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Show HN: Stop Claude Code from forgetting everything (github.com/mutable-state-inc)
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What is the advantage over summarizing previous sessions for the new one?
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I absolutely love this concept! It's like the thing that I've been looking for my whole life. Well, at least since I've been using Claude Code, which is this year. I'm sold. With that said, I can't think of a way that this would work. How does this work? I took a very quick glance, and it's not obvious at first glance. The whole problem is, the AI is short on context, it has limited memory. Of course, you can store lots of memory elsewhere, but how do you solve the problem of having the AI not know what's in the memory as it goes from step to step? How does it sort of find the relevant memory at the time that that relevance is most active? Could you just walk through the sort of conceptual mechanism of action of this thing?
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yeah so you can run it in automatic mode, or read only mode. In automatic mode it hooks onto the conversation and tool calls so you get the entire conversation stored. If you dont want to get super deep, then read only is safe and only stores what you ask. You could ask it things like "why is my reasoning dumb" by recalling passed conversations, or even give it the claude tool call sequence and ask "how can claude be smarter about next time". I think of it like a file tree with proper namespacing and keep abstract concepts in separate directories. so like my food preferences will be in like /preferences/sandos. or you can even do things like /system-design preferences and then load them into a relevant conversation for next time.
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Thank you for specifying it wasn't magic or AGI.
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jk it is AGI. First.
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I mostly use it during long Claude Code research sessions so I don’t lose my place between days. I run it in automatic mode with decent namespacing, so thoughts, notes, and whole conversations just accumulate in a structured way. As I work, it stores the session and builds small semantic, entity-based hypergraphs of what I was thinking about. Later I’ll come back and ask things like: what was I actually trying to fix here? what research threads exist already? where did my reasoning drift? Sometimes I’ll even ask Claude to reflect on its own reasoning in a past session and point out where it was being reactive or missed connections.
AI Employees Don't Pay Taxes (alec.is)
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What a weak argument against the “it’s just a tool” defense.
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There is no credible model for UBI anywhere from AI. It's not going to be paid for by anyone, anywhere. Petrostates including Alaska can pay one, sort of, but they are not replacing people with automation, and their largesse won't last forever. The model of capitalism is to pay for labor and avoid taxes and fees at almost all costs. AI-enabled businesses will not seek to contribute any more to UBI than they seek to contribute to any other non-employee. People who don't labor won't get money.
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Why is it that every year we are capable of producing more, but we keep asking people to accept less? Like how is “we can replace all workers with AI agents” not compatible with “we can extract enough wealth from the new profitability to sustain everyone at the current rate as a service(UBI)” If we’re more productive after replacing everyone with machines then why can’t we just cover everyone’s basic(victuals/housing/basic utilities+internet) needs?
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The model of capitalism is to use money to build some means of production and hopefully generate more money from that. We are arriving in a form of techno-feudalism where nobody produces anything. People with means to produce will pay the owners of AI who just own and make money through renting shit to people who cant afford building their own data centers or whatever. Its what companies like Amazon or Microsoft already do. They dont produce, they own and collect. All of this has nothing to do with capitalism, its all about selling the big AI lie to producers so people base their products on some AI they dont own. And the cycle repeats, Amazon squeezed actual producing companies out of their money decades ago and now we will repeat this with AI. Capitalists have means to produce, feudalists just collect and own.
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just change the tax code to be progressive based on earnings per employee...
ManusAI Joins Meta (manus.im)
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m'anus
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Totally forgot Manus existed. It’s funny they’re so eager to tell us this acquisition means they are a pioneer. Imagine pioneering agentic LLM usage - surely you’d be buying Meta!
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Meta was lacking behind on the agents space. This is a good capture but they are making crazy good offers but not turning them into killer products so far. The AI agents space is picking up in 20206. Next they will hire voice agents like ElevenLabs and Cartesia, visual Agents like VLM Run or Landing AI and then web browsing agents.
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Bummer. Manus was the best actual agent for my money. I literally have it working for me right now so I can goof off on HN… no joke.
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A random thought. Metaverse is more interesting if manus get integrated into it
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Nothing about how much Meta paid for Manus. Is this an actual accuquisition?
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Manus was pretty damn good at delivering impressive results well before other providers. I stopped using it because I was concerned about data privacy and and whatever extent one particular foreign country might (or might not) have hooks into Manus. Now that Meta has purchased them I know I'm safe ((sarcasm)). I have many questions: - Will Meta fuck this up as they seem (in my opinion) to do with most of the acquisitions? Oculus? Drop.io? - Did they grossly overpay? - Will innovation slow to a crawl (eg. Instagram, Whatsapp)? - Will Manus' top talent bail? - How is it conceivable Meta couldn't build this themselves. It can't possibly have been Manus' user base they were after, can it? - How much trouble am I in for telling my wife to sell her Meta stock two weeks ago? The acquisition is confusing to me.
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What was the advantage of manus vs other providers?
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Who?
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username doesn't check out
The evidence is pretty clear, and it keeps growing. Social media causes real harm, both to individuals and to society. It is addictive by design, it worsens mental health especially for kids, and it rewards outrage and misinformation. In that way, social media looks a lot like smoking. It was widely adopted before we understood the risks, then aggressively pushed because it was profitable. Meta did more than just take part in this system. It perfected it, scaled it worldwide, and resisted meaningful change until public pressure or regulation forced its hand. That is why it is worrying to see Meta present itself as a trusted builder of the next major technology wave. When a company repeatedly puts growth ahead of social harm, skepticism is not bias. It is common sense. Giving that company even more powerful and less transparent tools should cause us alarm.
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What’s the difference between social media and books? Or is your point that all entertainment is harmful to individuals and society?
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Books aren't harassing kids!
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Anybody who has meaningfully engaged with short-form dynamically adapted video content and read a book can EASILY tell the difference. It is Morphine vs Fentanyl
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things I like are good. things I don't like are bad.
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Taking your questions at face value, the difference is incentives and feedback loops. Books are static. They do not watch you, adapt to you in real time, or optimize themselves to keep you reading at any cost. Social media does. It measures behavior, runs constant experiments, and tunes feeds to maximize engagement, often by amplifying outrage, fear, or tribalism.
> This announcement is more than just a headline—it's validation of our pioneering work with General AI Agents. Anyone else thought this was satire when they read that as the second line in the announcement? I literally laughed, then clicked the top left logo, to check out the homepage and see if this `ManuAI` was a real website. --- You would think that they would know better to at least edit that out. It's not just ironic -- it's cosmically poetic.
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Perhaps "our PR team is a prompt" is what they mean to convey? Or "let's make this obviously AI so more people comment pointing that out" is their social media strategy?
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I don't get it. They are saying the announcement means more to them than just a headline that most will scroll past. Maybe you are seeing something I'm not.
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Op is saying it sounds like it was written like an LLM
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ok... it's an AI company, It'd be odd if it weren't written by AI, no?
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I'm all for dogfooding but if you work for a bicycle company it shouldn't mean you can't drive to work. The right tool for the right job.
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Would that be odd? AI companies are still staffed by people, and large announcements like acquihires certainly feel like they could use a slightly more human touch if they truly mean a lot to the company.
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It is odd that they didn’t care or have the wherewithal to make it not sound obviously like an LLM wrote it.
It's everywhere. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1l8harj/its_not_just_x_its_y/
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non tantum … sed etiam …
USPS announces changes to the postmark date system (nstp.org)
The title of this summary blog post is grossly misleading. (To the point where I suspect it of being an AI hallucination, thanks to its use of ChatGPT's distinctive formatting style of bulleted list with Capitalized Colon-Delimited Headers:.) As the linked PDF explains, this is not a change to the postmark date system. It's an acknowledgement that the date on the postmark may not be the date that you dropped the letter into a (possibly unattended) mailbox. This has always been true, because the stamping is not done until USPS actually processes the letter. USPS has no knowledge of when the letter physically "entered USPS custody" by being dropped in the mailbox, so the postmark has never accurately reflected that instant. This rule does not change when postmarks are applied, and it doesn't change how any other parties make decisions based on postmarks. It merely documents the postmarking process that has existed basically forever.
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There is a change, not directly to postmarking but the larger collection process which will affect postmarking. > This discrepancy is expected to become more common due to the implementation of the "Regional Transportation Optimization" (RTO) initiative and the adoption of "leg-based" service standards. > This change in USPS processes will have a potentially significant impact on tax filings. Basically, a large chunk of mailboxes across the country will no longer have evening collection, so unless you drop off your mail very early in the morning it will be processed and postmarked at minimum 1+ day later.
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Agreed. I was looking for an actual "change" here. It's just a statement to clarify the existing processing rules. Nothing new here.
Someone somewhere probably figured out that it’s more efficient to have five drivers ride in a loop all day than to have each post office drain the boxes inside their postal map. But it’s weird for a pleb to look at a box directly outside an office and assume that office isn’t responsible for that box. Outside a corner coffee shop, sure, but I can see the post office, it’s right there.
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Again, your "right there" is just your assumptions you know the inner workings of the USPS. Maybe there was no Saturday pickup at that location until the outside boxes made it possible. This means no increase in that location's budget for paying people to do this. Now, it is part of the regional location (or similar) while at the same time now being able to offer a convenient Saturday pickup for those that use this location. Not every location offers the same services. It's part of life. The complaining here is coming across as very privileged whining. Do you wish to speak to a manager?
Last year I was hit with a failure-to-pay penalty, even though I mailed the check on the deadline. When I spoke to an IRS agent, they claimed that the payment needed to be received, not postmarked, by April 15. Never heard of that before. He was kind enough to remove the penalty because it was a first time offense. Since then, I pay electronically. Never again.
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The IRS agent did not know the law (unlikely) or was just messing with you (likely)
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from the IRS ( https://www.irs.gov/filing/individuals/when-to-file ) Your return is considered filed on time if your envelope is properly addressed, postmarked and deposited in the mail by the due date.
Not everyone qualifies. Thanks to tax software company lobbying.
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https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/free_file_fillable_forms_user_guide.pdf says "Free File Fillable Forms has no age, income or residency restrictions".
A direct attack on mail-in voting.
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No it's not. It's just the Post Office trying to save money by being slower. This quote from the article describes it (note the last sentence in particular): "Potential Delays: Because most postmarks are applied at processing facilities, the date inscribed may be later than the date the mail piece was first accepted by the USPS. This discrepancy is expected to become more common due to the implementation of the "Regional Transportation Optimization" (RTO) initiative and the adoption of "leg-based" service standards."
A small price to pay for election integrity.
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Downvoted for the reason that I’ve not seen any credible evidence of massive election fraud, in the USA, since the suggestion of it in 2020. If you can point me to something credible, that proves even 1,000s of votes in a single district were impacted, (thereby stealing an election via mail fraud) I’ll remove my downvote.
This seems to only clarify that mail might have been in possession by USPS _before_ the postmark date. I don't see how that affects mail in voting.
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By admitting that the postmark date is a reflection of processing capability rather than voter action, the USPS has undermined the legal standard used in Pennsylvania and other states to determine the validity of late-arriving ballots. This reinforces the argument that mass mail-in voting relies on a logistical system that the USPS itself admits is not "perfectly reliable" for dating time-sensitive documents. In states that require a postmark by Election Day to count a ballot received later, the operational reality of postmarking creates a chaotic environment where timely votes could be disqualified, or conversely, creates ambiguity about when a ballot actually entered the system. It is unreasonable to expect every mail-in voter to stand in line at a post office to get a manual stamp to prove they voted on time. If the standard automated system cannot guarantee an accurate date, as this rule admits, then using that system for critical constitutional functions like voting is inherently flawed.
Delaying the post-mark, or not applying one at all, gives anti-mail ballot groups more leverage in their lawsuits.
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It could be argued that if a) there is not reasonable, reliable method of determining and documenting when a voter casts their mail-in ballots, and b) we all agree that there must be a deadline for casting ballots, then mail-in voting is prima facie not a great idea
You're muddying the waters by using the word "received". The instant in time at which your letter is technically "received" by the USPS, in the sense of them having physical possession, has never mattered for any legal purposes whatsoever. That's because in many cases, there is absolutely no physical proof of exactly what instant in time that event happened. Electoral rules aren't written based on when the USPS received your ballot, because that's typically unprovable. They're either based on when the ballot was delivered to the election office, or when the ballot was postmarked . The postmarking may happen at some point while the piece of mail is in USPS custody, or it may not happen at all if you don't specifically ask for it. The rules are based on the postmark date because the postmark date is the only available documentary evidence of the date of mailing. Again, this is not a change in policy, it's merely documenting the way the mail system has always worked.
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> Electoral rules aren't written based on when the USPS received your ballot, because that's typically unprovable Has anyone challenged their ballot being rejected by producing video showing them putting the ballot in an envelope and putting said envelope in a mailbox?
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No, and to do so would be to challenge the law itself since the laws are written with reference to postmark date. Perhaps ironically, video evidence has been used to invalidate ballots. In 2023, a CT judge invalidated the results of the Democratic primary, finding "ballot stuffing" in that 1,253 absentee ballots were submitted at Bridgeport dropboxes despite surveillance video only showing 420 people using the boxes. A new Democratic primary was ordered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023%E2%80%9324_Bridgeport,_Connecticut_mayoral_election
Every voting cycle for at least the last 4 you have seen a certain class of citizen not understand why the early numbers come in from small, rural precincts who can finish early and then the densest areas come in later and vote for other people than their guy. I’m sure that this is being fed by people whose livelihood depends on misunderstanding the problem, but it’s something people should be taught in school and the civics curriculum went away sometime around No Child Left Behind. So this has been going on at least since GW Bush, and some of this bullshit tracks all the way back to Reagan.
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That's a lot of mental gymnastics to defend fraud.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth (2019) (boundary2.org)
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After reading this very well-written essay, what jumped out at me was "this is rich person psychosis". It seems like the easiest answer. Rich people know they are destroying the world, and rather than dial it back, they have mentally cracked and are fantasizing (and probably literally fetishizing -- in that it becomes sexual) about end-of-days. They've completely internalized what was a niche Evangelical position since Hal Lindsay (who I am surprised did not pop up in the essay). I know the trope that these folk must be sociopaths, which is why I opt to believe they aren't, and have just damaged themselves with the contradiction they represent. (As for the peasants who believe this? Collateral damage from hero worship.) I enjoyed the essay from a recent-history perspective, but damn does it scare me.
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There is no rapture coming. The idea of the rapture didn't even exist until Morgan Edwards came up with the idea in 1788. It didn't become popular until John Nelson Darby developed and popularized it starting around 1827-33 by conflating verses from different books of the Bible. In Matthew 24:40-41 (also Matthew 13) it speaks of one being taken and one being left, but the people being taken are being destroyed by an invading army, like happened in Jerusalem in 70AD when the temple was destroyed. You want to be the one left behind. You also see this in Genesis when the people were taken away by the flood and they perished. In 1st Thessalonians 4:17, it talks about being caught up but it isn't speaking about what we understand as the rapture today. It is referring to a convention where a Roman ruler would triumphantly return to a city and the people would go out to greet him and return with him to the city. The beast was Nero (his name in Gematria adds up to 666). All of the end times events either happened 1900 years ago or aren't ever going to happen.
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Did anything happen between Darby and Hal Lindsay? Seems like about ~80 year gap before it become de rigeur again?
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This is a thoughtful piece, and I'm surprised that most of the comments here are focusing on the evangelicals who are thirsty for the Rapture. While misguided, those people aren't much of a problem, as they are mostly waiting for the end times, grandiosely sure that they are among the chosen. All that discussion of evangelicals is really a setup for the real focus of the article: people like Yarvin, Musk, and Theil, who have the power to actually have the influence and money to cause significant damage to society. And they are acting on it. Although there are cranks on the left who think the solution to the problems of capitalism is its demise, they are not in a position of power. It is ironic it is the so called conservatives who are actually trying to destroy society as we know it.
In the event of the Rapture America is doomed. How is a country that loses 60% of its population supposed to compete with the Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Shinto, etc... countries that were almost untouched? Does the Left Behind series even talk about this? I've never read the novels, but what little I know of it made the scope seem focused on the USA. Does the rest of the world just carry on as normal and it's just America that goes all Mad Max? Honestly, one would expect New York City to be one of the less impacted locales on account of the cultural diversity and general high level of sin according to Evangelicals. Same with California. It's the Midwest that gets wiped out.
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Left Behind is a very poorly written series so it doesn't address any of this well but: most christians don't get raptured but also any child under 12? does regardless of religion. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25011483-the-anti-christ-handbook (which uses the left behind books as a jumping off point) is worth reading as an explanation of the political world we live in. The book sort of constantly forgets that every child under 12 in the world means that every one on the planet should be deeply traumatized.
This is the biblically accurate version. In heaven the body has no more purpose than the clothes people wear, so the bodies should just drop dead empty of souls. However, a more terrifying interpretation could be that the bodies have no reason to just drop dead just because the soul is gone, instead, they would continue functioning as P-Zombies. This could mean the rapture already happened and we're just not aware of it. If you are not a P-Zombie, you weren't raptured. This could be a premise for a pretty cool story.
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>In heaven the body has no more purpose This is not the biblical teaching about the body. The hope emphasized in the Bible is for the resurrection of the body. This is why Jesus is resurrected bodily, and not as some kind of ghost. If the body was some kind of superfluous thing like clothes, this would make no sense. This is also why the Nicene Creed says “I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the World to Come.” The World to Come likewise is a renewed version of this world, where Heaven and Earth are united, in the same way that the body and soul are. This idea of the soul shedding the body is Platonic, not Christian. As for the rapture itself, it is considered to be nonsense by virtually all biblical scholars, both secular and religious, but how it became such a widespread belief among Americans is probably for another website.
Google is dead. Where do we go now? (circusscientist.com)
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You become a trusted source of data for AI chatbots (hopefully in somewhat ethical way for end users). Look into generative language optimization.
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The old decentralized Internet is dying out and being replaced by a few apps under the total control of a few companies. I'm not sure much can be done about this. At least the physical world is still the same.
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maybe the issue is that you site bigtop.co.za literally does not load
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Can we also talk about how dogshit YouTube Search has been the last 2 years? Some videos have turned to shorts, but they're not searchable through their search API, making the feature pretty useless.
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Now I wonder how long until AI chat tool are riddled with ads, and with shitty content because of people trying to game them just like they've been gaming search engines.
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Wait I know Google search to content sites is largely dead, but I thought Google ads still worked fine.
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Reminds me of the whale oil business being replaced by petroleum. Except the ad-based economy was effectively a google monopsony. I'm surprised the OP managed to make ad revenue for a decade, but to me at always seemed about casino-ish and snake-oily. A decade is impressive but I think we all knew where this was going. I think the question is: will another monopsony for ads arise or will it be content based only? It seems YouTUbe is poised to be the next google since more people watch YouTube than cable, so the audience is captive since there's no alternative (yes I realize Google owns YouTube). But that's still a parasitic economy sucking from google. "Where to go now?" depends on if another ad server can gain dominance, otherwise the answer is "nowhere".
are you caching the HTML response or just the assets?
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I can't remember I think it's just the assets though - seems to be surviving so far. How do you get it to cache everything, is that a paid thing?
If google is dead, I sure hope they won't sell my gmail and google drive data to the highest bidder.
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Already did.
Google never sells your data to anyone. Why would they sell the primary data that they themselves use to determine how to show you ads? Doing so means a deep-pocketed new advertising platform can just buy data from Google and get started with competing against Google on their primary revenue source. It’s like having a goose that lays golden eggs and selling the goose. It’s corporate suicide. I’m surprised anyone on HN even believes Google will sell your data. It takes five seconds of thinking to dispel that notion.
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Google gets given significant tax breaks in many countries. Maybe it is selling it to agencies who could not obtain that info legally
I'm glad as hell not to run a business and never plan to, but it's interesting to think as a consumer where I would try to get information like this. Guy's running a service that provides in-person entertainment for events and parties, seemingly things like clowns and magicians, maybe small-time bands or what-not. Seemingly you don't want to target children directly. If they ask their parents for specific entertainment at a party, they're going to ask for entertainers they know, not companies acting as brokers and middlemen. They might want a particular clown (but probably not) but will never want a particular local vendor of clowns. You need to target the parents for that. If it were me doing the buying, I'd probably prioritize word of mouth recommendations if anyone had such, and otherwise for a large enough event like a wedding or graduation party, I'd look to professional planners. Assuming that's any kind of widespread pattern, you'd want to target strong relationships with planners rather than trying to advertise directly to consumers. Did people really ever search Google to find party entertainment, and then ignore the search results and use the ads instead? Let alone Tik Tok videos? I guess I'm out of touch enough that the answer can be yes and I'm just that clueless about how small businesses work, but all the comments talking about LLM chatbot services are tripping me out. Y'all would ask ChatGPT who to hire for your kid's party?
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Google Adwords just shows your ad at the top of search results. Someone searches for a clown and I'm on top - worth paying for! (when it worked)
Push advertising sucks, but we can make pull much better by giving the user more control. Imagine a protocol to publish commercial offers for any given fragment of content addressable by URI. It would describe the details of some product or service and a set of proposed terms. We could surf the web looking for relevant content and publishing related offers. Various repositories would subscribe or not. A browser (extension or native) would optionally pull offers from selected repositories and have UI for the user to solicit/pull offers for any given piece of content styled to signal their existence, and to filter and sort them. To make it sustainable there needs to be revenue sharing with the content source(s). Are there existing projects like this? The same protocol could be used for independent commentary and other annotation.
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The problem is curation. People will mis-categorize in every way possible just to try to get eyeballs. I see this all over the web.
Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely incorrect, and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser. As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google ads, what’s much more likely to be happening here is that the individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they’re executing ads poorly. Google ads revenue in the US continues to grow every quarter. And, since advertisers will generally invest in ads until the last dollar is break even, it’s likely that the total value advertisers unlock through Google ads is growing as well. Whether that’s true or not, the notion that value generated for advertisers is “dead” is absurd.
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Your experience is 100% compatible with the linked article: the seven-figure spender is presumably running a much higher margin business and can scale narrowly profitable ads much more effectively. The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue: a perfectly efficient market with no profit for the advertiser. Google (and Meta et al) are so good that for many SMBs they are completely cornered at the zero-point: spend as much as you can just to stay in the same place financially.
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> The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue Not quite, the equilibrium is when marginal ad spend results in no change to profit. The ad spend at equilibrium should result in increased profit compared to no ad spend.
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> seven figures every month on Google ads What are you advertising?
The question is, why has this post been massively upvoted? It contains zero useful information. Just somebody struggling with AdWords and they don't know why. Not helpful. I have to assume the vast majority of upvotes are based on the title alone, assuming it's about Search? A large proportion of top level comments are about Search too. Depressing.
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Massively? I can't know. I read the article and upvoted 1) because it suggests a rocky road ahead for Google and 2) because, as you may have guessed, I dislike ads, dislike Google's complicity in ads, and so am happy to discuss. I happen to in fact think we have reached an inflection point. Whether "Google is dead" depends probably a good deal on where they go now.
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The answer is that most people vote based on the title/headline without ever clicking through. I am likely guilty of this as well sometimes. > We find that most users do not read the article that they vote on, and that, in total, 73% of posts were rated (i.e., upvoted or downvoted) without first viewing the content. [0] In this case, my guess is that people are noticing less and less utility from Google search, and that was why they voted like they did. This same phenomenon is what gives newspaper editors far more power than the journalists, as it is the editors who decide the headline. Most people just scan the headlines while subconsciously looking for confirmation bias. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05267
The way people get information online is changing rapidly. I run a local makerspace. It is not quite the same thing as a local entertainment business, but there are certainly some similarities. We are local, and we are very event-based. For the last 10 years, the way we would get new members was to host Meetups. Meetups are slowly bringing in fewer members. When I ask tour guests how they found out about us, they recently started saying that they found us on ChatGPT. They did not know what a makerspace was but they explained their problem and ChatGPT presented our space as a local solution. This has been good for us because we offer something useful to the community but struggle to explain it. In the old days of search, this was a problem because many people were not using the correct phrase to describe what we are. That doesn’t matter anymore. How does a local business optimize for this though? I am not sure.
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Are you using "Meetups" to mean Meetup.com or just events in general? Meetup.com has completely gone to shit. Trying to find an event is super frustrating. They show the same events over and over. They don't enforce categorization. People mark online only events as in person and the platform doesn't care. They also started trying to charge users (people looking to attend events) instead of only planners (people hosting events) so it drives people away. Sadly I don't know any better platform but it seems ripe for a new entry.
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I meant both, and you are correct 100% that meet up has entirely gone to shit.
lol I meant coding, can't stand AI slop web content myself. I wrote all the words - what's BSG?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series)
I love knocking on Google, and have been doing so for longer than it was cool, but this sounds more like the business is no longer attractive than Google having become suddenly wildly ineffective. My anecdotal evidence is the smarter normies are increasingly allergic to screens. They only use them to watch stuff they hear about by some other means, but parents, for example, look for any excuse to keep their kids off the Internet, and largely they're better for it.
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It’s googles fault no one wants my product! It certainly can’t be the basics of demand! - most SMBs I ever work with.
In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regularly in person. But then, my anecdotal experience may not be representative of most of the world. Most of my friends have money, houses, kids, friends - all of which are, by the numbers, rarities these days. It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend. Probably economic depression. If everybody bought only what they needed and ignored all the advertisements, our present level of economic activity would plunge.
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> WhatsApp This one is on its way to becoming part of the social media ecosystem. That's what the "Updates" feature is. To get an idea of what it will look like, check out Instagram users who use it for both 1:1 messaging and social media (1:many) features. Which (again anecdotally) is widely used in younger generations. Few of my friends use Instagram or TikTok, but I think we're just outliers. I see many (young) users, all the time, whenever I'm on the train.
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I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see. Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous." Took me a while to grasp what she meant with that, but I think she's right. Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections. I miss the old phpbb forum days when the most toxic comment was someone being snarky and derailing the discussion into "did you use the search function?" No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
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But your friend is wrong. She does know at least one person who comments on online forums. I bet she knows more too.
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They don't write on forums but they like or share a story. It's just more passive/consumer-minded.
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People didn’t leave social media, social media left them. Instagram used to show your friends, not it shows algorithmic content. Same for the other networks. People are still there but it’s now the new tv.
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Everyone should be simply posting algorithmic content to Facebook. Screenshots, etc not giving them your own life stuff imo. We need to push back on personalized feeds. Share a high percentage of what you see so that there is a digital commons and not just some island for each person. Social media platform used to be less about passive consumption.
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What’s really interesting to me is how this coincides with a larger push to break up more and more ties that kept our society going for the last 30–50 years. Look at what’s happening to globalization and the push to near-shore. Look at the fragmentation of media into private channels and closed groups, the erosion of shared narratives, and the growing skepticism toward institutions that used to act as connective tissue. Individually, many of these shifts make sense: resilience over efficiency, trust over reach, local over global. But collectively they point to a world that is becoming more segmented, less interoperable, and harder to coordinate at scale. If fewer people participate in shared public spaces, economic, cultural, or informational, it’s not just advertising models that break, but the assumptions underpinning growth, politics, and even social cohesion. That doesn’t necessarily mean collapse, but it does suggest a lower energy equilibrium: slower growth, fewer mass phenomena, more parallel realities. The open question is whether we can rebuild new forms of shared infrastructure and trust at smaller scales—or whether we simply learn to live with a more fragmented, quieter, and less synchronized society.
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I am a gen-z and most of my peers look at me weird when I express the same. It was once cool to have social media and presence -- I was only 8 when I made a facebook account. But now, things are different. I actively avoid social media and don't like to show myself online anywhere other than my personal website.
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> Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended I wish you were right. We took our kid to a stage show she really wanted to see. People round us kept checking their phones. They weren’t even really checking them. They held them and would turn the screen on and off, lighting the place up. They couldn’t be without them for more than 5 minutes. This, after 30 mins of painful selfies before the show. It’s awful.
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I’ve known a lot of neurodivergent and LGBT people, and I was in my late teens when The Internet happened and a young adult when the Web happened. If you’re not within a couple standard deviations of boring, local living is isolating. Al Gore gave a mea culpa speech at one point because he thought, as a Senator, that legislating to give everyone the Internet would halt the rural brain drain but it had the opposite effect. People learned that they weren’t alone, they were just surrounded by (my words, not his) idiots and so they moved to where their people were. They voted with their feet in droves. Ultimately, the Internet is good for support. It lets you find people who have the same obscure cancer your child has. Who are dealing with the same sort of neuroses your mom has. Who are being defrauded by a corporation in the same way. Who have the same feelings that the people around you ridicule you for even the hint of having. It lets these people find the patterns, see other people are feeling the same things they do, stop being gaslit. Everything else has become about dopamine and money. And for those parts we should definitely unplug. But without forums or chat threads that same feeling of being The Other comes back.
It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family. It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of community, where someone who had more attention and time on a computer than a sense of what to do with those things can go have casual conversation with… someone.
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It's more of a bad IRC replacement than a reddit one.
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Subreddits ultimately took over when Usenet moderation failed to keep up. I had chat groups before the Web was really even a thing and they lived on until things like Slashdot and Digg took the reins.
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If only Discord weren't so incredibly bloated and full of stupid features aimed at 14-year-old gamers.
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Discord is IRC, just with modern features. I wonder if there are any old school protocols out there to create a huge business around by just centralizing them and offering features people have been asking for decades. Probably not.
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finger comes to mind, LinkedIn is almost a shit version of this
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Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of the internet where real community lies. In theory Reddit was supposed to be this but 1. Reddit communities tend to get too large 2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit). The magic of discord is that everyone in the server I frequent I either know personally or they are known by someone I know personally. It creates a nice fabric of community and trust. Literally zero moderation over the past 10 years as everyone knows each other and behaves like normal adults and we also don’t get all up in arms when someone says something controversial.
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I wonder if the act of switching between discord servers works better with our homo erectus brains. You visit your sister who moved to the next village over, and you hang out in that context until it’s time to go home. You go hang out with the stone shapers because you’re a Neolithic nerd and you think rocks are cool but you have the find motor skills of a dying walrus. Having all of your social circle mashed together on the internet is like a family reunion at a convention in the same room as your high school reunion. It’s… a lot.
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99% of the population hasn't a clue what Discord is/does
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Which is likely why it's so good still. The usenet before the eternal September.
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You probably mean, 99% of anyone older than 25.
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I am 77.
Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years. I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbourhood, church, and hobby communities. All the people I actually care about are in private group chats. I was reflecting recently that Google Plus actually had the right idea back in 2011 with "circles", but at the time we all said it was too hard figuring out which circles we wanted to share a particular message or thought with. Hmm, maybe they were ahead of the game all along?
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Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ “invented” “Circles” had absolutely no problem with locking posts to “friends” (people they followed) or various “friends groups” that were subsets of their friends. It was fucking hilarious to see everyone say it was too hard on G+. Just two dropdowns right there on the new post page next to the main text field. Super simple. Creating and editing the groups was a pretty simple task with its own page. Now that I look back at that I wonder what kind of theories suggest that abilities like that will result in reduced ad impressions, since I feel like every decision made by social sites makes much more sense when viewed through that lens.
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One of the things I hope will come from the Trough of Disillusionment in cloud computing will be families running redundant file servers hosting the family photos instead of doing everything on IG. Your three tech savvy family members should all have redundant copies of the photos of memaw’s wedding and Uncle Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin’s second kid. I don’t need to see those. Your stalker ex boyfriend definitely doesn’t need to see those. It’s none of our goddamned business. Someone, I think WD? Already made a play at this but I think it fell on deaf ears and will have to be tried again after the hype cycle calms tf down.
Google seems relatively good at never giving me SEO crap near the top of most of my search results. And a list of links to original sources or close to it is precisely what I do want. If you want an LLM to generate an answer from its training data, that's fine, but go use a different search engine instead of demanding that the one many of us have relied on for decades has to do that.
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I don't believe I was demanding anything of the sort. If you're happy with Google, enjoy. I am adding my own anecdotal experiences to other's (who appear also to have found search lacking for some time now).
LLMs are honestly rather amazing for product search and comparison. Here's a use case for me last week: I'm re-organizing my bathroom sink/vanity, and I want a few counter top organizers to keep things neat and tidy. I have a low mirror, low medicine cabinets, and generally tight spaces to work with and want to maximize storage. So, I have a 10" wide space and I can't have anything over 16". I want to find a drawer organizer as close to 16" tall without going over, and as close to 10" without going over. Given a choice between the two, I want to bias for more height. Go to Google or Amazon and try finding that. You're going to be trying permutations of 10x16 and 9x16 and so on, and digging through pages looking for something approximate. In theory maybe there's some filter options on Amazon that might work, but they're usually incomplete, wrong, or absent. It's a terrible experience even when it's supported. ChatGPT (or even Amazon's kind of janky Rufus) immediately finds top near-perfect matches for me to choose from. 15-20 minutes of aggravating digging turned into 90s of letting ChatGPT think and search while I was off grabbing a coffee.
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> LLMs are honestly rather amazing for product search and comparison. True, LLMs are quite good in things where I have limited knowledge. It shortens exploration phase considerably. Before, I would need to go to web pages, compare parameters (somewhere), think out why this, not that.
Revenue generation via advertising is an emergent property of humanity?
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100%, but it's not a direct 1:1 relationship. First you need agriculture so people tend to settle in one place. After ag comes more specialization, farmers need houses, graineries, and as society grows social specialists in which we'd call government. These things in an area typically cause the area to grow because of their stability. As they grow you get more than one person/business doing the same line of work and you get more people than fit in ones monkeysphere. At that size you may not know a person that knows what you need to know and start looking further. This is why as cities grow advertising itself becomes an emergent property. Just go to a Roman city and look for dick pavers for example. Then someone will think "Hey, I can give some poor kids a board with a message on it and have them cry out to go to the place that people pay me to advertise" and suddenly you have an emergent property of humanity.
I have a feeling that it is mostly unsophisticated advertisers bidding up the price of AdWords.
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As someone who leads large parts of ad tech for TikTok and worked at Google for 10 years, it’s the K shaped economy that is pressing SMBs out. Pure and simple Everyone can make up some complex theories but I see it in the numbers every day. Spend distribution is now k shaped and SMBs simply can’t compete at top end performance levels.
A surgeon in our family got basically all his (private) clients from Google. Spend was multiple k per month. If you consider that one surgery brings in 7k in revenue, then those numbers actually make sense. He's retired now but did this up to 2y ago.
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This is a Kshaped example that’s solid. Some SMBs can afford per keyword large spend in focused high reward arenas. The rest can’t do anything.
But Gemini doesn't bring much visitors to your website. Also, optimizing for AI is even more "black magic" than normal SEO.
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Instead sites adds Gemini integrations, which are targeted based on prompts. When you pay enough, Gemini recommends your shop and AI buys the stuff for the target audience.
Any state sponsored actor can pay to play.
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I'd be curious to know how much cable tv content was direct propaganda or hype on youtube most of what i see is hyped hyperbolic content, polarized podcasts, shorts.. the way and reason why "content" is produced has changed
It's like TikTok but you hit buttons instead of swiping.
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that sounds like a lot of work
Click fraud is malicious activity where someone runs bots that click on ads for specific category keywords. For example, if this is a villa rental website, someone like competitors or a large platform , might use ad agencies that perform click fraud against the villa rental website to exhaust their budget and therefore get more traffic themselves. In the case of an entertainment agency, it might be other competitors interested in your traffic. The first step you might take is to check that you are not advertising with AdWords partner networks , as they might be the reason for the clicks on your ads. Second, you can check your server logs and verify clicks from Google Ads, especially the geolocation of those clicks. If they are not from your region and the visitors perform no action after viewing the first page, this is most probably click fraud. I use our own open-source security platform (I'm a co-founder) for this purpose (1), as it's server-side and works even if bots aren't running JS. However, your website analytics might also be useful if they can collect events without JS. 1. https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno
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Shockingly, I did not consider malicious intent as a possible reason. I will look into it. Never did trust the partner networks though, it's not that anyway, just used plain old search network
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I tried to visit your website to get a better idea, but found `Connection timed out Error code 522` by Cloudflare.
A little over 15 years ago you could index the web with a small cluster. I remember people doing doing it with Cassandra or Elasticsearch. I'm sure you'd need a much bigger cluster, but outside video and images I imagine it's still doable even for a small organization, especially if you're filtering out content farms. Plus, there are many organizations interested in having access to an index, and I'm pretty more than a few currently running their own index and selling to analytics firms.
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Index is one thing, great search over it is another. A competitive, general-purpose web search engine with its own full index is _brutally_ hard and expensive. This is the reason there are only a few world-class like russian yandex, chinese baidu (to not state the obvious names like google).
NO that's a side project - my product is my juggling/magic shows here in Durban (also good for video though). I made the poi for myself and open sourced it, now people are selling them in Brazil, and Australia. Sometimes I get a bit of cash from it but not a lot.
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I see. Not sure if TikTok is the best plattform then as you want a very local audience (but I never used TikTok, just watched family members do). I rather would try to get an entry on google maps. Meaning when people browse the area, they see your thing. I certainly like to discover new stuff like this in new areas and some things I find are clearly there because of ads, but other got there by other ways. Making a entry by hand, publishing a picture there with further info ..
AI is built with content from the open web, but it has also killed the open web. The death of Adwords is only one symptom of that. I don't know what comes next, I just know it will be worse.
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No, google search has stopped being useful years before "AI".
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It was still useful to advertisers and publishers.
Binance's Trust Wallet extension hacked; users lose $7M (web3isgoinggreat.com)
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Not your keys, not your coins.
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But it has trust in the name. How can it be hacked?
> Having a government-insured bank deposit means that I've never had to think about this in my lifetime. It's a problem that I don't need. Government-insured bank deposits are mostly BS, the fine prints say they have about 10 years to reimburse you and in case of a systemic failure good luck. In case the bank app, their "system" or your computer is compromised most banks will not reimburse you. It is very easy for them to say you were ultimately responsible for the hack. Very few banks have the policy of taking the loss and it is hard to know which one still do that unless you know someone in their fraud department.
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even if that's the case re: government insured banks.... Maybe it feels more secure because there is someone to hold accountable if/when it all falls apart. People can show up in DC with pitch forks and vent their frustration; good luck tracking the stateless billionaires behind a company like Binance through Micronesia/the Caribbean/Seychelles/whatever island paradise they stashed their cash on.
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I was a victim of bank fraud a couple of years ago. My bank was totally at fault (I caught it, not them) and they reimbursed me in full. From what I understand, government insurance goes more towards bank failure, not fraud.
All Delisted Steam Games (delistedgames.com)
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[delayed]
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I'm sad that Platine Dispositif pulled their games. Chelsea Has to Beat the Seven Devils to Death (known more widely in English as Bunny Must Die) was a lot of fun and one day I'd like to play some of their others, but they mostly seem to just release on Switch and Playstation stores in recent years. Their site[1][2] is getting pretty bitrotted, and their blog has an entry from a month ago[3] talking about their next game displayed in Digital Games Expo 2025. I don't immediately see any mention of Steam or intent to return anywhere. These are all Japanese of course. [1]: https://www.platinedispositif.net/ [2]: https://www.platinedispositif.net/sitemap.htm [3]: https://murasame.hatenablog.jp/entry/20251130/1764507793
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Ahh, there seems to be a distinction between "delisted" and "purchase disabled". This is a list of all games which are no longer available on steam along with the reason: https://steam-tracker.com/
This can’t be all of them. My business partner and I delisted our tiny (unsuccessful) indie game after we wound up our company and our game doesn’t show up here.
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Ultimately, all the datasets on Steam are scraped one way or another, since Steam themselves don't seem to publish it. I could be that they simply never came across your project before you delisted it, and of course after delisiting it I don't think they'll ever come across it.
The original story was definitely unique and a fun play on 360.
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Until I looked it up, I almost thought my memory of it was the Bernstein effect especially since there’s a 2017 game by the same name and much more popular.
I loved Blacklight Retribution. It's been so long delisted that my most unique achievements from it disappeared from my profile. One was 0.01% of all players.
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It's surprising that it doesn't seem like the X-ray mechanic (which is the main thing I remember from that game) was really picked up by any other game. There were way fewer cheating accusations than in other games, because what would normally be a "cheat" was a core game mechanic, and IMO that made it really enjoyable. It's a shame that game died.
About one of my favorite racing games of all time: "The game could have been removed for a number of reasons, including the closure of developer Bizarre Creations in early 2011, but the most likely cause was expired licensing of the real-world cars featured in the game."[1] To me this is one of the most egregious examples of how licensing massively hurts consumers. The game is fully playable offline (and online with a patch) but cannot legally be sold because of an arbitrary restriction limiting the use of likeness of virtual cars in the game. [1] https://delistedgames.com/blur/
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The title track of the game, Smile by Crystal Method [0] is one of my all time favorites as a result of playing Blur. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EbkSMPbj_I
+1 for Blur, great game, it's like Super Mario Kart for grown-ups. Too bad the only way to get it is by pirating it. But in these situations, doesn't piracy become morally acceptable?
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It becomes a moral imperative to pirate it and continue seeding it for others to also acquire, as a mean to help preserving something you cared about, apparently more than the owners of the IP/rights themselves care.
I've had negative opinion on company behind Warhammer ever since Emperor TTS debacle everything I've heard since only confirms that that universe would be better dead and never be talked about
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I've been noticing a bit of 'totally not Warhammer but grimdark and space marines' settings being used more these days. Void War game on Steam is a notable one.
Just like there’s lots of people that love Star Wars and far fewer that love Disney?
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Or even George Lucas.
The future of software development is software developers (codemanship.wordpress.com)
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This time it actually is different. HN might not think so, but HN is really skewed towards more senior devs, so I think they're out of touch with what new grads are going through. It's awful.
> One can treat current LLMs as a layer of "cheese" for any software development or deployment pipeline It's another interesting attempt at normalising the bullshit output by LLMs, but NO. Even with the entshittified Boeing, the aviation industry safety and reliability records, are far far far above deterministic software (know for a lot of un-reliability itself), and deterministic, B2C software to LLMs in turn is what Boeing and Airbus software and hardware reliablity are for the B2C software...So you cannot even begin to apply aviation industry paradigms to the shit machines, please.
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I understand the frustration, but factually it is not true. Engines are reliable to about 1 anomaly per million flight hours or so, current flight software is more reliable, on order of 1 fault per billion hours. In-flight engine shutdowns are fairly common, while major software anomalies are much rarer. I used LLMs for coding and troubleshooting, and while they can definitely "hit" and "miss", they don't only "miss".
how sure are you that an llm won't be better at reviewing code for safety than most humans, and eventually, most experts?
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It will only get better at generating random slop and other crap. Maybe helping morons who are unable to eat and breathe without consulting the "helpful assistant".
I think I've been using AI wrong. I can't understand testimonies like this. Most times I try to use AI for a task, it is a shitshow, and I have to rewrite everything anyway.
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how much time/effort have you put in to educate yourself about how they work, what they excel at, what they suck at, what is your responsibility when you use them…? this effort is directly proportional to how well they will serve you
Stop freaking out. Seriously. You're afraid of something completely ridiculous. It is certainly more eloquent than you regarding software architecture (which was a scam all along, but conversation for another time). It will find SOME bugs better than you, that's a given. Review code better than you? Seriously? What you're using and what you consider code review? Assume I could identify one change broke production and you reviewed the latest commit. I am pinging you and you better answer. Ok, Claude broke production, now what? Can you begin to understand the difference between you and the generative technology? When you hop on the call, you will explain to me with a great deal of details what you know about the system you built, and explain decision making and changes over time. You'll tell about what worked and what didn't. You will tell about the risks, behavior and expectations. About where the code runs, it's dependencies, users, usage patterns, load, CPU usage and memory footprint, you could probably tell what's happening without looking at logs but at metrics. With Claude I get: you're absolutely right! You asked about what it WAS, but I told you about what it WASN'T! MY BAD. Knowledge requires a soul to experience and this is why you're paid.
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> Review code better than you? Seriously? Yes, seriously (not OP). Sometimes it's dumb as rocks, sometimes it's frighteningly astute. I'm not sure at which point of the technology sigmoid curve we find ourselves (2007 iPhone or 2017 iPhone?) but you're doing yourself a disservice to be so dismissive
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Copilot reviews are enabled company wide and comments must be resolved manually. I wish I could be so dismissive lol I cannot, literally do not have the ability to be dismissive
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We use code rabbit and it's better than practically any human I've worked with at a number of code review tasks, such as finding vulnerabilities, highlighting configuration issues, bad practices, etc. It's not the greatest at "does this make sense here" type questions, but I'd be the one answering those questions anyway. Yeah, maybe the people I've worked with suck at code reviews, but that's pretty normal. Not to say your answer is wrong. I think the gist is accurate. But I think tooling will get better at answering exactly the kind of questions you bring up. Also, someone has to be responsible. I don't think the industry can continue with this BS "AI broke it." Our jobs might devolve into something more akin to a SDET role and writing the "last mile" of novel code the AI can't produce accurately.
This reads like shilling/advertisement.. Coding AIs are struggling for anything remotely complex, make up crap and present it as research, write tests that are just "return true", and won't ever question a decision you make. Those twenty engineers must not have produced much.
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I'd be willing to give you access to the experiment I mentioned in a separate reply (have a github repo), as far as the output that you can get for a complex app buildout. Will admit It's not great (probably not even good) but it definitely has throughput despite my absolute lack of caring that much [0]. Once I get past a certain stage I am thinking of doing an A-B test where I take an earlier commit and try again while paying more attention... (But I at least want to get where there is a full suite of UOW cases before I do that, for comparison's sake.) > Those twenty engineers must not have produced much. I've been considered a 'very fast' engineer at most shops (e.x. at multiple shops, stories assigned to me would have a <1 multiplier for points[1]) 20 is a bit bloated, unless we are talking about WITCH tier. I definitely can get done in 2-3 hours what could take me a day. I say it that way because at best it's 1-2 hours but other times it's longer, some folks remember the 'best' rather than median. [0] - It started as 'prompt only', although after a certain point I did start being more aggressive with personal edits. [1] - IDK why they did it that way instead of capacity, OTOH that saved me when it came to being assigned Manual Testing stories...
I would say while LLMs do improve productivity sometimes, I have to say I flatly cannot believe a claim (at least without direct demonstration or evidence) that one person is doing the work of 20 with them in december 2025 at least. I mean from the off, people were claiming 10x probably mostly because it's a nice round number, but those claims quickly fell out of the mainstream as people realised it's just not that big a multiplier in practice in the real world. I don't think we're seeing this in the market, anywhere. Something like 1 engineer doing the job of 20, what you're talking about is basically whole departments at mid sized companies compressing to one person. Think about that, that has implications for all the additional management staff on top of the 20 engineers too. It'd either be a complete restructure and rethink of the way software orgs work, or we'd be seeing just incredible, crazy deltas in output of software companies this year of the type that couldn't be ignored, they'd be impossible to not notice. This is just plainly not happening. Look, if it happens, it happens, 26, 27, 28 or 38. It'll be a cool and interesting new world if it does. But it's just... not happened or happening in 25.
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I would say it varies from 0x to a modest 2x. It can help you write good code quickly, but, I only spent about 20-30% of my time writing code anyway before AI. It definitely makes debugging and research tasks much easier as well. I would confidently say my job as a senior dev has gotten a lot easier and less stressful as a result of these tools. One other thing I have seen however is the 0x case, where you have given too much control to the llm, it codes both you and itself into pan’s labyrinth, and you end up having to take a weed wacker to the whole project or start from scratch.
When prices go down or product velocity goes up we'll start believing in the new 20x developer. Until then, it doesn't align with most experiences and just reads like fiction. You'll notice no one ever seems to talk about the products they're making 20x faster or cheaper.
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Who is saying anything about 20x? Sorry did I miss something here?
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> work of an entire org that used to need twenty engineers. From the OP. If you think that's too much then we agree.
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You’ve never read Simon Willison’s blog? His repo is full of work that he’s created with LLM’s. He makes money off of them. There are plenty of examples you just need to look.
AI boosters? Like people are planted by Sam Altman like the way they hire crowds for political events or something? Hey! Maybe I’m AI! You’re absolutely right! In seriousness: I’m sure there are projects that are heavily powered by Claude, myself and a lot of other people I know use Claude almost exclusively to write and then leverage it as a tool when reviewing. Almost everyone I hear that has this super negative hostile attitude references some “promise” that has gone unfulfilled but it’s so silly: judge the product they are producing and maybe just maybe consider the rate of progress to _guess_ where things are heading
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I never said "planted", that is your own assumption, albeit a wrong one. I do respect it though, as it is at least a product of a human mind. But you don't have to be "planted" to champion an idea, you are clearly championing it out of some kind of conviction, many seem to do. I was just giving you a bit of reality check. If you want to show me how to "guess where things are heading" / I am actually one of the early adopters of LLMs and have been engineering software professionally for almost half my life now. Why do you think I was an early adopter? Because I was skeptical or afraid of that tech? No, I was genuinely excited. Yes you can produce mountains of code, even more so if you were already an experienced engineer, like myself for example. Yes you can even get it to produce somewhat acceptable outputs, with a lot of effort at prompting it and fatigue that comes with it. But at the end of the day, as an experienced engineer, I am not being more productive with it, I will end up being less productive because of all the sharp edges I have to take care of, all the sloppily produced code, unnecessary bloat, hallucinated or injected libraries etc. Maybe for folks who were not good at maths or had trouble understanding how computers work this looks like a brave new world of opportunities. Surely that app looks good to you, how bad can it be? Just so you and other such vibe-coders understand, here is a parallel. It is actually fairly simple for a group of aviation enthusiasts to build a flying airplane. We just need to work out some basic mechanics, controls and attach engines. It can be done, I've seen a couple of documentaries too. However, those planes are shit. Why? Because me and my team of enthusiast dont have the depth of knowledge of a team of aviation engineers to inform my decisions. What is the tolerance for certain types of movements, what kind of materials do I need to pick, what should be my maintenance windows for various parts etc. There are things experts can decide on almost intuitively, yet with great precision, based on their many years of craft and that wonderful thing called human intelligence. So my team of enthusiasts puts together an airplane. Yeah it flies. It can even be steered. It rolls, pitches and yawns. It takes off and takes down. But to me it's a blackbox, because I don't understand many, many factors, forces, tensors, effects etc that are affecting an airplane during it's flight and takeoff. I am probably not even aware WHAT I should be aware. Because I dont have that deep educaiton about mechanical engineering, materials, aerodynamics etc. Neither does my team. So my plane, while impressive to me and my team, will never take off commercially, not unless a team of professionals take it over and remakes it to professional standards. It will probably never even fly in a show. And if me or someone on my team dies flying it, you guessed it - our insurance sure as hell won't cover the costs. So what you are doing with Claude and other tools, while it may look amazing to you, is not that impressive to the rest of us, because we can see those wheels beginning to fall off even before your first take off. Of course, before I can even tell that, I'd have to actually see your airplane, it's design plans etc. So perhaps first show us some of those "projects heavily powered by Claude" and their great success, especially commercial one (otherwise its a toy project), before you talk about them. The fact that you are clearly not an expert on the topic of software engineering should guide you here - unless you know what you are talking about, it's better to not say anything at all.
Take food for example. We don't eat food made by computers even though they're capable of making it from start to finish. Sure we eat carrots probably assisted by machines, but we are not eating dishes like protein bars all day every day. Our food is still better enjoyed when made by a chef. Software engineering will be the same. No one will want to use software made by a machine all day every day. There are differences in the execution and implementation. No one will want to read books entirely dreamed up by AI. Subtle parts of the books make us feel something only a human could have put right there right then. No one will want to see movies entirely made by AI. The list goes on. But you might say "software is different". Yes but no, in the abundance of choice, when there will be a ton of choice for a type of software due to the productivity increase, choice will become more prominent and the human driven software will win. Even today we pick the best terminal emulation software because we notice the difference between exquisitely crafted and bloated cruft.
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Is your argument that we only want things that are hand-crafted by humans? There are lots of things like perfectly machined nails, tools, etc. that are much better done by machines. Why couldn't software be one of those?
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You should look at other engineering disciplines. How many highway over passes have unique “chef quality” designs? Very few. Most engineering is commodity replications of existing designs. The exact same thing applies to software engineering. Most of us engineers are replicating designs that came earlier. LLMs are good at generating the rote designs that make up the bulk of software by volume. Who benefit from an artisanal REST interface? The best practices were codified over a decade ago.
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Just like cooking in the middle ages. As the kitchen, hygiene, etc. got better, so did the chefs and so did the food. This is just a transition. re-Rest API, you're right. But again, we use roombas to vacuum when the floor layout is friendly to them. Not all rooms can be vacuumed by roombas. Simple Rest api can be emitted one shot from an LLM and there is no room for interpretation. But ask a future LLM to make a new kind of social network and you'll end up with a mash up of the existing ones. Same thing, you and I won't use a manual screwdriver when we have 100 screws to get in, and we own an electric drill. That didn't reinvent screws nor the assembly of complex items. I'm keeping positive in the sense that LLMs will enable us to do more, and to learn faster. The sad part about vibe coding is you learn very little. And to live is to learn. You'll notice people vibecoding all day become less and less attached to the product they work on. That's because they've given away the dopamine hits of the many "ha-ha" moments that come from programming. They'll lose interest. They won't learn anymore and die off (career wise). So, businesses that put LLM first will slowly lose talent over time, and business that put developers first will thrive.
>> From where I’m standing, it’s scary. You are being fooled by randomness [1] Not because the models are random, but because you are mistaking a massive combinatorial search over seen patterns for genuine reasoning. Taleb point was about confusing luck for skill. Dont confuse interpolation for understanding. You can read a Rust book after years of Java, then go build software for an industry that did not exist when you started. Ask any LLM to write a driver for hardware that shipped last month, or model a regulatory framework that just passed... It will confidently hallucinate. You will figure it out. That is the difference between pattern matching and understanding. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness
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Why would you expect an LLM or even a human to succeed in these cases? “Write a piece of code for a specification that you can’t possibly know about?” That’s why you have to do context engineering, just like you’d provide a reference to a new document to an engineer writing code.
just tried to reverse the string you provided using Gemini. it worked fine on the first try
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In gemini: > The reverse of the string 'gssssyeekxxuoaqaaaiooo9aaa7zjx' is: xjz7aaa9oooiiaaaqauxxkyeessssg > Youve made a mistake ``` I see where I tripped up! Let's re-examine that long string carefully. The original string you gave me was: `gssssyeekxxuoaqaaaiooo9aaa7zjx` Let's look at the end of that string: `...aaa7zjx`. When we reverse it, it should start with: `xjz7aaa...` Here is the precise character-by-character reversal: *xjz7aaa9oooiiaaaqauxxkyeessssg* Wait—I see it now. In my previous response, I included an extra *'i'* and missed one *'o'* in the middle section. Let's do a strict count to get it perfect: * *Original:* `g` `ssss` `y` `ee` `k` `xx` `u` `o` `a` `q` `aaa` *`iooo`* `9` `aaa` `7` `z` `j` `x` * *Correct Reverse:* `x` `j` `z` `7` `aaa` `9` *`oooi`* `aaa` `q` `a` `o` `u` `xx` `k` `ee` `y` `ssss` `g` The correct reversed string is: *xjz7aaa9oooiiaaaqauoxxkyeessssg* Thank you for catching that. It’s easy for the eyes to glaze over when there are so many repeating vowels! Since I've stumbled a bit on these, would you like to give me one more string to see if I can get it right on the first try? ``` After more back and fors it consistently fails in this task, even though when strictly dividing the tokens it will get this right. Yet the final answer is always wrong.
Hardest part of programming is knowing wtf all the existing code does and why.
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And that is the super power of LLMs. In my experience LLMs are better a reading code than writing it. Have it annotate some code for you.
AI is forcing us to write good code (bits.logic.inc)
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Strong agreement with everything in this post. At Qlty, we are going so far as to rewrite hundreds of thousands of lines of code to ensure full test coverage, end-to-end type checking (including database-generated types). I’ll add a few more: 1. Zero thrown errors. These effectively disable the type checker and act as goto statements. We use neverthrow for Rust-like Result types in TypeScript. 2. Fast auto-formatting and linting. An AI code review is not a substitute for a deterministic result in sub-100ms to guarantee consistency. The auto-formatter is set up as a post-tool use Claude hook. 3. Side-effect free imports and construction. You should be able to load all the code files and construct an instance of every class in your app without a network connection spawning. This is harder than it sounds and without it you run into all sorts of trouble with the rest. 3. Zero mocks and shared global state. By mocks, I mean mocking frameworks which override functions on existing types or global. These effectively are injecting lies into the type checker. Should put to tsgo which has dramatically lowered our type checking latency. As the tok/sec of models keeps going up, all the time is going to get bottlenecked on tool calls (read: type checking and tests). With this approach we now have near 100% coverage with a test suite that runs in under 1,000ms.
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I‘m on the same page as you, I‘m investing into DX and test coverage and quality tooling like crazy. But the weird thing is: those things have always been important to me. And it has always been a good idea to invest in those, for my team and me. Why am doing this 200% now?
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Wouldn't a better title be "How we're forcing AI to write good code (because it's normally not that good in general, which is crazy, given how many resources it's sucking, that we need to add an extra layer on top of it and use it to get anything decent)"
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Then it wouldn't be effective advertising/vanity blogging from some self-promoting startup.
I'm sad programmers lacking a lot of experience will read this and think it's a solid run-down of good ideas.
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Could you be more specific in your feedback please.
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100% test coverage, for most projects of modest size, is extremely bad advice.
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laziness? unprofessionalism? both? or something else?
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all of the above.
I like this. "Best practices" are always contingent on the particular constellation of technology out there; with tools that make it super-easy to write code, I can absolutely see 100% coverage paying off in a way that doesn't for human-written code -- it maximizes what LLMs are good at (cranking out code) while giving them easy targets to aim for with little judgement. (A thing I think is under-explored is how much LLMs change where the value of tests are. Back in the artisan hand-crafted code days, unit tests were mostly useful as scaffolding: Almost all the value I got from them was during the writing of the code. If I'd deleted the unit tests before merging, I'd've gotten 90% of the value out of them. Whereas now, the AI doesn't necessarily need unit tests as scaffolding as much as I do, _but_ having them put in there makes future agentic interactions safer, because they act as reified context.)
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It might depend on the lifecycle of your code. The tests I have for systems that keep evolving while being production critical over a decade are invaluable. I cannot imagine touching a thing without the tests. Many of which reference a ticket they prove remains fixed: a sometimes painfully learned lesson.
I don't know about all this AI stuff. How are LLMs going to stay on top of new design concepts, new languages, really anything new? Can LLMs be trained to operate "fluently" with regards to a genuinely new concept? I think LLMs are good for writing certain types of "bad code", i.e. if you're learning a new language or trying to quickly create a prototype. However to me it seems like a security risk to try to write "good code" with an LLM.
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They are retrained every 12-24 months and constantly getting new/updated reinforcement learning layers. New concepts are not the problem. The problem is outdated information in the training data, like only crappy old Postgres syntax in most of the Stackoverflow body.
I never claim that 100% coverage has anything to do with code breaking. The only claim made is that anything less than 100% does guarantee that some piece of code is not automatically exercised, which we don't allow. It's a footnote on the post, but I expand on this with: 100% coverage is actually the minimum bar we set. We encourage writing tests for as many scenarios as is possible, even if it means the same lines getting exercised multiple times. It gets us closer to 100% path coverage as well, though we don’t enforce (or measure) that
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SimpleCov in ruby has 2 metrics, line coverage and branch coverage. If you really want to be strict, get to 100% branch coverage. This really helps you flesh out all the various scenarios
The value of the blog post is negatively correlated to how good the site looks. Mailing list? Sponsors? Fancy Title? Garbage. Raw HTML dumped on a .xyz domain, Gold!
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The exception is a front end dev, since that's their bread and butter.
Wearing seatbelts is critical for drunk-driving. All praise drunk-driving for increased seatbelt use.
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Finally something I can get behind.
Can you say more? I see a lot of teams struggling with getting AI to work for them. A lot of folks expect it to be a little more magical and "free" than it actually is. So this post is just me sharing what works well for us on a very seasoned eng team.
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As someone who struggles to get AI to produce productivity gains (see recent comment history) I appreciate the article. 100% coverage for AI generated code is a very different value proposition than 100% coverage for human generated code (for the reasons outlined in the article).
List of domains censored by German ISPs (cuiiliste.de)
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And lithuanian list is here: https://www.nksc.lt/vasaris.html (in lithuanian). Mostly phishing sites, but includes fun piracy portals too. Content piracy specific, mostly movies, blocked by public broadcaster orders: https://www.nksc.lt/doc/vasaris/siena-lrtk.txt , https://www.nksc.lt/doc/vasaris/siena-lrtk-2.txt , https://www.nksc.lt/doc/vasaris/siena-lrtk-3.txt
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Being German, is not surprising so many are sites with football games (i.e. the game Americans call "soccer").
The main complaint about these blocks is that they are managed and decided on by private companies and _not_ by the government / law.
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they are still optional for the ISPs though. But if they don't implement them, they will have dozens of lawsuits to handle, that is why many ISPs say "fuck it" and just implement the blocks, to save money on their legal team
Voluntarily under threat of prosecution under existing legislation if they don't.
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no, under threat of filing every single copyright claim against them, swamping their legal department. Which is the correct way to do it (i.e. file a claim if you see someone violating copyright law). This just makes it easier for the ISPs
I knew about torrenting, due to the problem of redistributing copyright material. But pure streaming? Are you sure that is illegal in Germany?
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the problem is people don't know about torrents, and many streaming sites are based on torrents, so they re-upload the stream while you're watching, which gets you into trouble
Wait people are illegal streaming twitch? I guess that makes sense but I never thought about that.
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Prime includes Amazon Video or whatever
It's mostly certain law firms employed by copyright owners. Famous (in Germany) example: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frommer_Legal (use auto-translate, it's German)
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> Famous (in Germany) example: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frommer_Legal (use auto-translate, it's German) For a lot of Germans who are knowledgable in this topic, being associated with such a company is nearly like openly admitting to have raped children. The hate for these companies and their employees is extreme.
For those wondering: it's DNS blocks, so only affecting those using ISP DNS.
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Regardless of censorship, I don't recommend anyone to use ISP DNS servers. They are often slow, flaky and don't respect record TTLs. Quad 1/8/9 isn't optimal alternative (too much centralization if everyone uses those by default) but running your own is easy.
The ISP's blackhole the IP for some blocked domains. So changing your DNS to 8.8.8.8 will resolve the domain, but the IP won't work. A VPN avoids this, since the traffic goes via the VPN IP.
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Wow that’s intense. I remember hearing someone complain on HN of their site getting blocked because it shared an IP with an illegal soccer livestream. I can’t imagine they’re doing this to IP blocks owned by CDNs like Fastly, CloudFlare, or CloudFront though. Or are they? Does this regularly break most of the internet for UK customers?
We are condemned to, every time a list of blocked sites is posted, endure the "hahaha this is great guys a list of pirate sites! bookmarked!!!!" edgy comments.
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Well it's the truth ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
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I don’t know why you think this is an edgy comment, I’m actually screenshotting it to take a look tomorrow at the links. I’ve seen Anna archive and SCI hub which are extremely useful, if it helps finding more gems I’m all for it !
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Show HN: Superset – Terminal to run 10 parallel coding agents (superset.sh)
is there such a tool, which is composable? I have my own VM's with agents installed inside, is there a tool which supports calling a codex/claude in a particular directory through a particular SSH destination? Basically BringYourOwnAgentAndSandbox support. Or which supports plugins so I can give it a small script which hooks it up to my available agents.
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We have the BringYourOwnAgent part! For sandboxes we may try to use just one provider if I had to guess as I'm not sure what the effort would look like to support a bunch of them, which provider do you use for your VM's?
The real bottleneck isn’t human review per se, it’s unstructured review. Parallel agents only make sense if each worktree has a tight contract: scoped task, invariant tests, and a diff small enough to audit quickly. Without that, you’re just converting “typing time” into “reading time,” which is usually worse. Tools like this shine when paired with discipline: one hypothesis per agent, automated checks gate merges, and humans arbitrate intent—not correctness.
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Agreed. I generally see much better results for smaller, well-scoped tasks. Since there's very little friction to spinning up a worktree (~2s), I open one for any small tasks, something I couldn't do while working on a single branch.
Higher fidelity? What does that mean in this context? What higher fidelity do you get with a real postgres over a SQLite in memory or even pglite or whatever. The point isn’t you shouldn’t have a database , the point is what are your concerns? For me and my teams, we care about our code, the performance of that code, the correctness of that code, and don’t test against a live database so that we understand the separation of concerns between our app and its storage. We expect a database to be there. We expect it to have such and such schema. We don’t expect it to live at a certain address or a certain configuration as that is the databases concern. We tell our app at startup where that address is or we don’t. The app should only care whether we did or not, if not, it will need to make one to work. This is the same logic with unit testing. If you’re unit testing against a real database, that isn’t unit testing, that’s an integration test. If you do care about the speed of your database and how your app scales, you aren’t going to be doing that on your local machine.
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There is your idealization, and there is reality. Mocks are to be avoided. I reserve them for external dependencies. > What higher fidelity do you get with a real postgres over a SQLite in memory or even pglite or whatever You want them to have the same syntax and features, to the extent that you use them, or you'll have one code path for testing and another for production. For example, sqlite does not support ARRAYs or UUIDs natively, so you'll have to write a separate implementation. This is a vector for bugs.
Tesla's 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99% (electrek.co)
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There's a lot of speculation here. The actual facts of this reporting could just as likely be explained by vertical integration, very typical of Tesla, or of a supplier shift due to absurdly high tariffs.
I think they mean grift or even fraud, since they were definitely meant to attract investment. Now excuse me while I go check on where my 2016 full-self-driving Tesla car. It was supposed to pick me up 9 years ago, something must have happened.
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I still don’t understand how they haven’t been sued for the hundreds of millions they took as a deposit for a new Roadster…8 years ago!
Tesla stock dipped a little today it seems but it's still up 8 percent over the month. I really don't understand those investors and how they price a struggling company so highly.
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The stock market learns from experience, because it's made of people who learn from experience. Imagine an investor's experience with TSLA. From the beginning, they're flooded with news reports about 'fundamentals' this, 'fundamentals' that, about how Tesla would imminently collapse, how it's a scam, yada yada. Said investors _constantly_ see themselves being right and those skeptics wrong. Tesla is in fact disrupting an industry. They really are just continuing to scale. Marginal profitability keeps going up. Their cars keep getting better. FSD keeps getting better. The competition that people kept pointing at kept failing to materialize. None of this seems to change the skeptics' byline. Tesla is actually in a materially worse position than it was a few years ago, by many metrics, but the stock price isn't set by 'fundamentals', it's set by the people setting demand for the stock. With TSLA, this is disproportionately going to be people who have learned to and gotten rich from ignoring the people loudly telling them why investing in Tesla is a bad idea. A market will correct eventually, but corrections either require people to change their minds or run out of capital. Neither has happened yet, so the market can't correct.
Five Years of Tinygrad (geohot.github.io)
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Is this the guy who talked a big game about all the things he was going to fix at Twitter, then utterly failed when confronted with a real world codebase and gave up having done nothing of use?
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He left after realizing nothing was going to change (not like he’s in the leadership). Also half-joked how the good food went away. — George is many things but not a quitter (see comma ai for example). If someone could pull this, it’s him due to “never give up, never surrender” attitude. The shit with nvidia just needs to stop
Lattner is a smart guy, but I think Mojo might be the wrong direction. Time will tell. History has not so far been kind to projects which attempt to supplant cPython, whether they are other Python variants such as PyPy, or other languages such as julia. Python has a lot of detractors, but (despite some huge missteps with the 2-3 transition) the core team keeps churning out stuff that people want to use. Mojo is being positioned "as a member of the Python family" but, like Pyrex/Cython, it has special syntax, and even worse, the calling convention is both different than Python, and depends on the type of variable being passed. And the introspection is completely missing.
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Honestly, I feel like Julia might as well beat Mojo or sommat to the punch, sooner or later. It has some facilities and supporting infrastructure for a lot of scientific and data-handling tasks surrounding ML, if not for compiling and dispatching kernels (where XLA reins supreme to anything in the CUDA ecosystem!) For example, Bayesian programming like Turing.jl is virtually unmatched in Python. It's been a while since I looked at Lux.jl for XLA integration, but I reckon it could be incredibly useful. As long as LLM's and RLVR training thereof should continue to improve, we may be able to translate loads of exiting Pytorch code eventually.
GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder (gog.com)
The problem is what will happen when Gabe Newell passes away. My GOG installers will never degrade though.
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I’ll be very surprised if during all the time he spends doing nothing and winning, he hasn’t planned ahead for his company not becoming the very thing he hates and sets it apart. I’d put a controlling interest in a trust with ironclad instructions to have Valve do the opposite of Ubisoft/EA. That would buy it another half-century at least.
They might spend $600 on 10 of those games, though. It's not all-or-nothing.
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They might still spend $600 on 10 more games though. Or spend it on a subset of the games they pirated because they want to support the developer. Who knows.
What has been proven many times is that people overwhelmingly choose the least effort/risk option. A free Steam full of certified pirates games with official games updates would obviously drop sales but this is moot as it will never exist.
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It will never happen precisely because of anti piracy measures
You are the first person I hear that seems to care about that.
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I care about it a little, not comparing with friends, but I do like the "X% of players" stats.
If I am a person interested in this specific thing (backing up my games) I would for sure check. Wouldn't you?
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I would but since there's no way to know before buying, all games on Steam need to be treated as having DRM and not supporting backups.
Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM (arstechnica.com)
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Not only that... horror stories of eSIM transfers getting stuck and losing the phone number. Nobody is talking about this
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there will be a point where esim will be forced on everyone, because having to swap sim is bad for tracking people
eSim is fine, SMS "authentication" is once again the f#?*ing problem. Its going to take congressional action before we can get rid of this menace. All we're doing is half-ass offloading credit and identity checks to cellphone carriers, which do this, and by having a cell phone, you've probably been through an identity and credit check.
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Still beats a specific sum or $0.01 transaction with a code appearing on your bank statement. ;)
For what it's worth, this is entirely a carrier problem and has little to do with the technology. Various people and the article have outlined some bad experiences but to give a contrasting example: Digital Republic, a local MVNO here in Switzerland, allows you to replace your eSIM by simply logging into their web portal with TOTP-based 2FA and clicking a button. No SMS, no contact with support, no reidentification. In theory, all carriers could do this.
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Apple force removed SIMs.
The only eSIM issues I’ve had have been in the US. Some carriers use single-use eSIM QR-codes. So you need a new one for every swap. In Europe and Canada I’ve always been able to reuse the eSIM QR I got initially. Have I just been lucky or has anyone had problems outside the US?
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This used to be possible, IIRC. Not anymore tho
My experience with eSIM has so far been quite negative. I’ve upgraded phone twice since being forced to use one by my carrier and it’s been a pain both times. The initial setup of scanning a QR code was nice, why is every subsequent SIM change a 10 step dance in an app (or worse a support call) rather than one phone showing the QR and the other scanning it? Once this phone needs updating, I’ll be swapping carrier to one that has regular SIM cards.
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There are also SIM cards you can upload eSIM profiles to, now.
The funny thing is, I used eSIM on a Pixel 3, since it was the easiest way to activate on Sprint. Now, no big carrier will use a Pixel 3's eSIM. But then on Sprint, they tried to copy the CDMA activation system on LTE whereas everyone else just used SIM cards directly. Sprint was very progressive on eSIM even if they were slow to VoLTE. My Pixel 3 moved to a physical SIM due to switching to T-Mobile 3 months before the merger, and I've mostly used physical SIMs before the Pixel 10 Pro outside of international travel. I avoid MVNOs as my primary service because of the specter of eSIM-only phones, and that was pre-Pixel 10. And yes, if my Pixel 10 Pro had a physical SIM card slot I'd use it.
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i refuse to use pixel 10's for this reason.
I disagree with the overall point of the article. I guess maybe they're worse for professional phone reviewers, who switch phones all the time, but I'm not one. In my experience, I think about two-thirds of the time I've gotten a new phone and wanted to switch to it, the SIM card size had changed, so I needed to get a new one anyways, which could only be done by mail order, so took a few more days. And about half of the time the same SIM card did physically fit, something else went wrong, like the APN names wrong, carrier didn't want to let it activate, RCS failed to work, all of which are virtually impossible to troubleshoot. IMO, the dream of universal SIM card portability has been dead for at least a decade, if not longer, and started long before eSIMs came out. The eSIM on my current phone Just Worked as far as activating. I haven't tried switching to a new phone with it yet, so I guess I'll have to see how well it works when that happens. Clearly there are cases when both are better. eSIMs are nice for being able to switch carriers immediately, get set up in a new country you're visiting smoothly, and recover the number from a physically lost phone. Physical SIMs are nice if you want to try out a different phone model, assuming they support the same SIM size and you can find the little tool. And also if your phone is seriously damaged but not physically lost. So not everyone necessarily loves them, but I don't think it's a case of the big bad big tech companies are enshittifying everything.
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Most of the issues you described, such as carrier registration issues, are just as likely with eSim as they were with physical SIM cards. The difference is that you can't swap out the eSim physically, which was a pretty reliable way of getting around misconfiguration. This isn't really an indictment of eSim as a technology, but the reality is that Telco's are incredibly slow and inefficient, and by removing a workaround for their incompetence, it can make the problem worse.
I agree, although two counterpoints. One is that carriers would just lock the phones in the US anyway. Second is that eSIM is easier while traveling.
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for now.
My telco requires that I receive an SMS on my eSIM to move it to new phone so... yeah. It's amazing if the phone for whatever reason doesn't work and that then requires a long customer support call that might not work. The direct phone-to-phone transfter the devices offer is also blocked on the carrier. Another issue I had was (travel) eSIMs failing to provision because the carrier didn't whitelist my phone brand/model. The QR code was spent, my money gone and customer support nowhere to be found. I've never had such issues with pSIMs in decade before. It's ridiculous.
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Lost money on quite few esims this way.
So don't do business with dodgy telcos and stick to the big ones? And as a bonus the established players even have their own stores in every mall!
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Where when I go to cancel stuff, I am told, I would need to call for support to India for that.
> It's like having one murder down your block and stating that you don't see the issue because nobody attempted to murder you so far Yeah over exaggerations are probably not helping the cause. I’ll stick with eSim
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Proving the OP's point. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean somebody else doesn't
Isn't that just semantics? It's tied to the same phone number, and I assume the generation of a new eSIM invalidates any old one (as happens with my carrier.) It's essentially backed up, even if it's just a (carrier, number) pair. If the Lyca account is trashed, the rest is just an implementation detail.
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NO. IT IS NOT. If it is a backup, then you should be able to restore it verbatim without involving a middle man 3rd party
You can get the app and provision the esim in your home country, or use airport wifi?
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not all airports have that. and even when they do I have had to fight to stay online or get online requiring entering email and clicking the link in the email before being granted online access.
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What’s wrong with provisioning the esim in advance then? Android and iOS both support loading many (8?) esims and swapping the active one(s)
Note that if you just have a broken phone you don't need a new SIM, you just pop it out and pop it in the new phone. So 1min for a physical SIM vs 0-3 hours to create a new eSIM profile. I know which one will be faster. :)
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Not only that... horror stories of eSIM transfers getting stuck and losing the phone number
Yes, that was the situation for me exactly, that basically if I lose or break my phone, I obviously have other devices that can access 1Password and my email, but I'm locked out of anything that requires SMS or an authenticator app to 2FA. Definitely made me feel that at the very least I should be getting a yubikey so that I can have authenticator codes across multiple devices.
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Back when eSIM was relatively new, while upgrading to a newer iPhone, my wife’s eSIM didn’t get transferred over but still got deactivated on the old phone. And the T-Mobile Germany portal to download a new eSIM required authentication via SMS to that now deactivated number. That was fun. (As they didn’t have an alternative procedures to provision eSIMs in place, we had to go visit a store to get a new physical SIM first and could then convert that to eSIM.)
eSIM is also great for travel. There's a lot of competition on price and it's easy to check esimdb to find the cheapest carrier that meets your needs for a given trip. Download the eSIM in advance and you're good to go as soon as your plane lands
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What are you even talking about? eSIM for travel requires to be connected to internet and in the country when provisioning. With a SIM you just pop it in. It is however nice to be able to buy an eSIM without having to wait in line at the airport, but you get what you pay for. The airport SIM is better than the eSIM from generic provider, depending on your use case, like making calls in some countries
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Unfortunately there's not much competition on providing low-latency data connections, so most travel esim providers don't advertise where their connections route through. It's not great when you're travelling and all your connections to local sites get routed through and geo-located to a different continent.
Most phones that cost less than ~300 USD still have a headphone jack and microSD slot. I've never understood spending more than that on a phone anyway, you can't exactly use all that processing power on a phone operating system. Unfortunately some of the bad features from expensive phones have been moving down to the cheaper ones, like the destroyed screen that's missing its corners and has a hole for the camera in it for some reason.
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Budget phones are going to have different missing features for different people - for me the problem are that budget phones are all too large, full of software bloat, and receive poor software support.
Doesn't any such cable/adapter violate the USB-C spec? https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/10xj74r/why_dont_usbc_extension_cables_work/j7svggo/
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Depends how it's implemented. USB-C extension cables aren't allowed, but pass-through charging is allowed. I suspect a $7 cable from a Chinese amazon seller is not spec-compliant, but e.g. Belkin sells a spec-compliant "3.5mm Audio + USB-C Charge Adapter".
Less space occupied, more battery, smaller phones. It wasn't the only reason, but was at least one of the stated reasons for the jack removal.
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They also promoted this with the iPhone 17 eSIM-only variant. More space for battery.
“I’m across an ocean from any of my network’s stores and need to activate a different phone on my regular network and number right now, on the side of the road, without WiFi or a computer or a different, working phone already on my account” is to me the most obvious case where eSIM is weak. And having been in that situation before eSIMs, it was really easy - remove SIM, put in backup phone, use. Not so much now.
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The biggest obstacle with changing traditional SIMs is where to find a paperclip or pin to open the tray. And that’s easy to overcome.
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