652 karma · joined November 13, 2025
honestly it's driving me crazy. i really miss just having nonsensical dreams it was refreshing.
side note: man i hate how people write sql, drives me nuts how wild west it is syntax wise out in the world. i could wax poetic on how its stinky but when it comes to sql, people are already locked in on how they write sql so they are absolutely unwilling to entertain new approaches there. im literally the only one dying on this hill but using caps all over the place when syntax highlighting exists in 2026 is wild. sql might be the one place in the universe where commas on the left in your select statement makes sense, `on` clause join keys deserve to be on the next line and tabbed in under the thing they join to otherwise you're stuffing join tablename alias on alias.id = b.id (this wouldnt be such an eyesore but people are very not-verbose with their table aliases, so eye scanning tablename/alias/join keys kinda sux)
i too am desperate to just sever ties with these big providers, my fingers are crossed we get there within the constraints of local hardware even if that means me spending 3-5k i just want off this wild ride.
though id have the utmost respect for someone who could hold onto the possibility to threaten the facebook/instagram/snapchat moat, realistically i don't think anyone in here could stick to the ideals so strongly.
it's not even a valuable thought exercise. if this thing were to gain any traction at all it's assuredly gonna get acquired. you gotta be tech-buddha to resist that.
"in todays fast paced business environment.."
the incentive structure on medium is so busted. just people churning out half-working insights to look good for job interviews or promotions, it's like the worlds laziest portfolio. it straight up isn't any sort of bastion of knowledge-share.
makes things like https://beej.us/guide/ an absolute treasure
i think the only time ive ever run into an apple engineer was on mastodon related to gptk it was interesting to see they actually are quite tuned into what is possible on these devices and what that could mean for gaming. despite being a developer toolkit to help studios get a read on the work needed to optimize a game for a metal port, they were expressing that they were well aware such tools showed a lot of promise for getting games going on mac. not much of a gamer myself, but thought it was interesting to see a slice into engineering there & that they weren't as hostile as HN would believe them to be and broadly aligned with many of us. id be mega curious what apple engineers think about asahi.
> ChaCha20-Poly1305
ha! i ran into this when looking at the source for yaak (guy who made the insomnia rest client who's now making yaak). i never got to the bottom of how it worked.
i actually feel for him, it's definitely one of the career paths that's looked at as excess/waste now while companies slim up to reappropriate money for AI. but i do think there was something there, he was genuinely passionate about what he did and it's just really hard to find work doing it now.
i feel guilty saying this but i've let him talk me through some of what he does, show me how he sees and approaches design (the bulk of what he did was design the interfaces for publicly used webapps and mobile apps) and... idk. i feel like it's all acquired taste and almost a "good app developer will think of these things when they design the front end" and a lot of his insight to me broadly looked like a lot of stuff i would've considered myself as a mere sidequest and my general thought process to deliver a good app. the difference is im building the app and designing the user experience, but his entire career is silo'd to just building the user experience.
im not against breaking out the design to a dedicated resource whether thats one designer or one team who wants to try and maintain a consistent language for a company. i think this has upside to make the design experience not locked to a single developer or developer team, and opens it up to a lot more channels of input. but on the other hand, like it's not the end of the world for me as a developer to come up with a really good design & i personally have never imagined myself not considering UX/UI at every corner when I'm building something. It feels like a second nature to me, there's creative aha moments to it, i think it's generally really good for a developer to step into a users shoes and almost "debug" the experience.
where i think ui/ux has gone off the rails:
- i think it's unduly influenced web design and has been poisoned by marketing. the rise of landing pages for SaaS that say a whole lot of fucking nothing and the crossover with "marketing research". i actually literally can't stand these types of pages, i swear 75% of the time i click around and can never get a straight answer on what the product/service is. examples: https://boomi.com https://www.astronomer.io
- things like OP, issue links opening in popups. changing things for the sake of changing things. such a change is probably "backed by research / surveys" giving the illusion that this was a data driven-decision, making it hard to push back on.... despite on deployment = everyone universally hating it. there seems to be some heavy flaws with the data sampling/collection methods that drive these decisions. i think the field of ux/ui as its own distinguished and defined field needs to undergo a self-awareness evolution here. something that's happened quite a few times in engineering. they really need to scoot back and have one of those "sometimes the best path forward is to not change anything at all" moments collectively and learn to recognize when that is right in front of you
- sometimes (maybe more than sometimes) allowing the business to dictate design is mayhaps not a good thing. i think what im trying to say here is the existence of "hes the ux/ui guy in the department, go talk to him" gives business stakeholders misaligned incentives to just go and push a change that isn't _actually_ user oriented, but is heavily tied into some metric or some other stupid business initiative. actually the more that i think about it this is probably why a lot ui/ux careers exist (give all control of the design over to the business) and that seems like a slippery slope
Yeah I'm thinking some sort of test artifact bleeding into prod and subject so some nightly process is likely the case.
if it is, in fact, something nefarious at play that would be a pretty crazy 2026 era exploit. but i'm certain it's a bug/artifact of some sort that, for whatever reason, affects this specific app.
stealing this. you will be paid 0 in royalties/licensing
i'd say it's been a huge distraction for him and the obsession over using LLM for Big Wikiz hasn't yielded anything near what he thought the tech was for. few occasions now he's learned the hard way how imperfect the technology is.
between that and everyones grand visions for agentic workflows i've mostly just receded into being one of the few who is still regularly delivering stuff. i'm using AI to speed my delivery up quite a bit, i'm just not wasting my time taking it on some big grand adventure. the irony that a lot of people pushed back on companies who wanted to implement chat bots and they spend most of their credits/tokens making their own chat bots by collecting six trillion .md files and adding skill files.
my real takeaway is this: i've come to reason that there is some sort of loss in actual real institutional knowledge when we attempt to take shortcuts to growing the breadth of our own knowledge. i don't mean "hey claude give me some examples of how companies typically design x to solve for y" or "golang is new to me, what are the benefits of a compiled language versus something that requires a runtime going".
no, i'm talking about these kinds of questions:
"/somePersonalBigWikiProjectInvokedBySkill.md claude review our current tooling and infrastructure, how can we 5x our deployment speed, then search the web for <some SaaS company> and put a proposal together to get it implemented at the organization and include a 5 year cost benefit analysis and ... "
i look around and it feels like everyone is nerfing themselves. that latter question? people are just sending claude proposals left and right. my eyes have completely glazed over. is it really that hard to do some digging yourself? we're already ceding the ability to just go grab an architect or senior engineer and ask him what he thinks about how <some SaaS company> will fit with the broader suite of technologies and visions on the horizon. we're just skipping the pieces where we do a little discovery together and work together on an outcome. we're walking away with surface level understanding of many things.
this clearly has visible impacts on how we engage with each other, there's something there that I'm noticing and don't have the words for. it's mostly that people are less able to explain what it is they're talking about when pressed for deeper details, but also everyone's behavior is now different because AI sort of... makes them feel like they have definitive answers/strategies and they're no longer willing to have their ideas challenged. they no longer see that as a learning experience, a chance to learn from someone who has wisdoms who is already a walking wikipedia on something. the perfect technology for people who hate when someone with way more experience than them says "maybe not a good idea and here's why"
i've met some interesting people who are just... walking encyclopedias on some or many domains. incredibly smart people who have so much knowledge and wisdom and so many years of experience not just with tech but with people and failures and successes. i don't doubt for a second that the human brain is capable of holding an unbelievable index of information in a natural way that marries well with decision making processes that come from experience. i'm not sure what gap people are trying to close building themselves some proverbial great library here, but i would encourage people to just sit back and trust that their brain is still one of the greatest technologies at their disposal.
so it's mostly a desk weight now. besides pencil input, there isn't anything i'd do on it that i wouldn't prefer doing on my laptop. i absolutely can't stand typing on ipads.