Google

- Search is slow. Latency for most queries is about a second. Sometimes 3 seconds. Google is shockingly fast in comparison.

- Personalized results is a killer feature (blocking, boosting and suppressing domains)

- There is no iOS app. Only one in beta that is seemingly abandoned.

- Their site/app design is just passable at best

- Their AI quick answers give solid answers and are pretty concise

Drew_··on C Is Best (2025)
> Safe languages usually want to abort if they encounter an out-of-memory (OOM) situation. SQLite is designed to recover gracefully from an OOM.

As someone who runs into this problem a lot, this is pretty cool! Does anyone know how they can recover from this in SQLite?

Drew_··on AI World Clocks
The website is regenerating the clocks every minute. When I opened it, Gemini 2.5 was the only working one. Now, they are all broken.

Also, your example is not showing the current time.

Drew_··on iPhone Pocket
Same story for me, but with the 15 Pro. The Pixel 7 phones were huge so I just switched to my first iPhone.
Drew_··on A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size
No need to include that specific guard rail in every prompt - just use RAG to include it where appropriate.
Drew_··on A new experimental Google app for Windows
I suppose they technically could overlay more ads, but they've already had mobile apps, Chrome and Chrome OS for decades and have never gone that far for obvious reasons.
Drew_··on A new experimental Google app for Windows
How does a native app provide any "more surface area" for ads than a web page? Are they not displaying on the same screen?
Drew_··on MacBook Pro Insomnia
The amount of "looses" (loses) typos I see everywhere lately is actually crazy
Drew_··on AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
Strongly agree with this. Many authors and video creators have interesting, valuable things to say, but they don't exercise restraint or respect for their audience's time.

If something is overwhelmingly long, especially considering the subject matter, I just skip to the comments or throw it in an LLM to summarize.

Drew_··on AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
I agree whole heartedly. It seems clear to me that art and knowledge will transition to more private and/or undocumented experiences in the coming years in order to preserve their value.
Drew_··on Recovering from AI Addiction
You read these comments incorrectly
Drew_··on I'm done with social media – Or: why I have a blog now
I did the same, but I'm still holding on to Reddit with many restrictions:

- No mobile apps

- 10 min/day time limit on web

- Only browse 6 subreddits individually

- Filtering all posts below a certain karma level (depending on the subreddit)

- Collapsing all comments by default

This has completely changed my relationship with the platform for the better. I would quit it entirely, but unfortunately it's the best news source for a few of my hobbies.

Drew_··on Recovering from AI Addiction
Yup. The steps are definitely rooted in Christianity, but you can exercise them however you want. As you might imagine, most people suffering with addiction are not that religious (if at all) and the same thing goes in those groups.
Drew_··on Poor Man's Back End-as-a-Service (BaaS), Similar to Firebase/Supabase/Pocketbase
It sounds like you use CSVs to build static websites, not store or update any dynamic data. That's not even remotely comparable.
Drew_··on I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric
There's a noticeable difference to me between exercising my thinking skills and feeling mentally exhausted versus consuming lots of media and feeling "hungover".

I get that exhausted feeling after any hard day at work. On the other hand, scrolling through reels for about 30 minutes gives me a headache. If I spend over an hour on YouTube, I also get a similar feeling, but only if that time was spent watching many different videos. If I watched one 2 hour video, I feel fine.

Drew_··on The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
I'm looking around and I don't see anyone mentioning what I think is one of the biggest advantages of debugging: not having to recompile.

Even assuming print statements and debuggers are equally effective (they're not), debuggers are better simply because they are faster. With print statements, you might need to recompile a dozen times before you find whatever it is you're looking for. Even with quick builds this is infuriating and a ton of wasted time.

Drew_··on Meta: Shut down your invasive AI Discover feed
Because Mozilla's long term sustainability is good for the internet.
Drew_··on Meta: Shut down your invasive AI Discover feed
You can enable email notifications specifically for Facebook events btw. I quit, but leave that enabled.
Drew_··on Meta: Shut down your invasive AI Discover feed
Mozilla should be more focused on figuring out how to actually make money and not this sensationalist stuff. Depending on how the Google case lands, they're finished.
Drew_··on Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
My time in college was 10 years ago, but absolutely none of that was true at the time (I personally seen pretty much everything you referred to as "not allowed"). I find it very hard to believe that much has changed since then.
Drew_··on The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state
I don't know what country you're in, but I'm almost certain people your age are not meeting each other on Instagram. It is not really a platform to meet anyone, especially not in the last 5 years. Joining communities (clubs, churches, etc) are the way to meet new people.
Drew_··on What Was Quartz?
Ditto on loving Quartz and the chat app around 2015 I think it was. After Quartz was gone, I didn't really find what I was looking for until I discovered Axios.
Drew_··on Wired is dropping paywalls for FOIA-based reporting. Others should follow
It doesn't sound like much of a wild guess to me. Basically every single publication is letting customers sample their news before paying (free articles, free trials, etc). This is just more of the same.
Drew_··on Wired is dropping paywalls for FOIA-based reporting. Others should follow
And not 0 either - meaning your numbers and thesis are wrong. The NYT is a successful publication using a "hybrid" model. In fact, basically every publication is.
Drew_··on Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working
OP described a group of families that accrued wealth over 3 generations "without inheriting any wealth". Assuming they weren't orphaned at birth, each generation definitely benefited from the fruits of the previous generation. Even without an overt handout like a trust fund, we still inherit wealth from our ancestors (eg: housing, health care, education, credit, social networks, etc). In this case, the "handout" would have been their upbringing. They feel "the system is working" because of this, but not everyone in the system has an ancestry like this.
Drew_··on Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working
I’m not on a high horse.
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