bccdee (u/bccdee) - Readit News

bccdee commented on “Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work vangemert.dev/blog/nothin... · Posted by u/spmvg

When I write book chapters I write, throw away, write, throw away. Mostly with no a-priori outline

But eventually I get to a point where all the failed attempts crystallize and it flows out of me start to finish in one sitting. Every piece of knowledge from those failed attempts crystallizes into one gestalt of how it’s supposed to be.

Those final “easy” 20 pages always come after 100 pages of discarded, frustrating, exploratory work that feels like it’s going nowhere.

Also a deadline helps.

bccdee · 6 hours ago

Yeah, one of the toughest but most rewarding lessons I've learned about writing is how valuable it can be to set aside your current draft and start from scratch.

It's very tempting to want to write an outline & then revise the outline until it's perfect, so that your first draft can be as solid as possible. That never works out well for me, though. It's only after I've written a substantial chunk of the thing that I realize half my ideas were bad and the other half are being poorly realized, and I start to understand the story I really want to write.

I'm very taken with this one HYTRADBOI talk [1] that applies a similar approach to software design. It's not something I've ever gotten a chance to apply, but it really appeals to me.

[1]: https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/03580e19-4646-4fba-91c3-17eab...

bccdee commented on Components will kill pages bitsandbytes.dev/posts/co... · Posted by u/cmsparks

bccdee · 11 hours ago

> [Given] a method for chat applications to understand components exposed from the website in question [...] AI chat applications win, and so does the brand that gets to keep ownership of how it tells the story of its product to its users.

Never happening. The brand may "keep ownership of how it tells its story," but it loses its users. You have turned your tool into a series of widget in someone else's application, with no control whatsoever over how users interact with you. Want to show your user a notification? (Sure you do—I can't get away from the things.) Too bad. ChatGPT owns your users, and they only see what OpenAI wants them to see, which likely will not include ads for your premium features.

Don't mistake this for user freedom, either. Users still won't own their own tools. We're just moving from a model where each vendor separately leases you their tool to a model where every tool is leased via OpenAI, which curates them based on its own monopolistic whims.

Tech companies will not surrender control of their users so easily. They may integrate chatbot components into their apps, but they will not permit an inversion of control where their product becomes a component in a chatbot.

> You likely won’t expect users 5 years from today to navigate 5 pages deep

Of course I do. There's this fallacy that, because chatbots are useful for some things, chatbot interfaces must be the best at everything, and that's just not true. I don't go to ChatGPT to ask it for relevant tech news. I go here and browse the HN frontpage. Chatbots offer zero discoverability; search bars didn't replace page navigation, and chat bots won't either.

bccdee commented on Vouch github.com/mitchellh/vouc... · Posted by u/chwtutha

otterley · 4 days ago

I'm reminded of the old Usenet responses to people claiming to solve the spam problem, so I can't help myself:

    Your solution advocates a
    ( ) technical (X) social ( ) policy-based ( ) forge-based
    approach to solving AI-generated pull requests to open source projects. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws.)
    
    ( ) PR spammers can easily use AI to adapt to detection methods
    ( ) Legitimate non-native English speakers' contributions would be affected
    ( ) Legitimate users of AI coding assistants would be affected
    ( ) It is defenseless against determined bad actors
    ( ) It will stop AI slop for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
    (X) Project maintainers don't have time to implement it
    (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from maintainers at once
    (X) False positives would drive away genuine new contributors
    
    Specifically, your plan fails to account for
    (X) Ease of creating new GitHub accounts
    (X) Script kiddies and reputation farmers
    ( ) Armies of LLM-assisted coding tools in legitimate use
    (X) Eternal arms race involved in all detection approaches
    ( ) Extreme pressure on developers to use AI tools
    (X) Maintainer burnout that is unaffected by automated filtering
    ( ) Graduate students trying to pad their CVs
    ( ) The fact that AI will only get better at mimicking humans
    
    and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
    (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
    been shown practical
    (X) Allowlists exclude new contributors
    (X) Blocklists are circumvented in minutes
    ( ) We should be able to use AI tools without being censored
    (X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually across projects
    ( ) Contributing to open source should be free and open
    (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
    (X) This will just make maintainer burnout worse
    
    Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
    (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
    ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
    ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out what project you maintain and
    send you 50 AI-generated PRs!

bccdee · 3 days ago

This is a fun post. I think you're mistaken, though.

Your strongest point is that allowlists exclude new contributors. (You're right about blocklists, but this seems to me like a primarily allowlist-based approach.) Thing is, new contributors are already being excluded by a flood of slop PRs within which they are indistinguishable. Whatever strategy they would currently use to distinguish themselves (reaching out through social channels, volunteering in the issue for an important problem, etc) should still work with vouch. But when it does work and they are vouched for, they will get a reputational shortcut to contribute again in this repo and to contribute in other repos sharing the same vouchlist.

Like any good social solution, `vouch` is trying to codify & extend the existing ad-hoc practices that have arisen to cope with slop PRs (i.e. largely ignoring PRs submitted by strangers). Obviously it's not a full solution, but I'm suspicious of solutions that claim to fully solve a difficult problem. It's a step forward.

bccdee commented on Vouch github.com/mitchellh/vouc... · Posted by u/chwtutha

sbr464 · 3 days ago

I think a system that allows a reason someone is denounced, specifically for political views or support, should be implemented, to block the mob from denouncing someone on all of their projects, simply because they are against certain topics, or in an opposing political party

bccdee · 3 days ago

1. Such a system is already in place (see the `--reason` flag).

2. Being able to denounce people with noxious political views is a feature, not a bug. If someone shows up in your issues complaining about how your CoC is "woke," they're a bad actor stirring up pointless drama. At best, this is just a waste of everyone's time, and at worst they're haranguing your actual contributors who happen to be trans or something. Respectful contributors naturally will not fall afoul of this, regardless of their beliefs or party affiliation or what-have-you.

bccdee commented on Vouch github.com/mitchellh/vouc... · Posted by u/chwtutha

aragilar · 3 days ago

Would it not be better to report accounts then?

bccdee · 3 days ago

To whom? It's not against Github's ToS to submit a bad PR. Anyway, bad actors can just create new accounts. It makes more sense to circulate whitelists of people who are known not to be bad actors.

I also like the flexibility of a system like this. You don't have to completely refuse contributions from people who aren't whitelisted, but since the general admission queue is much longer and full of slop, it makes sense to give known good actors a shortcut to being given your attention.

bccdee commented on Vouch github.com/mitchellh/vouc... · Posted by u/chwtutha

anon-3988 · 3 days ago

I am still not going to merge random code from a supposed trusted invdividual. As it is now, everyone is supposedly trusted enough to be able to contribute code. This vouching system will make me want to spend more time, not less, when contributing.

bccdee · 3 days ago

I think something people are missing here is, this is a response to the groundswell in vibecoded slop PRs. The point of the vouch system is not to blindly merge code from trusted individuals; it's to completely ignore code from untrusted individuals, permitting you to spend more time reviewing the MRs which remain.

bccdee commented on Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” (2025) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=l-kZG... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

tavavex · 7 days ago

Why not? They hold all the cards and have aligned one of the most powerful governments in the world with them, while wielding enough money to make almost any nation, let alone individual, more inclined toward doing what they need. They will only become more powerful.

bccdee · 6 days ago

Nikolai Yezhov held all the cards under Stalin, right up until he got purged by Beria. Then Beria held all the cards until he was ousted and shot in turn. In a dog-eat-dog world, the top dog is the biggest target.

bccdee commented on Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” (2025) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=l-kZG... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

toomanyrichies · 7 days ago

"Thankfully, we live in a beautifully democratic and capitalistic society where we can fight in court."

Of course he's "thankful" for that, since in our "beautifully democratic and capitalistic" society, Flock can use their $658 million of VC funding [1] to wage lawfare against the have-nots with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers. [2]

1. https://websets.exa.ai/websets/directory/flock-safety-fundin...

2. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...

bccdee · 6 days ago

It's pretty funny—the only think Deflock does is map out the locations of Flock cameras.

When Flock decides to track people's activities, they're "following the law" and "open to reasonable debate," but when people decide they want to track Flock's activities right back, that makes them terrorists.

bccdee commented on Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” (2025) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=l-kZG... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

try_the_bass · 7 days ago

> False, he is forcing Flock on EVERYONE

> No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled

As much as I dislike Flock, this is bad logic. There's no such thing as opting out of surveillance in public spaces. Public spaces are defined by being public, in that everyone (even governments/corporations!) is free to observe everyone else in that same setting.

So in reality, everyone has permitted themselves to be surveilled, purely through the act of being in public.

This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.

bccdee · 6 days ago

> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is bogus

Okay: Just how long would you permit someone to follow you around with a camera, recording everything you do?

The thing about a stranger watching you in public is that eventually you go somewhere else, and they can't watch you anymore. A surveillance organization like Flock, however, is waiting for you wherever you go. In this sense they're much more like a stalker following you around than a stranger who happens to see you.

This analogy bears out in practice: Cops have used Flock data to stalk their exes.¹

[1]: https://www.kwch.com/2022/10/31/kechi-police-lieutenant-arre...