mcdow

i’d rather “waste” my tokens on opus+ than waste my time with sonnet

can’t speak for Proton, but it’s no wonder Windows doesn’t see Wine as a threat. because Wine sucks to run. any normal person would just run Windows instead of having to fool with Wine. it’s for us hobbyists, because we don’t mind a little pain.

not saying $TECHCO doesn’t know about X project. i’m just saying that if the average person doesn’t know about it, it’s unlikely to get shut down, as it poses no threat.

from the faq: > Is this... legally sketchy? No. Consider projects like ReactOS, a from-scratch effort to create an OS compatible with Microsoft Windows, GNUstep, which provides an open implementation of Cocoa APIs and other things, or Darling, a compatibility layer for running Darwin (macOS) binaries on Linux. ravynOS is similar and stands on the shoulders of many such projects.

as far as i understand it, most companies don’t bother sending cease and desists to projects you’ve never heard of. the fact that the aforementioned projects have avoided the banhammer of Apple should not be an indication that a successful MacOS clone would receive the same treatment.

but on the other hand, maybe that’s a champagne problem. if you can make a macos clone good enough to get the attention of Apple, you’ve already done something incredible.

yep, i have a little helper in my zshrc for this sort of thing:

alias git-hot-refs="git branch --sort=committerdate | tail"

i inadvertently do this at work anyway. i burn through my monthly token budget on boring-but-valuable tasks, and then i spend the rest of the month doing stuff by hand.

that’s the issue with these newer models. they are able to string together a sequence of “not-serious” bugs in a system that ultimately results in some serious vulnerabilities.

it may not be an issue for ffmpeg, but it might be for an application that bundles ffmpeg.

every tool present in an IDE is available elsewhere. it’s not that the IDE-avoidant aren’t using sophisticated tools, they just aren’t using them packaged up in a single application.

it’s funny because it’s unexpected. one of those members is not like the others. the rest are tech companies.

it does make me wonder what prompted them to join. it would suggest to me there are forward looking people in Brazil’s government. I am impressed.

lol the government of brazil is in there

y’all seem to be missing the fact that Java is a mature product. it has left the “move fast and break things” era of it’s development.

code is a liability, and they likely have more to lose than gain by allowing AI contribution.

“no open source project will succeed with this level of unprofessionalism”

y’all clearly are not acquainted with some of the things Linus has said on the LKML

Haven't done any research into this, but I wonder how tough it would be to build a decent 3D printer. Maybe there are open-source designs out there.

there’s another thing that started to get quite popular in the late 2000s… smartphones

Chrome, Android, and Gmail are optional to use.

They might be buying time to sell the relevant stock

I’m working on a combination of a semantic embedder and vector database with a focus on Apple devices https://github.com/emmettmcdow/dve

It should be drop in semantic search for any text. No need to worry about what models, what database, how the data is processed, dealing with performance concerns. None of that. Just vector search.

I’m looking forward to using a RISC-V computer in 20 years

It's the phones dude. It's literally just the phones. Get rid of the phones and you fix it.

This is awesome! I’ve been looking for a way to batch export my notes out of Apple notes, will this work for that purpose?

I totally agree with you that most notes apps miss the mark. I’m working on one now which I hope satisfies the same requirements as Apple notes(dead simple, iCloud sync, free) but has some things I want (improved search, first class markdown support).

I’ve been using it as my daily driver for a while, but it’s not quite ready for other users yet. I wrote a bit about it in my year in review[1] under the section “Not Another Notes App!”.

1. https://emmettmcdow.com/posts/2025-in-review

Is any company actually doing this? I haven’t heard of anyone that has this setup. Maybe contract work, but never a full time employee working 4 days.

This is tangential but the whole Tiananmen Square thing is kind of odd. When I visited China many people were more willing to discuss it than I had imagined. Some spoke about it unsolicited. It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for. It’s rather subtle what can and cannot be discussed relating to it. Those I spoke to about it told me that most people have a good understanding of what happened, and many people speak negatively of the CCP. You just can’t do it if you have a major platform (e.g. you’re Jack Ma or you are an LLM).

Not to discount how negative free speech restrictions are, but I’m not so sure how effective that particular propaganda campaign would be.

From the comments here it sounds like most people think the amount Anthropic paid for the company was probably not much more than the VC funding which Bun raised.

How would the payout split work? It wouldn’t seem fair to the investors if the founder profited X million while the investors get their original money returned. I understand VC has the expectation that 99 out of 100 of investments will net them no money. But what happens in the cases where money is made, it just isn’t profitable for the VC firm.

What’s to stop everyone from doing this? Besides integrity, why shouldn’t every founder just cash out when the payout is life-changing?

Is there usually some clause in the agreements like “if you do not return X% profit, the founder forfeits his or her equity back to the shareholders”?

Super cool!

Why does Steam/Valve care so much about Linux? I know as devs we all would prefer to use Linux/Unix. But developer experience isn’t a good business justification.

This is true but there is another cost. If you carelessly write you can end up with a system which is a mountain of bandaid fixes; an incoherent and unmaintainable mess.

I’ve used both approaches and I can’t disagree more. Writing code first might feel faster but it isn’t. It’s great for surface level issues but just muddies the waters for any consequential feature.

Measure(communicate) twice, cut(build) once.

Oh ok. Is it still worth learning without LiveView? E.g. in my case I’m much more proficient in Python. Is it worth the jump, over something like Django?

I really want to choose Phoenix, but I can't get over the fact that LiveView is front-and-center. The whole web-socket model just seems so brittle to me.