fathermarz

Doesn’t this mean that some percentage of Microsoft’s investment is being given directly to their competitor? This feels like a bubble moment.

I have been seeing this a lot. Does this add new meaning to “a picture is worth 1000 words?”

I think I saw a benchmark on HN for formats of text files given to an LLM to see which would give better results. I wish that study had thrown in images to the comparison.

It’s interesting that Valve can be ridiculed for both fostering the gambling market AND dismantling it. By no means am I picking a side of this fight, but I think Valve wants to stay off the radar of the gov and keep printing money. The reason they were called to Congress in the first place was a misnomer IMO, but maybe Gabe said “I don’t want to get called there again y’all”

Excellent, thank you taking the time to respond. It makes sense now and is very clear. Great work!

This post is eliciting different feelings for me.

1. Congratulations on getting a product into a major chain’s distribution network. That is a feat and is something to be proud of.

2. Do I think this product should exist? No. There are services that do this already, the only thing different is making it standalone. I fear it’s just another toy that will sit on the shelf and eventually contribute to the e-waste problem.

3. The capitalist in me thinks I would have also done subscriptions and “buy more minutes”, but in practice I don’t think I would have been able to execute on that.

4. Confusing to see a “build your own” in the same breathe. Are you a part of the Mr. Christmas team that built this? Or just contracted to build it based on your experience in hardware?

5. Were you really hooked? Hooked on the technology stack? Or hooked talking to Santa? Do you have kids that you built it for?

Many thoughts rattle around in my head on this one.

I do appreciate what’s being said here and I think there is a balance to strike. Is it a good idea to plan and design before jumping into code? Absolutely. Is it worth spending a month thinking of the perfect system when you don’t have customers actively using it or how they will use it? Probably not.

I also think it’s important to not get stuck in the sunk cost fallacy to avoid a rewrite. Take your lessons learned and bite the bullet.

I am in a position right now watching 3 years of tech debt get refactored into the same spaghetti garbage because leadership waited too long before calling a rewrite, and now they are under immense pressure to get it done but picked a warm body to rewrite it because everyone else is busy on other important things.

In another life, I was able to see the writing on the walls after initial implementation and spent two weeks rewriting the MVP to then be able to add new scalable features at a much higher velocity.

Needs analysis is crucial here, but I don’t disagree with OP.

Does it have Windows APIs for sub systems like certificates/auth stores?

It’s less about them being “not all there” and more like the level of disconnected they are from modern society. The last time they had the average job (if ever) was before credit cards existed and it was $0.50 for a loaf of bread.

As I mentioned above. I do not like Microsoft, but there is a difference of intention. In your over-characterization, you forget the fact that they provide product/services to users. Regardless of their strategies and how they build their bottom line, they provide users something in exchange for money. Regardless if the thing they provide has far reaching consequences or happens to be built for better fingerprinting, it’s been long enough of this that informed users know the trade offs.

I am so shocked at the amount of people that think someone who wants to siphon your livelihood in a parasitic fashion is equivalent to a corporation that you have to conceivably opt into using. Users can make choices in the products they use. This person injected themselves as a man in the middle in user’s lives. Completely different circumstances and not at all the same intention.

> How do you define “malicious”?

Malicious to me is intent. Microsoft does not store my emails to snoop or to potentially steal my assets. It Is a side effect of the systems they have created to ease user friction.

Some might argue that they want my data or behaviour (which is snooping) but exactly what has been said, my subscription fee is the value they extract from me and their enterprise value is the stickiness and the experience they provide.

To be clear, I am not a Microsoft fan, but I think it is safe to assume that Microsoft would not scrape my crypto wallets or bank account information to steal the entirety of my liquid assets. I can’t say the same for actors that plunk in a rogue email address to BCC themselves.

I have no idea how far the crew at Microsoft or any other large tech giant is willing to go into the grey area, but I can tell you they won’t attempt to drain my bank account without providing SOME kind of value to me in return.

> to use a different program for turning equations to pixels?

They explain in the comment why it was risky (new thing instead of tried and true methods, not a large user base, etc.) and yet you minimized their explanation, over simplified and seem to not understand the risk involved in writing one of the most important pieces of literature in one’s career.

> why? they wont give you a phd if a single pixel is off by one bit in the alpha channel?

They meant pixel perfect as in matching the template to infer the importance of this. Then for some reason you went down the “off by one bit in the alpha channel” which is a bit of wise-assery and not meaningful nor necessary to the conversation.

As I said before, please dig deeper and use your well meaning System 2 to contribute, and not your Reddit-Tainted System 1.

Correct. For the main composition, many artists don’t use samples. But for ear candy and other flavors, I would argue that most do. Remember, difference between producers and musicians, and there is a lot of overlap.

Correct, but think upstream from Splice. Most percussion, risers and ear candy come from the same place. Think back to Super Seal records and crate digging. If you use samples, regardless if you subscribe to Splice or not, the sample you found, is on Splice.

Microsoft Servers != Malicious Actors Computer

If you don’t understand what they mean and are hunting for pedantic discoveries in explanations of a problem, then please try to dig deeper and contribute more meaningfully, as per the HN guidelines.

As someone who has been producing music for 20 years, this is absolutely incredible. I remember when I started building things from samples in FL4 and just how mind bending that was. I am so excited for this to actually get new ORIGINAL samples.

What people miss is since the creation of Splice, basically all new music that isn’t from an already established artist is paint by numbers. You can get any sample in any key that are given to splice by artists. You probably hear a lot of the same sounds in most modern music. This breaks that open.

The Suno team has been doing this exactly right and this is just another step in their evolution.

Major congrats to the product team for this, I can’t wait to see the next iteration!

I can understand the frustration, however, part of the skills you have acquired should be taught and shared within teams you work with. Such a skill is meaningful, but the ability to pass on that skill to Juniors is more important than the skill itself.

I am not quite a fan of the “professional software development” elitism in some posts like this because it points to me vs you or highly skilled vs unwilling to learn, which I have found to be not true.

Also to say “attention to detail” while also having grammatical and spelling mistakes in a blog post is kind of poignant.

Also they got hit with the most recent supply chain attacks on NPM. They aren’t exactly winning the security game.

I don’t think the best way to communicate with someone is by questioning their character and intentions, then simply demanding something of them. All this blog post does is show that you need to mature in both your communication style and your security knowledge. CVE != Vulnerable

When creating a backup, it attempts to condense sectors through some non-standard proprietary algorithm that shifts addressing and tries to roll it up. It wouldn’t be an issue if when restored it reversed this process, but it does not and leaves holes, gaps, or new sectors altogether in the reconstruction. Because of the spaghetti nature of this, the user can only use their software unless they want to reverse engineer the patented algo.

This is becoming known the software supply chain space, but Acronis software tampers with backups and lots of companies are dropping it. “True Image” couldn’t be further from the truth. Recommend Clonezilla for sure.

Not all LLMs are created equal and can be used for different aspects and workflows. I think the important bit is to gravitate to the tool that gives you the closest to your expected outcome.

Copy pasting code into ChatGPT gives me unreliable results, because I don’t know how to talk to it. I find copilot annoying in Visual Studio. The workflow of cursor/windsurf is not intuitive for me. Gemini context is wicked but I didn’t like how it constructed its outputs. I tried Claude Code and became a believer, not because it’s perfect, but because it fits my cadence and allows me to pivot quickly.

I still use chat for the occasional MSSQL syntax check, or Gemini for writing a technical doc. But there are so many variables and trial and error involved.

I keep reading posts like this thinking that there is a flavour of fear holding people back. Nothing to fear, just level set your expectations, don’t believe the hype and be open to the vibes.

I’m at a large firm of ~1000 employees, only about 25% are devs and everyone is being told they should be using LLMs/AI Agents or they are going to be behind. Even to say, if you don’t adopt these tools, we can find someone who will.

If you are going to release a new set of models and eliminate the old ones, your new smallest model should have equal capabilities equal to or greater than your old models of similar size. This is not a routing problem. This is a driving the price down of running and scaling the business problem.

Google is raising prices for most of their services. I do not agree that this is due to the cost of compute or that this is the end of Moore’s Law. I don’t think we have scratched the surface.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hamburger button on the top left. Usually top right… or am I hallucinating?

Depending on the structure of the legal entity, even when the company you work for gets acquired, it may be an asset purchase for the IP and team instead of a stock purchase. I went through this last year and my options became worthless. It’s unfortunate because it came down to decisions made years prior that affected the outcome at exit time.

I have started to lean into my love for education and security and created Phended for non-technical users. I just did a rebranding, added an LLM chatbot, and a learning management system which I am going to be working on courses for the next little bit and would am looking for contributors to course content.

Would love some feedback overall and suggestions: https://phended.com

Honestly wrapping code in a front end is enough of an “app” experience that people don’t care as long as it brings value. Perfect case I ran into last week, I had to convert a legacy .pst outlook file to .eml for new outlook. Only a handful of these tools exist and I picked the one that had a front end and a nice looking installer. $110 to that company for something I will likely never use again.

Not sure if the first video demo matches the hero statement. Professionals with deadlines doesn’t really map to “here is how to start a Minecraft server”