HN detectives, hard at work. I wish there was a way to automatically hide all the comments saying "but I think LLM was involved in this software". These days it seems like most of the content here on HN.

This is especially galling when we discuss software that has been around for >20 years and that people (actual users, not HN haters) universally love. See other comments around here.

It works. It does its job. It doesn't pester me with popups. It didn't get bloated. It didn't get rewritten using Electron to support New Enterprise Features. It didn't get a built-in sync client for my pictures and videos so that I can share them with my team. It didn't get ads. It didn't get enshittified in any of the hundreds of possible ways that other apps did.

I find it ridiculous that all I paid for this experience was… $27.95 back in 2006 (I just checked the receipt). That's $1.40/year. I have no idea how Dave can make a living this way, and if he ever introduces subscription pricing, I'll be happy to subscribe (cue the HN hater crowd with their knee-jerk reaction "subscriptions BAD!" and downvotes).

If you don't like the enshittification of everything around you, support software that doesn't do that.

Thank you for the fantastic app, Dave. I will happily pay for the upgrade and will happily keep paying, because good apps are worth paying for!

A second side effect of a knee-jerk reaction to bots crawling websites is that if you try to fight all bots, you also end up hurting real users that use "bots". If I run a local script or an LLM that needs to fetch a web page from your site and you block that script or LLM as being a bot, you hurt me, the user. I wanted the information and I have no way of getting at it without investing my own time and effort in going to your website. That might or might not be what you expected, but it's worth taking into account.

And finally, something worth noting is that there are so many websites whose owners complain about bots, but the real problem is that the website is poorly built and should be improved anyway. Bot traffic is not necessarily bad.

Cheaper prices with subscriptions are not a problem at all. It's just that I should always see the final price that I will be paying per kWh before starting to charge.

On a related note, there is already a plug-and-charge system that identifies the car when it gets plugged in and is capable of charging the owner, but it almost never works. This is also something that should be mandated for larger EV adoption.

I own an EV and enjoy it a lot. I would not even consider buying a gas vehicle again. But while charging at home is great, charging during a trip is annoying. This needs regulation.

I use it to develop a large MRP-style app. This is as complex as things get.

Is it Clojure that makes things so efficient? My work style (lots of design documents)? I really don't know.

Do people skip the "review the code and read the documents" step perhaps?

This results in everyone copying Apple, for example, even their bad decisions.

Somebody noticed a while ago that all the AI company logos look like anuses — and they are right! They do!

Even product design decisions are not immune to this. Look at cars for example; Tesla started designing non-circular steering wheels and everybody followed. There is absolutely no reason to do this. A non-circular steering wheel in a road car is worse in every respect than a circle shape, yet everybody does it until the trend passes (hopefully soon).

If you look around, you will find plenty other examples.

Similarly here, I think that all AI apps have small icons not because they are AI apps, but because the design groups copy each other's work.

The big companies do not have to care because nobody will block Google, Microsoft or Amazon. They are too big to fail.

Spoofing a From field is an insignificant problem in comparison.

I mostly use the MacWhisper app until now, but I got frustrated by its slow development and lack of focus and dictation. So I tried the free TypeWhisper app. It works very well, but then I tested multiple models and my conclusion was that one cannot beat the Whisper Large v3 model for accuracy. I tried Qwen ASR (very good, but only for English), Voxtral (spoke Polish to it and it wrote Russian, BIG oopsie), Parakeet TDT 3 (very fast, but sometimes inaccurate).

I got frustrated by the speed of the Whisper Large model. So I spent an hour with AI benchmarking, testing and developing a new plugin. Turns out that on a modern Mac with a good GPU you can run the Whisper Large model at roughly the same speed as the tiny Parakeet model. 2-3x faster than what other apps ship. It's just that nobody bothered.

So, I am now happily dictating into TypeWhisper and then feeding the dictated text into a local gemma-4-26b-a4b-qat LLM for corrections. Everything happens instantly.

The reasoning behind this is also flawed: blocking "bots" and "AI" means that our AI agents working for us are unable to do their work for us, because of knee-jerk bot-blocks.

This extends to any device which has software or firmware: banking websites, banking apps on mobile phones, car firmware, etc.

I find it very depressing, especially when I think of the people who design, develop and deploy these apps. We are talking about large companies and teams of people. Entire chains of well-paid people designed, looked at, developed, tested, and then accepted these apps. And yet they break in the most obvious ways, or fail to be usable, instead pestering us with pop-ups and useless drivel and forgetting their state at every point.

These problems are not subtle. To take a glaring example from my everyday life, in my car there are buttons for moving windows up and down. Sometimes when you press the button to move the window down, it will actually start moving up. We are talking about a simple button that moves a window. And seemingly everybody thinks this is fine?

I don't know what to do about this.

Some things to try:

- noise cancelling headphones with white noise background (Iceland White or Naturespace apps provide really good quality natural recordings)

- clean desk

- clear split between work and non-work environments

Not perfect, but doing pretty well, and the effects can be seen.

First, there is no requirement for "consistency". Every person chooses where to draw their moral line. The world is not black and white, but the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and subsequent (ongoing!) murdering, raping, and bombing of civilians is pretty clearly on one side of the line in my world.

Note that this in itself says nothing about the United States or any other country. You may consider every other country and choose not to support its economy, and this in no way makes the above point weaker.