jasonkester

Because people move to different countries.

There's no way to update the billing address of my US bank to a foreign address. My UK bank is in the address of my house there. My French bank is in the address of my house here.

As I said, you get one and only one guess as to how the company in question wants to handle this. I want to buy Minecraft for my kid's birthday. Do I buy it from the US store with my US card because that's where I lived when I set up my Microsoft account? Do I buy it in the French store with my French card (with that US Microsoft account)?

Answer: Both of those will get you permanently banned from buying Minecraft on that account. There's a Secret Third Answer, but there's no way of knowing it in advance (or even after the fact since there is no functional customer support that knows about this issue).

It's amazing that companies still can't handle the concept of somebody moving to a different country but still using a credit card from their original country.

I spent two days on the phone with Microsoft last year trying to find a way to pay them $700 to renew my lapsed Visual Studio subscription. I live in France and want to pay with a US card (or UK card or even a French card at this point), but because of some combination of physical location, store location, account location, card country, and vpn that I had on the first time I tried the process, the system is in a state where it can never again process a payment for me.

There are like 5 or 6 companies where I'm in this state. You get exactly one try to guess the magic combination of all those things above to get the backend to sail you through smoothly. If you blow it, it'll write everything down and refuse to let you change anything, then drop you into an infinite loop telling you to just change [store|country|card country|hairstyle] and sending you back to the beginning.

I mean sure, it's probably saving me a couple grand a year in services that I wish I could get working. But it baffles me that those companies don't want that money for themselves.

I didn’t get to use any of the cool terms for what I was doing though. FIRE and Digital Nomadding hadn’t been invented yet.

The problem was that every time I stopped contracting for somebody, they stopped sending me money. Building software products fixed that:

https://expatsoftware.com/articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-a-l...

> Managers love the idea that contractors can be fired more easily than employees. Except that this flexibility comes at a cost;

I noticed this early, and spent the first half of my career leaning into it. If you negotiate every gig as a contract, you get to double (or more) your salary. And the only thing you're trading away is job security which, if you pay attention, you'll notice doesn't actually exist for your salaried counterparts either.

To nitpick, you also have to pay for your own health insurance. So subtract $200/month from that extra $15,000/month for the sort of catastrophic coverage plan that a 27 year old needs.

Yeah, that went about as well as I would have expected.

It dug up a bunch of what can only be my information, then made up a bunch of confidently wrong things to say about me.

I'm a Software Engineer and SaaS guy, known for running the company "[random word from my blog] Software" and his [different word from my blog] Blog. Founder of three separate startups I've never heard of and may not exist, and well known contributor to Open Source (because that's something that software people often do, so it makes for pretty words to put into a paragraph, despite me not contributing to open source).

Overall, it's like watching a really bad sight reader doing his act. It suggests something that's likely true about you given your background, then keeps tweaking those suggestions until you go "yeah, that's it! you nailed me!".

Sadly, this is pretty par for the course watching AI try to do stuff.

If you're not familiar with this channel, do yourself a favor and watch your way through his backyard trail build videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAsuk8OndHs&list=PL5S7V5NhM8...

They're so well done. Sadly, he doesn't do them anymore because Youtube's algorithm doesn't make it worth his while. Evidently, he gets the same traffic & revenue from a 10 minute video reviewing "stupid bike gadgets" into the camera as he does for spending a month building a cool bike jump and editing together one of those amazing videos on the playlist.

If youtube rewarded evergreen stuff like that instead of cheap "reaction" videos, it'd be a much cooler place.

Yeah, I'm still waiting for Ken Arnold to get in touch to offer to compose me a soundtrack.

I'm building a video game. It's a Retro Survival Crafting RPG that crams the gameplay of Valheim into the tile-based UI of Ultima IV.

https://stravaeger.com/

It's all vanilla Javascript, running in the browser, so you can wreck today's productivity right this minute if you like. It has multiplayer support, so I'll stand up a server in case anybody wants to jump in.

I guess the difference between the parent and me is that I’ve been around long enough to see my share of “fix typo “ and “remove logging “ commits that accidentally removed the line above or below.

That’s the commit I want to find six months later when the SVG text is blurry because we’re no longer forcing opacity to 1.0 at the end of a transition.

This is the response I expected to see here.

Reading through the article, I'm reminded of my dismay reading this exact sentiment every time version control is discussed. So many people are so quick to throw away their history so that things look "tidy". It makes no sense, but somehow it fits a certain programmer-brain logic that is surprisingly common.

My style is to commit often. Like dozens of times per day. Commits are the record of what happened, and I want as much of that record to exist as possible. I've been saved so many times by a git bisect that landed pointing at a tiny commit to a single line that looks completely innocuous, yet broke something in a subtle way that only got discovered way later.

That's what source control is for, in my opinion. Finding stuff like that. So many of these things would have been really painful to find if I'd had to sift through every line of a big commit.

So to watch people intentionally balling up an entire PR's worth of commits and squashing them together to throw away the only (in my mind) thing that version control is good for, is truly baffling.

But yeah, there are plenty of people like the parent in that camp, so the author's plan to add even more granularity will be an uphill battle.

Yeah, of course. I’ve only ever been disappointed by ai, so I don’t use it.

I run my own shop, so I can do what I want, but I’m happy with my pace (which I’ve noticed is quite fast compared to folks I’ve worked with), and I don’t find “speed of writing code “ to be a bottleneck.

When and if it gets good, I’ll hop in. But for the time being I don’t get the sense that I’m missing out on anything.

It’s the big advantage that small companies have over big ones.

I’ve ridden startups through the phase where they transition to “responsible adults”, and start putting in policies and locking things down and generally behaving like the giant corporations they expect to be one day (and that the locker downers came from and are used to).

You can feel the deceleration, like taking your foot off the gas on the freeway. I’ve sat through all hands meetings where the ceo asked why we don’t ship as fast anymore, and since by that time most of the fast moving folk have moved on, nobody has an explanation.

You need to compensate for not adding it though. The recipe without was literally the same ingredient list as the site it copied, just missing a line.

And almond flour does its thing by carmelizing in combination with butter and sugar, turning your whole cake into a sort of giant macaron. You can’t pull it off without any one of those things.

But google won’t give you the recipe. It’ll give you a pretty piece of text that resembles a recipe. You’ll only find out it’s not a recipe when it fails to produce a cake.

But then, the sites it's training on are starting to do the same thing, so maybe it won’t matter. Just last night, I pulled up four sites with “gluten free almond cake” recipes. One specified less than 1/4 the flour it would have needed, and another didn’t have any butter in the ingredients list. I had to eyeball the median and tweak from experience to actually get a bakable cake out.

Yeah, compared to the AWS experience:

I had a toy Free Tier account that managed to overstep a limit one month and rack up $0.0038 in charges.

AWS hounded me about it for an entire year before finally putting the account on hold. Then kept at it for months more before finally deleting it.

It’s pike the paperboy from Better off Dead, if he were to continue delivering newspapers while hounding you for his two dollars.

There are good overnight ferries from England to France, Ireland and the Netherlands. Cheap too.

We live in France and often spend the summer visiting family in the north of England. For a family of four, it works out about the same price to take the Rotterdam to Hull night ferry (outside cabin, meals and all) as it would to go through Calais and spend the night in a hotel instead.

And then it’s 2 hours of driving instead of 8 at the end.

Even when plans take us south, we’ll often take a night ferry from Portsmouth instead of the tunnel, just because it’s a better experience for roughly the same price.

Everybody gets killed by the goat.

Thanks! Yeah, all the tiles are hand drawn, though I took a lot of inspiration from the original Ultima graphics.

Early on, I actually used a bunch of tiles that I had lifted straight from Ultima V, but I swapped them all out for my own work once it looked like the game was fun and I might want to actually show it in public one day.

The json thing is what makes it particularly surprising.

It’s literally ’gameconstants.js’ with an item list that has a .name string and a .armor value that it could look up. But when I pointed it to the file and told it which row to read from, still chose to make something up instead of read the data designed to be read by computers.

I do like how your ai tries to cover for its buddies with lies about there not being any documentation online. Because pointing AIs to a specific page and asking them to read the numbers there is a known trap.

Yeah. I wasn’t angry about this a couple days ago, but I am now.

So the thing that’s on by default and makes autocomplete worse (plain intelligence never changed my s.x = 0 to s.xVInputRadiusDetectionThreshold = 0 if I happened to take my eyes off the screen for a moment) is now stealing credit for my work?

I’m speechless.

Also glad I use a standalone git client.

That's the plan. A game for all seven of us old enough to remember when games looked like this.

LLMs seem really bad with reading numbers and reporting them back. I’m building a game, and to se how well its docs were being indexed, I tried asking simple questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever Microsoft’s thing is, etc:

“What is the armour value for the Leather Shirt” in the game Stravaeger?”

It confidently got it wrong.

“You can find the game at https://stravaeger.com”

Different confident answers, also wrong.

“You’ll find it in a table on this page: https://stravaeger.com/docs.html?inventory_item=LEATHER_SHIR...“

Oh, sorry. I was inferring from other similar games. Here is a different confidently wrong number.

“It’s also in the .json file linked on that page”

And another wrong value. Random numbers should have got it right by now, but no. And the confident, authoritative tone never changed. Every model I tried was the same story.

I hope this doesn’t come across as making fun, but it had never occurred to me that GitHub could be anything more than a tool for hosting my source code. So if you had written this same piece about all the good times you’d had in Windows Explorer, I’d be no less confused.

Can I ask what was there that made you visit the site for anything other than reviewing pull requests and issues?

It’s interesting to read the comments here. People seem to be either strongly for, or strongly against this tapping feature. I bet the split correlates to whether all your friends live in the same town as you.

For me, I already know what the handful of people who live in my little town are doing. I see them all the time. An app like this is for keeping up for the rest of my friends who live out of town and I might only see in person every few years.

I really like the idea of a “facebook before it got bad “, with just people you actually know posting about what they’re up to.

But the “tap phones” thing wouldn’t work for me.

Most of my friends and family live halfway around the world from me. I visit the states every couple years, and make a point of seeing them when I can, but the reality is I live here and they live there (a dozen different theres in half a dozen countries)

Those are the people I want an app like this to keep up with. But they’re the people your app won’t even let me add as friends.

From their point of view, that's the product working correctly. The whole point of all these consumer cloud storage products is to make it easy to upload your stuff and impossible to download it. (impossible - 1u to be precise, for legal purposes).

iPhoto does this the best. Its default is to upload every one of your photos to its cloud and delete the original from your phone. Then if you want it back, you can just click on the one photo you want and like magic, it's back on your phone. Want it on you PC? No problem. Open the web interface, click the one photo you want, and there's even a download button.

Want all your photos? Oh. Well, you can just click each one of them then click the download button.

I mean, sure, there's also this icloud app that will slowly download your entire photo collection into a single folder on your computer, slowing down the entire time before eventually grinding to a halt by the time it has put 10000 of your 250,000 photos into that folder. Of course, you can restart it, but it'll start again at the beginning.

But yeah, that's the business model. Put your stuff on the cloud, make it hard to get it back, charge you to keep it there.

My advice: If you want people to give you money so that you don’t have to shut down, and you’re writing a ten paragraph plea for donations, consider using one of those paragraphs to tell people what your thing is.

If we knew what it was, we might want to help.

I found myself hoping to find signals that it was written by AI, so that I didn't have to feel embarrassed for an actual author.

That's a first for me.

The reasoning makes more sense when you factor in that your startup’s VC is also Slack’s VC.

You’re actually giving that same venture capitalist $4m of their own money back, in a way that makes their investment more valuable.