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archeantus

489 karma · joined March 21, 2017

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archeantus··on Lightweight PDF parser with layout, tables, formulas and bounding boxes
Great work, thanks for sharing.
archeantus··on What even is an OS now?
Banks and schools and businesses should get in the business of simply vending APIs (or MCP connections). Agents and bots are taking away the need for the endless knobs and dials of traditional software. Just expose my data securely and my agent will do what I want with it, when I need it.
archeantus··on Being ambitious and being a dad
I am the father, and I have a ton of involvement in the day-to-day work of running the house. This brings me and my wife a lot of satisfaction and it undoubtedly wouldn’t be possible if I was still commuting to work in Silicon Valley.
archeantus··on Being ambitious and being a dad
Correct, real estate.
archeantus··on Being ambitious and being a dad
I felt very conflicted about this topic when I was young and working for Apple. I decided the Valley commute and rat race wasn’t very family conducive so I took a remote job and moved a few states over and it’s been great.

I’ve been fully remote for 12+ years now, and I’ve had a very successful career in engineering and engineering leadership. I also have eight kids that I get to spend a ton of time with. There’s a remote tax on career growth, but my RE side hustles have more than compensated for it.

Every now and then I wonder what might have been if I had stayed at Apple. No way to know for sure, but I probably couldn’t have afforded the family and lifestyle that I enjoy now.

archeantus··on OpenAI's new device will be hockey puck-sized and cost over $300
This feels like the obvious future. Everybody doom scrolls on their phones too much, but we can’t get rid of them because of the convenience of the productive things we can do when we need to.

So if there was a way to enable the productivity (or even multiply it, let’s be real) without the doomscrolling, a lot of people would go for that.

Not to mention the endless fiddling we’ve had to resort to with phones. We’ve gotten used to it, but apps for everything is such a cognitive burden on people. A screen-less AI assistant is the perfect solution for this. I can’t wait.

archeantus··on Taste Is All That's Left
Great read. Ironic that he cited Pirsig because I think that reading ZATAOMM was the last time that I experienced this type of writing that made me pause and think deeply about what I just read.
archeantus··on OpenAI Acquires TBPN
Distribution is the moat. This is distribution, I guess.
archeantus··on Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
Not according to this guy who works on Claude Code: https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389?s=20

What a PR nightmare, on top of an already bad week. I’ve seen 20+ people on X complaining about this and the related confusion.

archeantus··on New YC homepage
I see Airbnb first
archeantus··on New YC homepage
What stood out to me more than how impressive the carousel of companies was, was the order of them. Wild that they have OpenAI and Stripe second and third to Airbnb.
archeantus··on Why senior engineers let bad projects fail
When I read the title I wondered “does this really happen?” And then I read a few lines and remembered “yes, I definitely did this all the time”.

The reality is that a lot of people put ideas forward solely for the purpose of getting attention and trying to get promoted. A lot of those ideas are full of hope and enthusiasm and lacking in fundamentals. But to shoot it down makes you come across as a nay-sayer, or a Debbie-downer. Even though you are sure it’s going nowhere, the reality is that it’s a lot easier to let the market prove you right.

Less hurt feelings and interpersonal drama that way. Seems wasteful, but at the end of the day you got data and learnings that you didn’t have otherwise. So hey, silver linings.

archeantus··on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says
Nope. This is the original. Maybe someone else took my idea
archeantus··on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says
Maybe it’s true they can’t find citizens:

- at that price - in the Bay Area

But certainly they don’t have grounds to say they can’t find citizens to write JS or make apps.

archeantus··on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says
If you want a good job in tech, go look at Walmart’s job board in the coming weeks. They literally have thousands of Indians doing all kinds of jobs that could easily be done by Americans. I liked my time there, and there’s lots of great people, but it felt very clear that the system was being abused.
archeantus··on Some thoughts on LLMs and software development
If all you’ve done with AI is just use it for autocomplete, you’re missing out big time. I built a slick react app using Lovable yesterday and then created a Node BE using Claude Code today. I told Claude Code to look through the FE code to understand the requirements and purpose of the site, and to build a detailed plan (including proposed DB schemas) for a system that could support that functionality.

It generated a thousand line file with a robust breakdown of everything that needed to be done and at my command it did it. We went module by module and I made sure that each module Had comprehensive unit test coverage and that the repo built well as we went. After a few hours of back and forth we made 9 modules, 60+ APIs across 10 different tables, and hundreds of unit tests that all are passing.

Does that mean that I’m all done and ready to deploy to prod? Unlikely. But it does mean that I got a ton of boilerplate stuff put into place really quickly and that I’m eight hours into a project that would have taken at least a month before.

Once the BE was done I had it generate extensive documentation for the agent that would handle the FE integration as a sort of instruction guide - in case we need it. As issues and bugs arise during integration (they will!) the model has everything it needs to keep on track and finish the job it set out to do.

What a time to be alive!

archeantus··on Show HN: Base, an SQLite database editor for macOS
I first bought this app 15+ years ago (before the logo was glowing). It was an incredible piece of software then, and I’m sure this is a worthy upgrade. Absolutely a delightful product.
archeantus··on Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately
I read that most of the crazy comp Zuck is offering is in stock. So in a way, going to the place where they have lots of stock reflects their belief about where AGI is going to happen first.
archeantus··on Series C and scale
Can you elaborate more on this? You’re using a web ide? And you love it?
archeantus··on Embeddings Are Underrated
Great read. Brain started fry when it talked about infinite dimensions but then I imagined it looking like the black hole scene at the end of interstellar and that helped a bit (though it’s not like that scene made any sense either)
archeantus··on GPT-4.1 in the API
“GPT‑4.1 scores 54.6% on SWE-bench Verified, improving by 21.4%abs over GPT‑4o and 26.6%abs over GPT‑4.5—making it a leading model for coding.”

4.1 is 26.6% better at coding than 4.5. Got it. Also…see the em dash

archeantus··on Gemini 2.5 Pro vs. Claude 3.7 Sonnet: Coding Comparison
Can you please expound on this? You’re using this approach to turn an existing codebase into a single file and then asking Gemini to make changes/enhancements? Does it also handle breaking the files back out? Would love more info!
archeantus··on The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you're in Brazil
I was just at the Outer Banks and I walked through the memorial/park they have there. It was very well done and I left feeling very inspired and motivated.

Then I went home and watched a documentary explaining all the stuff that happened after their success at Kittyhawk. Pretty sad that they took the patent/scarcity approach and stopped innovating. It was a cautionary tale to me to never let your foot off the gas once you’ve found something that works.

archeantus··on Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]
Apple should just buy Nintendo at this point. They don’t seem to have anything else going on.
archeantus··on Apple squandered the Holy Grail
It feels very apparent to me that Apple was caught completely flat footed by ChatGPT’s release. As a result, they were very far behind and have been unable to catch up.

What they released as Apple Intelligence wasn’t a well-planned, cohesive product as much as the only thing they could possibly do, given the timelines they were up against. Maybe they’ll catch up, but they’re definitely behind and it’s a shocking thing to behold.

archeantus··on The Startup Trap (2013)
This post sears and burns with the heat of a thousand suns. How I wish I could have read this every day, ten times a day, as I was starting out on my startup journey three years ago.

So many corners were cut in the name of speed. So much pressure from my cofounder/investor to get things out way too fast. So many months of endless suffering and never-ending bugs due to poor architecture that doesn’t scale on the BE.

I know how to push back. I do it for a living at my day job and I’m really good at it. For some reason I decided that I couldn’t ever push back against the guy who put in some money. How horribly wrong I was.

archeantus··on Reverse Engineering iOS 18 Inactivity Reboot
Great post. They talked about the possibility of iOS 18 wirelessly telling other phones to reboot, but then afaik didn’t address that again. Maybe they did and I missed it?
archeantus··on Sam's Club CTO to Exit Due to Walmart Relocation Policy
I spent 7 amazing years working for Walmart Labs (what they called it at the time) and it was a great place to work. I was being paid like I lived in the Bay Area, but I lived in a much lower cost of living area. I worked my tail off for them and got two promotions. On the second one they declined to increase my annual RSU target because I was making too much for my geo. I saw the writing on the wall regarding their plans for remote workers and left to a competitor that has been much more remote friendly.

I know so many amazing people that were doing the work of their lives that quit or were laid off because of the RTO mandate. I can’t believe that they are doubling down on this, despite the human and financial costs associated with it.

Ultimately it highlights an important fact about working at WM (and lots of other companies, I am sure): you aren’t as special or irreplaceable as you think you are. Look out for yourselves and do what makes sense for you, always!

archeantus··on The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
I love this story but I wish I understood it better. How did people find their way to the URL if they didn't have DB access? Did they inspect the traffic with a proxy and see the db file going back and forth? I'm just trying to understand what one of these teens had to do to find their way onto that channel where they were hanging out. What steps did they have to figure out on their own?
archeantus··on The Vision Pro is a flop
It’s not a competitor to Siri…yet. But it’s pretty easy to see the two converging in the near future. The best way to make sure that your voice assistant is used and useful is to back it with an LLM that literally does and knows everything. That’s the future OpenAI is chasing, and the one Apple should be chasing. I’m hopeful that this year brings some quick advancements in this area. But judging by the fact that it’s a year behind OpenAI in the timing, it’s hard to believe that Apple isn’t behind right now.
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