As far as I know they sell the patterns, not the finished knitted artifact. Aspiring knitters buy them to enjoy knitting. The physical representation of the pattern isn't worth anything (just a piece of paper), what you're buying is a license to use their intellectual property, so I'd say they're making money from copyright.

Remote: Yes (required)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript, Python, Django, Vue, Nuxt, React

Résumé/CV: https://zgajner.com/work

GitHub: https://github.com/mzgajner

Email: work@zgajner.com

Full-stack web developer with 20 years of experience, currently working at a startup where I was employee #2.

My strongest area of expertise, if I had to point one out, is frontend. I've built complex multiscreen dashboards, mobile games, IPTV set-top box interfaces, you name it. Consistent and performant UIs are my jam.

I enjoy working with people, I've happily and successfully led teams, conducted dozens of technical interviews and managed cross-team initiatives. That said, I'm a deeply technical person at heart, so I'm not looking for a full-time management position.

Over the past year I've been working with LLMs extensively, building an AI asset management product at my current employer, which required diving into coding harness internals and shipping features supported by LLMs. Our development processes started relying on LLMs as well, so I'm well prepared to join a team that's already heavy on AI or help it make that transition.

My preferred environment is one where I get a seat at the table early so I can own a feature from conception to production. I'm used to low overhead, frequent exchanges with product people and daily deploys. If you're not there yet, I can help you get there.

Corporations aim to make the cheapest possible product that still sells because that creates the biggest profit margin.

If we're collectively unhappy with the outcome, that's the core value we need to change.

Are you manually keeping all copies in sync?

Some people argue even that behavior ends up producing the most good, but I cannot accept that level of mental gymnastics.

I tried to purchase tickets for an event last week. I had to go through Ticketmaster as it was the only official way. They forced me to verify my account using a phone number, but whoever they were using for messages wasn't able to deliver a code to my number. I tried a few numbers from our household and they all failed.

Searching for this issue yielded a bunch of results, so it was definitely a known issue, but there wasn't anything I could do, really. To them, it's simple math. Another SMS provider that covers my (tiny EU) country might be more expensive. They might be avoiding scammers that used my mobile operator in the past. Whatever it is, it would probably cost them more than they lose in ticket sales.

Without some government entity to force them, they don't give a shit about me being able to see an event.

If anyone is willing to give us a bit of feedback, I guess we'd mostly like to hear if the issues this blog post opens with are even a problem for you and if yes, how are you currently solving it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48585979

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

Without any special car-charging equipment, just with a regular outlet, I'm able to get over 100 miles of range every night (charging only from 11pm to 7am).

This is enough for a pretty long daily commute and it doesn't block car use during normal hours.

Big disclaimer - I'm from Europe, which helps my case because of shorter commutes and faster home charging with 220 volts.

But at the end of the day I think the solution lies in equipping all parking spaces at home and at work with power outlets. DCFC is definitely needed, but should be viewed as a solution for exceptional cases (i.e. roadtrip that exceeds your range), not a gas station for EVs.

So far the answer of the current economic system has been to invent new products/services and redirect the workforce there. It's been working so far, but isn't without issues - ever-increasing consumption is bad for the environment; the jobs are getting more and more pointless; people wonder why automation doesn't result in shorter working hours for everyone.

The real reason, however, are the political and economical implications of GMOs. Sure, they say they'll use them to fight famine. But in reality, they'll just try to extract as much profit as they can, regardless of the interests of the people growing the plants and eating the food. We've seen farmers get sued (see Bowman v Monsanto) and other evil stuff like that.

How seriously would you take a proposal on car pollution regulation and traffic law updates written by Volkswagen?

So why are we doing this now? Has anything changed fundamentally? Why can't we let software do everything and then blame the user for doing bad things?

Polluting vs. not polluting sounds super straightforward, but then you look outside and we often pollute rivers, so it's clearly not that simple.

Personally, I'm fully with you on not polluting. But that immediately puts us in an ideological position - we value preserving the environment and staying healthy.

A neo-liberal might come along and say we're wasting economic potential. Keeping the river clean means not building a factory near it. If the products from that factory and the jobs it provides offset the negative effects, they'll argue we _should_ pollute the river.

Same with taxing sugary drinks - uncertain results aren't the issue. The issue is we have different opinions on how much a government should be able to regulate certain aspects of life in the pursuit of improving public health.

Even if you have reliable statistical data from countries that implemented such a policy, some people will argue their freedom to drink whatever they want is what's important here and your bean-counting of medical expenses is completely missing the point.

The author implicitly assumes that the constraints of our society are fixed and that it's therefore possible to determine which political systems are objectively better or worse. We should be doing that research (like astronomers trying to determine how the universe works) instead of religiously supporting ideological positions.

I fundamentally disagree with that assumption. I think we behave the way we do in large part due to the ideological principles we were raised with. This can be confirmed by observing various closed-off societies sometimes operating on principles that seem completely bonkers to most of us.

If you teach people capitalism/socialism, you build a capitalistic/socialistic system. It's impossible to live inside that system and objectively determine whether it's good or bad, let alone better or worse than other systems.

So in that context, I believe following an ideology is _not_ the opposite of thinking for yourself, as the author puts it. It is a conscious decision based on morality. You decide what your values are and you find a political option that aligns with them.

To be clear, that's still a very imperfect decision to make, many things can go wrong from that point on and I believe this is where the author is correct in many ways. We should reason about it constantly to make sure we're actually doing what we want to be doing and not just blindly repeating things.

When it comes to AI, we're trying to replace existing technology with it. We want it to drive a car, write an email, fix a bug etc. That premise is what gives it economic value, since we have a bunch of cars/emails/bugs that need driving/writing/fixing.

Sure, it's interesting to think about other things it could potentially achieve when we think out of the box and find use cases that fit it more, but the "old things" we need to do won't magically go away. So I think we should be careful about such overgeneralizations, especially when they're covertly used to hype the technology and maintain investments.