Having lived in China for five years and seeing how it is done there (literally everywhere), I see this as a payment problem. There is no sensible, low cost payment infrastructure to support this safely. Instead most of the west has a fractured app ecosystem where each app ‘does payment’ rather than via a set of trusted payment apps that do the security up front and then passes to the provider.
For example, in the article the photos show an anonymous QR code you’d scan with your camera, rather than in China where you’d use Alipay or WeChat, whose app you’d use to scan the QR.
When I returned from China, it took a while to readjust to the heightened (and often expensive) friction of payments.
Not saying scams don’t exist in China, just that the payment provider gives some guarantees on the veracity of the claim made by the QR code
Readit Newsavastmick commented on Organised gangs behind rise in QR 'quishing' scams bbc.com/news/articles/cq6... · Posted by u/dabinat
avastmick commented on How I Stay Motivated Working on My Solo SaaS (When It Feels Like Nobody Cares) · Posted by u/Sayyidalijufri
I used to be a schoolteacher; I left teaching and became a software engineer a few years ago. For the past two years, I've been building a solo Saas product, that solves a problem I spotted when I was teaching. I hope to launch later this year.
To answer OP's question, about a year ago, I told my parents what I was building. My mum is a teacher, so she's my first test user. Every time I talk to them, they ask how things are going, so I need to keep working on it so I've got something to tell them.
To join in on everyone else's roasting OP's business idea: OP, what are you offering your users that they can't get from typing 'coworking space' or 'cafe' into their search engine of choice? It's not enough to make something useful, it also has to be something that your customers don't already have.
I’m in a similar space. Solo working on an Edtech solution. Man it can be hard. @cjs_ac, I’d be keen to chat, if you’d have time.
avastmick commented on How much are LLMs boosting real-world programmer productivity? lesswrong.com/posts/tqmQT... · Posted by u/gatinsama
I’m a solo founder/developer (https://kayshun.co) my relationship/usage of LLMs for codegen has been complicated.
At first I was all in with Copilot and various similar plugins for neovim. It helped me get going but did produce the worst code in the application. Also I found (personal preference) that the autocomplete function actually slowed me down; it made me pause or even prevented me from seeing what I was doing rather than just typing out what I needed to. I stopped using any codegen for about four months at the end of 2024; I felt it was not making me more productive.
This year it’s back on the table with avante[0] and cursor (the latter back off the table due to the huge memory requirements). Then recently Claude Code dropped and I am currently feeling like I have productivity super powers. I’ve set it up in a pair programming style (old XP coder) where I write careful specs (prompts) and tests (which I code); it writes code; I review run the tests and commit. I work with it. I do not just let it just run as I have found I waste more time unwinding its output than watching each step.
From being pretty disillusioned six months ago I can now see it as a powerful tool.
Can it replace devs? In my opinion, some. Like all things it’s garbage in garbage out. So the idea a non-technical product manager can produce quality outputs seems unlikely to me.
Without bragging, but I have succeeded in two of my startups and I have always been super lazy. Work life was mixed all the time. But never had stress. Always took time for myself. And maybe worked 3 days effectively a week. Remaining time I spend with my kids and hobbies. I dont believe in this rat race 60 hour a week thing.
I like this view. I’m not especially successful (by any of the measures knocking about) but in the midst of a startup again for the last year.
This time I work how I want to work and am actually enjoying myself. The whole 80 hours a week startup thing is padded with a lot of performance art in my experience. I am actively avoiding all that this time around. I find that I solve a lot of things by not doing them or solving them when not actively trying.
We’ve made great progress so far.
I really cannot understand consciousness. And if I am honest nor do I see peoples fascination with it. Especially now that scientists are trying to measure, they seem to come up short and some posit that it must a quantum effect or something else.
I am not sure what new learning all the research and thinking brings: I am lost it all the “arguments”; I really do not understand.
A lot of way smarter people than me think it’s a worthwhile concept to wrestle with. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to get it.
A lot of people way smarter than me agonised over the nature of the soul too. Is it that debate replayed? Are we just trying to justify humans “specialness”?
avastmick commented on Entire home spotted floating across San Francisco Bay sfgate.com/local/article/... · Posted by u/harambae
This is a uniquely American thing, no? I can't recall hearing about a house being moved in Europe.
Fairly common in Australia and New Zealand to relocate complete houses. I’ve seen them done here in NZ fully furnished.
Most houses here are wooden construction with corrugated steel roofs which keeps the weight down.
avastmick commented on Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on? · Posted by u/panqueca
Slightly tangential is the work I did on a National digital identity platform. It enables personal information sharing from trusted sources (birth records, tax records, banks) and could simply enable true/false responses to queries such as “Are you over 18” instead of sadly spraying PI data everywhere to be lost or stolen.
We as a team worked super hard and were super proud of what the platform could do. We even won some awards. But due to politics and bureaucracy its capabilities were never used and today the service is a national joke and really only used to logon to government services. It is going to be replaced with something new and shiny.
Now, I look back and think why did I care so much and work so hard. Why was I so naive that it would be used as designed.
Maybe I move in the wrong circles, but we banned both plastic shopping bags and plastic straws in New Zealand, and I don’t hear anyone complaining about it. Everyone I know uses paper bags (from the online supermarket deliveries) to line their bins.
It’s not plastic bags and straws that make it to the landfill that are the problem - it’s the ones that don’t make it to the landfill. I haven’t seen a plastic bag stuck in a tree for years!
I have to second this. No one I know complained when it was introduced, and I saw no complaints aired in the media of any noticeable degree. We still have too much unnecessary plastic in packaging.
My wife is Irish, and they started the removal of plastic bags over 20 years ago. It was carefully phased in over time. It led to a 90% reduction in plastic bag use [0]. They also weigh your trash (in Dublin, anyway) as a means of cost pressure to reduce waste and encourage recycling. It is stated to have reduced waste by 50% [1].
[0] https://www.irishenvironment.com/iepedia/plastic-bag-levy/ [1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/why-it-pays-to-c...