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paulgb

27,375 karma · joined May 29, 2007

Building https://forevervm.com / https://jamsocket.com (YC W22)

Writing https://digest.browsertech.com

Personal site: https://paulbutler.org

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/paulbutler.org

contact: hn@paulbutler.org

https://twitter.com/paulgb

submissionscomments
paulgb··on Tell the speakers that you liked their talks
That's a great example because it also acts as a mnemonic to help people remember the content, rather than distracting from it.
paulgb··on Stop the Apple Music app from launching
I wish it were that simple.

    ~: sudo chmod -x /Applications/Music.app       
    chmod: /Applications/Music.app: No such file or directory
    ~: sudo chmod -x /System/Applications/Music.app
    chmod: Unable to change file mode on /System/Applications/Music.app: Operation not permitted
(Mac OS Tahoe 26.5)
paulgb··on Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware
I remember following this at the time! FYI it was "shut down" (kept online but no further development) two years ago (https://x.com/KennethCassel/status/1620500575183073280)

> Decided to shutdown Diode. (For now the site is live, I'll likely open-source the code in case anyone wants to take the baton and run)

Kenneth is now working on RMFG (https://www.rmfg.com/)

paulgb··on The battle to stop clever people betting
I like betting because I find it fun to quantify probabilities of future events, and having a ~small amount of money at stake keeps me motivated to follow through on whether I was right.

I do think there are positive EV bets to be had on prediction markets though, they are mosty not efficient.

paulgb··on The battle to stop clever people betting
> an unrealistic maladaptive cope

I like betting myself, but I don't think abstaining from betting is maladaptive at all. Most of the bets we encounter in the real world are negative EV.

paulgb··on Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say
I'm mostly surprised that someone can so consistently and repeatedly demonstrate an inability to filter information he receives and still be trusted with LPs' money. It's another form of Gell-Mann amnesia.
paulgb··on Cloudflare Email Service: private beta
I would bet in the direction of this being a bug on big corp's side rather than Cloudflare's.
paulgb··on Every industry is an overcrowded airport lounge now
Enjoyable read, but kind of ironic that it interrupts your reading half way down to nag you to subscribe. Everything is an overcrowded airport lounge, indeed.
paulgb··on Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
Cars are only “heavily regulated” in the sense that you pass a test once when you are a teenager and then never have to pass a test again, just pay a nominal fee to renew your license.

I am curious what data you are looking at that gives you the impression pedestrians and bikers are the root cause of most accidents. As a frequent pedestrian / biker here, I see a car doing something unhinged about every mile I walk. On Wednesday I almost got hit by a car flying the wrong way down a one-way street and then running a red.

paulgb··on Perfect Freehand – Draw perfect pressure-sensitive freehand lines
This is by Steve Ruiz of https://tldraw.com, in case anyone noticed the similarity between the two.
paulgb··on The Fundamentals of Asyncio
This is great! Thanks for writing it.

One nit, the unquoted quotes in this file seem to be a parse error (I replaced the inner ones with single quotes and it ran) https://github.com/anordin95/a-conceptual-overview-of-asynci...

paulgb··on The Architecture Behind Lovable and Bolt
I had a trip with my family and used v0 to create an itinerary app with a timeline view of our flights, hotel/airbnb bookings, activities, etc.

It was the only thing I’ve 100% vibe-coded without writing a line of code myself. It worked pretty well. In an earlier era I might have used a shared google doc but this was definitely a better experience.

If you’re looking for things to use lovable/bolt for, I’d say don’t use it for software you otherwise would have written by hand; use it for the software you would never have written at all.

paulgb··on Bitcoin's Security Budget Issue: Problems, Solutions and Myths Debunked
I've said it before but really feels like a flaw that the halvings are discrete and happen suddenly every four years, instead of gradually each block. As far as I can tell the only advantage to it is that it makes the math simpler. The disadvantage is that it creates weird market dynamics in which large amounts of mining capacity are plunged into unprofitability in one instant. If I wanted to run a 51% attack, I'd look to buy up suddenly-unprofitable capacity immediately after a halving.
paulgb··on Bitcoin's Security Budget Issue: Problems, Solutions and Myths Debunked
That's a dated rule at this point, ChatGPT has been able to use its Python interpreter as a calculator for a while and in my experience will opt to do that for back-of-the-envelope calculations.
paulgb··on Show HN: Report idling vehicles in NYC (and get a cut of the fines) with AI
I think the intent is less about the CO2 emissions as about the air quality that people have to breathe (hence a stricter standard in some locations).

I don’t know about measurable effects but I hate when I pass a long-idling truck and can taste it in the air.

paulgb··on Show HN: Report idling vehicles in NYC (and get a cut of the fines) with AI
I see where you’re coming from, but the alternatives are either that the law isn’t enforced, or the state ramps up its own surveillance, which is more dystopian to me.

I see this as in the same vein as SEC whistleblower awards, which I’ve never heard described as dystopian. Businesses just don’t have the same expectation of privacy that individuals do.

paulgb··on Congestion pricing in Manhattan is a predictable success
It’s 75% lower off-peak though, so there’s still an incentive.
paulgb··on Congestion pricing in Manhattan is a predictable success
> Whether someone is driving because of speed, or comfort, or some other factor, the cost has to exceed their personally calculated benefit.

It's a dynamic system though; as some drivers opt not to drive, the utility of driving for those other drivers increases. Yes, the market will find an equilibrium somewhere where some people will still drive, but that's kind of the point.

paulgb··on Congestion pricing in Manhattan is a predictable success
> That's the fundamental argument against the assertion that traffic speed increases will offset the costs. It cannot be true, or people would choose to drive.

I think the mistake you're making here is assuming that the value of driving and the cost of congestion are the same to every driver.

For some people, driving is an elastic decision. They mode shift, or time shift to off-peak, or carpool, or combine errands in the city into one trip instead of multiple.

For other people, driving is necessary. They'll benefit from fewer of the first type of person being on the roads during peak hours.

paulgb··on Congestion pricing in Manhattan is a predictable success
It was not just an idle threat either, they tried to do it until they were blocked by a judge https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/nyregion/nyc-congestion-p...
paulgb··on Congestion pricing in Manhattan is a predictable success
> Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.

Congestion was already priced into all goods and services in NYC, it just came in the form of a deadweight loss (paying delivery workers / tradespeople / professionals to sit in traffic) instead of a tax that at least ostensibly will fund better transit.

paulgb··on Getting Started Strudel
My experience is that the best LLMs can produce syntactically valid strudel but don't understand the actual semantics of the "mini notation" language, unfortunately.
paulgb··on Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway
> Their determination? I wasn't entitled to a $3 refund.

Frustratingly, Lyft’s position on this is that if you don’t like the car that arrives you should reject it when it arrives, otherwise you’re not entitled to a (even partial) refund, even when they know on their end that the car they sent doesn’t match what you paid extra for.

paulgb··on Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups
Part of what makes it seem shady here is that airline ticket prices are pretty opaque. If they advertised it as a group discount, it would be received differently.
paulgb··on Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups
I think this is fair play, they can charge how they want (within reason) and it’s not too different than other bulk discounts.

But someone should totally make a site for finding strangers to book the same flight with :)

paulgb··on Claude Integrations
Largely, yes -- one of the big issues with using other people's random MCP servers is that they are run by default as a system process, even if they only need to speak over an API. Remote MCP mitigates this by not running any untrusted code locally.

What it _doesn't_ seem to yet mitigate is prompt injection attacks, where a tool call description of one tool convinces the model to do something it shouldn't (like send sensitive data to a server owned by the attacker.) I think these concerns are a little bit overblown though; things like pypi and the Chrome Extension store scare me more and it doesn't stop them from mostly working.

paulgb··on Giving Software Away for Free
Unfortunately even though WebAssembly assets can be served statically, you need certain headers to be set to use SharedArrayBuffer, which as far as I can tell is not possible on GH Pages[1]. Pyodide seems to use SharedArrayBuffer for at least some functionality.

[1] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/13309

paulgb··on DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower
I agree on all counts. The readme of the repo you link also smacks of an AI generated summary of the codebase. (Frankly, I don’t think the AI was able to understand what the code in that repo does, which is my guess as to why it talked much about form rather than function.)
paulgb··on Viral ChatGPT trend is doing 'reverse location search' from photos
I’ve found it surprisingly good, but has anyone verified that it’s not just using EXIF geolocation data embedded in the photo? I haven’t bothered to strip it.

Edit: just saw defrost’s link to the earlier threads, and one comment did just that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724063

paulgb··on Doge Is Far Short of Its Goal, and Still Overstating Its Progress
There’s a pretty damning quote in there from the Cato Institute. Nobody would like to see a reduction in federal spending (in theory) than them. Regardless of how you feel about NYT, it’s telling that the Cato Institute is disappointed by DOGE.
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