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benjaminwootton

5,719 karma · joined October 10, 2010

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benjaminwootton··on Mistral raises €3B
It’s thought to be because it’s a private company but it’s very well cited.
benjaminwootton··on Social media use on the rise among Australian under-16s after ban: data
Of course they have a say in it. It’s bordering on neglect to give a 10 year old that junk.
benjaminwootton··on LinkedIn CringeBot 3000
It’s been on the long slow decline for a decade. It used to be filled with interesting content and made it easy to access interesting people and get your message out. It’s really in the dregs now but I still open it and post to it more out of habit than anything. I’ve deleted the app and just use it from my laptop to try and break the habit and it’s very questionable ROI.
benjaminwootton··on Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Every big business in the world biases towards risk reduction and cost reduction over getting an edge.
benjaminwootton··on An oral history of Bank Python (2021)
I was lucky enough to start my career sat on the next desk across from Kirat. Genius programmer and nice guy! He later went on to found Beacon platform which was the same again, as a cloud hosted service.
benjaminwootton··on How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
You can vibe code a clone of Trello in 30 minutes.
benjaminwootton··on Domain expertise has always been the real moat
Brilliant framing. If you understand a domain and understand software architecture then you are in an extremely strong position right now.
benjaminwootton··on Google Workspace CLI
They need something like this as it's hard and flaky to automate Google apps with AI. However, step 2 drops me to a fairly technical looking page where I have to configure Google Cloud. If they had a one click installer to automate Google Apps it would be an absolute killer use case for AI for me.
benjaminwootton··on ClickHouse Agentic Data Stack
A demo of using an LLM/agent to analyse data stored in ClickHouse. This stuff is getting really good!
benjaminwootton··on OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again
I’ve been saying the same and the same about data more generally. I don’t want to go and look, I want to be told about what I need to know about.
benjaminwootton··on Google is dead. Where do we go now?
I wish I knew the difference. I’ve ran or been close to tens of businesses over the last 20 years and we’ve always paid the Google tax, but I’m not sure it’s ever had a positive ROI.
benjaminwootton··on Google is dead. Where do we go now?
The AdWords platform is extremely complicated nowadays, and try as I might I can’t get any impressions from it. I then went through a period with an AdWords specialist from their team who also couldn’t get any impressions. It’s like they don’t want or need my money.
benjaminwootton··on Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash
It’s yet another way for investors to screw early employees whose face doesn’t fit.
benjaminwootton··on Don't Force Your LLM to Write Terse [Q/Kdb] Code: An Information Theory Argument
The bigger issue is that LLMs haven’t had much training on Q as there’s little publically available code. I recently had to try and hack some together and LLMs couldn’t string simple pieces of code together.

It’s a bizarre language.

benjaminwootton··on Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
There is some truth in this. I fit into a few of these buckets and I don’t think I could ever recommend their enterprise stuff after having my favourite consumer products pulled.
benjaminwootton··on The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy, analyst says
The public markets are hitting all time highs every week. It’s going to be painful if that pops.
benjaminwootton··on Why many young adults turn on TV or movie subtitles, according to a new poll
This has pretty much ruined TV for me. I watch with a remote control and constantly turn it up and down. It breaks the immersion.
benjaminwootton··on Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
You are correct but with Venmo or PayPal there’s a middleman charging fees who can lock your funds. A decentralised PayPal is appealing.
benjaminwootton··on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'
Try Claude Code. You’ll literally be able to automate 90% of the coding part of your job.
benjaminwootton··on Enough AI copilots, we need AI HUDs
I think there is a third and distinct model which is AI that runs in the background autonomously amd over a long period and pushes things to you.

It can detect situations intelligently, do the filtering, summarisation of what’s happening and possibly a recommendation.

This feels a lot more natural to me, especially in a business context when you want to monitor for 100 situations about thousands of customers.

benjaminwootton··on I've launched 37 products in 5 years and not doing that again
Yeah, I spent some time researching this crowd and most of the ones I found have the playbook of selling to indie hackers and talking about how successful they are with fake MRR screenshots.
benjaminwootton··on Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf
I’ve always dwelled over $5 a month subscriptions for iPhone apps due to subscription fatigue. I find myself signing up for $200 AI subscriptions without a moments hesitation.
benjaminwootton··on OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google
I do agree, Claude Code absolutely changed the game. It is outstanding.
benjaminwootton··on Using Gemini and Claude for SQL Analytics
I didn't test with ChatGPT yet so this is a fair comment. I'm not sure how good their MCP offering is at this time? It was quite easy to connect MCP and ClickHouse for Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Gemini CLI.
benjaminwootton··on GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom
Assuming there’s fixed demand. If companies can get 20% more software for the same price then there is still a lot of automation to do
benjaminwootton··on Show HN: I made a screenshot beautifier
It's nice. I actually pay for something like this.

The only thing I think I would need to switch is canvas size, ideally where I can select sizes for Twitter, Instagram etc.

Being able to paste an image would be nice too.

Nice work!

benjaminwootton··on Show HN: I made a screenshot beautifier
Because it looks nice and makes it pop in a social media feed.
benjaminwootton··on When will M&S take online orders again?
How can it take 3-4 months to get an eCommerce site back online? I assume you could redeploy everything from scratch in less time if you have source code and release assets. With backups and failover sites I can’t think of any world where this would happen?
benjaminwootton··on When will M&S take online orders again?
They outsource as much as they can to the cheapest system integrators they can find, primarily TCS.
benjaminwootton··on Why does the U.S. always run a trade deficit?
Isn’t the bigger problem that the US has a population of 340 million, New Zealand has a population of 5 million?
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