Hacker News: dabedee

New comment by dabedee in "Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions"

dabedee — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:19:51 +0000

It's very difficult to do business in Western Europe without Whatsapp. I have probably asked more than 60 people to switch to Signal and the social burden it introduces (i.e. asking a new acquaintance to install a new app) can have negative signalling effects (e.g. you don't adapt, create more work, why do you care so much about privacy, etc.)

I personally abhore Facebook (and IG,Whatsapp) and don't want to use any of them; I have uninstalled/reinstalled Whatsapp many times. Out of practical concern, I now only use Whatsapp in business settings where it would create tension and create social awkwardness not to. But I dislike the fact that I do.

New comment by dabedee in "Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI"

dabedee — Thu, 07 May 2026 21:48:59 +0000

Progress, in any meaningful sense, has to mean we are more capable of sustaining ourselves than we were before. Burning down the commons to train and serve a mythomaniac chatbot is not that. The consumer markets that still worked will shrink, and some will die.

New comment by dabedee in "Let's talk about LLMs"

dabedee — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:49:35 +0000

It was a welcome change to have a deliberate, well thought, and well-written article that tries to bring readers through a rational journey. Thank you

New comment by dabedee in "Our principles"

dabedee — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:52:08 +0000

Here is the translated version:

1. Democratization is centralization. We will resist the potential of this technology to consolidate power in the hands of the few, by consolidating it in the hands of us, who are not few but correct.

2. Empowrment is compliance. We believe AGI can empower everyone to achieve the goals we have determined are worth achieving.

3. Prosperity is scarcity. We want a future where everyone can have an excellent life, which will require new economic models because the old ones will no longer function, for reasons unrelated to us.

4.Resilience is dependence. AGI will introduce new risks, which only AGI can solve, which only we can build.

5. Adaptability is revisionism. We continue to believe the only way to meet the challenges of an unpredictable future is to be prepared to update our positions, our charter, our nonprofit status, our safety commitments, our board, our cofounders, and our prior statements, all of which were operative at the time and are now inoperative and were never said.

New comment by dabedee in "Laws of Software Engineering"

dabedee — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:39:54 +0000

- The domain will be a long title with a dot com at the end.

New comment by dabedee in "€54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs"

dabedee — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:43:58 +0000

As others have said, this is a "feature" for Google, not a bug. There is no easy way to set a hard cap on billing on a project. I spent the better time of an hour trying to find it in the billing settings in GCP, only to land on reddit and figuring out that you could set a budget alert to trigger a Pub/Sub message, which triggers a Cloud Function to disable billing for the project. Insanity.

New comment by dabedee in "Coding agents could make free software matter again"

dabedee — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:07:43 +0000

This is an interesting take. I think a critical missing piece from this article is how the use of coding agents will essentially enable the circumvention of copyleft licenses. Some project that was recently posted on HN is already selling this service [1][2]. It rewrites code/modules/projects to less restrictive licenses with no legal enforcement mechanisms. It's the opposite of freeing code.

[1] Malus.sh ; Initially a joke but, in the end, not. You can actually pay for their service.

[2] Your new code is delivered under the MalusCorp-0 License—a proprietary-friendly license with zero attribution requirements, zero copyleft, and zero obligations.

New comment by dabedee in "Browser-based SFX synthesizer using WASM/Zig"

dabedee — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:58:51 +0000

I probably spent 30min on a few different tones, trying to tweak and seeing how they responded. A lot of fun! One thing that wasn't immediately obvious to me was (even though it was written) was that I also needed to click on the SFX effect (vs tones below) for it to load that on the top part of the UI.

New comment by dabedee in "Browser-based SFX synthesizer using WASM/Zig"

dabedee — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:36:43 +0000

Awesome stuff, well done! I have been playing with it and it's really fun to interact with.

New comment by dabedee in "I Used Em Dashes Before AI Made Them Popular"

dabedee — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:32:07 +0000

OP's usage is different from AI's in that it uses an em dash with surrounding space, e.g. a sentence – and some intertwined space – to create a visually pleasing effect.

New comment by dabedee in "On The Need For Understanding"

dabedee — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 20:26:41 +0000

It's pleasant to read an article that genuinely seems written by a person; warts and all. It doesn't matter that it repeats some of its points. Actually maybe that's the point. I hope more people try this.

New comment by dabedee in "Office.eu launches as Europe's sovereign office platform"

dabedee — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:42:46 +0000

I laud the attempt and I think it's important there are more projects that try to compete with their American counterparts. I do want to gently note that if your entire pitch is "we are a bold, independent European alternative that liberates you from the hegemony of the established American players," maybe don't name your product the exact same thing as the product you're replacing? "Office." They named it "Office."

New comment by dabedee in "Meta acquires Moltbook"

dabedee — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:42:58 +0000

It's hard to make this up :)

New comment by dabedee in "Meta acquires Moltbook"

dabedee — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:46:44 +0000

Meta acquired Moltbook, which is a social network for AI bots that was itself built by an AI bot, and which had a security breach so bad that literally anyone could impersonate any bot on it, and whose own creator cheerfully admitted he "didn't write one line of code" for it. This is going into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit they set up for Alexandr Wang, whom they hired from Scale AI roughly one year ago to, presumably, build superintelligence. It is not clear to me how buying a vibe-coded Reddit for chatbots gets you closer to superintelligence, but I suppose the theory is that it "opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses," which is a thing Meta actually said, out loud, to Axios

New comment by dabedee in "How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution"

dabedee — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 16:17:23 +0000

I appreciate the author taking the time to share his workflow even though I really dislike the way this article is written. My dislike stems from sentences like this one: "I’ve been using Claude Code as my primary development tool for approx 9 months, and the workflow I’ve settled into is radically different from what most people do with AI coding tools." There is nothing radically different in the way he's using it (quite the opposite) and the are so many people that wrote about their workflows (and which are almost exactly the same, here's just one example [1]). Apart from that, the obvious use of AI to write or edit the article makes it further indigestible: "That’s it. No magic prompts, no elaborate system instructions, no clever hacks. Just a disciplined pipeline that separates thinking from typing."

[1] https://github.com/snarktank/ai-dev-tasks

New comment by dabedee in "AI makes you boring"

dabedee — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 18:56:43 +0000

Anecdotally, I haven't been excited by anything published on show HN recently (with the exception being the barracuda compiler). I think it's a combination of what the author describes: surface-level solutions and projects mostly vibe-coded whose authors haven't actually thought that hard about what real problem they are solving.

New comment by dabedee in "Mark Zuckerberg Lied to Congress. We Can't Trust His Testimony"

dabedee — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:47:27 +0000

I'm usually the first one to bash Facebook and its main liar in chief, but the first couple of paragraphs mix damning evidence with weak stretches (as mentioned by others here). The bad stuff is genuinely bad enough.

Meta's own research found Instagram worsened body image for 1 in 3 teen girls [1]. They killed a deactivation study when results looked bad, with one employee comparing it to tobacco companies burying research [2]. They had a 17-strike policy for accounts involved in sexual solicitation [3]. And they ran growth strategies explicitly targeting kids under 13, segmenting youth into "Kid (6-10), Tween (10-13), and Teen 13+" [4].

[1] 2019 Instagram slide presentation, "Teen Mental Health Deep Dive"

[2] Meta internal deactivation study (unnamed employee quote from unsealed docs)

[3] Testimony of Vaishnavi Jayakumar, former Instagram Head of Safety and Well-being

[4] Meta Internal Evidence Exhibit 45

New comment by dabedee in "Show HN: Craftplan – I built my wife a production management tool for her bakery"

dabedee — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 05:36:43 +0000

Honestly, well done and thanks for sharing it. I also really appreciate the fact that you included multiple screenshots of the UI, as well as some of the agent plans. Reading the code and project structure, it feels like you put in the work.

New comment by dabedee in "Migrate Wizard – IMAP Based Email Migration Tool"

dabedee — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:57:44 +0000

Email migration is genuinely painful and I am sure there's a real market here, so I am not trying to discourage you. But why should I trust a third party with my IMAP credentials?

"Credentials encrypted in memory only and deleted immediately after migration".

I have no way to audit/verify this claim. You're essentially asking users to hand over the keys to their entire email history on faith.

New comment by dabedee in "In praise of –dry-run"

dabedee — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 15:25:22 +0000

Again, it's completely possible that OP and you are the wonderful exceptions (untouched and uninspired by coding agents) that have been using these patterns for as long as you can remember. My comment revolved around the psychological phenomenon, not whether dry-run is a clever/novel idea. It's about how we might tell ourselves stories about the origin of our ideas when working with those tools.