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wmichelin

811 karma · joined February 25, 2015

Software Engineer
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wmichelin··on Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production
I legitimately would have bought it if they made it look more like a regular pickup truck, and if Elon didn't go full crazy.

I did buy a Model-Y shortly before his Trump endorsement, and then sold it for technical reasons.

On a cold January morning, I was pulling up to a stop-sign, didn't have any autopilot turned on, and the car accelerated.

I think there is just too much software between gas pedal and the machinery of the car. They're honestly kind of dangerous vehicles. The average person can't handle the responsibility of a self-driving vehicle.

I told all of my friends and family that I would not recommend the vehicle yet to a non-technical person, even when I was myself driving it and loving it.

wmichelin··on We've built an open-source feature flag server for 11 years
We have automatically generated readouts that run hourly and daily, show metrics between control and variant across a ton of core business metrics, and we can even opt into measurement of some super esoteric stuff.

Granted we have a whole team supporting just that experimentation platform, but it's pretty cool. They even expose an MCP server for us to have agents do experiment analysis for us using.

wmichelin··on Start Doing Graph Theory
HN hug of death
wmichelin··on New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6
The decompilation efforts I've been seeing with 15 year old Xbox 360 games or PS3 games has been absolutely incredible, getting them running natively on macOS with presumably much fewer engineering resources than are allocated to a standard game port.

I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem - people don't game on Macs because there aren't that many great games on Mac (Although Cyberpunk runs amazingly on my M4 Macbook Pro).

I'm very excited for the future.

wmichelin··on JetBrains reports revenue growth, net financial loss for 2025
I just look at my own diffs in a draft GHE PR and iterate with my agent on Github. This is often a much better UX than trying to make sure every single linter or thing is consistent between my machine and the CI machine. We do use Docker but it's still just easier to do it all on the CI box / Github.
wmichelin··on Find the flattest route between any two points in SF
It’s all just the wiggle lol
wmichelin··on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
yes, each of these things are larger than the other
wmichelin··on iPhone Duo
Very brave take about Apple /s
wmichelin··on Fastpotify
This debate is irrelevant. It doesn't matter. Having the idea and the skills to dictate a stable piece of software are all that matter.

There is no point in taking pride in typing out lines of code by hand. The entire world is moving on.

wmichelin··on Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO
Probably FF lol
wmichelin··on Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO
Safari is fantastic for me. Passwords app integration alone is a killer feature.
wmichelin··on France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026
Damn! We had it in the sunset when I lived there back in 2017
wmichelin··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
I know of social media sites who have kept an untracked version of the link in the dom of the A tag, but replace it with their in-house link tracker copy of it as you're clicking, that way the destination looks correct when you hover over the link.
wmichelin··on Pixel Watch 5
Apple Watch has never lasted the full night for me. I'm super happy with my Garmin Instinct 3. A full blown iOS device on my wrist was too stimulating anyways. I'll take charging once every ~25 days-ish over the color + capacitive touch screen.

The Garmin Instinct 3 is my favorite tech purchase I have made in a very very long time.

wmichelin··on AI is a bad tool
The finished product alone does not have to be the reward. The reward can still be building a great tool, a great application, etc. With AI we can build it 100x faster, freeing us up to think deeper about our test coverage, our design, our scaling, our observability.

There is no excuse for lazy execution using AI, that is, IMO, equivalent to shoddy software engineering. it's just faster and more accessible now. "AI slop" is just poor execution delivered more quickly.

The onus is still on the human in the drivers seat to deliver quality outcomes.

wmichelin··on AI is a bad tool
I enjoy building things. I do not enjoy the act typing out code by hand.

> Do you not enjoy coding? I'm not trying to be snarky, just a genuine question

To follow this debate through, to maximize coding enjoyment, shouldn't we be avoiding compilers? They take away a lot of the code we need to write. Frameworks as well?

wmichelin··on Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
This is frankly disgusting and I hope you do not deploy this to any children. The classroom is the last place where we should be deploying AI.

Look where smartphones not being used in the classroom got us. Imagine how this would harm us.

wmichelin··on Show HN: HackerNows – Native iOS HN Client
Honestly? Why does it matter? This isn’t going away so we can all focus our energy on helping this workflow improve, or just ignoring it.
wmichelin··on Linux for the Sega MegaDrive
and everybody clapped
wmichelin··on The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
Well, it was for many. MySpace, and then BBM, Facebook, and Twitter were absolutely huge at that time for the folks using them.
wmichelin··on Cursor Introduces Composer 2.5
Not a cursor shill by any means, I do use it at work but that's because it's what they pay for.

But Cursor has a CLI harness.

wmichelin··on Show HN: We missed Winamp, so we built an audio player for macOS
I also hate the idea of streaming, but I have been super lazy in the past

I have listened to 44,000 songs on Spotify over the last 13 years. It has brought me a ton of value, but I would love to move back to owning my music as files. I've been getting fancier with managing self-hosted infra at home, especially using AI to help me out.

Maybe I'll get back there, but I also can't imagine only listening to 500 songs!!!!

wmichelin··on I switched from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook
Framework has always been appealing to me as a Mac competitor
wmichelin··on Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise
At my job, I would just say they are in the ear of engineering leadership, but are not part of it.
wmichelin··on Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?
I had to take computer architecture. We made a 4 bit CPU... or maybe it was 8 bit. I can't remember. But it was all in a software breadboard simulator thing. LogicWorks.
wmichelin··on Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant
why is it asking me to select a model during setup if it supposedly runs on my machine?
wmichelin··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://waltermichelin.com
wmichelin··on Stepping down as Mockito maintainer after ten years
your test environment should not have the credentials to write to prod data. yiiiiikes!
wmichelin··on TailwindSQL – Like TailwindCSS, but for SQL queries in React Server components
GraphQL and SQL are not comparable or competing technologies. GraphQL is more analogous to a REST API. GraphQL can use SQL under the hood, or you can even hand serve the bytes (tongue in cheek here). It's just an over-the-network protocol to serve data.

a Node.JS server might use SQL directly or call out to a GraphQL API, but I literally don't think it's possible to let client-side JavaScript (safely) call a SQL database server directly.

wmichelin··on Internet Protocol over Avian Carriers (1990)
TIL
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