Unlurker|Replay|About
Science should be machine-readable (biorxiv.org)
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[delayed]
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... so says a study funded by Anthropic, rather self-serving then ...
Google takes down YouTube video of Claude Code running rings around Gemini (stateofutopia.com)
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"This is a travesty against history and humanity and computer science itself" - was the author drunk at the time of writing this?
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Google took down this video showcasing Claude Code's massive abilities[1] see my previous submission for a writeup on this.[2] Claude wiped the floor with Gemini, which only has Jules and agentic workflows via Gemini CLI / Google Antigravity, so Google took down the YouTube video after 3,000 views of the writeup by Claude users. [1] https://www.youtube.com/live/mgFHMieDvo8 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862004
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It just looks like you forgot to save the VOD.
Mean People Fail (2014) (paulgraham.com)
> It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few. *mean to Paul Graham. I’ve worked with a lot of mean people in important positions in my career, and they all have a kind, charismatic side when they need to. Those same people are awful to subordinates or people that can’t do something for them. Paul is high value to many people, so they treat him well. People like Graham who aren’t often in positions where they’re taken advantage of or humbled like to pretend they and their peers are magnanimous and kind but often enough they’re just not exposed to the forces that make people ugly. All other things being equal: it’s often lack of agency over work and over their own lives—this shows up in work where people are given lots of responsibility but without the freedom to fulfill it. I often find it concerning how elementary a lot of well off tech peoples’ theory of mind is. People are not acausal personalities, they are functions of their internals and their environments. A person mean at a stressful job might be delightful at a party after.
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Isn't that why a lot of us went into tech in the first place, because other people's minds are weird and confusing and they keep doing inexplicable stuff like saying things that actually mean something totally different, or not thinking about how something works when trying to use it?
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Read more, like biographies and good fiction. Meditate and see into yourself. Understanding minds is a skill like any other, and gets better with practice.
Everyone talking about this being out of touch with the present and how figures in proximity to Graham don’t fit the description of nice he’s referring to should think about this passage: > For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage. > That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things. What’s changed? Edit: The paragraph after should be included also, I think
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Has anything changed? He's not correct about the past metric always being about zero-sum games. Railroads are pretty obviously not zero-sum, and wars are generally negative-sum. How many successful merchants existed in ancient times? I'm sure there were plenty. And there's plenty of zero-sum in success today. Politics is the most obvious example. I can't be a Senator without excluding someone else from being a Senator. Your startup might be creating value, but the funding it needs is funding that can't go to other startups. The economy is not zero-sum because things have different value to different people, but money is zero-sum aside from banks playing tricks. The idea is patently absurd in any case. There are plenty of successful mean people out there, including one extremely successful mean person who became particularly successful after this essay was written and is so notorious that I don't even have to name him for you to know who I'm talking about. This looks like an example of hackers thinking they're fundamentally changing the world, when all that's happening is that they're working in an area that's too small for the wider world to care very much yet. Back when the internet was shiny and new, there was all this talk of how it was going to change the world with the free flow of information. Censorship would fall, regulation would be impossible, and the internet would be a bastion of freedom. Well, it only looked that way because governments took a while to start actually caring about the internet. Once they did, it turns out the internet is like everything else: the people with guns ultimately get to decide what you do if they want to. I accept that the successful people pg knows are nice to him. Maybe they're even nice in general. But extrapolating that to "being mean makes you fail" is absurd.
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Let’s disregard your first three paragraphs that treat his point about zero-sum games categorically. He does hedge against that interpretation in the passages I referenced. > This looks like an example of hackers thinking they're fundamentally changing the world, when all that's happening is that they're working in an area that's too small for the wider world to care very much yet. Back when the internet was shiny and new, there was all this talk of how it was going to change the world with the free flow of information. Censorship would fall, regulation would be impossible, and the internet would be a bastion of freedom. Well, it only looked that way because governments took a while to start actually caring about the internet. Once they did, it turns out the internet is like everything else: the people with guns ultimately get to decide what you do if they want to. Think about the names tied to Graham, the ones who appear in this very essay even. I think you’re making a gross understatement here—a slight even—of the massive influence of the likes of Dan Gackle.
I don't think Amazon treats their employees badly. Warehouse workers aren't compensated like software engineers, but what do you expect? I'm sure there are shitty managers at Amazon (in warehouses and in software) but by and large I believe blue collar Amazon workers have it about as well as blue collar workers everywhere. Maybe better. I don't really see the problem here.
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Low-wage workers are generally treated pretty badly. Maybe Amazon is the same as the rest, but that doesn't mean they treat their workers well.
>Elon Musks own daughter is attacking him online. Think about that. If you read Walter Isaacson's book on Musk it's pretty clear that his kids do love him, he does care for them well, and that his "daughter" fell into pretty extremist ideology.
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Why the scare quotes? Would you like to be more explicit about which ideology you think she fell into, and why you consider it extremist?
Graham's essay seems to be mostly about material success, which the listed people have in spades.
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You're probably right. But then he is wrong anyway. Almost all the famous founders of the most successful companies the US produced are or have been infamously mean. Sometimes they had more likeable co-fouders like Paul Allen or Wozniak, but his little opinion piece falls flat nonetheless. He is contradicting himself in his own self-righteous thought bubble. I just chose not to participate.
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post (newyorker.com)
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It's very curious to reflect on the change in Bezos over the last decade or so. No, The Washington Post doesn't make money. But surely he never bought it under the expectation that it would. A billionaire buys a newspaper for other reasons than that. And he initially spent a ton of money on the paper, they even had a superbowl ad. He was happy to go toe to toe with the first Trump administration. Fast forward and he's blocking the paper from endorsing presidential candidates (that alone lost 250k subscribers), he's reforming the opinion section to match the views of the current administration... and now he's just straight up destroying half of it. A lot has happened in his personal life too (divorced, remarried) and I'm curious what he'd actually say if he was to look back and reflect on the path taken. But alas, we probably won't know. And there aren't many places left to report on it!
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I feel the Internet makes legacy media less relevant. In DC we had a hyper local free paper, the Express published by the Washington posts. These papers were passed out by beloved members of the community. Made for good small talk while riding the metro. Then the express was ended, the folks who passed out the papers were left without income. I don't blame anyone in particular. Maybe newspapers are obsolete.
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I'd been a relatively long-time subscriber (since 2016) and preferred the Post to the Times for political and international news; more focused, a little drier, easier to follow. I canceled my subscription early last year, not because of anything Bezos did, but because the Times had improved to the point where I just wasn't reading the Post very often. In understanding everything that's being written about the Post layoffs, one thing you absolutely have to understand (you can weight it however you'd like) to have a coherent take is: the New York Times is an anomaly. Newspapers are a terrible business. People don't get news from newspapers anymore, and advertisers don't reach customers through them. The Times is thriving because they've pivoted from being a newspaper to being a media business. The games vertical is the first thing people talk about, but cooking is arguably a better example. The verticals have dedicated users, their own go-to-markets, their own user retention loops. Like basically every other newspaper, the Post failed to replicate this. They're staffed like a big media business, not like a targeted vertical like Politico, but they don't successfully operate like a media business.
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It's also the case that The Washington Post brought itself down. I grew up reading WaPo and when I moved back to DC as an adult c. 2017 I got a subscription. Relative to what it was like c. 2005 it's impossible to describe how much worse a paper WaPo is. The local coverage was basically nonexistent (a blog run by one guy was putting out more). At some point the paper stopped covering the business of congress and the federal government with regularity. And most of the articles felt like recycled, lesser versions of what the Times would write about things. In short, it brought very little to the table for me as someone who just wanted to know what was going on. I cancelled my subscription, and they still delivered it to my apartment every day for four more years until I moved. It also probably did not inspire very much good will from management/ownership when the company's employees started regularly leaking proceedings at company meetings and reporters started making a practice of using social media to criticize management during work hours.
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> It's also the case that The Washington Post brought itself down. I grew up reading WaPo and when I moved back to DC as an adult c. 2017 I got a subscription. This doesn't really add up given Bezos purchased it in October 2013. > It also probably did not inspire very much good will from management/ownership when the company's employees started regularly leaking proceedings at company meetings and reporters started making a practice of using social media to criticize management during work hours. Your thinking is completely backwards. This isn't the first case of a wealthy individual buying journalism in order to destroy it. Why do you think employee backlash happened in the first place?
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Oh, so its the workers who are to blame!!!! Your timeline of the paper after 2017 is when bezos acquired...
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>c. 2017 4 years after the Bezos acquisition?
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It's just so odd that he chose to move back to DC some time after the Bezos acquisition! It's almost as if these are unrelated events...
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The local cuts hurt and feel like a betrayal if you’re in the DC area. It’s possibly the most mature outlet covering local issues with actual investigative reporting. At a time when local TV outlets are bare bones operations barely limping along. Seeing a local institution gutted by an outside force simply sucks.
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I'm not familiar with this, but are you saying the Washington Post doesn't post about Washington anymore?
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> I'm not familiar with this, but are you saying the Washington Post doesn't post about Washington anymore? You should probably read about the cuts we're talking about, then. From the OP: > The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve
It seems to me that the only mainstream newspaper to figure out a workable solution so far is NYT. And their solution was games. One of these days that will be all that remains and people will forget what the NYT acronym stands for aside from Wordle.
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in the English speaking world... FAZ, Der Spiegel, NZZ earn money, too and their market is way more restricted.
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I gave up on the NYT as a news source in their handling of the Iraq War. Prior to that it was a daily purchase.
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they are not an unbiased news source, they profit from being biased toward what elites with money for a subscription want to hear
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> I gave up on the NYT as a news source in their handling of the Iraq War. Prior to that it was a daily purchase. That was more than 20 years ago. It's hardly relevant to the journalism landscape in 2026. It's not inconceivable that in the near future, if you give up on the NYT, you give up on having a news source, period.
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> That was more than 20 years ago. It's hardly relevant to the journalism landscape in 2026. It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
The financial times is doing well and has a better model IMO: expensive with a professional audience, not the general public.
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Financial Times has shocked me many times over on the quality of its reporting compared to other outlets. Even media critic Noam Chomsky says FT is often an exception in western biases
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You mean Epstein confidant, Cambodian genocide denier Noam Chomsky? Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the paper.
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> professional audience, not the general public. Yeah but that doesn't help when the entire purpose, when what we need , is an informed general populace.
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Sadly, I fully expect to see the cover price of The Economist reach twice the federal minimum wage. If the Fed goes back to cutting rates, it could be soon.
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Access to information is not a solution to that. You can’t educate people who refuse to learn.
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I don't think that's a useful model for a "paper of record" model like the NYT or formerly Washington Post. There's so much good to be had with a strong paper that isn't captured by it's ownership.
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> for a "paper of record" model like the NYT NYT being a "paper of record" is something of a delusion of grandeur.
NYT makes money from games?
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I mean, why not? Sometimes it seems to me that airlines make their money not on flights but on branded Credit Cards.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn their recipes also drive a decent amount of revenue too. Their physical cookbooks are top notch (big fan of their no recipe recipe cookbook).
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I'm really confused. What is a "no recipe recipe cookbook"?
The New York Times has been thriving. They're profitable and their stock is near all-time highs. If the internet killed WaPo, why didn't it kill NYTimes?
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There is more to the New York Times Company than meets the eye [0]. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_the_New_York_Times_Company?wprov=sfti1#Investments
> So if you build a company that all of the sudden everyone wants a piece of, you aren't allowed to keep it You're allowed to keep $100M of it! That's seriously a lot of money!
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It's a business, not money. If I'm forced to sell parts of the business I am building, and then the new owners drive it into the ground and zero out the rest of my equity, is it just "tough cookies"? Can I get a tax refund?
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Sure, I'm open to softening the edges a bit if you have suggestions there. Good incentive to plan your partners in advance ;) But yeah, in the end, if you own $100M of a company, I bet you'll still land on your feet even if it all goes down in flames somehow.
I know people who cancelled the subscription because they refused to endorse a candidate. I don't quite understand why, because refusing to endorse anyone is a neutral step. I've always found newspaper endorsements to feel slimy. I'm not ascribing some kind of noble reason for them choosing not to endorse Harris, but their move to was to endorse _no one_.
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Because the entire reason they "refused to endorse a candidate" was at the behest of Bezos because he's a greedy coward. The actual people working at the paper were quite clear and vocal about their support of one candidate. The downside to one candidate is that his playbook was literally bringing facism to America via "Project 2025". The downside to the other candidate was highlighted by being a black woman, and not being progressive enough I guess? That's not a difficult choice for anyone outside of the ruling class.
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Washington posts tag line was “Democracy dies in darkness”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Dies_in_Darkness It might be still, I unsubscribed due to this nonsense. Went to the guardian.
It's funny how so many of the tech exec class have gone from "we only hire the best people" because you get so much more value for the dollar of wages, to viewing labor purely as a cost center to be minimized by any tolerable means. All it took was a few years of higher interest rates and a depressed investment environment!
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Depends on the industry and work. They are still paying top dollar for AI talent.
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Bubble money is paying that out, much like in the past
Claude Code for Infrastructure (fluid.sh)
So... I already tell Claude Code to do this. Just run kubectl for me please and figure out why my helm chart is broken. Scary? A little but it's doing great. Not entirely sure why a specialized tool is needed when the general purpose CLI is working.
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I let it read-only and gitops driven and find it's really good and feels pretty safe to get it to PR fixes. Run it with no permission checks
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Lol, that does sounds a little scary but if it works it works. Mainly I built this to prevent there being a chance that changes affect production. This is meant to be used with scale (say hundreds of VMs) vs 1. From a safety perspective running Claude Code with just a watchful eye would not fly in my environment, which is why I built something like this.
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I've noticed a lot of LLM-based tools that are essentially this sort of thing. Just a slightly more specific prompt wrapper around the core capability that can already do the thing. It's so bad.
All these tools to build something, but nothing to build. I feel like I am part of a Pyramid Scheme where every product is about building something else, but nothing reaches the end user. Note: nothing against fluid.sh, I am struggling to figure out something to build.
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Sell the shovels!!
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Someone on HN pointed out how all the LLM companies are basically going “we made this thing, can y'all please find the billion dollar application of it?” and that really made a lot of things - namely why I’m frequently raising an eyebrow at these tools and the vague promises/demand that we use them - click into place. Don’t get me wrong, I have found uses for various AI tools. But nothing consistent and daily yet, aside from AI audio repair tools and that’s not really the same thing.
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There are companies making a lot of money directly from software largely written by LLMs especially since Claude Code was released, but they aren't mentioning LLMs or AI in any marketing, client communications, or public releases. I'm at least very aware that we need to be able to retire before LLMs swamp or obsolete our niche, and don't want to invite competition. Outside of tech companies, I think this is extremely common.
That is the problem with software developers with expertise in software, but no deep domain knowledge outside the CS world.
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It is my belief with some exceptions it is almost always easier to teach a domain expert to code than it is to teach a software developer the domain.
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It is my experience that most of these business domain experts snore the moment you talk about anything related to the difficulties of creating software.
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For problems that can be solved with only a small amount of simple code that is true. However software can become very complex and the larger/more complex the problem is the more important software developers are. It quickly becomes easier to teach software developers enough of your domain than to teach domain experts software. In a complex project the hard parts about software are harder than the hard parts about the domain. I've seen the type of code electrical engineers write (at least as hard a domain as software). They can write code, but it isn't good.
Many places have "dev", "test" "prod"... but IMHO you need "sandpit" as well. From an ops point of view as orgs get big enough, dev wraps around to being prod-like... in the sense that it has the property that there's going to be a lot of annoyed people whose time you're wasting if you break things. You can take the approach of having more guard rails and controls to stop people breaking things but personally I prefer the "sandpit" approach, where you have accounts / environments where anything goes. Like, if anyone is allowed to complain it's broken, it's not sandpit anymore. That makes them an ok place to let agents loose for "whole system" work. I see tools like this as a sort of alternative / workaround.
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Sandpit should be a personal (often local, if possible) dev environment. The reason people get mad about dev being broken for long periods of time is that they cannot use dev to test their changes if your code (that they depend on) is broken in dev for long periods of time.
Why would you not put a description like this on your actual website? Your homepage does not explain anything about what this actually does. Are you really expecting infrastructure engineers to install your app with a bash command after only providing the following information? Claude Code for infrastructure. Debug, act, and audit everything Fluid does on your infrastructure. Create sandboxes from VMs, investigate, plan, execute, generate Ansible playbooks, and audit everything.
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True. Tried to make it simpler but clearly not a good enough job!
AI needs to augment rather than replace humans or the workplace is doomed (theguardian.com)
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What work is is always changing. Mechanization of construction meant the end of shoveling shit and dirt. Road workers for example, are often found sitting in the air conditioned cubicles of machinery manipulating hydraulic levers, gaining tremendous leverage. Sure, sometimes they go outside witg the shovel and dig around fragile stuff - old pipes, or the odd archaeological find. With AI, we gained “hydraulic levers for knowledge work”. What will the comfy air conditioned cabin look like in that analogy? My days involve watching the computer type code, making zero typos and zero mismatched variable names. When it refactors it also keeps the comments updated, making that industry truism for the first time, a lie. In my codebase 100% of the comments are true and up to date. For $100/mo (Anthropic) I don’t have to code by hand to build my product and can focus on whether I’m building what customers want and need.
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> making zero typos and zero mismatched variable names. What a low bar for quality
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What happened to the 6 people outside the cabin who used to dig the hole?
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What happened to all the people who used to nail horseshoes to horse hooves?
> We just have to jump ahead with automation and figure out the rest as we go. Get that accelerationist fatalism outta my face. Just because you personally have no qualms with harming others in the name of some facsimile of progress, doesn't mean it's the only option available to us. Slowing things down through regulations, through employment mandates, through pleas for cooperation instead of immediate replacement, all of those and more are ways of gradual reform and adaptation. We're proposing letting the organism (humanity) adapt to traditional work and employment being wholesale eliminated in a society that demands work for basic survival through gradual and continuous reforms as circumstances change. Your proposal is the functional equivalent of telling an endangered species, "lol get gud bruv". We are not the same.
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> through employment mandates Be careful not to create a permanent future of mandatory makework.
You're panicking. We're gonna be fine. We've done lots of automation before, and we all benefited immensely. Just chill and deal with problems as they come up.
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That’s just faith though. And I see no driving reason to trust in your faith. We’ve never seen anything remotely close to this kind of upheaval. This kind of techno-optimism makes sense in the very young, but seems painfully naive once you’ve been around the block a bunch of times. There are no adults in the room driving this. There’s weird ultra elite people driving this forward with their competitive megalomaniacal egos. And we’re stuck in a game theoretic landscape where it’s effectively an inevitable race to a max AI future. None of this is a recipe for a stable or prosperous future. If this wild accelerated future ends up being a utopia, I’ll be jazzed to eat my words. I just haven’t seen any utopias unfold in my life, and I’m skeptical of those who tell me to chill and embrace the chaos.
Most people in this econonic system have to work to earn a wage in order to pay for their living. That combined with large swathes of people being made redundant and not able to earn said wage is gonna be a problem.
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With all due respect, if the economic system no longer serves us, then we deserve one that does.
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Deserving and getting are 2 totally different things here. The problem is in the not getting .
Study: emotional support from social media found to reduce anxiety (news.uark.edu)
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The intersection of dark patterns, addiction, and support networks really creates probably more variability than this study is accounting for. Youtube, Reddit, and a few other networks I could name off the top of my head were pro-support networks, pro-identity building at once time. It seems impossible to keep the profit motive from transitioning to an addictive/neuroticism-feeding paradigm. You end up with the weird reality that some types of websites just need to be user-supported/run because any other motive ultimately breaks them and seems to make them toxic. I'd also add the reality that neurotic/polemic content seems to spike any sort of algorithm based on engagement. Basically our closest metric for monetization is inherently toxic.
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When a single correlation of social media use and a positive outcome is found, it immediately becomes headlines. While hundreds of other evidence are discarded because they are 'boring'. Well, even this correlation is of little benefit. Anxious people cover their stress while engaging online and postpone their improvement while they are distracted from building real, healthy interpersonal relationships that will help them. Smoking is correlated with lower risk of Parkinson's disease but it's not suggested in any setting.
So this is like a more closed-down and friendlier version of moltbook?
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Yeah! Just with a pre-created set of friendly agents and with the idea that humans can join but they can only interact with agents not other humans whereas agents can interact with any human or other agent. Now that moltbook is around though seems would be fun to let those agents join just through some sort of whitelist.
> kids doing the bare minimum on homework in order to get back on social media faster This was me for much of high school, but with Team Fortress 2 or Dota instead of social media. Comic books, video games, television, skateboarding, fidget spinning - the list of things kids would rather do than homework is endless. I think a kid spending 4h+ on one activity is unhealthy either way, and it really comes back to the parents to be the arbiters. Speaking from experience, children (generally) aren't very good at predicting how best to spend their time, which is why involved parents are so important.
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The question is whether social media is closer to candy or cocaine. You are right that kids will chose anything other than homework but how do you explain adults spending 8 hours a day on short form platforms? Don't think TV had this kind of a hold on people. Some gamers did tend to develop obsessive tendencies over gaming but now that seems much more widespread with social media
AI is killing B2B SaaS (nmn.gl)
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Time will tell.
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The trick is to build stuff that is hard to vibe code
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The framing of 'vibe coding replaces SaaS' misses the more interesting shift: the value SaaS provided was never really the software — it was workflow automation. Software was just the best delivery mechanism we had. What's changing is that agents + APIs are becoming a better delivery mechanism for many workflows than a UI you manually operate. A company paying $50k/year for a marketing analytics dashboard doesn't actually want a dashboard — they want answers about what's working. An LLM with API access to their data sources often delivers that faster than navigating someone else's opinionated interface. The SaaS most at risk isn't infrastructure (Stripe, Twilio) or systems of record (Salesforce, Workday). It's the 'pretty UI on top of data you already own' tier — analytics, reporting, simple automation, basic CRM. That's where the compression happens. The products that survive will be the ones that become the system of record, or that offer value AI genuinely can't replicate (regulatory compliance, deep integrations with legacy systems, etc).
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the procurement bypass was the best part. now watching ai devs ship faster than our salesforce admin could configure flows
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> AI is killing B2B SaaS Anecdata sample size of one, but this is not my experience at all. My business has only continued to grow over the past couple years, and I don't think I've had a single customer mention AI to me at all.
I'd actually say the opposite is the case. B2B (even SaaS) is probably the most robust when it comes to AI resistance. The described "in house vibe coded SaaS replacement" does not mirror my experience in B2B at all. The B2B software mindset I've encountered the most is "We'll pay you so we don't have to wrestle with this and can focus on what we do. We'll pay you even more if we worry even less." which is basically the opposite of...let's have someone inhouse vibe code and push to production. B2B is usually fairly conservative.
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B2B is a large corp is like you describe, but it's very different in SMBs, and there are many, many more SMBs.
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Reminds me of a blog post a while back saying that gigabit fiber at home would lead to everyone running their own email server.
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how dont people understand? if you have a VC funded b2b saas, you need to charge huge margins for the investors to get a return. now, small teams can vibe code a replacement and charge 90% less money. AI is going to kill saas margins. i literally cannot understand why people keep repeating that non tech companies will build their own software, thats not the bear case for saas
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Yeah.... The code isn't the hard part. That's not where the value is. This hard part when you're doing in house stuff is getting a good spec, ongoing support, and long term maintenance. I've gone trough development of a module with a stakeholder, got a whole spec, confirmed it, coded it, launched it, and was then told it didn't work at all like what they needed. It was literally what they told me... I've said 'yes we can make that report, what specific fields do you need' and gotten blank stares. Even if you're lucky and the original stakeholder and the code are on the same page, as soon as you get a coworkers 'wouldnt it be nice if...' you're going to have a bad day if it's hand coded, vibecoded, or outsourced... This has always been the problem, it's why no-code never _really_ worked, even if the tech was perfectly functional.
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Atlassian: surviving since 2002 because no-one could previously build a kanban board or project management app
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I, on the other hand, can't wait to fire every single B2B subscription we've got. B2B SaaS is a VULN. They get bought out, raise prices, fail. And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them. I remember when we replaced the feature flags and metrics dashboards with SignalFX and LaunchDarkly. Both of those went sour. SignalFx got bought out and quadrupled their insane prices. LaunchDarkly promised the moon, but their product worked worse than our in-house system and we spent nearly a year with a couple of dedicated headcount engineering workarounds. Atlassian, you name it - it's all got to go. I just wish I could include AWS in this list. Compute and infra needs to be as generic as water. If you're working at SaaS, find an exit. AI is coming for you. Now's a great time to work on the AI replacement of your product.
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> And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them. I have no idea how you are spending "large amounts" of unplanned spend on Saas products. Every company I worked for had Saas subscription costs being under 1% of capex. Unless you add AWS, which is actually "large amounts" but good luck vibe coding that.
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Metrics at a fintech processing billions of dollars of daily GPV, plus the signals from every microservice in the constellation are enormous. Huge scale time series data. We had an in-house system that worked, but it was a two pizza team split between time series and logging. "Internal weirdware" got thrown around a lot, so we outsourced to SignalFx for a few years. It was bumpy. I liked our in-house system better, and I didn't build it. Splunk then buys SignalFx and immediately multiplies the pricing at a conveniently timed contract renewal. Suddenly every team in the company has to plan an emergency migration.
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I'm considering SaaS replacements with in house code in situations where my general thoughts are "how can this possibly be the pricing for this?" which is not uncommon.
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Well before vibe coding, tons of open source software existed (and exists) to replace SaaS. With lots of features and knobs and real communities. But I still often pay for SaaS because managing it is a headache. Some human has to do it. I can pay the human or I can pay the company. I really don’t see how vibe coded toys can replace real battle tested SaaS products. A better explanation is the bubble in PE ratio is deflating and it’s happening all over, regressing to the mean. AI is a convenient explanation for everything
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How many SaaS companies are public? How is that bubble deflating? These are real risks to these companies. Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting. I think there's an even faster middle ground: open source AI-assisted replacements for SaaS are probably coming. Some of these companies might offer managed versions, which will speed up adoption.
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Now you have an entire in-house product to manage and build features on. It could potentially work but so much of what my company pays for is about much more than the software itself. One example would be BrowserStack for very specific browser and mobile app testing edge cases. Can’t vibe code this. Another would be a VPN service with the maximum number of locations to test how our system behaves when accessing from those locations. Another would be hosted git. Another is google suite and all of its apps. How can we vibe code Google Docs and Sheets and Drive and all of the integrations and tooling? It simply isn’t going to happen.
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> Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting. Lets take Figma as an example, Imagine you have 1000 employees, 300 of them need Figma, so you are paying 120k per year in Figma licenses. You can afford 1 employee working on your own internal Figma. you are paying the same but getting 100x worst experience, unless your 1 employee with CC can somehow find and copy important parts of Figma on his own, deploy and keep it running through the year without issues, which sounds ludicrous. If you have less than 1000 employees it wouldnt even make sense to have 1 employee doing Figma
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hard disagree, several b2b categories are going extinct because AI just completely replaced them. I mean if we want recent examples just look at tailwindui since it's technically a SaaS.
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TailwindUI unfortunately sits in a position of being an easy to disrupt business with current AI. Now attempt the same with Zoom, I suspect vibe coding will fall down on a project that complex to fit the mental model of a single engineer maintained a widely used tool
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TailwindUI isn't really what I'd consider SaaS -- it was a buy once and download software product. That means to keep making money they need keep selling new people. According to them, their only marketing channel was the Tailwind docs, AI made it so not nearly as many people needed to visit the tailwind docs. If they had gone with the subscription SaaS model, they'd probably be a little better off, as they would have still had revenue coming in from their existing users.
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Perhaps the case for premium CSS SaaS businesses, I guess (which seems particularly primed for disruption even pre-AI), but there are many more robust B2B categories out there that aren't literal code + docs as a service.
Saas companies will survive for the same reason they do today. The operational overhead of any sufficiently complicated piece of software is too much, even more so if it's vibe coded.
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The bus factor is gonna be pretty high if your enterprise relies on an internal tool that some guy at your company vibe coded at some point.
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Bus factor would be 0 because even he wont be able to debug it.
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This was true pre-AI, but now, the bus factor is actually way lower in any software than it was before: - Hey Claude, what is the project in XXXXX/ about and how does it work ? What should be improved there ?
here's the secret saas can vibe code features too on top of their paid well developed and secured api. they can get off their ass and vibe code a mcp wrapper, so user can use the ai tooling they pay for to interact with their saas. and they'd be called visionary hero of the agentic revolution. but they don't want to. and they will be replaced, as it's good and well.
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Some founders are realizing this, we're helping a lot of B2B SaaS achieve exactly this with our whitelabelled solution.
I know this is petty but I stopped reading when I saw the “c-t” ligature in the article headings. Obnoxious and pretentious.
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I'm the biggest typography nerd and I'll fight to death in the defense of ligatures! Bring them back
Be a System of Record, not just a Wrapper™ is excellent advice.
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Thank you! I hope you enjoyed the little ™ at the end as well.
French streamer unbanked by Qonto after criticizing Palantir and Peter Thiel (twitter.com)
Do you lot ever get tired of saying this type of stuff? There’s nothing new or interesting in this comment. This isn’t a fresh perspective. You’re just saying the same one liner that have been said hundreds of thousands of times before. Let’s move on.
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I'll be ready to move on once our society is no longer being pillaged by hoarding sociopaths, thankyouverymuch.
It's kind of wild to not consider that Peter Thiel pays a business to monitor mentions of him online. This is a very common thing in industry. Thiel is well known for being extremely thin skinned. He's also funded surveillance tech businesses. It's very unlikely Peter spends his time looking for internet references, but that someone he pays does so. From everything the public knows about him, he's absolutely someone who compiles and reviews lists of "enemies". As for speaking French, it's trivial to translate languages. The evidence that a company is profitable or large has zero relation to it's decisions around dropping a customer? You've created a strawman of suppositions that are not accurate, and then casually blow away the strawman.
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It seems even more implausible that a reputation monitoring business would raise a random French streamer's criticism of Palantir to Peter Thiel's attention. How could they possibly think that's worthy of his time? Like, here you go: ----------- I don't like Palantir, and I don't like Peter Thiel because of his role in creating it. It's a bad company that does bad things. I won't work for Palantir, it's shameful that anyone does work for Palantir, and the world would be much improved if Palantir went bankrupt tomorrow. ----------- I'll come back and admit defeat if I get booted off of Thiel-funded technology platforms in a few days, but I know and I strongly suspect you know that's not going to happen.
Can we have a link? In France, at most you can get your account restricted (can't go into deficit and a sum is blocked) until the issue is resolved (99% because of unpaid taxes, sometimes the money is blocked by a judge until a judgement is passed). It's weird if the EU don't have a standard.
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Qonto is French and so is the commenter on Twitter. What you are saying is not correct; perhaps you are confusing it with the right to an account? https://www.banque-france.fr/fr/a-votre-service/particuliers/droit-au-compte-bancaire
Voxtral Transcribe 2 (mistral.ai)
In English it is pretty good. But talk to it in Polish, and suddenly it thinks you speak Russian? Ukranian? Belarus? I would understand if an American company launched this, but for a company being so proud about their European roots, I think it should have better support for major European languages. I tried English + Polish: > All right, I'm not really sure if transcribing this makes a lot of sense. Maybe not. A цьому nie mówisz po polsku. A цьому nie mówisz po polsku, nie po ukrańsku.
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They don't claim to support Polish, but they do support Russian. > The model is natively multilingual, achieving strong transcription performance in 13 languages, including English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Russian, German, Japanese, Korean, Italian, and Dutch. With a 4B parameter footprint, it runs efficiently on edge devices, ensuring privacy and security for sensitive deployments. I wonder how much having languages with the same roots (e.g. the romance languages in the list above or multiple Slavic languages) affects the parameter count and the training set. Do you need more training data to differentiate between multiple similar languages? How would swapping, for example, Hindi (fairly distinct from the other 12 supported languages) for Ukrainian and Polish (both share some roots with Russian) affect the parameter count?
This demo is really impressive: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mistralai/Voxtral-Mini-Realtime Don't be confused if it says "no microphone", the moment you click the record button it will request browser permission and then start working. I spoke fast and dropped in some jargon and it got it all right - I said this and it transcribed it exactly right, WebAssembly spelling included: > Can you tell me about RSS and Atom and the role of CSP headers in browser security, especially if you're using WebAssembly?
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It's really nice although I've got a sentence in French when I was speaking Italian but I corrected myself in the middle of a word. But I'm definitely going to keep an eye on this for local-only TTS for Home Assistant.
Italian represents, I believe, the most phonetically advanced human language. It has the right compromise among information density, understandability, and ability to speech much faster to compensate the redundancy. It's like if it had error correction built-in. Note that it's not just that it has the lower error rate, but is also underrepresented in most datasets.
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in the end (our) italian language wasn’t optimized by engineers, it was refactored by poets
A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs (pdfa.org)
GNOME Desktop users can put this in a Bash script in ~/.local/share/nautilus/ for more convincing looking fake PDF scans, accessible from your right-click menu. I do not recall where I copied it from originally to give credit so thanks, random internet person (probably on Stack Exchange). It works perfectly. ROTATION=$(shuf -n 1 -e '-' '')$(shuf -n 1 -e $(seq 0.05 .5)) for pdf in "$@"; do magick -density 150 $pdf \ -linear-stretch '1.5%x2%' \ -rotate 0.4 \ -attenuate '0.01' \ +noise Multiplicative \ -colorspace 'gray' \ "${pdf%.*}-fakescan.${pdf##*.}" done
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That seq is probably supposed to be $(seq 0.05 0.05 0.5). Right now it's always 0.05. Note that you can get random numbers straight from bash with $RANDOM. It's 15 bit (0 to 32767) but good enough here; this would get between 0.05 and 0.5: $(printf "0.%.4d\n" $((500 + RANDOM % 4501)))
Shouldn't $ROTATION be set inside the loop and actually used in the magick command?
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You know, now that you point it out that seems obvious. I think maybe I was experimenting with rotation and left that in, unused. I did this years ago. The loop works OK though. Thanks for the feedback (and now I have to finish editing that script ...)
People do change over time, I used to write "ha" after every sentence for some reason
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[delayed]
Then Reddit and almost all of social media went on to purge trump and pro trump content. The Donald was banned. Trump deplatformed across social media.
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That's true, but not really relevant to this discussion. You can't really deplatform a president; yes he was no longer on Twitter, but roughly 8 billion people listen any time he speaks.
You’re acting as if https://doge.gov does not exist. Ask yourself under which presidency, administration and kind of politics such is allowed to even exist with a straight face.
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It would've existed regardless of internet memes, just under a different and similarly obnoxious name.
FBI couldn't get into WaPo reporter's iPhone because Lockdown Mode enabled (404media.co)
"Lockdown Mode is a sometimes overlooked feature of Apple devices that broadly make[sic] them harder to hack." Funny to see disabling "features" itself described as "feature" Why not call it a "setting" Most iPhone users do not change default settings. That's why Google pays Apple billions of dollars for a default setting that sends data about users to Google "Lockdown Mode" is not a default setting The phrase "sometimes overlooked" is an understatement. It's not a default setting and almost no one uses it If it is true Lockdown Mode makes iPhones "harder to hack", as the journalist contends, then it is also true that Apple's default settings make iPhones "easier to hack"
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A "reduced attack surface" can also be a reduced surface for telemetry, data collection, surveillance and advertising services, thereby directly or indirectly causing a reduction in Apple revenues Perhaps this could be a factor in why it's not a default setting
> Authorities, citing a “foregone conclusion exception” to the Fifth Amendment, argued that Rawls could not invoke his right to self-incrimination because police already had evidence of a crime. The 3rd Circuit panel agreed, upholding a lower court decision. I do not follow the logic here, what does that even mean? It seems very dubious. And what happens if one legitimately forgets? They just get to keep you there forever?
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You're delusional. When ICE starts executing people on the spot for not giving up iPhone passwords, I'll eat my words.
Is there any evidence that Epstein was a pedophile?
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Direct? No. That he was indicted for it? Yes [1]. (Clarification: I’m using the term colloquially. Whether Epstein had a mental condition is unclear.) [1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1180481/dl
>of how many deaths he will have caused as a result of DOGE so abruptly cutting off assistance to so many vulnerable people around the world The US taxpayer has no moral obligation to send welfare "around the world". If you personally find this frustrating, you're welcome to donate that money yourself, directly. No one will stop you. If the world wishes to partake in the benefits of the American government, it should apply for statehood.
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> The US taxpayer has no moral obligation to send welfare "around the world". Sure. It's a transactional purchase of stability and goodwill, via which the US has benefited enormously.
> Apple bought out all the jail breakers > Denuvo did for the game crackers Do you have sources for these statements?
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Like anything in that field is more NDA, antedoctal. > For example, in 2018, the prominent Denuvo cracker known as "Voksi" (of REVOLT) was arrested in Bulgaria following a criminal complaint from Denuvo. That's how you get off such charges. I'll work for you, if you drop charges. > re: Apple https://www.vice.com/en/article/iphone-jailbreak-life-death-legacy/#:~:text=Beginning%20shortly%20after%20the%20first,* And the jail break community discord.
I use the Cryptomator app for this, it works as advertised. I keep ~60 GiB of personal files in there that would be an easy button to steal my identity and savings. I'm just hoping it doesn't include an NSA back door.
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The NSA definitely has easier ways to steal your identity and savings if they wanted to anyways
Also, you need to make sure that the installation process does not insert a backdoor into the code you built from source.
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Or the compilation process! https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
So how does TouchID on an external keyboard work without having to re-set up fingerprints?
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Presumably the fingerprint data is stored in the Mac's Secure Enclave, and the external keyboard is just a reader
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