HN user
Ex. Firebase, Google, and Shopify.
Currently a mildly-employed Youtuber.
Hey all - I recently finished my mini PC build which uses custom SD card based cartridges. It's all open-source[1] and should be relatively used to recreate if you're interested!
Great write up, will be curious to see if Astro sticks around. It seems like all the static site gens last a few years then fade away - Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, etc.
This feels right, I can’t think of any consumer product where AI is providing value today.
I assume, like me, most consumers have been saturated with AI, tried it a few times, and found it doesn’t deliver on simplifying/improving anything. They tried it, it hasn’t helped and they’ve adjusted their mindset accordingly.
It actually never jammed I was just afraid that it would! It's just a generic micro servo, I think from Adafruit probably.
Haha yes, I'm still not used to people knowing so much about my projects, thank you for watching!
It was the AMOLEN Color Change PLA. Sadly I just took a quick look and don’t see it available anymore, but I might be missing it.
Oh hey that’s my Floppy8! Never woken up to find my stuff on HN before! So cool!
I actually just released a video earlier this week about the progression of my SD card based cartridges[0] which started with the floppy cartridges for this. If you like the Floppy8 you’ll probably enjoy seeing the dozen iterations I went through after this blog post haha
I’m mostly a YouTuber not a blogger so I have a bunch of other projects on my channel[1] in a similar vein which you might enjoy as well.
Bit of self promotion, but I do a lot of these types of tinkery projects (slightly less technical, but adjacent) on my channel "abe's projects"[1]
Fun fact about Hanafuda - you can still buy Hanafuda cards from a specific Japanese manufacturer who has been printing them for over 100 years and the more fun part is that that manufacturer is Nintendo! They still print traditional decks along with ones using newer IP like Mario and Kirby themes.
I own one of the original style decks and it's beautiful. Koi-Koi, played with a Hanafuda deck, is a great poker-style game that makes you feel very smart for knowing how to play even though the rules are pretty simple.
There definitely are but, perhaps by definition, items soft enough to dampen sound are often easily damaged so they aren’t great fits for most commercial locations.
They are also out of vogue as was mentioned, unless you’re a coffee shop then these “cozy” items just aren’t as common right now.
This is a really good discussion of density in different forms. I’ve always thought mobile UIs could have a density renaissance, would love to see folks questioning some assumptions of these devices - especially when the trend with LLMs is “wait a long time for a potentially incredibly wrong output” it feels like we’re going the wrong way.
This is the unspoken secret of all these mods. They’re built to be built, not played, so if there are subtle instabilities introduced which may impact practical gameplay they will likely never be discovered because the final creation just sits unused on a shelf.
To the same end, when you hire human beings anticipate them standing up for what they believe in and occasionally inconveniencing your immoral business practices. Humans on both sides, opinions and your right to voice them on both sides.
The thing with masterpieces is that they don’t hold that status because they can’t be replicated, they hold it because they were novel, innovative, and unrivaled at the time of their creation.
I never understand why people consume content like this accelerated. For me, I feel like if I felt the need to rush through something then it’s not worth consuming at all.
Firebase does that, the problem is "warning them" isn't as simple as it sounds. Developers ignore automated emails and they rarely if ever open the dashboard. Figuring out how to contact the developers using the platform (and get them to care) has been an issue with every developer tool I've worked on.
Writing directly to Firebase is rarely done past the MVP stage. Normally it's the reading which is done directly from the client. Generally writes are bounced through Cloud Functions or a traditional server of some form. Some also "fan out" data, where a user has a private area to write to (say a list of tweets) then they get "fanned out" to follower's timelines via an async backend process which does any verification / cleansing as needed.
Generally agreed on improved audit logs of some formed helping.
Re training materials, this is one of the mitigations we launched to attempt to pull security to front of mind. I do not really think this is a Firebase problem, I think average developers (or average business leaders) just don't, in general, think much about security. As a result, Firebase materials have a triple burden - they need to get you to think about security, they need to get you to disrupt the most "productive" flow to write rules, and they need to get you to consistently revisit your rules throughout development. This is a lot to get into someone's head.
For all the awesomeness of Firebase's databases, they're both ripe footgun territory (Realtime Database specifically). Our original goal was to make the easiest database to get up and running with, which I think we did, but that initial ease comes with costs down the road which may or may not be worth it, that's a decision for the consumer.
One of the things we fought for, for years after acquisition was to maintain a qualified staff of fulltime, highly paid support people who are capable of identifying and escalating issues like this with common sense.
This is a battle we slowly lost. It started with all of support being the original team, then went to 3-4 fulltime staff plus some contracts, to entirely contractors (as far as I’m aware).
This was a big sticking point for me. I told them I did not believe we should outsource support, but they did not believe we should have support for developer products at all, so I lost to that “compromise.” After that I volunteered myself to do the training of the support teams, which involved traveling to Manila, Japan and Mexico regularly. This did help but like support as whole, it was a losing battle and quality has declined over time.
Your experience is definitely expected and perhaps even by design. Sadly this is true across Google, if you want help you’d best know a Googler.
I worked at Firebase for many years and the concerns with security rules have always plagued the product. We tried a lot of approaches (self expiring default rules, more education, etc) but at the end of the day we still see a lot of insecure databases.
I think the reasons for this are complex.
First, security rules as implemented by Firebase are still a novel concept. A new dev joining a team adding data into an existing location probably won’t go back and fix rules to reflect that the privacy requirements of that data has changed.
Second, without the security of obscurity created by random in-house implementations of backends, scanning en masse becomes easier.
Finally, security rules are just hard. Especially for realtime database, they are hard to write and don’t scale well. This comes up a lot less than you’d think though, as any time automated scanning is used it’s just looking for open data, anything beyond “read write true” as we called it would have prevented this.
Technically there is nothing wrong with the Firebase approach but because it is one of the only backends which use this model (one based around stored data and security rules), it opens itself up to misunderstanding, improper use, and issues like this.
I've done a handful of fun hardware + LLM projects...
* I built a real life Pokedex to recognize Pokemon [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVcerPofkE0
* I used ChatGPT to filter nice comments and print them in my office [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AonMzGUN9gQ
* I built a general purpose chat assistant into an old intercom [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zDdpeTdv84
Again, nothing terribly useful, but all fun.
I recently did my own case build around a framework motherboard in a retro style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsOAE5c7YXs it worked pretty well and I actually met up with the Framework CEO, Nirav, when I was recently in SF to discuss ways to better enable this type of project. I truly believe they want to support creative re-use.
Yes! I’ve used them dozens and dozens of times. Not the cheapest if you want quick turnaround, but I did use to cut down cost by walking over to their Oakland warehouse for pickup. Was a nice small operation, smelled like burnt acrylic from a block away though haha
It's not mind-reading if you look at someone's actions and words then speculate about what their motivations and future decisions will look like - that's just deductive reasoning.
Personally, I turned my opinion on him when he tweeted about having approvals from major cities for Hyperloop tracks and then the mayor of one of those cities tweeted that they had never spoken to him.
It's clear he's willing to lie and manipulate on a mass scale (and we let him). He's either immature, evil, or something in between.
My two cents as a Linux based developer - my 11th gen Framework has been largely fantastic. There was some annoying BIOS issues but they pushed a fix, there was bad battery life, but they pushed a fix.
Overall it feels like an indie device still, but I’d take that over the mass production walled garden nonsense of competing machines. I feel like I own this device more than any other recent electronic purchases other than perhaps my Raspberry Pis.
Not exactly the same, but I have been using a technically similar stack (Pi 4b + Love2D GUI) paired with some custom autorun code to make a console which boots media off of whatever drive you insert (potentially a keyboard / mouse / controller optional media device).
I've got the Pi booting basically straight to Love2D (really it's a combo of carefully choreographed splash screen, LXDE wallpaper, then an autostart of the actual Love2D UI which makes it seem like the Love2D UI is in control from boot) and it's all worked very smooth.
I feel like this setup would work well for custom UIs (especially if you're not as obsessive about the polish as I am and can tolerate a few flashes as X boots up). There's nothing specific about Love2D which makes this work other than being a nice way to write code that runs smoothly on a Pi, but I like it :)
I highly recommend if you're interested in Lua checking out a few of my favorite Lua projects...
1. Moonscript (https://moonscript.org/) the compile-to-lua language powering Itch.io, it's amazingly pleasant to work with and I was amazed porting a JavaScript tool to Moonscript that the moon version was more readable despite my lack of familiarity with the language.
2. Redbean (https://redbean.dev/) the single-file, cross-platform binary magic web server that's been all the rage lately. Super fun to embed Lua apps into a single binary and build small web apps.
3. Pico-8 (https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php) the famed "fantasy console" a fake old computer with fake old requirements that forces you to get creative as you write games and apps with the limited resources, of course, all apps for Pico-8 are written in Lua.
I think the moral here (especially with the last two projects listed) if you like when computers get weird you'll like Lua. I also recently compiled the Lua runtime into wasm to make some of my scripts portable to the browser, it was simple and easy, including modifying the language code just a bit.
Lua is a little wacky, but there's something so fun it brings me back to the early days of writing code when everything was simple and just a little off.
(Source: Ex-googler for 5yrs)
So first this comment is clearly influenced by your own preferences for MacOS. Stackoverflow Developer Survey shows irl about 40% of development is done on Windows, 30% Mac and 30% Linux. So the platforms are at least equally appealing in real world circumstances.
Secondly Goobuntu was insanely well integrated with Google’s custom source control and internal ecosystem. No one actually did real engineering work on Macs because it was disallowed for security reasons by policy, but I also never met anyone who wanted to. The tooling and customization on Goobuntu was very good and although I’m sure people asked for a better experience on Mac, the ability to customize and control the Linux dev experience just beat Googles ability to modify MacOS hands down.
Also I think there’s very little MacOS offers from a developer perspective that isn’t matched or easily trumped by Linux, but now that’s my personal bias showing ;)
A lot of the story regarding the Tetris split between Nintendo and Tengen is covered in the great Gaming Historian video [The Story of Tetris](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8&t=1s).