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remus

3,122 karma · joined May 21, 2016

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remus··on ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state
I think the parent is just pointing out that these things lie on a spectrum. I have a website that consists largely of static content and the (significant) scraping which occurs doesn't impact the site for general users so I don't mind (and means I get good, up to date answers from LLMs on the niche topic my site covers). If it did have an impact on real users, or cost me significant money, I would feel pretty differently.
remus··on Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right
In a funny way it reminds me of writing survey questions. You have to be so careful not to introduce some bias just with the wording, as you can basically nudge the LLM to the answer you want with some little hints in the q e.g. "is it right that..."
remus··on 4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches
Sure, if you exclude the wealthiest parts of the country then it does look significantly poorer. Just as if you exclude California then the GDP of the US drops significantly. The point was whether the UK is economically relevant, not whether the economy is ethically sound (which is quite a nebulous question I'm sure you'll agree).
remus··on 4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches
> economically irrelevant in less than 10 years

The UK has the 6th highest GDP in the world. Pretty high bar if that make you economically irrelevant.

remus··on 4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches
> Guess how one gets "a suitable and sufficient illegal content risk assessment"?

This stuff is not magic, you can just do it yourself.

remus··on I'm OK being left behind, thanks
> You're only missing out if that's what you want to do.

Who writes software and doesn't have a list of "I'll fix this one day" issues as long as their arm?

This is honestly one of the things I enjoy most at the moment. There's whole classes of issues where I know the fix is probably pretty simple but I wouldn't have had time to sort it previously. Now I can just point claude at it and have a PR 5mins later. It's really nice when you can tell users "just deployed a fix for your thing" rather than "I've made a ticket for your request" your issue is on the never-ending backlog pile and might get fixed in 5 years time if you're lucky.

remus··on Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
I mean they're still expensive, they just seem relatively good value because everything else has gotten more expensive.
remus··on Code Review for Claude Code
I haven't used it so just spit balling, but surely it depends on the quality of the review? If it picks up lots of issues and prevents downtime then it could work out as worthwhile. What would it cost an engineer with deep knowledge of the codebase to do a similar job? You could spend an hour really digging into a PR, poking around, testing stuff out etc. Im guessing most engineers are paid more than $15-25/hr, not to mention the opportunity cost.
remus··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
Nothing revolutionary, but there is a small organisation called The Himalayan Database [1] who have recorded (in great detail) climbing expeditions to peaks in the area. The data is available in a downloadable format, but it is a little awkward to browse. I have been working in collaboration with them to build a website for making the database more accessible https://himalayan-database.climbing-history.org/

[1] https://www.himalayandatabase.com/

remus··on US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]
This is just the reality of the power asymmetry and is exactly the same for small company Vs big company. As a small company your business is just not worth that much to big company, so you choices are accept the terms offered or go elsewhere. Or, in an ideal world, there is a competitor who's found a space in the market offering better terms than big company.
remus··on Claude struggles to cope with ChatGPT exodus
> As such it’s unclear what the prize at the end of the present race to the bottom is.

It's a market worth many billions so the prize is a slice of that market. Perhaps it is just a commodity, but you can build a big company if you can take a big slice of that commodity e.g. by building a good product (claude code) on top of your commodity model.

remus··on We might all be AI engineers now
To lay it out, Im pretty firmly pro-AI.

Putting it succinctly, these kind of conversations feel weird because it's like asking whether carpenters are faster using power tools or hand tools. If you've used power tools it's obvious they make work a lot faster. Maybe there were some studies around the time power tools were introduced looking at the productivity of carpenters, if those studies had results saying the productivity gains weren't obvious in the data that means you have a problem with your study and the data you have collected (which is totally understandable, measuring imprecise things like productivity accurately is really hard). You have to look at the evidence in front of you though, try telling the guy with a chainsaw that he's actually no more productive than he was when he was using an axe and he'll laugh at you.

remus··on UUID package coming to Go standard library
It's currently listed as a 'Likely accept' https://github.com/orgs/golang/projects/17/views/1

Generally means it'll be going in unless something new comes up which alters people's thinking.

remus··on UUID package coming to Go standard library
Broadly speaking, maintaining a big std lib is a huge amount of work, so it makes sense that a language team is conservative about adding new surface to a stb lib which they will then have to maintain for a long time.
remus··on Mullvad VPN: Banned TV Ad in the Streets of London [video]
Have you lived in the UK? I have, and it doesn't feel like a police state.
remus··on Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers
> I dunno, is a free trial really a gift?

To OPs point, whether you want to call it a gift kinda feels like splitting hairs. As is well established, most software companies have huge dependencies on OSS yet contribute very little so $1200 in free service is a pretty big step up over the fuck-all you'll get from most places.

remus··on How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week
It'll be interesting to see if this happens at a service level too. Like how lots of companies offer an S3 compatible API, will companies start offering similar services and building a compatibility layer over the top as an easy way to for customers to transition? You could use the existing service as a test suite to check your compatibility API behaves the same as the original product.
remus··on Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins
From the POV of YC, they don't mind too much if it is a bit risky for any given individual company if it increases the legitimacy and stability of their portfolio as a whole.
remus··on Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation
No doubt there are significant challenges along the way, but waymo has a real product powered by tech that actually works which could massively change a huge industry. They're also notably more mature than competitors, and have track record of successfully rolling out in a safe way.
remus··on Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net
Yes, Freerider (the route he climbed on El Capitan) is much harder than the climbing on Taipei 101. The style of climbing is also very important, some of the moves on Freerider are very insecure and hard to climb in a reliable way, whereas on Taipei the difficulty largely comes from doing the same moves over and over again which means your body gets tired in a specific ways.

The climbing on Taipei was way more chill for him than the climbing on Freerider.

remus··on Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout
The "100 panels per second" number sounded a little high so I did a bit more reading. Apparently this was the peak pace of installation around May 2025, when there was a change in pricing structures associated with solar power so developers were rushing to finish projects so they could get in on the old structure.

Average pace across 2024 was closer to 25-30 panels / second (which is still incredibly high!)

remus··on LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick
The point of the article is to paint LLMs as a confidence trick, the keyword being trick. If LLMs do actually deliver very real, tangible benefits then can you say there is really a trick? If a street performer was doing the cup and ball scam, but I actually won and left with more money than I started with then I'd say that's a pretty bad trick!

Of course it is a little more nuanced than this and I would agree that some of the marketing hype around AI is overblown, but I think it is inarguable that AI can provide concrete benefits for many people.

remus··on Meta announces nuclear energy projects
I think that says more about their vast investment in other forms of power (particularly renewables) than it suggests a lack of investment in nuclear.
remus··on Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM
I've also found this a big plus. Being able to get a data only SIM for whatever country you happen to be in within 5 mins is very convenient.
remus··on Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
It might help you get there faster, but a billion users is still a billion users. Clearly they all find some value in it.
remus··on Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address
Are you based in the EU? You should be able to file a GDPR request for your data.
remus··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
Usually just the ones I don't get! ;)
remus··on Claude Code gets native LSP support
In a similar vein, I really struggle to understand why copilot is so crap when writing SQL and I'm connected to the database. The database has so much context (schema names, column names, constraints etc.) yet copilot regularly hallucinates the most basic stuff like table and column names, which standard auto complete has managed fine for the last 20+ years.
remus··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
Been playing daily since you last posted it on hn, great fun! For me Im a bit of an amatuer so the level is pretty nice, usually getting sub 5 mins or so.

A little feedback: clues which are cultural references can be pretty frustrating if you don't knw the reference. There have been some where even after piecing it together I've still got no idea how the answer matches the clue.

remus··on Trump launches $1M 'gold card' immigration visas
In the EU 'golden visa' schemes are typically about investing a particular amount in the economy of the country. Exact amounts vary, but it's usually along the lines of x00,000 euro in property in the country (mortgage free value) or x00,000 euro in government bonds or x00,000 euro in a business within the country

Usually this gets you residency for some years conditional on the investment staying within the country, and potentially a path to citizenship after some years of living in the country.

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