Hacker News: john01dav

New comment by john01dav in "My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup"

john01dav — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 01:48:06 +0000

This doesn't imply that it will settle at the same or lower price as before though.

New comment by john01dav in "'Buy Now, Pay Later' Lenders Pitch Loans for Needs Like Electricity and Rent"

john01dav — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:17:20 +0000

What basket of goods does your source use for determining income in real terms? The ratio of money on essentials versus luxuries has changed over the past few decades, and it's done so unevenly across the population. For example, a young person looking to find a place to live today is going to face astronomically higher rents while someone who bought 30 years ago in a place like California that caps property tax growth may find that their monthly (or total over a long time) housing cost is vastly lower.

Whether real wages have gone down depends on what you use as a benchmark for said wages.

The federal reserve even has an article about this topic: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/diff...

New comment by john01dav in "An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail"

john01dav — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:38:10 +0000

The sustainability of this is dubious to me because you're taking a one time fee for service forever, and eventually someone (possibly a future owner) is going to want to get more money out of you over this. Also, there are recurring costs to host this that continue forever, even with no further income from you.

New comment by john01dav in "An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail"

john01dav — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:31:09 +0000

A lot of those sites will let you just reset password, send an email to the Google account's associated gmail, and then you're done. I suspect that it isn't thought through as an official feature in such cases, but it does often work.

Additionally, if you signed up with an email and password, you can often just sign in via SSO with a matching email address for convenience and still have the underlying password remain working. Again, possibly not an intentional feature (but rather something like using the email reported via SSO or via email verification as a primary key).

New comment by john01dav in "Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index"

john01dav — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 20:54:54 +0000

Anthropic's constant changing of its mind leads to instability which leads to unhappy customers

New comment by john01dav in "The AI Aesthetic"

john01dav — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 22:34:51 +0000

> Basic bootstrap means 'the developer did not care much about design'.

It could also reasonably mean that they consider a generic design fine. Design has many aspects, and branding/uniqueness is only one. You could, for example, have a very high quality layout of the bootstrap controls that is very easy and intuitive to use.

New comment by john01dav in "The AI Aesthetic"

john01dav — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 01:32:34 +0000

I disagree because they communicate different things (to me).

Seeing Bootsrap for some custom software at my university pre-llm: "I think that a programmer made this and didn't have a designer helping them so they just used a library"

Seeing vibe-coded frontend: "This app may be entirely vibe coded so I am deeply suspicious of it, or it could be a programmer who didn't have a designer helping them and thus used Bootstrap"

New comment by john01dav in "Should you wash your solar panels?"

john01dav — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 10:36:23 +0000

I did exactly that! 2000 Toyota with dents, a little surface rust, and a good engine and transmission

New comment by john01dav in "Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped"

john01dav — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:41:19 +0000

Gemini has been perfectly willing to write such things for me

New comment by john01dav in "Watching Go's new garbage collector move through the heap"

john01dav — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 19:34:08 +0000

Are you sure that it doesn't just crash in that case?

Also, we have such a huge virtual memory space on 64 bit architectures that I can imagine that being involved somehow, but I don't know for sure.

New comment by john01dav in "Should you wash your solar panels?"

john01dav — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:02:37 +0000

There are other reasonable interpretations of such things. More precisely, one may simply care in different ratios about various things than is typical. For example, one may be fastidious with replacing furnace filters and water heater anode rods while not caring about their lawn beyond city or hoa mandates.

New comment by john01dav in "Should you wash your solar panels?"

john01dav — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:59:37 +0000

Being rational about this (i.e., buying a dirty or otherwise manageably flawed house) is a great way to save or make money in markets where the majority of the cost is the building.

New comment by john01dav in "What if the RAM/GPU shortage is deliberate?"

john01dav — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 01:10:06 +0000

That's false. It's evidence, but it isn't conclusive. Someone thought that the law suit was worth filing, and that could be because the law suit has a chance of succeeding. It could also be some other reason, and it could also fail even if completely good faith -- this is why the evidence is non-conclusive.

New comment by john01dav in "Software rendering in 500 lines of bare C++"

john01dav — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 18:57:20 +0000

Softbuffer?

(I originally wrote this a few years ago but other people maintain it now)

New comment by john01dav in "Advertise in ChatGPT"

john01dav — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:36:38 +0000

Kagi's business model also aligns incentives better than an ad and/or data mining fueled business model. Of course, this isn't proof, but it is evidence. One can also try the search in areas that one knows deeply and compare it to other search engines to see if it's truly better (I have not done this, but it is possible and isn't just trusting marketing.).

I don't use Kagi primarily because I'm quite averse to subscriptions if I can find another way.

New comment by john01dav in "Kimi Work"

john01dav — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:29:35 +0000

They may have a bespoke deal with someone. They may be losing money. They may have believed a claim from Deepseek about not storing things more than they should. It may be something else. AFAIK no third party audit has been done so all that we have is what they say.

New comment by john01dav in "Kimi Work"

john01dav — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:47:19 +0000

The Chinese api prices are already so cheap that that is arguably not needed.

You can also get $10/month opencode go (which officially can be used with any harness) with basically every major open weight model running inference in a place that I deem more trustworthy than the subject-to-Chinese-law inference options (but research this for yourself, there are some asterisks). This is what I use (in opencode) when I want an agent for personal use. Even if I'm being fairly intense with my usage by my standards anyway), I haven't managed to run out (yet), although I usually use the cheaper models (deepseek v4 is my favorite, and I've used both flash and pro).

From the FAQ:

> The plan is designed primarily for international users, with models hosted in the US, EU, and Singapore for stable global access. Our providers follow a zero-retention policy and do not use your data for model training.

And:

> Yes, you can use Go with any agent. Follow the setup instructions in your preferred coding agent.

New comment by john01dav in "U of Chicago law school bans laptops from classes amid AI backlash"

john01dav — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 07:35:48 +0000

This is a terrible way to learn. Lecture halls are uncomfortable and synchronous, which are objectively less convenient than reading or watching videos at home. If someone wants that then they can organize watch parties, without forcing it on anyone else. Synchronous and uncomfortable should be reserved for interactive things, like in a flipped classroom

New comment by john01dav in "Leaking YouTube creators' private videos"

john01dav — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 23:42:13 +0000

> Honestly it’s hard to refute the fact that we need roads and houses more than we need cat videos.

Software does more than cat videos.

Examples that may be relevant:

- CAD and simulation tools that physical world engineers use

- telecommunications (not just programmers, but programmers are vital for the current ultra-cheap generation)

- CT and MRI data processing

- alphafold

- scheduling systems for universities and other schools (makes education more scalable)

- infrastructure/systems programming (OS, web browser, etc.)

Furthermore, no one would claim that civil engineering is useless just because a certain class of billionaires liked to hire them to design silly structures. So, the prevalence of the less useful things speaks more to priorities as a society than anything about software engineering itself

New comment by john01dav in "Claude Code is steganographically marking requests"

john01dav — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 23:00:15 +0000

They're running code on users' computers that it would not be reasonable to think that the user consented to running on their computer. This is CFAA-violation-shaped. Of course, they won't be prosecuted if it is indeed a violation, and I do not know for sure if it meets the specific legal criteria. However, it is something that I think should be illegal. Make it so if software does something that would be unreasonable to think that the user wants to happen, it needs to make that abundantly clear before it does it, otherwise it's a CFAA or similar violation. This would, of course, have very broad consequences. However, this Claude issue feels particularly violating to me.