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pcloweson If You Build It, They Will Come

The impact in SF was absolutely incredible. A very small percentage of the writers was causing 90+ percent of the problems and vandalism.

Treating these people like adults would be best, but I’ll take getting them off of public transportation first.

https://x.com/SFBART/status/2020952977180328184

https://growsf.org/news/2026-02-12-bart-fare-gates-10-millio...

pcloweson If You Build It, They Will Come

Enforcing fares massively decreases vandalism, and antisocial behavior on public transportation.

If you don’t have public transportation that I feel safe having a 10-year-old ride on unaccompanied by an adult then you do not have public transportation. You have a very expensive drug addict shelter on wheels/rails.

pcloweson The state of open source AI

I dont know. The tooling feels trivial. I swapped from claude to codex and back with zero friction. If they were very expensive to me personally I would probably just use them to build the harness and then plug Kimi into it etc.

pcloweson Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

Counterpoint: XCode is such slop that an app made by a developer with the taste to avoid it has a higher probability of being less "sloppy" than average.

pcloweson AI and the Fall of Writing

“ You ask me if your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before me. You send them to journals. You compare them with other poems and you worry if certain editors refuse your efforts. Now, as you have given me permission to advise you, I beg you to give up all that. You are directing your thoughts outwards, and that above all is what you should not do at present. No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way. Withdraw into yourself. Explore the reason that bids you write, find out if it has spread out its roots in the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die, if writing should be denied to you. Above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night, “Must I write?” Dig deep into yourself for an answer. And if this answer should be in the affirmative, if you can meet this solemn question with a simple strong “I must,” then build up your life according to this necessity.”

- Rilke

pcloweson Understanding the Odin Programming Language

Not with a new language but novel approaches within a framework or paradigm feel outside the LLM wheelhouse.

Even if the LLM is adept at novel languages the developer still has to learn it and learning new languages now when most programming is done via a prompt-review loop feels like it has lower ROI.

pcloweson Understanding the Odin Programming Language

Interesting, I am thinking/expecting we will see a massive decrease in new languages. Or people might make new languages but the will not get any adoption.

A new language now has to clear the ever growing hurdle of not being in the LLM training data.

Unless the language provides an absolutely incredible technical or runtime advantage over every other language that LLMs “speak” well I think it will really struggle to gain adoption.

Additionally, a language’s qualitative benefits to human writers arguably matters less and less.

I used to live in my IDE. Now I use it maybe an hour each day even in a JVM based language. IDEs dont really matter as much anymore.

pcloweson Why American ambulance rides are so expensive

Australia is also going bankrupt just slightly faster than the United States. Looks like deficit spending and debt levels are only trending the wrong direction there as well.

I am all for flight for life as we call it here, but that is different than saying we should have a network of ambulances across massive swabs of mostly empty terrain.

I am willing to hazard that the Australian airlift response is slower than your average ambulance response in Sydney.

pcloweson Why American ambulance rides are so expensive

I think what I’m saying is being misinterpreted. I should have been more clear. Everybody’s definition of “taken care of” is different.

The government needs to balance the interest of the public with the interest of the individual. It is not intended to “take care of “people regardless of their asks.

Otherwise, what if I am only “taken care of” if I have a beachside penthouse in Malibu and also a pony?

The government is not taking care of people if it allows the average expenditure per person to eclipse the average tax revenue per person. The economics need to be roughly sustainable at the national state and even rural area level.

pcloweson Why American ambulance rides are so expensive

We give our farmers absolutely insane subsidies already.

It is not the government’s job to “take care of” anybody.

Everything has a cost, staying has a cost, leaving has a cost. The question is how much should the public be taxed to pay for individuals suboptimal decision-making? Or conversely, why am I subsidizing some billionaires remote horse ranch to have daily Postal Service and an ambulance standing by?

Can I move to the wilds of Alaska and then demand the same level of service as New York City? No that would be ludicrous.

pcloweson Why American ambulance rides are so expensive

Directionally, I am also fine with postal deserts or at least different delivery expectations for very rural areas.

But also because Postal Service is much cheaper than an ambulance service?

pcloweson Why American ambulance rides are so expensive

I don’t think it is reasonable to expect to have ambulance coverage across the entire United States. There is a lot of land with very few people.

Choosing to live far away from others is also choosing to live far away from help.

If a service is highly variable cost dependent and is unaffordable for the average individual to pay out-of-pocket it is unaffordable for the aggregate individual as well.

There _should_ be some ambulance deserts.

pcloweson Hanami 3.0: In Full Bloom

Small world! We were one of the clients at labs he tested that concept with while developing the book. Chatted with him about his newer book using packwerk a couple years back. Looks like we’re all on the front range!

Agree on the engines, you’re just fighting the framework the whole way.

Coincidentally working on modularity approaches for a different type of monolith https://viaduct.airbnb.tech/ (time is a flat circle etc. etc.)

pcloweson Hanami 3.0: In Full Bloom

Thank you for the thorough reply!

A long time ago I had a "Component Based Rails Application (CBRA)" using engines as the domain boundary. It was unpleasant because it just moved pain points into unfamiliar places. The slices approach is very interesting.

Overall I like dry-rb.

If I find myself on a ruby project again I will investigate more thoroughly!

pcloweson Hanami 3.0: In Full Bloom

I have loosely followed Hanami for years but never used it or heard of it used in a large codebase.

I still don't quite understand what it does all that differently from Rails? There are plenty of comments that are along the lines of > "Hanami brings is an intentional and well-reasoned architecture that supports building maintainable applications. It has taste" (posted below)

But concretely what does that mean? Their docs call out ways to avoid common rails anti-patterns and I agree with most of their opinions but you don't _have_ to write bad code in rails just because a lot of others have.

Having seen Rails deprecations at multiple large well known tech cos I appreciate the sentiment of an "architecture that grows with you" but I would say the driver behind those migrations wasn't so much the framework as the extreme flexibility of the code and what that produces with thousands of developers over 10+ years.

I don't see how any architecture of Hanami prevents that.

pcloweson The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

I disagree because the people who have the most important things to say have the most to lose by saying it.

Also anonymity can actually improve social media polarization (see Chris Bail’s research)

pcloweson Steam Machine launches today

I really appreciate Gabe's approach of treat the user as THE USER not the thing we are trying to use.

Very tired of every interaction with every tech company and subscription service making me feel used rather than served.

pcloweson White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

You want to campaign on improving election security and transparency (hopefully without being misleading about all of the systems already in place and the security, statistical analysis, and auditing already done)? Go for it.

That is very different than claiming fraud without evidence.

pcloweson White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

Faith in elections and election integrity is incredibly important.

Unsubstantiated claims of election fraud should be punished severely. Politicians who baselessly erode confidence in elections without providing timely evidence should be ineligible for political office at least and potentially tried for treason.

pcloweson White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

This is not comparable. A couple groups on the far left is not the same as the leader of the party. I don’t see any major figure on the left: Bernie, Obama, AOC, Biden, Hillary, Pelosi etc claiming fraud.

pcloweson White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

Big claims require big evidence.

pcloweson How to earn a billion dollars

What?!

Real median household income is the highest its ever been and risen steadily for 50 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

Unemployment rate is 4.3%

Also, I go to Detroit about once a year. Every year it is more vibrant than the lows of 2010. Real estate prices support this argument. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS19804Q

Not saying some people somewhere don’t have it rough but overall we are doing better than we ever have.

pcloweson How to earn a billion dollars

I don’t like it because it’s Elon (I literally have been an active litigation with him for years lol)

I like it because it’s useful.

Life is objectively much better today for the average person than it has been for 99% of humans in 99% of history.

(“They will kill us and eat us for our protein” makes you sound totally insane and in this ludicrous scenario I think the rich peoples army of drones/optimus robots would simply say “no”.)

pcloweson Did Anthropic ask for this?

I wonder if you can just use fable/mythos to basically re-create core Anthropic research. They seem to be very touchy about using their models for LLM R&D given the guard rails they built into the product.

None of the large language model providers have a very defensible product moat yet and if the models themselves can reveal research fundamentals their position would become extremely precarious.

It would be very tempting to hide behind a national security excuse to try and preserve the research moat.

pcloweson How to earn a billion dollars

Is the general public happy? Who cares, it is not the job of the government to ensure happiness but rights.

Regardless:

1. Starlink is amazing (literally never want to fly on an airplane without it ever again, wish I could search for flights based on having it)

2. Starship is amazing. (ensures American space dominance for generations)

3. Being able to manufacture hard things at scale and employ hundreds of thousands of people and making thousands of millionaires is amazing for our economy!!

Unless they are fools, the general public should be stoked AF.

pcloweson How to earn a billion dollars

Strongly agree from a purely economic perspective! However, founding engineer is a good way to watch the ups and downs of a startup before doing it yourself.

Additionally, since most startups fail, the founding engineer is typically better compensated than the founders. It’s only in the success case that it is a raw deal economically. However, in the rare case that it is a successful company, the founding engineer does alright and then also knows more about how to do it again.

The difference between founding engineer and founder is typically the difference between starting before any money came in or joining after (basically guts/conviction)

pcloweson How to earn a billion dollars

Thank you, I never thought debating economics on hacker news of all places would be the equivalent of discussing orbital mechanics with flat earthers.

pcloweson How to earn a billion dollars

Do you feel like the cafeteria workers at SpaceX who were paid standard cafeteria wages when they started plus some equity that everybody considered worthless at the time and now makes them multimillionaires feel like they were treated unfairly?

I am struggling to understand where the unfair part is coming from. Nobody is making anybody do anything. Everything is transparent and above board. Everybody in this scenario is willingly working market wages (except for founders and early hires who work below market and take equity for a couple years because they believe in the idea)

pcloweson How to earn a billion dollars

People are generally happier when they are not starving to death and capitalism is really good at helping people not starve to death.

Every global economic statistic backs this up