alabut

Oh no, they're going to knock down Soma? Such an iconic all-ages venue.

Oh yeah, we’re already there. In fact it’s a pre-ai thing too, where I saw a cyclist YouTuber explain how making thumbnails look too professional is an anti-signal. People often crave authenticity over production value.

I get the impression a lot of people use ai to clean up writing when English isn’t their first language, which unfortunately means they can’t see the robotic generic tone it creates. E.g. the references to user groups in Buenos Aires.

One way they could maybe counteract it is approach it like code golf - can you use an LLM to make it much, much shorter? Because being overly verbose dilutes the handful of points you’re trying to make.

Terrible examples - they're both ugly. The honeycomb one is particularly bad because it's covered up with a cookie popup on the left and the chat widget on the right.

Yes they both have the same overall structure as the Stripe landing page but if you can't tell the difference between the level of execution of those three, then you're just arguing for mediocrity.

Simon Willison made a similar parallel recently:

https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/6/vibe-coding-and-agentic...

  “The thing that really helps me is thinking back to when I’ve worked at larger organizations where I’ve been an engineering manager. Other teams are building software that my team depends on.

  If another team hands over something and says, “hey, this is the image resize service, here’s how to use it to resize your images”... I’m not going to go and read every line of code that they wrote.

  I’m going to look at their documentation and I’m going to use it to resize some images. And then I’m going to start shipping my own features. And if I start running into problems where the image resizer thing appears to have bugs or the performance isn’t good, that’s when I might dig into their Git repositories and see what’s going on. But for the most part I treat that as a semi-black box that I don’t look at until I need to.”

Well that's a first - a nice clean landing page explaining a pivot that still retains a personal touch in both design and writing. Makes me want to try out their new thing.

Don't know why this is getting downvoted. AI as air cover for layoffs seems very plausible for at least some companies, especially the ones that were already predisposed to doing layoffs pre-ai.

Sure, notifications are inherently disruptive by nature and there’s an admin tax to turning them off. But unless you’re installing new apps every day, it’s a one-time fix and not an ongoing distraction.

That’s the realistic gray area in between the extremes of the argument. I enjoy the analog experience of my 20 year old Nikon the way you like your Casio, but they’re also both luxury items precisely because neither one is inherently important to daily life. They’re fun toys, not real tools.

At least they’re making some kind of minimal disclosure. So many of these fluff pieces have the same format PG complained about two decades ago:

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Ha! CSS is at the very bottom.

It's not exactly a fair test for stylesheets since so many styles look similar but aren't actually boilerplate setup, but it does capture the Groundhog's Day feeling of frontend work.

Promoting the good parts is very worthwhile and there’s a thriving scene. A bunch of interesting people talk over zoom and IRL regularly because of events.indieweb.org and we just had our 3rd annual weekend camp here in San Diego a few weeks ago.

I don’t know about the rest of big social media switching away, so I’m personally just focused on appreciating the community that’s been built up already instead of evangelizing. Maybe I’m wrong and something open will go viral, like the new Loops video app.

That’s a good take and is underrated. It’s what has kept me from completely automating everything in favor of a semi-automated approach instead of doing the “spray and pray” approach of blasting everywhere.

Follow-up comments and engaging with others after posting is big too. People that “syndicate” without actually engaging on each platform are like some weird proselytizers that show up to a house party and hand out flyers to their own weird shindig without talking to anyone there.

I wish that were true but if ease of use is all that mattered, then micro.blog and other “Indieweb in a box” services would be as big as Bluesky, or maybe even at least as big as Mastodon.

The truth is that we’re social creatures and for social products, that means hanging out where other friends are already hanging out. It’s my personal thesis that no matter how matter how much we lower the bar to participate in the indieweb, fediverse, or other non-corporate platforms, it’s going to be inherently niche.

Which is fine. Small is beautiful.

I’ve been an Astro user for the last two years and I can’t recommend it. RSS support isn’t native, doesn’t support anything other than plain markdown, and all of the extra magic of MDX and their custom .Astro templates is wasted without feed syndication.

My big project for sometime this year is to switch to Eleventy.

Agreed. I love stacking the months like that and turning it into a never-ending river of days, looks like it'd be easier to estimate the length of time between two different months.

Yep, and quiet electric motors is why air taxis could be a real thing again in major cities. E.g. Uber partnered with NASA to try to bring them to Los Angeles before the 2028 Olympics, with 18 heliports scattered around the county.

Yeah, the reality check in that video was eye opening. Clearly it’s a deliberate strategy to roll these things out at flight schools at first, so they’re always circling within landing range.

Electric planes will definitely graduate to short hop commutes eventually though and not just be niche training vehicles, especially when you consider how much safer they are than jet engines: they have way less moving parts, require less maintenance, and most importantly, they don’t stress the airframe nearly as much.

And that’s just with current airplane designs retrofitted for electric (which is essentially what these training planes are) instead of the upcoming designs that are built with many small electric motors and not the giant jet engines.

Lilium is an example of the new style of electric plane, with motors distributed through the wing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohig71bwRUE

The embedded video is super short, so here's a longer piece by a youtuber that spent some time with the same model when they hit Australia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CS3isCH4bk

Can confirm. The founder of this site is actually a close personal friend that started teaching me about this stuff years ago, first in a more casual way when catching up and then recently much more in-depth as he started documenting his experience.

I'm still more of a prepper lurker that's reading up on this stuff while friends are starting to take it more seriously. I personally don't know if prepping is a fad like cold war-era nuclear bunkers, a potential lifesaver like a beefed up version of the red cross emergency kits, or somewhere in between as a useful hobby like hiking and camping, but my inner research nerd is having a great time learning more.

It helps that my YC team was a product review website and there's a lot of gear junkies in the survivalist crowd, so that's been my entry point into it, not so much the angle on being freaked out about the news.

I also liked the article's critique of Western philosophy as being too analytical and divorced from real life. Apparently that wasn't always the case in the ancient world and philosophy had more practical application, which probably explains the revival of Stoicism lately as well.

A good starter book on the Stoics that also reinterprets the ancient lessons for the modern age:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0040JHNQG/

Ugh, it's so much noise for your neighbor though. I worked next to someone with an old IBM keyboard for a year and was grumpy the entire time. Couldn't find headphones strong enough to cancel out what sounded like someone shooting an automatic weapon in the office.

Partnered (YC S12, http://partnered.com) San Francisco, Senior Engineer, Full-time

We’ve built an exclusive private network of startups and brands that connect for business partnerships. It’s a hard problem to solve and we’ve shrunk the process down from months to minutes.

If you want to work someplace that’s just starting to take off but small enough to have a huge impact on its outcome, then we’re at the perfect Goldilocks size for you. The timing is great too: activity on our network is starting to spike and we’re getting great customer feedback on where to take it next.

Our development process is best described as “relaxed yet driven”. We have just enough process to keep momentum - big quarterly goals, weekly kickoff and wrapup meetings, team dinners on Wednesday nights, everything’s tracked in Trello - but it’s loose enough to give people the space to get shit done. So it’s more of a trust-based system than some childish flavor of agile. I.e. we don’t do daily standups, enforce pair programming, or have hourly work estimates. Yuck.

We’re looking for a senior dev, someone at least backend but ideally fullstack and as comfortable with server admin as they are with writing code. We’re a python/django/angular shop but honestly we care less about your specific skills than finding someone great, because you’d be more than good enough to pick up new languages anyway.

Interested? Great, then email me directly: al@partnered.com

Dude, congrats on the hustle! How did you land your first artist and convince them to crowdfund? Was it a weird experiment for them or totally natural?

Yeah, the MDRV6 with Beyerdynamic Velour earcushions are my secret sauce for getting in the zone. The stock pleather earpads will give you "hot ears" that make long shifts uncomfortable.

If you keep going down the audiophile rabbit hole like I did, next up is a DAC or a tube amp. A good starter cheap one (sub $100) is the Qinpu:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001TGDB9Q/

That's not the default behavior for inline elements. In that example with the 4 hearts, you can imagine a visually ugly effect where a browser width is narrow enough to show 3 of them and the last one drops to a new line.

Dude, you should brag about your approach to private offices, like your designer wrote about:

http://blog.circleci.com/silence-is-for-the-weak/

It reminds me of Joel Spolsky's articles on their approach to workspaces.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper...

It's so rare to find a workplace in SF that's not an open office plan that some of the most productive people retreat to remote work just to get shit done in their home office, like Rands did with his Nerd Cave:

http://randsinrepose.com/archives/a-nerd-in-a-cave/

Talking about the productivity of private offices could be a major attractor, the way Microsoft way back in the day had a big poster for college recruiting that was a photo of a door and the words "you'll get one of these" on it.

Nope, the military isn't as strong in Turkey as it used to be. Jailing a bunch of top generals will do that.

Paul Buchheit said something similar at startup school years ago and I watch the video every once in a while to remind myself not to be similarly prescriptive when I meet new people.

His key takeaway slide was a simple equation:

Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization = Advice

The full video has more info on how to get past the advice you hear and actually process feedback:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZxP0i9ah8E

Me too, but you need to get funded by them to participate :)

One important improvement is that it looks like they go the full product release cycle and incorporate the feedback into something testable with real users, so they go from idea generation to actually testing products or features by the end of the week.

The one on managing a remote team is still my personal favorite, 6 months later:

https://zapier.com/blog/how-manage-remote-team/

It's a great primer on workflow in general, not just remote teams. I must've referred to it a dozen times at my previous gig and kept trying to model our process after theirs when I decided to just join the real thing instead.