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dabedee

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Leave a Trace 1 month ago

I think this is pragmatic and useful advice. Often it also helps you work through what you think by writing it down. Left this comment as a trace.

You're asking people to trust you and hand their codebase/IP to your tool while showing them exactly how you treat other people's code/licenses by "deciding" to not carry forward the GPL license.

This is coming from a cofounder at github, someone who probably knows precisely what the GPL is for. Whatever the legal merits, building on a GPL3 project's complete test suite and relicensing under MIT is not acting in good faith toward the original authors. I really find it disgusting and it makes me want to avoid gitbutler entirely.

AI is slowing down 1 month ago

Fair enough. I won't debate preferences or how you choose to spend your time. I think one of the merits of his articles is that he surveys and gathers sources that others can engage with. Even if we admit he is biased, that exercise (his writing) alone is valuable because one can contradict or reassess his claims.

AI is slowing down 1 month ago

This is what critical reading is for. It requires you examining your own assumptions as much as the text's. If you don't engage with something or someone because of your own bias or assumptions, that is also willful ignorance; you also might end up never updating your prior stance when new information emerges.

There is a financial argument and capability argument.

In this case, he doesn't make the claim one follows from the other.

Dopamine Fracking 1 month ago

It's great that someone penned their experience and path towards self-awareness in a way that helps others achieve the same. Or, at least for me, it put words on an uneasy feeling I hadn't yet fully materialized. I too would be saddened if the flattening of our shared human experiences accelerated even more.

It's very difficult to do business in Western Europe without Whatsapp. I have probably asked more than 60 people to switch to Signal and the social burden it introduces (i.e. asking a new acquaintance to install a new app) can have negative signalling effects (e.g. you don't adapt, create more work, why do you care so much about privacy, etc.)

I personally abhore Facebook (and IG,Whatsapp) and don't want to use any of them; I have uninstalled/reinstalled Whatsapp many times. Out of practical concern, I now only use Whatsapp in business settings where it would create tension and create social awkwardness not to. But I dislike the fact that I do.

It was a welcome change to have a deliberate, well thought, and well-written article that tries to bring readers through a rational journey. Thank you

Our principles 3 months ago

Here is the translated version:

1. Democratization is centralization. We will resist the potential of this technology to consolidate power in the hands of the few, by consolidating it in the hands of us, who are not few but correct.

2. Empowrment is compliance. We believe AGI can empower everyone to achieve the goals we have determined are worth achieving.

3. Prosperity is scarcity. We want a future where everyone can have an excellent life, which will require new economic models because the old ones will no longer function, for reasons unrelated to us.

4.Resilience is dependence. AGI will introduce new risks, which only AGI can solve, which only we can build.

5. Adaptability is revisionism. We continue to believe the only way to meet the challenges of an unpredictable future is to be prepared to update our positions, our charter, our nonprofit status, our safety commitments, our board, our cofounders, and our prior statements, all of which were operative at the time and are now inoperative and were never said.

As others have said, this is a "feature" for Google, not a bug. There is no easy way to set a hard cap on billing on a project. I spent the better time of an hour trying to find it in the billing settings in GCP, only to land on reddit and figuring out that you could set a budget alert to trigger a Pub/Sub message, which triggers a Cloud Function to disable billing for the project. Insanity.

This is an interesting take. I think a critical missing piece from this article is how the use of coding agents will essentially enable the circumvention of copyleft licenses. Some project that was recently posted on HN is already selling this service [1][2]. It rewrites code/modules/projects to less restrictive licenses with no legal enforcement mechanisms. It's the opposite of freeing code.

[1] Malus.sh ; Initially a joke but, in the end, not. You can actually pay for their service.

[2] Your new code is delivered under the MalusCorp-0 License—a proprietary-friendly license with zero attribution requirements, zero copyleft, and zero obligations.

I probably spent 30min on a few different tones, trying to tweak and seeing how they responded. A lot of fun! One thing that wasn't immediately obvious to me was (even though it was written) was that I also needed to click on the SFX effect (vs tones below) for it to load that on the top part of the UI.

It's pleasant to read an article that genuinely seems written by a person; warts and all. It doesn't matter that it repeats some of its points. Actually maybe that's the point. I hope more people try this.

I laud the attempt and I think it's important there are more projects that try to compete with their American counterparts. I do want to gently note that if your entire pitch is "we are a bold, independent European alternative that liberates you from the hegemony of the established American players," maybe don't name your product the exact same thing as the product you're replacing? "Office." They named it "Office."

Meta acquired Moltbook, which is a social network for AI bots that was itself built by an AI bot, and which had a security breach so bad that literally anyone could impersonate any bot on it, and whose own creator cheerfully admitted he "didn't write one line of code" for it. This is going into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit they set up for Alexandr Wang, whom they hired from Scale AI roughly one year ago to, presumably, build superintelligence. It is not clear to me how buying a vibe-coded Reddit for chatbots gets you closer to superintelligence, but I suppose the theory is that it "opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses," which is a thing Meta actually said, out loud, to Axios

I appreciate the author taking the time to share his workflow even though I really dislike the way this article is written. My dislike stems from sentences like this one: "I’ve been using Claude Code as my primary development tool for approx 9 months, and the workflow I’ve settled into is radically different from what most people do with AI coding tools." There is nothing radically different in the way he's using it (quite the opposite) and the are so many people that wrote about their workflows (and which are almost exactly the same, here's just one example [1]). Apart from that, the obvious use of AI to write or edit the article makes it further indigestible: "That’s it. No magic prompts, no elaborate system instructions, no clever hacks. Just a disciplined pipeline that separates thinking from typing."

[1] https://github.com/snarktank/ai-dev-tasks

AI makes you boring 5 months ago

Anecdotally, I haven't been excited by anything published on show HN recently (with the exception being the barracuda compiler). I think it's a combination of what the author describes: surface-level solutions and projects mostly vibe-coded whose authors haven't actually thought that hard about what real problem they are solving.

I'm usually the first one to bash Facebook and its main liar in chief, but the first couple of paragraphs mix damning evidence with weak stretches (as mentioned by others here). The bad stuff is genuinely bad enough.

Meta's own research found Instagram worsened body image for 1 in 3 teen girls [1]. They killed a deactivation study when results looked bad, with one employee comparing it to tobacco companies burying research [2]. They had a 17-strike policy for accounts involved in sexual solicitation [3]. And they ran growth strategies explicitly targeting kids under 13, segmenting youth into "Kid (6-10), Tween (10-13), and Teen 13+" [4].

[1] 2019 Instagram slide presentation, "Teen Mental Health Deep Dive"

[2] Meta internal deactivation study (unnamed employee quote from unsealed docs)

[3] Testimony of Vaishnavi Jayakumar, former Instagram Head of Safety and Well-being

[4] Meta Internal Evidence Exhibit 45

Email migration is genuinely painful and I am sure there's a real market here, so I am not trying to discourage you. But why should I trust a third party with my IMAP credentials?

"Credentials encrypted in memory only and deleted immediately after migration".

I have no way to audit/verify this claim. You're essentially asking users to hand over the keys to their entire email history on faith.

Again, it's completely possible that OP and you are the wonderful exceptions (untouched and uninspired by coding agents) that have been using these patterns for as long as you can remember. My comment revolved around the psychological phenomenon, not whether dry-run is a clever/novel idea. It's about how we might tell ourselves stories about the origin of our ideas when working with those tools.

Of course and I am not trying to point fingers. But I do think it's interesting because it's also possible that it is confabulation. Not lying, but genuinely constructing coherent explanations for decisions whose true origins are different than we recall. I think working with coding agents has already made this immensely more common.

From the article: "I added –dry-run on a whim early on in the project. I was surprised at how useful I found it to be."

Not to be overly critical (I think it's great OP found value in adding and using --dry-run), but I am willing to bet that this was a suggestion/addition from a coding agent (and most likely Claude code/Opus). Having used it myself to build various CLI tools in different languages, it almost always creates that option when iterating on CLIs. To the point where it's almost a tell. I wonder if we're entering a moment of convergence where all the tools will have similar patterns/options because they are similarly written by agents.