randito

What are you doing to avoid sending your personal info to non-trusted "whatever models?" I wouldn't trust some of the cheaper models to have zero data retention, etc.

Can you talk a little about this? Are you committing transaction logs?

Disagree. I've seen so many PR slop grenades -- they are essentially unreadable. I'd prefer a paragraph or two human written explanations. I suspect people are just taking the default AI text -- which is way too wordy.

> using a database engine we built on top of FoundationDB: a distributed key-value store

it would be interesting to see their experiences with using FoundationDB. this feels like a tech that is amazing if only it had more information and practical examples of how to use, leverage and manage it. the client is complicated and needs expertise to use correctly. would love it if there was more info about it all.

> antitrust laws. Even more so since they’re bundling their AI products with their search monopoly.

couldn't this just be framed / spun as just using search data as training? i don't seem being bundled enough to run afoul with anti-trust.

(McKenna tangent). I like this version of that talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL0yfxDe6jE. It's about 12 minutes and animated with some hand-drawn whiteboard drawings. Good stuff.

> In my last performance review, my manager was actually surprised when I told him that I am now more a manager of my own work than actually doing the work.

I think this is very telling. Unless you have a good manager who is paying attention, a lot of them are clueless and just see the hype of 10x ing your developers and don't care about the nuance of (as they say) all the surrounding bits to writing code. And unfortunately, they just repeat this to the people above them, who also read the hype and just see $$ of reducing headcount. (sorry, venting a little)

Great link. I've always been drawn to sqlite3 just from a simplicity and operational point of view. And with tools like "make it easy to replcate" Litestream and "make it easy to use" sqlite-utils, it just becomes easier.

And one of the first patterns I wanted to use was this. Just a read-only event log that's replicated, that is very easy to understand and operate. Kafka is a beast to manage and run. We picked it at my last company -- and it was a mistake, when a simple DB would have sufficed.

https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils https://litestream.io/

I've been through a Vista Equity acquisition. It was not pretty -- they slashed, consolidated and basically ran their one-size-fits-all playbook. The brought in their crew -- which is totally expected -- and then bought other companies in the same vertical. Of course, they all had different tech stacks.

(like ya said, operators is the right word. it felt icky)

At least for the first year, the acquired teams were able to run more or less the same but with new hyped-up-overly-aggressive Vista hotshot managers and then the sh*t-from-above just started raining down.

Also, they hired the worst sw architect / person I've ever had to work with. He wasted so much time and money.

Thanks for the reply. Summary: Here's this really cool thing we're doing! Oh, are you wrote something exotic for it? Nope, just regular Erlang goodness that's been around 20 years.

(Disclaimer: Newbie checking but still curious).

Are you using libluster or Distributed Erlang to reach the clusters? Or just simple networking over the Fly network.

> That will find or place an Elixir process on the cluster and rpc the target node with our code.

Is this similar to what you did with Flame? Or just a refinement of that idea.

If you look at Elixir keynote for Phoenix.new -- a cool agentic coding tool -- you'll see some hints about a browser control using a API tool call. It's called "web" in the video.

Video: https://youtu.be/ojL_VHc4gLk?t=2132

More discussion: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/23/phoenix-new/

Interesting project. I'm glad Vue is getting the same attention as the Svelte one. And props for digging in to optimize the payloads, and making it diff-able.

Can you just drop existing Vue components in there? Or are their LiveVue specific things you need to add?

Would love to read about some of the techniques for how you accomplished this.

> a consistent path to interacting with the world e.g sms, mail, weather, social, etc.

Here's an interesting toy-project where someone hooked up agents to calendars, weather, etc and made a little game interface for it. https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/04/12/how-i-made-a-useful-...

You may want to consider Elixir instead. It has an easier syntax and is (don't quote me on this) equivalent in function and purpose with Erlang. Plus you get lots of other goodies like LiveView (notebooks) and a good web stack (Phoenix).

What a great timely tip. Was just looking for good direction on how to do this. Thanks!

For people wanting to dig into this idea some more, I'd recommend the book by Austin Kleon called "Steal Like An Artist." Also, there is some nuance in the book about copying and stealing, without being a thief.

If you want a better discussion about tariffs and their impact on the Boardgame Industry:

https://stonemaiergames.com/the-math-of-tariffs/

As others have said, avoid this article. It doesn't add anything meaningful to the discussion.

To state the obvious (again), it's shocking the rate of progress is with these tools. If this is 2 years of progress, what does 10-20 look like?

Totally agree. A general-purpose solution that ties together different messy interfaces will win in the long run -- i.e the IP protocol, copy-paste, browsers. In these cases, they provide a single-way for different aspects of computing to collaborate. As mentioned before, semantic web initiatives did not succeed and I think there's an important lesson there.

My experience with Notion keyboard use is different. It's not 100% VIM hands-on-keyboard mouse-free but it's getting there. If there was only a "insert after this block" shortcut.

My favorite is to type something then /turnh3 where /turn let's you turn the block into something else.

For people who want to learn biochemsistry and subsequently be in awe and the complexity and mechanisms, there's a great beginner book, The Machinery of Life. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6601267-the-machinery-of...

I found my way there after an Alan Kay video -- OPSLA 1997 - The computer revolution hasnt happened yet: https://youtu.be/oKg1hTOQXoY?t=1787

On the subject of awe, here's another from Kurszsegat - The Most Complex Language in the World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYPFenJQciw

(newbie checking) tsnet is a really interested idea -- that an application can act like a device with networking baked in. that applicatin access can be controlled at the network level via the tailescale ACLs.

are there any equivalents in other languages?

There's also:

Paper Programs:

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

https://github.com/janpaul123/paperprograms

There's also a dead-project: Tiny lands

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26751374

Here are some of my notes for Dynamicland:

https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/

https://twitter.com/redblobgames/status/907253802931126272

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJc2esBVwAAnj4X?format=jpg

https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/nic...

Oh, that's nice! One of my jobs -- a Ruby on Rails job at that -- was a top 50 small business in Fortune 500. It really is transformative when you work for a great company.

Your description kind of reminds me of this post -- "Being Glue". https://noidea.dog/glue. It's an important "pseudo" role that doesn't get enough credit, IMO.

In some states, there is something called a Lady Bird Deed. It lets people keep their homes while still being eligible for Medicaid. Plus, it avoids the probate process.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/estate-planning...

At a company that large and that diverse, the biggest gain in using protocol buffers would be having an official schema and versioning for the messages. Serialization is nice (but not 60% improvement nice). But having some structure around messages is the big win.

Austin Kleon's books are not hustle porn to me. In fact, it comes across as the opposite. It feels like tips for being creative. Some of the advice is for unplugging, pursuing side projects, practicing procrastination -- things that do not sound like your typical "top 100 tips to succeed" tripe. The third book -- Show Your Work -- could be taken as hustle porn. But if you read it in context with the others, it doesn't seem that way. Just a way to get your work out there without being spammy. If it seems hustle porn, you might be missing the point.