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rohansinghon Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

> bicycles ... has made us increasingly weak

This is pretty difficult for me to buy. Cycling has been shown time & again to be a great way to increase fitness.

GitHub's reliability has gotten pretty terrible since the Microsoft acquisition, well before ZIRP ended.

rohansinghon Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

Generally agree with your point, but not sure I'd call 312 EV and a 1.6% margin a "landslide".

rohansinghon Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

The point is that the Fed isn't classifying those things. "Ordinary" includes all primary mortgages, whether for a modest home or a luxury pad. It includes all personal car payments, whether for a shared Honda or a Maserati.

rohansinghon Sticker on caption phone says that using the captions can be illegal. Why?

The phone tree stuff on Pixel is decent but nowhere near 100% reliable or robust.

If it hears and understands an automated system speaking out a phone tree, it will start to list the options and you can tap on them. Usually works but often doesn't recognize that a phone tree is happening. Other times it recognizes the phone tree, but mistranscribes the options.

As a non-deaf person, it's a handy UX improvement. But I wouldn't recommend that anyone rely on it.

rohansinghon What is ZIRP, and how did it impact the startup world? [video]

You captured some of the ideas that have been swimming around in my brain for a little while and really crystallized them. Couldn't agree more.

rohansinghon Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity

I think for a lot of founders, there is significant financial cost or opportunity cost upfront. Especially if you are bootstrapping.

rohansinghon Don't DRY Your Code Prematurely

Maybe but hallucinations become a real problem here. Even with publicly available API's that are just slightly off the beaten path, I've gotten full-on hallucinations that have derailed me and wasted time.

rohansinghon Sharing details on a recent incident impacting one of our customers

That's great internally, but serious external communication with customers should have a name attached and responsibility accepted (i.e., "the buck stops here").

rohansinghon Gio UI – Cross-platform GUI for Go

Isn't the whole "Flutter team layoffs" narrative somewhat debunked at this point? My understanding is that some positions were cut and some were moved, but no more than any other engineering area at Google.

rohansinghon We gotta stop ignoring AI's hallucination problem

Just to be really clear since I had to call the IRS tax hotline the other day... they are real experts over there.

And generally, people will tell me, "I'm not sure" or "I don't know". They won't just start wildly making things up but stating them in a way that sounds plausible.

rohansinghon Australian man says border force made him hand over phone passcode

How do you login to iCloud without any second factor available?

rohansinghon The IMEI Code: Your phone’s other number

Probably not a lot. It needs to have a fixed length on the wire, and having 100 updates to the radio firmware for any given model of handset... not likely?

rohansinghon A tiny ultrabright laser that can melt steel

Wouldn't you still need to provide an amount of power to the laser that's not currently feasible for a watch?

rohansinghon Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

Yeah, good point. This would probably be better received overall if it were a per-artist minimum rather than a per-track.

On the other hand, that would make it pretty trivial for garbage/AI content distributors to circumvent.

rohansinghon Paying off people's medical debt has little impact on their lives, study finds

First off, it's not strictly true that medical debt won't show up on a consumer credit report. Medical debts that are in collections will eventually show up, if they are large enough.

Secondly, it's still a legal debt. That means the billing department will employ escalating collection tactics for large debts where they believe the debtor has sufficient assets.

rohansinghon Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

Article states "threshold of 1,000 plays in the preceding 12 months".

Sounds like you're well over that, at around 3-4K plays per year.

rohansinghon Meta takes $40K, holds our business ransom

Yeah... unfortunately it seems like "problem with major company, can't get support" has become an entire genre of HN post.

rohansinghon Meta takes $40K, holds our business ransom

UPDATE (2024-03-26):

A business development manager at Meta saw this post yesterday and escalated the issue internally. They provisionally unsuspended our account this morning.

This afternoon, the collections team confirmed that they received our payment, and applied it to the account.

Thanks to everyone for their advice and input. For what it's worth, we'll definitely maintain a presence on Meta, but our team is taking a second look at TikTok for marketing.

rohansinghon Meta takes $40K, holds our business ransom

Thanks for the heads-up. Exploring other channels now. We can't risk having the account shutdown for 200 days (or even 30).

rohansinghon Meta takes $40K, holds our business ransom

Thanks. I'll update here if/when I can.

rohansinghon Meta takes $40K, holds our business ransom

You're probably right. We can hopefully get back the money, but there's no getting back the lost revenue. Missed the wire cutoff for today but guess I know what I'll be doing tomorrow.

rohansinghon Meta takes $40K, holds our business ransom

That's a really good point and suggestion. I'll reach out to our attorney. (grimacing at the cost as I write this)

rohansinghon Meta takes $40K, holds our business ransom

It's not possible to pay by credit card again — just get a generic error when trying to open the payment form. So it would have to be by wire transfer, for which there are no chargeback protections.

rohansinghon Meta takes $40K, holds our business ransom

Thanks Paul, appreciate it. Still trying to reach out to anyone and everyone.

rohansinghon Meta takes $40K, holds our business ransom

It's truly a bummer. I posted about this in a Meta alumni group, and here's a couple different responses that I received:

> Same exact situation. Millions in spend. Jumped over to TikTok.

> Nearly every time I interact with the ads products, I hit multiple bugs ...

rohansinghon Meta takes $40K, holds our business ransom

I'm definitely considering it but trying to make sure we fully, thoroughly exhaust all other channels. Totally agree that it wouldn't be "reasonable" to permanently suspend our account for a chargeback in this scenario, but it's hard to know what's reasonable at this point.

Sucks to say it but having to double-pay this invoice may still be a better scenario than having the business fully banned from Meta Ads.

rohansinghon Fault tolerance and resilience patterns for Go

I do, at somewhat medium scale. My experience was similar to other posters here, where we ran into production issues that were incredibly difficult to pin down.

If you'd like, you can attribute that to lack of Erlang experience or skill on my part. But in practice, we instead replaced that system with Go running on a Kube cluster and it's now been rock solid.

rohansinghon Boeing overwrote security camera footage of repair work on Alaska door plug

It's not at all a technical limitation here. The cockpit voice recorder will record 25 hours in the EU and only 2 hours in the US, and that's been the case for years.

rohansinghon Boeing overwrote security camera footage of repair work on Alaska door plug

Cockpit voice recorders are frequently overwritten because they are limited to only 2 hours in the US. Pilots' unions have pushed back on increasing this, stating they have privacy concerns.