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thatmf

366 karma · joined February 24, 2026

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thatmf··on The AI Zombie Effect
"AI was supposed to help us get our work done faster, so we could have more free time."

No it wasn't. That's not what investors have poured billions of dollars into. They do not care about your free time.

AI is supposed to help capital extract value more efficiently.

That's it. That's the whole goal. The rest is incidental.

thatmf··on Archiving pirate radio station Kool FM
*Mandem
thatmf··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
I would typically never install a .0 release, but as an 18 holdout who begrudgingly had to finally "upgrade" to 26, I have to say 27 really is an improvement. The egregious bugs are gone. Safari is usable again. You can pretty much disable liquid glass. It feels faster. This is all I really wanted.
thatmf··on For AI leaders Doom is a form of hype
The mea culpas are quite exhausting too.

"Oh no this thing I gained generational wealth from is going to destroy the world! I am so sorry!"

thatmf··on Trump attacks 'sick conspiracy' against AI as tech stocks slide
The US president wrote on social media: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the USA has that, in spades!”
thatmf··on Feeling Sad about AI
I was the same at that age (decades ago, but still). And I'm kind of glad I didn't go down that path, seeing friends and colleagues who did. There's a (I think) Folding Ideas video where he's talking to some 13-yo Roblox developer who already has that jaded veteran kind of vibe to them. Which might be the most salient visual. The thing is separating the consuming experience from the creating experience, but also recognizing the validity and importance of both. It's obvious but hard to really internalize.

A good parallel I've discovered as an adult is wine. I love it, and collect it, and can talk at length about terroir, techniques, etc. About ten years ago I wanted to get hands-on experience, and thru a friend was able to intern at a local winery during harvest.

That was one of the most intense months of my life, and I was in physical pain for months afterwards, even as a relatively fit person. So much of that elegant, philosophical final product is manual labor, lifting lots of heavy shit, and endless repetitive motion. It was fun, but it was also brutal.

It left me with even more respect for the people who dedicate their lives to it. But also the realization that I'm much more comfortable being on the other end of it. And that's not only ok but absolutely essential, because the producers need people to buy (and maybe wax philosophical) about their product.

So yeah, by all means give it a shot. But also I think it's important to communicate that there are many valid and satisfying ways to engage with something. Consumer/maker isn't a binary.

thatmf··on Feeling Sad about AI
Same.

My spouse and I were recently at a pizza place that had one of those arcade tables with Mrs Pacman, Donkey Kong etc. As we were sitting there eating I started getting pretty animated talking about what amazing technical achievements these games were, and how clever and resourceful it required the developers/artists to be due to the constraints they were working with. That cleverness is what first drew me, as a young smart-ass, to being creative and building things with computers and hardware. Transcending limitations.

But now you don't need to be clever. And that's what fucking sucks. Yes, I can 100x or whatever my output. Who cares?

Well, the people with the money care. The delusional accelerationist types with god complexes. The types that will sell out their fellow worker to VC because they believe themselves to be somehow above it or if I don't do it someone else will etc. Fuck all of those people. I mean, they've always been here, or even necessary. But there used to be at least some sort of balance between labor/creativity and... them. That balance is now gone.

The thing is- yes you still can be clever with these tools. But the motivations aren't the same. You can get something perfectly acceptable without it. The imperative is no longer there. And maybe this is me realizing how lazy I am (aren't all good programmers?) But another word for "imperative" in this context is "purpose". And well, I guess I'm just glad to be old enough now that I'm closer to the end of my career than the beginning, and I can sort of see the exit sign from here, and I'm learning to be clever in other domains that haven't been drained by LLMs yet.

So yeah. Feels bad man.

thatmf··on Tell HN: OpenAI keeps re-enabling the 'allow training' setting
Navier-Stokes has entered the chat
thatmf··on ZX Spectrum: Experimenting with 1-Bit Sound
Wow, that Chronos track is like early My Bloody Valentine!
thatmf··on Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI
Ah, yes, I'm sure the article that moral paragon DHH wished to translate was not at all harmful, and that this was a good-faith effort on his part /s

While I agree that Claude can be overly paternalistic at times, how should it respond to a request to translate, say, bomb-making instructions? It's reasonable to me that it might refuse this.

thatmf··on 1Password wades into a right-wing mess after funding a Linux project
I'm a long time 1p user and wrote customer support earlier today. Here is their (no doubt canned, given how quickly it shot back) reply:

Hi [thatmf],

I'm [name] from 1Password Support. Thank you for reaching out and sharing your concerns about our decision to become a corporate patron of the Omacom Foundation. We value the relationship we have with you, and we want to respond thoughtfully and openly about the purpose of this commitment and how we're approaching it at 1Password.

At 1Password, we support developer and open-source communities because they're an important part of the ecosystem our customers rely on. We have a long history of supporting open source projects, including the Linux, Rails, and Rust Foundations. We chose to support Omarchy because it is a growing Linux environment that developers use and value, and because 1Password already had a meaningful presence in that community.

Contributing to the Omacom Foundation is intended to support hosting infrastructure and provides stable, long-term funding for the upstream open-source projects and maintainers on which Omarchy depends.

We recognize that Omarchy is closely associated with its founder, and that raises questions about what our support means. Our contribution is made to the Omacom Foundation, not to an individual, and is not an endorsement of any individual's personal or political views. 1Password does not endorse hateful, dehumanizing, or exclusionary views.

The patronage is also separate from product decisions. It includes no requirements or guarantees related to product placement, exclusivity, endorsement, or roadmap influence.

We understand that this explanation may not change how you feel about our decision. We take all feedback seriously and share it with the appropriate teams.

Our commitment to the security and privacy of our customers remains unchanged.

We're grateful for the trust you place in 1Password.

Best, [name] Sr. Service Representative - 1Password Support

--

This is the same move as buying a Tesla and putting an anti-Elon sticker on it. The person is inseparable from the product. So they can claim "not an endorsement" all they like, but their actions say different. It's just so disappointing.

thatmf··on Omarchy: 1Password and 37signals become Distinguished Corporate Patrons
Here are a few good points: https://www.alilleybrinker.com/blog/1password-funds-ethnic-c...
thatmf··on Omarchy: 1Password and 37signals become Distinguished Corporate Patrons
Love how all the submissions of this get flagged right away. Lots of DDH fanboys here?
thatmf··on Show HN: Weedout – Safari extension that hides YouTube AI-labeled videos
I wish I had this but for every website and media surface
thatmf··on Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions
Very cool but wow that just triggered motion sickness I didn't even know I had
thatmf··on Degraded performance for multiple models
Probably not surprising, but Opus 5 on my company's enterprise subscription seems to be working fine.

But on my personal (pro) subscription- "Claude is at capacity right now."

Hm.

thatmf··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
I'm glad this is being talked about. I noticed it too. I find Opus 5 to be overly (and unhelpfully) critical, in a sort of well-actually way. It ignores nuance in my direction or prompts.

It is better at engineering tasks; I've seen an appreciable difference in its problem-solving abilities. But perhaps that same thing makes it kind of an annoying prick to work with on anything non-engineering, for which I stick to 4.8, where the prose is a little more florid rather than pugnacious.

thatmf··on Choosing an AI model: one prompt, 11 models, different results
I found it pretty interesting. To me, the GPT Sol and Luna ones are the nicest, which is not what I was expecting. Font choice goes a long way. The Opus ones are acceptable, but still disappointing. The rest are hideous.
thatmf··on The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert
> the person you're responding to has provided a valid counter example of what life can be like without such stress

Their counter example: "I am rich"

thatmf··on I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy
> The AI is no longer “other”

> My AI is a natural extension of me. It feels like a sixth sense and another limb. I wonder about a problem, feel as though I’m literally surfing the web, see glimpses of the websites, get flashes of intuition about the problem, and ultimately derive the answer.

We call this AI psychosis.

thatmf··on The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
The two are not unrelated, and perhaps the inventiveness and energy of the latter could be applied to affecting the outcomes of the former.
thatmf··on The Sound of Inevitability
Derivatives trading is a net negative upon society and this florid prose is just one more ghastly effluvium from the sarcophagus
thatmf··on Big Food vs. the People
Fair point! Some of them are certainly more legible than others. I thought the vending machine one was brilliant. But for instance the one with the slices of pizza... does get a little lost in its own sauce, yes :P

I just rarely see someone commit to the bit so deeply, and I think that's fun.

thatmf··on Big Food vs. the People
Fantastic infographics!
thatmf··on All major LLMs are lib-left. Even Grok, half the time
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" -Stephen Colbert
thatmf··on Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
I'm very curious as to what places of the world that would be.
thatmf··on Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
For some reason when I opened this the sound of a helicopter hovering shook the walls.

> Come September, he will have to walk across town to school on his own.

*THE HORROR*

> But if he's going to be walking around out in the world without me, then a tracking tag won't cut it.

Uhhhhhhhhh. The way this is stated so plainly as if it were self-evident fact is telling. The author longs for the umbilical cord.

> but what if he gets lost?

What if he learns a life lesson, navigation and/or some form of self-reliance or independence?

I just... no wonder Kids Today are so cooked.

thatmf··on US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers
Another novel approach to saving money: stop fighting Israel's wars
thatmf··on Waymo reports teen riders for bad behavior and delivers them to the police
As Benn Jordan pointed out, imagine what a hacker group or ICE could do with this. Fun times!
thatmf··on Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402
All for this. Micropayments have been tried so many times before, but they all relied on user opt-in and never reached any sort of critical mass. Someone of Cloudflare's scale could actually pull it off.
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