nabbed

This is from my memory of listening to the full interview a few days ago, not just this snippet: I am not sure he is advocating that people should avoid AI, as long as they recognize its limitations and dangers, and he admits it can boost productivity.

His argument is specific to himself only:

"Many programmers come at programming at a much more business oriented perspective. Their goal is to make a specific thing and sell it ... or release it as a piece of free software. And the goal is just to have the software. They don't really care how they got there. So if you're coming at it from that perspective, whether you programmed it line by line, or whether you use AI, doesn't really make a difference.

...

But for me, I just like the act of programming. That's always been kind of why I did it. It's just kind of a happy accident that I lived in an era where I got paid well to do that. But that wasn't why I did it ... It's not an argument about quality. It's not an argument about productivity. It's about a fundamental love of the act of programming."

I am in the same boat as Casey. I like to program more than I like the finished product (and for me, that's just fine, since I don't work for anyone, so I am not screwing up any company's productivity).

The discussion over work-from-home now seems like such a quaint topic from a different age (even though I was very much in favor of it when it was a hot topic).

>The supreme court ruled last year that prosecutors’ decision to allow a key witness to give testimony they knew to be false violated Glossip’s constitutional right to a fair trial.

Since stuff like this occasionally happens[1], and sometimes needs to be rectified long after a guilty verdict, I don't understand why any state would support the death penalty. Glossip is still alive only because there was a snafu related to the lethal drugs intended to kill him. Had that snafu been overcome, there would be no defendant to retry.

[1] "Occasionally" describes only the cases we know about, of course.

I am probably hitting the same datacenter as you. I get:

>Bing isn't available right now, but everything should be back to normal very soon.

"AI means smaller, differently resourced teams in product and engineering can make a bigger impact than ever.

Fewer layers means faster decisions. Flatter is better, and our new structure will optimize for this."

Edit: Sounds like the Coinbase post from the other day.

Old text: Sounds like the "Building for the future" Cloudflare post from the other day.

I wish I could go back in time and tell my 10 year old self to knock it off with the polish jokes (which were all the rage at that time, although I can remember only one now).

I worried this blog post was going to pivot into a marketing pitch for some product, but no, it just describes the issue where the AI tool that generates your code probably won't document its reasons for the choices it makes. That documentation problem exists in the pre-AI era too, except that the reasons might exist in the heads of your co-workers and could possibly be teased out.

I know nothing about AI code generation (or about AI in general), but I wonder if you could include in your prompt a request that the AI describe the reasons for its choices and actually include those reasons as comments in the code.

Am I supposed to?

I stopped going to McDonald's (which I previously visited about once per month) mainly because they got very expensive, and the price does not match the quality of the food (and they also are not that fast anymore). If I am going to spend that much, I could spend a little more a go to a much nicer mom-and-pop place.

A secondary reason is that they are American. Although I am American, I am currently a resident of another country that is targeted by American tariffs, so I am trying to buy local as much a possible.

My US-based car has an "O"-like character in my license plate number, and honestly I could not figure out whether it was the letter O or a zero (even after searching the state's DMV site for information on how to distinguish one from the other). The character is very square, so maybe that means it's the letter O.

If the headline is more correct ("Because Police Cameras Cannot Tell the Difference Between a Zero and the Letter O") than the article content (which contradicts that claim), then I am alarmed. Otherwise, I am less alarmed.

By different accounts too. I see a few repeated accounts, but there must be many 100s of accounts created/hijacked for this "prank".

>Either way, GoDaddy is not the first choice for a new domain in 2026.

Off the top of your head, what would be a decent one?

As a closeted gay kid, I had zero interest in the nude ladies in Playboy.

However, I remember being absorbed in the fantastic interview with John Lennon (in an issue that came out weeks before or weeks after his shooting death) and being blown away by the things the interviewer got Lennon to talk about (a song-by-song analysis, and Lennon's shocking claim that McCartney tried to sabotage some of his best songs during the recording process, in particular Strawberry Fields Forever).

>As long as they don’t require The Cloud

Given that you hear frequently (even on the front page of HN today)

- people getting locked out of their cloud accounts and then facing a Kafkaesque faceless bureaucracy

- physical products turning into bricks because the cloud account disappeared with the company's failure

I would certainly hope that a cloud account is optional.

The essay Choose Boring Technology covers some of this ground. From that essay:

"One of the most worthwhile exercises I recommend here is to consider how you would solve your immediate problem without adding anything new. First, posing this question should detect the situation where the “problem” is that someone really wants to use the technology. If that is the case, you should immediately abort."

https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

Another nice thing about the above essay is that it uses dark text on light background (as opposed to this blog post, which I had to print to PDF in order to read).

I have to say, though, that I really miss the days when I was the excited young programmer dying to use the new language, the new framework, the new paradigm or even just some design pattern. Lots of fun! Luckily, during those years, I was always in a team with a more level-headed and experienced developer who would bring me (and the other team members like me) a little closer to earth. And the level-headed developer was learning from us while he/she was moderating our technical ambitions.

I'm not worked up at all about the auto-pen. But presidents should not be pardoning friends and family (although friends seem to get pardoned quite frequently). If a president feels it's important to do so, that president should wait until they are an ex-president and petition the next person in power.

I guess I wasn't paying enough attention, for what would she get charged? I know about the illegal appointments of US attorneys, the vindictive attempted prosecutions against Trump's perceived enemies, and some problems with the Epstein file releases, but I thought all those were under the category of "incompetency". Did she lie to congress or something like that?

It's odd. My email address is included un-obfuscated in ~90 commits to a popular open source repo on github. I also use this same email address for a mailing list associated with this OSS project. As far as I can tell, I've never received a single spam email in the 8 years I've had this email account.

When I view a commit on the github UI using view source, I can see the commit author's email address just as text with no special handling. It's bracketed by "<" and ">", so maybe that's enough to confuse harvesters.

I just looked at the spam folder of one my personal accounts (where I sign up for services), and it has got tons of stuff, most recently 2 or 3 with the subject "YOU PERVERT! I RECORDED YOU!".

It seems spammers are doing less harvesting and more purchasing of email lists from service vendors.

>I've had to turn off a lot of features.

On my pixel 4a, I had to turn off a "call 911" feature that I think was initiated by shaking the phone. I took a couple of walks with the phone in my front pocket, and the movement from my leg called 911 (which I would only find out when the police would call me back to ask if everything is OK).

Based on this description, it sounds like someone walking past your unattended desk and bent on disrupting your day but not stealing your data, could enter in a garbage password into the lock screen a few times and lock you out of your own laptop.

I guess the same also works for cloud accounts as well. I remember, back in the mid-2000s, trying to log into my hotmail account (never having failed to log in before) and getting a "locked out due to too many bad passwords". So someone, only knowing my user account name (which was the same as my email address), locked me out of my own account. The problem was, I couldn't remember what my recovery accounts were (I eventually figured it out).

I came to post the same thing. I assume my cat liked the heat emanating from the CRT's vents on top.

>It's not as hard as you think.

You're probably right, still...

I often wonder how I survived going for a random drive or even simply leaving the house from 1980 through to the advent of smart phones. Was I simply more brave and self-sufficient back then?

But then I note that there was some infrastructure and also some attitude differences back then that don't exist now.

When my car would break down in the 1980s or 1990s, typically there would be a pay phone nearby. One time in the early 90s, I just knocked on a random door and the resident let me use their land line to call a tow truck (I'm not sure anyone would let a random stranger into their home now, but maybe they still do). Breaking down in the boonies was no fun, but likely someone would come by eventually and help (or murder you, but probably help).

I was reminded recently of this when I went to park in the city in a garage that I frequently patronize only to find they had removed the payment terminal, which was replaced by a sign that said "use our app!". I have a low-data phone plan, so if I had to install their app, I would probably blow past my limit for the month. Also, there was no signal in the garage. So I just left and found another place to park (and was almost late for my appointment).

Also I don't like having to pay just to print my boarding pass at the check-in kiosk. Maybe I am not less brave but just more cheap.

At one point, I worked in the labs division of a big internet company, where I was a regular software developer surrounded by people with the title "scientist" (basically, programmer/statisticians with PhDs who were running engagement and revenue experiments on our user base).

In the first group meeting I attended, I jokingly asked why no one was wearing a white coat, but my colleagues didn't get the reference, so my joke fell down with a thud.

>Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction.

I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more quickly that you built the wrong thing, allowing you to iterate more quickly.

>Create a separate Mac / Windows non-admin account just for coding?

Yes, I got as far as creating a separate account on my MBP a few years ago and I do programming and open source stuff with that account. And it has helped quite a bit! Although it's not perfect (case in point, I am here on HN right now).

I would love it if my laptop had a "study mode" for when I am trying to debug something or learn something new using my laptop. Some of us have less than stellar self-control, so a study mode which requires a multi-step rigamarole to shut off might prevent me from casually checking my email or a news website when I am supposed to be learning a new data structure or figuring out a data corruption bug. I have no idea how it would work in real life: I need access to the internet to lookup API documentation, download libraries, and read online books, but I imagine something could be worked out.

(This article mentions that not only are cell phones banned at the featured school, but these kids have hobbled laptops that supposedly help them focus on school work, although the imperfect nature of the hobbling has unintended consequences).

I can't speak specifically about Peter Thiel, but I get the impression that two things affect some extremely wealthy people later in life regardless of their intelligence or benignity: 1) they get encapsulated in a bubble, and 2) they run out of things to achieve, so their obsessions start to become more and more odd. As to number 2, it's almost like those telomeres that keep the integrity of DNA, where every time a cell divides, the telomere gets shorter and shorter, until the cell gets weird.

I stopped going sometime mid-2000s, not because of the cost or the quality of movies, but because of the quality of my fellow movie watchers, who were pretty awful to be honest (at least in Silicon Valley at the time):

- Lord of the Rings: a family came in after the movie started with a cluster of helium balloons, each of which eventually got loose and floated around the theatre. A small balloon creates an outsized shadow on the screen when it floats in front of the projector (e.g., sometimes a third of the picture would disappear).

- A Beautiful Mind: Several guys, in different spots in the theatre, would wait for a quiet moment in the movie and say loudly "Oh my beautiful mind". One guy had a squeaky seat, so each time he said his bit, he would squeak his chair 5 times.

- Panic Room: Two people directly behind us just laughed hysterically at seemingly every line in the movie.

Also, the advertisements went on too long (20 minutes maybe?) and were also rock-concert loud.

Last night, I watched Wolfs (Apple TV) in my living room with my spouse and we enjoyed it. It's not a great movie, but it's good, there are no ear-splitting advertisements, and the audience is well behaved.

Edit: Later in the 2000s I did see a few Coen brothers films in the theatre, and those were good experiences, but I still avoided the theatre for the most part.

>Yes, I would make arguments about how it would strengthen our communities, and the GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors,...

I can't quite figure out what "it" refers to in "it would strengthen our communities". It's probably obvious, but I still can't work it out (the GPL maybe?)

Wishful thinking, possibly, but this seems like a little bit of good news amidst all the anxiety.