dkobia

Swift is actually a really good language let down by its official IDE. Slow build times, laggy autocomplete, random crashes etc. I can’t remember Xcode ever being great to use.

What a time to be alive. 3 companies competing for what might be the next trillion dollar business.

- Waymo has the advantage of launching sooner but has much more expensive vehicles which will eat into margins.

- Tesla has the advantage of full vertical integration owns their hardware and cheaper cars but also trying to do this with vision only.

- Zoox has the advantage of building purpose-built autonomous vehicles from the ground up with Amazon's deep pockets behind them, but faces the challenge of manufacturing at scale for a novel vehicle.

There’s a wonderful science fiction book by Ray Nayler about just this - “Where The Axe Is Buried”

I thought the idea of a folding phone was just a cash grab until I saw someone on the plane across the aisle from me interacting with one. It has been a while since I saw someone get so much enjoyment out of a device. The back and forth between folded and unfolded to read messages and watch movies/read a book was mesmerizing. It made me realize that this form factor could actually enhance the user experience in a meaningful way.

This is a pretty big deal. Stripe is already processing billions of transactions. Additionally Stripe already has the relationship with merchants that other L1's lack along with the payment network expertise.

If Stripe’s closed-loop system scales, banks and card networks could lose significant transaction volume, fees and even merchant relationships. Merchants and customers win with lower transaction fees. This marks a very credible and large-scale effort yet to challenge the Visa and Mastercard duopoly.

Obviously not perfect and other questionable projects have stained blockchains reputation but it is a net win, no?

AI investment is headed toward 2% of the US GDP, getting close to the Apollo program and 10 times the manhattan project. Almost 15% of the US stock market is tied up in these investments so most of us have skin in this game whether we like it or not, for better or worse.

With unlimited resources, I’d solve the fundamental bottleneck holding back our species: getting off this single planet and establishing a true space-based civilization - colonizing our solar system.

Along the way we’ll be solving for energy, jobs, resources, environment and existential risk.

This. The meta glasses have so much potential and it is absolutely frustrating as a developer to have no way to make use of it.

Nice work!

The Meta Raybans are a fantastic device hobbled by a weak LLM and supported by a bad actor - Meta [1]. Frankly I feel dirty for running any Meta software on my phone. I can talk to ChatGPT or Claude using the glasses but unfortunately I can’t show them what I’m looking at which is what the OP has built.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/meta-and-yandex-are...

Thank you for writing this. Many software developers on HN are conflicted about ceding control of software development to LLMs for many reasons including the fact that it feels unstructured and exploratory rather than rigidly planned using more formal methodologies.

There's a good middle ground where the LLMs can help us solve problems faster optimizing for outcomes rather than falling in love with solving the problem. Many of us usually lose sight of the actual goal we're trying to achieve when we get distracted by implementation details.

A few other interesting links on this:

- https://fortune.com/2025/05/15/mcp-model-context-protocol-an...

- https://retail-mcp.com/

High service and cleaning fees while being a significant source of Airbnb's revenue, helping to drive topline growth are also the biggest source of frustration for many users. Throw in privacy issues and the fact that hotels are stepping up their game and the midlife crisis sounds about right.

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As context size in LLMs grows I suspect getting taxes done in a very near future will be something trivial. For most people it is merely a form filling task moving a set of numbers from here to there.

It is absolutely terrifying to watch tools like Cursor generate so much code. Maybe not a great analogy, but it feels like driving with Tesla FSD in New Delhi in the middle of rush hour. If you let it run ahead of you, the amount of code to review will be overwhelming. I've also encountered situations where it is unable to pass tests for code it wrote.

I've been wrestling with this tension between embracing AI tools and preserving human expertise in my work. On one hand, I have experienced real genuine productivity gains with LLMs - they help me code, organize thoughts and offer useful perspectives I hadn't even considered. On the other, I realize managers often don't understand the nature of creative work which is trivialized by all the content generation tools.

Creativity emerges through a messy exploration and human experience -- but it seems no one has time for that these days. Managers have found a shiny new tool to do more with less. Also, AI companies are deliberately targeting executives with promises of cost-cutting and efficiency. Someone has to pay for all the R&D.

I've often wondered what impact the fact that major prominent liberal media outlets are often paywalled while conservatives one are not, has on public discourse. I have to imagine this translates to conservative media dominating online spaces, no?

I love this. Open source projects often suffer from a combination of a funding crisis and maintainer burnout. I think state funded open source projects are a wonderful idea!

By investing in open source projects, governments can create more efficient, transparent, and innovative digital services. If anything I’m sure it’ll save tax payers money on expensive licenses paid to a company in another country.

I support software in many languages and ruby has to be the most syntactically stimulating.

A bit hyperbolic on my part but I think Trump and Elon are quite a potent combination for the money and media influence they have between them. Members of congress and senators with opposing views are very unlikely to stick their heads up for fear of the immense amount of money that could be used against them in the midterms and beyond.

This new administration lays bare what we've known all along - the legislative gridlock and dysfunction in the house of representatives and senate has made them completely incapable of governing -- the least productive in a generation.

This is opened up an opportunity for a well funded strongman, and the checks and balances that were intended to protect our democracy are now mere suggestions.

With extreme wealth, the next goal becomes immortality. Ellison and others are obsessed with living longer (or forever) and viewing all their ideas through this lens helps explain their investments in biotechnology and artificial intelligence.

One of the most interesting metrics I came across this week was the rise in custom built software over SaaS as AI enabled the “Build” in the “Build vs Buy” equation that has typically pushed companies to SaaS.

In the end, all the leaders can offer is Bread and Circuses.

These lite apps are a way for Apple to dip its toes into popular niches in the App Store while not killing the goose.

In this case, Evite, Partiful and Hobnob have been put on notice as Apples expands its services revenues which have grown to roughly 25% of its annual earnings.

Perplexity is a pretty awesome and much needed app, but Aravind Srinivas has many posts on X reek of a desperate need to succeed - scruples aside. To me that signals an inevitable enshitification.

Won’t it affect America as well? Yes, it buys time, but also delays innovation, disrupts global supply chains and ultimately means costlier American cars no?

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann.

When worlds were conquered through brute force and wooden ships, it is crazy to imagine how pivotal vitamin C was.

AGI is the Sisyphean task of our age. We’ll push this boulder up the mountain because we have to, even if it kills us.