lonelyasacloud (u/lonelyasacloud)

lonelyasacloud commented on AI agents are starting to eat SaaS martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/jnord

jwr · 5 days ago

I am the founder of a niche SaaS (https://partsbox.com/ — software for managing electronic parts inventory and production). While I am somewhat worried about AI capabilities, I'm not losing too much sleep over it.

The worry is that customers who do not realize the full depth of the problem will implement their own app using AI. But that happens today, too: people use spreadsheets to manage their electronic parts (please don't) and BOMs (bills of materials). The spreadsheet is my biggest competitor.

I've been designing and building the software for 10 years now and most of the difficulty and complexity is not in the code. Coding is the last part, and the easiest one. The real value is in understanding the world (the processes involved) and modeling it in a way that cuts a good compromise between ease of use and complexity.

Sadly, as I found out, once you spend a lot of time thinking and come up with a model, copycats will clone that (as well as they can, but superficially it will look similar).

lonelyasacloud · 5 days ago

Coding agents like Claude are just one line of AI making inroads. There are lot of nearly tasks that can be almost, but not quite, implemented effectivly with existing tools like Excel and Word. As they seek a return on their investments, are MS likely to target those nearly cases with AI in their Access, Excel, Word etc product lines?

lonelyasacloud commented on Native ads coming soon to Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange meta.stackexchange.com/qu... · Posted by u/exploraz

illusiveman · 8 days ago

Does stack overflow still exist?

I mean, it's there any genuine case you can cover with SO that you cannot with your favorite LLM?

Because where a LLM falls short is in the same topic SO fell short: highly technical questions about a particular technology or tool, where your best chance to get the answer you were looking for is asking in their GitHub repo or contacting the maintainers.

lonelyasacloud · 8 days ago

>> I mean, it's there any genuine case you can cover with SO that you cannot with your favorite LLM?

Perhaps better than current models at detecting and pushing back when it sounds like the individual asking the question is thinking of doing something silly/dubious/debatable.

lonelyasacloud commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

jl6 · 9 days ago

Is the mechanism of the ban actually going to work, or is it just going to train more kids how to use fake IDs and VPNs?

lonelyasacloud · 9 days ago

Not sure it matters.

It's a relatively uncontroversial ban, with public support in Aus because of mental health concerns, and key social media sites complying.

VPN's come with their own minimum age 18 T&C's. As do the credit and debit that are usually required somewhere along the line to pay for the services.

Historically, if it's awkward to circumvent most people tend to comply; which means in turn that minority that can figure out a way around it are unlikely to find many of their friends present. While for majority there's unlikely to be much of a draw or peer group pressure to circumvent.

I'm sure Aus gov will monitor, media will highlight problems etc, but would be surprised if it was not actually quit effective.

lonelyasacloud commented on In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution e360.yale.edu/digest/new-... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

biophysboy · 9 days ago

Is that true for slower moving vehicles? I can't imagine there's a lot of brake dust generated by stopping & starting in the 0-10 mph range.

lonelyasacloud · 9 days ago

Afraid the intuition is somewhat incorrect.

Similar to with tire wear what's important to emissions is the amount of force that has to be applied to decelerate and how often it occurs. At highway speeds it's far less of an issue, but in slow speed urban environments with lots of stop start driving and high vehicle densities it's a real problem.

See for instance https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/reports/cat09/1...

lonelyasacloud commented on A supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine boomsupersonic.com/flyby/... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

shrubble · 10 days ago

You get 42MW inside the footprint of what looks like 2 truck trailers, that you can park in the parking lot next to the electrical transformers. Virtually no permitting or installation required.

lonelyasacloud · 10 days ago

How does the fuel get to it?

Building roads and running tankers is expensive. Ditto pipelines unless very close to suitable sources.

Especially when the moment these go online at any scale the price of natural gas starts getting jacked even further.

lonelyasacloud commented on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines? · Posted by u/embedding-shape

lonelyasacloud · 10 days ago

TL;DR; Until we are sure we have the moderation systems to assist surfacing the good stuff I would be in favour of temporary guidelines to maintain quality.

Longer ...

I am here for the interesting conversations and polite debate.

In principle I have no issues with either citing AI responses in much the same way we do with any other source. Or with individual's prompting AI's to generate interesting responses on their behalf. When done well I believe it can improve discourse.

Practically though, we know that the volume of content AI's can generate tends to overwhelm human based moderation and review systems. I like the signal to noise ratio as it is; so from my pov I'd be in favour of a cautious approach with a temporary guidelines against it's usage until we are sure we have the moderation tools to preserve that quality.

lonelyasacloud commented on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden andyljones.com/posts/hors... · Posted by u/pbui

retrac98 · 11 days ago

Unnecessary complexity isn’t much of a problem when the code is virtually free to maintain or throw away and replace.

lonelyasacloud · 11 days ago

Even if a throw away and replace strategy is used, eventually a system's complexity will overrun any intelligence's ability to work effectively with it. Poor engineering will cause that development velocity drop off to happen earlier.

lonelyasacloud commented on Ask HN: How many people got VPNs in response to laws like UK Online Safety Act? · Posted by u/hodgesrm

lonelyasacloud · 13 days ago

Yes.

It wasn't an unintended consequence.

The goal of the legislation was to "stop children from accessing age inappropriate content" on the internet.

Ahead of the legislation it was known that there would be a significant proportion of individuals who would switch to using VPN's because without platform based verification it would be a pita for users (more logins, random age verification services, and some sites just deciding to block).

However, VPN's, come with their own minimum age 18 T&C's, as do the means of payment for those services (credit and debit).

So from the pov of "stop children from accessing age inappropriate content" similar result

Not perfect, but empirically this seems to be working well enough e.g. "New data shows no rise in children’s VPN use after the introduction of online age checks" (https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/research/data-shows-no-r...), i.e. the VPN traffic is largely adults.

As to other unintended consequences, such as making it more difficult for the authorities to snoop on their citizens, I doubt this effectively makes any difference whatsoever.

lonelyasacloud commented on What Killed Perl? entropicthoughts.com/what... · Posted by u/speckx

lonelyasacloud · a month ago

What killed it was that a lot of its development talent effectively went off and worked on a completely different programming language that eventually got released a Raku.

When the team departed, Perl lost its development velocity and Python wasn't that far behind.

lonelyasacloud commented on Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright bbc.com/news/articles/c1j... · Posted by u/YeGoblynQueenne

lonelyasacloud · a month ago

Empirically on UK roads it's as much about the car industry getting away with selling vehicles that are too large for our roads i.e. oversized SUV's and trucks, as anything else. The combination of driver's side closer to crown, and higher mounting, mean the light's from these behemoths tend to cast more of their beams into the eye line of anyone coming the other way, particularly in smaller, lower to the ground vehicles.