ryandrake

Yuck. Look closely at the wording: He is trying to counter a "user choice" feature by saying it doesn't have "protection". "File protection." "Protection of the key." Protection from who? From the user, that's who!

This mentality that the user is an attacker, and the software must protect its data from the user. Isn't a passkey ultimately supposed to be my data?

Yea, I worked for a competitor to ATI back in the day and we were definitely Quakemaxxing. We were not so unethical as to try to detect the .EXE name so to put the GPU into a "cheating" mode only when that benchmark was run, but we did run Quake 3 pretty much constantly while trying to eke out a few more FPS...

Some applications provide a "paste without formatting" that is distinct from "paste" but often that one removes things like hyperlinks, which you generally want to keep.

The "paste" idiom has been thoroughly stressed to the limit. Should "paste" paste just text? Should it include text color? Should it in crude text background color? Should it include typeface? Should it include text size? Should it include attached metadata like hyperlinks? Should it include other stuff around and peripheral to the text?

I resent that I need a special app to "manage" them. I want to know where this key is on my filesystem so I can back it up and edit it myself, not have to use some app to access it. My ssh authorized_keys is just a text file. I can "manage" it with something as simple as vim. Maybe KeePassXC and BitWarden give you that simplicity, if so great!

I don't know any knowledge-worker role that gives you a fixed X amount of work to do, and lets you chill if you get it done in Y amount of time. If the expectation is that with AI you should be doing your work in Y/2 amount of time, they all will just require you to do 2X the amount of work.

Yup, when the company succeeds or does something good, it's the CEO's excellent leadership. When the company fails or does something bad, the culpability gets spread vaguely over the entire company.

I guarantee you that there are real people out there in tech who think getting to a "Drink verification can" world would be great for corporate profit, and are actively doing things that bring us closer to that world rather than farther away.

I never understood the business reason for doing this. Do they really think listeners will switch away if they go 500 milliseconds without hearing a human voice?

That's the most annoying thing about password managers, and a major reason I still don't use them: there exists no password manager that is cross-platform (desktop/mobile in particular), local-first, and isn't sketchy or enshittified or otherwise on HN's current "don't use it, use <whatever> instead" list.

I've used pwsafe for years now. I think it checks off all your boxes. Works on desktop and mobile. Local-first but allows cloud if you really want to. No ads or enshittification. Bonus: Open Source. Other Bonus: Not owned by BigTech or LittleTechThatValuesMonetizationOverSecurity

In some areas, density is appropriate, and in some areas it's not. I wish we could talk about housing density and "build more housing" as if there was not one universal solution that worked everywhere and for everyone. Dense urban living is not appropriate in a rural or suburban town. Single family homes are not appropriate in a high-demand urban area. Different people want different things, too. No matter how efficient and good for the environment it is, I don't want to live in a concrete honeycomb in the middle of a loud city.

Yea, there's probably not one single issue that people are fed up with, but datacenters have become lightning rods that represent big tech's disproportionate power over us, job-displacing AI, and are a visible example of how municipalities that we elect--serve and prioritize companies from out of town over their voters.

Also, most commercial radio DJs would talk and talk and talk all the way up to the point in the song where lyrics started, and then right after the last lyric, they'd start yacking again. A lot of music that was on the radio in the 70s, 80s and 90s had great instrumental intros and outros that you just totally missed because some garbage DJ had to get in one last "TODAY'S HITS, YESTERDAY'S LEGENDS, ONLY ON IDIOT ROCK 95.1!!!"

If only ISPs would actually crack down on (usually unwitting) users whose systems are participating in a malicious botnet or otherwise have their networks compromised. They could offer temporary disconnection + anti-malware support to get the user cleaned up, if they actually gave a shit.

Those apps just shouldn't exist.

I don't know how "join your users to a botnet" became some kind of legitimized monetization scheme. Ads are bad enough. What's next? "Participate in a DDOS in order to use our app?"

I wonder how informed the end user actually is, and if it's disclosed to them what kind of content might pass through their network as a result of agreeing.

Only if the app provides 1. prominently-displayed, informed consent, 2. an option to opt-out without losing app functionality, or 3. joining the botnet provides some kind of actual benefit to the user, besides just money to the developer.

I'd at least expect there to be an investigation, based on the huge volume of information that already exists. Unless we believe that the files are just 3 million pages of casserole recipes and that the people who visited just went to play Settlers of Catan.

Yea, until at least one non-ringleader Epstein party participant goes to jail, I'm not going to believe the US actually gives a shit about protecting children.

The irony of trying to block content/visitors based on country, while publishing on a platform called the "World Wide" web. IP address blocks that roughly correspond with geographic regions is kind of a design flaw.

Same here. XBMC/Kodi pointed at NFS has served me and my family well for 15+ years. Every once in a while I check out the alternatives with their custom server software and thick "stacks" and conclude that they don't offer me anything I want to do that I can't do with just shared files.

I'm just like that, but minus the expectation of release/money/success. To me, the building and programming itself is the reward, and I have no motivation or desire to release anything I work on--or any belief that it would/should make money for me. To me, the hours spent fine sanding down and polishing my code, always approaching but never achieving perfection, is its own reward.

You are right--Doctors absolutely share blame. Take my dentist's behavior, for example. When the oral hygienist is done doing all the real work, my dentist sits down for 10 minutes to count my teeth and say the words "You should floss more." She bills $85 for that sentence and calls it "Oral hygiene instructions". My insurance company (IMO rightly) denies paying for this. It's ridiculous and the dentist knows they're going to call bullshit on it, but they bill it anyway, and then I'm technically on the hook to pay for it. So far, the dentist has not yet attempted to balance bill that charge, and I will drop them like a bad habit if they ever do.

I feel the same way. I want to watch movies and listen to music and read books! I don't want to "consume content." That phrase feels like it reduces my role to just be a generic pac-man gobbling up whatever bland grays dots of vague content are "created" and set down in front of me. That's not what it should be.

Some of them are.

What makes that reasonable? I can open and repair pretty much any other electronic device in my house if I need to. What makes a phone special?

I think the point is that using an LLM is not really going to shrink project timelines by that degree.

Most large software projects I've worked on in a professional environment, "writing the code" was one of the fastest and smallest parts of the project. Maybe 10% of the overall calendar time of any given project was "designing and typing in software." The bulk of time spent tends to be working with customers, researching and refining requirements, reviewing the requirements with execs and leads to get their buy-in and support for staffing the project, performing various non-engineering reviews like legal and privacy, aligning timeframes among multiple contributing teams, seeking approval from Director X to move on to the next project phase, waiting for Key Team Member Y to get back from vacation, conducting QA and field testing, soaking the software through various rollout stages like internal, dogfood, internal staging, external beta, and then incremental percentages in prod, while watching and waiting for any regressions or failures. On a project that takes 6 months from idea to 100% in-production, writing the code might take a few weeks of that.

So why are we so focused on a tool that speeds up the smallest part of this process?

I think this is an area where the developers of the agent harnesses should be spending a lot of effort. It's not reasonable to expect your users to set up and maintain a VM just to safely use a tool. When I run cmake, I don't have to worry about it accidentally deleting my root filesystem or posting my account credentials to github. Most of the command line coding tools I use don't even need/have a --dry-run option.

One of the most wild parts of the "Is AI useful" arguments is how different people are getting so astoundingly different results from it. One guy will claim that he can one-shot "Port this unmaintained app from 2017 to modern Android," go do the dishes, and come back to a working application. And the next guy will say, "I can't get it to do anything groundbreaking and have to micro-babysit it every step of the way to the point where it is more work." Assuming both people are truthful and operating in good faith, how can this be explained? How can simply writing a prompt in English be a "skill issue?"

I'm personally much more towards the "I struggle to get it to work well" side, but there have been so many anecdotes from people who are earnestly saying it does all their work for them and that they hit enter, go to bed, and wake up to working software. I'm trying to imagine a hammer or band saw that produces such wildly different results in the hands of different users.

As a casual AI code user, I can’t even go 30 seconds without claude grinding to a halt asking for permission to run a bash script for the 10th time.

It’s probably been 20 years since I’ve even noticed what brand of shoes anyone was wearing, let alone processed that information into some kind of economic class judgment. Is this really still a thing?