jmathai

A tweet of yours a decade ago convinced me to add Google Photos into my workflow (thanks).

https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go...

I removed it from my workflow when its integration with Drive was sunset.

I was without a great UI for a couple years, paying attention to Immich in my periphery. I decided to add Immich this year on a Mac Mini as well.

https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...

no

Agree - it's annoying. rclone to the rescue. Requires choosing Google Drive as the destination and then downloading with rclone to your computer. It's the closest to sane I've found.

https://metadatafixer.com/learn/how-to-download-google-takeo...

In my experience, most open source photo apps lacked basic features like facial recognition, mobile apps, etc. And where they do exist, the UX isn't the best. Are there ones I'm unaware of?

I say this as someone whose last startup (circa 2012) was an open source photo app (https://github.com/photo/frontend).

There's plenty of tutorials but you can request a Google Takeout of your photos and then point immich-go at it. I can confirm that this works really well.

https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1 https://github.com/simulot/immich-go

I know this post is about Noodle, but I want to talk about Immich.

I believe I've spent, perhaps, the most time of anyone on earth on digital photo management (hard to quantify, but since 2005 - 2 startups, one acquisition, and an ongoing open source project used by thousands).

I say that because I've refused to settle for most solutions in this space. Even when I adopted using Google Photos, it was as a read only viewer of my canonical photo library (I wasn't about to let Google take that responsibility). I have such high demands of whatever software I use for managing my photos and videos - they're really the only digital files I actually care about.

Immich is absolutely wonderful. It may have some shortcomings ... like partner sharing and sharing facial recognition between users. But man is it remarkable that an open source project can rival something from Google in terms of quality and experience.

And a soft fork like Noodle is precisely the way to handle it. I am perfectly happy with Immich so am not a user of Noodle. But it's open source flexing its strength.

I’ve been a paying customer of Dropbox’s consumer plan for over a decade. Each time I visit their website I am greeted with a full page modal ad asking me to upgrade to a different plan I have no use for.

I’ve dismissed it every time. I don’t mind being shown that ad once. But it bothers me that they don’t care enough about my experience using their product to provide a “never show this again” option.

Or just use some metrics to know that if I dismiss it 50 times then maybe I’m not interested.

I'm not sure why, exactly. But I don't pay any attention to news like this from Google. I don't know if there's some marketing which has me writing them off or if it's something else.

What I do know is that the Gemini integration into sheets is surprisingly incapable of performing basic tasks. This is where I expect Google to really shine. I expected Sheets + Gemini to be magical like Google Photos was. I hardly try anymore besides some basic math questions when I don't feel like inputting the formula myself.

The other thing I know is Google's propensity to sunset products. For many things, it's not a huge deal. And it may not be for this. But, why? When there are alternatives - both open and closed.

That’s very close to my setup. Agree it’s a massive shift that doesn’t even resemble how I used to create products before.

https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one...

This is an example where AI is likely safer, better and more deterministic than humans.

I don’t think they care enough to limit the use of their own products to trust them to help solve the problem.

I agree with the article - I don’t see how exposing children to AI in school ends well.

I don’t think we should expose developing minds to much tat we haven’t had a lot of time exposure understanding the impacts of coughsocial mediacough. The downsides just aren’t material.

Thankfully kids seem to already be jaded towards AI. Perhaps that buys them time to let their brains develope a bit more.

I understand roundabouts are safer. But am I the only one who struggles to use ones with multiple lanes properly anytime not making an immediate right?

I wish we, as a society, would label companies which cause more harm than good as such.

I would go one step further. Instead of 5 low impact features, build the one high impact one. Instead of a cheap notifications hub, fix the need for why you need one.

> so many here have deeply conflicted interests

What do you mean by this? I use AI both personally and for work but I'm not conflicted at all about its use for things we generally agree are harmful.

I have written A LOT of PHP in my life. Not so much anymore but I only have fond memories of the community - thanks to folks like you. Kudos.

I come to HN to learn things I never realized I wanted to know.

Yeah - I'm sure folks have pushed it further than I have. But this is what I've seen with my own eyes as opposed to read from others. And even at 471, I'm impressed.

Do you save the plans from plan mode alongside of the feature? I use specs to save the artifact but hadn't thought of using plan mode as the spec generator itself.

I have a super simple spec-based workflow. It works amazingly well. I’m amazed how well coding agents can work through what I consider large features.

Last week, I gave a 471 line spec to implement a major feature and it didn’t flinch. I wrote about it here.

https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one...

What you describe, is what's needed to make a good product whether it's vibe coded or written completely by hand.

Zuck is either an idiot or a liar. You pick.

> People won't want to use agents that are misaligned with them and that don't do what they ask

He runs a company that recently lost a lawsuit because you manipulatively addicted children.

> Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm

I'm pretty sure he'll be a case study of how profit can often be much larger than liability.

> Engaging independent evaluators

Lol. Didn't he disregard the studies which showed his company is harmful to children?

> Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely.

I think he left out the word "ads" between "serving" and "people".

For context for those outside the US, this is a play on a common saying "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."

It's commonly used in relation to the 2nd amendment which gives citizens the right to bear arms. It comes up when there are political debates relating to gun violence.

It's a statement of responsibility. Whether it's the government, gun makers', or citizens' responsibility to ensure responsible gun use.

I hear the words you're saying. But this was not the case for myself setting up Wordpress and trying to help a non-technical user navigate the admin dashboard to manage their content.

I think a large % of Wordpress usage is for simple websites that are better served by tools simpler than Wordpress. I'm not sure if you've tried to use Wordpress for a simple site. I did recently and it was a horrendous experience.

I haven't used Astra or Fable much. It's because Opus 4.8 is doing everything I need and I feel confident in using it. Why fix what's not broken? The model isn't the limiting factor for me right now.

I just wrote about my process [1] and I fully agree that the more tied you are to existing approaches to software engineering the more trouble you will have.

[1] https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one...

I just came here to say that I tried setting Wordpress up for someone a couple weeks ago and the entire admin experience felt like someone designed it WHILE AT burning man.

There is a simple version of this idea that really resonates with me.

For about a decade, I've been using flat files on disk or object storage for most of my side projects. There's even a python library that handles some of the plumbing for you [1].

If you don't have strong record-level concurrency needs then it's a lot nicer, easier, cheaper than a relational or document database. And if you do need that, you can design your data model around what defines a record.

[1] https://tinydb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

I'm not sure "most" people have taste (assuming taste isn't subjective).

I don't think AI slop is indicative of taste. A lot of work doesn't care about taste at all. And AI slop is problematic in that it churns out an awful lot of output that people don't really care to review.