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arnvald

2,356 karma · joined May 17, 2012

Hi, I'm Gregory, good to see you here!

You can see some of the content I write and record on my website: notonlycode.org; and some more at twitter.com/GregoryWitek

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arnvald··on Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B
Wow, this is quite shocking. I used to work in Amsterdam and Miro used to be one of more well-known companies there. A few of my friends worked there at some point.

I used it quite heavily at one company. I found it a bit bloated, but it was ok, and I didn't have to jump between one tool and another, it allowed me to draw some diagrams, do retrospective, share ideas with others.

Clearly the pandemic skyrocketed their valuation to a level they couldn't maintain...

arnvald··on My favorite keyboards
I’m one of those people. I loved Ergodox, switched to Moonlander but didn’t like it, tried out Voyager and stuck with it.

Voyager is not even a very ergonomic keyboard, but it’s good enough for me, I configured it so that it’s very convenient for me to use, I added some accessories to for better tilt, I’m good - my wrists don’t hurt anymore, and that was my goal

arnvald··on Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans
> See above. I assume what you are upset about is that rich fans are the ones going.

I'm upset that artists make the tickets affordable for different groups, and their fans want to see the concert. You have 2 sides that are in agreement. Then there's a 3rd, independent side that decides to abuse the system to make profit, hurting 2 other sides.

Imagine that you pay road tax and the government builds highway. Everyone's happy. Now there's a militia that sets up checkpoints and takes a toll for driving on the highway. Unrelated 3rd party tries to benefit by abusing the system.

> Scalpers don't buy tickets and not sell them. The most scalped concerts are obviously the most attended

If you buy 100 tickets for $100 and sell them for $300 you need to sell only 34 tickets to break even. The concert hall could be sold out and half empty at the same time. Of course there are concerts where scalpers will sell 100% of what they got, but they don't need to.

arnvald··on Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans
Fewer people go to concerts, fans can’t afford the tickets, less connection with the artists, less interest in music overall.

Artists lose, even if they get paid and all the tickets technically are sold out. Fans lose. The only people who win are scalpers who just abuse the system.

arnvald··on Googlebook
> powered by premium hardware

It's hard to treat this part seriously while seeing HP logo on the page.

arnvald··on Waymo in Portland
I wonder if at some point we'll see a hockey stick adoption of self-driving cars. For now every new city is worth a blog post, eventually they'll allow intercity drives. Will international adoption take off? Will I be able to use it on a country road to visit my family in 10 years?
arnvald··on Social media is no longer social
For me it was:

- most posts I saw on Facebook were from my friends

- Instagram was full of photos from my friends

- on Twitter I mostly saw tweets from people I knew in person or open source contributors I followed

Then my Facebook feed started having more and more „suggestions” then pages and groups, more brands than people. Instagram started showing me influencers and over time moved from photos to videos to counter TikTok. Twitter also started showing algorithmic feeds with more and more „suggested” people rather than those I followed. I stopped replying, commenting, eventually posting, social media turned into consumption-heavy media

arnvald··on An update on recent Claude Code quality reports
What's the alternative? Are you suggesting other LLM providers don't charge high price? Or that they don't make mistakes? Or that they provide better quality?

We're talking about dynamically developed products, something that most people would have considered impossible just 5 years ago. A non-deterministic product that's very hard to test. Yes, Anthropic makes mistakes, models can get worse over time, their ToS change often. But again, is Gemini/GPT/Grok a better alternative?

arnvald··on SDL bans AI-written commits
Will they? Will someone have enough time, skill and dedication to maintain it? I don’t think using AI will by itself make a big enough difference, it’s still a lot of work to maintain a project
arnvald··on Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight
Let’s say I listen to 10h a month of a single artist, nothing else. So 100% of my payment (minus Spotify take) should go to that artist.

Let’s say you listen 90h to another artist, and nothing else.

In the current model both artists are put together, 100h and let’s say $20 to split. Your artist gets 90% because they’ve been listened to for 90h, so they get $18 and my artist gets $2

In my model my artist gets $10 because they get 100% of what I pay and your artist gets $10 because they get 100% of what you pay.

The difference is 50/50 vs 90/10 split

arnvald··on Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight
Well, if I listen to a shuffle radio then the artists I listen to will get paid, right? Which I’m fine with, it’s not that I want to support one specific artist (I can buy their album or merch if that’s my goal), I just want the money I pay to go to artists I listen to, not to the people from top charts that I don’t care about
arnvald··on Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight
I’d love to see a streaming service where my payment goes to artists I listen to.

Spotify pays 70% of their music revenue to publishers based on the total number of listens. All revenue is put together and split based on the global numbers. Which means that niche band I like will get next to nothing. Instead if they account for 50% of my listening time in one month, they should get 35% of what I paid to Spotify that month. Unfortunately big labels will never agree to that.

arnvald··on My AI-Assisted Workflow
Nobody writes about their work thinking the whole world will read it. They write it for their friends, maybe a small group of regular readers, also for themselves. I for one really like it, even if I get bored after reading 5 similar articles, because maybe someone will only ever read one of them, and it’ll help them improve their own work.
arnvald··on The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind
Absolutely, the moment I saw „95% of Slack core functionality” I stopped believing the author knows what he’s talking about
arnvald··on We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
I think it means parallel branches. Normally in git you can use one branch at a time. With agentic coding you want agents to build multiple features at the same time, each in a separate branch
arnvald··on Dear Heroku: Uhh What's Going On?
Heroku runs on AWS though, doesn’t it? They just package it.

I don’t think it’s impossible for them to survive. Salesforce bought them more than 10 years ago and did little to support growth of Heroku. And yet they’re still around and people still ask „is there something new with comparable customer experience?” because they don’t mind paying more

arnvald··on I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok
I actually enjoy having mobile apps for lots of use cases – travel, news, entertainment, utility bills, banking. I have probably around 100 apps on my iPhone right now and I'm fine with this number.

There are 2 things though that make me dislike mobile apps.

First, regularly logging me out. It's so frustrating, especially if the app does not support biometric login. I have a password manager, so I can log in rather quickly, but I just want to be logged in for months.

Second, webviews, I just can't understand mobile apps that render part of their content inside webviews. Like, either commit to having a proper native mobile experience or just let me use your website. One of the more annoying cases for me personally is NBA app. I'm searching for some stat, I open their website in a browser, it redirects me to the app, the app opens and then renders the same web page in a web view. What's even the point?!

arnvald··on GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
I’ll never understand why they ruined GitHub. They had everything they needed - the one place in the world where 99% of open source projects were hosted, where all the discussions happened. A product that people were so used to that it was a no brainer when it came to hosting private repos. And they had to ruin it and give space to GitLab and other competitors. What a waste…
arnvald··on Garry Tan's Claude Code Setup
I don't understand how adding an ad to every single skill is a good idea:

https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/commit/9d47619e4c72136574...

It just unnecessarily clutters the context, in EVERY single skill.

arnvald··on Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
It's really not that simple.

Numerous times I've seen promotions going to people who were visible but didn't do the actual work. Those who share the achievements on Slack, those who talk a lot, get to meetings with directors, those who try to present the work.

arnvald··on Don't become an engineering manager
> It’s a bad time to move away from tech

Working at big tech these days I see EMs and directors playing with AI, building tools, contributing to codebase through AI agents. Today when there's less hiring and building the org, becoming EM doesn't mean moving away from tech

> The ladder is very competitive

Just like on IC path. You think that being a great builder will move you from staff to principal role? Nope. It's about setting direction, aligning people, finding opportunities. A set of skills that's very close to what managers do.

> The pay is lower

When you compare EM against staff engineers. Is EM and staff the same level? In some companies, yes. In some companies, EM is at senior or between senior and staff. So yes, on average it will be lower than staff, but EM is not a promotion, it's a change of career path.

In any case, if someone's wondering whether they should try EM role given a chance, I still say: go for it. Going back has never been easier, a lot of companies now cuts manager roles and allows people to move back to IC, so if you have a chance to become EM and are curious about it, give it a try.

arnvald··on Don't trust AI agents
It’s totally different. People have to obey laws and contracts because there are consequences if they don’t, there are fines, arbitrage, courts.

What happens if AI agent you run causes a lot of damage? The best you can do is to turn it off

arnvald··on Two insider cases we've recently closed
I imagine most countries will regulate it as gambling. Some already do – Netherlands fined Kalshi or Polymarket (don't remember which one) for operating without a gambling license. I guess US will be one of the last ones to do it (certainly won't go for it under the current administration)
arnvald··on Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
Any pledges/values/principles that are abandoned as soon as it becomes difficult to keep them, are just marketing. This is just the next item on the list.
arnvald··on Facebook is cooked
IMO Facebook has a bigger problem - I’m a millennial, far closer to a middle aged man than to a teenager, and I don’t want to be on Facebook because it’s so full of garbage. There’s just nothing interesting except for Market.

Surely there’ll be a follow up to TikTok and other trendy apps, but Facebook is where I should want to be, and I don’t

arnvald··on ClawHub
Do these skills actually provide much value? Like, how much better are they than something that I could tell Claude to generate based on a single API doc from Slack/Trello?
arnvald··on GitHub is down again
GitHub is the new Internet Explorer 6. A Microsoft product so dominant in its category that it's going to hold everyone back for years to come.

Just when open source development has to deal with the biggest shift in years and maintainers need a tool that will help them fight the AI slop and maintain the software quality, GitHub not only can't keep up with the new requirements, they struggle to keep their product running reliably.

Paying customers will start moving off to GitLab and other alternatives, but GitHub is so dominant in open source that maintainers won't move anywhere, they'll just keep burning out more than before.

arnvald··on Company as Code
It's all cool as long as you keep all of this up to date, and that requires a lot of scrutiny and discipline.

Once I had to go through a security audit at a job I had. Part of it was to show managing secret keys and who had access to them. And then I realized that the list of people who had access to one key was different than the list of the code owners of the service I was looking at, which was yet different than the list of the administrators of that service. 3 different sources of truth about ownership, all in code, all out of sync.

arnvald··on All my new code will be closed-source from now on
That's cool, and I'm happy for you that you are in a position that allows you to get income from other sources, so that you can write OS code in your spare time.

Not everyone can or wants to go this way, though, and we got a number of fantastic tools and libraries thanks to people who tried and succeeded in making money from open source. Some folks live off donations, some are paid by their employers to write OS, and some added extra features that allowed them to both offer their tools for free and to monetize them at the same time. It's sad that the last path starts to disappear, at least for some tools. In the end it probably will result in fewer OS libraries, because some number of authors will have to either find another income stream, or abandon their projects.

arnvald··on Oh My Zsh adds bloat
I used Oh My Zsh for years, but there were literally 3-4 features I relied on: autocompletion, git plugin, history search, and one theme.

For some reason it was slow to load which I found annoying, so I used Claude Code to optimize it. In the end I ended up removing Oh My ZSH entirely, now I have a single .zshrc file that contains everything, and it became much faster.

Similarly I moved from Packer to Lazy.nvim and updated a number of libraries, and from iTerm to Ghostty, Claude Code essentially converted my configs in a matter of minutes

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