shubhamjain

I was wondering if it was because of heavy-handedness of the administration, but apparently:

> The policy change is separate and unrelated to Anthropic’s discussions with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Their core argument is that if we have guardrails that others don't, they would be left behind in controlling the technology, and they are the "responsible ones." I honestly can't comprehend the timeline we are living in. Every frontier tech company is convinced that the tech they are working towards is as humanity-useful as a cure for cancer, and yet as dangerous as nuclear weapons.

Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue.

My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else. There are no network effects for sure, but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. Understandable that it would be hard to get majority of these free users to pay for anything, and hence, advertising seems a good bet. You couldn't have thought of a more contextual way of plugging in a paid product.

I think OpenAI has better chance to winning on the consumer side than everyone else. Of course, would that much up against hundreds of billions of dollars in capex remains to be seen.

I always assumed “tech company” meant using technology to build a fundamentally better car from the ground up. I don't know at what point the bait-and-switch happened, it was suddenly about pursuing every stupid moonshot fantasy at the cost of making better cars.

The mystery I can wrap my head around is how Tesla has avoided getting hammered despite being hit from a hundred different directions. What exactly is the market pricing in?

They peaked around 2021, and even after posting multiple quarters of disappointing results, the stock is still trading above 2021 levels. For almost any other company, slightly lowering guidance or missing estimates by a few percentage points simply tanks the stock. But for Tesla, no amount of Musk’s idiocy seems to be enough to seriously move it.

The very fact that people are siding with AI agent here says volumes about where we are headed. I didn’t find the hit piece emotionally compelling, rather it’s lazy, obnoxious, having all the telltale signs of being written by AI. To speak nothing of the how insane it’s to write a targeted blog post just because your PR wasn’t merged.

Have our standards fallen by this much that we find things written without an ounce of originality persuasive?

> The article does point out exactly this problem, but glosses over the fact that most artists don't want to change to popular art. Only a few can, and most don't want to.

I don't think author hides the fact. It's plain as day that to make a living, you need to sell art which resonates with people. You can still find room to be creative within that constraint, but you can't ignore the audience.

Artists should quit the illusion that they can create whatever they please and expect the income to automatically follow.

Yeah, I am amazed how people are brushing this off simply because GCC exists. This was far more challenging task than the browser thing, because of how far few open source compilers are there. Add to that no internet access and no dependencies.

At this point, it’s hard to deny that AI has become capable of completing extremely difficult tasks, provided it has enough time and tokens.

> Going forward, the U.S. government will continue its global health leadership through existing and new engagements directly with other countries, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, and faith-based entities. U.S.-led efforts will prioritize emergency response, biosecurity coordination, and health innovation to protect America first while delivering benefits to partners around the world.

The funny thing about this administration is that they label existing system as "bad" and "corrupt", use that as justification to abandon it, and then proceed to recreate the same thing different way.

I feel AI will have the same effect degrading Internet as social media did. This flood of dumb PRs, issues is one symptom of it. Other is AI accelerating the trend which TikTok started—short, shallow, low-effort content.

It's a shame since this technology is brilliant. But every tech company has drank the “AI is the future” Kool-aid, which means no one has incentive to seriously push back against the flood of low-effort, AI-generated slop. So, it's going to be race to the bottom for a while.

This is the reason I absolutely hate shadcn. The number of dependencies and files you introduce for trivial components is insane. Even tiny little divs are their own component for no good reason. I genuinely don’t understand how front-end developers accept this level of needless complexity.

Shoutout to Basecoat UI[1], so implementing the same components using Tailwind and minimal JS. That's what I am preferring to use these days.

[1]: https://basecoatui.com/

Why attempt something that has abundant number of libraries to pick and choose? To me, however impressive it is, 'browser build from scratch' simply overstates it. Why not attempt something like a 3D game where it's hard to find open source code to use?

Considering his approval rating is still in low 40s, and not 0, tells you volumes about the average American mind.

You mean the big companies who still haven't moved away from abominations like SAP and Oracle? The ones where you require twenty approvals to get a small pilot done? Instead of moving to saner and cheaper alternatives, they would just say, "hey, why don't we just start making our own software?" Every effort like this—if it had any takers—will fail spectacularly.

I get it people are skeptical about the future. But I can't imagine any scenario where people would like taking responsibility of building and mantaining their own software for everything vs. paying marginal amount of money (relatively speaking) to let someone else take the headache.

Yeah, I am disappointed by how shallow it is. Lexing, Parsing, AST would apply to nearly every programming language and not SQL alone. There’s no mention of how the parsers actually work on the code level, which would have made it an interesting read.

I want to believe people who feel they are 10x more productive with agentic tools but I can’t help notice how there’s lot of doing things that don’t need to be done at all. Either that, or doing them superficially as the article shows.

Looking at that list, the top three companies are essentially about building apps without writing code. The next one is about helping developers write code. Perplexity is the only real outlier, and even that not by much. I am by no means an AI pessimist, but I can't help think where are all the awesome companies in other sectors that this technology is supposed to unlock.

I understand that many industries will take years to adopt. Fine. But about sub-sectors in tech—gaming, design, data? What is happening beyond "make software development easier"? Is it because ChatGPT like apps are enough for most people?

I tried this. One week in, I got used to grayscale as well and my screen time was back to the baseline (maybe only marginally affected). After nearly a decade of trying these tricks, hacks, and gamified interventions, it’s clear to me why they rarely work: they fixate on the symptom (screen time, social media use) rather than the underlying problem. Your mind craves to feel engaged/challenged in something. So, the actual problem is finding meaningful activities to replace your empty screen time, which isn't necessarily easy.

If you want to reduce your screen time, the boring old discipline is much more sustainable approach. Put the phone down and replace it with a book, or puzzles, or hobbies, or time with people.

Proxyman is 100x value for 2x the price. I am not even kidding. Native UI, shortcuts, cert installation helper tools. And script editor to programmatically edit requests is so much better and powerful than Charles' request editor.

Could there be a worse news regarding where content production is headed? Netflix production is trash and all they care is about metrics like viewers who have watched at least x% of certain content. Cuz if they have, and they accumulate y minutes of viewing, they are unlikely to cancel. This is to the point that they are exclusively making dumbed-down content that can be good background noise while viewers scroll through Instagram feeds. They have little taste, or any motivation to bring good stories out.

HBO might not be perfect, but at least its development process still begins with the story and the enthusiasm of the showrunner.

I am a person who wants to maintain a distance from the AI-hype train, but seeing a chart like this [1], I can't help think that we are nowhere near the peak. The weekly token consumption keeps on rising, and it's already in trillions, and this ignores a lot of consumption happening directly through APIs.

Nvidia could keep delivering record-breaking numbers, and we may well see multiple companies hit six, seven, or even eight trillion dollars in market cap within a couple of years. While I am skeptical of claims like AI will make programming obsolete, but it’s clear that the adoption is still going like crazy and it's hard to anticipate when the plateau happens.

[1]: https://openrouter.ai/state-of-ai#open-vs_-closed-source-mod...

As much as I appreciate Bhutan's ideas around happiness and its style of sustainable development, I feel Bhutan being a tiny hilly country is what allows them to work. Add to that the gift of Hydroelectric power, which alone contributes 1/4th of government revenue, and was responsible for 14% of its GDP[1]. Its population is less than a million, where as even tier-3 towns in India have a couple of million people living there.

A large country, with a large population, has far fewer options other than supporting economic development at a scale.

[1]: https://thewire.in/world/south-asia/bhutan-hydropower-electr...

> Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that

I started TextQuery[1] with same moralistic standing. Not in respect of using AI or not, but that most software industry is suffering from rot that places more importance on making money, forcing subscription vs making something beautiful and detail-focused. I poured time in optimizing selections, perfecting autocomplete, and wrestling with Monaco’s thin documentation. However, I failed to make it sustainable business. My motivation ran out. And what I thought would be fun multi-year journey, collapsed into burnout and a dead-end project.

I have to say my time was better spent on building something sustainable, making more money, and optimizing the details once having that. It was naïve to obsess over subtleties that only a handful of users would ever notice.

There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in your work, but you can’t ignore what the market actually values, because that's what will make you money, and that's what will keep your business and motivation alive.

[1]: https://textquery.app/

Just look at the article on HN[1] on Grokipedia. It's almost 5500+ words long. The Wikipedia article is not even 500 words[2]. This won't be a problem if the article contained anything of substance. It doesn't. It's written as if LLM was specifically instructed to be as verbose and as boring as possible.

> Its algorithmic ranking system, which weights recent votes more heavily to counter brigading and promote fresh, high-signal content, combined with editorial moderation to curb low-quality or off-topic posts, has cultivated a reputation for rigorous debate, though not without internal tensions over shifting cultural norms, perceived negativity in comments, and debates on whether business-oriented stories overshadow pure technical discourse

What surprises is not the fact that it exists. Elon is a man with a fragile ego and a history of cheap stunts like this. It’s the fact that he still has almost cult-like base that treats him as some kind of mankind's savior despite all of this.

[1]: https://grokipedia.com/page/Hacker_News [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News

> Companies prey on those who forget to cancel their free trial. So far, it only happened once to me, but thankfully, I managed to get my refund.

This dark pattern has completely taken over the iOS ecosystem. Apps hide the fact that they’re paid until you’ve gone through several steps—registration, login, setup—making you believe the what you downloaded it for is just one the next screen. And then, bang, a paywall! with a “generous” 3-day free trial and a $3.99/week subscription.

I uninstall such apps immediately and leave a one-star review. I get it, devs need to make money, but there are better ways than this sleazy bs. Unfortunately, too many gurus have normalized this practice by constantly bragging how much revenue they are making.

> Spec-Driven Development changes this: specifications become executable, directly generating working implementations rather than just guiding them.

Reminds me of TDD bandwagon which was all the rage when I started programming. It took years to slowly die out and people realized how overhyped it really was. Nothing against AI, I love it as a tool, but this "you-don't-need-code" approach shows similar signs. Quick wins at first, lots of hype because of those wins, and then reaching a point where doing even tiny changes becomes absurdly difficult.

You need code. You will need it for a long time.

This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. For all its breakthroughs, OpenAI lacks any fiscal discipline. Sam Altman seems convinced that as long as they’re delivering value and have a clear mission, the money will somehow take care of itself. That’s fine for now, but the music will stop playing one day.

When it comes to software engineering at scale, nothing beats Google. They already operate the world’s largest and (profitable) information index, they design their own chips, and employ the best engineers who know how to deliver massive systems cost-effectively. They can sustain large investment far longer than any other company simply because of how profitable all their existing businesses are. I just wish they would get their act together when it comes to product management.

Partially, yes! Population is #1 strain on resources. However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem.

> Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution.

They haven't, imo. I am from India, and I have been hearing for the last two decades how we have avoided same mistakes as China and the latter is headed for a demographic collapse. China is only marching forward, and focusing more on automation to hedge its bets. While overpopulation in India has choked almost every city in India. I honestly don't know what will happen as more people migrate from rural to urban areas.

India's population will peak in 2065, while China's already has. It's depressing to imagine that 250-300M more people are left to be added before we finally see a decline.

Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated, the modern idea that “a large population is a blessing” feels equally misguided.

> Foreigners poured a record $290bn into US stocks in the second quarter and now own about 30 per cent of the market — the highest share in post-second world war history. Europeans and Canadians have been boycotting American goods but continue buying US stocks in bulk — especially the tech giants.

I fail to find any plausible explanation for this other than the fact that yes, it is a bubble. Tesla, a car company facing declining sales, an executive exodus, and a CEO who’s more of a liability, is almost a $1.5T company now. An absurd P/E of 259. Sure, P/E isn't the most realiable metric. But, for a company with declining sales, and onslaught from Chinese competitors, a P/E of anything above 50 is absolutely ludicrous. Do people actually buy into the absurdity of humanoid robots and robotaxis?

"Be fearful when everyone is greedy." I’ve cashed out of U.S. stocks, and I think it's wise thing to do when craze is at its peak.

> I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can't be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people's money and then lighting it on fire.

This is what I don't like. Debating in extremes. How can AI have bad unit economics? They are literally selling compute and code for a handsome markup. This is classic software economics, some of the best unit economics you can get. Look at Midjourney: it pulled in hundreds of millions without raising a single dime.

Companies are unprofitable because they are chasing user growth and subsidising free users. This is not to say there isn't a bubble, but it's a rock-solid business and there to stay. Yes, music will stop one day, and there will be a crash, but I’d bet that most of the big players we see today will still be around after the shakeout. Anecdote: my wife is so dependent on ChatGPT that if the free version ever stopped being good enough, she’d happily pay for premium. And this is coming from someone who usually questions why anyone needs pay for software.

This are zero details on how it's supposed to work, or how it avoids the problem traditional crypto. “Instant global transactions” sound good in theory, but it has never been a technological problem, purely a regulatory one. Govts. don't like this happening. They want oversight, especially for cross border transactions.