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dzink

4,255 karma · joined October 28, 2012

Building and growing online products.

https://DianaZink.com https://www.DreamList.com, https://SantaWho.com, https://MamaBear.ai, https://www.DoerHub.com and others. Reach me with username at dreamlist.com.

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dzink··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
If everything is local, why the subscription? That 150 is instant incentive for me to prompt my own on Claude and get a more personal outcome right away. Margin comes from a moat, and local LLM is the opposite of that, especially if you need internet to verify subscription for local use at any point.
dzink··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
Fun fact - some of it may be a subset of all data and with trimmed outlying points, so when you set some stop loss conditions they get tripped in the real world, but not by your dataset. Get data from my sources.
dzink··on What if the Hormuz closure will not be brief?
Rare earth minerals are often all over the place, they are just very messy to get to and that gets in the way of EU pollution regulations. China is not a sole producer - they are just cheap enough to make mining elsewhere not worth the hassle. That will change fast if they bottleneck the supply.
dzink··on I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years
I grew up in a world that didn’t have secure corporate jobs as a thing. That’s most of the world outside the US. There, you could get secure government jobs (if you come from the right family or connections) or you had to learn how to build a business yourself. Anything else, paid barely livable wage if at all.

The way to survive it was to 1) move to a village/small town where you could have a garden for fruits, vegetables, corn, chickens, maybe a pig or two for winter. 2) Young people lived with their parents while the parents saved up to build/buy their children their own flat or house. Children whose parents saved up enough would often start a family after getting their own place. Those who didn’t, co-lived with parents.

The secure middle class corporate employment in the US is getting severely downgraded by AI. While there is talk of universal basic income the reality is that many many companies depend on the surplus that middle class families enjoy spending and without it, vast swaths of industries will get starved as well. The solution is to show people quickly how to hunt and gather and farm as makers instead of just employees. Figuring out what is needed, taking on a small corner of needs somewhere in meat space or online, and planting there. AI has been fantastic at helping even solo founders with that. They need to encourage a cornucopia of ideas and experimenters as early as k12. They need to set up more favorable conditions for handling the admin side as well.

If the US government does not encourage cornucopia of AI-powered small business entrepreneurship and lets monopolies squash that early, they will end up with far FAR worse conditions. Any monopoly who keeps pitching “universal basic income” while actively avoids paying taxes, will end up forced into more taxes.

Big tech needs to make room for people to build and grow businesses (looking at you, Apple, for copying every successful app with a native, and you Meta for eating every social competitor) or they will end up paying for everyone’s universal basic income and then some.

If this country wants to survive the AI era, it needs to remove the pink glasses of “secure corporate job” and teach people how to plant, hunt, and gather as independent players in the market really fast.

dzink··on What if the Hormuz closure will not be brief?
Putin’s war ambitions profit most from the scare around Hormuz. His sanctions get removed to provide alternative supply, he can charge exorbitant prices, and he gets leverage. Since he is also providing targeting information for Iran to shoot at, it feels like this is an avatar joystick war for him to distract from his Ukraine disaster.
dzink··on The Brand Age
Hoping to add to this perspective:

The ability to transfer a lot of money in the physical shape of brand watches costing 200k per piece may have added to their appeal. AppleTV’s show Friends and Neighbours upselling their value as Jon Hamm tries to steal them from neighbours may be product placement. But these were all tactics from the 50s and 60s where relatively few media sources meant you could buy your way into the hearts of the masses with an ads campaign.

Today we have a massively accelerated pace of society burning through fads and information - largely due to social media. The artificial scarcity trick is no longer an MBA secret. A brand, especially an AI brand, can burn in and out of favor in days. Transparency in society helps maybe bring out authenticity. Advertising of the past was often “advertising to your weaknesses” and that game is over.

If we can structure the transparency and apply it to politicians and other less transparent institutions that count on “Brand” to the list (especially ones with high margins and large networks) maybe the world will see true competition that benefits everyone more. Lack of transparency (and liqidity, and availability) are what make trust bubbles that distort markets.

dzink··on Show HN: PageAgent, A GUI agent that lives inside your web app
Is this Affiliated with the Chinese company Alibaba? Any chance data goes there too?
dzink··on Everett shuts down Flock camera network after judge rules footage public record
The link is broken. Here is a working one. https://www.king5.com/article/news/community/facing-race/was...
dzink··on What our DNA reveals about the sex life of Neanderthals
One reason for that might be the size of the baby homo sapiens scull/head upon birth. Bigger brain might have meant female Neanderthals couldn’t give birth to Homo Sapiens babies. Just a theory.
dzink··on Block the “Upgrade to Tahoe” alerts
Try Liquid Glass on iphone. Absolutely horrible if you don’t turn off all the motion.
dzink··on Block the “Upgrade to Tahoe” alerts
I use their accessibility features to stop all animations I can. Maybe if more people upvote here they will hear us. No point in suffering in silence.
dzink··on Block the “Upgrade to Tahoe” alerts
Dear Apple, no latency from brain to action is the greatest design you can possibly have. We want to feel one with the machine. That's the greatest joy and difference between a Mac and a Windows machine. Adding latency to the fastest machine possible is criminal. Please STOP DOING IT with unnecessary animations.
dzink··on Ask HN: Share your productive usage of OpenClaw
Which underlying model/s do you use to power it?
dzink··on What Happened to Fry's Electronics
I’ve been missing the local Fry’s and recently learned that MicroCenter has opened a store in Santa Clara. It felt like heaven! It was pure fun to meet all fellow enthusiasts who would swarm the demo DGX Spark to figure out if a couple of those would be better than a Blackwell. That’s my happy place now and I didn’t even spend a dime on the first visit.
dzink··on Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows
This needs to include life-changing false positive rates. Imagine being given a diagnosis like this - people around you who know and any corporations who can sniff it out by snooping on your communications can lead to much rejection early in life. What happens when the diagnosis is as positive when it shouldn’t have been?
dzink··on I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over
I don’t say it to justify what linkedin is doing - there is no justification for that. I say it to warn those who are conscious of it that there are more places that will harvest the data and use it.
dzink··on I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over
If you fly to US, Singapore, and many other countries these days, your face will be photographed and the photo will be matched to your passport photo via facial recognition (the machine tells you that outright, and does the action on the spot). They also take your right hand fingerprints.
dzink··on The only moat left is money?
The well is drying. You have less money available for hustling and less small players with money. With layoffs happening everywhere you have more people with ambition and time on their hands, but less of them can afford big expenses or major risks.

The hype machine currently pushing for agents is selling agents ability to do automated marketing. However the bigger companies know better than to create giant security holes and the small players are either not technically skilled, or will balk at the huge per-use fees for the good models, or will be drowned out because of low quality cheap model output.

dzink··on Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
Same here. Silicon Valley did a great disservice by not having a character like her. We are often invisible.
dzink··on Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
And just like that, their sales skyrocketed.
dzink··on Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
Yes, hands down the best show! They need to do more seasons, especially with modern day problems.

Other thoughtful and well made shows: Dark Matter, For All Mankind, Foundation (also Lee Pace and also stellar).

dzink··on Assistant to the Regional Manager
I grew up in that world. People making 150 per month would have kids carrying 600 phones just to put something on the table. In eastern europe, an adidas track suit seemed like Armani, when advertising just started after the fall of communism and people thought that made them feel sophisticated for wearing western brands. When you can’t brag with an expensive house or car, you brag with expensive accessories on yourself (gold chains, phones, watches).

It’s no different than a national geographic video where the loudest frog signals it can be bold enough to broadcast its location, even though it can be eaten. Wearing gold chains and bragging you have crypto is akin to yelling “come and rob me” in a less safe world.

The reality is that status is just a way to “encourage/compel” voluntary submission of services from other people, who may think they will benefit from your status rubbing on them in some way.

Strangers don’t support you for what you do, but for what you can do for them in the future.

dzink··on Assistant to the Regional Manager
Freedom is not “doing anything you want”. It’s “not having to do the things you don’t want to do”.

AI may automate a white colar subset of those, but modern day society has for the longest time used wives, young people, immigrants from countries with bad currency devaluation, etc, to fill the gap above. The article talks about status and attention as the ultimate goal, but that may be a male-only perspective. Or even a him-like-perspective. The reality is humans chase many ladders since brains have may proclivities. For more than half of the population (wives and the poor) the goal may be freedom or time to do more.

dzink··on Single bone in Spain offers first direct evidence of Hannibal's war elephants
After interacting with some Asian elephants with handlers recently this makes a lot more sense. Even if he used North African elephants - they can hike up and down mountains and rough terrain easily with stability. I’m assuming they could pull equipment and even potentially be armed and armored. They are incredible creatures.
dzink··on Vouch
Excellent point. Currently HN accounts get much higher scores if they contribute content, than if they make valuable comments. Those should be two separate scores. Instead, accounts with really good advice have lower scores than accounts that have just automated re-posting of content from elsewhere to HN.
dzink··on Roger Ebert Reviews "The Shawshank Redemption" (1999)
I wouldn’t exclude TV shows: Halt and Catch Fire, Dark Matter, Ted Lasso.
dzink··on The Value of Things
The author attributes meaning for the giver and hopefully receiver to time spent by the giver. They argue less time spent for same utility lowers the meaning.

I see something very different:

1. The government post shared as an example of efficiency to utility increase has glaring errors: “journey-level developers”. You will never achieve any improvement on government code bases if the people leading the effort can’t pay attention to the most basic and broadcasted elements of the job. AI used by junior developers will only compound the massive complexity of government systems to the point where they are not fixable by seniors and they are not usable by humans.

2. The time spent doing something, meaningful or not, with care is a training for that person into attention to detail, which is absolutely critical to getting things right. People who lazily lean on generating more without attention to detail, don’t see the real point of the work - it’s not to add more stuff to less space (physical or mental) faster. It’s to make the existing space better and bigger by needing less in it. The rest is just mental and physical complexity overload. We are about to drawn in that overload like hoarders next to a dumpster.

3. If you ever live in a small home you may noticed that the joy of getting things (usually derived from dopamine-seeking behaviors like shopping or making, or shopping for ingredients so you can make things, or from getting toys for your kids or other people getting toys for your kids) will quickly overload any space in your living quarters. Your house becomes unbearably small and it becomes impossible to find things in piles or drawers filled with other things if nobody ever organizes them. We all have become dopamine adduces or the world has turned us into such and there are few if any humans willing and capable of organizing that world. So most people today will be paralyzed with a million choices that were never organized or pruned down by the owner or their predecessors. The overwhelming feeling would be to escape the dread of organization into more dopamine- generating behaviors. We need more of the “moms” who clean up our rooms after we’ve had fun with all the legos we can now generate. Or we will all be living in a dumpster before too long.

dzink··on Reid Hoffman: Silicon Valley can't be neutral any longer
In today’s world, Autocracy is not possible without Tech. Tech firms enable it with anything from surveillance, to mass propaganda by anyone willing to pay, to enabling things as private data collectors for law enforcement that law enforcement would legally not be allowed to do on its own.

The even bigger approach now is the denial of service attack on the judicial system coming from AI-enabled infractions that are too new to the system. To deny enforcement in an area that helps authocrats - an AI tool can enable anyone to create problems on that area automatically and easily, and now the pipeline for getting justice in that area becomes clogged. It doesn’t even need to be intentional - it can be automatic.

The zero sum game of tech firms competing for the same fluid investors in the stock market means the control of government becomes guaranteed - because if a single one is singled out the money flows out of its equities and into their competitors. It’s blood supply to vital organs. The CEOs have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders above all else. They cannot do anything that will damage the stock price without being sued to oblivion and that would attack their personal assets as well.

dzink··on How AI destroys institutions
Think back to Maya history when the rulers kept astronomy knowledge secret to pretend they were Gods and had control over celestial objects. If expensive education and publishing access provides power to someone and free education and publishing becomes a thread to their authority, that’s not a good testimony on how they used their education advantage while they had it.

AI may be destroying truth by creating collective schizophrenia and backing different people’s delusions, or by being trained to create rage-bait for clicks, or by introducing vulnerabilities on critical software and hardware infrastructure. But if institutions feel threatened, their best bet is to become higher levels of abstraction, or to dig deeper into where they are truly deeply needed - providing transparency and research into all angles and weaknesses and abuses of AI models. Then surfacing how to make education more reliably scalable if AI is used.

dzink··on Legal Structures for Latin American Startups (2021)
Nevada protects founders from shareholder lawsuits. So if someone defrauds or intends to defraud shareholders - they are more likely to prefer Nevada. To be fair, a lot of things can turn into a shareholder lawsuit in Delaware.
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