When you’re on the receiving end of it… still spam.
If it doesn't offer anything of value, sure.
But the good ones do.
Readit Newsfinancltravsty commented on Show HN: Built an email marketing platform after paying $230/month fertit.com... · Posted by u/rasadov
financltravsty commented on Show HN: Built an email marketing platform after paying $230/month fertit.com... · Posted by u/rasadov
Email marketing is called spam.
Only to tech nerds. When it's B2B, and targeted and positioned properly, it's business
financltravsty commented on Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024) michaelbastos.com/blog/wh... · Posted by u/mbastos
I get no satisfaction from rediscovering CS concepts & algorithms first put to paper by the field's pioneers between 1940-1970s, though it sounds like you do.
Some wood (or metal) workers take pride in making their own tools, and others, who are like me, buy off the shelf tools and use them to make actual things that people buy.
I'm insulted, but I won't drag this out.
financltravsty commented on Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024) michaelbastos.com/blog/wh... · Posted by u/mbastos
> The computer science graduate will generally not even try to figure out a problem in completely unfamiliar territory
Hard disagree, as someone who had a stint as self taught before getting a CS degree. Once, I wasted a whole afternoon figuring out graph-traversal & loop detection from first principles[0] -if had I taken DS&A class, it'd have taken me all of 2 seconds to choose between BFS and DFS. Attentive CS graduates have a structured pool of information to draw from, as well as the language to describe the issue when they have to dig deeper.
> The computer science graduate will generally not even try to figure out a problem in completely unfamiliar territory
Do your colleagues actually do this? I'm curious about the mechanics- they just say "Sorry, that can't be done" and everyone moves on? Passing the buck feels to me more of a junior/mid-level/senior concern, rather than self-taught vs graduates. Juniors have the latitude to make challenges someone else's problem, and ownership grows with seniority.
0. For a C-program stack analyzer, it has to parse C code, generate a call-graph, and spit out worst-case stack-memory usage.
Pretty myopic viewpoint. You wasted an afternoon figuring out graph-traversal & loop detection from first principles -- using and stretching your mental abilities -- rather than being spoonfed it? That's absurd. Utterly absurd.
I agree. But it's also a mindset game. Experienced devs often approach AI with preconceptions that limit its utility - pride in "craftsmanship, control issues, and perfectionism can prevent seeing where AI truly shines. I've found letting
go of those instincts and treating AI as a thought partner rather than just a code generator be super useful. The psychological aspects of how we interact with these tools might be as important as the technical ones.
Bunch of comments online also reflect how there's a lot of "butthurt" developers shutting things down with a closed mind - focusing only on the negatives, and not letting the positives go through.
I sound a bit philosophical but I hope I'm getting my point across.
What's your track record. What is your current scope of work for Claude Code?
This conversation is useless without knowing the author's skillset and use-case.
> I can't afford a car or a house instead of an apartment (also as my wife is still looking for work). Meanwhile terrible criminals like the Nytorgsmannen got only ~5 years in prison for over 25 rapes, and was living in a rent-controlled apartment in central Stockholm! I wouldn't be able to afford that at market rates!
This almost reads like a satire of right-wing populist propaganda, people's real economic grievances are getting redirected towards the most inconsequential and powerless scapegoats in society, immigrants.
This is especially tragic for people who themselves are immigrants who will also become the target by these populists. The more people suffer economically, the more they are looking for real alternatives. Then an "outsider" right populist comes in and offers just that, except of course with the backing by the wealthiest class of society, the ones actually responsible for your economic grievances in the first place.
This pattern repeats itself all across the western liberal democracies. Its not the people rising up, it's the richest people in the world holding on to power while the neoliberal house of cards that made them rich comes crumbling down.
You missed the point to hop on your soapbox.
Yes immigrants are used as a scapegoat. No immigration is not a completely faultless thing that can be allowed willy nilly and have zero negative consequences.
Humblebrag much?
Do you think your employees are where they are in life because they aren't willing to do uncomfortable things? Or because they follow their interests too much?
Yes.
> And no, please spare us all your justifications for how caffeine is fine or micro-dosing has been amazing, because they are simply varying levels of rationalization, I do it too, I’m just not in it as deeply. And no, just because you were able to become rich with and on the back of drugs does not mean you did it without harm, you likely just scandalized a lot of harm to, e.g., get rich selling some service to some coke head investor who will only fuel the abuse of data mining and social media addiction.
I think you make some interesting points, and it's a very well thought-out post, but this is the definition of "poisoning the well". You're attempting to preemptively discredit the most obvious flaw in your argument.
There is a massive amount of evidence for the impact on both society, economy and neurology for each of the drugs listed in your last paragraph – and it's these impacts that often change personal and societal perception of risk and reward. Caffeine, at average doses, induces an effect that is comparable to a small cortisol spike – it is mildly addictive, but nowhere near that of an opioid, for example.
Drugs like meth and heroine (and one wonders why you left off fentanyl) are highly addictive and destructive, cause enormous loss of life an an inconceivable scale, and can permanently damage neurological pathways. From what I've read, the impact of hallucinogenics is less well understood... but probably not great.
If your argument is "we like to say caffeine and alcohol are fine, when they're really no different than opioids and meth", well there _is_ a staggeringly enormous difference in the potency and impact of caffeine vs the other drugs you've listed. I do agree with you that alcohol is far more harmful than society cares to admit, however, and that's both well-studied and often ignored.
I hate to write out these words, but you're strawmanning.
The point is caffeine etc. corrupt the mind and cause a person's mental faculties to run in a way they were not initially designed to.
The point is not that these drugs are all extremely harmful, only that they are all harmful. Caffeine and other things get a pass because the "hard drugs" are so uniquely and visibly harmful that they overshadow all other forms of harm.
One could even say that this has tricked us into thinking that lesser drugs like caffeine or canabinoids are "effectively harmless" because they're not causing us to OD or steal things to get another hit or causing visibly psychotic states. But that is not true. We've simply accepted that the harm they due is not worth thinking about (this is subjective, not objective).
I feel like one of us must be in a bit of our own bubble.
The company that I work for is currently innovating very fast (not LLM related), creating so much value for other companies that they have never gotten from any other business.. I know this because when they switch to our company, they tell us how much better our software product is compared to anything they've ever used. It has tons of features that no other company has. That's all I can say without doxxing too much.
I feel like it's unimaginative to say:
> What more tech is there to sell besides LLM integrations?
I have like 7 startup ideas written down in my notes app for software products that I wish I had in my life, but don't have time to work on, and can't find anything that exists for it. There is so much left to create
I speak only from a very high-level POV. From a lower-level/in the "trees" -- yes, I don't disagree whatsoever with your characterization that a single company can achieve that. I know of many many many products I use (tech even!) that I could create exponentially better alternatives for, as well.
Now, there come a few considerations I don't believe you have factored in:
- Just because your company has struck gold: does that mean that pathway is available or realistic enough for everyone else; and to a more important point, is it /significant/ enough that it can scoop the enormous amount of tech talent on the market currently and in the future? I don't believe so.
- Segueing, "software products that I wish I had in my life." Yes, I too have many ideas, BUT: is the market (the TAM if you will) significant enough to warrant it? Ok, maybe it is -- how will you solve for distribution? Fulfillment is easy, but how are you going to not only identify prospective customers (your ICP), find them and communicate to them, and then convince them to buy your product, AND do this at scale, AND do this with low enough churn/CAC and high enough retention/CLTV, AND is this the most productive and profitable use of your time and resources?
Again, ideas are easy -- we all have them. But the execution is difficult. In the SaaS/tech space, people are burned out from software. Everyone is shilling their vibe-coded SaaS or latest app. That market is saturated, people don't care. Consumer economy is suffering right now due to the overall economy and so on. Next avenue is enterprise/B2B -- cool, still issues: buyer fatigue; economic uncertainty leading to anemic budgets and paralysis while the "fog" clears. No one is buying -- unless you can guarantee they can make money or you can "weather the storm" (see: AI, and all the top-down AI mandates every single PE co and board is shoving down exec teams throats).
I'm talking in very broad strokes on the most impactful things. Yes, there is much to create -- but who is going to create it and who is going to buy it (with what money?). This is a people problem, not a tech problem. I'm specifically talking about: "what more tech is there to sell -- that PEOPLE WILL BUY -- besides LLM integrations?" Again, I see nothing -- so I have pivoted towards finance and selling money. Money will not go out of fashion for a while (because people need it for the foreseeable future).
Ask yourself, if you were fired right now at this moment: how easy would it be for you to get another job? Quite difficult unless you find yourself lucky enough to have a network of people that work in businesses that are selling things that people are buying. Otherwise, good luck. You would have more luck consulting -- there are many many many "niche" products and projects that need to be done on small scales, that require good tech talent, but have no hope of being productized or scaled (hint!).
M-series chips are insanely cool (literally and figuratively) and have no competition even five years in. Same with the W-series SoCs on watches.
Are there any third-party haptic vibration motors yet?
Shoot, even their trackpads, which already stood alone, have gotten _better_ over the years.
Nobody else will have their own vertically-integrated modem out in production. This will make budget iPhones (maybe all iPhones) so much cheaper once they show Qualcomm the door.
That's before the advances they've made in software, like their camera processing pipeline (which only gets better; their video stack still has no equal) and differential privacy.
Oh, yeah, and the Vision Pro, which basically everyone who has tried it has said that it is the most advanced technology they've ever used.
Almost all of this happened under Cook's tenure.
Apple is still in the business of building insanely cool shit.
Cool is a vibe, not tech specs and little things. It's a whole aura.
Apple is not cool.