Unlurker

Europe plans to squeeze out Starlink (politico.eu)

That's funny. How many years behind is the EU in having a LEO constellation that could support direct-to-cell? 6 years at the earliest but that's optimistic. Keep innovating, EU bureautards!

probably not - there are too many compradors in the Europe. The only truly Gaullist leaders are somehow also MAGA-tards, who are in their own way Atlanticists at heart.

Ask HN: Are you tired too in this AI era?

Enforcing boundaries and saying no have gotten more important than ever, now that violation of either is automated at superhuman speeds. FWIW, there might be a silver lining in this. A lot of dysfunction in the current state of tech can (IMO) be traced back to violation of boundaries. This might lead to a cultural shift. Though, that might also just be wishful thinking on my part. ___ > I would love to hear your tips, but still be relevant in this AI era, so my boss does not fire me. If your boss fires you because you didn't multiply your performance by doing more work in the same time (without your compensation changing), that's not your fault but simply your employer trying to squeeze you harder and that not working out. Always keep that in mind in these discussions. Which isn't to say that you should not improve efficiency and all, but it needs to be organic. If something inorganic is asked, then the (moral) failure is on the asker and not the askee.

I don't no, but I can understand why others might. For me it's very exciting and AI has been so far a crazy enabler for me. Both in my work and my personal life. But I also enjoy keeping up with it and reading about it etc.

Sometimes, I skim the generated text. I mean, most of it is supposition and filler, right? The rest of the time, I cut to the chase: does the code work? If not, I ignore all the generated text, pass along the errors/warnings, and go from there. What I like best about working with AI is that I feel like a leader developer again (I've been retired from programming for almost 30 years.) It's pleasant and I don't need to worry about how snarky I get when going over bad code.

I'm building a dashboard for a client. I realised how easy it is for me to build the dash. But how hard it is to sit down for 1 hour, look at the pages, scroll through them as if I am my client, notice inconsistencies, notice where the numbers don't make sense. Sitting down, and actually checking and comparing and thinking were already hard before AI, and they became a lot harder.

I'm just extremely tired of non-technical people trying to tell me how to do my job, what the state-of-the-art is, that I can implement their non-existent specs faster, or that software development is just about the ideas not implementation because we have swarms of clankers available.

I am vey tired. I maintain Pinggy - my first bootstrapped startup and building Lumirank , my next one. But every day is a struggle of coping up with what is new and what 20 more competitors that corpped up yesterday are up to. Millions of lines of codes being written every day, I can not merge without knowing the overall architecture and flow. But I can't rest. Everyone is running. Sometimes I feel please someone give me a job where I can work 12 hours a day - but the rest of the 12 hours I don't need to think about what will happen tomorrow.. It will still be less stressful.

I am old enough to be retired -- career spent as a research geophysicist. I have about 2-3 scientific projects/papers/codebases left in me before I go be a hermit in a cave somewhere. LLMs appear to be able help me get through that. I'll take the help. BUT JEEZ! Dealing with "Rain Man"[1] LLMs week-in and week-out is wildly annoying, frustrating, and anger inducing. If they all would just STOP sounding so authoritative when spewing nonsense! [1] After the Dustin Hoffman character in the movie of the same name. "Ah but you know I'm an excellent d̴r̴i̴v̴e̴r̴ programmer."

> read enormous amounts of generated text This is something I avoid at all costs. If it's someone else's slop I just won't read it, and if it's "my" slop I prefer to interactively ask questions about it rather than reading a wall of text.

I think it's a very exciting time and I am enthusiastic about it. What I tried to do is automate as much as possible of that decision-making, guidance and taste. Having said that, it is significantly more context switching, my solution so far is to have agents run longer autonomously, less interruptions is less switching. Prerequisite is that you must build a system first that lets you automate that, which is often very personal; most tools don't particularly apply.

My entire life, I have found meaning in solving problems with code. With AI, this is no longer competitive. Now I develop more than ever and am more productive than ever, but it still doesn't feel as rewarding. I would like to go back.

I use a sort of kanban board so I have a column of the backlog of things to do, a column of tasks agents are actively working on and a column of things that need review. The agents put summaries of what they did in each task and I can write my own comments there too. It’s not perfect, but it definitely helps me with context switching because I can open a task, quickly scan it to see what is going on and then open an agent with the task as its context to continue working on it.

Remember to take breaks, this is applicable before and after AI.

I am tired of the fact that even my hobbies have now been taken over by LLM-wielding imbeciles. Nothing better than going through LLM output your whole work day only to tune in to your favourite community after work to see an absolute idiot throw a slop grenade and refuse to accept that the LLM served him bullshit...

It feels a lot of reddit comments (but also here on HN) are AI generated. It would be helpful to see a kind of marking of probability a comment is generated.

Over 40 here, and I’m having the opposite experience. Honestly, I think experience is part of why. Years of projects teach you what to ignore: which generated code actually needs a careful review, which decisions matter, and when to stop. I don’t run many things in parallel. I’d rather do one thing well than babysit five agents. It also helps that a lot of my AI use is on my own side projects, where I set the pace. That makes it fun instead of draining. Maybe the tiredness has less to do with AI itself and more to do with being pushed to maximize throughput?

It's weird times. I feel incredibly productive. I'm building in an afternoon what would've taken weeks. I spend all my time in either MR's reviewing code, or a terminal prompting. I've moved from being a coder, to being a product-engineer-architect. I love coding -- LOVE it. But the role has morphed. And, I actually really like the new role. I love being product centric, and caring about architecture -- it suits me wel.. The code Claude produces is often clean, but terribly archictected. So I'm spending a lot of time reviewing in detail. But the anxienty - OMG the anxiety. I work on multple features (generally 4-5 work streams) concurrently, so am constantly context switching. I worry about how much time I'm spending on each task. Am I doing enough code review? Too much? Too little? What about click-through testing? Our test coverage has never been higher - should I be able to just merge these features? Wasn't that always the promise of TDD - merging with confidence? But, it feels like a risk. And, I'm moving really really fast - but I assume my competitors are too. So that drives me to move faster. Automate more. Use claude in more places. Which brings more anxiety - am I cutting too many corners? Is this all gonna crumble on me? Also, is everything I'm working on going to become irrelevant? Will customers buy this product, or vibe code it? Do we even have a moat? Anxiety. More anxiety. My investors are reading stuff constantly too. They're pinging me with market updates, emerging players, shifting landscapes. More anxiety. Also - productivity tools - look - internet influencer X is now producing a gajillion lines of code a second -- are we doing that? Are we token maxing? Are we feature maxing? Are we building the right number of internal tools? Are we automating enough? Should I evaluate the market for this new tool, or just smash something out with claude? More features. Burn more tokens. Ship ship ship. Having to explain to investors why we're not going as fast as those guys, and building enterprise products requires care and dedication -- that takes time. Time I should be shipping, coding, featuring, tokenizing. More anxiety. I'm exhausted. Anyway, gotta go - herdr has pinged me four times during writing this reply. Gotta ship.

I feel so sorry for you and the kind of life you're building for yourself... I really hope this is a joke

I am fighting context switching by - spending more time upfront working with agent on intent of the change, then design, so agent does not try to work around issues in a way that I don't intend to - investing in ways in which agent can verify it's own change - giving access to as much prod telemetry, etc so it can also verify the change post-merge - obvious stuff, like automated review loops etc But in the end I still read the "load bearing" parts of the code. Less closely, and I've long ago stopped looking at the tests. It's better for me than couple of months ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U

Some questions that bother me: Are people reviewing all the tests that have been created automatically? What about existing tests? How do we make sure that AI does not fake them by silently (by silent changes or by faking the test output)?

>Are people reviewing all the tests that have been created automatically? No. > How do we make sure that AI does not fake them by silently (by silent changes or by faking the test output)? I have never seen this happen for a couple of months at least.

I just had an interview and they asked me prepare for coding live. I had to manually code bubble sort before the interview. It felt really nice, but it ended up them showing me some code and review it instead :facepalm:

I am tired, even if I don't use AI too much for my day job designing HW, mostly for disposable scripts if at all. The utter lack of stability, not even 5 years out, is sad. That is even though I have savings to weather the storm and no major liabilities. AI is a boon for learning, but the result will heavily depend on mental capability of the user; having a depression-induced brainrot doesn't help though. And, in the last year clankers have started coming for us EEs. The reality is that many people are more fucked than I am, but I can't stop the bad thoughts.

Yes, the worst (or just longest) pieces of slop tire me out. When I leave work I usually cannot read or spell properly. The texts I read in the afternoon make much more sense in the next day. I'm making typos I could never ever imagine making. There's just too much to review and ignore.

> Although AI lets us do much more, More of what? I see many here using AI to build more of the same things in another language such as rewrites and then claiming that they are "productive", which is the problem of many engineers here. Not that much risk taking if all what everyone is doing is just full blown rewrites and then abandoning it in a couple of months later and just wasting tokens for free. If the result is to vibe code something for free and it makes no money and has no users then it is a waste of time.

I’m tired of exuberant hardware prices so that companies can shove AI down our throats on subpar products that work way worse than they did before.

When we get good at something, it results in flow state, but it also means that was mechanizable in a way and now AI is taking that away. So we are always grappling with the new and effortful. And the context switching, jeez. We need entirely new visualizations of work flow that recognizes we are now doing more, and in parallel. Wonder if this is how air traffic control people feel.

> We need to keep track of many things happening in parallel... That your workplace, not "AI era".

Fair point

I use AI to correct AI :D Yea I know, sounds ridiculous, but hear me out. Claude Web works differently than Claude Code. I use Claude Web/Chat for briefs, general overview of the project outside of code/app, for planning and handing off the work to Code, that includes prompts. Code is tasked to output a detailed view of what it found, run measurements and tests (designed both by me and Chat) and report findings back. That is fed back to Chat and I get a rough summary. Errors are categorized by their blast-radius and so on. Eventually I do a deep dive of what changed, how well it's handling, how much it's struggling, token usage, time spent per review/test and so on. (btw, Code is tasked to run an independent review via contextless agent on the codebase, that easily costs me another 20-30 mins and ~200K tokens on my current project, each run). It still makes architectural issues, tries bandaiding and patching instead of properly designing, overvaluing/devaluing certain cases and misallocating where most of the focus should be, but that's relatively easier to spot and propose a fix for than doing a line by line code review. Codebase quality is ensured through mapping the flow and the output space and having a hard-pinned tests Code can't modify to green its answers, + the independent reviewer I mentioned above. It's not as fun as going in by hand on deep technical problems, sure. But AI usage is less about fun and more about output speed, so use it for what it is for ig? :D

My boss is demanding me to use AI but hasn’t started demanding me to run parallel agents or anything like that, so I’m managing to keep things under control. Who knows how long it’ll take before they start doing that or just fire me outright. I feel pretty checked out anyway. I do remind myself every day that “it’s just a job” and I shouldn’t care about it. I think I’m more worried about AI ruining my leisure time too and has me check out of life entirely.

I Returned My iPhone Duo (codakuma.com)

Still waiting for my Duo so I have no authority really but… Complaining about app support in the first week of release is silly. It will obviously get better very fast. Apple will force developers to make all new updates work well.

The majority of reports of people reporting issues with their Duo are due to the early defects found in the phone [0]. Yet another reason why it makes sense to never buying the first version of an Apple product [1], since previously: > "But once again as I said before, don't buy the first version of an Apple product." This was Apple's first foldable iPhone. If the price wasn't enough of a deterrent, then the defects should now be even clearer to wait until Apple fixes them in the next version. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/26/iphone-duo-owners-cracks-apple-first-foldable-handset [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49631052

If the extremely low odds of buying a defective one, that has full support from Apple to replace it at no cost (like they should), concerns you, then you should play the lottery more often...

How did this advertisement land the second spot on HN with 6 points in 30 minutes? The typography on this blog-ad is really disgusting; it provides no character, opting for font-family -apple-system, Roboto, etc. (in this order) and whenever it tries to actually do something, it defines subheading paddings in pixel values which have been perhaps randomly determined. You can really tell this blog CSS wasn't created by AI, for it would do a better job.

This article made me realize I'd never consider returning a non-defective product, I wonder why that is.

I'm the opposite, for big purchases. I consider the first week or so basically the demo and I'm conscious of the fact that I'm in "returning range". Hard to do otherwise when everything from reviewers to reddit comments are astroturfed.

Maybe you're very amenable, or you have too much money.

Maybe a bit of that, but I think I'm just more careful about what I buy in the first place.

Perhaps you don't crave attention as the author does?

The "which screen do I use this time" decision is what I suffer with the most.

>I’m not convinced that most apps will adapt well to the Duo seems like the crux of the matter right there.

Next year Apple will be culling apps that update without Duo adaptation

I feel like there are a lot of reviews like this, where people talk about why the phone wasn’t for them, but not the opposite. Why are Duo owners keeping theirs? It’s kind of maddening to only see one dimension of the device.

An article like "I don't have much of a problem and the folding aspect is cute" doesn't engage in any way and currently there are mostly experimental apps and not yet the absolute killer app.

I love mine. The build quality is excellent. The two screens are useful in different environments or for different tasks - quick glance at a message vs reading a book. The large screen especially is a great replacement for my Kindle. Now all I carry for phone calls, photography, music, reading and work (T3 remote to my Mac mini at home) is this one device. Combined with a good dictation software like Aqua Voice it’s a jack off all trades for me. Not returning it anytime soon :)

I'm keeping mine - its great! Love the short outer screen, the inner screen is nice and large, the titanium build is great, love tent mode and laptop mode. Inner screen is large and its very thin when opened. The speakers are great and the cameras are as well. Idk what other info you need?

Maybe no one is keeping them?

> I used to think this was a bit boring. I’d get a new phone, restore it from a backup, and then think “what now?” It wasn’t usually appreciably different than my previous phone, and I felt like I missed the pre-iPhone days when I’d switch form factors all the time to try new things: a Sony Ericsson slab phone, a Samsung flip phone, a Nokia with a truly bonkers keypad layout. I even tried a Windows Mobile phone for a spell. I wonder how many thousands the author has spent chasing the dragon.

I never bought a flagship phone until very recently but I did switch (budget) phones and still remember the excitement of trying brand new phones with very different physical and software features. I also remember recent (Android, in my case) phone upgrades feeling meh after setting up new phone.

There is always at least one guy in the room flashing newest phone. Maybe author is one of them.

The guy's business is a mobile app. Difficult to blame him to know what his app feels like without ever touching one.

The author's first two reasons for return are not liking Touch ID or the outer screen. These are two of my favourite aspects. Each to their own. I like the short screen in particular, having always consciously felt that my focus zone was only a fraction of the slab format.

Having both would be even better. My current Android phone (Pixel 7) has both Face Unlock and an on-screen fingerprint scanner. My previous phone (a OnePlus) had Face Unlock along with a rear-mounted fingerprint reader, which was even better. Unlocking a phone has never felt as effortless on my iPhones; after all these years, it continues to be a nuisance. Face ID is fine, but you have to hold the phone right in front of your face (and its angle sensitivity is far less forgiving than on my Android phones, where it recognizes you even at an angle--unlike the iPhone, where you practically have to hold it parallel to your face). Plus, there are countless situations where you cannot or do not want to pick up your phone from a table just to align it with your face. In those cases, I am forced to type in my passcode, whereas an on-screen fingerprint scanner would be a billion times more convenient. I am mostly baffled that such a "solved," trivial problem in the Android ecosystem continues to be a topic or a matter of "choice" on iPhones.

I prefer touch ID over face ID as well.

Have you used the one on Duo? It’s in a weird position, essentially always gets in the way on what you’re doing. Just feels like a compromise on least bad form factor that apple engineers said was feasible placed at the least bad spot that apple UX designers could come up with. But that least-bad is still just not great, not “apple great”

May I ask why.

In my case, I'd like to have both. Face ID works well with a motorcycle helmet, so I don't have to take off my gloves (I can roughly work the phone with the gloves on). But if I'm in the mountains, wearing sunglasses and a winter coat that hugs my chin and a hat that goes down to my eyebrows, face id struggles. I sometimes don't wear gloves in this situation, so touch ID would be usable.

'Elite North Korean hackers' blamed for $6.3B Binance hack (theguardian.com)

How do they launder the coins generally? Given you traceable (most) cryptocurrency is by design, it seems you could sanction anyone who transacts with them? I understand it's likely not that simple, though.

Sophisticated? Perhaps. But could also be run of the mill honey trap/romantic approach. Easier to slip by 2fas through a front door.

My money is on an inside job.

It’s a pity. If he hadn’t been born in North Korea like that, he would have become a truly great programmer. My life is really hard and painful, but sometimes I think I’m better off than they are.

Maybe if he hadn't been born in North Korea he'd have lived his dream of opening a coffee shop; perhaps he got into hacking there because it's the only way to support his family.

To be fair, people can't afford COL by opening a coffee shop in this day and age.

> At some point it clicked to me that crypto people don’t really care about the utility. Main purpose is creating new players in the world with immense amounts of power. There are many types of crypto people. Some of them are not crypto people per se, but people who saw crypto as a means to an end. Among them, there are plenty of people who seem to be invested in sheer fraud. It's also important to note that there are many sides to the scheme. There's for example the instant transactions side, and the long term bet in scarcity. For example, Russia has been leaning heavily on crypto to circumvent sanctions due to their invasion of Ukraine. https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/08/russias-use-of-crypto-schemes.html > In the end, it did produce a lot of rich people out of thin air, and I guess, served its purpose. It was not out of thin air. This is literally a grift where the people holding the bag saw their money find its way to the pockets of those who got rich from it.

>the people holding the bag saw their money find its way to the pockets of those who got rich This is the key issue. Crypto by itself created little to no actual additional value. Especially when it devolved into just another centralized currency with less government oversight. So the whole thing was a zero-sum game. People only got rich because they made others poor.

Why would Russia need crypto, when they can trade with China or buy through middle men in Dubai or similar places ?

Exactly. It's called the oracle problem. It's the Achilles heel of the whole idea. And it's unsolvable. As soon as you want to trade some coin for something real, you need an oracle. Wanna buy a flat in a world where (for argument's sake) even the ownership of that asset is tracked on a blockchain? Let's say I come home from holidays and someone else lives there. How do I then prove it's mine? Because it says so in some computer? Someone has to believe that is true and let me enforce that ownership tie. Those persons (a judge, the police, even if robots by then) are the oracle. And a more common scenario than theft is btw legal ownership transfer. What if I die somehow before giving the blockchain keys needed for that to someone? How will my brother inherit the flat? Oracle.

"Oracle" being the cover for crypto bros who dont want to admit they need "the legal system" to fix thier mess. Its all idiology and freedom when you are poor but once you actually own something of value, like a flat, suddenly you want lawyers and police to keep you safe from bad people.

Their haul is over 20% of North Korea’s GDP.

It's well understood that crypto (scams, hacks) has contributed a third to half of the DPRK's foreign exchange income over the last few years.

So a sixth?

> North Korea’s GDP Would note that nobody—including probably the Kims—knows what this figure is.

Respected Comrade knows everything.

Pico CSS is no longer maintained (github.com/picocss)

> To stay relevant, Pico CSS would need a full rewrite: plain modern CSS instead of Sass, built on features it doesn't use today (OKLCH colors, cascade layers, Popover, anchor positioning) with fallbacks for older browsers Why? Why? Why? I hate how everyone seems convinced they need to adopt the latest and greatest browser features just to stay relevant. I hate oklch and I hate Tailwind popularized it. I don't care how scientifically accurate it is at representing human color perception. It's a PITA to understand a new type of color system, and learn to tweak it, especially when HSL/RGB just worked fine.

I'm pretty sure I'd hate Tailwind, but please leave OKLCH alone. It is actually ok (as opposed to RGB and HSL which very much aren't ok).

This is a strange take, sorry, OKLCH is simply better and it's not that complicated to understand?

OKLCH is as you say unambiguously better and IMO easier to understand than RGB, where choosing relative adaptations of colour is basically pretty fraught. Alas, in terms of the software people use to mock up designs, very few desktop apps support it. HSL is, for now, the more practical option.

> So it's not like those "latest and greatest browser features" are there just to complicate your life, but actually the contrary. What justification do you have to adopt and replace this with existing solutions with such urgency? Have you researched its compatibility? Are you providing any fallback? This just seem to like 1) you are not applying your mind why you want this, 2) faulty premise that it makes it easier, because in reality your software never reaches a point of maturity, where its just "done", and 3) shiny object syndrome ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiny_object_syndrome )

I think you two should take this rather pointed dispute outside and resolve it with a duel ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duel )

As you're mainly complaining about CSS layout features being used here: For a long time we were forced to use the ugliest hacks imaginable to get to the nice (responsive, design-minimalist(!)) layouts we wanted, because CSS layout tools were utter archaic bs, for years on end, because browsers iterated so slowly. Then things started speeding up, and we're getting to make better websites (and apps!) that are way easier to design (with the correct design theory equivalents), implenent (with less code) and easier to maintain (i.e., understand). And you're not missing out if you just keep your browser up to date. I know it sucks if you're on an unsupported device that doesn't get any updates, fair. But let's face it: 99% of the population is better off security-wise when we're not enabling them to run unpatched devices forever.

Security updates have nothing to do with level of support for css3 modules. Much of the issues of layout were already solved more than 12 yrs back, ie when css3 became mainstream. The issue is devs are unaware about different levels of css3 or just plain ignorant about it. Are you aware about the different levels of css3? Are you even aware there are levels to css3? Why are these frameworks not listing them and simply saying that they comply with web standards? Which specific web standards do they comply? Any new css3 feature should have a fallback if they say they comply to web standards, which these frameworks don’t add. Basically you want to adopt latest w3c guideline but completely ignore wcag guidelines on accessibility - https://www.thewcag.com/principles/robust Why should some population forced to suffer because of your ignorance. I am sorry if I am blunt, but your comment about polarising users is rude. Which comes back to my main point, Devs are simply not educating themselves about the fundamentals of web design.

All of them failed my ten second evaluation. It's amazing how many mediocre CSS frameworks that are out there.

Despite its idiotic naming, I still use PureCSS[0]. Not sure why they keep maintaining it. I don't mind, nothing ever seems to change anyway. How's your ten second evaluation of it? [0]: https://pure-css.github.io/

I haven't done frontend dev in a while, but one thing stands out to me here... they call out using OKLCH colours, which I had to look up. (For the uninitiated, this is a cylindrical projection of the also-new-to-me Oklab colour space, which appears largely unrelated to the older CIE L*a*b* colour space). Do people actually use this? In particular, before LLMs ate the world, I mean. When I did frontend, it was hex, or if you felt fancy, `rgba(...)` (though at that point named colours had mostly fallen out of style). Is using these less-intuitive colour encodings made more practical through the use of CSS variables?

> Is using these less-intuitive colour encodings made more practical through the use of CSS variables? I find it more intuitive: when I want to mix colors, or algorithmically choose colors, only oklch works to give decent results. Maybe you want to severely darken/lighten a color on a page when the user hovers over it - doing it in RGB or HSL results in a color that does not go with the existing colors. Doing it in OKLCH does.

I really enjoyed using Pico CSS, but I understand the choice. Thank you Lucas Larroche for building Pico CSS and sharing it with us.

With AI he could have made the updates to "stay relevant" as he called it. That seems easier than ever. PicoCSS has brand recognition that shouldn't be throw away.