dbgrman

absolutely love it! Gorgeous drawing, meticulous detail.

1. been using sudoku.com's app for a while and have some reservations with it, and a few new ideas that i wanted to try, so building a new sodoku app. this is in its earliest stages. Have a prototype to test ideas i want to build in.

2. Continuing work on Standly, a standing desk app for iOS and Mac (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/standly-standing-desk-timer/id...). I just grossed $1000 total on the app and get few customer feedbacks a week which is very exciting.

3. Almost finalized the first episode of my labor economics youtube channel, hand animated by a team of amazing artists. Looking to build it into a sustaining channel.

4. Building a server-driven UI framework at work with Go and OpenAPI on server side, swift and kotlin on client side.

Enjoyed it until the first emdash (was half expecting it to arrive anyway). Sorry.

its not a misconception. As an advertiser, I can go use meta's tools, target people specifically, and show them ads on meta's platform. While i don't get the CSV dump, but if i can target people with my message, its the same thing. Meta keeps the data AND the distribution. Data brokers have the data but no distribution of attention for that data. Newspapers have distribution but don't have the granualar data for direct targeting.

There are many, many use cases of having a CSV dump of the data, but in reality, all of it boils down to either reselling the data, or marketing a product to the demographic in the data.

The 3rd use case is that of palantir but let's not get distracted.

So, meta is not selling data is like saying netflix is not selling movies (its actually buying them). Technically true, but a shallow understanding.

which email client do you use?

The overbearing of gmail and the perpetual tech issue with Apple Mail made me want to look for a new email client software. I landed on Spark Mail and i Nope'd the heck out of it very quickly.

There is no guarantee today that any software manufacturer will not slap AI whenever, wherever they can.

I want stuff to work like linux commands. Do one thing well. Work well with other processes over a standard protocol.

If you ever find a good email client @speckx let me know. Something that does not get in my way, can work on mac/windows/iphone/android, can work offline, can do basic things like search predictably (I'm look at you apple mail) and (FFS!) does not show me random unread badges on folders where everything is already read (You again, apple mail).

found a good no BS collection of tips from a friend using AI in legacy production codebases

Mad respect for his work. Love his writing. But no, i'm not buying the story of going offline, especially not with a trending hackernews post and a typewritten letter to the internet. When one is done with something, they're done. Cold turkey. like "Fck this sht, i'm out". If someone notices that you are missing, they'll ask, and you can give them your spiel about being AI-Amish or whatever.

Even if you ignore all that, I think you just need a break, rest, recover, find something else in life and move on. The whole thing about "life was better in the past" is just plain non-sense, simply because the past, for all we know, extends to infinity. Why 1980 and not 1890? or 1590? the inquisition? maybe the crusades? or maybe the pharohs? If you believe in biblical tales then how about being in the great flood? or being one of the pharoh soldiers that die after the sea moses split closes on them? or one of the skulls in gengis khan's tower of skulls?

You can read Steven Pinker's "Better angels of our nature" and get a good sense of how far along have we come.

in a good way or bad way? in my experience going back to 4.6 was a breath of fresh air again. Opus 4.7 for some reason was "suffocating". Too obnoxious, tried too hard to impress and used exxagerated/pompous language.

thats a pretty cynical take. > past the point of human ability to discern whether they are actually better or worse

This is lack of imagination. If you use these models heavily enough, pretty soon you'll hit the edges of their capabilities. The smarter among us are collecting these problems into a personal benchmark and use that to judge model capability. I think this is the right approach, and dare I say, even better than generic benchmarks. To me, it matters less what the benchmark says, and more what my particular problems are.

had a similar unsolicited psych evaluation interview back in 2017 in twitter. There was a VP (or maybe director), who started with "go back in history and tell me what your boss at position X would say about you", and this kept happening for an hour.

I tried to do the same from USA to Turkey. Can't ship lithium. So my brother took the laptop to Germany, and then shipped it to Ankara.

The laptop was never released from the customs. The Turkish reps were rude and expected bribe and pretended they don't understand english. After few months it was returned back to Germany. My cousins' laptop had a keyboard issue and local shops would not replace it and the HP agents on the ground also didn't want to help.

also, could the website plz fix its scrolling code? its annoying. i can't read the article

LOL! Perfect. one change request: brighter should be more intense. Right now the more intense days are dark red and to a color blind person like me, that doesn't pop out.

Bitzscaling. Reid Hoffman's snake oil (thought piece). https://www.blitzscaling.com/

It has poisoned more than one company (especially startups). Its the "go big or go home" mentality. The "the market is ours to take if we just put more fuel to this fire" mentality.

was in a startup once (Reid was an investor). The CEOs bought into blitzscaling, told the whole company we're going to "blitzscale". Hired 2 directors (with 0 reports). They had amibitions of hiring 100s of engineers. Then reality struck. There was no revenue and no path to revenue (because early days of AI). The blitzscaling was "paused". The directors had 1 EM report to them each. You can imagine what happened in the months after that.

knowing sama, that's exactly what he would do. except, the story wouldn't end with openai collaborating with a competitor who is better than them, openai will collaborate with them to ensure they're destroyed from inside out so that only openai can dominate eventually. "Eventual dominance" architecture, you know.

When a company writes down principles, you should be highly skeptical.

- Democratization. Why is it your prerogative sam bro? In other words, what he means is consolidate access so "We" can democratize. We choose who gets what.

- Empowerment. People are empowered by default. Its the totalitarians who curtail the empowerment. The fact that sam things he has the power to "empower" people is arrogant at best. People are empowered already, you just build the tools and make the tools accessible at a reasonable price.

- Universal prosperity. This one pisses me off the most. Who TF made you the benevolent mayor of universe? Are you running for president of the universe and people ask: Hey sam, what would you do as a president of the universe? "I will bring universal prosperity".. yaaaay Sama for president. FFS!

- Adaptability Yep. we'll kiss the ring of whoever is in power, until we get in power. then we will adapt if needed to your needs.

You know who else has principles: Meta. (https://www.meta.com/about/company-info/?srsltid=AfmBOooT6i0...)

- Give people a voice. Read: ensure you control their voice. My take: who tf are you to give anyone a voice? Everyone HAS a voice.

- Build connection and community. Read: ensure that you control all the connections and communities so that you can steer elections and other important things. My take: people have been connecting already for thousands of years.

- Serve everyone Read: control who you serve. My take: Serve everyone, except for totalitarian regimes and people with ideas that are not aligned with ours.

etc. etc.

TIL ppl have domains that make $9k/yr and here i am being happy my niche app is bringing me $200/mo revenue

They’re trying that with meta compute

20% is the outlook for the whole year. Wait and see :)

I am sorry but people going and wanting to go back to meta after being laid off is exactly why Meta keeps getting away with it.

I am in some ex-meta groups and people tell they got laid off and in the same sentence ask how/when can they apply again. If someone is laid off for supposed ‘low performance’ and they still want to go back because it pays 10-20% higher than others is just weak. Have some self esteem!

On the topic of recording clicks and keystrokes: they have one of the most extensive surveillance-ware on employee devices since 2015. So its not new. Its posted publicly to avoid some law suits in near future.

On the topic of training ai with this data: where do i even start. Meta is so delusional. NO ONE uses the ai in whatsapp, messenger, facebook, instagram. Many people don’t even try it. So regardless of the quality of the model, no one wants to speak to meta’s ai. Even if they produce a very efficient coworker, why would anyone touch meta’s ai? I wouldn’t want to touch it with a 10-foot pole.

Not just bloated, obese. These companies have an eating disorder. They can longer control it. Even after all the layoffs meta gained net weight in 2025.

its not a 'concerted campaign'. meta laid off 4300 in 2025, but by the end of the year was actaully ~4800 higher than before. If that is not 'over hiring', i dont know what is. The headcount went from 74K in dec2024 to 78K in dec2025, even WITH the layoffs.

There is no "workforce reduction". its just "we need new faces around here". Hire-to-fire.

I agree with that sentiment. Most discourse around AI is shallow. There are people who do have a rather profound world view on this and sometimes it surfaces on hackernews. Karpathy for instance is very pragmatic but also philosophical at times.

What we see today is stuff of sci-fi. The amazing and deep stuff Asimov and many others wrote about.

Why though? It is the technology of today's times. 70s had microprocessors, 80s had languages and tools, 90s was about the internet, 00s was about e-commerce and then web2.0 and later iPhone, mobile/local/social, 15s-20s was gig and creator economy, blockchain, metaverse... and now its AI. If you are sick of reading about AI, what would you rather read/talk about?

“ That's why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.”

Because ends justify means. To quote Boz himself:

“ The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.”

not enough.

After all the layoffs, labeling people as underperformers while laying off, etc. can they stoop any lower? Why TF would anyone in their right mind would want to join this company?

The answer to your question has less to do with "vibe coding," "harness," and all the jargon and "productivity guru speak."

It is akin to asking, "How do you get a runner's high when running in the Nike Vaporfly?" You don't. What you _can_ do is improve your core strength, endurance, cardio, etc. Then, there will come a day, if you are consistent in your running, when, while running, you are less worried about tired legs and generally feel "open" and feel like flying. That day, you will push your pace and realise "oh shit" and bonk. That day you realise that your body and mind are not ready for sustaining a very high pace for a long time. You start doing interval training, hill repeats, and so on. A few months later you try to push the pace again on a good day and voila, you love it! Pure running bliss.

The same is true for engineering. If your "multitasking" muscle/mechanism is weak, if your orbital-prefrontal cortex is weak and you get distracted easily, then no amount of process hacking will get you to flow state. So first understand your mind, understand your body, understand your weaknesses. Work on them consciously, deliberately.

As for me, I can work on at most 2, maybe 3, projects at a time. I observed that my mind works well as a stack, and I am good at pushing context from one project onto the stack, loading the next project's context, then pushing it onto the stack and starting work on the next one. Finish it, then pop to the previous project, and keep going around. When my mind feels weak, I use digital sticky notes or just jot down notes somewhere to maintain context between projects, to just drop down t o focusing on 1 project a time.