Hacker News: DragonStrength

New comment by DragonStrength in "Another Day Has Come"

DragonStrength — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:03:34 +0000

It's funny because Apple said on stage Lightning was their connector for the next decade in 2012 then shipped it for exactly a decade, despite being the first to ship a USB-C device. When they switched to Lightning in 2012, the peanut gallery complaint was Apple making everyone buy new cables and accessories. Either too fast or too slow for their critics with the same timing.

New comment by DragonStrength in "How Much Money Jeff Bezos Made Since You Started Reading This Page"

DragonStrength — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:34:21 +0000

Jeff Bezos started Amazon with family money. Sure, there were richer folks, but few have parents capable of giving them hundreds of thousands of dollars for a business venture.

New comment by DragonStrength in "Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns"

DragonStrength — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:07:26 +0000

If you can point to single product he has made through his "vibe-coding" that isn't for "vibe-coding," I think they would all relent.

New comment by DragonStrength in "Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns"

DragonStrength — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:34:23 +0000

I see a lot of folks lamenting how Yegge has ignited a fire under leadership for egoless, factory worker style engineers. I don't think many would care much otherwise, but his post here is lamenting AI is not enough of a factory worker yet. On a site mostly populated by folks who put most of their lives into becoming skilled professionals, hearing "we think your work should be the kind of work we send to the cheapest, least-developed places on earth" like factory work is disheartening. Of course, it mostly seems like Yegge is here to make money off meme coins and selling Dolt plus his vibe-authored book, so why would anyone take this seriously?

I mean, he can't explain what he's building except pickaxes to make more pickaxes, so it's a bit suspicious. It's just incredible how much impact he has had with this little hustle, given his products are basically turtles all the way down.

New comment by DragonStrength in "Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns"

DragonStrength — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:40:59 +0000

Every Yegge post about AI reads like a Music Man style con job, but he’s got Silicon Valley startup founders salivating and pushing his book to their employees.

New comment by DragonStrength in "Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales"

DragonStrength — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:17:09 +0000

I know plenty of engineers with expensive trucks used to carry their families around during the week and haul their hunting bounty home on weekends. In that scenario, the Cybertruck is a total failure. Where's the exposed bed for a deer? How about hauling the boat to the lake?

Cybertruck is a product management failure.

New comment by DragonStrength in "Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales"

DragonStrength — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:13:14 +0000

BINGO: the folks buying these things are doing so to virtue signal their politics. If you need a truck for work or hunting, you're still buying a truck, not some Silicon Valley concept car like the Cybertruck.

New comment by DragonStrength in "FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs"

DragonStrength — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 01:14:12 +0000

Open up an Amazon media app and navigate around enough, and you'll encounter a page with all their "Third Party Software Licenses."

For instance, here's one for the Amazon Music apps, which includes an FFMpeg license: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

New comment by DragonStrength in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

DragonStrength — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 08:11:36 +0000

There are no empty slots for med school in America. We turn qualified kids away.

New comment by DragonStrength in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

DragonStrength — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 22:08:29 +0000

As my manager at Amazon once told me, “Amazon prefers H1Bs because they take more abuse.”

New comment by DragonStrength in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

DragonStrength — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 22:07:19 +0000

Exactly. The difference is doctors were able to cap the number of doctors graduated, and now we have a shortage. Welp, I know the solution to that.

New comment by DragonStrength in "U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier"

DragonStrength — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 15:05:24 +0000

This article is saying the slowdown started as early as a year ago. That of course opens up the discussion of whether this new revision is political cover for the current administration since they just removed the BLS head.

New comment by DragonStrength in "AI not affecting job market much so far, New York Fed says"

DragonStrength — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 23:48:10 +0000

Amazon's hallucinating a fake 1-800 number for me to call is both peak Amazon and peak AI bubble.

New comment by DragonStrength in "AI not affecting job market much so far, New York Fed says"

DragonStrength — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 23:47:07 +0000

Yes, but when Marc Benioff says he laid off thousands of customer service agents, the reporting is "Salesforce cuts tech workers using AI." The narrative in media is a total mess right now, and there are many in VC and AI-related companies ready to help muddy the waters further for their own benefit. Obviously, many small companies follow the media narrative.

New comment by DragonStrength in "White House in Talks with Intel for 10% U.S. Government Stake"

DragonStrength — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 20:24:55 +0000

From the subhead

> Money earmarked for semiconductor company under Chips Act could be converted into equity

They’re already getting federal money.

New comment by DragonStrength in "Is the A.I. Boom Turning Into an A.I. Bubble?"

DragonStrength — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 18:40:39 +0000

For sure, the Dotcom crash didn’t mean the web was bad technology.

New comment by DragonStrength in "Stanford to continue legacy admissions and withdraw from Cal Grants"

DragonStrength — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 13:58:37 +0000

You’re close. The issue is we can’t discuss class, so they look for all sorts of other analogs which they can get the wealthy folks on board with. DEI is acceptable to the wealthy because they ultimately see less of a threat there than from a person of the same race from the South or Midwest. In the workplace, the female Stanford legacy can still be underprivileged then thanks to gender versus the white male from a poor state with a land grant degree.

New comment by DragonStrength in "Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG"

DragonStrength — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 14:12:39 +0000

Could you please point to the whining? He says MPEG is broken, but AOM will stagnate. You’re mad at the messenger.

New comment by DragonStrength in "Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG"

DragonStrength — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 13:22:15 +0000

You missed the first part of that quote:

> At long last everybody realises that the old MPEG business model is now broke

And the entire post is about how dysfunctional MPEG is and how AOM rose to deal with it. It is tragic to waste so much time and money only to produce nothing. He's criticizing the MPEG group and their infighting. He's literally criticizing MPEG's licensing model and the leadership of the companies in MPEG. He's an MPEG member saying MPEG's business model is broken yet no one has a desire to fix it, so it will be beaten by a competitor. Would you not want to see your own organization reform rather than die?

Reminder AOM is a bunch of megacorps with profit motive too, which is why he thinks this ultimately leads to stalled innovation:

> My concerns are at a different level and have to do with the way industry at large will be able to access innovation. AOM will certainly give much needed stability to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of reduced if not entirely halted technical progress. There will simply be no incentive for companies to develop new video compression technologies, at very significant cost because of the sophistication of the field, knowing that their assets will be thankfully – and nothing more – accepted and used by AOM in their video codecs.

> Companies will slash their video compression technology investments, thousands of jobs will go and millions of USD of funding to universities will be cut. A successful “access technology at no cost” model will spread to other fields.

Money is the motivator. Figuring out how to reward investment in pushing the technology forward is his concern. It sounds like he is open to suggestions.

New comment by DragonStrength in "Intel CEO Letter to Employees"

DragonStrength — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 22:33:22 +0000

The Capital Order lays out an argument that austerity measures are ultimately labor suppression, not necessary. Of course, that’s true of many pieces of policy wisdom: they start from an assumed good. In this case, the assumed good is the current winners should remain the winners despite, well, losing.

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Order-Economists-Invented-Aus...