jspann

Hang on. You've published hundreds of apps? As in the same thing slightly modified several times?

I feel like this take is for a more passive form of stoicism. No you don't have to care about what is going on around you, but you do need to somewhat engage with your life to solve problems, pay bills and take care of loved ones.

(Disclosure: I'm getting a PhD in CS now)

> The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it

Funny enough, this is why I think a PhD is undervalued by many. You spend years focused on a single area, sometimes pivoting topics, and getting hands on experience with operating solo on the outskirts of a particular field.

The overall point of the degree is you learn how to learn. The nice part is you have the padded walls of university equipment, funding, and time; So failure isn't terminal, just an opportunity to figure out what didn't work.

There's a few reasons how and why this message got distorted and lost in modern academia (honestly it would be a great subject for a book). It's no mistake that better known programs and programs with ties to a stream of successful startups are also the ones where there's a culture of builders and makers.

This got a laugh out of me! Thanks for sharing!

-My spreadsheet is in Google Sheets

-The hosting is in AWS

-The server itself uses the FastMCP library, in python

> Quell doesn’t store your messages — they’re processed and discarded in real time.

Are you using a 3rd party system to generate the numbers and forward them to your number? How can you audit that they 3rd party that creates the Quell numbers isn't saving the messages before they move to your server?

> Ivan was born at a very young age, this has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move.

Lol

> 50% of buyers don't even finish the first video.

Just wondering - Is that a guess or a backed up statistic? Would be eye opening if that really was the case

I've had a project idea in the back of my mind for a long time: take all of my locations that I've saved in Swarm (https://swarmapp.com) and 3D render all of the buildings that I've been to. The issue was a lack of models of the actual buildings - which is here! Maybe it is possible...

What was the Texas patent case?

This is fun!

Maybe I'm reading the headlines wrong, but it doesn't seem like a lot of people read the actual press release and earnings report from the August 11th, 2025[1]:

1) The "Going Concern Assessment" that they put out was a regulatory requirement because they didn't have full control of the sale of parts of the pension. They say in the release that they're going to have the sale finalized on December 15th, with details on August 15th

2) They not only mention opening a new business segment, but built a lab AND got FDA approval for that segment (Advanced Materials & Chemicals)

3) The sale of the pension is going to have so much of a surplus they're going to pay down parts of the long debt that they have.

I'd love to be corrected if I'm misreading this, but the reports of Kodak's death seem greatly exaggerated

[1]: https://investor.kodak.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...

This is a very cool project / startup! I'm curious, how do you get the ground truth data? Is that just you marking down where you are as you walk through the store?

> 100% of Windsurf employees will participate financially in this deal

> 100% of Windsurf employees will have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date

> 100% of Windsurf employees will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work to date

This sounds like a happy ending for the employees of Windsurf and a good deal for Cognition

> It’s unclear whether Trump can legally pause the TikTok ban.

Irrespective of my political leaning, Trump's legal scenarios have made me learn more about how the U.S. government works and question hypothetical scenarios that I'd never thought of before. Can a non-member be the speaker of the house? How did the Gulf of Mexico get its name? What procedures are official rules vs. just customary? What does it truly mean to be "impeached"? It's given me a new perspective on how laws are written and appreciation for how rules are defined for future generations.

I love the concept and loved the results I got. I tried it out and found a lot of papers both from my lab group and ones related that I had missed. I'd happily pay for it but as a grad student the price is a little steep - would it be possible to make a student tier?

I remain skeptical until I see it in action. On the one hand, Apple has a good track record with privacy and keeping things on device. On the other, there was too much ambiguity around this announcement. What is the threshold for running something in the cloud? How is your personal model used across devices - does that mean it briefly moves to the cloud? How does its usage change across guest modes? Even the phrase "OpenAI won’t store requests" feels intentionally opaque.

I was personally holding out for a federated learning approach where multiple Apple devices could be used to process a request but I guess the Occam's razor prevails. I'll wait and see.

I'm on Google Domains right now, was disappointed when I heard the change to SS, and have been putting off moving to someone else before the transfer but want to now. What are other registrars other there that I should move my domains to? I've heard good things about porkbun.

> NetBSD sits in the middle. It is a relatively small, clean, and simple OS.

The "build.sh" system for compilation is so easy to use for compiling your own toyOS that I initially felt like I had done something wrong. Linux is a bigger, better funded, wider documented project but the overall ease of specifying output type for a boot image and what platform I was developing for was the second deciding factor for me. The first was being able to compile it (with no weird extra steps) on my Mac (pre Apple Silicon).

In undergrad it became my hackable OS of choice if I wanted to compile something for my old Mac, a server for my bike, or some incredibly niche computer I found by accident. When I had questions, I asked the IRC group. For me, it was a great introduction by practice of the different parts of an OS.

> What has your experience been in starting a tech blog?

I made one in 2014 (Blogger) then got bored and stopped. I tried again a few years later (Bloger, Medium, Wordpress), then got bored and stopped. I recently got interested in another attempt (BearBlog) which I'm looking into now. The issue for me was not a lack of topics but the opposite - I'd start writing about one thing and get side tracked and start writing about something else. A blog is a great way to explore your interests but it is important to stay focused on what you want to write about. I put too much emphasis on having a consistent output schedule and high standards on what I should write about, which eventually ended up with nothing.

> I am afraid of sharing though and getting negative feedback. Was that something that you pushed through when starting?

I used to be worried about this too and usually consulted my friends or some writing assistants at my undergrad. I think this goes away the more you write.

> Did starting a blog lead to a new job?

No but some people saw my posts and remembered them when they saw me in real life later.

Being in Rochester, I always wonder how this will affect the local community here, where the Xerox was founded and where the majority of its workforce still is [1]. Still, I'm surprised they announced this after the holidays. I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse, or even says anything about the company itself, but it doesn't seem like the norm of other larger technology companies.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox

The disappointing part of this is the large parts of the population who will look at this and other recent cases (see: Francesca Gino) and think that "academia is broken" or "scientists can't be trusted". That narrative will even be amplified by many YouTubers and periodicals who were quick with those headlines. However, as soon as this work came out, multiple scientists voiced concerns, several even filed complaints with the journal. Those in the field even took steps to reproduce the work found in the paper. The fact that this error was caught and several were skeptical enough to comment is how the system should work. Arguing over results that are too good to be true, taking steps to try to reproduce it independently, and publicly taking it down is why science can be trusted. Research isn't going to be perfect every time but peer review and reproduction should weed out the less than credible.

I'm always caught off guard whenever I see Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) or the City of Rochester in general mentioned anywhere. I just don't expect it. I know Rochester is a former U.S. Boomtown and has a major historical presence in the U.S. but with the great leaps other cities made in Rochester's decline I don't jump to the idea of seeing Rochester mentioned unless it is about lasers.

That being said, Rochester is an up and coming city and I say that more emphatically with each passing year. Pittsburgh is a great case study, but when combined with a Great Lake, quality of life, infrastructure for big business (including the people and schools who are still there), and the talent that closely surrounds the city on all sides (Boston, NYC, Toronto, Chicago, Pittsburgh), future growth is inevitable.

Great timing! I just watched this last night with my friends. We all were surprised that this movie didn't get more traction!

> But Glenn Howerton’s Portrayal of Jim Balsillie’s explosive rage is one of the great performances. Ever. it’s one of those instant legendary meme performances.

Totally agree. Even if you're not into the story of blackberry, the character performances and rarely onscreen story of "engineer becoming corporate" is worth the watch.

I didn't even know Squarespace was buying Google Domains. This was an interesting way to find out.

I've been journaling (handwriting in a composition notebook) almost my entire life but started taking it more seriously over the past 2 years. It's the first thing I do in the morning and I usually spend 1 hour writing my feelings over the past few days and reflecting on things that made me happy. I love it and it's created a tremendous amount of motivation for me. Not only has the routine of writing first thing in the morning given me the feeling of accomplishing something before I've left the house, but it gets all of my feelings out, as if I'm telling a friend, so I don't ruminate on yesterday and can focus on today. It was tough to start but worthwhile over time.

I liked playing this game! The art style, animations, and overall messages were a really good experience! I look forward to sharing this with my friends later.

  Location: Rochester, NY, USA
  Remote: Open to it but don't have a preference
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: Deep learning, statistics, Python, C/C++, web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS, etc), 
  Résumé/CV: https://jspann.me/CV.pdf
  Email: james@jspann.me

-- Currently in a CS PhD program but thinking of leaving for other opportunities. More about me at http://jspann.me

Seconded! I would love to get daily updates.

That is a great idea! Measuring distance between embeddings has always been a cool concept (ex. If I have a vector that represents the word "king" and from it subtract the vector that represents "man" then add the vector that represents "woman" it will approximately equal the vector for "queen") and it's awesome to see the same concept applied to music.

Most other services try to find matches by seeing what other songs the people who like the searched song like, and finding trends amongst those. This site finds songs with similar sounds and rhythms by looking in the vector space. Awesome! Congrats on the finished site!