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cseleborg

447 karma · joined May 13, 2020

Based in Berlin, Germany. Long-time HN reader. Former developer, mostly in the music tech industry, nowadays I work on business model strategy and innovation still in that sector [1]. Former (part-time) business owner [2]. I have a (self-programmed) blog at [3].

[1] https://www.ableton.com

[2] http://carlseleborg.com/goodbye-das-cask

[3] http://carlseleborg.com

Reach me at my first name dot my last name at something that sounds like 'email.com' but with a 'g'.

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cseleborg··on Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
> they are very strongly tuned to value code that has no errors which can be picked up by linters or similar, while humans work the opposite way

This is a really valuable insight! It resonates well with my own experience revewing AI-authored code: I look hard at interfaces, architecture and performance, and merely glance over code that just "gets the job done", because if it works, I'm not worried about it. Now I can express that dichotomy much more clearly -- thank you!

cseleborg··on JIT Compiling Code in 5μs
That is my experience as well. I get a (subjective) speedup between 1 and 3 for parts of the code I'd consider critical and where I check the output tightly, and 5-20 for menial work OR for important code that's well isolated into its own module such that its quality doesn't matter because I can have it rewritten easily if it doesn't work as expected.
cseleborg··on Show HN: Bento - An entire PowerPoint in one HTML file (edit+view+data+collab)
A bit off-topic, but it is interesting that you say this.

Just earlier today I listened to Startups for the Rest of Us podcast episode 842 [1] titled "The future of SaaS in an AI World", where host Rob Walling addresses the "SaaS is dead" question. One of his arguments is that it's rarely worth spending time on rebuilding your SaaS vendors' solutions, taking time away from your core mission. But I guess that:

  1. the projects you hinted at are low-value services (e.g. CRUD web apps over DBs), and not SaaS services which have real moats, like CRM (connectors ecosystem) or email service providers (IP reputation, IT security).

  2. His argument applies to startups, where you're trying to grow your valuation by growing revenue (valuation = 5-10x yearly revenue) as opposed to established corporations which usually have a higher incentive to limit costs.
You seem like a very smart person, so I'd be curious to hear your thoughts here. Were these low-value SaaS services, and is this in the context of an established business?

Bento is awesome, well done!

[1] https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-842-...

cseleborg··on DRIVE – Operational Excellence for AI-accelerated engineering
The copy has AI written all over it. I find it very difficult to take any of it seriously.
cseleborg··on Tidal AI Policy
That's a genuinely grim thought, but not unrealistic either. I'll have to chew on that one, it's interesting.
cseleborg··on Tidal AI Policy
I agree in sentiment, I love knowing that another human made this, either because I fancy I could maybe do something as good as that, or because I just admire the talent, or simply because the lyrics or music touch me somehow.

That said, there are a lot of people who simply enjoy having something playing in the background, it doesn't matter what, and if you're into country music it's great to have 10,000+ hours of country music to play.

If Tidal provides a checkbox so you can choose whether to exclude AI content, I think that would work for both audiences.

cseleborg··on Tidal AI Policy
Maybe if enough AI produces self-report their work as AI, and enough non-AI producers are honest about uploading non-AI work, they'll quickly have the necessary amount of good-enough data to train good classifiers?
cseleborg··on Midjourney Medical
True, we conducted science, part of which involved gathering and analysing data, to refine those "simple rules", though I'd say they've been pretty stable for a long time.

Both our unhealthy habits, and the "simple rules" to keep us healthy, have been around for decades. Building devices that give us gigabytes of data won't change anything. Dr Peter Attia makes a compelling argument in his book "Outlive" that science, as it is structured now, has achieved miracles when it comes to injuries and infectious diseases, but has been more or less powerless, for entirely systemic reasons, to do anything about neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases or against cancer and diabetes. His book is well worth reading to understand his argument--but the gist of it is that those require lifestyle changes.

cseleborg··on Midjourney Medical
> You want as much data as you can get about your health

The device looks very cool, but I strongly disagree with the premise, and think this statement is rather misguided.

1. Most people who feel unhealthy don't do so because of a lack of data but because of bad habits around meals, exercise, sleep, social interactions etc.

2. If you measure and scan all the time, every blip above or below the normal curve will start generating anxiety. One of the most frequent pieces of advice for people waking up in the middle of the night is to not look at the clock. Information can be stressful.

cseleborg··on Midjourney Medical
It's not about being against technology. It's that we know the simple rules that will keep us healthy most of the time, and they don't need any technology at all. Eat healthy meals. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Get enough rest. Don't smoke. Don't drink alcohol. Don't do drugs. Spend enough time with people. Serve others. Spend time outside.

Midjourney Medical looks amazingly cool. But it, and megabytes of data, is not what we really need.

cseleborg··on ChatGPT for Google Sheets exfiltrates workbooks
Anthropic, as much as I think they are the soundest of the AI labs out there, still has a massive incentive to push things out that aren't saftey-vetted to the level we expect. They are very willing to "move fast and leave holes", to paraphrase M.Z. Hell, they leaked their own source code!
cseleborg··on Downdetector and Speedtest sold to Accenture for $1.2B
Out of curiosity, I just compared my home wifi between fast.com and cloudflare's speed tedt and got similar results, completely and definitely disproving (n=1) my claim above.
cseleborg··on Accenture to acquire Ookla
I read a while ago that certain ISPs will optimize the traffic to Netflix's servers, and so when you run fast.com (which is my default, by the way), you get your Internet speed for watching Netflix, but not necessarily for other things.
cseleborg··on Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
No, thank you. LLMs are great for fuzzy things. But there are still a lot of things I do on my computer that are just a few mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts away, achievable in less than 3 seconds. It'd be a disaster if that got removed.
cseleborg··on Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents
Isn't "why" what commit message bodies are for?
cseleborg··on Adversarial poetry as a universal single-turn jailbreak mechanism in LLMs
If you create a chatbot, you don't want screenshots of it on X helping you to commit suicide or giving itself weird nicknames based on dubious historic figures. I think that's probably the use-case for this kind of research.
cseleborg··on GNU Health
> The easiest way to get MyGNUHealth is by installing the package from your favorite operating system / distribution. Many operating system distributions already ship MyGNUHealth.

I was actually curious to try this out on my phone, since they claim to support mobile devices.

If running a command-line package manager is the easiest way to install this on Android, I don't want to know what harder ways exist.

I find this is quite typical for open source projects. The community still hasn't really, truly adopted mobile. I guess it's because of the need to have some sort of entity be present in the various App Stores? But if it's possible for servers, why is this so rare to have open source projects as app store vendors?

cseleborg··on A startup doesn't need to be a unicorn
There is something to be said for trust here. I like that I can go straight to the imprint ("Impressum") to know with whom I'm dealing with online, where the company is located and who the CEO is. This is not always easy to decipher from the "Terms" pages companies in the US and elsewhere provide.

The downside for founders is that you have to divulge your address, unless you take additional steps to give yourself a mailbox address, but this can also be illegal if you're not careful. You can also rent an office of course, but for indie devs and freelancers, this is usually not financially viable.

cseleborg··on A startup doesn't need to be a unicorn
That's a bit exaggerated. I did have a company, and while it did come with bureaucracy, the vast majority of my time was spent on what you expect a founder to do (sales, marketing, product, etc.).
cseleborg··on Ask HN: What is replacing SEO for discoverability?
This piqued my interest. Can you elaborate?
cseleborg··on AnandTech Farewell
There's an excellent podcast called Acquired with a 3-part episode covering the birth and evolution of NVIDIA, highly recommended.
cseleborg··on AnandTech Farewell
Slackware!!! Dang, I had forgotten that name. That was the first distro I installed as well. Xeyes and stuff. Oh, dear...
cseleborg··on Start presentations on the second slide
This very technique is why I loved Salman Khan's teaching videos on Khan Academy so much. On any topic, he goes straight to the content, no intro whatsoever.
cseleborg··on Gio UI – Cross-platform GUI for Go
That's a great answer, very helpful. I just picked up Avalonia for a test drive. Why do you think Uno is better than Avalonia for mobile?
cseleborg··on Drug resistant bacteria found on ISS mutating to become functionally distinct
The strain of bacteria was described as "notoriously drug-resistant". It didn't sound to me like the bacteria became drug-resistant in space.
cseleborg··on A useful front-end confetti animation library
The developer has of course provided a print stylesheet (expect no less from a pro). Just print it, frame it, hang it up on the wall and voilà! A no-JS confetti demo right there in your living room.
cseleborg··on The purge of German science in 1933
String theory has, however, been successfully applied to oranges. Here in Germany, these are now routinely sold in nets, made of some sort of string. QED
cseleborg··on Object that slammed into Florida home was space junk for ISS, NASA confirms
Should we send them a warning? Maybe they haven't spotted it yet? It's our junk after all...
cseleborg··on How does the classic Win32 ListView handle incremental searching?
I agree. I'm writing a desktop app based on a web stack and I'm agonizing over tiny details in how tabbing should work and how the arrow keys should interact with lists etc. I don't know if my UI is any good, but I know that good UI takes a tremendous amount of attention to detail.
cseleborg··on The Lonely Funeral Project in Amsterdam
But we'll all be dead one day! It's a compelling idea that if something happens to me and I lose touch with all my relatives, there might still be someone at my funeral.
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