@dang likely a bot
Readit NewsCactusBlue commented on Experiment: Making TypeScript immutable-by-default evanhahn.com/typescript-i... · Posted by u/ingve
CactusBlue commented on A new book about the origins of Effective Altruism newrepublic.com/article/2... · Posted by u/Thevet
> I think they’re recovering. They’ve learned a few lessons, including not to be too in hock to a few powerful and wealthy individuals.
I do not believe the EA movement to be recoverable; it is built on flawed foundations and its issues are inherent. The only way I see out of it is total dissolution; it cannot be reformed.
CactusBlue commented on Show HN: Epstein Files Organized and Searchable searchepsteinfiles.com/... · Posted by u/searchepstein
How long until people build EpsteinGPT that does semantic search on this?
CactusBlue commented on Cursor: Past, Present, and Future cursor.com/blog/series-d... · Posted by u/whizusukite
Well, they delivered something that is usable and useful for me and my team, and a lot of people I know, and I guess that’s what counts in business?
I barely use the autocomplete features of Cursor, and for agentic coding, Claude Code blows Cursor Agent out of the water. I don't think Cursor has anything that cannot be replicated in a week or two other than the first mover advantage; certainly not an advantage that cannot be justified at 30B+ valuation.
CactusBlue commented on Cursor: Past, Present, and Future cursor.com/blog/series-d... · Posted by u/whizusukite
I mean, they have built their own model: https://cursor.com/blog/composer
And presumably they'll use the funding to build more than just a modified VSCode.
most likely a finetune of existing model
CactusBlue commented on Cursor: Past, Present, and Future cursor.com/blog/series-d... · Posted by u/whizusukite
They haven't built their own editor, they haven't built their own models; what have they actually built?
CactusBlue commented on Hack Club: A story in three acts (a.k.a., the shit sandwich) kys.llc/blog/my-hackclub-... · Posted by u/alexkrchff
I expected this to happen. I knew people who were involved in the organization who were unnecessarily chummy to TPOT/Postrat/FTX culture before it blew up.
My last remaining social media account was with bluesky and when many of their visible employees took the opportunity to belittle and dismiss their community with that "waffles" horseshit, a month or so back, I dropped off of that one too.
I really thought they were on to something with the "make it a protocol" thing. Now I see that no social media will satisfy me. I don't WANT a platform where "everyone can say anything (so long as its legal and you don't say anything bad about fascists so the fascist government will leave us alone)". I WANT a platform where productive people show what they produced and discuss it along with the things other people produce. Even if that product is "jokes" or "writing". I just want a marketplace of ideas that have some grounding in practical reality. Not a hyper-void filled with nonsense thoughts and ideologies that can withstand rounds and bouts of academic scrutiny but would wither instantly in any practical application.
I don't want a place of arguments and gossip and attention. I want a place of content and challenge and speculation and application. I don't want social media, even for what it purports to offer. I don't want to "be in a room with everyone in the world". I want to "be in a room with people who are doing wild an interesting things and want to do so in a community of others like them."
I don't want the unwashed masses. I want self-selection and communities.
tl;dr: I want forums that work like feeds. Small groups of like-minded people engaging with one another. I just want it to WORK like social networks, with following, and topical follows (hashtags), and content feeds.
You made a right decision; The big-world social platforms are doomed to fail, as they have quadratic scaling costs. I am a big proponent of "curation over moderation".
I am working on Mikoto Platforms, which is basically designed to be somewhere between Discord and Notion, but open source + decentralized. There is no global feed; in fact, some users thought it was a bug that it took you to such an empty screen when you first started it. Platforms are what you make of it.
To me there were two ways of using social media: #1 interacting with people I know about things in my life and #2 interacting with third-party content and then people I don't really know.
To me Facebook, Instagram and Twitter went completely downhill when it became about #2 for me and my social circle. Twitter was the first, followed by Facebook and then Instagram. I just deleted them in that order. To me they became divisive, angry, political, it made following certain friends impossible, it made people addicted to it, it generated influencers, it made certain friends behave strangely IRL (communicating via meme language only).
HN is definitely #2, but way less political due to moderation.
I like the fact that there's less politics - I know that many people might call it censorship or something, but I feel like it does do somewhat to reduce doomscrolling, as it is one of the topics that people are deeply invested about. Still, there's that mix of "A Modest Proposal" style faux-intellectualism (low-effort social conservatism, kneejerk reactions to technology, toxic startup grindset positivity), that I still tend to get sniped by.
For interacting with the people I know, I try to collect Signal/Discord contacts for those who I find valuable enough to talk at a future point, with the end goal of moving all contacts I know to Mikoto Platforms (a messaging platform that I am building).
I was working with Hack Club students on an experimental VPN client (https://github.com/hackclub/burrow) but never got the momentum to finish it. Made some great friends, though! It's a really fantastic organization.
The students have one big global Slack instance. If you're a student and on here, you should also be in there: https://hackclub.com/slack/