OtherShrezzing

Cool concept. Small feedback on the first user experience flow.

I downloaded the app to listen and write constructive notes for people, but I can’t enter the app until I’ve given microphone access and recorded a 30s clip. I’m on the bus, and can’t provide that audio now, and I’ll almost certainly forget about the app before I get 30 free seconds this evening. I think you’ll drop a lot of first time users here.

> Sometimes, these redirect URLs take a perceivable amount of time to load, which is very irritating

I do a bunch of work in remote areas with low-ping/low-bandwidth networks. The “hold on a skimmer while we round trip to Google” dark pattern makes the service unusable for me when I’m on-location.

I feel that the overly verbose AI generated marketing text on the page doesn’t do this product justice, given that the product’s claim is that it can reduce the verbosity of AI generated output.

> It isn't true now and it never will be for the top 1% of tasks, which will create the most economic gains

Vulcan Materials Company has produced some of the strongest and most resilient economic gains for investors at around 25% gross margins for 50 years.

Vulcan’s business is crushing rocks, and then driving those rocks to where people need crushed rocks.

I mention it because Vulcan isn’t a sophisticated business at its core, but its economic returns are exceptional, because they do their unsophisticated work exceptionally well, and exceptionally efficiently.

Across the economy, most economic gains are created by companies like Vulcan, who do boring repetitive work exceptionally well and efficiently.

I expect this to hold true into the era of AI. Most stuff probably doesn’t need an exceptional model, and paying for an exceptional model to do unsophisticated work will leave your business vulnerable to competitors who take time to find the most efficient model for the task, and undercut you.

That’s the average household cable tv subscription, no?

I subscribe to YouTube and my partner subscribes to Prime. We have a joint cable-like tv package too, and one of us pays for Disney Plus. In the past we’d have been consolidated into one cable subscription consumption, but now we appear in the stats as lots of distinct consumptions.

I think all-in, streamers plus other subscription based entertainment services are nearer to the $140 figure per household than the individual figures describe.

>So we're all lawyers, doctors and engineers,

I'd assume from the rest of your post that you'd all become olympians, astronauts, high ranked politicians, or founders of mega-corps. These are all fairly run-of-the-mill careers your family entered into, and plenty of people (I'd guess close to 100%) enter these roles without the type of abuse you suffered.

Hopefully the mortal disappointment you project onto your kids is a little lighter than that your parents projected onto you.

Considering how language models work, you'd expect two distinct conversations on the same mathematical problem to have enormous crossover.

If you could construct a sandbox to test this, where it doesn’t touch the real economy, then yeah it’s a great benchmark.

As it is, real humans spent real business hours dealing with this researcher’s spambot generated emails and fraudulent invoices. Individual recipients reported feeling harassed.

This isn’t a good benchmark. It’s a series of socially destructive crimes committed by the researchers and then documented and published on the internet.

I'd say this article is a stronger argument that "programming can be a hobby" than "programming is an art". Lots of people do lots of things for enjoyment without a salary, and we tend not to call all of those things an artform.

There's lots of competing definitions of art, but I don't think the article has reasonably linked programming to any of them. Maybe there's a thin & stretched link to the concept of a starving artist.

I read your comment first, and thought it was a bit uncharitable to the author. But then looking through their social media presence. No sign of commentary before late 2025.

Looking at the wayback machine, the site was first published in January 2026 with no blog. Then in Feb, the site was updated with a blog archive, including posts from 2025, before the site's blog functionality was active.

The blog post ends:

>I don’t use AI when writing. It produces soulless, bland text. AI slop that no one wants to read

But if you look back through earlier essays you see stuff like this:

>Technology evolves. Complacency endures. Building something means taking responsibility for its survival. It’s respect for time that can never be regained

Which has all of the hallmarks of a Claude generated essay (or just a human failing the Turing test).

I call this a tautological mental model. You can read the code over and over again, but your second reading will be mostly an echo of the mental model you built up in your first.

German law for malicious computer use is fairly loosely defined, and massively favours the harmed party over the one causing harm.

I don’t think it’d be a slam-dunk by any means, but a reasonably competent legal team should be able to establish a case around malicious data interference at the least. There’s certainly enough merit to the idea that OpenAI would be better off settling it as a civil matter early.

I think if you start taking cost into account for tasks which models have saturated a long time ago, the bitter lesson stops being applicable.

If your task is "write a function to sort a list of 1mn entries alphabetically", a small coding model will exactly match the performance of a frontier model (it'll 1-shot it, with 100% accuracy). So the only differentiator is cost, and the frontier model will cost orders of magnitude more than the specialised model.

For most intelligence based tasks, you don't (and never have) needed the tool which "performs best at all tasks". You need the cheapest one which performs adequately for your immediate task.

This doesn't mean the bitter lesson is incorrect. At the frontier, it's still correct. It means that it's not applicable at all to lots of tasks.

10% of their revenue comes from YouTube, so they need to make sure that they own any technology that might disrupt that platform.

Not sure this counts for Nebula. Font licenses (even very liberal ones) are a massive pain and expense for content creators who publish to multiple platforms in a variety of different mediums.

Collectively their creator/owners will be paying thousands of dollars/month for their fonts. Something you’ve correctly assessed that a very low number of their viewers will notice or care about.

Nebula can make one upfront payment (likely less than a single months font foundry payments for their owners), and give the creators absolute certainty that the created font is free forever, no matter the viewing platform or medium.

Seems like a decent place to allocate some idle cash.

>I imagine they are only buying one copy of each book

The previously struggling second hand bookseller in my town has upgraded their car from a 15 year old hatchback Renault to a brand new Range Rover. Some Canadian company has been buying any book he can provide them for the last year. Their quotes aren't by number of books, or even weight, but by volume. As in, they pay him by the shipping container, and he sends several of those a month.

I think it's reasonable to assume the books in this supply chain which aren't destroyed in digitisation are just pulped and sold to Procter & Gamble for toilet paper manufacturing. I can't see any other fate for Anthropic's second and third copies of The twelfth edition of Vera Lynn's 1980's memoir "We'll Meet Again".

One-to-many implementation. Stripe is one api to every bank. Openrouter is one api to every language model.

> A model you can run on a loptop is simply not going to work as well as it's needed for programming

The models you can run on a high-spec laptop today are approximately where frontier models were 12-18mo ago (albeit at a lower tok/s rate). If you scan back through hn comments from that era, you’ll find plenty of people saying “this is powerful enough to massively increase my productivity”.

Milton Friedman being the main quoted figure in the article, and that he attempts to link it back to his own field, is a huge irony. He’s certainly one of the most “wild ideas beyond his domain” public intellectuals of his century.

JaneStreet has enough free cash to not worry about those issues. If one of their key persons dies in service, they can go out and contract the worlds leading expert in that domain, and their annualised rate isn’t even a rounding error on their bottom line.

> I also like this kind of examples because no one in their right mind would ever spend the time to write something this custom

This is an odd take, given that Karpathy is certainly aware that the LotR films absolutely did create Bag End in digital format; that their creation was outstandingly high quality; and that Claude’s output here very obviously “leans heavily” on their prior art.

The readme on this project is nonsensical, and seems to be full of trivial errors. Example:

> CONTEXT_DEV_API_KEY Company logo, industry and socials from a domain.

It could be that the set of your day-to-day workload which could feasibly be accelerated by AI just happens to be saturated around Opus4.5, but you can still see lots of “reasoning” which makes you think the model is more performant in the first days of use. That’d mean you couldn’t perceive any meaningful difference in more powerful models’ results, even though you can see a difference in the raw output due to the length of reasoning traces leading up to the result.

So for example, if your workload was literally just addition of sets of numbers, you’d never have noticed progress in the result beyond GPT3.x level models. But you would perceive a difference in the now-Tolstoyan length reasoning text accompanying the result.

Am I misreading this, or is ycombinator running a tool that transfers IP from an applicant’s machine to OpenAI and then transfers the generated summaries into their own servers. And that tool has some “webapp security 101” level vulnerability in it.

Feels like a disaster waiting to happen.

I think the main thing of interest in the linked site is the dates. You can quickly get a view of what was possible and when.

I feel like we read different articles, because without context, the pictured dish looked like overcooked pork chops served next to a type of carbonara tagliatelle topped with a fried egg & chives. I can't imagine anyone has ever set out to make spamsilog and ended up with the generated dish.

It's different in kind to a "my Big Mac is more squashed than the advert on TV" type situation.

>But is that a widespread feeling, are the vibes bad for regular people, or is this effectively just old man shouting at clouds?

A cursory glance at YouGov strongly suggests that people have bad vibes about AI in basically every territory where they're asked about it, and for basically every use-case

There’s an OpenAI slide deck sitting in Goldman’s IPO preparation department right now with a pair of bullet points that read

>Q3 2027, introduce ‘ad-enhanced’ paid subscription tier

>Q2 2029, complete ad rollout to all paid subscribers

In the UK, farm vehicles use a specially dyed Red Diesel, which is the same liquid with a chemical added to it to turn it red. It’s taxed at a much lower rate, so you’ll sometimes pass petrol stations selling two Diesel from two different pumps, one of which is around half the price of the other.

If you’re caught running red diesel on a normal carriageway, the penalty can be steep.

I’m not suggesting Simon’s pelicans in the dataset are having a meaningful impact. I’m expecting that a company like ScaleAI has a product along the lines of “benchmax dataset: SimonW’s Pelican on Bikes test” which is a private curated series of well-drawn SVGs of animals riding vehicles for training and RL.