pocketarc

There is a big difference between storing your data in the same cloud as millions of others, and having someone individually unlock and look at your phone.

My phone has:

* Photos going back 10+ years

* Emails going back 10+ years

* Messages going back 10+ years

* All passwords (restricted, but if you're at the border and the person tells you to open it, you'll have to)

* Access to all files on my home NAS

If you got access to my phone and wanted to snoop around, you'd get... everything, all at once, all right there for you to see. There's SO much personal data. Even in airplane mode. It's all local.

Some of it is stored in companies' clouds, but surely you see the difference between my having my emails with fastmail, files on iCloud Drive, passwords with 1Password, and... "you have direct physical access to a fully unlocked phone and can force me to unlock any part of it, and you have no restrictions, and you don't have to 'collaborate' with Apple or any other company to get that data part by part".

> ...because, its obviously not any better than the 'tool use' API that everyone was already using. It can't be. It doesn't do anything differently.

Instead of you writing tool use code (which requires you to know how to write code, and to put in the effort), you spin up a server that provides that tool use code for the LLM.

As an example, you could hook up an "email" MCP that connects to your email provider and provides a "get_unread" tool and a "send_email" tool, and then go nuts having a chat with your LLM saying "hey let's work through our unread emails, bring up the first and then come up with a draft response for it, for me to review before sending". Hook it up with the "linear" MCP, and tell the LLM to also raise tickets with all the relevant details in your project management tool.

Of course you could write those tools yourself, and control all of the prompting, etc, but the point of MCP is so you don't have to write anything.

That's the ELI5, I think. "pre-built tools for the tool use API".

Sibling mentioned nativephp, but PHP-GTK[0] was also a thing in the past!

[0]: https://gtk.php.net

What, in your opinion, has been going downhill? Is it all the agile stuff, or something else? Serious question, quite curious.

I agree, and I feel like that goes for everything in general. It's like people who get mad at customer service people - the customer service person has absolutely nothing to do with the product that's giving you grief. Even the telemarketer, as you point out, doesn't want to be there (or even if they do, they may just be there because they have no better options and need to put food on the table).

In life, there are very few situations where being unkind is ever worth it.

And even here on HN, I sometimes get the impulse to argue with someone for whatever they said. What I do is I type out my little comment, then close the tab without actually posting it. Some things are better left unsaid, regardless of how satisfying they'd be to say.

I don't think a lot of people have a problem with AI summaries (a lot of people are using AI for exactly that). I think the 'hate' mostly comes from the fact that people tend to copy/paste whatever AI says without adding anything to the conversation.

It's the same as me running a query on Google and copy/pasting a list of 10 results. It doesn't really add anything to a conversation - anyone can go to Google and look something up.

Either grandfathered (I signed up in 2019) or it might've been a new change - I left the UK last year so if it was introduced last year, that would make sense. Good to know though, so I don't keep saying "oh yeah it was free".

Yep, this is exactly my situation - look up HP Instant Ink for your country, hopefully it'll be of use.

No monthly recurring payment in the UK - I was paying £0, unless I went over 10 pages.

In the US you do have to pay $1.5/mo.

I print maybe once or twice a year. In the past, my workflow was: "need to print, realize cartridge has dried out because it's been so long, go buy a ridiculously-priced new cartridge, finally print the 1 page I needed to".

For the past several years I've had an HP printer, with a subscription that costs £0 unless I print more than 10 pages (at which point it'd cost £1 per 10 extra pages). They send me ink for free automatically, and I never had to worry about it. The printer was stupid cheap.

It's honestly the best printer deal I could've asked for. I'm completely OK with it. It's convenient, virtually free, and I haven't had to think about cartridges in a long, long time.

I don't know -anything- about how HP treats its customers, I'm sure there's lots of horror stories. But... I'm very happy with the current situation, and unless I needed to print more regularly, I don't think I'd ever change.

I'm a bit confused about this - if I build something in React/Vue... I'm never going to be using Vue/React alongside it, or anything else. Am I missing something? Who's out there changing frameworks in existing projects?

Or is this about something else?

> a total NPC

Honestly, I think that is a great way to describe what bugs me most about this list. It's the idea that other people are there for your entertainment.

Like: 'Go to a cemetery. Look for sacred places. People live authentically there.'

Like really. Why are you going to a place to watch people grieving for your entertainment? What -is- this list? After 50 years of traveling? This mentality is what he has to show for it?

Yeah, a few of these items sound a lot like "white tourist in poor country".

Like the one about asking the taxi driver to drive you to his mom, like holy cow that's creepy. Imagine asking an American Uber driver "hey drive me to your mom's" and see how they'd respond.

I guess that's really the thing - when a 2TB SSD is $100 and and 64GB RAM another $130... there's just not much ROI in trying to make the app more efficient. Your users won't care.

I personally still value it, and I try to build super-efficient apps, but... I'm the minority. And I can understand why.

macOS is the best platform for wondering that, too.

Apple's ecosystem is incredible, all the APIs they provide, all the neat little native functionality you can build into your apps, all virtually for free, and a user base that cares about the quality of their apps and is willing to pay for it.

There's no better platform for building a native app, in my opinion.

Same. I am back to Copilot sadly. I don't know that there are any other good alternatives for autocomplete (good as in: so much better than Copilot that it's worth switching to).

It feels like nobody's working to improve the autocomplete/copilot experience, everyone's focused on the "chat with the code and get AI to make all the changes for you" instead of "I know what I'm doing, just predict what I'm about to type and save me the effort of typing it out".

One of the companies I worked with developed software for drug rehabs. Copilot would just constantly stop autocorrecting whenever I went into code files that mentioned anything to do with drugs (or sex - that's not a new censor!). It's the main reason I switched to Supermaven (before they got bought out and gave up on updating their extension).

> I believe what we'd need is education.

> The more educated the masses are, the more likely it is that they vote for governments that have the long term interests in mind

Consider: Globally, the masses are more and better educated than at any other point in history. More people than ever have a higher-level education, and people have access to more information than ever before, more easily than ever before, and for free! There has never been a better time to be a thinking human, we're surrounded by knowledge and education.

If that's still not enough, it might be worth considering that maybe it's not an education thing. Maybe it really is just human nature to think short term, and not some bad government maximization route. Consider how that short-term thinking shows up everywhere: In people's diets, in people's elected governments, in people's finances, and so on.

Maybe it's not something we can just wish away with education. Maybe it's just... humans being human.

You can -dictate- long-term thinking and long-term policies. But from a democratic perspective, the candidate that promises short-term wins will obviously beat the candidate that says "endure now for long-term gain".

This is actually an incredible way of articulating something that's been on my mind for quite a while. Thank you for this, I will use this.

The received wisdom is, of course, to lean on the DB as much as possible, put all the business logic in SQL because of course the DB is much more efficient. I myself have always been a big proponent of it.

But, as you rightly point out, you're using up one of your infrastructure's most scarce and hard-to-scale resources - the DB's CPU.

When people try to cheap out on customer support, this is exactly what they lose, and it's something I always try to bear in mind as I go about things.

By having someone like that replying to emails, they ended up with someone praising them years down the line in a high-profile place, where it'll be seen by countless engineers.

I always think about this - how many great engineers might be out there that are hard to spot/hire because there's no indication anywhere that they're great? And simultaneously, how many crap engineers out there are hired simply because they know how to play the "thought leader" game?

And as a thought exercise: How would you yourself like to be found / hired? What would you do to show the company that you are indeed great / knowledgeable? Is it Leetcode, or is that too much to ask? Is it a take-home project? Is it a lengthy interview that shows off your skills? A lengthy probationary period? What would you be willing to do to make up for your lack of "bs"?

Yes - there are insanely great houses all over Texas. $400K gets you incredible houses, depending on the area, and $1M would get you mansions beyond your (or at least my) wildest dreams.

Meanwhile, if you live in the Bay Area, I can totally see "$1M net worth but not really able to buy a house".

Where you choose to live in really does matter a lot. Not to say there aren't issues with property costs, but... come on.

You might've pasted the wrong link! Although damn, this modem looks good too, worth thinking about.

The internet was great before the great monetization of it, had tons of information provided for free with no ads. After ads, it will still have tons of information. Stack Overflows will still exist, Wikipedias, corporate blogs that serve just to boost the company, people making courses and other educational content, personal blogs (countless of which make their way here), all of those will continue to exist.

Ad-driven social networks will continue to exist as well.

The age of the ad-driven blog website is probably at an end. But there will be countless people posting stuff online for free anyway.

> could you theoretically offload large file downloads to HTTP/2

Yes, you can! You’d have your websites on servers that support HTTP/3 and your large files on HTTP/2 servers, similar to how people put certain files on CDNs. It might well be a great solution!

> More troublingly, performance has not improved in CI at the same pace as on developer machines—it’s usually a lot slower to build our app in CI than it is to do it locally on my M1 laptop.

While some of the other comments around optimizing CI pipelines are solid, this whole thing seems to be due to having CI running on servers that are -worse- than a laptop. Isn't that wild? Servers weaker than laptops. Not even desktops or workstations. LAPTOPS.

And they are, because they're just cloud instances. And most cloud instances... are not fast.

Consider the idea that you could run your CI runner on an M1 laptop if you so choose to. Setting up a self-hosted GH Actions runner (for example) is quite straightforward. Doesn't even need to be an internet-facing machine, it can be a spare machine sitting at home/office. $600 will get you a Mac mini with an M2 CPU and super-fast SSD; everything will build faster than it ever could on any generic CI build server.

That's actually incredible - and it has just barely grown since the 60s, when we had just 3 billion people. That means we can now feed nearly 3x the humans on virtually the same amount of land. That's fantastic, I had no idea the efficiencies had been that significant.

In the 2001 movie AI, the protagonist children play with an "old" robotic teddy bear named "Teddy".

The bear's movement isn't great, and its voice sounds robotic. Projects like this make me think that Teddy either could be built with today's tech, or is very close to being buildable.

> without any apparent loss in productivity

I think there might be a few things to consider here:

1. Is it without any loss in productivity? Or are they so productive/skilled that they can still outpace most other devs even without the IDE's additional functionality?

2. Is there a loss in productivity, and they just don't realize it? Just because they can still do a good enough job without an IDE doesn't necessarily mean that they couldn't do a better job as experienced IDE users.

This is similar to the arguments people make against using Rust. "I can code C just fine and never have any issues, I don't need Rust"

It's also similar to this Copilot discussion. The people who say "I don't see any benefit from LLMs when coding", could it be that they just... don't have enough experience using LLMs? We've -just- had that come up in HN[0], where everybody in the comments was showing how they got the answer just fine out of their LLM of choice, while the OP was all about how AI couldn't possibly understand that bit of code.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41712564

Between this and Apple's policies, big tech corporations really seem to be putting the screws to the EU as much as they can.

"See, consumers? Look at how bad your regulation is, that you're missing out on all these cool things we're working on. Talk to your politicians!"

Regardless of your political opinion on the subject, you've got to admit, at the very least, it will be educational to see how this develops over the next 5-10 years of tech progress, as the EU gets excluded from more and more things.