foxfired

I can start by saying thank you! The name looked familiar. I remember stumbling upon her css presentation[0] And I was surprised to see one of my articles as a resource.

[0]: https://noti.st/anarodrigues/abfj0M/refactoring-css

If we wait for the next models, we will never test anything because there will always be another model. Like the Ai Scotsman:

> "Nay, laddie, that’s no’ the real AI Scotsman! He’s grander still! More powerful! Just wait for the next model!"

Note that there is Strata (strata.com), the 3d software company, which I immediately thought it was about. It was the first 3d software I used some 30 years ago.

Orally they are interchangeable. Though, I only ever append the “a” when speaking in my native language.

6 Football (soccer) players share my name and I still am at the top. Type "SEO" and I'll DM you my one little weird trick. /jk

Fun story about my name [0], the bank couldn't mail me my debit card because the mailman kept crossing my address off the envelop.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/sharing-a-name

Whenever I write something that gets some traction, I get emails. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. One of them is from a guy that tells me "I love your blog, but you got terrible spelling." If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't bother doing a spellcheck before publishing.

Ha! Mine ran on 18.04 [0] and I migrated it a couple months ago. When I went to take a screenshot for bragging rights, I noticed two other servers 16.10 and 15.04

The applications run just fine, but I don't even know where to start. Apparently I coded them directly into the server, no dev machine!

[0]: https://cdn.idiallo.com/images/assets/daily/98/old_servers.j...

I've always added analytics scripts on websites I worked on. It was second nature for me. Then when I got my own start up, I didn't just add regular analytics but one that tracks mouse movements so you can watch sessions back like a video [0].

I told a friend about my start up and she jumped on it immediately. I opened the tool and watched her interaction. Then I told her "oh so you opened the dev tools" She immediately ended the session. "How did you know? That's creepy". It was the first time I've actually felt like these tools invade privacy.

Yeah, we include it in our terms and condition and privacy page, but I don't think users truly grasp how those tools work. I understand that all analytics tools provide this feature now, but its always creepy to know someone can watch what you are doing.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/spying-on-your-user

We had a mandatory ChatGPT training course at work. You had to sign up in limited space classes. This is a large company, needless to say it was chaos to get a significant number of people to participate.

I got a spot. We were shown how to copy and paste data from excel and other data sources into the chat interface. We had sample data to work with, there was always someone in class who would say "mine didn't work." The developers in the room asked about codex, the instructor said she wasn't a developer.

We did get a certificate though. There was nothing they could teach that you couldn't learn by using the free version in your own time. Whatever they are doing with the Maltese government is just to increase the monthly active user count.

Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field.

Right know, prompters are setting up whole company infrastructure. I personally know one. He migrated the companies database to a newer Postgres version. He was successful in the end, but I was gnawing my teeth when he described every step of the process.

It sounded like "And then, I poured gasoline on the servers while smoking a cigarette. But don't worry, I found a fire extinguisher in the basement. The gauge says it's empty, but I can still hear some liquid when I shake it..."

If he leaves the company, they will need an even more confident prompter to maintain their DB infrastructure.

Copilot never gave Windows 11 a chance. Now Gemini will do the same to whatever this device is supposed to do.

For every argument against AI slop, you will get a variation of it's the future, or I'm 10x more productive now, I've shipped 3 applications in 2 days, etc.

They won't stop talking about it and defending it. But I can't get anyone to share their amazing work with me.

There is a reason the Show HN projects that are mostly vibecoded don't get much response. It's because they aren't any good. Comments that are AI generated are hollow. Videos that AI generated a shell of their sources.

One thing I learned is that AI written text is not hard to spot. Usually, when I meet slop, I close it one or two paragraphs in. Although tools like this will become more common, they usually serve to win an argument, or confirm what you already believe.

Also, it was painful to learn that my very first blog post I wrote in 2013 is AI generated. But I'm fine with it because I read this:

> A short punchy opener (≤10 words) followed by two or more substantially longer elaboration sentences — the LLM "hook then evidence pile" rhythm.

... and realized that the entire app is AI generated.

Since voting is that power we say we have in the US. Does the public get to vote on this? If not...

> Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster - Neil Postman

You can look up Maroun Al-Ras [0] and it's map coordinate [1]. If you search for the name, you find a garden of the same name, but not the village. The instagram reel that was posted earlier had more context [2].

From wikipedia:

> In October 2024, IDF forces operated in the village as part of its invasion of southern Lebanon. The Israeli flag was raised, after the victory.

Which Apple might use as a justification. There is a Israeli flag, so it must belong to them.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maroun_al-Ras

[1]: https://maps.apple.com/frame?center=33.107500%2C35.444722&sp...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47742363

One thing that will be incredibly useful is to limit comments from brand new accounts. A combination of vouching, limiting the posts velocity (5 daily limit), clear rules for new accounts, etc.

I understand we often see insightful comments from new accounts, but I always find it suspicious when non-throwaway accounts are created just in time only to make a quip.

800 is a huge achievement. But I have to admit, around 2011 I had completely given up on the Simpsons. Story and content aside, they did something with the audio. The quality of the voice is so clear that it sounds un-natural. You can see the same effect on many shows around that time. The voice is disconnected from the background music and sfx.

Anyway, they also improved the way the characters are drawn so much that it lost it's crude nature.

The app didn't work for me. One that was shared right here on HN. I selected 25 miles radius, same ethnicity. Naturally I was matched with a person 700 miles away, of different ethnicity. So we got married... and deleted the app.

We were interviewed as a success story and our faces are plastered on the Internet now. My friends didn't find the same success, I concluded that they didn't know how to date. (wear the right clothes, etiquettes, conversation, navigate ghosting, etc.)

"What if the app could teach you how to do just that?" That's what I asked in our interview. That part was never published.

There’s no need to fear the construction of mass surveillance anymore. It’s already here. We built it one convenience at a time [0]. When I see all my friends with Alexa devices at home, ring cameras, and a million food apps on their phones, it feels like it’s already too late.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/we-have-all-we-need-for-mass-survei...

The blog that I started ~13 years ago started as 3 .html files. Everything else followed as needed (styling, rss, comments, etc.). If you can get past building it, the next question becomes "What should I write about?" [0]

My answer is usually that you can write whatever you want on your websites. It's yours after all. None of the limitations that exist on third-party platforms exist. You can make all the pages read upside down if you want to.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-should-i-write-about

Thanks for reporting this. I'm assuming you are referring to the RSS feed? The actual feed is https://idiallo.com/feed.rss in the meanwhile until I figure out the issue

You are right, my statement may be a bit misleading or incomplete. The ~500 readers are not just local rss bots, but they include aggregate RSS bots. For example, I see the feedly reporting ~200 subscribers, newsreader reporting 50 subscribers, feedbin, etc. Each of those only have between 1 to 3 ip addresses. So for each RSS bot, there are an arbitrary number of actual users reading. I can't track those accurately.

However, users can click on an RSS feed article and read it directly on my blog. These have a URL param that tells me they are coming from the feed. When an article isn't on HNs frontpage, the majority of traffic is coming from those feeds.

By the way, thank you for sharing this tool. Very insightful.

Not even close to making a living! It does pay for my server though which costs $15 a month. YouTube gives you much more visibility. I'll try to compile the numbers from my single Carbon ad placement and the donations I receive from readers.

But I also don't think I have the process in place to do Blog, YouTube, Podcast and hold a full time job. Yes the job is my source of income.

There are some actions you can take. For example, when my traffic plummeted, I saw through my logs that search engines were trying to access my search page with questionable queries. That's when I realized I became a spam vector. I gave a better rundown through the link I shared.

Just an FYI, the data collected to make those conclusion was through the server log (Apache2 in my case). So if you run your own server or VPS, you already have this information.

I've restarted blogging last year, going from a handful of blog post to, publishing consistently. All content gets published on my blog first. I've seen an ~8x increase of traffic. I was affected by zero-clicks from Google's AI overview, but the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers.

I published a write up just this morning: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-its-like-blogging-in-2025

If it makes you feel better, on reddit, I shared my very first blog post about deprecating mysql_* functions in php. As a result, someone said something mean about my mother. I figured the web was full of trolls.

But that wasn't enough. Someone else wrote that my article was useless and I write at a 7th grade level. I turned off the monitor, went for a walk. I decided that blogging wasn't for me. It was time to delete my blog. I was so embarrassed.

When I came back, there was a reply to that comment. It said something like "that's a good thing, 7th grade level writing means we can all understand it easily". And that was enough to keep me going. 13 years so far.

I found my own blog [0]. But interestingly, it is missing the letter I in screenshot starting from July 2025.

[0]: https://onemillionscreenshots.com/idiallo.com/screenshot

A while back, I've decided to make time tags dynamic on my website. First of all they have the title tag to show the actual date in UTC. By dynamic I mean, when something is just published, I use relative time that updates in real time. 1 second ago, 2, 3... etc. Then the minutes, then the hours, then daily.

I always get frustrated when I see a 7 months ago, or X years ago, the math is always inconsistent when they round it. So when something is more than 3 days old, I display the actual date.

I disagree. When the tool promises to do something, you end up trusting it to do the thing.

When Tesla says their car is self driving, people trust them to self drive. Yes, you can blame the user for believing, but that's exactly what they were promised.

> Why didn't the lawyer who used ChatGPT to draft legal briefs verify the case citations before presenting them to a judge? Why are developers raising issues on projects like cURL using LLMs, but not verifying the generated code before pushing a Pull Request? Why are students using AI to write their essays, yet submitting the result without a single read-through? They are all using LLMs as their time-saving strategy. [0]

It's not laziness, its the feature we were promised. We can't keep saying everyone is holding it wrong.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/none-of-us-read-the-specs