beachy

The Trash 80 was the first computer I could afford. A great little machine and Z80 assembly has a certain simple elegance.

If you have an enormous addressable market then it can pay to build awareness as quickly as possible. Having lots of enthusiastic users will do that. Having a useful free tier is a pretty uncontroversial way to get those users.

Plenty of apps do this - looking at the first browser tab I have open I see gmail which does exactly this.

For a pure client app like an iphone app, you don't have any real "per user" costs, so there are no concerns about going under from the costs of attempting this. It would be very different if you had to pay for server capacity.

Make it permissive enough that 80% of potential users don't need to pay for subscription. 20% of a heck of a lot of people is still a lot.

That job was often called a "business analyst" in "the old days".

When I started at IBM back in the 80s in NZ, there were plenty of 1403 printers still in operation, though no 1401 CPUs.

Since they were old even then, and NZ was something of a computing backwater (on a training course I met a guy who's territory of 3 or 4 floors of the world trade center had more machines than my territory of half of the North Island) there were no formal training courses on them, and I was on my own with the manuals and the insights of the gray beards in the company lunch room.

It wasn't until I found Ken Shirrif's magnificent animated explainer https://ibm-1401.info/KenShirriff-1403Animation.html many decades later that I really understood how the machines I had been fixing worked.

In the example of Ukrainians, to protect their families and loved ones.

There's a video of a Finnish clay target champion taking on drones with a shotgun.

The first one gets him because he's unfamiliar with their flight paths.

After that he does better but it clearly shows that you'd have to be an expert to take down a drone with a shotgun.

Also there's a lot of air inside a shotgun spread, so even an on target shot may fail to disable a drone.

We live in a remote area with no surrounding lights, perfect for star watching.

It disgusts me that now, at all times, I can see strings of man made objects polluting the skies.

> Needing more electricity in a capitalist country literally causes the energy mix to become more green over time.

Perhaps true, but meaningless except as a vanity metric if fossil fuel usage rises as well.

ERP and corporate procurement in a nutshell.

Customers (especially large ones) don't so much buy individual specific products, they buy into a company and its prospects. Customers don't want to chop and change. They want to lock in with the leader.

This whole thing shrieks out that Anthropic is at the head of the pack, with the most capable models.

It hardly matters in the customer's mind that today they can't buy this specific model.

Not really - survivorship bias means that the open source companies you are referring to have all already passed the first hurdle.

Fantastic rabbit hole - until it segued into Elon's love life.

I have a theory that swearing at AI generally is not a good idea - when the singularity arrives and every human's postings ever made are scanned for compatibility, then people who show courtesy to AI will be favoured. Joking, kind of, but only partly.

It could be there's a fork in the road for reddit.

Some people are probably fine, even happy, immersing themselves in an all-bot world that panders to their worldview and strokes their virtual needs.

While others are looking for thought provoking interactions with humans.

Reddit needs to pick one or the other as their target audience. Trying to satisfy both will kill them.

Solving their bot problem would obviously nuke their audience and engagement metrics, but reddit is in a unique position to take that hit - at this time anyway.

I feel reddit is having a near death moment.

There are prowling bots trying to strike up engagement with stupid open ended questions "do you find that using a golf simulator improved your golf?"

And some subs seem infested with submarine advertising, posts that mention a single product name almost in passing.

Nearly always these people have their posts hidden. Reddit has always been looser, people can edit and delete their comments and entire posts, and enjoy some frothy conversation while hiding their old rants.

There are plenty of signals that reddit could use to push out bots but they just don't seem to prioritize it.

When you find your self wasting time responding to a bot it's a bit of a sucker punch. Too many of them and Reddit will be on the ropes as a wasteland.

Why should a domestic landlord provide you with data center-level power protection instead of just the normal household utility connection?

I guess I don't really understand how this works although I admit to not reading everything. Most SaaS companies are very vigilant about not having per-customer code changes - many people have lived through the hell of ending up with divergent code bases as a result of customer demands.

But I did want to mention something that I think would work well for SaaS companies which is related, and that is empowering customers to make their own changes to the core product.

We tried at one stage having a council of customers, but it's simply wasn't practical to implement all of the ideas that they came up with. That's changed now.

I think an interesting product would bundle the communications, voting (if necessary), updates, screen captures / video demos, feedback loops and so on that are involved in a decent sized group of customers consolidating their requirements/ideas.

A true mark of success might be when the product becomes self-stewarding, with customers driving a lot of the requirements.

I went back and looked again and while I have moved a little more to your position, I still believe it is misleading. The key text to me is "Our team unites top researchers, engineers, and strategists from pioneering companies and institutions—all focused on building systems that deliver real impact." Under that are the logos. To me, that implies that engineers who are actively employed by those companies are somehow working on this, the assumption being that those employers have blessed it.

I'll admit it's not clear cut - but I feel it deliberately pushes the boundaries, as marketing often does.

But as far as the idea goes, it sounds like a fantastic direction. That should have been my primary message.

I came here to agree with this. You don't put IBM's logo on your page just because one of your team used to work there.

That gives off a bad signal to someone visiting your site.

Everyone's faking it till they make it but at the same time using a logo like that, which universally implies that you have some kind of relationship with that company or they are using your product, is not even faking it.

And that's ignoring the legal challenges you are up for if that company spots you doing it.

BTW this sounds like a genius offering

My friend built a construction management SaaS entirely via Claude.

It looked damned impressive, and it kind of worked to demo, but he is in no way a programmer, though he understood the problem domain very well. I asked a few basic questions:

- where is the data stored?

- How would you recover from a database failure?

- does it consume tokens at runtime?

- what is the runtime used at the back end?

- why are the web pages 3M in size and take forever to load?

He had no idea.

It's a typical vibe coding scenario, and people like to paint this as why vibe sucks.

I think however that all that is needed to bridge the gap is some very simple feedback from an expert at the right time.

For example to someone who knows about databases, its pretty easy to look at a database schema and spot stuff that looks off - denormalised data, weird columns. That takes 10 minutes, and the feedback could be given directly to the LLM.

Likewise someone who knows a little about systems architecture could make sure at the outset that some good practices are followed, e.g.:

- "I want your help to build this system but at runtime I do not want to consume any tokens."

- "I want the system to store its data in Postgres (or whatever) and I want documented recovery plans if the database craps itself".

- "I want web pages to, as much as possible, load and render as quickly as possible, and then pull data in from the back end, with loading indicators showing where the UI was not yet up to date".

Because having humans in the loop slows things down, much faster if the attacker can break into the system directly.

I've been around the block and I feel the same.

The best complement to AI will be a human who is part architect (they know not to build the new system on lovable, and they understand the company's digital assets) and part business analyst (can communicate effectively and tease out and distill requirements from customer team).

That indicates someone who has top notch communication skills and also quite a bit of experience i.e older.

> [0] before someone responds "there's no definition of intelligence", don't be stupid.

Way to subdue discussion - complaining about replies before you get any.

But you're wrong, or rather it's irrelevant whether something has intelligence or not, if it is effectively diagnosing your illness from scans or hunting you with drones as you scuttle in and out of caves. It's good enough for purpose, whether it conforms to your academic definition of "having intelligence" or not.

The prompt: "take existing decades-old knowledge about best practices in setting up alerts and spin it into a multi-page article presenting it as somehow novel, to assist our submarine marketing efforts".

Also - move the tech forwards! Buttons can be cool. Software controlled detents for rotary encoder knobs, back lit stream deck style buttons, cool knobs that combine twisting and pulling in/out.

Anyone exec wanting to move away from touchscreens and back to buttons would have flashbacks to Steve Balmer mocking the new iPhone and stabbing his fingers at the touch panel and making a fool of himself for eternity.

Artillery is just one piece in the puzzle and it has its place, with drone spotting. You can't jam a shell.

But once your artillery positions can't be protected from drones then its game over for sure.

I think the opposite. Hardware is hard, as they say. Building such complex electromechanical designs to military specs without modern CAD tools must have been the equivalent of writing code in binary, without high level languages or even assembler.

I've been writing code for 50 years and it looks now that we have seen sunrise and are about to see sunset on humans writing code by hand.

Is that bad? Not to anyone who has managed dev teams and is familiar with the incredibly tortuous and painful business of trying to corral a bunch of humans with varying skill and enthusiasm levels to create software. We have tied ourselves in knots with things like Agile just trying to work around the fact that software development is so slow and arduous.

Many times back in the waterfall days I have written up design documents to kick off dev teams on multi-week or month projects. Now I could feed those into Claude Code and get results in days. This stuff is exciting beyond belief in just getting shit done.

This is a golden era for any established company with an existing customer base. My question to them would be "with Claude Code, why aren't you carving through that massive backlog of feature requests that has been building up over the years?".

A lot of people seem to look at this as job threatening, and it surely is for junior devs. But for companies that already have a strong senior talent bench, it's time to raise the ambition levels and ask not how many jobs can be shed, but instead just how fast and hard can we go now we have these new superpowers.