I noticed once I took a ferry ride at night in a big city and one of the buildings had a company name written on it with bright blue lights and I couldn't read it; too blurry. I couldn't focus my eyes... And I have perfect vision. I had no issues with other colors. Not sure if it's something to do with my eyes specifically or human eyes in general or because of this effect associated with the blue color.
Readit Newsjongjong commented on Why is the sky blue? explainers.blog/posts/why... · Posted by u/udit99
jongjong commented on The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7
That's what you get when you have a centrally planned economy.
This is just like communism. The software industry has been like this for over a decade and the effect started spreading to other industries. I've been warning of this for years.
It has been a very painful decade for some. At least now millions of others are starting to feel the pain. More broadly distributed pain creates incentives for change which did not exist before. Pain is hope. Being on the frontline has been an excruciating and isolating experience.
I predict it's going to be a bloodbath. People who worked for Big Tech have no idea what's coming. Some of us software engineers who have been outside have been experiencing issues for almost a decade. The industry is extremely anti-competitive.
Whatever you produce, nobody is going to use unless you produce it under the banner of Big Tech. There are no real opportunities for real founders.
The problem is spreading beyond software. The other day, I found out there is a billion dollar company whose main product is a sponge... Yes, a sponge, for cleaning. We're fast moving towards a communist-like centrally planned economy, but with a facade of meritocracy where there is only one product of each kind and no room for competition.
This feeling of doom that software engineers started to feel after LLMs is how I was feeling 5 years earlier. People are confused because they think the problem is that AI is automating them but reality is that our problems arise from a deeper systemic issue at the core of our economic system. AI is just a convenient cover story, it's not the reason why we are doomed. Once people accept that we can start to work towards a political solution like UBI or better...
We've reached the conclusion of Goodhart's Law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" - Our economic system has been so heavily monitored and controlled in every aspect that is has begun to fail in every aspect. Somebody has managed to profit from every blindspot, every exploit exposed by the measurement and control apparatus. Everything is getting qualitatively worse in every way that is not explicitly measured and the measurement apparatus is becoming increasingly unreliable... Most problems we're experiencing are what people experienced during the fall of communism except filter bubbles are making us completely blind to the experience of other people.
I think if we don't address the root causes, things will get worse for everyone. People's problems will get bigger, become highly personalized, pervasive, inexplicable, unrelatable. Everyone will waste their energy trying to resolve their own experience of the symptoms but the root causes would remain.
jongjong commented on I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams kirkville.com/i-now-assum... · Posted by u/cdrnsf
I now assume everything is a scam. If I heard about it, it's a scam.
Some things are not scams but I will never hear about them.
Making music with AI is a new hobby of mine.
My journey started after my wife found a Ukulele on the side of the road near where I lived a few years ago and took it home. Then often when I had a short break, I started just tugging at strings, trying to fully internalize the sound of each note and how they relate... After a few months, I learned about Suno and I started uploading short tunes and made full songs out of them. I basically produced a couple of new songs each week and my Ukulele playing got a lot better and I can now do custom chords. I'm all self taught so I literally don't know any of the formal rules of music. I shun all the theory about chords and composition like chorus, bridge, outro... I just give the AI the full text and so long as the main tune is repeated enough times with appropriate variations, I'm fine with it.
TBH, as a software engineer, I was a bit surprised at how rigid music is. Isn't it supposed to be creative? Rules stand in the way of that. I try to focus purely on what sounds good. For me, even the lyrics are just about the sound of the voice, I don't really care what they say, so long as it makes a vague general statement (with multiple interpretations) and not cheesy in any way.
jongjong commented on It's 2026, Just Use Postgres tigerdata.com/blog/its-20... · Posted by u/turtles3
I’m a huge Postgres fan. That said, I don’t agree with the blanket advice of “just use Postgres.” That stance often comes from folks who haven’t been exposed enough to (newer) purpose-built technologies and the tremendous value they can create
The argument, as in this blog, is that a single Postgres stack is simpler and reduces complexity. What’s often overlooked is the CAPEX and OPEX required to make Postgres work well for workloads it wasn’t designed for, at even reasonable scale. At Citus Data, we saw many customers with solid-sized teams of Postgres experts whose primary job was constant tuning, operating, and essentially babysitting the system to keep it performing at scale.
Side note, we’re seeing purpose-built technologies show up much earlier in a company’s lifecycle, likely accelerated by AI-driven use cases. At ClickHouse, many customers using Postgres replication are seed-stage companies that have grown extremely quickly. We pulled together some data on these trends here: https://clickhouse.com/blog/postgres-cdc-year-in-review-2025...
A better approach would be to embrace the integration of purpose-built technologies with Postgres, making it easier for users to get the best of both worlds, rather than making overgeneralized claims like “Postgres for everything” or “Just use Postgres.”
I hate how developers are often very skeptical but all the skepticism goes out the window if the tech is sufficiently hyped up.
And TBH, developers are pretty dumb not to realize that the tech tools monoculture is a way for business folks to make us easily replaceable... If all companies use the same tech, it turns us into exchangeable commodities which can easily be replaced and sourced across different organizations.
Look at the typical React dev. They have zero leverage and can be replaced by vibe coding kiddies straight out of school or sourced from literally any company on earth. And there are some real negatives to using silver bullet tools. They're not even the best tools for a lot of cases! The React dev is a commodity and they let it happen to them. Outsmarted by dumb business folks who dropped out of college. They probably didn't even come up with the idea; the devs did. Be smarter people. They're going to be harvesting you like Cavendish.
I know competent adults whose login flow for most websites is “forgot password.” Might be better off writing your passwords on post it notes at that point.
Whenever some website asks me to use specific weird characters in my password. I have to write it down on a post-it note and put it in the top drawer of my desk.
The irony is that the websites which require such passwords are often low-importance.
jongjong commented on Don't rent the cloud, own instead blog.comma.ai/datacenter/... · Posted by u/Torq_boi
If you were to read TFA, it is about ML training workloads, not web servers
Well the article starts out with a suggestion that we should all get a data center... It's quite a jump to assume that everyone reading this article needs to train their own LLMs.
We haven't yet lost the war against complexity. We would know if we had, because all software would grind to a halt due to errors. We're getting close though; some aspects of software feels deeply dysfunctional; like 2FA and Captcha - They're perfect examples of trying to improve something (security) by adding complexity... And it fails spectacularly... It fails especially hard because those people who made the decision to force these additional hurdles on users are still convinced that they're useful because they have a severely distorted view of the average person's reality. Their trade-off analysis is completely out of whack.
The root problem with 2FA is that the average computer is full of vulnerabilities and cannot be trusted 100% so you need a second device just in case the computer was hacked... But it's not particularly useful because if someone infected your computer with a virus, they can likely also infect your phone the next time you plug it in to your computer to charge it... It's not quite 2-factor... So much hassle for so little security benefit... Especially for the average person who is not a Fortune 500 CEO. Company CEOs have a severely distorted view about how often the average person is targeted by scammers and hackers. Last time someone tried to scam me was 10 years ago... The pain of having to pull up my phone every single day, multiple times per day to type in a code is NOT WORTH the tiny amount of security it adds in my case.
The case of security is particularly pernicious because complexity has an adverse impact on security; so trying to improve security by adding yet more complexity is extremely unwise... Eventually the user loses access to the software altogether. E.g. they forgot their password because they were forced to use some weird characters as part of their password or they downloaded a fake password manager which turned out to be a virus, or they downloaded a legitimate password manager like Lastpass which was hacked because obviously, they'd be a popular target for hackers... Even if everything goes perfectly and the user is so deeply conditioned that they don't mind using a password manager... Their computer may crash one day and they may lose access to all their passwords... Or the company may require them to change their password after 6 month and the password manager misses the update and doesn't know the new password and the user isn't 'approved' to use the 'forgot my password' feature... Or the user forgets their password manager's master password and when they try to recover it via their email, they realize that the password for their email account is inside the password manager... It's INFURIATING!!!
I could probably write the world's most annoying book just listing out all the cascading layers of issues that modern software suffers from. The chapter on security alone would be longer than the entire Lord of the Rings series... And the average reader would probably rather throw themselves into the fiery pits of Mordor than finish reading that chapter... Yet for some bizarre reason, they don't seem to mind EXPERIENCING these exact same cascading failures in their real day-to-day life.
jongjong commented on Don't rent the cloud, own instead blog.comma.ai/datacenter/... · Posted by u/Torq_boi
Or better; write your software such that you can scale to tens of thousands of concurrent users on a single machine. This can really put the savings into perspective.