figassis

sorry for the typos, I didn't actually come back to grammar check and I'm cringing now

I think vendors will do what vendors will do, and you can choose to buy into that or not. Containers fullfilled their promise. You can today host anything yourself easily, with a single command.

The problem comes when developers start building things without this in mind. I see simple site analytics apps in github, where the docker compose file is a web os services and the repo itself is full of init scripts and the sort. You have redis, mongo, an RDBMS container, an analytics db, kafka, all the kafka tooling like bookkeeper, then you have outsourced auth liek clerk or supabase (when the whole thing is not just some supabase chimera with edge functions and whatever else supabase is supposed to run outside your infra).

And the repo description is: simple, anonymous wesbite analytics. The entire thing is more complex than the thin you want to do analytics for. So you bring that into a cloud, and instead of a container, you are now advised, but both AWS and your HN peers that you need to replace each component with it's cloud version, such as elasticache, AKS, cognito, firebase, whatever.

All of these services as you set up, trap you into overprovisioning. Your DB needs to have 3 replicas or you have no guarantees, your auth needs an entire instance of something running somewhere or unicorns start dying.

By the time you come out for sunlight your bill could pay your rent. So you don't self host, you signup for google analytics.

Everytime I find a project on GitHub, the first thing that makes me close it immediately is whether it has a docker-compose.yaml and if it's a single, sane/dumb, low footprint deployment or a chimera.

So self hosting is alive and well, whether your app is easy to self host, and whether you know how to use just what you need from cloud vendors are different questions.

If you could that reliably, you wouldn’t have a job

Cool! Building something similar at https://crew.ao

This happens when people are gripping their phones waiting for the next clever post to write. Anything they disagree with is an opportunity to sting someone else. You succeed 100 times, 1000 if you have FU money. Then you stop checking yourself.

We can argue whether the term DEI has been misused, but...what does it take for someone to come to the conclusion that country first is DEI?

"Universities have long advertised job placement rates for the majors in their departments" - they shouldn't have, this was actually never their purpose but it was easy to make that promise when jobs were easier for college graduates, so they used it to sell more seats. No one can give you a formula to get a job. You're competing with everyone for a scarce resource. That formula is self defeating. Let's enroll 10000 students and promise all of them that if they are on the top 500 they will be employed at one of the 100 available jobs?

And really, if universities wanted to feed the entrepreneurship engine, they should use their endowments to create funds within their programs, so innovative students could apply for, get some seed funding that is required to actually become a real business and generate a return on the fund.

Then you not only create actual founders, you grow your endowment and you actually evaluate the university on their fund's performance.

You democratize the YC model. I wonder why they haven't tried. Maybe bc they can't actually create founders?

I don't know how a university could package this, or package "experience" or. "building", etc. I went to college, did engineering and also did economics and did "entrepreneurship". The last 2 were useful not in a sense that they unlocked anything, but I was already starting a business by my second or third year, that I run to this day. I took the courses because I felt I needed them as I bootstrapped. Went on to build multiple startups since. Never went to YC though.

So something was already brewing in me much earlier, and idk what advice to give, honestly not sure how a university can inject this into students. But I think the useful part of the advice is to get universities to stop packaging "entrepreneurship" courses as the path to actual entrepreneurship.

What percentage of students in those classes actually go on to become founders? Willing to bet the numbers aren't encouraging.

A few observations. I consider myself smart, but far from smartest.

tldr: intelligence lets you control some variables for happiness, but it is not the entire happiness function.

1. We're social and emotional beings beings. Emotions are more powerful than intelligence. We gladly choose something that we enjoy over something that will make us happier long term. All humans do this, mental fortitude is in short supply.

2. Life, and society move the definition of happiness constantly. Either through manipulation, new discoveries, new laws, new constraints. So even smart people need to adapt. If yo were happy last year, maybe today you have to pay higher taxes, or your country gets into a war, or you get a new president, or you're just competing with other smart people in an endless game of chess.

3. We move our own goalposts. Think the rich who thought wealth was the source of happiness, then they get there are are miserable. Or simply spend their time looking for new challenges, infinite growth, etc.

4. Living in a society means your happiness is always, always dependent on the state of that society, and therefore the happiness of others. It's like fluids. You can't be the one drop of water in a bottle that is red. It will dilute, and vice-versa. Maintaining a state of happiness in an unhappy society means building barriers and constantly fighting "them".

5. I have a theory that live is like a wave of ups and downs. The sum of all your highs will equal the sum of your your lows by the time you die. You have some control of when, how much and for how long to be happy/unhappy (unhappiness also means hardship, work, selling time for money, etc, the things we use to pay for happiness), and that controls how the quotas get distributed throughout your life. I have absolutely not tested this, I am still experimenting with my life. Counter examples may exist, I have a sample size of 1.

This, idk how many times I've begged it to let the code be self documenting. The worst? claude's own comments cause it to go in unproductive loops. It tries to satisfy for your instructions and the incorrect comments it assumes are yours but forgot it added them.

You use another model

This baselines to a clear set

I thought I was going insane. Thank you.

SO a company Github's size can't handle the slop they invested a lot to enable and this is not a failure? I mean if the market moves and you cannot move with it, what do we call it?

You are saying "let's regulate the things I think should be regulated, but not the things others think" because other people's problems, specifically because you do not value them, aren't worth solving.

Cars are a luxury, credit cards are a luxury, smart phones are a luxury, internet is a luxury. Clean, drinkable tap water is a luxury, you can just filter, boil your water or add a few drops of disinfectant.

You made me look, are they on drugs?

Cursor for one https://cursor.com/origin

They announced this on the day of the outage, yesterday.

Sure, the app would be worth zero dollars, but it's not worth zero dollars, and it's not because people just enjoy having a random app in their phone is it? If I deleted it, it would still be worth millions, because a non zero number of people probably find it useful or necessary.

So is your solution really a solution? I guess we should just abolish all kinds of regulation, not even talk about it. Just choose not to interact with the thing. Don't regulate credit card fees, just use cash. Don't regulate car emissions, just get a bicycle. We just fixed the world you and me.

Why not evaluate them on the merits? Is the name really the thing that’s important here?

“GitHub has so many outages, but dammit, that other one has a terrible name, it’s practically unusable”.

And origin is a pretty great name to give a git hosting platform. And do you think GitHub, Gitlab are original?

I think this is the curse of scale, but also of pseudo-leaders who think leadership is "pushing engineering to rapid-fire features for number go up."

You tell engineers and engineering leaders to "just add this one feature, it's really important, what's the ETA? No, that's too late, the market will have moved on, this is existential, you're a bottleneck," fire, hire, fire, hire. Meanwhile the CEO feels great, because they're delivering. The reports look nice, the posts get written, the lectures get given on X and LinkedIn about what steering a ship really means.

Then the issues that required your system to actually be robust, the ones that required engineers to have spent the time engineering, show up. And it's way too late. You cannot move faster, no matter how much money you throw at it.

It gets bad enough that everyone is now telling the CEO 70% of the platform needs refactoring, and even that is like solving the three-body problem, because every domain boundary is broken. Claude can't reason about any component of the system but is very confident it understands it, and ten seconds later tells you "You're right! And I won't sugarcoat it, I completely misrepresented this concept, let me go fix that by rewriting this other module."

You can't rebuild GitHub. You can't rebuild components of it in reasonable time over live data and migrate over without very public incidents. So now the CEO feels very, very dumb, and can't admit it.

Meanwhile a new company capitalizes on your lack of leadership and launches a competitor...and the cycle starts anew.

merges work fine, the git experience as well, this is a web infra issue

I called this maybe 3y ago, but I think so did everyone else that was sane. Sure, we get immense value from AI, but indiscriminately injecting into everything, the one thing we know to be unreliable above the threshold we used to fire people for, is probably the greatest undoing of all the good companies like Google brought to the internet. I mean what a way to destroy your legacy of democratizing information. The amount of harm (direct and indirect) this will cause, and the cost to return to baseline will be so immense, and yet we will not be able to point to the root cause. They won't be there to take responsibility.

Yesterday I was working on some video editing tools to create a demo from screen recordings. I started with Gifox, recorded a 5 min video and then started cutting it in their UI (small things like remove these 5 seconds from here, etc). Everytime I performed an action, the spinner would start and take 10-30 seconds to complete. This was on a 36gb M3 mbp with almost nothing else running. It got so unusable and it slowed down my machine so much that I had to force kill the app, and that did nto work, I had to restart the machine.

Then I tried in iMovie. I tried importing the raw gifs. It would hang everytime and I had to restart it. So I had to export .mov directly from Gifox.

It worked great on iMovie, until I needed to speed up or slow down some clips. I noticed on the first operation, it would spin for about 3s, on the second, 5s, on the third, 10s, and by the 6th operation it would either spin for 1min or not stop at all. The machine started getting flow, iMovie was using 22.4gb of my 36gb machine. Had to also force quit iMovie several times. A task that should have taken 30-60min tops, took 5h.

Memory was definitely leaking somewhere, and in different application with completely different engineering budgets. The product was there, people were paying for it, the software was not delivering, which means it was costing customers time and money, meaning people were overpaying for it. This is not a thing product can solve. Programming is absolutelly the hardest part sometimes.

You could say throw more AI at it, and MSFT tried, how's that going for them with all the weird product decisions and bugs and apologies?

I use this expression as well, but I think it has a different meaning when a programmer says it vs anyone else. In my pov, it is not the hard part because I have already mastered it to the point where it feels like breathing to me. So the next stage is simply how to build something that people want to pay for. So what I mean is I've moved on to challenge #2.

When a random person says it, they mean it was never the hard part, learning it was never required and programmers have just been holding everyone hostage for decades and now AI came to reveal the truth that product had always been the hard part. Which, well, good luck.

I think this has been the misunderstanding.

That would be nice, and what I woudl expect from judges. But from what I experienced and from what I've seen, real nuanced judgement happens rarely. Most often judges simply lean on technicality, they act like machines, and this is why laws are gamed. People companies who violate certain regulations always comply to the letter, but never to the spirit, and yet they often get a pass or a pocket change fine, why do you think that is?

How do you define "trying to make it look authentic"? You make a deepfake of a politician saying a discriminatory joke, and the author will just say "It was obvious this was not intended to be authentic. Anyone could see it's out of character". But the message already influenced millions.

It's always been the purpose of ads, and this is how google was. Then they started making it hard to tell ads apart from content. When OpenAI starts injecting subliminal ads into your responses it will effectively win the manipulation battle and also have full plausible deniability becuase there is not even an algo you can point to.

idk, taking free stuff on principle is not a thing that's done everywhere. Time is costly. Reading crap content costs me more than the money I'd pay for it.

I'm not sure if they're irrational. Payment/subscription fatigue is a thing. Today it seems like you have to pay to breathe. It's suffocating. I often go through periods where I reject every money ask compulsively, the same way as I would "disconnect".

It's quite interesting how quality of life gets inverted in non intuitive ways. If you travel to a "developing country" you notice you are no longer bombarded with ads. Watching YouTube is close to the premium experience, bc the country presents no ad revenue to Google. You then travel to a "developed" country and you can't watch a 5 minute video without watching 2 ads.

Everything is a transaction, it is too easy to transact. People used to just write, to just make music. Sure, they need to eat, but they lie. You hear people that make insane amouns of money asking for a coffee. imho, writing is a thing you to to share knowledge, to have a conversation, to learn, etc. It is a way to also get people to know you better, and maybe learn about the things you do that they would want to pay for. So unless writing is your full time job, asking money for it leaves a bad taste.

I would definitely pay a monthly subscription to help fund a non profit compete with Anthropic and OpenAI. I already pay subscriptions for myself and 2+ other people. It's a non brainer to be able to pay for the training of better models that I can then run myself for many more. I hope someone starts this, I think this model would work. I'd start it today if I had the team and initial capital to bootstrap the infr. I know VCs won't fund it, but we definitely will, enthusiastically and continually.

Today you could plug this into your agent as a second brain to give it more insight on related topics and ground it's responses when doing research or building products that can benefit from cross polinating between fields.