callc

I recently had a similar experience using Libby for the first time.

An absolutely incredible piece of software. If anyone here on HN works on it, you deserve to be proud of your work.

> The only effect this is going to have is accelerating the offshoring of jobs through more hiring in India, Europe and Canada, which is a net loss for the US.

I’m honestly tired of hearing the argument “if we do X then business will move to another state or out of US”.

Good riddance to the companies that flee from jurisdictions enforcing workers rights, don’t allow exploitation, etc.

The most important thing is protecting people, not fearing the cries of money-making machines.

I looked in the tech specs and found no mAh listed. Just video playback time. I find that incredibly sus.

Does anyone know it? Was it in announcement video?

Almost. Having access to the internet requires a device, or public computer if available. A just society would at least maintain ability to interact with all government services through in-person and through post office. Universal access.

> I don't care about competition, I care about the best product.

Competition is how you get to the best product. Lack of competition leads to malaise of product improvements as the market dominators are owning the space and happily exert their power over people.

> It's no different than going to a restaurant and them serving only Pepsi products.

There are two viable players for the average Joe in the phone market. There are I would guess 200-300 restaurants in my not so big town.

The number of choices matters a lot. If there were only two real option for restaurants around me, I would hope the management does not decide to be evil and lower food quality, jack up prices, or collude to only offer specific food while the other restaurant does not offer.

Also, in the restaurant example, we always have the option to buy our own food and cook at home. So to match the phone market situation, imagine cooking at home is illegal, and the only food you can eat is from two restaurants.

Since most every transaction is digitalized, checking banking app is the same as looking in your wallet.

Any limitations to access to banking is serious f**ed. Makes me want to use cash.

I was away from my regular desktop dev PC for multiple months recently and only used a crappy laptop for dev work. I got used to it pretty quickly.

This makes me remember so many years ago starting to program on a dual core plastic MacBook.

Also, I’m very impressed by one of my coworkers working on 13 inch laptop only. Extremely smart. A bigger guy so I worry about his posture and RSI on such a small laptop.

TLDR I think more screen space does not scale near linearly with productivity

I was going to respond to this part of GP but along the lines of communication being (mostly?) not a crime in an of itself. Committing crimes in the physical world is still illegal.

I just want to make that clear, governments don’t need complete access to your digital life to make the legal system go round.

Unfortunately the argument of strong privacy for everyone loses compared to the emotional argument of “we could have prevented this horrific crime if we had access to XYZ”, in the emotional political arenas

A pessimistic/realistic view of post high school education - credentials are proof of able to do a certain amount of hard work, used as an easy filter for companies while hiring.

I expect universities to adapt quickly, lest lose their whole business as degrees will not carry the same meaning to employers.

This. Privacy does not matter until it does.

Thanks for your example, qrios

I don’t know about the FBI MLK files. But if I were to meet MLK or Ghandi or <insert widely recognized figure> and they were an asshole, I wouldn’t excuse or overlook their behavior.

The underlying ideas here are greatness and individuals ascribed to doing great things.

Without any evidence I suspect an extremely large majority of progress is done by normal individuals whose names we’ll never know.

I don’t see human interactions having a “net effect”. If someone is nice to me 99% of the time, and 1% screams obscenities at me, the 99% does not excuse the 1%.

Bad behavior is bad behavior full stop.

Try slapping someone and then follow it up with “but I wrote X software that benefits Y amount of people”

Do you really think Python’s consensus-driven language development is better than authoritarian?

I am honestly tired of the Python packing situation. I breathe a sigh of relief in language like Go and Rust with an “authoritative” built-in solution.

I wouldn’t mind the 30 different packaging solutions as long as there was authoritative “correct” solution. All the others would then be opt-in enhancements as needed.

I guess a good thought experiment would be if we were to design a packaging system (or decide not to) for a new PL like python, what would it look like?

That would at least help change size expectations!

n=1 I’ve used Wikipedia for many years with no immediately noticeable false information. And of course all the “citation needed” marks are there. I trust Wikipedia to be correct, I expect it to be correct, and Wikipedia has earned my trust. Maybe I don’t read it enough to see any vandalism.

Compared to LLMs, it’s extremely striking to see the relative trust / faith people have in it. It’s pretty sad to see how little the average person values truth and correctness in these systems, how untrusted Wikipedia is to some, and how overly-trusted LLMs are in producing factually correct information to others.

+1

Offloading of liability / responsibility to complex systems, particularly AI, has been a trend for at least two decades.

I hope society sees past this excuse.

Alternatively, ignore EVERYTHING except the files you need.

Puts the onus on the committer

Humans writing the test first and LLM writing the code is much better than the reverse. And that is because tests are simply the “truth” and “intention” of the code as a contract.

When you give up the work of deciding what the expected inputs and outputs of the code/program is you are no longer in the drivers seat.

+1. I learned Java first, in school and on my own. I needed to unlearn the OOP-first mindset.

A good time to teach a hard lesson about the trustworthiness of LLM output

Even though I’ve never used python walrus, I’m a huge fan of the “X language feature can be used as an expression”

I feel the same way with rust control flow being used as an expression, and am disappointed when other languages don’t have it.

Even though one could argue it makes things more complicated, I feel more mental freedom and feel the language getting out of the way.

Thanks for your comment. I definitely could have worded mine better too with a bit more effort and context.

Funnily enough, I made the opposite switch recently, and am also liking it.

My thoughts about python here: https://calvinlc.com/p/2025/06/10/thank-you-and-goodbye-pyth...

Next time I get into Python I’ll try uv, ruff, ty.

Hi rsyring, I made this comment out of experience.

As python projects grow and grow, you need to do lots of support work for testing and even syntactic correctness. This is automatic in compiled languages where a class of issues is caught early as compile errors, not runtime errors.

Personally I prefer to move more errors to compile time as much as possible. Dynamic languages are really powerful in what you can do at runtime, but that runtime flexibility trades off with compile time verification.

Of course, every project can be written in any language, with enough effort. The existence of large and successful python projects says nothing about the developer experience, developer efficiency, or fragility of the code.

I coded happily in python for many years and fell out of love with it.

It doesn’t ship with a first party package manager so you got the community trying to fill this gap. Use any other language with good tooling like golang or rust and it is a breath of fresh air.

Python used as an actual PL is a footgun because it’s dynamic scripted. (Don’t tell me about using tools X, Y, Z, mypy, …) You essentially become the compiler checking types, solving basic syntax errors when uncommon paths are executed.

A programming language that’s only good for < 100 line scripts is not a good choice.

I honestly wish python were in a better state. I switched to rust.

The “use LLMs or you will fall behind” narrative is pearl clutching.

I don’t see anywhere in the near future our profession becoming something other than knowledge work.

So, at the end of the day training your brain is what matters.

Over-reliance on LLM is like skipping the brain gym.

Under utilizing LLM may make you slower. There’s a good optimum of putting in the work so you learn and asking LLM

If it’s mostly a social phenomenon in your company that non believers are pushed out, that does not seem like a fun place to work.

The carpenter may have thought the same sentiment is being applied to loud power tools such as table saw, jointer, router, …

This sounds very close to the “It’s ok to abuse and kill animals (for meat), they’re not sentient”

Does anyone else see a timer ticking down in their vision or is it just me?

Time to quit my job at the LHC and be a baker.

> Why should I be forced to open up the carefully designed ecosystem I’ve built?

I think general purpose computing devices should be open.

This is a moralistic argument, putting legal and business reasons to the side.

Go ahead and lock down specific purpose computing devices, like ATMs, fridge, mouse firmware.

The practice of setting up fiefdoms to become the landlord is an abhorrent practice.