archeantus

Distribution is the moat. This is distribution, I guess.

Not according to this guy who works on Claude Code: https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389?s=20

What a PR nightmare, on top of an already bad week. I’ve seen 20+ people on X complaining about this and the related confusion.

I see Airbnb first

What stood out to me more than how impressive the carousel of companies was, was the order of them. Wild that they have OpenAI and Stripe second and third to Airbnb.

When I read the title I wondered “does this really happen?” And then I read a few lines and remembered “yes, I definitely did this all the time”.

The reality is that a lot of people put ideas forward solely for the purpose of getting attention and trying to get promoted. A lot of those ideas are full of hope and enthusiasm and lacking in fundamentals. But to shoot it down makes you come across as a nay-sayer, or a Debbie-downer. Even though you are sure it’s going nowhere, the reality is that it’s a lot easier to let the market prove you right.

Less hurt feelings and interpersonal drama that way. Seems wasteful, but at the end of the day you got data and learnings that you didn’t have otherwise. So hey, silver linings.

Nope. This is the original. Maybe someone else took my idea

Maybe it’s true they can’t find citizens:

- at that price - in the Bay Area

But certainly they don’t have grounds to say they can’t find citizens to write JS or make apps.

If you want a good job in tech, go look at Walmart’s job board in the coming weeks. They literally have thousands of Indians doing all kinds of jobs that could easily be done by Americans. I liked my time there, and there’s lots of great people, but it felt very clear that the system was being abused.

If all you’ve done with AI is just use it for autocomplete, you’re missing out big time. I built a slick react app using Lovable yesterday and then created a Node BE using Claude Code today. I told Claude Code to look through the FE code to understand the requirements and purpose of the site, and to build a detailed plan (including proposed DB schemas) for a system that could support that functionality.

It generated a thousand line file with a robust breakdown of everything that needed to be done and at my command it did it. We went module by module and I made sure that each module Had comprehensive unit test coverage and that the repo built well as we went. After a few hours of back and forth we made 9 modules, 60+ APIs across 10 different tables, and hundreds of unit tests that all are passing.

Does that mean that I’m all done and ready to deploy to prod? Unlikely. But it does mean that I got a ton of boilerplate stuff put into place really quickly and that I’m eight hours into a project that would have taken at least a month before.

Once the BE was done I had it generate extensive documentation for the agent that would handle the FE integration as a sort of instruction guide - in case we need it. As issues and bugs arise during integration (they will!) the model has everything it needs to keep on track and finish the job it set out to do.

What a time to be alive!

I first bought this app 15+ years ago (before the logo was glowing). It was an incredible piece of software then, and I’m sure this is a worthy upgrade. Absolutely a delightful product.

I read that most of the crazy comp Zuck is offering is in stock. So in a way, going to the place where they have lots of stock reflects their belief about where AGI is going to happen first.

Can you elaborate more on this? You’re using a web ide? And you love it?

Great read. Brain started fry when it talked about infinite dimensions but then I imagined it looking like the black hole scene at the end of interstellar and that helped a bit (though it’s not like that scene made any sense either)

“GPT‑4.1 scores 54.6% on SWE-bench Verified, improving by 21.4%abs over GPT‑4o and 26.6%abs over GPT‑4.5—making it a leading model for coding.”

4.1 is 26.6% better at coding than 4.5. Got it. Also…see the em dash

Can you please expound on this? You’re using this approach to turn an existing codebase into a single file and then asking Gemini to make changes/enhancements? Does it also handle breaking the files back out? Would love more info!

I was just at the Outer Banks and I walked through the memorial/park they have there. It was very well done and I left feeling very inspired and motivated.

Then I went home and watched a documentary explaining all the stuff that happened after their success at Kittyhawk. Pretty sad that they took the patent/scarcity approach and stopped innovating. It was a cautionary tale to me to never let your foot off the gas once you’ve found something that works.

Apple should just buy Nintendo at this point. They don’t seem to have anything else going on.

It feels very apparent to me that Apple was caught completely flat footed by ChatGPT’s release. As a result, they were very far behind and have been unable to catch up.

What they released as Apple Intelligence wasn’t a well-planned, cohesive product as much as the only thing they could possibly do, given the timelines they were up against. Maybe they’ll catch up, but they’re definitely behind and it’s a shocking thing to behold.

This post sears and burns with the heat of a thousand suns. How I wish I could have read this every day, ten times a day, as I was starting out on my startup journey three years ago.

So many corners were cut in the name of speed. So much pressure from my cofounder/investor to get things out way too fast. So many months of endless suffering and never-ending bugs due to poor architecture that doesn’t scale on the BE.

I know how to push back. I do it for a living at my day job and I’m really good at it. For some reason I decided that I couldn’t ever push back against the guy who put in some money. How horribly wrong I was.

Great post. They talked about the possibility of iOS 18 wirelessly telling other phones to reboot, but then afaik didn’t address that again. Maybe they did and I missed it?

I spent 7 amazing years working for Walmart Labs (what they called it at the time) and it was a great place to work. I was being paid like I lived in the Bay Area, but I lived in a much lower cost of living area. I worked my tail off for them and got two promotions. On the second one they declined to increase my annual RSU target because I was making too much for my geo. I saw the writing on the wall regarding their plans for remote workers and left to a competitor that has been much more remote friendly.

I know so many amazing people that were doing the work of their lives that quit or were laid off because of the RTO mandate. I can’t believe that they are doubling down on this, despite the human and financial costs associated with it.

Ultimately it highlights an important fact about working at WM (and lots of other companies, I am sure): you aren’t as special or irreplaceable as you think you are. Look out for yourselves and do what makes sense for you, always!

I love this story but I wish I understood it better. How did people find their way to the URL if they didn't have DB access? Did they inspect the traffic with a proxy and see the db file going back and forth? I'm just trying to understand what one of these teens had to do to find their way onto that channel where they were hanging out. What steps did they have to figure out on their own?

It’s not a competitor to Siri…yet. But it’s pretty easy to see the two converging in the near future. The best way to make sure that your voice assistant is used and useful is to back it with an LLM that literally does and knows everything. That’s the future OpenAI is chasing, and the one Apple should be chasing. I’m hopeful that this year brings some quick advancements in this area. But judging by the fact that it’s a year behind OpenAI in the timing, it’s hard to believe that Apple isn’t behind right now.

See “faster, lighter, etc” :D

I can see that happening. My vision for the future is that voice assistants and LLMs will converge into something as useful and powerful as “Computer” in Star Trek. And that this assistant that will know you and all of your accounts/online profiles, will only need a microphone and an internet connection to function.

So the Apple Watch, for example, could be everything you need to carry around because the voice assistant can literally do everything you can possible think of (besides consume social media and YouTube content).

You must not have tried the voice feature in the ChatGPT app yet. Try it out, it’s amazing. It pairs the power and functionality of a conversational voice assistant with all the power of ChatGPT and LLMs. Obviously the integration isn’t as convenient as Siri’s yet, but the utility is infinitely higher.

My point is that it seems pretty clear that the future is in the space that OpenAI is right now. And that isn’t a bet that Apple was investing in very heavily.

I tried it for the first time last night and I was not too impressed. It felt like a solution in search of a problem.

For the past decade Apple’s product lineup has pretty much remained the same (faster, lighter, etc), while they invested heavily in spatial computing (flop) and autonomous vehicles (scrapped). All while totally neglecting the industry they pioneered (Siri) and should have been perfecting. Instead, OpenAI came along and ate their lunch and Apple was caught completely flat-footed. And now they’re way behind.

It’s shocking to me how bad the above bets and non-investments have played out for Apple. Tim Cook needs to ride off into the sunset. It’s been a good ride. He ran the business well. They need an innovative CEO at the helm that can make better bets.

Great post. I love the idea of the product and have wondered why AWS doesn’t offer this level of convenience out of the box.

Half-joking name suggestion: I recognize the domain probably isn’t available but wouldn’t “upordown.com” be slightly more slick? ;)

Back in 2014 I was tired of how awful the Mint app was and I wanted to make a banking app of my own (that I affectionately called Basil). The premise was that it would be like Mailbox (remember that flash in the pan email app?) but for finances. You’d swipe on every transaction to make sure they were categorized correctly. I even wired it up to my local bank’s very rudimentary API.

It was beautifully designed (thanks to some help from a designer friend) and I was really proud of the architecture and Objective-C code.

A large retailer reached out to me on LI and asked about a job. As part of the interview process they asked me to submit a code sample and I submitted basil. The senior dev in the interview commented that he didn’t have any negative comments about the code but instead spent the interview telling me the things he liked about it. It was so fun and gratifying to get that feedback and I got the job and worked there for seven years. It totally changed the direction of my career!

My first smartphone. I started working at Tmobile in college as a sales rep when the G1 came out and I immediately was smitten with it. The functionality and experience was so much better than anything that BlackBerry had to offer, yet all of the seasoned reps scoffed at the G1 and continued to push and sell Blackberries. They thought I was crazy to carry and sell the G1. I think I got the last laugh.