Same answers you'd use beyond "we don't want to pay an engineer". 100x shorter iteration speed, and the associated workflow (stream of microrevisions and spaghetti throwing), top quartile outputs in many langs/styles/contexts without having to source, hire, and maintain a fleet of separate specialists who can quit when they feel like it.
I'm torn on the scale thing. It definitely seems net negative. But I think we collectively underestimate just how deeply sick the existing thing already is. We're repulsed by image gen at scale because it breaks our expectation that images are at least somewhat based on reality, that they reflect the natural world or what we can really expect from a product, from a company, from the future. But that was already a bad expectation: when's the last time you saw a mcdonalds meal that looked like the advert? Or a sub-30$ amazon product that wasn't a complete piece of shit? Advertisements were already actively malicious fantasies to exploit the way our brains react to pictures. They're just fantasies that required whole teams of humans doing weird bullshit with lighting and photoshop, and I'm not sure that's much better. It was already slop. All the grieving we do about the loss of truth, or the extent to which corps will gleefully spray us with mind-breaking waterfalls of outright lies, I think those ships sailed a long time ago. The disgust, deceit, the rage we feel about genAI slop is the way we should have felt about all commercials since at least the 80s IMO.
> Advertisements were already actively malicious fantasies to exploit the way our brains react to pictures. They're just fantasies that required whole teams of humans doing weird bullshit with lighting and photoshop, and I'm not sure that's much better.
This is a good point. My gut reaction is “well at least someone was paid to do it and can continue to keep society/the economy going ”.
I can see the other side where that’s a soulless job. Not sure what’s worse. Soulless job where your skills apply or even less jobs in a competitive industry.
Same way it does with nukes. It's Mutually Assured Destruction. If there's a credible promise that attack will result in a total boardwipe, there's strong incentive not to attack, because then China's fucked too. It's crude but it mostly works.
What's interesting is that I don't hear much about China spinning up chip fabs. I haven't gone looking, and I imagine they're doing it, the way we are with the CHIPS act etc. If china could get within a few notches of SOTA (in both nm and throughput), their attack position would be much stronger, but it'd still be a generationally brutal experience for most of humanity.
An alternative client for Bambu 3D printers that plays nicely with network sandboxing and multiple printers. It's great.
Bambu's printers are functionally best-in-class, but intrusive and proprietary in their approach to software. Their first-time setup "requires" linking to a cloud account or using a bambu app via QR code, and they've been known to disable functionality in updates, making a device-managed "LAN-only" mode unsafe to trust. Their apps also just suck. Camera feed is janky and LAN-only sync often requires knowing an access code, serial, IP, and then it fails most of the time anyway, silently, without saving values to retry. And that's before you start doing things like a custom VLAN/SSID to properly wall them off, at which point you can ping them from terminal but the apps break completely.
Anyway, turns out that at least on A1 and P1S, there's enough functionality available through traditional means to skip the apps entirely. The handshake works fine across VLANs and utils like print status, file upload, and auto-start are available. Even the camera is reliable when pulled as a series of still images.
I had opus vibe out a replacement front end that gives me a simple upload and monitor UI for my A1, and it just kept hitting stretch goals. I added support for multiple printers so you can see them stacked on a single page and manage all of them from one place. And it even works on just-unboxed models that have never been through the official setup. SSID info on the SD card, it joins the network, immediately accessible via IP. Zero association/contact with any cloud or app, fully sandboxed/offline. Wrapped in a lil python launcher so I can run it from the dock instead of in the browser (just my preference).
Will probably open source it soon.
IMO this kind of thing is the answer to "what do you have to show for your LLM use". Cost was about $65 because I was using opus 4.6 with no regard for efficiency, and because there were multiple total refactors of two apps. An annoying problem I deal with almost every day now has a permanent, personalized solution that took me ~3 hours and would never have otherwise happened.
The network itself is also such a project. I previously hobbled together a working unifi setup, but it was primitive and brittle. With LLM guidance, I was able to build something much more robust. TrueNAS scale for file backup that also runs Frigate for POE cam mgmt (similarly sandboxed), raspi running the unifi controller, another for homeassistant, etc. Absolutely miserable few days getting that dialed, but now that we're out the other side, it's very nice. Reminds me of building the house. You suffer more upfront in exchange for something that fits you like a glove. Very rewarding.
Capture: notion and twitter have been best, obsidian and regular markdown have been worst.
Notion is good because of how they support a calendar view where you can put documents in a day's cell, and then see a list view that's just a stack of those notes. I keep a daily diary or youarehere type doc, where I'll have checklists and notes on small things that don't merit changes to a dedicated page. There's arguably a "retrieval" breakdown in that I don't really go back through these to update them or collate them into bigger pages.
Twitter is good because it's low friction and I can just go off, which is fun, and because they have decent search, so I can quote-tweet a related thing and sort of thread the graph together. If you're talking about BASB you're probably familiar with this corner of twitter. visakanv etc. This method works well if you use it enough to be able to recall your other notes. I think there's something special about the twitter format here too: it discourages whole-page thoughts in favor of sequential pithy bits, which i think are easier to both link and recall.
Execution: I would like a chat frontend (signal/SMS/etc) where I can just talk to my projects, ask the status of things, get suggestions, etc. Push based, rather than pull based, execution.
Active project context: I've dropped todoist-like things since they're limited in what they can express, and notion/markdown can do todolists etc. I tend to have lists in markdown style that live in two places: my daily diary/todo docs, and the actual projects themselves. This is messy and it would be lovely if notion or similar had the concept of a "todo block" and could collate all of them into a single view where I could understand association, prune and dedupe, etc. Even better if there's an agent that does or suggests cleanup whenever a new block enters.
Larger projects will get docs of their own, lots of sprawl and notes etc, and then some formalization around a spec or something. I move these to an archive folder when I'm done with the notes and the final document is fleshed out, but I'd love an agent review that makes sure I'm not leaving things on the cutting board, and that I've handled all the todos etc in my notes pages.
I don't use bidirectional linking/tagging enough, but I really should, since I want to be able to coin keywords for particular concepts inline, and then be able to access their overview and see everything that mentions them in a graphlike way.
Calendar is definitely a much used component day to day. For planning, etc. But it's not a source of truth. Everything on a calendar should just be a proxy/link to a more robust doc.
Hard nos: My take on privacy policies for things like this is "show me your incentives and I'll show you your outcomes". That is to say, any company that can survive an attempt to profit from data fuckery will do so. Your data retention policy should include technically unambiguous red lines that are not to be crossed, and define specific per-user monetary payout in the event that a breach occurs, to include clauses that cause user payout to occur before eg preferred stockholders get liquidation preference and drain the possible payout pool. Routine third party audits of how user data is handled/retained/distributed etc. I recognize that this is a bit unhinged, but that's what signaling credibility looks like. A company says "we won't sell your data" and I say "or what" and there's hemming and hawing because nothing will happen to them. If the answer is "this company dies on the spot and our investors get completely fucked", now we can talk.
I think AI service pricing applies here: generally, if it seems neat I could be in for $20 easy, and if it's genuinely game changing, $200/mo is completely reasonable to ask.
re Migration cost: I expect to be able to get 100% of my data in a reasonable non-proprietary format. If that's some blend of markdown, json, sqlite, whatever, fine.
But the bottom line for me, where does my second brain break down the most? It doesn't talk back to me. I want it to understand what I've got going on, and my idiosyncracies. I want to present it with new information and have it be like "oh, this relates to X" or, periodically, to pop up with something like "I'm noticing this correlation / related idea in areas X, Y, Z... does that resonate? Is there something here?" Again, push vs pull. My second brain should be a proactive chatbot. "Noise" is so often thought about in terms of frequency, but it's really about insight quality. If my response to 80% of push notis is "damn, good call" then you can send one every 5 minutes.
I also hear no mention of one's personal life. I don't really make the distinction. It's all in there. I should be able to bitch to this chatbot about my manager, have it know about that background, and riff with me to navigate hard convos. I should be able to talk to it about side projects I have going on, and let it thread those into my calendar. Etc. Notion is already an adequate second brain for work. Nobody has yet built an adequate second brain for the home. My house, my relationship(s), my side projects, my own diarying and self reflection... these are the contents of my brain that matter.
Email in bio if you want to talk. I'm a design technologist and happy to riff / give feedback.
This “push and pull” framework and the perspective that “noise equals insight quality” are precisely the core constraints I wanted to center my design around.
Two follow-up questions:
1.If the connector adopts a chat-first mode (similar to Signal/SMS), could this generate excessive noise? Since human input often carries emotion and subjective bias, my original intent was for the AI to serve as an emotionless, relatively neutral bridge.
2.Regarding trust mechanisms: Before implementing stricter governance measures (auditing/penalties), should we establish foundational safeguards through local-first storage + explicit export (md/json/sqlite)?
If you're open to deeper discussion and love to explore this further. I put additional information and an optional feedback form in my HN profile.
I wouldn't say it was oneshotted, but it did produce a working MVP in one Plan execution. Meaning, I went back & forth a few times about requirements, it built a plan, and then CC spent just under 15 minutes writing the code. Once I got the credentials plugged in, the core integrations (Slack, gmail, IMAP, iCloud calendar) and agent loop did work. I can share the initial message if you're curious.
This is very compellingly written but I've found a lot of it not to be true for me. It is gray and rainy and a bummer outside most of the time, so frequent sights of that are like frequent sights of politics news. In my home office, I don't have much of a (detectable) background thread running for who could be at my office door, but opening the window and seeing people walking their dogs etc directly at the edge of my unfenced front yard absolutely causes that sense to flare up, even if they're all harmless and I recognize half of them.
Getting the room cozy and psychologically satisfying was a huge deal, and I"m really glad I did it, but the end result is much closer to horse blinders. I have ADHD, so distraction minimization is the name of the game.
We're all used to legislators with foundational misunderstandings of both firearms and technology, but this one is particularly unhinged.
It uses a highly invasive, trivially circumvented rule to target two cohorts, while ultimately impacting neither:
1. High volume, low complexity: These are your glock switches (overwhelming majority of the illegal firearm parts trade), 80% lower kits, etc. You catch these at customs in the case of most temu switches, and at distribution time by creeping public IG accts for the ones that are actually printed. Blockers here aren't technical. Customs needs to deeply inspect small things, LEOs need resourcing to pursue the long tail of digital market vendors, prosecutors need to find the political will to hand a looottttt of 15 year olds to the ATF. This bill doesn't do those things.
2. Low volume, high complexity: this is your FGC9s, all-but-barrel printed guns, etc. This crowd is tiny, niche, slow, and basically unstoppable for as long as copper wire and magnets continue to exist. Overindexing on manufacturing here is silly, as there are vastly more regular illegal guns trading hands, and anything that works on those will work here too.
I've done some of this using the daisy seed. For time based effects like reverb, the memory/hardware constraints can be spicy. Definitely maxed out the seed hardware before achieving the (very long) level of reverb I wanted.
The hardware descriptions here seem on the light side. I'd want to be confident that it can handle intense time based effects.
It's promising that they seem to allow arbitrary write to the device, and only charge for tokens for the people that require the prompt playground.
Looking forward to see where this goes.
As an aside: building an ear-pleasing FDN reverb on an obscure-ish board with intense hardware optimization needs has been one of my favorite barometers for the abilities of new LLM models.
I'm torn on the scale thing. It definitely seems net negative. But I think we collectively underestimate just how deeply sick the existing thing already is. We're repulsed by image gen at scale because it breaks our expectation that images are at least somewhat based on reality, that they reflect the natural world or what we can really expect from a product, from a company, from the future. But that was already a bad expectation: when's the last time you saw a mcdonalds meal that looked like the advert? Or a sub-30$ amazon product that wasn't a complete piece of shit? Advertisements were already actively malicious fantasies to exploit the way our brains react to pictures. They're just fantasies that required whole teams of humans doing weird bullshit with lighting and photoshop, and I'm not sure that's much better. It was already slop. All the grieving we do about the loss of truth, or the extent to which corps will gleefully spray us with mind-breaking waterfalls of outright lies, I think those ships sailed a long time ago. The disgust, deceit, the rage we feel about genAI slop is the way we should have felt about all commercials since at least the 80s IMO.
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