fourside

I wasn’t aware of GearLab, thanks for the tip. I will say, though I took a look and it seems like they heavily use Amazon links so they suffer from similar downsides as Wirecutter.

Amazon nowadays is such a crapshoot. A link to a product isn’t reliable. The price could be different than what the review stated, and the link might be for an listing that shows as out of stock. I think GearLab tries to fix this by giving you a link to search results on Amazon instead, but in some ways that’s worse. In the couple of links I tried the reviewed product wasn’t the top result so now it’s up to you to decide which of the links is the real one.

That loses some of the value prop for me because part of what I want from a service like this is to give me a link to a legit product listing. That’s not GearLab’s fault, Amazon makes that very difficult, but it still reduces the utility for me. That said it’s better than nothing which just points to the sad state of affairs in e-commerce today.

Edit: it looks like at least some of their links take you directly to the product page. Not sure why some of them take you to a search results page instead, but my guess is it’s an issue with expiring links.

At the top of the home page:

> When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission, which helps support our testing.

That’s what the parent comment was referring to

> no one is getting arrested

Not only have there been no consequences but those same companies are trying to position themselves as the best people to keep these AI systems in check.

No, I try to avoid products that continuously show a lack of respect for their users.

> So it was dead on arrival. You should have contacted support who would have figured out if you need the whole unit replaced or just part of it.

I mentioned that in my comment. I contacted CS. Multiple times in fact. They wanted to diagnose the issue remotely before issuing a refund. Their instructions were poorly written and assumed familiarity with the internals of the machine. ChatGPT helped some but not completely. Then life got busy, I had work travel and the 30 return window passed before I realized it.

Your response is, frankly, a little condescending. You seem convinced this is somehow my fault or that sat there twiddling my thumbs. Of course I understand that duds make it through manufacturing at times. It’s great that the happy path is easy. Do we judge the accessibility of a product only by how it behaves when everything goes right? I was careful during assembly and watched multiple YouTube videos and read the official instructions when putting it together, I contacted CS. In retrospect I should have pushed harder for a refund, but my original point still stands. As someone who wanted a “just works” solution, what I got instead was something faulty and then a really painful process for getting it solved.

I recently bought a Bambu Lab A1 printer. I went specifically with Bambu Lab because everything I read said that was the better choice if you want something low maintenance and easy to set up even if it’s not as open as some of the alternatives.

It’s stuck in the auto calibration stage. It gets halfway through then it stops with a generic error message. The UI around this is really clunky. I’ve tried searching online, asking Claude and nothing. I emailed customer support and they came back with cryptic instructions that assume familiarity with the internals of the machine.

I decided to leave this for a day when I wasn’t too mentally drained from work to debug issues in my free time and instead the machine has been collecting dust ever since.

Maybe it was a mistake to get a Bambi Lab? I thought it was the more turn key option but it hasn’t been my experience.

I thought the parent comment was missing something obvious too but if you click the top link in that section, it’s a page describing LFS but without linking to its content. Then I clicked the “Read online” link on the menu on the left, but the top links are errata and security advisories and then the main link. Not the worst navigation I’ve seen but the parent comment does have a point.

How are you evaluating the Android build if you don’t use Android and you don’t know Kotlin?

Yeah and it’s buggy on mobile

Yeah I truly do not understand some people’s logic. Like the ones talking about some post scarcity world where universal income will offset AI related job loss. So the people in power, the ones who have constantly tried to cut back government spending, are now going to flip and support universal income? Right.

I don’t think the parent comment was trying to equate the two, but rather pushing the argument to its logical extreme to test show that the reasoning doesn’t hold consistently across cases. Whether they made a convincing argument is separate.

> HN is showing (expected) dismissing attitude towards this idea. That tells me it might work :) !

I recently learned the name of this logical fallacy: Galileo gambit. It’s one of my pet peeves. Yes, we all know Dropbox was infamously dismissed by the top comment on HN. No, just because someone criticizes your project on here doesn’t mean it’ll be a big success.

Instead of fixing the education system and giving it the resources it deserves (eg paying teachers more like the other reply said) we’re going to “fix it” by ossifying a two tiered system where wealthy kids get individualized attention from well trained adults while poor kids are taught by AI.

I’m on the same boat. I get why people do it. Writing prose is significantly slower than consuming it, but there’s still a part of me that thinks “if you didn’t think writing was a good use of your time, why would reading this content be a use of mine”. I don’t mind AI-assisted writing but it’s hard to know to how much human editing was involved when the text shows so many AI tells. Almost by definition, AI writing is average it’s hard to justify spending the time when there’s so much content out there.

So tired of this false equivalence between left and right politics in the US. So because major LLMs support a increase in the minimum wage we need to offset it with an LLM that has spouted Nazi propaganda and lets you generate porn image of real people?

We have three major foundational models not including Grok.

When the defense for a company is basically “yeah they host csam in the platform but is that really worse than the others” you’ve really lost the plot

It really is that simple. “Users of company with a long track record of unethical behavior surprised at the company’s latest unethical business decision.”

I know it’s not easy for some to stop using their platform for some reason or another. That’s the point. When you use their product not because they are the best choice in a free market with options, but when you use it because you have to. Just don’t surprised when FB keeps pushing the limits.

Growing up, I’d wonder how people could work for companies like cigarette manufacturers even after it became well known that their products wreck havoc on your health.

This comment is a masterclass in the type of mental gymnastics people do to justify working for these kind of companies.

> Is the company toxic? where do you draw the line?

You couldn’t even answer the question you yourself posed.

Why does SpaceX warrant a change of existing trading rules?

And to the developing industry of software consultants who specialize in fixing vibe coded slop that has grown out of control ;)

Damn this comment really made the anti-unionists come out of the woodwork. I’ll admit, I’m a bit skeptical and think it’s not a given that the benefits you listed will come to be.

But I’ve been annoyed at the significant shift in tone that software company executives’ have used when communicating with employees lately. For one, we went from being admittedly pampered compared to most other industries to getting threats of mass layoffs unless we do more and demand less.

I wouldn’t mind the idea of using the possibility of unions to have executives back off, but if people are going to pop off at mere suggestion of unions I don’t think we’d get very far.

I read the parents comment as sarcasm and not a serious suggestion.

> it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI

I think it was partly also PR. Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting for mindshare and Dalle-E, Sora, Nano banana, etc generated a lot of media buzz for Google and OpenAI at various points in time.

He was on stage and had a mic. I don’t know that the students had a lot of options to make their voices heard in the situation. And since folks like Schmidt already have access to channels to spread their opinions and this was the students’ graduation I think they get a pass.

Sounds like the parent comment probably doesn’t know much about how the auto industry works and should refrain from commenting.

This is a very loaded question. I’m not sure what type of answer you expect to get.

People who reach outlier-level success in a field tend to have strong opinions and an emotional connection to said field. It’s probably a non-trivial part of why they are so successful.

Maybe for folks who are deep into this, but it’s not exactly accessible. I tried reading up on it a couple of months ago, but parsing through what hardware I needed, the model and how to configure it (model size vs quantization), how I’d get access to the hardware (which for decent results in coding, new hardware runs $4k-$10k last I checked)—it had a non trivial barrier of entry. I was trying to do this over a long weekend and ran out of time. I’ll have to look into it again because having the local option would be great.

Edit: the replies to my comment are great examples of what I’m talking about when I say it’s hard to determine what hardware I’d need :).

Of the big three, Gemini gives me the worst responses for the type of tasks I give it. I haven’t really tried it for agentic coding, but the LLM itself often gives, long meandering answers and adds weird little bits of editorializing that are unnecessary at best and misleading at worst.

Except there are several obvious ways in which LLMs are not indistinguishable from humans.

I get that credit cards are a barrier of entry but I’m more willing to give providers a break now that AI agents make it much easier to abuse free tiers. It’s also harder for smaller companies to offer free tiers. If we want a more diverse set of service providers we as customers need to be willing to accept some trade-offs.