jodacola

Or a third party was paid a one-time fee to make something look good - which still isn't a testament to the quality of the first party's service they're providing.

My perspective on this, as someone skeptical of (but also bullish on) AI, is complex and I haven't completely nailed it down.

My knee-jerk reaction is instant credibility loss for the business/person/thing.

Follow-on is sadness (what are we losing in society because of this?), and curiosity: if a polished appearance (even if it is mega plastic) is no longer a sign of quality, then what is? What signals do I need to look for now?

But, wait! Was a high degree of polish ever truly a sign of quality? I've certainly had experiences where a place made every effort to look polished and professional (and generally did a good job at it), but quality missed the mark. In the case of restaurants, a common refrain of mine used to be, "they're trying too hard in the wrong places." Now, I guess, they don't have to try too hard... but they're still not focusing in the right places.

I don't know what to make of it and I go back to still trying to figure out new (or old?) signals for quality.

"Beginning July 20, Claude Fable 5 will be included in all Max and Team Premium plans, at 50% of limits.

Pro and Team Standard users will continue to have access to Fable via usage credits, and will receive a one-time $100 credit.

Demand for Fable has been challenging to predict, which is why we rolled it out to subscription plans in stages, extending access several times as we secured additional capacity." [0]

[0] https://x.com/claudeai/status/2078302415804379218

Ah, I've witnessed a US-based company try to fire someone it had hired in the UK and was surprised that it wasn't like firing someone in an at-will state in the US.

Appreciate the insight.

I'm really quite curious about the inverse of this from the US. HNers who don't live in the US but have worked for a US company trying to do business in local markets: what weird US-centric idiosyncrasies have you seen companies and US-based leadership foisting upon local markets?

"You're absolutely right, that wasn't a military target—it was actually a girls school. It won't happen again!"

I realize that's not a great argument and was definitely tongue-in-cheek, but given there's still a lot of debate about the accuracy of AI for far more mundane tasks, my personal perspective is that until we have LLMs and such that are truly, demonstrably far more accurate than humans, with true reasoning and judgement capabilities, they don't belong where lives are at stake.

I wouldn't want an LLM-underpinned machine running anesthesia during a surgery; why would I want an LLM-underpinned military apparatus that is deciding the lives of far more? I wouldn't, not in their current state.

In a hypothetical future where we truly trust incredibly smart AIs or LLMs or whatever "smart" technology it is for driving weaponry, okay - if it's truly necessary; I abhor war and the death and destruction wrought by it.

In my mind, though - even if we get to that future where there's some vastly superior technology to the LLMs we have today, which can judge and reason, then I'll have a bunch of other questions, like understanding the motivations of said technology, because I suspect it'll be something much closer to AGI, and that opens a whole separate can of philosophical worms.

Bingo.

My wife brought them to my attention recently because she heard about them from Scott Galloway, who was speaking highly of Bending Spoons on one of his podcasts. As she was explaining this to me, I said "It's just PE."

They must be doing some good PR/marketing, because, for some reason, "PE" isn't the first thing entering a lot of minds about Bending Spoons right now.

Agree on the animation.

As an aside, I've seen folks mention respecting reduced animation hints and such in the past and was always curious about this because I've never had any negative experiences with animations... until now!

Something about the animations on this site did my brain in while scrolling through the papers, and now I "get it."

I don't get car sick looking at a screen in a car, but my daughter very quickly does. Excited to set this up for her to see if it helps her, especially with our annual US Independence Day car trip coming up.

Can this same idea be extrapolated to a device that emits concentrated beams onto the surface of a book?

I'm thinking of those clip-on lights for books that allow one to read in the dark, but for this purpose explicitly. My daughter also gets car sick reading paper books while in a moving vehicle.

Curious for folks who have made the switch I’m considering: if I swapped Claude Code to DeepSeek API pricing, would I get more bang for my buck compared to the $100 Max plan I’m using now?

I only hit the 5 hour limit every few days and the weekly limit a day or two before it resets at the most aggressive. I wouldn’t expect my usage to increase dramatically, other than not being stopped by limits.

I’m still apprehensive about shipping all my stuff off to a lab under an adversarial government (to the US), so not just looking at this from a pure cost basis, but my question is from the cost lens at the moment.

I would shell out cash right now for something like Opus on silicon, like what Taalas [0] has built for Llama 3.1.

Having lightning-speed, local inference of a super high-quality model would be incredible. If you haven't played with it, check out Taalas's demo [1].

Honestly, though - I have my doubts. Recurring revenue is just too nice to pass up; I'm sure AI companies wouldn't want me buying a dedicated Opus card and not giving them money for several years until there's something worth upgrading to.

[0] https://taalas.com/

[1] https://chatjimmy.ai/

Nice. Yeah, I was checking it out while drinking my coffee and thought I'd share the impact of the experience, because I'm sure you'd like folks to hang around and check it out more!

Nit on the page itself: let me use my back button after opening an icon instead of having to reach up for the close button.

When I hit back and get returned here when I wanted to check out other icons made me not go back to check out others.

Very similar thing this week, and an interesting story to go along with it!

I called my normal HVAC company for my rental home because the tenant reported the AC wasn't cooling the house. When I called, I got one of the latest AI voice assistants to help me, and it was an awful experience and I ended up not hearing back after the assistant told me the office would call me back.

So, I went over to the house and used ChatGPT to help me diagnose the issue by taking some photos of the compressor panel outside. It walked me through what to check, I provided some diagnostic codes I witnessed... and it walked me through the very simple repair of replacing the $25 capacitor. It was going to cost me almost 4x that just for the service call to diagnose what was wrong in the first place.

So, the weird experience was: Gen AI made me lose trust in my normal HVAC company, and more Gen AI basically allowed me to replace my HVAC company and do the repair myself all in one day.

It is. I don’t have opened up to the wide internet, but it’s still super convenient to have it on my tailnet, which all my other devices are on, so I can review and manage repos wherever I am, while operating with the privacy of a self-hosted GitHub-like experience.

I was considering doing just this; I’ll spin something up soon. Thanks for the push!

I've been an avid GitHub user for a very long time.

I remember way back in the "olden days" in San Francisco seeing people with Octocat signs on Market. GitHub was awesome. Fond memories.

But times are a-changin', and for lots of reasons I just don't feel like GitHub is cool or "for me" anymore.

So, with my new Mac Mini, because they were on sale and everyone was getting one for OpenClaw... I put that puppy on my tailnet, installed Gitea, and I've been using it exclusively for all my projects. It's been weeks since I've pushed anything to GitHub.

I feel free.

I won't over-generalize here, because maybe your statement is true in some cases, but I will provide a counterpoint: this is not true (in my experience) in real estate title insurance and escrow services.

I've consulted for and led large teams for real estate title insurance and escrow companies for many years, and the domain expertise is so incredibly deep, nuanced, and multivariate (especially depending on jurisdiction) that building valuable and viable products in the space is incredibly difficult - before LLMs, and even now, with LLMs.

Without getting too deep into it, I'm pretty bullish on AI (and have been very close to it and deep in it for a long time, while also very apprehensive about the effects it'll have on society), and I can tell you, from extensive attempts from myself and many on my teams to leverage the latest frontier LLMs to bring deep domain experience to bear to help drive valuable products: we have not yet seen success. It's not helping engineering folks, it's not helping product folks. It's creating a ton of questionable output and hasn't resulted in real ROI, and it's not capable of accurately answering deep domain questions without hallucinations or assuming what works in one jurisdiction works in all.

I've seen success in many other areas, but not this domain - and, importantly, the regulatory environment in which title insurance operates is incredibly complex and strict, meaning you can't just YOLO LLM output into production (as much as we'd love to try so we can learn at a faster clip).

And the kicker: we've found the way for us to build the best products is still going out into the field, sitting with escrow and title folks, watching them work, asking them questions, and designing for the real world, the regulatory nuances, the local client nuances, etc. You can't get that from an LLM.

It makes me wonder(i'm korean): how would a Westerner react if they saw me romanticizing the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain? They’d probably find it strange and out of touch with reality.

Quite the opposite - for me, anyway.

FWIW, as a Westerner, I find the Mondragon Corporation to be fascinating and something I've read a lot about because there's no way we've figured out the ideal sort of setup for a business (or government, or any sort of human organization, given appropriate context) in the year 2026.

We have a lot to learn, and while "different" doesn't always mean "better," I strongly believe being exposed to "different" is necessary for us to devise novel approaches to human organization.

Enjoyed this article, but was immediately distracted into another rabbit hole from the editor's note on the time zone, which I hadn't heard before:

If you’d like to pinpoint the instant when the world entered the nuclear age, 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time on 16 July 1945

So, I went digging because time zones have been a weird fascination for me due to dealing with all their annoyances as an engineer, and found this article from 2019 [0]!

From the article:

In February 1942, Congress implemented a law instating a national daylight saving time to help conserve fuel and "promote national security and defense," which is why it was nicknamed "war time." The time zones were even known as that: Eastern War Time, Pacific War Time, etc.

[0] https://www.war.gov/News/Feature-Stories/story/Article/17791...

edit: grammar

I just listened to a fascinating podcast episode of Armchair Expert on pain psychology that went into such topics [0].

May not be some folks’ cup of tea, but I was sucked in and want to study more.

[0] https://armchairexpertpod.com/pods/rachel-zoffness

Random fun fact (?): I had a little project I let run all of last year which pulled down bills from Congress.gov's APIs and ran them through an LLM to summarize the bills and attempt to provide different political viewpoints, along with some image generation, ultimately resulting in something resembling X or Threads, but fully simulated - as though the House or Senate was "posting" bills they put forth and "people" from different political camps were responding with their thoughts.

I found that for 2025, on average, it took about 20 days for a bill to be posted before its text was made available via Congress' APIs. Sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes almost immediate... but 20 days on average last year.

I learned a lot about congressional processes and such through the project, like this[0] really cool flow chart about the legislative steps (recommend viewing the tiff and really zooming in on the details), with the action codes[1], which is data that can come from the APIs[2].

[0] https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.33996/

[1] https://www.congress.gov/help/field-values/action-codes

[2] https://api.congress.gov/

edit: formatting

Is that a subtle 5th Element reference in the crontab?

This is fun!

The following isn’t a knock on anyone doing cool stuff like this: I’ve avoided any sort of tinkering and automation of my gardening because I find gardening to be a slower-moving, meditative escape from technology. My brain shifts into a different mode (almost a flow state?) when I’m out working in the soil and tending to my plants.

General AI skeptic and manager reporting in.

Have had success at work, real value, real results.

Example: extracting a bunch of data from a tool we’re required to use at my company for getting a bunch of performance metrics. The data is useful but the interface is awful and it’s impossible to pull out trends and spot the real information I need from it. So, I threw Claude at it after months of dreaming of being able to better use the data. It generated for me in a few minutes all the data I could hope for in a CSV I was able to load into another tool that gave me deep insights almost immediately and allowed me to go make some different decisions I otherwise wouldn’t have.

What I did:

1. I have created and curated a set of sub-agents and commands/workflows for building things for me.

2. I used my build command, which details a workflow for refining, planning, implementing, code reviewing, testing, then conducting a final “product review” to determine if original requirements were met.

3. I then review the code myself before running it.

The code was solid (I’m also a very strong engineer and have tailored my agents and workflows to generate code I’d be comfortable with).

Another example: one of my teams went on a journey to convert one of our internal legacy frontend applications to a newer shared component library and eliminate old cruft that we inherited when we inherited the codebase.

The team was able to get this massive UI rewrite done in under two weeks, the updated code was better than the original code (it was all React to React, TypeScript to TypeScript), and we eliminated (literally) hundreds of thousands of lines of old hand-written over-abstracted code. Bundle sizes dramatically down, higher performance, more modern UX, and the thing is in production and working. Real value: faster product iteration in this now far smaller and easier-to-work-with codebase, far less technical debt, and faster builds, etc.

The team only used GitHub Copilot for this and it required a bunch of iteration and starting over with different instructions, but they got there and still managed to save a ridiculous amount of time; hand-writing the UI migration would have been one of those multi-month projects that went over schedule (I’ve seen and lived that movie many times before).

I’m still very skeptical of all the hype but I’ve seen very real, very valuable results out of this stuff.

edit: formatting

This is so cool. Also, it sounds like a cheeky plot to a zombie apocalypse or global contagion movie.

How subtle are the flavors? Unsubtle enough that an oblivious taster might ask, "Does this bread taste like grapes to anyone else here?" Or does one need guidance to search for the flavor?

Fully visible with naked eye in Kansas City. Beautiful magenta hues in the sky. My first time seeing an aurora in person.

Not using TUIs (unfortunately). Work in a large business on services for real estate transactions. Heavy GUI applications. I’ve actually been investigating adding heavily keyboard-driven interfaces to our GUI apps with my teams because the multi-screen clicking around all our users have to do now is so incredibly slow and inefficient.

Some of my most productive use of software (in both personal and professional settings) have been with TUIs.

Even with all the hype around AI right now (and we’re working with that, too), we can’t not have more traditional UIs to keep a human in the loop when it matters the most and as a fallback for when AI misses the mark - but that doesn’t have to mean it’s all click heavy.

Disclaimer: I’m not a fan of TikTok and have many critical opinions of Ayn Rand’s philosophies, but…

This gives me vibes of a weird company takeover, a la the kinds of things that happened in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: government-driven benefits to large corporations and investors with friends in the right places, government involvement, forced licensure of a core aspect of the product (Rearden Metal?).

I’d like to learn more about: what are some other similar instances of such a thing?

FYI: daggerjs.org is resolving to a GoDaddy domain parked page right now.

Will check out the repo linked at the end of your message.

That wasn’t the take I was going for, but can see how it came off that way.

I’m opposed to these mega corps and looking (hoping) for some silver lining here that gives me some hope. Sibling comments have educated on that front.