48
points
shubhamjain
Joined 9,723 karma
Web geek. Love tinkering, building, and learning.
Currently working on: https://textquery.app/
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Blog: https://shubhamjain.co
Email: hi [at] shubhamjain.co
Twitter: @shubhamjainco
- shubhamjainProxyman is 100x value for 2x the price. I am not even kidding. Native UI, shortcuts, cert installation helper tools. And script editor to programmatically edit requests is so much better and powerful than Charles' request editor.
- Could there be a worse news regarding where content production is headed? Netflix production is trash and all they care is about metrics like viewers who have watched at least x% of certain content. Cuz if they have, and they accumulate y minutes of viewing, they are unlikely to cancel. This is to the point that they are exclusively making dumbed-down content that can be good background noise while viewers scroll through Instagram feeds. They have little taste, or any motivation to bring good stories out.
HBO might not be perfect, but at least its development process still begins with the story and the enthusiasm of the showrunner.
- I am a person who wants to maintain a distance from the AI-hype train, but seeing a chart like this [1], I can't help think that we are nowhere near the peak. The weekly token consumption keeps on rising, and it's already in trillions, and this ignores a lot of consumption happening directly through APIs.
Nvidia could keep delivering record-breaking numbers, and we may well see multiple companies hit six, seven, or even eight trillion dollars in market cap within a couple of years. While I am skeptical of claims like AI will make programming obsolete, but it’s clear that the adoption is still going like crazy and it's hard to anticipate when the plateau happens.
[1]: https://openrouter.ai/state-of-ai#open-vs_-closed-source-mod...
- As much as I appreciate Bhutan's ideas around happiness and its style of sustainable development, I feel Bhutan being a tiny hilly country is what allows them to work. Add to that the gift of Hydroelectric power, which alone contributes 1/4th of government revenue, and was responsible for 14% of its GDP[1]. Its population is less than a million, where as even tier-3 towns in India have a couple of million people living there.
A large country, with a large population, has far fewer options other than supporting economic development at a scale.
[1]: https://thewire.in/world/south-asia/bhutan-hydropower-electr...
- > Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that
I started TextQuery[1] with same moralistic standing. Not in respect of using AI or not, but that most software industry is suffering from rot that places more importance on making money, forcing subscription vs making something beautiful and detail-focused. I poured time in optimizing selections, perfecting autocomplete, and wrestling with Monaco’s thin documentation. However, I failed to make it sustainable business. My motivation ran out. And what I thought would be fun multi-year journey, collapsed into burnout and a dead-end project.
I have to say my time was better spent on building something sustainable, making more money, and optimizing the details once having that. It was naïve to obsess over subtleties that only a handful of users would ever notice.
There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in your work, but you can’t ignore what the market actually values, because that's what will make you money, and that's what will keep your business and motivation alive.
- Just look at the article on HN[1] on Grokipedia. It's almost 5500+ words long. The Wikipedia article is not even 500 words[2]. This won't be a problem if the article contained anything of substance. It doesn't. It's written as if LLM was specifically instructed to be as verbose and as boring as possible.
> Its algorithmic ranking system, which weights recent votes more heavily to counter brigading and promote fresh, high-signal content, combined with editorial moderation to curb low-quality or off-topic posts, has cultivated a reputation for rigorous debate, though not without internal tensions over shifting cultural norms, perceived negativity in comments, and debates on whether business-oriented stories overshadow pure technical discourse
What surprises is not the fact that it exists. Elon is a man with a fragile ego and a history of cheap stunts like this. It’s the fact that he still has almost cult-like base that treats him as some kind of mankind's savior despite all of this.
[1]: https://grokipedia.com/page/Hacker_News [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News
- > Companies prey on those who forget to cancel their free trial. So far, it only happened once to me, but thankfully, I managed to get my refund.
This dark pattern has completely taken over the iOS ecosystem. Apps hide the fact that they’re paid until you’ve gone through several steps—registration, login, setup—making you believe the what you downloaded it for is just one the next screen. And then, bang, a paywall! with a “generous” 3-day free trial and a $3.99/week subscription.
I uninstall such apps immediately and leave a one-star review. I get it, devs need to make money, but there are better ways than this sleazy bs. Unfortunately, too many gurus have normalized this practice by constantly bragging how much revenue they are making.
- > Spec-Driven Development changes this: specifications become executable, directly generating working implementations rather than just guiding them.
Reminds me of TDD bandwagon which was all the rage when I started programming. It took years to slowly die out and people realized how overhyped it really was. Nothing against AI, I love it as a tool, but this "you-don't-need-code" approach shows similar signs. Quick wins at first, lots of hype because of those wins, and then reaching a point where doing even tiny changes becomes absurdly difficult.
You need code. You will need it for a long time.
- This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. For all its breakthroughs, OpenAI lacks any fiscal discipline. Sam Altman seems convinced that as long as they’re delivering value and have a clear mission, the money will somehow take care of itself. That’s fine for now, but the music will stop playing one day.
When it comes to software engineering at scale, nothing beats Google. They already operate the world’s largest and (profitable) information index, they design their own chips, and employ the best engineers who know how to deliver massive systems cost-effectively. They can sustain large investment far longer than any other company simply because of how profitable all their existing businesses are. I just wish they would get their act together when it comes to product management.
- Partially, yes! Population is #1 strain on resources. However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem.
- > Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution.
They haven't, imo. I am from India, and I have been hearing for the last two decades how we have avoided same mistakes as China and the latter is headed for a demographic collapse. China is only marching forward, and focusing more on automation to hedge its bets. While overpopulation in India has choked almost every city in India. I honestly don't know what will happen as more people migrate from rural to urban areas.
India's population will peak in 2065, while China's already has. It's depressing to imagine that 250-300M more people are left to be added before we finally see a decline.
Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated, the modern idea that “a large population is a blessing” feels equally misguided.
- > Foreigners poured a record $290bn into US stocks in the second quarter and now own about 30 per cent of the market — the highest share in post-second world war history. Europeans and Canadians have been boycotting American goods but continue buying US stocks in bulk — especially the tech giants.
I fail to find any plausible explanation for this other than the fact that yes, it is a bubble. Tesla, a car company facing declining sales, an executive exodus, and a CEO who’s more of a liability, is almost a $1.5T company now. An absurd P/E of 259. Sure, P/E isn't the most realiable metric. But, for a company with declining sales, and onslaught from Chinese competitors, a P/E of anything above 50 is absolutely ludicrous. Do people actually buy into the absurdity of humanoid robots and robotaxis?
"Be fearful when everyone is greedy." I’ve cashed out of U.S. stocks, and I think it's wise thing to do when craze is at its peak.
- > I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can't be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people's money and then lighting it on fire.
This is what I don't like. Debating in extremes. How can AI have bad unit economics? They are literally selling compute and code for a handsome markup. This is classic software economics, some of the best unit economics you can get. Look at Midjourney: it pulled in hundreds of millions without raising a single dime.
Companies are unprofitable because they are chasing user growth and subsidising free users. This is not to say there isn't a bubble, but it's a rock-solid business and there to stay. Yes, music will stop one day, and there will be a crash, but I’d bet that most of the big players we see today will still be around after the shakeout. Anecdote: my wife is so dependent on ChatGPT that if the free version ever stopped being good enough, she’d happily pay for premium. And this is coming from someone who usually questions why anyone needs pay for software.
- This are zero details on how it's supposed to work, or how it avoids the problem traditional crypto. “Instant global transactions” sound good in theory, but it has never been a technological problem, purely a regulatory one. Govts. don't like this happening. They want oversight, especially for cross border transactions.
- > For myself, in the last 10 years, my work of writing code has largely defined what I do with my working time. Now I experience large swaths of that work being created and done by AI (sometimes amazingly well, sometimes poorly), and I find myself thinking of the photographer above.
Which is ironic, because smartphone photography is astonishingly average to someone who actually understands photography. Phones try to handle every scenario for the user. It has been optimized for bright outdoors, low light conditions, even specific stuff like sunsets. So most people never realize how difficult it really is to shoot in bright daylight with the light source behind the subject. Only when you pick up a traditional camera do you realize that’s one of the worst conditions to take a photo in.
Maybe coding is headed toward the same place. AI coding will smooth out complexity for the majority of programmers, but at the same time, we’ll also see a lot of programmers building things that don’t actually need to be built, or not realizing the limits of their solutions, or just hung in the narrow space of what AI can do for them.
Having done photography with Sony-a6000, I’ve found that it made me more skilled with a smartphone camera. So, I am still optimistic that knowledge gained through deliberate effort has value, even in a world that increasingly prizes “effortlessness” in everything. But only time will tell how much that belief really holds up.
- 5 points
- It's difficult even being someone not from United States. Even more concerning is how most of the social media has been hijacked to echo views that should have been unthinkable a few years ago. For some, it's great news of course. It's free speech—they think. But, I am not sure future generation needs to across opinions like feminism is bad, or women belong in the kitchen.
I do believe that this is a temporary phase, and things would return to a bit of normalcy in a few years. It's my hypothesis that political pendulum swings between two extremes. 2016-21 was a period of extreme leftist opinions and it was problematic too in many ways. The other extreme is a hundred times worse and most people have lost taste for that, too. Secondly, the support for these movements mostly stems from an aging demographic, a lot of which are just passing their last few years.
But I would say social media needs to be clamped down/regulated, free speech be damned. It has caused enough evil already. Can't let a few billionaires decide the direction of world politics.
- In my late 20s, I felt disillusioned with this kind of wisdom. Found it too simplistic and not enough to cope with the fact that existence is absurd. I am 32 now, and I can't help think that simplicity is all that there is: curate a happy state of mind, meaningful relationships, active lifestyle, and maybe some audacious goal to keep yourself busy. Thinking that there's some higher state of mind (via spirituality, for eg) is delusion at best.
I feel everything follows the Midwit meme progression [1]: at first you use crude, obvious methods because you don’t know better. Later, complexity is alluring, you drown yourself in optimisations and finding the bestest tools and methods. In the end you come back to the same conclusion: simplicity was the most reliable tool the whole time.
[1]: https://medium.com/@obandoandrew8/bell-curve-meme-avoiding-t...
- No one needs to make an investment. The playbook—as all countries are figuring it out—to navigate the crisis is simple: agree in principle to the demands, let the narcissistic toddler self-pat, brag about how fantastic of a deal maker he is. Stall, delay to make things official. Let it all die down slowly. Need more time? How about blatant corruption like approving Trump Towers, or gifting a corporate jet? Or make a token investment, just enough to let him brag again.
What every country is doing is buying time. Just enough till the next election or (hopefully) sooner.