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toddmorey

6,706 karma · joined November 25, 2009

Building for the web for 20+ years. Currently with amazing folks at OnMachina.
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toddmorey··on Underwater oxygen loss threatens earth's stability, researchers warn
Have we ever as a species successfully changed our behavior on a scale needed to address something like climate change and underwater oxygen loss?

What would be the closest “we’ve got to change or perish” moment we’ve successfully navigated?

toddmorey··on Removing React.js from the codebase and adapting Htmx for UI interactivity (2023)
Nope, HTMX could power endless scroll features if you want them
toddmorey··on Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story
One way to think about it is that more powerful models mean solid best practices are more important than ever, so humans moving too quickly / carelessly bites us more than ever.

If a typical SaaS platform moved and shifted this fast with this many downstream consequences, we’d tell them to slow the fuck down, stop launching new features, and focus on security for a second.

But in AI I guess the idea is that more power and intelligence will solve for everything else.

toddmorey··on Flock CEO Apologizes for Calling Activists 'Terrorists'
"We believe in a world where we can have safety and privacy."

  - Flock camera feeds were set up public-facing, giving anyone on the internet access to live high-resolution feeds
  - Flock's AI does more than just read license plates. It catalogs vehicle color, make, model, bumper stickers, dents, and roof racks.
  - Police officers nationwide have abused their access to the Flock network to inappropriately track romantic partners, neighbors, and personal acquaintances
  - local police departments share Flock-captured license plate data with federal immigration agencies like ICE and CBP
  - Flock cameras have been used to track lawful citizens attending political demonstrations
  - Flock also expanded into audio surveillance (!!) before public outrage made them back down a bit
toddmorey··on NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook
Yeah I think the podcasts were just a clever hack until AI is fast enough to support realtime. It’s practically there now, so a fake podcast is a funny relic and hard to sit through.
toddmorey··on NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook
I can’t believe how bad Claude’s voice mode is. So much latency and it often tells me “this is rather technical” and would be better talking it out over text.

OpenAI has much less latency, can adapt to speak about any topic (though will tell you it put a code sample to look at later), and it just feels like brainstorming with a colleague.

If you haven’t tried the live voice version of ChatGPT recently, you should. I love to brainstorm ideas while on walks and it’s fabulous for that.

Ask it to summarize the conversation into a doc that will be waiting for you when you are back at your desk.

toddmorey··on Codex Micro
I did too! That HAD to be by design.
toddmorey··on Collection of Digital Clock Designs
This is awesome! I made a Soroban (Japanese abacus) version, but I couldn't add it to the collection since I used css-based animations. Published here: https://soroban-clock.netlify.app
toddmorey··on SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status
I'm very pro tech. Because I'm pro tech, I honestly wish there were more ethical companies in the space. It can be hard to find US tech companies to cheer for. My main business-related challenge with Elon is his public predictions are so wildly ungrounded. Skepticism is absolutely warranted.

Two things:

  - You can cheer for his companies and technologies but against these financial maneuverings because they risk genuine harm & setback to the industry

  - I stopped asking for people to put politics aside in support of these companies when I realized Elon couldn't put politics aside to support these companies.
toddmorey··on Migrating a production AI agent to GPT-5.6: 2.2x faster, 27% cheaper
But it's not about whether it was AI or human authored. That misses the point. We're all fatigued on the writing style. The same cadence and patterns; the same phrases and terms like "load-bearing". Used everywhere, they create a super fatiguing monoculture in all the writing. It's like if every illustration on the internet suddenly contained Garfield the cat.
toddmorey··on Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
I thought I read somewhere that according to filings for going public, subscription revenue is tiny… like 5%.

Edit: consumer Claude subs are the 5%. I’d bet most all of CC subs lump in under enterprise.

  - API & Enterprise: 75% to 85% of total revenue.
  - Business Subscriptions: Roughly 10% to 15%.
  - Individual Subscriptions: About 5%.
toddmorey··on Satteri: A Markdown pipeline forged in Rust for the JavaScript world
Processing markdown into html is a significant task for many blogs, sites, and apps. Satteri moves that processing into rust for speed gains.

Now used in Astro 7: https://astro.build/blog/astro-7/#markdown--mdx-in-rust

toddmorey··on Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold?
“Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books.”
toddmorey··on Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold?
Also: load-bearing!
toddmorey··on Astro 7.0
Thanks for your work on this!
toddmorey··on Please stop the AI confidence theater
I value both great devs and great marketers because I’ve seen dev teams build awesome tech that never found its audience.

It’s the culture of the org and that decides how the ammo is used. What you want is good devs AND good marketers building and promoting great product.

Anyone in any role who works at facebook holds culpability. Marketers aren’t building all those user hostile features.

toddmorey··on ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2
Does anyone use an agnostic TUI or harness for development tasks that can fairly seamlessly switch between providers?

I'm wanting local context in the spirit of "here are 3 AI providers available, for coding tasks use this one... and for writing prose use this one... and for generating images use this one..." etc.

toddmorey··on Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5
I predict we all be using the hell out of fable until the next great model comes around and in two weeks we won’t be talking about the export controls anymore. We just don’t have the attention span.

Nobody should be putting loadbearing weight on Amazon or Microsoft with their ruthless monopoly ambitions, yet here we are

toddmorey··on Apple increases MacBook and iPad prices by 20%
I think the AI companies are so motivated (desperate) it just puts all the existing rules and contracts at risk. The Apple supply chain has always had aggressive contracts and commitments... for normal times.
toddmorey··on Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
Well, I think from the technology side, the performance and capacity you can get in a personal computer (especially a laptop) is absolutely incredible.

It's just component suppl and that supply is being eaten up and re-diverted to data centers. Prices and availability will be in poor shape. Though I am wondering if GPU compute and memory start to diverge enough that AI companies begin using such specialized chips they stop threatening consumer devices. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.

toddmorey··on Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new homegrown, ultra-affordable EV
counterpoint: I have an EV that I never drive more than 77 miles a day and I paid over $70k for it. Top speed would definitely be a limiting factor, but I do think there's a huge gap in the mobility market between e-bike and a traditional (and expensive!) car.
toddmorey··on GLM 5.2 vs. Opus
I’m actually amazed at the output since GLM doesn’t have eyes. If GLM 5.2 costs 1/5 as much, seems like it could be set up to reach out to a multimodal model for vision tasks when required. Closer to parity but probably still significantly cheaper.
toddmorey··on Running local models is good now
For the curious, it looks like a PC with a RTX 5090 32GB graphics card will run you about $6,000.
toddmorey··on "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
I always imagine the model rolling its silicon eyes when it’s assigned a personality (“you are an expert growth hacker”) at the start of the prompt. Was that ever actually shown to be effective? Is it still?
toddmorey··on Waymo Premier
I'm SO tired of subscription services that only offer the opportunity to buy more stuff.

  - Doordash wants you to subscribe
  - AMC movies want you to subscribe
  - Now Waymo wants you to subscribe
You can't buy anything now without being hassled for a subscription. I don't see any value here except for when they degrade the service for non-subscribers to make the priority pickups seem worth it.
toddmorey··on Apache Burr: Build reliable AI agents and applications
Anthropic seems to agree with you as more recent Claude updates have it just building task specific harnesses as needed.
toddmorey··on Claude Fable 5
I fear it's a smokescreen to manage cost and capacity.
toddmorey··on Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models
I'm interested in how it feels to use: whether there is any context leaking, as you mentioned, if it introduces latency, and whether there are any pricing implications? I know they weighed a variety of factors, including the smaller models, but cost had to be a big concern, too... I feel like Google is the only provider giving away so much AI inference for free.

This will further blur the picture about when and how consumers / employees are supposed to pay for AI services. For example, they showed consumer rather than coding tasks, but could you select five files and ask Siri to write a Python script or a small app? Will enterprises just disable Siri AI functionality, or will they be able to route it through their own AI auditing and providers?

toddmorey··on Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute
I don’t know. Give me a 94x multiple and I can make any financial deal look brilliant. I think a better word is just opportunistic.
toddmorey··on DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
Ok, not my favorite narrative, but assume asymmetric application of intellectual property rights was a big factor. Wouldn't the US exploiting asymmetric labor wages, rights, and conditions be the even bigger story? It still feels like a short-sighted own goal. The US abandoned its ability to manufacture. Maybe dark factories and robotics can bring it back, but manufacturing supply chains are just so much more advanced in Asia than in the US.
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