fxtentacle

"changing a commonly used fn to take a locale parameter, because it will soon need to be locale-aware"

JetBrains has a deterministic non-AI function for that refactoring. It'll usually finish before your AI has finished parsing your request and reading the files.

It's basically a DSP for noise cancellation. They just call it AI because, presumably, that'll increase their stock price.

Recently, I've been trying to figure out how to finance software and hardware that's actually useful to everyday people. The sentiment clearly resonated with HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713454

but when I tried asking around how I could finance a useful OS app, I didn't get much of an answer. That's why I spent some days on research to understand how the FOSS projects that I enjoy and rely on are financing their operations. And how well that appears to work (or not).

Thanks :)

Yeah I'm still on 22. But I also usually use the ESR versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, because especially when I'm traveling, I value the stability of my home workstation over almost all else.

The author is Vietnamese. And that language has almost no associative words. Instead of “my son will be smart in the future” you just say “son mine future smart”. That’s probably why some of his sentences are shortened in unexpected ways. But I still found it reasonably easy to read.

"Reuters could not independently verify the report. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours, while Cerebras declined to comment."

Sounds like the typical OpenAI deal to me. Where's project Stargate? Asking for a friend ;)

Much better summary: "transform Congressional compensation from fixed pay to performance-driven rewards."

SaaS = Slop as a Service. I heard SaaS is all the rage with VC money these days.

Wow. I thought you were being snarky, but he actually says to skip all kinds of introspection, reflexion, and also therapy.

Ugh. It’s a company selling AI agents claiming that an AI-first strategy without agents is wrong.

Let me say the quiet part out loud:

The only reason why directly pushing AI code to production works for you is because nobody actually relies on your product. If there was any kind of accountability towards your customers, you’d probably insist on a slower, more careful approach. Or else you’ll go bankrupt paying for avoidable SLA violations. “Move fast and break things” only works if you can dodge paying for what you broke.

Financing what comes after Open Source

Or at least, I'm trying very hard. When I was younger, I was super happy about all the gifts that I received from anonymous strangers through the Debian package repository.

Then I had a phase where I tried to contribute to and publish my own open source software. I got horribly ripped of by companies, multiple times, in some instances they even sent their paying customers to my private email for support inquiries, so I got unpleasant insults and thinly veiled threats by random strangers who thought they were paying for my open source software and I was the asshole.

Then I stopped doing any Open Source for a while.

And now I feel like we urgently need a new way of financing software for the common good, like Thunderbird, Wine, and maybe one day a Linux file manager that feels as intuitive to use as the Mac Finder. The world could also really use a desktop GUI framework to replace those pesky Electron apps. 128 MB of RAM used to be enough for a snappy coding IDE. But it looks like recently every infrastructure-level Open Source project is effectively fighting for survival because it gets turned into a hyperscaler cloud service and then nobody donates to its development, despite astronomical user counts. The last defense that still worked was AGPL, but with AI "re-implementation", that won't help anymore.

And that's why I strongly feel like we need to find a way to build trustworthy closed-source apps for the common good. Like where regular everyday non-technical people spend a few dollars a month to help support software that makes their everyday life better. (As opposed to being digital hostages in services that sell them as the product to be advertised into buying useless junk.)

Didn’t Disney famously use an EULA contract for dodging responsibility after a deadly food poisoning?

Sure. They have a secret AI called “Mythos” that is claimed to have the mythological power of remotely controlling every server in the world. Someone got high sniffing their own farts. But it’ll surely help with the IPO anyway if newspapers can’t be bothered to fact check.

Munich was rolled back but inspired SH to do it instead of them.

Yes. And that’s why the rules say that the human submitting the code is responsible for preventing this case.

Munich led to "all of Schleswig-Holstein" in Germany. 44,000 Exchange mailboxes replaced with Open-Xchange. 25,000 Windows+Office desktops replaced with Linux+OpenOffice.

I stopped using VMware because they stopped supporting newer Linux kernels.

Lack of maintenance => lack of users.

Actually, a camera that scores the clean up progress, together with some virtual gold coins and real loot boxes for a week of good compliance might really do the trick.

How about arithmetic coding? That will give you the highest amount of entropy reduction for any possible number of containers. Which probably means that you’ll sort similar pieces far apart but group by colors that are easy to separate, like red+yellow, brown+green

I would agree. CNC-ing POM also tends to work extremely well for prototype plastic parts.

Also, I already built a robot arm, a robot car, and a custom camera in my free time. So I’m having a hard time imagining that a robot vacuum prototype wouldn’t be possible for me to build in a year, let alone with the team size that $1m in annual salaries buys.

That one needs to be operated manually. I was thinking more along the lines of robot dog + OCR + 6 dof arm on the robot's back.

This video is from 8 years ago:

https://youtu.be/wXxrmussq4E?si=bgDdDvZODVov3sSC&t=15

I'm sure, by now we could make them for <$1k per robot, if we wanted to.

EDIT: BTW did you see that the page you linked to has this at the bottom of their landing page:

"Example product"

"This area is used to describe your product’s details. Tell customers about the look, feel, and style of your product. Add details on color, materials used, sizing, and where it was made."

so I wonder if they actually sell anything.

pedigree is a great word here and being upfront about it (if true) would make for some fun VC slogans:

"We've replaced due diligence with a DNA test."

"No mutts, no miracles. Three generations of wealth or GTFO."

"Your bloodline is fine. Don't fret the cap table."

"You forgot to attach the pitch deck, but we really like your family crest."

I'm not worried about my parenting duties. I am worried about the inequality created for the kids if I am strict about rules, but other parents are not. That's why it is in my interest if other (lazier) parents are forced to comply.

And yes, the PASS card has name and photo. But no adress, no social security number or secret ID or equivalent. If your PASS card leaks, nobody can create a bank account in your name. If your passport leaks, they can. That's the difference in privacy, seen in action.

I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it.

But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works. On the list of pain points in my life, “what comes after Git” has roughly the same priority as “try out a more exciting shower gel”. But did you ever step on a LEGO brick while walking to the bathroom at night? That pain is immediately obvious.

Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?

While I agree with the general argument that iOS shouldn’t limit the user’s freedom, it looks to me like Apple actually put in some effort to make this as privacy-preserving as possible.

The article somewhat glosses over it, but you can buy a PASS age verification card at the local post office for 15£. That one is widely accepted and it doesn’t contain unnecessary information that might cause trouble if it leaked (like for example a passport does). And 1 in 3 adults (according to the article) have an Apple account that’s old enough so that they will automatically be unlocked, no further documents needed.

The article strongly accuses iOS of being a walled garden, but I don’t see that as a particularly strong argument after iOS being locked down for ~20 years now.

And as a parent, I know that if child protection is opt-in, there’ll be a huge fight about it, because some other parents won’t activate it, which then makes the situation unfair for the kids. I’d much rather have it on by default so that all kids are treated the same.

my favorite is Ctrl+Shift+A which lets you search through all available UI actions (hence the A). That's just so helpful if you know the IDE can do something but you forgot where in the menu structure it was. And to top things off, you can also use Ctrl+Shift+A to look up the keyboard shortcuts for every possible action

Sadly, I have not been able to find any open model that comes close to Opus 4.6. So while they are much cheaper to deploy, they also aren't good enough for unsupervised agent execution. But you need a model that can run unsupervised for the claim "Code is Cheap" to become possible.

... because they noticed first-hand that AI fails often and that hallucinations can cause problems for them.

It's very easy for a manager to say "just use AI". It's A LOT harder for the employee who will be personally held responsible for AI-generated work that contained mistakes.

Code is not cheap. It's just heavily subsidised with VC money. But that won't last forever.

Uber Eats also used to be dirt cheap. Surprise! it's not anymore.

And even if you just pay API prices for Opus - as opposed to using a subsidized subscription - you can easily reach the point where the tokens for AI-generated code become comparable in price to just paying a junior dev salary for a manual implementation. AI is great for greenfield projects, where there is little to no existing context. But on real codebases, people memorize large parts of it. That allows them to navigate files with 100k+ tokens in them. (Wherease the Opus API will charge you $2.5 for each time the model runs through 100k thinking tokens reviewing your file.)

But what AI can imitate pretty well is the result of having a clueless middle-manager review your code. So my prediction would be that the AI "revolution" will slim out management layers before it'll reach actual developers.