joshstrange (u/joshstrange)

joshstrange commented on Ask HN: Recently laid off developer looking for solo product ideas · Posted by u/thatgloomyguy

My preferred method of finding something to build (assuming I don’t already have an idea I’m passionate about) is to pair up with someone who has deep industry knowledge in a non-tech industry (or any industry I’m not well versed in). Take their knowledge with your skill set to create a tool/platform/whatever for the given industry.

I find that vast majority of people, even top people in another field, don’t have a good grasp of what is possible with technology. I don’t say that to make them sound dumb, just they don’t know what they don’t know. You get to be the one who can suggest technologies they can use, either existing things you can glue together and/or custom code to help accomplish a task.

joshstrange commented on Gangs are using increasingly sophisticated kit to steal cars economist.com/britain/202... · Posted by u/petethomas

joshstrange · 5 days ago

> MPs have argued, for example, that Apple could easily undermine the business model of phone-snatchers by introducing a “kill switch”, but it won’t because of “strong commercial incentives”.

MPs are stupid then. Which thankfully this article points out. Apple (and I assume Android) already allow for remote bricking/locking of your devices. Apple won't let you disable Find My or other security measures without your passcode and Apple has a way to disable turning off Find My if you aren't home/normal location (so if someone snatches your phone while you are out and they also shoulder-surfed your passcode they still can't disable it).

I have no clue what "strong commercial incentives" these MPs are referring to but I assume it's just general (tech or otherwise) incompetency of elected officials.

joshstrange commented on Apple and Amazon will miss AI like Intel missed mobile gmays.com/the-biggest-bet... · Posted by u/gmays

joshstrange · 6 days ago

> Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?

People like screens. They like seeing IG pictures,they like scrolling through TikTok, they like seeing pictures/videos their friends/family send/post. I doubt many people will want to see pictures/videos on a watch screen or in glasses (which still have a ways to go).

Also I don't buy the premise of this article that Apple is deciding to take a backseat in AI, they were late to the party but they are trying (and failing it seems) to build foundational models. Reaching for OpenAI/Anthropic/etc while they continue to work on their internal models makes a lot of sense to me. It acknowledges they are behind and need to rely on a third-party but doesn't mean they won't ever use their own models.

Unless something changes (which is absolutely possible) it does seem we are headed towards LLMs being comedities. We will see what OpenAI/Ive end up releasing but I don't see a near-future where we don't have screens in our pockets and for that Google and Apple are best placed. With the GPT-5 flop (It's 4.6 at best IMHO) I have less concerns with LLMs growing as quickly as predicted.

joshstrange commented on ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL UPDATE performance comparison clickhouse.com/blog/updat... · Posted by u/truth_seeker

joshstrange · 7 days ago

I only use CH for work so I'll read about this more on Monday but I shudder to think of the caveats. We have used cancelling rows and now the one of the merge engines that just needs a version (higher cancels out lower). No database has ever driven me more mad than Clickhouse. If your workload is append-only/insert-only then congrats, it's amazing, you'll have a great time. If you need to update data... Well, strap in.

As long as you can get away with Postgres, stay with Postgres. I'm sure this update here is a step forward just like version-merging is much better than cancelling rows but it's always got a ton of downsides.

Unrelated to updating data, the CH defaults drive me insane, the null join behavior alone made me reconsider trying to rip CH out of our infrastructure (after wasting too long trying to figure out why my query "wasn't working").

Lastly I'll say, if CH does what you need and you are comfortable learning all the ends and outs, then it can do some really cool things. But it's important to remember it's NOT a normal RDMS nor can you use it like one. I almost wish they didn't use SQL as the query language, then people would think about it differently, myself included.

joshstrange commented on iPhone DevOps (2023) clearsky.dev/blog/iphone-... · Posted by u/ustad

Xss3 · 10 days ago

Any dev choosing iOS in my view has a twisted moral compass as they're perfectly happy to support the social divide apple purposely created and perpetuates to this day with its refusal to move to RCS.

joshstrange · 10 days ago

iOS has had RCS support since iOS 18 (September 16, 2024)

joshstrange commented on Humanloop Joins Anthrophic humanloop.com... · Posted by u/clemo_ra

moralestapia · 11 days ago

Sorry, what does Humanloop do?

The site is devoid of info now.

joshstrange · 11 days ago

This link still works and seems to explain their product: https://humanloop.com/home

joshstrange commented on Optimizing my sleep around Claude usage limits mattwie.se/no-sleep-till-... · Posted by u/mattwiese

bakugo · 13 days ago

Is it really censorship when 90% of AI related posts are just not-so-thinly-veiled advertisements with zero potential for meaningful discussion beyond "yes I agree fellow independent user, I also love Claude Code™ from Anthropic® and it has 1000x'd my productivity, their $5000/mo plan is a steal and everyone should buy it!"

joshstrange · 13 days ago

> Is it really censorship when 90% of AI related posts are just not-so-thinly-veiled advertisements with zero potential for meaningful discussion beyond "yes I agree fellow independent user, I also love Claude Code™ from Anthropic® and it has 1000x'd my productivity, their $5000/mo plan is a steal and everyone should buy it!"

I'm far from sold on vibe-coding or heavy-ai-assist (whatever you want to call it) but I find these "How developers use Claude Code" blog posts fascinating and not for a second do I think they are paid ads.

Do you really think the blog posts shared here on HN talking about how people are using Claude (among other tools) are all (or mostly) paid ads?

joshstrange commented on The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers simonwillison.net/2025/Au... · Posted by u/tosh

simonw · 16 days ago

It's possible you are a victim of bugs in the router, and your test prompts were going to the less useful non-thinking variants.

From Sam's tweet: https://x.com/sama/status/1953893841381273969

> GPT-5 will seem smarter starting today. Yesterday, the autoswitcher broke and was out of commission for a chunk of the day, and the result was GPT-5 seemed way dumber. Also, we are making some interventions to how the decision boundary works that should help you get the right model more often.

joshstrange · 14 days ago

Altman is not trustworthy IMHO. So I have a really hard time taking that tweet at face value.

It seems equally possible that they had tweaked the router in order to save money (push more queries towards the lower power models) and due to the backlash are tweaking them again and calling it a bug.

I guess it’s possible they aren’t being misleading but again, Altman/OpenAI haven’t earned my trust.

joshstrange commented on The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers simonwillison.net/2025/Au... · Posted by u/tosh

eurekin · 16 days ago

I couldn't be more confused by this launch...

I had gpt-5 only on my account for the most of today, but now I'm back at previous choices (including my preferred o3).

Had gpt-5 been pulled? Or, was it only a preview?

joshstrange · 14 days ago

> I couldn't be more confused by this launch...

Welcome to every OpenAI launch. Marketing page says one thing, your reality will almost certainly not match. It’s infuriating how they do rollouts (especially when the marketing page says “available now!” or similar but you don’t get access for days/weeks).

joshstrange commented on GPT-5 openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd

nobodywillobsrv · 17 days ago

This is one of these "best efforts" but also "lying a bit in marketing" is ok I guess.

On bad days this really bothers me. It's probably not the biggest deal I guess but somehow really feels like it pushes us all over the edge a bit. Is there a post about this phenomena? It feels like some combination of bullying, gaslighting and just being left out.

joshstrange · 17 days ago

OpenAI does this for literally _every_ release. They constantly say "Available to everyone" or "Rolling out today" or "Rolling out over the next few days". As a paying Plus member it irks me to no end, they almost never hit their self-imposed deadlines.

The linked page says

> GPT-5 is here > Our smartest, fastest, and most useful model yet, with thinking built in. Available to everyone.

Lies. I don't care if they are "rolling it out" still, that's not an excuse to lie on their website. It drives me nuts. It also means that by the time I finally get access I don't notice for a few days up to a week because I'm not going to check for it every days. You'd think their engineers would be able to write a simple notification system to alert users when they get access (even just in the web UI), but no. One day it isn't there, one day it is.

I'll get off my soapbox now but this always annoys me greatly.