medhir

“Have a job you love” -

As someone who has basically never had the chance to work in an environment I’d say I “love”, I’m not sure how to take away any sort of lesson.

Sounds great on the surface, but how many people are afforded the privilege of selecting a job based on what they’re passionate about?

Agreed with the sentiment of the author, but are teams really arguing for pulling in dependencies in the name of security?

I’ve seen the exact opposite — every dependency introduces a new opportunity for vulnerabilities, and to be judicious in pulling in new ones due to the potential security risk.

yeah, I’ve had many moments in my AI-driven development cycles looping with the LLM in a dead end, eventually giving up and falling back to regular old programming.

I think LLMs are great for reducing the friction with just starting a task, but they end up being more of a nuisance when you need to dig into more nuanced problems.

yes it does…

If you find your X feed is fucked, bluesky is right there and offers complete algorithm customization… the network effects aren’t as strong but at least there’s some options to better control the experience.

China publicly advertises itself as communist regime. I get that we want to protect our interests from foreign adversaries, I disagree that this is the way to do so.

China banning Facebook is an authoritarian action. If we are doing the “same shit”, it feels expressly undemocratic and I am speaking towards that.

was not really on TikTok but a bleak day for anyone that believes in the free speech ideals the US was founded on

Ah nice, thanks for the heads up! I’ll look into adding this soon.

Took me a few hours. I use MDX for formatting so most of the time was spent figuring out how to convert the MDX to plain HTML. Not a very heavy lift overall :)

I recently had a popular post on HN and several people reached out asking if I had an RSS feed implemented.

Was surprised that anyone would be interested in keeping up with my writing, but was happy to oblige the request as it had been on my to-do list for a while. Happy I did do as it seems many people are hitting the RSS endpoint now. Cool to see that RSS is relevant in 2025, and will definitely advocate for its usage more moving forward :-)

ok, that’s fair, I totally blanked on the anti-encryption stance.

I still think having something on the books for general data protection is a net good, as it forced all the biggest US-based companies to at least start implementing data privacy controls.

I mean, however flawed the EU may be, I think they are earnestly trying to protect the average person from the current paradigm of abusive data collection. Perfect can’t be the enemy of good.

In a more functional democracy we would see that mass data collection of any sort, by any company (foreign or domestic), is a national security risk.

Have witnessed first-hand the threats by foreign state actors penetrating US-based cloud infrastructure. And it’s not like any of our domestic corporations are practicing the type of security hygiene necessary to prevent those intrusions.

So idk, the whole thing feels like a farce that will mainly benefit Zuck and co while doing very little to ultimately protect our interests.

We would be much better off actually addressing data privacy and passing legislation that regulates every company in a consistent manner.

will do, thank you!

so… the fear of speaking up should lead to staying silent? what exactly are you advocating for here

I relate to this a lot. Someone is referring to this take as “bullshit” contrasting the experience of the average worker to a software engineer.

I’d argue the average worker is in the position they’re in because of a whole chain of people that couldn’t be bothered to care.

Our government has let go of its principles, because no one in charge could be bothered to give a fuck. There’s a certain nihilism to life in the US in 2025 that has been enabled entirely by people not speaking up.

I’m myself guilty of staying on the sidelines. Starting to realize that perhaps I need to be louder, because no one else is speaking up and that “giving a fuck” is something that must be led by example.

Yes — I set out to write a blogging platform to learn tools of the trade when I first was getting into the workforce in 2017. It’s been an on and off effort over years, and I don’t actually have that much writing to show.

Taking simonw’s advice (shout out since I see he also contributed to this thread), I’m trying to be less precious about my writing. I finally published a post that I’ve been wanting to see out in the world for years and it got to the front page of HN, which was of course immensely gratifying.

My motivation is partly “branding”, but also because I am a strong proponent of owning your own digital presence. Even if nothing ever came of it, there’s an artifact I can point to that’s a deep expression of my own sensibilities, and that’s what keeps me going.

I’m all for another team trying to build out another relay and prove atproto has the decentralized “juice”.

Might be more convinced to donate if there was a white paper with more details on the roadmap the funds will help drive.

thanks for sharing. the loss of property rights is an aspect I hadn’t considered… would be great to brainstorm further with an actual lawyer on these topics

this!!! sustainability is a huge aspect that seems to be getting lost in the broader discussion. locked devices are leading to an incredible amount of e-waste and it's entirely preventable.

OP here. Really glad to see others engaging with this topic, I wrote up this post because I felt like there wasn't anything out there that was advocating for unlocked hardware as part of the discussion on "right to repair".

As someone that works in security, I fully understand the need for sane defaults that protect the average user. I even advocate in the article that we should keep these defaults in place for the most part.

What I tend to not understand is the argument that there should be no option for more enterprising users to access their hardware at the lowest levels because we need to protect the average consumer. It may be a footgun for some, but that's sort of the point. I expect to be able to modify something I own, whether it's to my detriment or not.

My argument isn't that root access should be the default, but at the very least it should be an option. I just don't think it's right that we've normalized corporations blocking the ability to load / inspect software, which often is marketed as a safety or privacy thing, but is arguably more a business decision meant to protect profit margins.

Absolutely incredible, the power of persistence can yield such cool results.

I bookmarked to play around with the editor sometime, I’ve always wanted to learn GLSL and this feels like a more gentle intro into the world of shaders.

“Smart TVs are, unfortunately, more like smartphones: designed for frequent replacement.”

Except unlike smartphones, these TVs are not built with high-end components due to the razor-thin margins that have to be optimized for. So you end up with underpowered hardware and janky software that benefits only these companies through ad revenue.

I was in NYC around the time this exhibit was put together and was told by a friend to go, referencing this article.

I don’t think I’ve ever connected so strongly with a gallery exhibit as I did for Wacław’s artwork. Something about how intricate the works with just a single line. It was such a serendipitous moment that I won’t soon forget.

so when I first tried the demo I wondered, “are these pieces generated meshes?” thinking about the ability to zoom / pan the board in 3D. The high fidelity of the pieces would seemingly be more in the domain of 2D image generation given current gen AI standards, which would be my educated guess as to why there’s only a handful of views.

Personally, such a product is a non-starter if it faces the same restrictions that an iPad does.

If I’m spending “pro computer” money, I want the pro computer. Having no way to access the file system or run code is just crazy to me.

Think it’s worth calling out that many people in tech have significant reservations about the reckless push of generative AI into just about every product — the issue is the executive class that insists on chasing hype and potential short-term stock growth over everything else.

given the historical trajectory of OpenAI’s branding, deciding to include “safe” in the name is certainly a choice.

It’s very hard to trust that whatever good intentions exist now will hold over the course of this company’s existence.

at first I was shocked by the noise, but then the whole experience brought me back to 90s era computer games I played as a kid. very cool

without running tests it’s hard to say. my educated guess is it would hold up better than LIG on its own… LIG didn’t really hold up even outside of a washing machine.

generally speaking not many of these materials are designed to withstand repeated wash / dry cycles. I imagined the sensor component to be replaceable, similar to glucose test strips.