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mceachen

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Founder of PhotoStructure, a new home for all your photos and videos.

https://photostructure.com/

Founded AdGrok (a YC startup), which was acquired by Twitter in 2011.

Posts53
Comments1,119
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photostructure.com 4mo ago

The LLM Sycophancy Antidote

mceachen
12pts1
photostructure.com 2y ago

Just another day spelunking in the electron mines

mceachen
2pts1
jsxgraph.mentat.org 3y ago

Interactive Geometry and Mathematics Library

mceachen
1pts0
gist.github.com 3y ago

Git-restage: Ensure all diffs in currently staged files are staged

mceachen
2pts1
github.com 4y ago

ECMAScript Proposal: Types as Comments

mceachen
2pts1
www.githubstatus.com 4y ago

GitHub Actions is currently degraded

mceachen
5pts2
photostructure.com 5y ago

Switch your cross-platform CI to GitHub Actions in 5 minutes

mceachen
2pts0
devblogs.microsoft.com 5y ago

TypeScript v4.0.2 Released

mceachen
7pts0
jeff.sarn.at 5y ago

Structuring Changes with the Code Reviewer in Mind

mceachen
2pts0
www.reddit.com 5y ago

How I Prevented Love Triangles in My Database

mceachen
2pts0
www.theregister.com 5y ago

QNAP NAS malware Qsnatch reaches 62,000 infections

mceachen
1pts0
twitter.com 6y ago

Xfinity is now charging $10/50gb bandwidth overage fees

mceachen
3pts0
photostructure.com 6y ago

Why 3-2-1 isn't enough; or, How do I safely store my files?

mceachen
3pts0
medium.com 6y ago

What is a programming language community and what does it value?

mceachen
5pts0
www.wired.com 6y ago

Cryptography Could Protect Privacy in Covid-19 Contact-Tracing Apps

mceachen
2pts1
www.rei.com 6y ago

REI Retail Stores Closing Until March 27, with paid leave for employees

mceachen
2pts0
blog.photostructure.com 6y ago

Uncertain, lazy, forgetful, & impatient: It’s what you want your code to be

mceachen
4pts3
www.brainpickings.org 6y ago

The Measure of a Life Well Lived: Henry Miller (2014)

mceachen
2pts0
en.wikipedia.org 6y ago

Top 500 supercomputers by processor family

mceachen
57pts29
devblogs.microsoft.com 6y ago

TypeScript 3.6

mceachen
295pts204
history.stackexchange.com 7y ago

When did “&” stop being taught alongside the alphabet?

mceachen
13pts6
usn.ubuntu.com 7y ago

USN-3984-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities

mceachen
1pts1
blog.photostructure.com 7y ago

Introducing: PhotoStructure

mceachen
8pts0
nymag.com 7y ago

How Did the End of the World Become Old News?

mceachen
2pts0
www.typescriptlang.org 8y ago

TypeScript 2.7 released

mceachen
13pts3
medium.com 10y ago

How to fix the tech diversity crisis: Lifting the fog of bias

mceachen
14pts0
matthew.mceachen.us 12y ago

How to make breaking changes and not break all the things

mceachen
40pts12
blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp 13y ago

Ruby 1.8.7 EOL in 90 days

mceachen
94pts24
www.newyorker.com 13y ago

The Lie Factory: How politics became a business

mceachen
85pts15
matthew.mceachen.us 13y ago

Free and Easy Encrypted Storage with DropBox on Mac OS X

mceachen
5pts0
Qwen 3.8 4 days ago

Please don't conflate a volunteer effort with no expected economic gain with a very well funded company (or fleet of companies).

With the CCP's highly successful track record with subsuming other markets, Occam's razor applies to why they're doing this.

All of those phrases I've heard actively used even a decade (or two) ago. (I actually had to read your comment twice because I thought you were saying always, not never!)

"Critical path" and "long pole in tent" didn't make it into the model training data, but those were certainly also in play incessantly.

But they're all reasonably useful descriptions for common things, so I'm not surprised.

I don't know if it's universal, but your non-dominant hand may form reflected letters delightfully easily if you air-write simultaneously with your dominant hand.

More than 3 channel displays have been attempted by several companies, but I suspect they fail due to:

1) trying to convince content makers to use new custom high-gamut hardware to capture the new spot colors

2) you'd need a full video content production pipeline that can render to that color space

3) finding enough people to care enough to pay the (substantial) premium for niche production numbers.

4) Most content just doesn't warrant high gamut unless it's narrated by David Attenborough.

So, you have both a chicken and egg problem, and not that big of a TAM to warrant the struggle.

Cloudflare Flagship 2 months ago

If your engineer tells you that, you're going to have a bad time.

I think you're thinking this:

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. -Reid Hoffman

Nope, current flagship models are very happy to make huge missteps across the whole development stack of design, planning, implementation, and testing -- but playing different models against each other can help catch more egregious issues.

This is a very recent model behavior change: for me, Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and ChatGPT 5.4(ish) -- prior models and harnesses suffered much more from sycophancy.

(I still prompt some questions and reviews with "our intern suggested..." to allow models to judge the quality of the content apart from the messenger)

Do_not_track 3 months ago

I applied it to PhotoStructure more than a year ago—I think it was when I first saw this on HN?

My point is that there *is* such a thing as software that tries to respect their users. I'm not the only one.

Before anyone downvotes this guy, spend some time on the official Apple support forum.

I can't point at a bug that I've seen addressed in subsequent OS releases.

Seizure-inducing HDMI flickering from Night Shift. Finder Trash not supporting put-back _sometimes_. Printers becoming permanently "paused" sporadically, or worse, very consistently. Mouse lag/stuttering because you used "the wrong USB port." Apple photos libraries corrupting themselves with no recovery paths.

It would be strictly better to just not have the forum, then shouting sorrows into the void would feel more solitary.

Shades of Halftone 5 months ago

I drove a Scitex RIP (raster image processor) as my part time job in college. The CMYK (and if you were rich, N more spot colors) rotation degrees were held in religious fervor. Me: "These degrees seem random." Boss: "You are not to ever digress from those, they are the Only True Values" (and if you play with them in TFA you'll see it indeed becomes a moire mess with tiny tweaks, which would cost a ton in reprinting and delays).

It was mildly humorous that stochastic dithering (even with dot-gain compensation) was an option back in 1990, and produced much higher grade color reproductions, but clients wouldn't have any part of it, because it wasn't "the look" that I think they expect their readers expected.

I maintain a fork of sqlite-vec (because there hasn't been activity on the main repo for more than a year): sqlite-vec is great for smaller dimensionality or smaller cardinality datasets, but know that it's brute-force, and query latency scales exactly linearly. You only avoid full table scans if you add filterable columns to your vec0 table and include them in your WHERE clause. There's no probabilistic lookup algorithm in sqlite-vec.

The Codex App 6 months ago

It’s the inconsistency that gets me. Very similar tasks, similar complexity, same code base, same prompting:

Session A knocks it out of the park. Chef’s kiss.

Session B just does some random vandalism.

I wrote some tips and tricks that I've found to help coax Google Takeouts into working: https://photostructure.com/faq/takeout/

Also: you should try out the latest build! https://photostructure.com/about/v2026.1/

FWIW all of these projects rely on ExifTool (which people should donate to!) and my open-source node.js wrapper (that adds concurrency, does a ton of extra parsing work, and makes things a bit more ergonomic to live with): https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js

Gobsmackingly poor deals made by city and town politicians are par for the course, and why https://www.strongtowns.org/ should be prerequisite reading for any council member, mayor, or board member approving deals that impact their community.

It's easy to look at a glossy project 2-pager and only see the immediate tax revenue.

It's much harder to glean a nuanced understanding of future financial burdens from a given project. No company will have any incentive to be forthright with that information.