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Not hard to understand. People will pay for a better UX. Which Plex has, once you disable all the streaming junk.

Also there’s simply more clients for it. The only way to play Bluray Dolby Vision layers correctly is with an AM6B+ which has an amazing Plex frontend.

This assumes Valve isn't artifically bumping up the Steam Machine for more exposure.

Well I don't know the details from Apple's side, and this was 20 years ago. That was just the discussion on the ground. I personally experienced a senior Mot employee grilling me about some IP I had developed, then go to Apple the next week. Also saw many directors/VPs with extensive proprietary knowledge go to Apple. Apple opened up recruiting events 10 minutes down the street from Mot HQ in Schaumburg Hilton to poach the best people (which I went to, and flew to Cupertino to interview for the original iPhone ios team - wish I had passed that, I would be retired by now!). I know there was also a free flow of information as part of the ROKR collab while Apple was working secretly on the iPhone.

Psychotherapy. I've also done a lot of CBT in the past - but I found it didn't really solve my issues, just provides some temporary relief. I personally found going for a long walk to be better than CBT techniques.

Yep - meds. Tried a bunch and duloxetine is making a massive difference for me. On them for 4 months so far.

Also picked up therapy yet again but tbh I never found therapy to really solve things - it helps me understand myself better at a logical level but the underlying anxiety / depression (including suicidal ideation) has never really gone away until the meds.

I'd say right now I'm feeling quite content with life, and even find myself feeling genuinely happy throughout the day about things. Which is something I haven't really experienced before. I still have some of those feelings of anxiety crop up but they fade away pretty fast. Depression is completely gone for the most part. I'm still trying to understand this new reality as I'm not used to it at all. But I think (with some caution still!) it's pretty great.

I know anti depressants have a lot of bad press and I’ve even had therapists tell me it’s a crutch. So I’ve generally been hesitant to start them. But they work, not sure why they work, but they do for me at least and I’m glad I stuck with it to find the right one.

This... I finally changed my life by talking to a psychiatrist after 40+ years of suffering and trying a myriad of things. Mental illnesses are real and need real treatment.

The irony to me is Apple did the exact same thing to Motorola back in the day, which I saw firsthand as a Mot eng. Poached employees and IP. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.

Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.

As an old timer, I saw this firsthand happen with Motorola. Apple did the same shenanigans, stealing IP and engineers. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.

Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.

The harness is so much better than cc which is a buggy mess. Gpt is also way faster than Claude. I’ve been using gpt for a while now and I know a lot of people that swapped away from Anthropic for multiple reasons. However - fable still seems to be the best coding agent, it’s just slow and the harness sucks. So I still use it in some rare cases like to review codex. I’m hoping 5.6 lets me drop it entirely.

Yikes, why is this AI slop post #1 on HN? I have to deal with enough of this at work.

Watching companies burn themselves to the ground at the altar of AI is really something.

This is the one great feature about Gmail I think.

But I haven’t touched Gmail in years, been on fastmail for about 6 years now.

I’ve solved this by using the fastmail-mcp plugin and have a skill that organises all my mails for me and highlights high priority ones. Works great - I run it every few days, takes about 5-10 minutes.

This sucks to hear.

I honestly think the rise of LLMs will be the death of open source in the long run. Already, apparently, quality of OSS has dropped significantly since 2025 (so most models stop training on github after this).

I don't think a lot of OSS authors quite understand the extent to which models like claude/codex rely on their work. I'd bet money there are extensive curated tasks using your tooling for post-training. With 0 attribution or anything, these models are using your work wholesale to build sophisticated agents that can do your job.

Yeah it's depressing as hell. I guess it's the same thing for artists and musicians and writers.

P.S. I can symphathise with the old house issues! I bought a 1901 terraced property, it's an absolute money pit.

Thank god for Kagi. It literally saved search for me, although I mostly use kagi.com/assistant these days.

I almost always use orchestration tooling nowadays. cc itself feels too basic, even with things like superpowers.

Can golang do zero copy networking nowadays? In the past golang was terrible at this kind of thing due to allocations and copies of all relayed data.

Don’t really agree with this.

That dev is productive with AI precisely _because_ they have a good mental model.

AI like other tools is a multiplier - it doesn’t make bad devs good, but it makes good devs significantly more productive.

Yeah it was a bit reductionist. I guess it was my reaction to the negativity.

I think his experience is quite common in big tech, and even swapping teams doesn’t seem to help in my own experience. It’s the rare teams that have any agency, or even clear ownership over the code. It seems by design but as a craftsman it is very frustrating.

I haven’t read anyone put it in words quite as well as Sean’s posts. This really is the nihilistic side of big tech that is rarely written about.

So I think it’s a unique insight - hence why I’m kind of baffled at the reaction. I think if you can relate to what he’s saying (it hits really close to home for me), it’s easy to sympathise with.

Imagine an entire world of interactive, colourful ascii art.

I mostly started on my local BBS on Long Island playing tradewars in my teens, around 14 (where I memorably won as top player for a few months and got tons of credits).

I actually have no memory of how I discovered BBSs, I think I found some directory at the library then found my local one.

I expanded from there to some bigger ones (requiring a special telephone plan so it didn’t cost a fortune!). I played some rpg (maybe lotrd?) with like a hundred players and it was an absolute blast.

Other highlights:

I found a credit card generator and used it try getting free credits which got denied. The owner called my parents house and they had no clue what they were talking about.

Another time I was trying some exploits to get ops access and the admin caught me (BBS servers would echo the remote session). Admin interrupted my session and we started chatting. He recognised I was a naive script kiddie and we chatted about love of BBSs and computers. Pretty cool.

It was a magical time for sure.

Everyone's circumstances are different right? It's not always so simple.

Big tech was a bit of an experiment for me in my 40s, I always worked at small/med size companies before. I think it was worth it (for the learnings and comp). I get a lot more choices in the future when I'm financially secure.

Sean, I wonder why people are so negative here. I think they’ve never worked in big tech.

As a staff swe in big tech your blog posts resonate strongly and reflect my own experience. But I can see if I didn’t have that experience I’d be unable to relate or even understand.

Maybe it is nihilism - but I think that’s also a natural result of working for big corps.

Cc is buggy as hell man. I frequently search the github for the issue I’m having only to find 10 exact bugs that no one is looking at.

Obviously they don’t care. Adoption is exploding. Boris brags about making 30 commits a day to the codebase.

Only will be an issue down the line when the codebase has such high entropy it takes months to add new features (maybe already there).

Hanlon's razor applies.

I don't really understand what is going on with Ofcom.

This nonsense, and yet they allow GBNews to keep spewing propaganda and violate almost all broadcast standards that Ofcom is supposed to enforce.

You can buy good quality replacement batteries. I got Cameron Sino "CS-EC003XL". It lasts at least a week before needing a charge, depending how much you use it.

Possibly it's a paid for ad. But the trend is real, at least among Gen Z/Alphas. I recently modded an iPod Mini 2nd gen for my daughter and put Rockbox on it. The thing is amazing, and I am thinking about buying an iPod classic myself. The touch wheel interface is one of my favourite interfaces ever.

Seems commonly used in Big Tech - first time I heard it was in my current job. Now it's seared into my brain since it's used so much. Among many other acronyms which I won't bore you with.

Honestly seems like the moral panic of the day. I was just reading about some “red vs blue” school meme in London which led to a lot of hand wringing and parents keeping their kids at home. The kicker? There was no actually school battles, it was a viral meme (mostly consumed by adults) and the kids just thought it was a joke.

Pretty much sums up all modern discourse in banning social media and doing age checks. When I was growing up it was satanic symbols in the music I listened to.

I guess - wtf is wrong with adults? Why do they feel compelled to control the younger generation?

Not sure why you got downvoted with a perfectly valid opinion!

I’ve done what OP describes but I’m heavily introverted and likely HSP too. I’m pretty good at it but it’s incredibly exhausting. My father is exactly the same way.

As I get older, the more I consider self care and prioritising my own needs over others to be happy. To that end, I much prefer to keep to myself and so I do.

However it doesn’t stop me from engaging in impromptu conversations. I just don’t go out of my way to talk to literally everyone.

There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.