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kldg commented on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration   ankursethi.com/blog/gemin... · Posted by u/speckx
cortesoft · 4 days ago
I have had way too many arguments over the years with product and sales people at my job on the importance of instant self-signup. I want to be able to just pay and go, without having to talk to people or wait for things.

I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer, but I am never going to sign up for anything that makes me talk to someone before I can buy.

kldg · 3 days ago
Bless you and your family for all time and beyond. Having to talk to someone before I even get a price to compare, or a demo, drives me mad, and then a week later you get their contract and find they claim ownership of everything your company uploads to them -- all that time down the drain, and the salesperson never read the contract so they don't know what to say. Then there are the smaller companies with unwritten policies -- we used to get call metric software from a small Swiss outfit, but I discovered we were billed based on how many employees we've ever had, not based on current employees, with no method to delete terminated employees from the database -- on what planet do you expect someone to pay a recurring expense in perpetuity for someone who showed up for training one day 5 years ago and was never heard from again? I was so mad when they gave us the renewal price, we made our own replacement software for it.

Anyway, long story short: I now require the price and details before I'll even consider talking to a salesperson, not the other way around. Might actually be a good job for an AI agent; they can talk to these sales bozos (respectfully) for me.

kldg commented on If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?   stephenramsay.net/posts/v... · Posted by u/sramsay
kldg · 5 days ago
Rust works very well for vibe-coding because the compiler is typically very specific and a bit picky; helps keep it out of traps. I like using WASM with Rust as originator when vibe-coding because AI models are still very "sloppy/forgetful". There is one thing you should still definitely do beforehand, and that's pick out which crates you want and write up the initial Cargo.toml for it, because frontier models have a lot of trouble with fast-updated libraries.

What frontier models also excel at is writing their own libraries and skipping third-party dependencies. It's very easy for a human to just pick up a bloated 750kb library they're only going to actually use 15kb worth of its code for, BUT that library can serve as a valuable implementation model for someone very patient and willing to "reinvent the wheel" a little bit, which is definitely going to be AI and not me, because I just want to point to a black box and tell it what to do. For big things like web server, I'm still defaulting to Axum, but for things like making a JS soundbank parser/player or a WebGL2 mp4 & webm parser/demuxer & player, these are tasks frontier models are good for with the right prompting.

To an extent, maybe counter-intuitively, I think the big thing we'll see out of AI is an explosion of artisanship -- with humanoid robots in 2040, perhaps, our households may be making their own butter again, for example.

kldg commented on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?    · Posted by u/embedding-shape
kldg · 5 days ago
This website has guidelines? I have a friend who vomits out what an AI's response to something is to current events; drives me mad, but I resist being a dick about it (to their face).

I don't recall any instances where I've run into the problem here, maybe because I tend to arrive to threads as a result of them being popular (listed on Google News) which means I'm only going to read the top 10-50 posts. I read human responses for a bit before deciding if I should continue reading, and that's the same system I use for LLMs because sometimes I can't tell just by the formatting; if it's good, it's good - if it's bad, it's bad -- I don't care if a chicken with syphilis wrote it.

kldg commented on Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help   blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt
JeremyNT · 6 days ago
Yes, and as much as I hate to defend modern UI designers, I believe the icons in the menus here are actually extremely helpful (even when duplicated).

In the first example, when I want to find the option to add or delete a row in this massive menu, the icons clearly convey the purpose. I can instantly filter a huge list of possibilities down to a few relevant entries.

kldg · 6 days ago
yes; I think it depends a lot on how accepted the icon is. Every few months when I have to open ST's CubeProgrammer, my brain substantially deteriorates because they don't use text and the icons for their main tabs are not always understandable to me. (and the thing's otherwise a relic from 20+ years ago)

X, volume & mute icon, disk icon, upload/download icon -- these are all fine and good; you don't need to spell those out for me because their use is so widespread that even if I didn't know what they meant, it'd be very useful to learn. I have no idea what a generic "integrated circuit" icon means, though, and I doubt anyone will use it elsewhere to mean the same thing, so I just click around randomly until I find what I'm looking for, like I'd do with the previously-unlabeled 6-switch panel in my living room where the positioning of the switches have no obvious relation to the physical placement of the ceiling lights.

I think Apple's menu actually shows exactly what I want and expect; show icons if it'll help me, don't show them if they wouldn't; though in come cases, I think Apple could apply some more icons (like for "Stop", there are a few good choices for that).

kldg commented on     · Posted by u/anonymous_ibex
kldg · 15 days ago
Good luck, bud. I found I wasted a lot of time in my youth and only stopped as I aged; took time to find purpose, I think. That purpose also evolves and becomes both "wider" and "kinder" with age, I think; to move from zealotry into a kind of zen progression.
kldg commented on Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)   evanhahn.com/stopping-bad... · Posted by u/emschwartz
kldg · 15 days ago
def not my wheelhouse, but I assume easiest way to keep bad guys out is to use copyleft license and only enforce against bad guys. despite what some say in defense of billionaires, you don't actually need to enforce every violation of your rights; rights don't disappear under law just because you don't use them.
kldg commented on Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?    · Posted by u/dennis-tra
petabyt · 17 days ago
I can't even imagine doing development in Windows without WSL anymore. I think Microsoft even requires it for some of their stuff.
kldg · 16 days ago
I guess it depends on what you do. I do python, rust, and web frontend in Windows. I have a personal bias against Docker, which'd otherwise be the primary WSL draw for me since if I want/need Linux, I can SSH into the majority of the machines in my house.

I'll throw out my unpopular opinion/experience here, too: I haven't liked any "desktop experience" I've seen or used for a Linux distro, and they all look and feel very similar to me: foreign, basic, and difficult for me to tweak and produce with. I greatly dislike the React stuff both on the web and in Windows, and use Classic Shell, which I'm satisfied with. Windows is easy to customize and almost everything can be tailored without even needing a reboot, many even with registry options already made and just waiting for a bit to be flipped.

It helps my puny, smooth brain, too, to just think of Windows being graphical and Linux being text-based; helps me remember what I'm doing.

kldg commented on NTSB report: Decryption of images from the Titan submersible camera [pdf] (2024)   data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Docu... · Posted by u/bmurray7jhu
Zak · 22 days ago
> Removed SD card. The manufacturer of the camera had requested certain components of the device be redacted. Portions of this image have been redacted.

And so it is, but anyone who has ever seen a Sandisk SD card knows what they're looking at. I can even tell it's not the fastest V90 speed.

The things companies try ineffectually to keep out of public view are weird.

kldg · 19 days ago
yeah, I'd guess the person who made this decision just wanted to cover their butt. it got a good laugh out of me reading the caption, though. "hmmm. who could use this distinct branding so many people are familiar with? it looks a bit orange; maybe it's Home Depot."
kldg commented on What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality   nytimes.com/2025/11/23/te... · Posted by u/nonprofiteer
ZpJuUuNaQ5 · 20 days ago
>People opting for unchallenging pseudo-relationships over messy human interaction is part of a larger trend, though.

I don't disagree that some people take AI way too far, but overall, I don't see this as a significant issue. Why must relationships and human interaction be shoved down everyone's throats? People tend to impose their views on what is "right" onto others, whether it concerns religion, politics, appearance, opinions, having children, etc. In the end, it just doesn't matter - choose AI, cats, dogs, family, solitude, life, death, fit in, isolate - it's just a temporary experience. Ultimately, you will die and turn to dust like around 100 billion nameless others.

kldg · 20 days ago
I lean toward the opinion there are certain things people (especially young people) should be steered away from because they tend to snowball in ways people may not anticipate, like drug abuse and suicide; situations where they wind up much more miserable than they realize, not understanding the various crutches they've adopted to hide from pain/anxiety have kept them from happiness (this is simplistic, though; many introverts are happy and fine).

I don't think I have a clear-enough vision on how AI will evolve to say we should do something about it, though, and few jurisdictions do anything about minors on social media, which we do have a big pile of data on, so I'm not sure it's worth thinking/talking about AI too much yet, at least as it relates to regulating for minors. Unlike social media, too, the general trajectory for AI is hazy. In the meantime, I won't be swayed much by anecdotes in the news.

Regardless, if I were hosting an LLM, I would certainly be cutting off service to any edgy/sexy/philosophy/religious services to minimize risk and culpability. I was reading a few weeks ago on Axios of actual churches offering chatbots. Some were actually neat; I hit up an Episcopalian one to figure out what their deal was and now know just enough to think of them as different-Lutherans. Then there are some where the chatbot is prompted to be Jesus or even Satan. Which, again, could actually be fine and healthy, but if I'm OpenAI or whoever, you could not pay me enough.

kldg commented on Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory   element.io/blog/verifying... · Posted by u/LorenDB
whatevaa · 25 days ago
If you make anything public, you will have to deal with it. You should be mentally prepared for that from the start.
kldg · 24 days ago
in defense of this comment, you do need to do a heck of a lot of preparation (including psychologically) to do anything publicly anymore. wild west days are long gone, at least for US-based servers. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to stop users from interacting too freely, to censor and moderate them so I don't wind up on some news site in 20 years being accused of hosting a site *Widely Used* by pedophilic narcoterror jihadists; I would like to not, but user content (and especially their information) is a huge liability to host... unless you're Equifax or Facebook or Google or some other large corporation -- then you can accidentally dump out everyone's sensitive financial information and only pay them $9 in compensation (or whatever the amount was; I keep throwing the cards they send me in the trash).

(yes I'm salty about that still)

u/kldg

KarmaCake day82May 16, 2025View Original