Hacker News: spamizbad

New comment by spamizbad in "McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture? (2016)"

spamizbad — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:02:39 +0000

There's actually a housing shortage in the US so it's not like this is an architecture that is responsive to consumer or cultural preference and demand - local zoning laws do not even permit such freedom.

New comment by spamizbad in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

spamizbad — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 01:20:07 +0000

To an extent that's true, but while Zuck might be hands on but he doesn't typically micromanage his lieutenants. Alexandr was clearly in over his head, has never run anything resembling a high quality engineering org, and blew it up in less than a year. I think his days are numbered.

New comment by spamizbad in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

spamizbad — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 01:09:57 +0000

Lots of people blame Zuckerberg, but my own view aligns with the author in that much of this is falls on Alexandr Wang's shoulders (Scale AI's founder). It's perhaps somewhat ironic that the "MEI" guy (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence) was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling - something that, let's be honest, is not where you want to allocate your top performers at an org like Meta.

This is one of those things where a (tech) celebrity founder was permitted to blew up a high-performing engineering culture. If shareholders knew the nuances of this they'd demand his ouster. His leadership has been lacking in merit, excellence, and intelligence.

New comment by spamizbad in "I Love the Computer"

spamizbad — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:48:14 +0000

I would say the claim that AI is going to replace most white collar work a very snake-oily term. The technology behind it however is very compelling and interesting.

New comment by spamizbad in "Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai"

spamizbad — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:34:35 +0000

I'm not sure if this was Flux, but one of those AI EDA tool companies had a somewhat absurd ad where the narrator stated the AI tool told them a capacitor was being used to block DC, and that's something they never learned while getting an EE degree. Now, I don't have an EE degree, but I feel like how capacitors interact with AC and DC are sort of "passive components 101" that even hobbyists learn quite early on.

The EDA space doesn't strike me as being anywhere near as SWE when it comes to AI.

New comment by spamizbad in "Nvidia RTX Spark"

spamizbad — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:43:55 +0000

Might be aimed at people who spec out the $5100 Macbook Pros with M5 Maxes and 128GB.

New comment by spamizbad in "Florida sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over AI risks"

spamizbad — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:18:34 +0000

Texas is becoming a hub for educated professionals and Florida is a hub for non-college retirees

New comment by spamizbad in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

spamizbad — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:50:50 +0000

Nobody dies if instagram collapses. Might even cause more people to live.

New comment by spamizbad in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

spamizbad — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:07:00 +0000

Oh we already had that with a RIF earlier in the year.

New comment by spamizbad in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

spamizbad — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:20:14 +0000

I will also tell you, as someone who works at a company that's trying to remain profitable, that token spend has caught the eyes of finance and much like cloud spend they've already started applying pressure to control costs. This May my team is protected to use 30% fewer tokens than we did in April - this was by intention. I suspect we'll drop more in June.

New comment by spamizbad in "Italy moves to Airbus A330 tankers"

spamizbad — Sat, 23 May 2026 18:16:52 +0000

You can’t lobby the Trump or “America First” crowd to not be themselves.

New comment by spamizbad in "Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars"

spamizbad — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:59:09 +0000

> But rich engineers and lawyers play boutique guitars - almost everyone else, including most professional musicians, still play Fenders (or one of the other big mainstream brands).

I'm familiar with this stereotype but two things:

1) Based on the data I've seen, a higher percentage of a boutique brand's guitars are purchased by working musicians than the mainstream brands. They're such a small segment of the market however those musicians seem rare by comparison.

2) Hobbyists, across all income levels, are responsible for the vast majority of gear sold. The working musician is really just collecting the "discount" from economies of scale afforded by this phenomena.

New comment by spamizbad in "The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't"

spamizbad — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:29:19 +0000

You have it backwards. You’d benefit tremendously from fixed PTO that pays out because you’re taking fewer than 10 days a year. Its biggest benefactors are low-seniority employees who take 20-30 days annually.

New comment by spamizbad in "Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars"

spamizbad — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:54:54 +0000

Fender does this with their headstock design for replacement necks only. However they forbid license-holding manufacturers from both selling a complete guitar with a Fender headstock shape and even showing the guitar neck on a finished guitar during the sale process.

New comment by spamizbad in "Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars"

spamizbad — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:56:45 +0000

If you're not guitar gear nerd, you might be unaware: Fender doesn't make the best version of its various guitar shapes (with one debatable exception)[1]. If you want an off-the-rack "S-Style" guitar (Stratocaster) there's a handful of premium, smaller brands that will make an objectively better guitar than any of Fender's offerings, including their premium "Ultra" series: Suhr, Anderson Guitarworks, James Tyler Guitars, Seuf, Shabat, LsL, Mario Martin, etc.

If Fender gets the industry to capitulate and abandon its shapes, there's a very real chance it does long-term reputational damage to the brand. Not due to lawsuit outrage but due to something much simpler: consumers and musicians no longer associating new production S-style guitars as great electric guitars. Today, the boutique builders Fender is suing do quite a bit to uphold the reputation of those shapes. Without them they're just designs of a legacy brand that mostly sells mid-market import guitars.

[1] That possible exception are Masterbuilt-tier instruments made by Fender's Custom Shop https://www.fender.com/pages/custom-shop The wait time is several months and the price starts around $8K USD and quickly pushes into 5 figures.

New comment by spamizbad in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

spamizbad — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:44:40 +0000

The people who hold these views are overwhelmingly not members of the working class. They're retirees or Gen-Xers coming off their peak earning years.

New comment by spamizbad in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

spamizbad — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:56:42 +0000

I got some (bad?) news for you: Most Americans are either in complete denial over this or genuinely don't care. They don't think the wealth and lifestyles they enjoy have anything to do with the US' status as a global hegemon. Some even think the relationship is inverted, believing that as the world de-Americanizes, Americans will somehow benefit from this.

New comment by spamizbad in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

spamizbad — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:01 +0000

What you're describing really isn't a new problem for organizations. Historically it's been a team of humans not using AI who gets over their skis and they have to have other more capable humans (also not using AI) to bail them out.

New comment by spamizbad in "Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%"

spamizbad — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:38:57 +0000

Yeah my experience in engineering management: Very easy to be a "player coach" when the team was small, like when I had 4 direct reports. As soon as I had 9 (in an org with no TPM/product) my full time job was wearing 3 hats, and maybe 3 hours a week were spent on actual pure technical tasks (mostly scut work to unblock team members after-hours)

New comment by spamizbad in ""People who don't use AI will be left behind""

spamizbad — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:55:17 +0000

The statement is absurd because the skill curve for AI tooling is so small you can can mess around for a day or two and get "caught up" with the zeitgeist. And what you need to know to get started is actually far less these days than it was 1.5 years ago thanks to all the product refinement that took place in the space.

The only real risk is that today there's an expectation from employers that you've got some AI experience under your belt you can articulate. But you can get that experience today.