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I’m a huge user of AI coding tools but I feel like there has been some kind of a zeitgeist shift in what is acceptable to release across the industry. Obviously it’s a time of incredibly rapid change and competition, but man there is some absolute garbage coming out of companies that I’d expect could do better without much effort. I find myself asking, like, did anyone even do 5 minutes of QA on this thing?? How has this major bug been around for so long?

“It’s kind of broken, maybe they will fix it at some point,” has become a common theme across products from all different players, from both a software defect and service reliability point of view.

I think it’s maybe close to a wash between non-replaceable batteries in wireless headphones dying and cords failing, in my experience at least. The ideal case IMO is over-ear headphones that have a replaceable cord—I have some 14 year old Bose QCs and some newer Beyerdynamics, both of which I’ve replaced the cord on.

I was just talking with a friend about this on Sunday, just before the big oil price runup—it was very curious to me that I had had to hunt around a bit for coverage of what was going on with the strait.

Closure was something I had known was a risk with any conflict with Iran after learning about the Tanker War in some politics class in college, and following the various threats over the past 15 years or so. It seemed like something that should have had tons of coverage as soon as I heard the US had attacked Iran, and I wanted to know what was actually going on with it...yet all of the mainstream press seemed to skirt around it until oil prices finally spiked on Sunday, even though traffic through the strait had fallen off a cliff a week beforehand.

If Moltbook becomes as big as Instagram I’m giving up on tech and moving to the mountains to raise goats.

Ultimately I think all of what you describe there falls into a bucket of personality traits and social skills that contribute to success in many areas of life.

It's some combination of what they call "self monitoring" in social psychology, plus general EQ and Machiavellian personality traits that allow people to read the room and adjust their tone, speaking style, word choice (including picking up in-group lingo quickly), posture etc to be most effective given the setting. This applies to basically any social environment, and is often a frustrating reality to many people who may be extremely competent but see others around them who are obviously less competent "getting ahead" through social acumen, office politics etc.

This has been studied among MBA graduates, Do Chameleons Get Ahead, The Effects of Self-Monitoring on Managerial Careers (pdf): https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/...

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I do have a 64GB machine that I'd been planning to bump up to 128 right around the time the prices went through the roof. My uses are:

- VMs, I'm leaning on them more and more for sandboxing stuff I'm working on, both because of the rise in software supply chain threats, and to put guardrails around AI agents.

- Local LLMs experimentation, even pretty big MoE models (GPT OSS 120b) run pretty usably (~10 tokens/sec) with the latest tooling on a 16GB GPU and a lot of system memory.

- Even compared to a fast NvME drive, it's super nice to load a big dataset into memory and just process it right there, compared to working off of the disk.

Meta has consistently and repeatedly shown an absolute lack of respect for user privacy for basically as long as they’ve existed as a company. I’m honestly not certain there’s anything fully out of the question as far as things they might do, regardless of what their policies might say.

Two examples that are top of mind…

They exploited browser vulnerabilities not unlike malware to track users’ behavior across the web: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/protect-yourself-metas...

They bought a “privacy” VPN app and used it to harvest data, then abused Apple’s enterprise app deployments to continue to ship the app after it was banned from the app store: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo

Interesting idea on the local search index! It occurs to me that running something that passively saves down content that I browse and things that AI turns up while it does its own searches, plus a little agent to curate/expand/enrich/update the index could be super handy. I imagine once it had docs on the stuff I use most frequently that even a small model would feel quite smart.

Biopsies, radiation from additional scans, surgery, treatment for cancers that would not have developed further.

A lot of potential harms are at a societal level as well—from a public health perspective, if everyone starts having regular MRIs that produce incidental findings which require followup, you’re suddenly tying up lots of resources that would otherwise be available to actually-sick people. A person with symptomatic problems whose treatment is delayed because they can’t get an appointment because the specialists are booked full with incidental findings, that person is indirectly harmed by this.

The radiation from CT scans is not especially concerning at an individual level when there is a compelling reason for it, but, if we’re suddenly doing tons more to investigate incidental MRI findings, there may well be a point where those scans are causing a significant amount of cancer overall—a recent study suggested, I believe, that CT scans may be responsible for 5% of cancers already.

Absolutely agreed—seeing this post continue to circulate across all forms of media with seemingly zero critical thinking or evaluation of its author’s credibility reminds me of the Zoolander “I feel I’m taking crazy pills” meme.

I remembered this guy from his “Reflection 70b” scam in 2024. That should have basically put his credibility at zero, but clearly it has not.

I found this interaction in the HN comments from the time of that minor scandal to be prescient:

>> It's amazing what people will do for clout. His whole reputation is ruined. What was Schumer's endgame?

> But does reputation work? Will people google "Matt Shumer scam", "HyperWrite scam", "OthersideAI scam", "Sahil Chaudhary scam", "Glaive AI scam" before using their products? He wasted everyone's time, but what's the downside for him? Lots of influencers did fraud, and they do just fine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41485180

Interesting that for some people flow state is non-verbal. I personally have sort of a constant dialogue in my head (or sometimes muttered out loud under my breath) that I have to buffer or spool into various notes/diagrams/code. The process of prompting winds up being complementary to this—typing out that stream of consciousness into a prompt and editing it becomes a more effective form of reflection and ideation than my own process had been before. Sometimes I don’t even send the prompt—the act of structuring my thinking while writing it having made me rethink my approach altogether.

Sentry is indeed, and is open source and self-hostable: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry

It’s a pretty large app (I think >1M lines of Python). I ran a self hosted version for several years and found it performant and pretty easy to keep running and updated.

That article is seemingly all about the perf of the complex frontend app with a custom renderer running in the browser, nothing to do with what’s happening on the server.

There are a variety of ways that democratic governments are structure that make this an inaccurate characterization of how things work.

The US, for example, apportions representatives and votes for President in a way that overweights less populated states, and there are various aspects of parliamentary systems that help avoid landing in a two-party system where a simple majority gets the say in everything—they force compromise and coalition building among disparate groups. Additionally, Constitutional systems will enumerate the rights of its citizens such that they cannot simply be taken away by a simple majority of any body.

Democratic countries are also basically never "pure" democracies where everyone votes on every decision as in your Plato's ship analogy—we elect people who audition for the role of running the ship, ostensibly those among the people who are best suited to the task.

I have not been following this whole thing closely, but this is where my mind went as soon as I heard there was some overlap in the popularity of this new un-sandboxed agent and people who are into crypto. It's like if everyone who is into buying physical gold started doing a Tiktok challenge to post pictures of their houses and leave their front doors unlocked.

Historically I've found sleepinginairports.net useful for this kind of intel—I was pleased to discover just now that it's still around! Nearly 20 years ago now it saved me from a night of awful sleep. My backpacking buddy and I had just arrived in Liverpool with an early Ryanair flight out the following morning, and no hostel reservations. We'd been traveling successfully without reservations for a bit, but it turned out there was some kind of event that weekend in Liverpool and there was absolutely nowhere to stay (or at least, nothing that cost less than, like, the budget for our entire trip).

We decided we'd just stay out late, then go to the airport and wait it out for our flight. After some effort trying to sleep on hard plastic benches in the airport Burger King (where Michael Jackson's Thriller was playing loudly on repeat, I do not know why), I pulled out my 12" PowerBook and found out via that site that the airport had a meditation room with dim lighting, soft carpet, and no Michael Jackson. Ahh.

As a fan of text adventures who has played many over the years—Anchorhead is hard. It was kind of a white whale for me over many years until I finally beat it during the pandemic lockdown.

Historically retailers have employed buyers in charge of selecting products that would appeal to the store’s customers. A customer will likely have different expectations, and have an existing understanding of what sort of products they’ll find if they’re shopping at, say, Nordstrom vs Dollar Tree vs a guy on Canal Street in NYC.

Amazon sort of threw this out with the steady movement towards blending third party sellers in with products they sell directly. They made it less and less obvious and easy to filter based on seller over time, so now you have all sorts of junk from the digital equivalent of street vendors mixed with normal products, and it’s up to the shopper to figure it out. They tolerate tricks and fraudulent behavior from those sellers much more than they should.

Amazon could, if they wanted, make it easy to filter for products that have been selected by a buyer who has a relationship with the vendor, and are directly sold by Amazon themselves, but it’s seemingly more profitable to allow third parties to peddle garbage en masse.

For what it's worth, I evaluated Fly.io during a divorce from Heroku some time in mid 2022 (I think), found the platform was... way too rough around the edges at the time to want to migrate any real workloads. I kept it on my radar and shipped an MVP with it in 2024, found it was a lot more polished, and now have multiple production apps running there. I'm genuinely pumped about Sprites and have started building against the API—I did notice the weirdness with the docs, but you guys have been doing well on the "this thing that {was broken|I didn't like|was missing} now works the way I'd hoped it would" front.

Pure speculation, but I’d guess that an arrangement with Google comes with all sorts of ancillary support that will help things go smoothly: managed fine tuning/post-training, access to updated models as they become available, safety/content-related guarantees, reliability/availability terms so the whole thing doesn’t fall flat on launch day etc.

This is the thing that makes any conversation about broad categories of food difficult—there’s just a huge range of ways to package those carbs, and people eat a ton of “hyper palatable” foods. A few hundred calories of Smartfood popcorn with a day’s worth of sodium and addicting flavors is quite different in my experience than, say, a few slices of chewy, crusty sourdough bread.

Working on a system like this (mostly configured with complex yaml, but extended with a little DSL/rule engine to handle more complex situations) a long while ago, I introduced a bug that cost the company quite a bit of money by using `True` instead of `true`—something that would have been readily caught in a proper language with real tooling.

That's a pretty frustrating market segment to shop for in the US these days, given there are so many good options that just aren't sold here. I was looking for similar cars early last year and quickly ruled out Golfs (and a variety of others) over the total lack of actual buttons. So annoying. I wound up with a Mini Clubman—another fun premium compact that's now no longer being made.

Ironically they could probably do some really useful deduplication/normalization/search across questions and answers using AI/embeddings today, if only they’d actually allowed people to ask the same questions infinite different ways, and treated the result of that as a giant knowledge graph.

I was into StackOverflow in the early 2010s but ultimately stopped being an active contributor because of the stupid moderation.

Examples of US-facilitated regime change that resulted in lasting stability/democracy are more the exception than the rule, when you look at the track record overall.

Gas is certainly less of a problem than coal, but they still produce plenty of bad stuff: nitrogen oxides and bad VOCs like formaldehyde that are well studied to increase risk of asthma and some types of cancer. I certainly wouldn’t want to live close to one.

I remember this being a problem when we first bought a DVD player in like 1999.

I've had an iPhone since 2009 and feel they have gotten much more confusing over time.

It seems to be there has been some sort of internal conflict between the need to add basic functionality to be remotely comparable with Android, and the desire to keep everything "simple". The end result being a kind of a worst case of neither being especially featureful nor all that simple. There's a cottage industry of apps that exploit users' lack of understanding of their own device's capabilities (e.g. flashlight apps with ads + in-app purchases).

Growing up in a quaint rural town where high-powered people from NYC liked to "get away", this is very common situation, and the inability to disconnect and adopt a slower attitude was, IMO, the primary cause of friction between the weekenders and the locals. They would physically get away from the city, but were unable to mentally release the blend of Type-A competitive neuroses that helped them get ahead in the city but just made them come off as obnoxious in this slower, quieter place.

I've found myself in this mode before, too. A couple of years ago I was preparing for weeklong wilderness backpacking trip with some friends. I'd recently quit my high-stress job to take some time off, and I had a few new pieces of gear I wanted to test before relying on them on a longer trip. When I looked at the calendar, though, every weekend before we were to leave was already spoken for.

I was worrying about it to my wife, trying to decide whether I'd just have to use the old worn out gear or risk it with the new stuff, when she stopped me: "why don't you just... go on Monday?" It took me a second to even get what she was saying—I was still so much in work-all-the-time-mode that my brain didn't even consider whatsoever the possibility that I could just... go off and go camping on a weekday. I was really baffled for a moment, and I've reflected on that a bit since, it's funny how you can be trapped in your own default operating mode and not even realize it.

SameSite=Strict is belt-and-suspenders protection in the case where you could have GET requests that have some kind of impact on state, and the extra safety is worth the UX impact (like with an online banking portal).

Discussions about this often wind up with a lot of people saying "GET requests aren't supposed to change state!!!", which is true, but just because they're not supposed to doesn't mean there aren't some floating around in large applications, or that there aren't clever ways to abuse seemingly innocuous side effects from otherwise-stateless GET requests (maybe just visiting /posts/1337/?shared_by_user=12345 exposes some tiny detail about your account to user #12345, who can then use that as part of a multi-step attack). Setting the strict flag just closes the door on all of those possibilities in one go.