bruce511 (u/bruce511)

bruce511 commented on AI is killing B2B SaaS nmn.gl/blog/ai-killing-b2... · Posted by u/namanyayg

gritspants · 7 days ago

No, and I agree with the conservative sentiments here. However, putting together a SaaS alternative that frees up money during a crunch, and now with the pet features your boss has always wanted, is potent indeed.

bruce511 · 7 days ago

You've hit the nail on the head. Immediate gratification.

AI is like sugar. It tastes nice, gives you energy quickly - what's not to like? The gratification is immediate, and if "today is all that matters" it's brilliant.

The problem with sugar (and AI) is medium term. So sure, that junior dev whipped up the whole framework in ClaudeCode, and it's humming nicely. Junior dev gets credit, and after a couple years moves on somewhere else.

Then something changes. Windows. TLS. Code Signing, whatever. We need to update the program to the change. Just a small tweak. Junior Dev has gone (or is otherwise occupied) so we'll get new-Junior-dev to do it. Is he expected to do the change at the code level? Or at the prompt level? Will ClaudeCode in 2029 be able to maintain ClaudeCode Code from 2026? Or will it want to rewrite everything? Will new-junior-dev have the skillset to prompt as well as first-junior-dev? Was the code good enough that a dev could just "take it over"? Or was it "it works, let's use it" standard?

AI makes everyone look good in the short term. But it worries me for what happens in 5 years, 10 years, and so on. Sugar is great, but you can't live (long term) on sugar. Sometimes you need a proper meal plan.

bruce511 commented on Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/ck2

AnthonyMouse · 9 days ago

The thing I find irritating is that the government has been doing things as bad the things Trump is doing for decades, and those things are actually bad and shouldn't be done, but people are now acting like Trump invented them.

Don't get offended that Trump is more brazen about anything than anyone else and try to retaliate against him in particular, instead change the things that need to be changed so that nobody can do those things anymore, even when they're acting like they're not.

bruce511 · 8 days ago

Yes I think some of what he's doing isn't new, and yes some of it isn't new, just more brazen, but I think there's also a lot of new.

For example, pardons are for sale. Thats pretty obvious. maybe it's been done before (?) but certainly not on this scale and not so soon in the term.

Secondly he's set up a direct method for paying him, TrumpCoin. That's different to campaign contributions. And indeed quite a bit of trumpcoin is being sold to foreign govts. I'm gonna put that in the "new" column.

In terms of international relations it's all new. He's blowing up trust in the US, via tarrifs, threats to invade a NATO country and so on. This is long term damage at unprecedented scale for no apparent actual gain.

There are plenty of laws which say he can't do any of this. Adding more laws is not the solution. A weak congress, and a weak Supreme Court unwilling to enforce the laws is the problem.

bruce511 commented on I made 20 GDPR deletion requests. 12 were ignored nikolak.com/gdpr-failure/... · Posted by u/nikola-k

SpicyLemonZest · 9 days ago

GDPR does not formally require cookie popups (and the cookie stuff predates GDPR as such anyway). But it's challenging to the point of impracticality to run a website with so few cookies that a popup is not required. The EU's official resources on data protection, for example, have a popup. (https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...)

bruce511 · 9 days ago

>> But it's challenging to the point of impracticality to run a website with so few cookies that a popup is not required.

Nonsense. It's easy to create a site that doesn't need a cookie pop-up. Indeed the mere existance of a cookie pop-up screams "we are tracking you and selling your info".

bruce511 commented on I made 20 GDPR deletion requests. 12 were ignored nikolak.com/gdpr-failure/... · Posted by u/nikola-k

kstrauser · 9 days ago

You're right, for sure. It'd be nice if the law included an explicit exception for local cookies for routine site operation purposes. I haven't put any time into nailing down the wording, but something that communicates "sites are allowed use 'authentication cookies' to validate a user's ability to make server requests" would be most welcome. Then you could actually have an incentive to remove the cookie banner on sites that only use cookies for session authentication. You don't also use them to integrate with your marketing analytics kraken? Sweet! You don't have to have a banner or other notice!

bruce511 · 9 days ago

See Article 5(3). There is a specific carve-out for cookies that are used solely for essential site operation and security.

bruce511 commented on Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/ck2

cucumber3732842 · 9 days ago

Is that a bad thing though?

Like say you can develop a 1000 windmill offshore wind project. At "market rate" for performing that activity they lose you money or make you very little, say a percent or two, because offshore is just harder.

But with government partnership and doors opening they make money at a low estimate 3%.

This causes you to forgo the 200 windmills in a field project that would make you a positive 1-3% regardless of which way the political winds blow because why do that when you can deploy 1k of them in some bay and make money hand over fist simply by joining hands (more tightly than the land based small project would) with government?

And as a result nobody can do the 200 windmill project because, between you and all the other people chasing the 100@% projects the cost of engineering, site prep, permitting, other fixed costs for such projects, etc, etc. are based on what the market will bear, and it can bear a lot more when your amortizing things over 5x as many units.

So maybe the things that do get invested in are more sustainable and financially conservative, which would improve public perception of them vs these megacorp-government joint venture type deployments we have now.

bruce511 · 9 days ago

Political instability is a bad thing regardless of what is being invested in. It's just as bad for everything, not just windmills or sea windmills or whatever.

nothing is safe if the project can fail because the political winds change. Much less the political tantrums of the guy in charge who doesn't think you bribed him enough.

And when those obvious bribes are simply ignored by congress and the courts, thus validating it, the landscape for large projects of any kind get worse.

bruce511 commented on Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/ck2

fsckboy · 10 days ago

the Venezuelan oil leases you are talking about was 1990s, not 1970s.

for Venezuelan oil leases to be comparable to wind farms you'd have to have the Venezuelan govt say "we are taking the leases away because we don't want any more offshore oil production", rather than "we are taking these leases away because you are rich and we want to pump the oil ourselves"

the cancelled Venezuelan oil leases were a taking, but that word is less useful in the case of wind farms. I would imagine firms with wind farm contracts would be made whole (i.e. get back lost investment, but not get back potential profit) but it's not a case of the wind farms being given to somebody else or those areas being put to some other use.

if you are "environmental" you might think it's a great loss not to pursue the wind approach, or that it's a great idea to shut down offshore drilling, but that's political not property ownership/taking.

bruce511 · 9 days ago

>> I would imagine firms with wind farm contracts would be made whole

Wait..what? Made whole by whom? Has this happened before?

(I'm genuinely curious, I've not seen this brought up before...)

bruce511 commented on Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/ck2

AnthonyMouse · 9 days ago

"The President's party loses seats in the midterms" is a long-term trend and it seems pretty likely to hold this time.

The real question is, once the Democrats are back in control of at least one house of Congress, are they going to be sane or are they going to spend two years making such fools of themselves that we end up with another Republican President in 2028?

bruce511 · 9 days ago

Alas you'll need to define "sane" first. That might be harder than expected.

Equally unfortunate is the need for 60 senate votes to actually have a meaningful say over what the president does. And in truth no part has had "control" of congress to this level for a while.

When one (or indeed both) sides are politically incapable of being bipartisan (witness the outcomes for those voting against party lines, on both sides) control of one house is meaningless and a majority in the senate (short of 60 votes) mostly meaningless.

Expecting any change in behavior after November, regardless of the results, is wishful thinking.

bruce511 commented on Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/ck2

Krasnol · 9 days ago

The problem is that the outlier might mark a beginning.

Seeing what's possible in this position, I doubt future US presidents will hold back.

bruce511 · 9 days ago

It doesn't matter I'd they hold back or not. The perception of political instability is enough.

If, as an investor, I'm asked to throw billions at a multi-year project, political risk is going to be on the PowerPoint.

You may think this current administration is an aberration, but it serves to prove that aberrations can happen. That the levers supposed to prevent this (congress, courts) are creaking. Sure a judge ruled for now, but this is a long way from finished.)

And that's enough to create doubt. Lots of doubt. The impact of this on long-term future infrastructure projects cannot be over-stated.

(Let's leave aside that this project was 6 years in the planning, during his first term, before construction start in 2022... which just makes the current behavior worse, not better.)

bruce511 commented on Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle dmitrybrant.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/zdw

darkwater · 10 days ago

> We switched to a SaaS model in 2011. Users fell over themselves thanking us. They don't have to justify it to procurement.

In the companies I've worked for so far since SaaS became a thing you absolutely need to go through procurement for a big enough purchase. You actually need to negotiate the contract each time it expires, which is IMO more burden on the end user than buying a one-off license.

bruce511 · 10 days ago

Sorry, I should be more clear. Yes there is a procurement process. But that happens out of band to the support request.

The problem with support contracts, or support requests solved by an upgrade, is that the User needs it now, not after a procurement process.

Doing procurement annually is easier because it can be planned for, budgeted for etc, and happens on a separate thread to the actual support.

Even when they overlap there's enough grace to keep the User happy while waiting on the customer.

bruce511 commented on Founding is a snowball blog.bawolf.com/p/foundin... · Posted by u/bryantwolf

with · 10 days ago

The metaphor is broken. The snowball grows passively over time naturally, but being a founder requires you to actively create value in your startup. Snow doesn't choose to stick to your ball based on PMF, and the entire piece romanticizes grinding without once mentioning customers, revenue, or whether you're solving a real problem people will pay for.

I think it's dangerous sentiment to say if you create a snowball (startup) and just keep pushing it forever it is guaranteed to grow to something large. Some might say "duh, of course", but I still think a lot of people don't understand this.

bruce511 · 10 days ago

Yeah, but its a metaphor of the creation process. It's perhaps a bit on the light side when it comes to obstacles, but it's not a bad metaphor of the business creation journey.

I would perhaps point out this is not a VC business journey, that snowball looks very different.

And sure, the business starts in a easy environment (lots of snow on the ground) but the idea of starting alone resonates.

And it leaves out the sun. That pesky sun which melts the snow causing 9 out of 10 snowballs to melt. The sun, which melts the snow around you even as you struggle to push. Your direction is meaningless if you insist on pushing away from the snow.