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jitbit

3,530 karma · joined September 22, 2010

Hi. I'm Alex, I live in the UK and I run a small self-funded startup - https://www.jitbit.com. My blog is at https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog
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jitbit··on You are no longer invited to dinner
Thanks you for this comment.

I’m bad at throwing parties and I’m a bad cook.

So instead I invite friends/family to stay over. Even with kids.

Thats also very gratofying, play some board games, sit next to the fire and then have breakfast together.

Best way to copē with the world at it’s current state.

(Also a European here, mildly affectrd ny war)

jitbit··on SAML: A fractal of bad design
I maintain a popular Saml library for NET (aspnetsaml). And yep, I made that rookie mistake too
jitbit··on Homebrew 7.0.0
same. "macOS Tahoe 26+" requirement is a bummer.
jitbit··on We must pace the frontier
> "I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life"

Reading this from Dario (or SamA) makes me sick every time. Such hypocrisy.

DeepMind built AlphaFold2, an transformer/attention-based system that predicts protein folding structure, then published the method, open-sourced the code and model, and together with EMBL/EBI made hundreds of millions of predicted protein structures freely available to scientists worldwide.

!THAT! is what "raising the quality of human life" looks like to me. An enormous contribution to structural biology and biomedical research.

Meanwhile, Dario spends a great deal of effort arguing for tighter controls for open-weight models, while OpenAI increasingly seems to treat mathematical discoveries as competitive PR/product announcements.

Jeez.

P.S. Not saying Google are the good guys here. It's just an example of what actually putting a major AI breakthrough into the hands of scientists can look like.

jitbit··on AI Responsibility – OpenAI and Anthropic
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49619227
jitbit··on Hacking IKEA Furniture
Not when the convention is that theres supposed to be a real person on the other side.

Example: a real musician decides to use AI to generate music (in full or partially) - their audience may still feel cheated.

jitbit··on Hacking IKEA Furniture
This comment is (mostly) AI generated.

Which is funny because it complains about the lack of originality

jitbit··on “It works better in the app”
Gmail mobile app doesn't let me search in the "trash" or "spam" folder.

Opening Gmail in mobile browser does not work too.

I have to open it in the browser - then "request mobile website" - then try to search there - aaaahnd it still reset to the mobile version ever other request.

jitbit··on The Amazon tax
> paying Amazon a dollar to show you an ad for the book you searched in the first place.

This is the worst part.

Google Ads are the same. I pay about $2 per click for my EXACT PRODUCT NAME search, otherwise 6 other competitor ads are shown on top of google search before the actual results

jitbit··on My server is a phone now
You can use a smart plug that turns it on/off. Or even a mechanical outlet timer.

Or set the phone to never charge above 80%

Thta said, keeping it on charger for months will eventually swell its battery, true.

jitbit··on GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability
tragedy of the commons, exactly
jitbit··on Show HN: I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscript
I've actually created a Chrome extension for [feature 2] ages ago (mostly for myself). If the current URL is on HN - it shows it (with the number of upvotes)

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hidhfijjhnnajlkikij...

jitbit··on Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment
You can contribute to an OSS platform. To accellerate innovation, adoption etc

You CANNOT contribute anything to a model.

jitbit··on Maybe you should learn something
I live in Europe, had to get my permanent residence permit and for that - you have to pass the language exam. Boy, that was some experience!

I'm in my 40's so learning a new language has activated the brain muscles that were last active when I was... 4?

They were so rusty, slow and amost physically refused to cooperate at first. This was tough. Now looking back it was absolutely worth it, best brain workout ever. Best.

jitbit··on Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
Anthropic: lets embed super secret invisible undetectable unicode telemetry into our prompts

Also Anthropic: lets do this in JS

jitbit··on A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown
> world can't deal with something that requires global concentrated efforts

Saddest part is that it used to

The Ozone layer problem was exactly this: coordinated global concentrated effort.

I doubt we can do that again though.

jitbit··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
I speak Russian and that version sounds way more natural. But you’re right, just being nitpicky
jitbit··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
Funny enough the post is machine-translated by AI - from the Russian original at https://orchidfiles.com/ru/im-tired-of-ai-generated-answers-...
jitbit··on Another Microsoft Copilot AD injected into 4M GitHub commits
This is is different from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269 - that was the copilot agent at github - this one is injected by VSCode
jitbit··on Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
Exactly brother, mind if I hug you.

I can play with my 7yo, or help the 11yo with his homework, or go for a run!! - while LLM is cooking a well-spec'ed agentic task. This sounds embarrassing, but LLMs have made our lives healthier, unbelievable.

PS. Not to mention all the "boring" sh*t that I used to postpone/stretch indefinitely, like writng docs or polishing copy for my website... No more stress, no procrastination, just let the LLM do it.

jitbit··on Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
Turning 50 this year.

Coding has never _stopped_ being a passion for me, but my increasingly limited time becomes an issue.

And Claude code (and cursor) saves me So. Much. Time.

I only have 10-20 active years ahead of me, so this is really, really important. Young ppl don’t get it.

jitbit··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
Anyone else paused at this line “we do not support mass DOMESTIC surveillance”

As a European I’m kinda... concerned now.

jitbit··on Oat – Ultra-lightweight, zero dependency, semantic HTML, CSS, JS UI library
I tried doing something like that in my app, and quickly discovered that some modern semantic/functional tags are STILL not supported in some browsers. Or work badly.

For example, in Safari showModal for a dialog tag causes recalculating layout for EVERY element on a page, it’s up to 59x slower than chromium…. :(

But I love the idea

jitbit··on AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
Can't upvote this comment enough.

"You're not imagining it."

"But my days got harder. Not easier. Harder."

"Now?" as the paragraph opener

"Why? No reason." as the paragraph opener

Nice try OP, submitting your own post to HN.

jitbit··on STFU
Sometimes when college kids in a hotel room next to mine are being too loud, I go out, check their room number , go back to my room and give them a call (usually just dialing the room number works).

I pretend to be “Jason from reception” and that “other guests are complaining about the noise”. Works every time.

jitbit··on Influencers and OnlyFans models are dominating U.S. O-1 visa requests
The title is misleading. It says “dominating” however no sources or percentages are provided. And later in the article it only says “increasingly applying”, with just two examples.

I do have a friend (very popular drummer-YouTuber who makes covers, has millions of subs) who did get an O visa because he actually is a, kinda, celebrity, so I guess this is indeed happening occasionally. But nothing is being “dominated” here.

jitbit··on Everyone in Seattle hates AI
I don’t work at Microsoft and I have (almost) no friends there, but—

My team has relied on the Microsoft stack for over a decade (dotnet, GitHub Actions, VS Code, MS extensions), and I can say that the overall quality and “polish” of their releases has declined.

I try to help where I can—filing issues for outdated docs, contributing to dotnet/core, joining discussions about .NET 10 still not being available in Ubuntu APT feeds, reporting and helping resolve issues with MSSQL drivers and SqlClient on GitHub, etc.

But every time I interact with someone at Microsoft, I can’t help but read between the lines: they seem slightly demotivated by the company's shift toward an AI-first focus.

It's sad.

jitbit··on FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs
True - if we're talking about actual security bugs, not the "CVE slop"

P.S. I'm an open source maintainer myself, and I used to think, "oh, OSS developers should just stop whining and fix stuff." Fast forward a few years, and now I'm buried under false-positive "reports" and overwhelmed by non-coding work (deleting issue spam, triage, etc.)

P.P.S. What's worse, when your library is a security component the pressure’s even higher - one misplaced loc could break thousands of apps (we literally have a million downloads at nuget [1] )

[1]: https://www.nuget.org/packages/AspNetSaml

jitbit··on .NET 10
I'm founder of a 100% .NET based company (15 years, 1mil LOC), all development happens on Macs, production servers run linux. No issues so far.

No, really, I'm facing more issues from Cursor based based on a year-old upstream version of VSCode than from this, heh...

jitbit··on .NET 10
For us, every .NET upgrade since .NET 5 has gone surprisingly smoothly and reduced CPU/RAM usage by 10–15%.

We were even able to downgrade our cloud servers to smaller instances, literally.

I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma.

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