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kunzhion Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

That's...wow. What an absolutely disappointing reply.

If "be kind" is an actual value of HN I have yet to see it in almost 15 years of being active on this forum. This community is generally speaking not kind and fulminating is de rigeur as far as I've been able to surmise.

But whatever. I won't bother you or anyone else on here anymore. Good riddance.

kunzhion Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

Thanks for your reply. Yep, you got me with that word. Exposure has become totally toxic to me, just like "merit."

kunzhion Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

[flagged]

kunzhion Three weeks after acquiring Windsurf, Cognition offers staff the exit door

I worked with a guy once whose previous employer, a startup, had been bought by a large well-known entertainment company (famous for running an amusement park or two in Southern California). He told me that when they had the company party, the three founders all got up on stage to thank the employees for their hard work, sacrifice, etc. The first two founders were humble, gracious, struck the right note.

However, alcohol was flowing and when the third founder took the mic he started with: "I just wanna thank everyone here...for making me FUCKIN' RIIIIICH." Didn't raise the mood exactly.

That was Silicon Valley then and it's Silicon Valley today. Folks are just saying the quiet parts louder and louder now.

"He got his bag."

kunzhion Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024)

Makes me think of this classic from Derek Sivers - There is no speed limit - https://sive.rs/kimo

kunzhion Grok 4

seriously?

kunzhion Grok 4

Grok might be able to find the cure for cancer but as long as it's associated with Musk, not touching that thing with a 10-foot pole.

(Simon's analysis, of course, is lovely)

kunzhion A Typology of Canadianisms

> It seems everyone outside of Ontario feels some kind of alienation or other. The west, as you mentioned, but also the maritimes, and especially the Québécois.

Yep, and then there's Newfoundland, which isn't even part of the maritimes. (No worries though, they're used to being excluded)

kunzhion An open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt GenAI in education

> At its heart, education is a project of guiding learners to exercise their own agency in the world. Through education, learners should be empowered to participate meaningfully in society, industry, and the planet.

I agree but I have never seen an education system that had this as a goal. It's also not what society or employers actually want. What is desired are drones / automatons that take orders and never push back. Teaching people about agency is the opposite of that.

We are so stuck in a 19th century factory mindset everywhere, GenAI is just making it even more obvious.

kunzhion A Typology of Canadianisms

> For anyone interested in Canadian history, always check-out the French version of a wikipedia page

In reading about Canadian history this entire comment strikes me as very "East" biased? (Because I'm reading a strong implication that the French are the true holders of the history and the English just showed up later. Which may very well be true)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_alienation

kunzhion Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

>Dynamic, on-the-fly generation & execution is definitely fascinating to watch in a sandbox, but is far to scary (from a compliance/security/sanity perspective) without spending a lot more time on guardrails.

Would love love love to hear more on what you are doing here? This seems super fascinating (and scary). :)

kunzhion Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

Funny this article is trending today because I had a similar thought over the weekend - if I'm in Ruby and the LLM hallucinates a tool call...why not metaprogram it on the fly and then invoke it?

If that's too scary, the failed tool call could trigger another AI to go draft up a PR with that proposed tool, since hey, it's cheap and might be useful.

kunzhion Ancient X11 scaling technology

Interesting article, I'll admit when I first saw the title I was thinking of a different kind of "scaling" - namely the client/server decoupling in X11.

I still think X11 forwarding over SSH is a super cool and unsung/undersung feature. I know there are plenty of good reasons we don't really "do it these days" but I have had some good experiences where running the UI of a server app locally was useful. (Okay, it was more fun than useful, but it was useful.)

kunzhion Meta announces Oakley smart glasses

Nice - maybe mine will be called YT.

kunzhion Meta announces Oakley smart glasses

> I really enjoyed the Oakley Flak series, the fit was superb.

Oh for sure, they were quite good, there was a real reason they became popular. But like you said, it got to be annoying that wearing Oakleys was a statement. (Plus, at least where I lived, they were part of the "douche uniform.")

In terms of recommendations, I'm still getting lots of mileage out of my Ray-Ban Wayfarers, and they're polarized.

kunzhion Meta announces Oakley smart glasses

Yeah it's odd. Was it a warning or a prophecy? Was it both? Hard to say I suppose.

kunzhion Meta announces Oakley smart glasses

I’m a 90s kid so there’s something poetic about Zuck choosing Oakley for this, feels on-brand for him.

In my mind it was inevitable that we would reach this point. The novel Snow Crash predicted this exact phenomenon (along with the Metaverse, of course, which is where they are trying to drive this). It’s the same with companies issuing cryptocurrencies and the like.

We aren’t totally locked in to the techno-feudal state just yet, but we’re getting there. Pretty fascinating how foreseeable these last many years and decades have been.

kunzhion Google is using YouTube videos to train its AI video generator

Reading this article I couldn’t help but remember the Key & Peele skit about joke theft - “high on potenuse.” All this AI training feels similar to me on some level. Yeah, it’s “just making a copy” on the other hand the person who originated the idea doesn’t get to participate in the success.

Life is hard, but at least on the other hand, it’s also unfair.

kunzhion The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

Not at all! No offense was taken.

kunzhion The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

Sometimes if I'm reading something and having trouble with the words or sentences, I'll slow down and focus on the individual letters. Usually helps a tremendous amount.

kunzhion Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?

> I think my seniority seems like a threat to some leaders.

Boy do I feel this one. I'm 20 years in now and holy shit are there are a lot of bad leaders out there. What they all have in common is that they don't want to be gainsaid. Most leaders are completely allergic to meaningful feedback, hardly any of them ever ask for it. A lot of people seem to feel that once they are "in charge" they have somehow become infallible.

It's too bad because like `softwaredoug I love developing young people, most of them are very hungry for mentorship. I find that most younger ICs are very willing to listen and learn, but the leadership sees it as a problem for some reason that they're not struggling on their own on basic shit. What a waste of time of money.

kunzhion Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard

Agree, The Economist knows who they are and they're very happy to throw some acidic British humor into their writing for fun.

kunzhion Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard

They've always been upfront about their bias, in no way are they trying to hide it.

Way back when I was in college 20 years ago they ran a very funny article poking fun at all the PhD's doing "deconstruction" on The Economist. Like super post-modernist fluff. I could tell the writer had a great time responding to it.

Their punchline: "so there you have it - a newspaper to make you feel good about tomorrow by promoting capitalism today!"

kunzhion "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

Yeah, it’s pretty clear who knows anything basic about business and who has only spent time in tech.

kunzhion What “working” means in the era of AI apps

100% agree on this. It’s 1995 all over again. AI is as big (or bigger) as the Internet back then. Hype to totally insane levels but eventually all things that go up must come down.

In the meantime, the usual suspects are gonna make a whole lotta money.

kunzhion "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

I don't think any of those companies learned a lesson.

kunzhion What if you could do it all over? (2020)

Reading the article and the comments I free-associated to Treebeard from Lord of the Rings:

"Still, I should have liked to see the songs come true about the Entwives. I should have dearly liked to see Fimbrethil again. But there, my friends, songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time their own way: and sometimes they are withered untimely."

kunzhion Edamagit: Magit for VSCode

Haven't tried this yet but love seeing that this project even exists.

Magit IMNSHO is the absolute gold standard for git UIs (or "porcelains" as they used to be called back in the day). Nothing else even comes close.

kunzhion I am disappointed in the AI discourse

> "Eventually we won't even need you and you can go die in a ditch somewhere while we party on our very large boats."

You reminded me of an interesting article from 10 years ago, so I went ahead and re-posted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44119705