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Yes, it’s not a hill I’m willing to die on. It’s a hill I’m willing to defend until the cause is lost.

This is what I'm saying. Chipmunks are not squirrels. I will do my best on this hill.

Obviously novel problems require novel solutions, but the vast majority of software solutions are remixes of existing methods. I don’t know your work so I may be wrong in this specific case, but there are a vanishingly small number of people pushing forward the envelope of human knowledge on a day-to-day basis.

jmtullosson Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

The reason for this is Rivian and Tesla bet big on software defined platforms… ie every piece of hardware talks to a small number of central computers instead of many independent systems. This gives them a huge leg up in developing software than can actually take all the available input and use it to control all aspects of the vehicle.

Downside is all the buttons are on a screen. But I’ve grudgingly decided it’s worth it for software upgrades.

jmtullosson Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

The current Gen 1s will start beeping at you if they can’t see the lines. If you don’t take over quickly it will start slowing down and beeping very insistently.

jmtullosson Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

Not only is Rivian betting on an integrated platform being important for their own cars long term, they’ve also essentially sold that portion of their business to VW. They are investing in the software platform for a lot more cars than just the rivian branded ones.

jmtullosson The profitable startup

Linear is a venture funded company

jmtullosson Ground stop at JFK due to staffing

A lot of commenters are focusing on the legalities and likelihood of backpay, which is relevant but I tend to agree with you… it’ll get paid because it’s in the interest of both parties to pay their employees what they’re owed.

We’re staring down the barrel of two missed paychecks though. If you're living paycheck to paycheck you’re getting desperate. If you’re living with about 1 month of emergency buffer… that buffer is one paycheck away from gone. It’s a cash flow issue

jmtullosson Ground stop at JFK due to staffing

And the republicans could just vote to change the rules of the senate.

The out of power party gets a little veto power here. The republicans know the day will come they want that, so they won’t change the rules even though they have the power to do so (theoretically… there are republicans that will never compromise on this). Unfortunately they can’t get on the same page with their lame duck leader

jmtullosson Claude Skills

My interpretation of the parent comment was that they were loading specific curl calls into context so that Claude could properly exercise the endpoints after making changes.

jmtullosson Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

It doesn’t have access to your repo when the agent is running (unless you give it internet access and credentials). The code is checked out into the sandbox before it’s let loose.

jmtullosson Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

Good point. The environments I’ve set up have been pretty easy but I’ll admit that at first I was very annoyed that it couldn’t just use a pre-existing GitHub action workflow.

Edit: environment setup was also buggy when the product launched and still is from time to time. So, now that I have it set up I use it constantly, but they do need to make getting up and running a more delightful experience.

jmtullosson Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

Why aren’t more folks using Codex cloud? Simon’s post mentions it, but the vast majority of comments are talking about parallel agents locally or getting distracted while agents are running.

Personally I’ve found that where AI agents aren’t up to the task, I better just write the code. For everything else, more parallelism is good. I can keep myself fully productive if many tasks are being worked on in parallel, and it’s very cheap to throw out the failures. Far preferable imo to watching an agent mess with my own machine.

jmtullosson iPhone Air

I'm the same way but that makes the bulge even more annoying. They're designing it to put a case on it.

The thickness should be from the front to the back of the camera lens, not to the thinnest point they can find.

jmtullosson Show HN: I replaced vector databases with Git for AI memory (PoC)

Seems really interesting! It would be great to see some evals to understand how well this works when stacked up against different approaches and use cases.

jmtullosson Jules, our asynchronous coding agent

Both from the design scheme and the process it uses to go about its business, Jules seems very inspired by replit

jmtullosson Jules, our asynchronous coding agent

https://blog.singleton.io/posts/2025-06-14-coding-agents-cro...

The former CTO of stripe, for one.

They show you the code they produce. Why wouldn’t you trust it after reading it?

jmtullosson I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

Yes it does

jmtullosson I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

Yes, but they’re over indexing on that imo. The smooth comfort they’re looking for is costing them multiples of how much time it will actually save

jmtullosson I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1

[deleted… my disagreements about time allocation aside, there’s no reason to argue on the internet about it]

jmtullosson Why is AI so slow to spread?

It’s likely that the models don’t need to get much smarter, but rather the ux for providing needed context needs to improve drastically. This is a problem that we’ve worked on for decades with humans, but only single digit years for AI. It will get better and that tediousness will lessen (but isn’t “alignment” always tedious?)

jmtullosson Preliminary report into Air India crash released

This is not true at all.

Perhaps there are more qualifying statements that you meant to include? The certification and type rating requirements certainly differ between agencies, but in terms of raw number of flight hours it’s easy to find that this statement is false.

jmtullosson uv: An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust

Does `uv lock —upgrade` not do what you want?

jmtullosson Airpass – easily overcome WiFi time limits

This is exactly how I managed to get my dorm room’s internet turned off in college. My roommate was unimpressed with my cleverness.

jmtullosson I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

Yeah, there's a lot of context there that isn't obvious from the outside and is behind my feelings that Palm just had too little too late. They shouldn't have been blindsided by the iPhone, but with that happening they really did the best they could. I'll make some brief points, but maybe I should write a blog post at some point.

- Kernel talent was never a problem at Palm. The ex-Palm folks lead or are technical leaders at many mainstream unix-ish OSes today, plus Fuschia (Android, Apple, Chrome, Fuschia)

- Boot times weren't the highest priority (though we did spend time on it since they were _so bad_). Battery life was. We didn't even do that well by launch date, but if Android hadn't mainlined their power-management framework before the Pre launched it would have been a joke. It was all hands on deck to get that stuff integrated in time for launch.

- The webOS platform was actually a thin UI layer on top of an Android-like Java-based platform that never launched. The Java-based OS wasn't derivative of Android (it predated Android), but it had no differentiating features with Android already live. Booting the Java runtime _and_ the JS engine and webkit was a lot.

- We knew we couldn't have Java running on this phone long-term, so tons of effort was going into nascent node services instead of Java ones. So all those were launching too.

- Your memory is incorrect on the JS jit, or mine is. My memory is that we were adopting the latest v8 engines as fast as they would come out (although not as fast as chrome) because they were the only ones that could keep the thing performant.

- Webkit was a mess, I'll give you that, but I'm surprised you noticed. Were you at palm too? Did you build apps? We generally provided UI components that were the way to build apps that, hopefully, allowed you to ignore the intricacies of exactly which webkit version you were on (at least to build an app).

jmtullosson I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

Hey. I wrote some of that trash.

I think this is a bad take because I don’t think the core issue of the platform was that it was based on web tech. The web tech basically worked fine. However the bugginess and challenging user interface (which is actually standard today) was a huge issue. The leadership decision that was needed wasn’t to kill the touchpad 49 days after launch, it was to kill it before launch.

Palm was a raccoon backed into a corner and it was using all its cleverness to get out. But it was willing to ship stuff that wasn’t ready and couldn’t be ready with the resources we had. HP had the resources. They could have taken a good start and given it the space to become great. Maybe.

jmtullosson Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)

No, this is not how it works. They can still deduct the entire first year of salary even if the person is let go, as that salary is considered a capital expense. There is no incentive to keep the person on payroll because of this policy.

jmtullosson FFmpeg merges WebRTC support

OK to your credit your original request was to get this all working in a single html file. That is not possible with the easy paths documented on ffmpeg.

By default, the build relies on web workers which need to load their code from somewhere (and usually it has to be the same origin as the code making the request)

Through much mastery of JS build systems that I would not wish on my enemies, I bet you could get it working on localhost, but you’ll have a much better time of it if you set up vite or something for a local build. You can still easily do a “serverless” deploy with GitHub pages or similar but you do need an http server correctly configured for asset requests.

jmtullosson FFmpeg merges WebRTC support

If you want to copy/paste, try taking the first example and asking the llm to refactor the code to run in a browser with no dependencies. It should be able to strip out the react stuff, or at least get it close and you can fix it from there.

jmtullosson Find Your People

What’s your point?

Peter Thiel and the people that did his fellowship don’t represent the majority of career paths people take in SV, but they do make for good (or too close to home) fodder.