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matt3D

159 karma · joined June 10, 2021

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matt3D··on Ask HN: What Should an Incumbent Do?
No particularly. We are toying with the idea of taking the engine of the flagship product, arguably where a lot of the value is, and rebuilding a more flexible front-end onto it.
matt3D··on Ask HN: Is WordPress the best way to create new websites for beginner
I find it a bit odd that none of the comments so far have mentioned LLMs.

Astro with a good understanding of how to build using a coding agent (my go to is the BMAD method)

matt3D··on Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?
Your metric for “getting it to work” is wrong. Developing software is a means to an end, not a goal in and of itself.

The simplest metric you should be tracking is; has it generated income.

In this sense my use of agentic coding has performed very well. People asking for evidence and repos are a little naive to how capitalism works in the real world. If I’m making money on something I’m not going to let you copy it, and I’m sure as hell not going to devalue it by publicising that it was built by AI.

matt3D··on Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
Pretty much every company I work with uses the desktop sync tools for OneDrive/GoogleDrive/Dropbox etc.

It would be madness to work completely offline these days, and all of these systems have version history and document recovery built in.

matt3D··on ChatGPT Health is a marketplace, guess who is the product?
These strawman arguments lack nuance.

If the person can use AI to lead a noticeably better life, something that may have been impossible previously due to economic circumstance, then the first order benefits outweigh the second order drawbacks.

I’m not disputing what you’re saying, I just think that treating it like a zero sum game every time the conversation comes up is showing an immense amount of privilege.

You, me, the parent commenter; we’re all dying, we don’t have time to optimise for the best outcome.

matt3D··on Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled
I have a slightly similar frustration; Netflix, Disney et al requiring me to figure out the name of the film by deciphering the poster. I don’t know how this passes any kind of accessibility testing.
matt3D··on AI Content Pipeline: My Experience
> Author: please write an article about this topic with examples of content you've created, discussions about dead ends and things that didn't work, and technical details about your setup.

I think the article itself serves as enough evidence to prove you should ignore their advice.

matt3D··on A new book about the origins of Effective Altruism
Is there a term for what I had previously understood Effective Altruism to be, since I don’t want to reference EA in a conversation and have the other person think I’m associated with these sorts of people.

I had assumed it was just simple mathematics and the belief that cash is the easiest way to transfer charitable effort. If I can readily earn 50USD/hour, rather than doing a volunteering job that I could pay 25USD/hour to do, I simply do my job and pay for 2 people to volunteer.

matt3D··on Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
I think the argument can be made that Deepseek is a state sponsored needle looking to pop another states bubble.

If Deepseek is free it undermines the value of LLMs, so the value of these US companies is mainly speculation/FOMO over AGI.

matt3D··on AI coding
This is a more extreme example of the general hacker news group think about AI.

Geohot is easily a 99.999 percentile developer, and yet he can’t seem to reconcile that the other 99.999 percent are doing something much more basic than he can ever comprehend.

It’s some kind of expert paradox, if everyone was as smart and capable as the experts, then they wouldn’t be experts.

I have come across many developers that behave like the AI. Can’t explain codebases they’ve built, can’t maintain consistency.

It’s like a aerospace engineer not believing that the person that designs the toys in an Kinder egg doesn’t know how fluid sims work.

matt3D··on Does anyone think the current AI approach will hit a dead end?
Watching my children learn how to talk, I have come to the conclusion that the current LLM concept is one part of a two part problem.

Kids learn to speak before they learn to think about what they're saying. A 2/3 year old can start regurgitating sentences and forming new ones which sound an awful lot like real speech, but it seems like it's often just the child trying to fit in, they don't really understand what they're saying.

I used to joke my kids talking was sometimes just like typing a word on my phone and then just hitting the next predictive word that shows up. Since then it's evolved in a way that seems similar to LLMs.

The actually process of thought seems slightly divorced from the ability to pattern match words, but the patter matching serves as a way to communicate it. I think we need a thinking machine to spit out vectors that the LLM can convert into language. So I don't think they are a dead end, I think they are just missing the other half of the puzzle.

matt3D··on The Claude Code Framework Wars
It manifests as a sort of extension for Claude Code.

When I'm in the terminal I can call on Agents who can create standardised documents so there is a memory of the product management side of things that extends beyond the context window of Claude.

It guides you through the specification process so that you have extremely tight tasks for Claude to churn through, with any context, documentation and acceptance criteria.

Perhaps there are others similar, but I have found it completely transformative.

matt3D··on The Claude Code Framework Wars
Pretty surprised BMAD-method wasn't mentioned.

For my money it's by far the best Claude Code compliment.

matt3D··on Google Pixel 10 series review
I'm curious how these changes align with their accessibility commitments.

For those struggling with impairments it must be hard to continue to adapt to your phone shape shifting with each update.

matt3D··on Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
They don't necessarily want to be the gatekeepers of information, they just want your next click to be another news story on their website.

External links are bad for user retention/addiction.

This also has a side effect of back linking no longer being a measure of a 'good' website, so good quality content from inconsistently trafficked sites gets buried on search results.

matt3D··on Anthropic raises $13B Series F
I use OpenAI's batch mode for about 80% of my AI work at the moment, and one of the upsides is it reduces the frantic side of my AI work. When the response is immediate I feel like I can't catch a break.

I think once the sheen of Microsoft Copilot and the like wear off and people realise LLMs are really good at creating deterministic tools but not very good at being one, not only will the volume of LLM usage decline, but the urgency will too.

matt3D··on AI coding tools are like that helpful but untrustworthy friend, devs say
I think we need to start being more nuanced in the way we describe "AI Coding tools".

In the same way Claude Code is a different beast to Cursor, my own process is a different beast to Claude Code and the months I've spent building out a robust pipeline is now paying dividends.

I also think someone at The Register needs to go on a statistics course. Those figures seem to paint the picture that an overwhelming majority of those surveyed have had positive outcomes, which I don't think is represented by the slightly snarky headline.

matt3D··on Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
I am currently using a stack which consists of:

- Makerkit Next.js/Supabase Starter Kit

- Python backend processing

- BMAD framework for building specification

- Claude Code with Max subscription

- Cursor for in IDE adjustments

I have managed to make some pretty incredible tools, it definitely feels like magic.

I would say I split my time 70% using BMAD as an assistant to build out my scope and clarify what I am trying to do in my own head, then 30% supervising Claude Code.

I have also managed to build out more simple tools using Streamlit to great effect

matt3D··on An upgraded dev experience in Google AI Studio
Which Rabbit are you meaning? When I search for Rabbit AI I get a few hits and none of them seem like the most interesting startup around.
matt3D··on Ask HN: How to Make Friendster Great?
Did you also buy the Copyright from MOL Global?

It would seem on first glance that you can't set up a social network called Friendster just because you bought Friendster.com domain.

matt3D··on Launch HN: SIM Studio (YC X25) – Figma-Like Canvas for Agent Workflows
Did you use SIM studio to set up this AI spam bot?
matt3D··on Launch HN: SIM Studio (YC X25) – Figma-Like Canvas for Agent Workflows
The one thing I find a bit odd about a lot of these orchestration tools is that they aren't AI first on their own UX.

Surely the first thing I should be presented with is a prompt window that can help be scaffold out the orchestration.

matt3D··on Show HN: I made a mini golf in my lunch time
It might be worth putting something on the page directing people to Gladden's original.
matt3D··on Show HN: Book and change flights with one email
While that's a good point, I think it would be wise for them to incorporate budget airlines if they are looking at the European market.

There are so many routes that are served exclusively by budget airlines.

matt3D··on Show HN: Data Formulator – AI-powered data visualization from Microsoft Research
After giving it a whirl I'm a little underwhelmed, but maybe I'm using it wrong. I'm getting less consistent results than if I prompted GPT4-o for a Vega graph after providing it with the documentation.
matt3D··on Man accused of using bots and AI to earn streaming revenue
If I understand this correctly he uploaded AI generated songs and then used bots to sign up for free accounts and stream them to generate royalties.

In which case the prosecutor's statement doesn't really make much sense:

> "Through his brazen fraud scheme, Smith stole millions in royalties that should have been paid to musicians, songwriters, and other rights holders whose songs were legitimately streamed,"

It wasn't other artists who lost out, it was advertisers paying for bots to listen to their ads.

matt3D··on Pharma CIO cancels AI enhanced Office 365 deal as "it doesn't add value"
Maybe not in Word but Excel is a completely different beast these days.

PowerQuery and the Data Model have more in common with python than the Excel of old

matt3D··on If you are using LLM RAG – you should be doing RAFT
Am I missing the point or is this not how everyone was doing RAG before?

I've had my much greater success doing the RAG process on a fine tuned model.

matt3D··on Screen time robs average toddler of hearing 1,000 words spoken by adult a day
Heard a similar story from a friend that had to wean their kids off of a tablet.

I don't want to come across as evangelical about it, but it is the best decision I think we've made as parents.

matt3D··on Screen time robs average toddler of hearing 1,000 words spoken by adult a day
Seems odd to say, but we just don't.

It hasn't really been hard at all. He just gets involved in everything around the house. He helps cook and clean and look after his baby brother.

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