Just as everything tends to evolve into something resembling a crab, all software seems to eventually become email — and, now, an LLM.
To be fair, productivity and writing tools are a better fit for LLMs than a lot of other use cases.
Readit NewsMajimasEyepatch commented on Grammarly rebrands to 'Superhuman,' launches a new AI assistant techcrunch.com/2025/10/29... · Posted by u/coloneltcb
This is a clear example of why the people claiming that using a chatbot for therapy is better than no therapy are... I'll be extremely generous and say misguided. This kid wanted his parents to know he was thinking about this and the chatbot talked him out of it.
Exactly right. It's totally plausible that someone could build a mental health chatbot that results in better outcomes than people who receive no support, but that's a hypothesis that can and should be tested and subject to strict ethical oversight.
MajimasEyepatch commented on Why are there so many rationalist cults? asteriskmag.com/issues/11... · Posted by u/glenstein
I don’t think it’s just (or even particularly) bad axioms, I think it’s that people tend to build up “logical” conclusions where they think each step is a watertight necessity that follows inevitably from its antecedents, but actually each step is a little bit leaky, leading to runaway growth in false confidence.
Not that non-rationalists are any better at reasoning, but non-rationalists do at least benefit from some intellectual humility.
I feel this way about some of the more extreme effective altruists. There is no room for uncertainty or recognition of the way that errors compound.
- "We should focus our charitable endeavors on the problems that are most impactful, like eradicating preventable diseases in poor countries." Cool, I'm on board.
- "I should do the job that makes the absolute most amount of money possible, like starting a crypto exchange, so that I can use my vast wealth in the most effective way." Maybe? If you like crypto, go for it, I guess, but I don't think that's the only way to live, and I'm not frankly willing to trust the infallibility and incorruptibility of these so-called geniuses.
- "There are many billions more people who will be born in the future than those people who are alive today. Therefore, we should focus on long-term problems over short-term ones because the long-term ones will affect far more people." Long-term problems are obviously important, but the further we get into the future, the less certain we can be about our projections. We're not even good at seeing five years into the future. We should have very little faith in some billionaire tech bro insisting that their projections about the 22nd century are correct (especially when those projections just so happen to show that the best thing you can do in the present is buy the products that said tech bro is selling).
In this little story, what's the difference if the direct ACME URL was used? What does the goo.gl indirection have to do with anything?
As the others have mentioned, the goo.gl step isn't necessary for linkjacking, but it is a reputational risk for Google.
What purpose does "deactivating" any serve?
It may help prevent linkjacking. If an old URL no longer works, but the goo.gl link is still available, it's possible that someone could take over the URL and use it for malicious. Consider a scenario like this:
1. Years ago, Acme Corp sets up an FAQ page and creates a goo.gl link to the FAQ.
2. Acme goes out of business. They take the website down, but the goo.gl link is still accessible on some old third-party content, like social media posts.
3. Eventually, the domain registration lapses, and a bad actor takes over the domain.
4. Someone stumbles across a goo.gl link in a reddit thread from a decade ago and clicks it. Instead of going to Acme, they now go to a malicious site full of malware.
With the new policy, if enough time has passed without anyone clicking on the link, then Google will deactivate it, and the user in step 4 would now get a 404 from Google instead.
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MajimasEyepatch commented on Show HN: Typeform was too expensive so I built my own forms ikiform.com/... · Posted by u/preetsuthar17
I didn’t notice they were lacking. Are animations really asked for by users?
They're not explicitly asked for, but everywhere I've worked that's tested them has found that they improve conversion rates.
MajimasEyepatch commented on Show HN: Typeform was too expensive so I built my own forms ikiform.com/... · Posted by u/preetsuthar17
What is the value proposition for these form libraries? Is it scale? Is it the custom builder? How complex are people's HTML forms these days from a UX perspective?
I was browsing the code, and noticed this forms library was using Supabase, presumably a paid service if this OSS library takes off. I just can't seem to grasp why a custom form building library needs a 3rd party, managed Database included. Scale maybe?
These are genuine questions as I'm woefully unaware of the state of HTML forms / Frontend in 2025
There's a few reasons. The biggest one, IMO, is that it lets non-technical users change things quickly without having to go through the engineering team. Obviously there are limits to that, but in many cases, a product or marketing team wants to modify a form or test a few variations without having to put it into a backlog, wait for engineers to size it, wait for an upcoming sprint, then wait another two weeks for it to get completed and deployed. (Even in more nimble organizations, cutting out the handoff to engineering saves time, eliminates communication issues, and frees up the engineering team to do more valuable work.)
On the technical side, these form builders can actually save a decent amount of development effort. Sure, it's easy to build a basic HTML form, but once you start factoring in things like validation, animations, transitions, conditional routing, error handling, localization, accessibility, and tricky UI like date pickers and fancy dropdowns, making a really polished form is actually a lot of work. You either have to cobble together a bunch of third-party libraries and try to make them play nicely together, or you end up building your own reusable, extensible, modular form library.
It's one of those projects that sounds simple, but scope creep is almost inevitable. Instead of spending your time building things that actually make money, you're spending time on your form library because suddenly you have to show different questions on the next screen based on previous responses. Or you have to handle right-to-left languages like Arabic, and it's not working in Safari on iOS. Or your predecessor failed to do any due diligence before deciding to use a datepicker widget that was maintained by some random guy at a web agency in the Midwest that went out of business five years ago, and now you have to fork it because there's a bug that's impacting your company's biggest client.
Or, instead of all that, you could just pay Typeform a fraction of the salary for one engineer and never have to think about those things ever again.
MajimasEyepatch commented on Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT personneltoday.com/hr/fal... · Posted by u/lsharkey602
We just shipped a major feature on our SaaS product. We, of course, used AI extensively.
The thing is, this feature leaned on every bit of experience and wisdom we had as a team --things like making sure the model is right, making sure the system makes sense overall and all the pieces fit together properly.
I don't know that "4x" is how it works --in this case, the AI let us really tap into the experience and skill we already had. It made us faster, but if we were missing the experience and wisdom part, we'd just be more prolific at creating messes.
But presumably you could have built it before, just slower, which is the point. For now, that speed-up just looks like a win because it’s novel, but eventually the speed-up will be baked into people’s expectations.
MajimasEyepatch commented on I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst fransskarman.com/phd_thes... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
Aren’t getting different results the norm in programming anyway? Developers usually don’t make the effort to include idempotency and make builds reproducible.
Normally, if you compile the same code twice on the same machine, you'll get the same result, even if it's not truly reproducible across machines or large gaps in time. And differences between machines or across time are usually small enough that they don't impact the observed behavior of the code, especially if you pin your dependencies.
However, with LaTeX, the output of the first run is often an input to the second run, so you get notably different results if you only compile it once vs. compiling twice. When I last wrote LaTeX about ten years ago, I usually encountered this with page numbers and tables of context, since the page numbers couldn't be determined until the layout was complete. So the first pass would get the bulk of the layout and content in place, and then the second pass would do it all again, but this time with real page numbers. You would never expect to see something like this in a modern compiler, at least not in a way that's visible to the user.
(That said, it's been ten years, and I never compiled anything as long or complex as a PhD thesis, so I could be wrong about why you have to compile twice.)