Thoughts

Link based "commentary" style posts, commenting on a web link

844 posts latest post 2026-04-16
Publishing rhythm
Apr 2026 | 18 posts

astral silently dropped a clever uvx.sh to help builders reach a wider audience, no longer does a user need to have python installed prior to installing a python cli. It does have a hard requirement on having curl or wget available.

Such a good interview @lexfridman is such a talented interview. It’s so cool to see the other side of this. For weeks we’ve heard about the story of the name change, we’ve seen everyone shitting on the security model, buying up all the mac minis in existance, fear mongering not to install this thing. @steipete.me has such a cool story from the beginning talking about making this thing fun and exciting. Giving it a personality that is not “You are absolutely right”. The story of changing the name twice, and getting pwnd on every step the first time and nailing it the second time is incredible. Dude is having fun trying to make the thing he wants in the world exist.

If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive usi…

Not surprising theirs a lag, between the models getting better, the tools getting better, and the masses getting better at using them, it takes time. This is still quite a hockey stick. I’m wondering how many are not posting on Show HN embarrassed they built something they know nothing about and afraid to get questions. I have no idea how anyone would get this ratio, but if I were a betting man, Id bet the ratio of build/show went way up. Plus we are probably getting a ton of people who have never heard of HN start building cool bespoke things for themselves and thats it, they use it, they love it, they might tell/show a friend.

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If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive usi…

Not surprising theirs a lag, between the models getting better, the tools getting better, and the masses getting better at using them, it takes time. This is still quite a hockey stick. I’m wondering how many are not posting on Show HN embarrassed they built something they know nothing about and afraid to get questions. I have no idea how anyone would get this ratio, but if I were a betting man, Id bet the ratio of build/show went way up. Plus we are probably getting a ton of people who have never heard of HN start building cool bespoke things for themselves and thats it, they use it, they love it, they might tell/show a friend.

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I tried this flow [of running an opencode server on tailscale] on day one of getting opencode, I wanted to prompt from my phone while were were running lights at the theater. It kinda worked, but the ui was really bad on phone, hard to use and the experience overall–it felt buggy. Happy to see they are making improvements and it might now be ready for some real use.

https://dropper.wayl.one/file/9065fcb2-5e40-479c-967e-498bc9bb6a4f.mp4

I’m jelous… as I was getting better, I got kicked down again. cant hold a conversation without coughing. Its hitting people from all over like crazy this year. so glad its just the flu and not something seriously harmful for hospitalization.

This post was filled with real life, snark, entertainment, feelings. I get a lot of these emails that claim they can change my SEO game if I give them 500, for a site making 0, Link partnerships from small startups. A lot of these are so automated that if I do respond I dont even get a response. I’ve responded to many simply asking what is this about, I get 10 others just like you a week. Can you tell me what exactly you want and what each of us benefit from it, how did you find me. All normal questions, they almost always result in crickets, no response, maybe its time to implement a Billie for more snark.

What a goat, speedrunning silksong at a competitive pace, live, with live audience, while co hosting, and raising $2M for Prevent Cancer Foundation. CEEN moves in ways that do not compute with my brain, everything looks so simple, things that take me so long are done in a few swipes. Watching this it really make silkspear look OP, this thing does so much damage if you never take damage and can use it continuously without needing silk for healing.

The answer is I do it habitually. If there’s a big enough idea I’ve had floating around in my head and I think others might find it useful / interesting then I usually think it’s worth logging it somewhere. If I don’t, I’ll likely just keep thinking about it so might as well get it out of my head and on the internet where people can find it.

This is how you do it. If you want to do something, you need to make it a habit. Something you crave, something you need. I need to write my ideas down in this blog, it helps me index ideas for later, but more importantly it helps me flesh them out and think through real things.

Congrats on 1k, your site is awesome Hammy

Never believe in absolutes, see what I did there. The hype bros will take you to the extremes, ai will take your jobs in six months or be burned to the ground in six months. How about its useful now and will be more useful in six months. If you turned off the hype bro feed for six months you would probably be fine, in fact you would probably be better off for not capturing so much noise along the way. AI has gone the way of next js framework, it churns fast, hype bros are always an expert that know exactly whats best for everyone. It changes fast, what was the best last week might be dead next week. In fact getting to know what works well for you and knowing that tool really well for a longer period will take you farther.

Salesforce gets pwnd by the ai hype bros and killed its reputation with employees, letting them know where they truely stand with them. 4k people sounds like a lot, its probably a big chunk of savings, but was it worth the loss of reputation? There must be a better way to give this a trial run that lets them understand this before disrupting the lives of real people right???

I thought this was an interesting take from Simon. I’ve been hearing him consistently say there will be more demand for software engineering in the future. More companies will have the ability and need to deal with software applications, but fewer of us will be hand editing any code. I thought this was an interesting interaction in the clip.

Uh Simon, what do you got for us?

I’ve just got the one. I think the act

of the the the job of being paid money to type code into a computer Yeah.

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In all of the documentaries I’ve seen on how hard it is to recycle plastic, how hard it is to separate all the small pieces from each other, how expensive it is, dirty it is, how just plain ineffective we are at doing it I’ve never seen this angle. In a nutshell the other side of the equation is that as we pull natural gas out of shale is that we pull ethylene out as a byproduct. We don’t even ask for it, it just comes with the methane gas that we are going for. So as we drill, Frack, and mine this out to heat our homes and create electricity we are stuck with all of this ethylene. It’s terrible for the environment, just like methane it’s a rough greenhouse gas. Companies are allowed to flare off a certain amount, they can push some down the pipe, but are still left with tons leftover that they practically give away. Turns out that this stuff is very cheap and very much wants to be turned into plastic. Very clean food grade plastic, very easily and cheaply compared to recycling. Excess is a big problem that needs solutions, but it has hard problems at both ends of the situation that don’t make it easy for anyone trying to take care of it.

Extract text from MDX files, removing J…

Damn this one is getting some reach, I’ve seen it from Simon Willison and Justin Searls and t3.gg. I feel for Adam, He has built a fantastic product that the world is running with, something we all needed. Something that everyone laughs at turns their nose up “ppft I don’t need that” the first time they see it, but once they try people get it, and a lot of them like it...

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While the non deterministic nature of llms scare the heck out of me in the sense of just cutting it loose on my writing. letting it go through all of my files and just edit them. I do like the idea of mundane tools like “desaturate”, “Gaussian blur”, evolving out of it for text. I don’t yet see this with the tools we have now, but it will be interesting to see them evolve.

file over app is a fantastic philosophy laid out well and concisely documented very well in this post. The idea is that tools will change, we will want to use different tools, different editors, different computers over time. What’s likely to outlast everything is plain text files that we can interact with a wide variety of tools. Not encrypted in dedicated formats that die with our tools, but in plain text where a computer from 2160 is likey as capable of reading the file as one from 1960 would be.

I actually like linus’s take here. My parents dropped $4k (~$8k in todays money) on a computer when I was a kid, (which turned into something too $$ to let me touch at that point). I played some educational games that no one else has heard of and I’ve long forgotten along with an early ciivilization game. It was e-waste in 2 years we maybe kept it 5, and it was barely working. Contrast this to my PC now I spent $2k on 3 years ago refurb from 2017, and it has no signs of age from me, does everything I need it to. Ram crisis sucks, the outright reason behind it sucks. But on the bright side you can still get a baller build for less than you could late 90s without inflation. The industry is not there for consumers right now, we had better times, but its still not bad times. Keep the hope alive that good times will come.

Yeah there’s some basics, you know things you might expect like using standard error and standard out correctly. One thing I’ll say on that because I think this is commonly misunderstood, standard error is not for errors, it’s for any information that isn’t part of the normal output. So you know often times that’s warnings and errors, but it might just be progress information. You know anytime that you just need to have something go to the user that’s what it’s there for." (6:15 - 6:42)

I’ve definitely done this sin in my own tooling before, and it does make things harder to use. I think I still take err/out at face value. I really like the translation Jeff gave here, one is for normal output, i.e. what the user asked for and the other is extra information. So if I wanted to list something and pipe it into something else, stdout only captures the list, thats it. if you have a bunch of information about config warnings, showing environment, are you sure questions, none of that is captured.

I really like a good link blog, it’s the old timers version of a reaction video. It gives me new posts to discover from other writers, and gives additional perspectives from ones I trust enough to add to my RSS.

It’s nice to have a place where I can jot down a few notes, fire off my reaction, and nobody can respond to it lol. At least, not in any easy, friction-less way. You’d have to go out of your way to read my commentary, find my contact info, and fire off a message (critiquing or praising). That’s how I like it. Cuts through the noise.

Ditto Jim. I’ve oddly found mine more useful to search than blog posts, zettlekaten, notes, whatever you want to call them. For me writing something down makes it more concrete in my brain that I’m less likely to need to go reference, but I often need to re read or references posts from others, this is where

Such a good breakdown of the leerob article, that is hitting everywhere right now. Feels like sanity was just a bit late to getting things right and it would have just worked for them how leerob was trying to use it, but MCP sucked so he jumped.

Reading their loose descriptions of a CMS, its an interesting realization to realize I’m rolling my own cms. I kinda feel like theres a few inspiration features to take from here, but I have no regrets. As a developer I like being able to build my own tools, I like being able to search and edit from nvim, and not have to write GROQ queries, and transforms. There were some really good points here that as I get more and more content on my personal site, I do kinda feel it. I’m surprised there is not more tooling that does some of these things for piles of markdown.

pinning this to re-read later, feels like a lot of good tidbits here.

It really feels like M$ is coming down hard on GH lately to make some unfavorable decisions for users. Maybe there is good reason for all of these changes from a business perspective, I can’t judge that. But right now there are some really great alternatives out there. I’m so grateful for what forgejo and gittea offer, and at the same time seeing the community get split up from GH is sad.

Silksong DLC announcement already, we waited 8 years for the game, and are getting DLC’s months after launch. Dudes I haven’t even finished the game get, maybe not even half way. It’s amazing. Its amazing that these three make such a kick ass game with great art, story, voice, gameplay, and now drop a free dlc in 2026.

Kelsey has a really good lightbulb moment here about platform engineering.

“if you had to do all the deployments for the entire company what questions would you ask of the development team?”

That’s your api, your platform, this is your product as a platform engineer. It’s not images, docker, terraform, hcl, yaml, kubernetes, It’s building out the right api for your company to deploy its products effectively.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdUbTyvrfKo&t=429s

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I did not realize all the places to be considered as AI water usage. Hank goes deep highlighting all of the sources he is aware of, most reports leave off a lot of these sources, some reports go maybe too far adding sources that may not make sense depending on the question you are asking.

As someone that runs computers with gpus in their house, and watching LTT make AIO installs on GPUs I’ve wondered what would AI use water for, now I understand that its a lot. No where near agriculture, but a lot.

Unlike running a gpu in your house, potentially with a closed loop AIO, data centers are filled with hardware making heat and it all must go somewhere. Current technology has this done with evaporative cooling, i.e. its not a closed loop, the water goes into the sky.

He goes on to point out that its not just the data center, using water, but also chip fab and power plants.

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Age verification hitting bluesky?? At least its not yet requiring your govt issued id or anything, but stepping that direction. I don’t know how I feel about age checks, does it actually protect kids when parents aren’t involved? I can’t say anything there, but it really does feel like its about ready to hurt the rest of us, requiring us to whip out ids and personal data for anything done online. This is a real problem that is hard to solve, and reasons why it has not been solved yet.

damn this is a rough one. A users entire home directory removed by claude code from an rm command.

rm -rf tests/ patches/ plan/ ~/

Reading the first half of that command it LGTM. If you had approved rm, you are hosed. If this is inside a larger script its running, you really gotta read close. This one still feels pretty obvious, but I can imagine some bash doing some nasty things I miss if I read it and understand it let alone glance at it.

I’ll take this as a reminder that I really need to be paying full-ass attention to agents, and moving towards a better sandbox for them, something in docker, maybe something like distrobox that is a magic wrapper over podman that just gives you the things you need for what it does. Something that starts up with access to start web servers, run agentic cli of choice, see project, git commit. It feels like the right thing has a lot of what distrobox does, but distrobox has too much and would be prone to this...

This looks like a really good low cost option for some workholding. There is never a shortage of workholding in the shop and everything has a place. Having something low cost that you can have a bunch of makes a lot of sense. Maybe you still need a super scucum unit for really clamping the shit out of something, but this easily covers most use cases in a garage workshop. I want to build it.

Moore’s Law is Dead pitches a pretty ingenious sku for the new gabecube aka steam machine. I fully support repairability and ewaste reduction. most of these components have not had MAJOR improvements in years, hence his channel name. There is a possibility here that Valve could ship with their unique hardware, (apu, psu, case, ports, networking) and let you bring your own ssd and ram from an old device that you might not use anymore. I love this idea. At the same time it feels like entering the star wars universe where there are no more new manufacturing and everything is cobbled together from old hardware made long ago.

What a heart breaking video to listen to. I’m trying to do a better job of being positive right now. I’m trying to look at the world in what I have control over (not much more than my attitude about it). AI is killing so much right now I’m trying to look at it as the good tools the engineers made it to be. Ownership is dying around every goddamn corner. Hats off to Edison, this guy gets it. We need more companies like this taking a stand for the average person who wants to make it out there.

What a great campfire story Casey stumbled into. Whether any of this is true few will ever know, but its very reasonable that a race condition and a stalled job to apply configuration caused by someone who left the company 10 years ago caused an outage. I find it hilarious that they call this guy he answers, yup I still know the password, but how do I know you’re legit, I’m not just handing out the password. Casey did a stand up job telling this story.

Linus is Techbrophobic like the rest of us. This is such an unexpectedly mild take from him. I expected some threat to the mother of the vibe coder, but he gave a pretty great middle of the road take. The industry sucks, it smells off, we know a lot wrong with it, it feels like theres a lot more wrong than we know. But the tools that its making are really good when used in the right ways. They are not a replacement for anything, they are assistive. They can lift someone from not knowing how to code to making a small webapp for their use. Someone who wants to write backend and give them a decent front end, someone who whats to write front end and give them a decent backend.

Great take from someone with more experience than most can ever...