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lvl155

1,068 karma · joined August 8, 2024

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lvl155··on ChatGPT Health
They’re not even trained for memorization. They’re trained for mitigation and I don’t really blame them for the crap pay they receive. Over the course of a 40-year career they basically make what a typical junior dev makes. It’s fast becoming a rich man’s hobby career.
lvl155··on US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year
Corporate America is such a weird place. They rather hire immigrants than retrain or educate existing workforce. Everything about the US economy is plug and play then discard. And if they can’t plug and play, they will just scrap the whole thing. That’s exactly what’s happening right now.
lvl155··on I switched from VSCode to Zed
For such an incomplete product, Zed sure is popular among devs. I guess they love to waste time working with a tool missing key features. I can forgive all that but Zed has one of the worst UIs I’ve experienced in a long time.
lvl155··on Databases in 2025: A Year in Review
I want to thank Andy and the entire DB Group at CMU. They’ve done a great job of making database accessible to so many people. They are world class.
lvl155··on Apple releases open-source model that instantly turns 2D photos into 3D views
I sunk my twenties involving the sh*tshow that was Microsoft antitrust. No, Microsoft shipping IE by default is pretty benign compared to what Apple has been doing for far longer than whatever Microsoft ever did. In fact, one can make an argument that Windows was really an open platform for developers based on Today’s standards.
lvl155··on Apple releases open-source model that instantly turns 2D photos into 3D views
Swift language is open source but the entire ecosystem is as closed as they get. The fact that no one is building anything outside of the ecosystem says everything about Swift and Apple’s intent. The fact that they still won’t support Linux on M chips also says they don’t care.
lvl155··on Apple releases open-source model that instantly turns 2D photos into 3D views
Apple trying to “open-source” something is pretty relevant. I don’t trust them at all. People constantly go at Microsoft but what Apple has done in the last 15 years is far worse. Their monopolies have had far worse impact than whatever Microsoft ever did with Windows and IE.
lvl155··on Perfect Aircrete, Kitchen Ingredients [video]
You can read the comments in the video but material science involving concrete is quite advanced.
lvl155··on Apple releases open-source model that instantly turns 2D photos into 3D views
I don’t know when Apple turned evil but hard for me to support them further after nearly four decades. Everything they do now is directly opposite of what they stood for in the past.
lvl155··on Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History
lvl155··on Perfect Aircrete, Kitchen Ingredients [video]
Love the enthusiasm but people get PhDs just for concrete. This stuff has been around for a very long time.
lvl155··on Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
He’s not wrong. They’re ramping up energy and material costs. I don’t think people realize we’re being boiled alive by AI spend. I am not knocking on AI. I am knocking on idiotic DC “spend” that’s not even achievable based on energy capacity. We’re at around 5th inning and the payout from AI is…underwhelming. I’ve not seen commensurate leap this year. Everything on LLM front has been incremental or even lateral. Tools such as Claude Code and Codex merely act as a bridge. QoL things. They’re not actual improvements in underlying models.
lvl155··on Jimmy Lai Is a Martyr for Freedom
I think it started out that way before Xi. But they soon realized they can actually overtake the US if they play it right. At least until the Chinese demand higher wages relative to the world, it’s going to be nearly impossible to compete against China in manufacturing. Likely at least another 15-20 years.
lvl155··on 1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5
Patrick’s enthusiasm is so contagious and you perfected tech YouTube format. There’s not a dead spot in your video.
lvl155··on 1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5
Seriously, Jeff has the best job. Him and STH Patrick.
lvl155··on Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?
That’s what I thought too but it’s not. Apple is refusing all gift card related hardware purchases in certain markets. Even what you already redeemed to your account. It certainly piqued my interest in what’s happening behind the scene.
lvl155··on Please just try HTMX
To be honest, none of these new-ish frameworks are good because there’s not enough data to train LLMs. React/NextJS is great because I can 80% get there with LLMs.
lvl155··on Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?
But that basically screws over loyal Apple customers who trade in an entire family’s worth of iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, Macbooks, etc over the years. Sometimes you just take a giftcard because you don’t want to buy a new thing. Fast forward a couple of years, you basically learn that you traded in your Macbook Pro for nothing. How’s that not a controversy? Perhaps they should give customers non-transferable store credits that cannot be purchased elsewhere. Avoids the entire issue with gift cards.
lvl155··on Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?
I experienced something similar recently. There’s something going on with gift cards at Apple. It’s a bit fishy. As in they don’t want you to use it so they can report higher holiday season sales. Or they’re experiencing a huge uptick in scams involving the cards. I started wondering if the system they use is actually secure from a cryptographical pov.

My lessons were:

1) if you’re going to accrue gift cards for hardware purchases, use a separate Apple ID. Do not use that ID for anything else and especially not as family organizer.

2) save paper trails for all your gift cards. That’s your only way out of this.

3) be prepared to be treated like a scammer by Apple Support. They will even question where you got the devices you traded in at the store. Some support staff will basically say you stole them without any evidence.

lvl155··on AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
7/10 senior devs (usually fellas 50+) will get mad at you for trying to use Claude Code. Me: “dude it writes better code than crap you write in your mush middle-age brain.” Also me: “I also have mush brain.”

I think LLM is a reflection of human intelligence. If we humans become dumber as a result of LLM, LLMs will also become dumber. I’d like to think in some dystopian world, LLM’s trained from pre 2023 data will be sought after.

lvl155··on Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company
It’s such a wasteland. I really think FB is fudging those Facebook user metrics. I might login once or twice a year and realize even marketplace is junk these days.
lvl155··on Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company
I refuse to believe that companies are allocating major ad spend to Facebook in 2025. Instagram, yes.
lvl155··on Pro-democracy HK tycoon Jimmy Lai convicted in national security trial
Agreed but even in places like South Korea where they staged national weekend strikes to remove a sitting president, it’s withering away. People are tired of politics and politicians. It’s death by apathy.
lvl155··on Pro-democracy HK tycoon Jimmy Lai convicted in national security trial
Democracy that we knew from 60s to 00s is effectively dead everywhere. I would like to think that social media and surveillance technology both played roles in accomplishing that so quickly and without public outcry/protests. All that blood spilled in 1900s to spread democracy wiped out in a matter of couple of years.
lvl155··on SoundCloud has banned VPN access
I am so sick of these IP blocks. Same thing in Discord where a lot of servers deploy third-rate services like Double Counter that’s effectively a malware host. There’s nothing wrong with using VPN. I don’t want my IP exposed when my ISP doesn’t allow me to freely change it like they used to even a couple of years ago.
lvl155··on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
100%. Amazon actually has a sizable robotics presence in Boston. It would have been great for Boston job market and there are actually a handful of companies based out of MA including BD. You really need a cluster of companies to strengthen an industry. I mean see biotech in Kendall if you need an example.

Every time I hear someone applaud China for doing it cheaper and better, you don’t actually know that long-term. Technology goes into China but rarely comes out of it. Meaning they like to “transfer” IP in exchange for cheap labor but they don’t share a lot of things. There’s a very real long-term price to pay for that.

lvl155··on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
They struck it down because they said it hurts competitiveness based on faulty economic arguments. It was clear even two years ago that the market was extremely competitive with much cheaper iRobot copies. Lina Khan just didn’t want Amazon to save an American company. Plain and simple. Anybody in the robotics field in MA could have told you iRobot was struggling and that Amazon was throwing them a bone to keep those engineers afloat.
lvl155··on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
Where is Lina Khan who struck down the acquisition? Read the comments from the FTC. That was from less than two years ago. I am all for antitrust but Lina Khan was inept as they come in terms actually dealing with anti competitiveness in the tech.

This is called dumping. Long-term dumping but it is what it is.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...

lvl155··on If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?
We need a new language designed specifically for Vibe coding.
lvl155··on Amp, Inc. – Amp is spinning out of Sourcegraph
It was really good in early stages (this past summer). But that was before Claude Code and Codex took off big time. I would say the biggest downside of Amp is that it’s expensive. Like running Opus the whole time expensive. But they don’t have their own model so what are you really paying for? Prompts? Not so sure. Amp is for people who are not smart enough to roll their own agents. So in that case, they shouldn’t be using agentic workflow.
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