jamwise

The implicit arrangement in corporate use and contribution to open source is that everyone benefits. People contribute work and testing that improves libraries and tools that everyone else can use, making all our projects better. This includes corporations, many of which also engage in this mutual benefit by hiring actual developers to back open source projects. I think it’s a brilliant system, huge fan.

Enter LLMs training off that data. It looks similar on the surface, but if you think about the balance of cost and benefit it becomes clear it is no longer balanced. The training algorithms and models are closed source, and come at a hefty usage cost. AI companies saved hundreds of billions of dollars of paying humans to help train their algorithms by taking advantage of an open system that was open on with another kind of balance in mind.

So in short the work was offered for free within a specific kind of relationship. Now a powerful outsider is steamrolling and taking advantage of that existing open dynamic.

I have two issues with AI coding. The first is how giant trillion dollar companies are profiting off the accumulated labour of mostly open source developers who mostly offered their work for free. Open source had this pattern too but there was a kind of give and take that is not present here. The other is the atrophying of my own skills. That’s one of the reasons I don’t use it for my side projects since it’s become a requirement in my day job and I don’t want to forget how to code.

This creates a grey area for things like a personal blog. If you’re not trying to maintain skills, yeah I wish we could avoid supporting these companies, but I can’t be a hypocrite seeing as I have to use them for work, and I use my provided account as a personal tutor to learn cool stuff.

Hmm. I tend to have the opposite. With science usually the process of overwriting a credence means increasing understanding and getting a deeper perspective. No one is born knowing anything, and as we advance it’s inevitable to learn certain prior beliefs were wrong. Might as well make it a fun thing.

Well it was fun as a child to speculate. Definitely don’t think there are ruins from ancient Egyptians on Mars now LOL. But the possibility of signs of microbial life is fascinating from an evolutionary biology perspective.

Noooooo

Loved the movie as a kid, I watched the series also, and am currently rewatching it.

Yeah very cool filming locations. Also the university they filmed the Tollana planet is where they filmed certain scenes from the new Battlestar Galactica.

The 10 year old inside me is so incredibly excited. My actual 10 year old self was obsessed with tombs and ancient Egypt. I remember a whole summer I couldn't stop thinking about and talking about the "Sphinx on the face of Mars". Thankfully these days I have friends, but I have been rewatching all of Stargate so this is very timely.

Back when I was hiring my team we looked through HN posts quite a bit to reach out. It's a good resource for potential employers. With everyone trying to AI-ify everything these days, makes sense they'd try to do the same with their "platform".

Are we all just going to go back to doing everything IRL? At least until the humanoid robots start following us on the street.

Serializing has many uses.

- Memory might not look the same on all platforms, if your app is multi-platform you stop being able to share your data cross-platform.

- The internal data structures of your app will absolutely change as your app evolves, the binary data in memory is a raw result of your data structures. So you have to commit to never changing data structures, or create complicated binary migration tools to update memory when your app updates.

- Debugging corrupted memory is incredibly tedious any sometimes impossible. Having plain text serialized data makes debugging much more straightforward.

Top my my head I would suggest to focus more on improving performance on your serialization pipeline. There might be some subset of your data that is unlikely to ever change and is identical on all platforms, maybe your serializer is hybrid in that case.

I guess Spike Jonze was right all along.

Bad code as an invasive species is the freshest take I've heard. I have a hard enough time arguing with people that tech debt isn't about bad code, but shifting priorities and requirements. This is going to be a really useful analogy for me going forward, thanks!

If you enjoyed it and want a code to unlock the mobile app let me know, I have codes for iOS and Android.

Feels like 2026 is the best time for non-US tech companies to grow. What a weird timeline we're in. Excited for our developments up here in Canada too :D

I wish I had learned about this when it was still $60. In Canada I can't find any for less than $300.

Safari is the new IE

Consumer solar has been a game changer, so doing the same for wind would be a huge innovation. But the reasons everyone doesn't already have wind generators on their roof is it's a much harder problem to solve. Not least of which is wind speeds are significantly lower closer to the ground. So I expect their 1kw output has a very narrow "optimal conditions" window. This might work if you live in a desert? Though given enough time with climate change...

There are two sides to this with companies automating hiring with AI as well, so the whole interface between employers and job seekers seems to be getting an ever thicker layer of bots talking to bots. I've heard stories of interviewees clearly reading responses off their screen in video interviews even.

So although it seems like an inevitable arms race, having built engineering teams in the past this is all really unsettling. I've worked in, and hope to continue to work in, a remote-only job. So much of my process in hiring relied on relatively subtle signals. It seems like in person interviews will still be able to provide those signals for now, but I have a feeling personal recommendations are going to become increasingly critical for remote companies in their hiring efforts.

This is all giving me flashbacks of Rehoboam in Westworld.

Appreciate the feedback, thanks for checking it out.

To be clear, LLMs were not used to design this game, just to edit my post talking about creating the board generator. And I do play it every day, today was definitely a tougher one, but the variety day by day is by design, which is pretty common in word games.

Mini Mot | Jul 1, 2026 ⣤s⣤y⣀e⣀b⣀i⣀o⣀u⣀t⣀o⣀d⣀

Max Mot | Jul 1, 2026 ⣿d⣿b⣿i⣶r⣤i⣤o⣤e⣤l⣤c⣤t⣤s⣤o⣤e⣤

The key to this game is to use your general intuition about English phonetics to deduce where a letter can't go among the available spots on the board. Kind of like Sudoku logic applied to a crossword. So in theory you can solve quite a few words you've never seen before because certain letter sequences just don't work in English, (the premise behind XKCD for example).

Thanks for the feedback. The premise of the game is you solve each individual word in order, so greyed out cells are places that aren't the next letter for any of the words right now. As you place the letters those cells open up.

EDIT: I used an LLM as an editor, and clearly that stank. So I just touched up my original draft and updated the page.

Yeah that's fair. I might dust off my draft and re-edit myself, I foolishly thought this would lead to a better post, and I guess am not as attuned to the AI smell as others.

Seems like others feel the same. I guess getting an LLM to help with editing was a bad choice. Thanks for the feedback.

Well it certainly was a wall. That's how I kept describing it to my partner, I was hitting a wall.

Sorry about the turn off ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I tried to put my best foot forward by reading about prose, engaging story telling, and did use an LLM to help me edit and reword parts of the post. Either way, I appreciate the feedback.

Yeah no criticism of the devs here, it's a great project. I meant to point at Apple. Though I'm a customer and like many of their products. I do hate their rigid clearly profit driven walled garden.

Information theory has been a really fascinating topic to get more acquainted with. Not really related to the crossword, but I highly recommend 3Blue1Brown's video "Compression is Intelligence", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6DKRf-fAAM

Yeah I understand. But there are plenty of good headphones that work with Android and include most of the features. That's kind of the point of Librepods right? To bring AirPods up to par for non-Apple devices and make them a viable option for Android and/or non-Mac users. So "this working" means those features.

If I wasn't certain Apple will do their best to patch every avenue to this working in the future it might be motivation to buy AirPods.

Fair enough. I appreciate the feedback regardless. Thanks for sharing.