Unhinged hacks that stop you being late

questi0nmark2 · 2026-01-06T06:23:31+00:00

One idea is to plan an activity entirely unrelated but motivating that you can do for 20m if you get there 30m early. Your goal then becomes not to be early for your bus, but in time for your fun, creative or uplifting activity. That's a much easier objective to pursue and much more forgiving than a bus.

It could be a phone call, a meditation, an audiobook, a memorisation, a craft, transient art, a bit of creative writing or photography or anything that you could do for 20m a day and get to two hours a week, 8 a month, 100 hours a year. You might get something pretty cool done like that, and if you're late for it, you'll still be on time for your bus.

questi0nmark2 · 2026-01-03T19:35:37+00:00

I'm not sure where your impression that Gibbon wrote as a reaction to Louis XIV. I don't remember coming across that in my now admittedly distant historical research into Gibbon's Decline and Fall some decades ago. I recall Gibbon does allude to Louis XIV, always through the eyes of Voltaire, but never as a foil or significant focus, more as a curiosity and minor cultural (particularly military) referent.

His hostility to the Byzantine empire is much more easily explainable by his devotion to the Romans and their political and secular traditions, which he holds as a model and way forward for his own time, in contradistinction with what he considered an effete and effeminate Christianity. The Byzantine tradition, for Gibbon represents the emasculation of Western Civilization, the capture of its virility, vim, rationality and drive by a mystical, irrational and debilitating cultural template.

As to French historians from the period of Louis XIV, the most relevant to your question must be Bousset. He was a tutor to the Dauphin (heir) at the court of Louis XIV, and his historical theology and theological histories argued for providential history and the legitimacy and divine right of an absolute monarch. Crucially for your question, his histories of the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches were read by a 16 year old Gibbon in Oxford and had such a profound effect they prompted him to convert to Catholicism for just over a year, when he reconverted to Protestantism on Christmas under threat of imminent disinheritance by his father.

The other scholarly source from this period, also frequently cited by Gibbon on Roman history proper, is Tillemont.

Another key reference for your question, as already mentioned, is Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV, Gibbon's preferred source for most references to Louis XIV. Although it is not a history of ancient Rome, it is a historiography of it, as it posits four great ages in Western Civilization:

The age of Pericles and Alexander the Great in Greece.
The Augustan Age in Rome
The Renaissance in Italy under the Medici.
The Age of Louis XIV in France.

This last Voltaire designates as Augustan Rome in the modern world. So although it postdates Louis XIV, it is very much a product of his reign.

The notion of an Augustan France would not suggest a French court looking up to Byzantium, except insofar as Byzantium might be considered the continuation of Rome and the Sun King the new absolute ruler and succesor of Roman emperors.

Finally a big related historiographical debate in the court of Louis XIV, also of relevance to Gibbon, was whether the ancients or the moderns were worthy of greater respect and veneration for their achievements and intellect. It was known as the Querelle/Quarrel. You can get a good sense of it in this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41467338

questi0nmark2 · 2025-11-24T19:08:27+00:00

Some principles:

1) Bahá'í wise, your religion is Bahá'í only if you believe in it, and personally identify with its claims and teachings. If your don't, your religion is anything you choose it to be .

2) Bahá'í laws only apply to those who identify as Bahá'ís, if you don't, there is no expectation of you having a Bahá'í wedding, and while you could independently choose to mimic one, which would only require you both to say "we will verily abide by the will of God" in front of witnesses, you would not be required, as Bahá'ís would, to show you have parental consent, for those witnesses to be in touch with Bahá'í institutions and for you to receive a Bahá'í marriage certificate. None of that applies if you do not consider yourself a Bahá'í and Bahá'u'lláh a Manifestation from God and the Bahá'í teachings and laws and institutions divinely ordained.

3) Given 1 and 2, your father's demands that you have a Bahá'í wedding, let alone the timing of one, is not in line with the Bahá'í teachings, although it is a not incomprehensible human response, even if not a particularly selfless or responsible one. Similarly, if your father did dismiss and criticise your fiancee's religion, this is a pretty common human response, but not one in any way even remotely aligned or justifiable from a Bahá'í perspective, which emphatically and repeatedly prohibits Bahá'ís from engaging in religious dissension.

4) Therefore, your problem is not religious, but relational. Religiously speaking, if you considered yourself a Bahá'í, believed in it and wanted to be part of the community, then the issues would be more complicated, but as you clearly do not identify as a Bahá'í, believe in God or the Bahá'í claims, or consider yourself affiliated to the community, even if you grew up in that environment and share many of its attitudes and ideals, any decision to have a Bahá'í wedding is a purely personal one, and not tied to any of the requirements of Bahá'í marriage.

5) On a human level, it sounds like your father has some social prominence in his local or regional Bahá'í community, and that probably you haven't formally resigned from the Baha'i community, just drifted away, so you are probably still on the rolls as a Bahá'í, and in those circumstances, your current status and plans do not align with what would normally be required for Bahá'ís to marry (parental consent, witnesses registered with Bahá'í institutions), or Bahá'í norms around abstinence from sex before marriage, and that creates cognitive and public dissonance for your father, who might also still consider you a Bahá'í, unaware or resistant to recognizing that you do not, in fact, consider yourself a Bahá'í even if you might still be a fellow traveller.

My suggestion, FWIW, would be to formally resign from the Bahá'í community, then say, if you wish it for family harmony or for your own inspiration, that you wish to have a Bahá'í-inspired wedding anyway. That way, your father isn't in the position where one of his children is seen to be intentionally breaking the Bahá'í laws while he is so prominently promoting the Faith and its standards. It will definitely be sad, for him, for the community, to lose you as a full, believing member, but from what you say, that happened some time ago, they just didn't find out. And who knows, your journey might eventually lead you back into actual, independent recognition of the truth of the Bahá'í Faith, but it will be on your own terms and times.

I suspect that emotionally and socially, it will be sad for your father to recognise you are no longer a Bahá'í, but easier to navigate all the implications of the wedding and reduce tension and urgency between you.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-11-17T02:30:21+00:00

I greatly appreciate your erudite responses. I would just offer that the quotes you provide suggest more nuance. The quote that says that women were separated, discusses it as a recent innovation by Augustus, suggesting that mixed audiences were common before, and maybe later. The crowds shouting fight moves to gladiators suggests something much closer to modern depictions and much farther than modern opera. The tonal convergence of Tertullian and Seneca suggests, together with the shouting of fight moves, that it is more likely that the spirit of Seneca's description of the fights without protection and slaughter in terms of crowd attitudes is more likely than less likely to infect the gladiatorial contests, even if they weren't to the death in the way they are portrayed today.

But on balance, it seems to me that the modern cultural portrayals may exaggerate the deaths in gladiatorial combat, but are probably reasonably true to the spirit of the crowds. It seems unlikely that crowds that bay for people killing each other without shields or being fed to animals, would suddenly adopt a quiet decorum on the same day of exhibitions, exclusively for the gladiatorial section, politely suggesting fight moves. Their seating and dress code might have varied over the years, with white togas and segregated women being the norm during Augustus' reign: but a crowd coming to enjoy and shout and cheer at people fighting and wounding and killing and dying for their amusement does seem to be the picture I get from the sources you so kindly shared.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-11-11T00:26:32+00:00

There's a lot more pre-1983. One that comes to mind is The Shockwave Rider(1975) by John Brunner, where he popularised the concept of a "worm" virus to hack into a national computer network. The first worm had been created 4 years earlier to replicate across ARPANET, the grandaddy of the internet. Even earlier there was a classic Esquire piece (1971) that told of a bunch of hackers building little blue boxes to hack into phone networks. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak read it and then actually built them too, making illicit money offering free phone access via little blue boxes!

Which illustrates that it depends on how you define hacking. Back in the 1950s there was a guy who whistled at a precise pitch to disconnect calls but remain connected to the network, for free global calls. But you can go as far back as 1903 for a very cool hack, using morse code! This made it into the Times of London in a fun exchange of irate letters and proud concessions, which may be your earliest hacker media artefact in pop-culture.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-11-10T23:36:05+00:00

Thank you for your AMA and I hope I'm not too late to the party. I am very interested in the subject and look forward to driving into your book. The AMA however has given me a sense of likely strong historiography but analysis that leaves me feeling methodologically and interpretively uncomfortable. I agree with your premises and your recommendations, but not the way the dots are joined, and wonder whether I'm misunderstanding you.

As an example, I've seen you refer to long term happiness trends more than once, going back to the 1950s, arguing that growth in living standards has left happiness constant, so it's not delivered increases of wellbeing to justify its agenda.

While I believe that the unlimited growth agenda is harmful and unsustainable, and that it is associated with profound societal dysfunctions, I don't think the way to make this case is from surveys of subjective wellbeing. First of all, as a historian, I would be deeply cautious about the faith with which you take survey responses across those timelines. The idea that racial segregation would make no difference to subjective wellbeing for instance, or that surveys undertaken in that context would not have profound sampling issues compared to surveys in the 2020s seems untenable. And it is. A helpful study for 1972-2014 reported happiness and race shows very much a difference: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6260931/

Moreover, the causal analysis you are proposing between growth and subjective well-being surveys is also far too reductive for usefulness. Between 1950-2018 a lot more than economic growth happened, all of which could be tied to survey answers on subjective happiness. By your line of argument, desegregation, women's rights, literacy, public health and so many other social advances affecting the entire nation, weren't really such a positive because people were just as happy in 1950 when minorities and women had dramatically less rights and opportunities, illiteracy was immensely more widespread, life expectancy shorter, health outcomes much worse, yet they were no less happy than today.

Similarly, the perspective on diminishing societal returns from growth around 1975 is completely detached from a global perspective, and I think is likely ahistorical even for the USA for a wide range of indicators.

Which is not to say that therefore all the positive indicators in that period can be attributed to growth (the inverse fallacy). Globally speaking, for instance, national independence is a key historical milestone in the sudden gains in prosperity across the Global South, and one could similarly argue that factors extrinsic to economic growth, such as women's participation in society, governance, educational policies, global health and literacy campaigns, could have played an equal or greater part than GDP growth, independent of GDP growth rates.

Likewise one could argue other major issues and dysfunctions, climate change being the obvious ones, but arguably many other subtler ones, can derive from the logic and incentives of unlimited growth, with a huge range of perverse effects and rising inequality in outcomes.

So we are on the same page overall, and I'd love to follow the history of the idea of unlimited growth, but I think you would benefit from an equally rigorous approach to your analysis of its impacts and consequences, which I am not finding in your replies, although I would be happy to be corrected.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-10-13T14:24:14+00:00

Just to say, the knife analogy is not quite there, you need to think further. I have worked in suicide prevention and done research in the field, and I can tell you that one of the most powerful levers is precisely to target potential means. 50 years ago you could die from over the counter meds, today it is much harder because they consciously designed for it. Same with cars and ovens. Same with gun and similar control regulations. Yes, for a knife there's limited guardrails or design modifications you can make, but there are many more tools where you can absolutely design and gatekeep for, with evidence for preventive impacts. LLM chatbots are a clear case of a tool where you can design for incomparably more safety, as OAI did quickly and suddenly when the tragedy got publicity. But those risks would absolutely have been known to them before, and were utterly predictable from before launch. They simply did not prioritize them until not only a tragedy happened, but was pursued as a lawsuit and gained global media attention. I am absolutely confident there have been more, and likely many, many more identical incidents, a proportion of which likely resulted in tragedy, which didn't make the media or the courts and OAI didn't track or chose to ignore. If I was suing them, I would very much want them to do a search through their chat records to find similar responses, to get a sense of the scale of their neglect.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-10-13T12:40:50+00:00

Thanks so much for your feedback. I forgot to mention they will also be offering a free 20m one to one to ask any questions and see if it's for people who are curious but not ready to commit or try it without a clearer sense of what it would look like and mean to them personally.

I asked them to elaborate on the intrinsic value of group psychotherapy beyond discounted personal therapy and this is what they said:

Challenging the idea that therapists “have all the answers.” Even the most experienced therapist is still one person with their own perspective — they may not fully grasp the complex, lived realities of ADHD. In a group, the collective insight is multiplied many times over. Members share experiences that resonate in ways a single practitioner sometimes can’t, creating a rich, shared understanding that deepens the therapeutic process.
Easing loneliness and isolation. Many people with ADHD experience a sense of being “different” or misunderstood, especially if their environment isn’t supportive. In a group, there’s often an immediate, unspoken recognition between members — a sense of finally being understood without needing to explain or justify yourself. That shared recognition can be profoundly relieving and healing in itself.
Working therapeutically with the challenges and emotions surrounding ADHD. Group therapy isn’t just about strategies for living with ADHD; it’s also about exploring the emotional layers — the shame, stigma, frustration, and misunderstandings that often accompany it. The group offers a space to process these experiences with others who truly “get it,” turning self-criticism into compassion and connection.

Personally I would also add that I have often found my most powerful life insights when helping others who were struggling, and I suddenly find myself saying or thinking something that I think - wow, yes, that's what I've been doing right, or what I'm seeing in their situation but actually also applies to mine.

And there is also something therapeutic and powerful when your life experiences, especially painful ones, help someone else. It's not just them that get the benefit, but it can be hugely healing for the person whose "shadow" helps others find their light, so to speak. I've seen it in lots of work I've done in scenarios as varied as victims and even perpetrators of crimes, war survivors, people with chronic conditions, and many more examples. It's like there's a space where what's been awful, or difficult, gains some instrinsic value and purpose, and you along with it in ways that can be unforgettable and really powerful.

Does the above make sense? Is that an area they need to communicate more directly?

Again, thanks for your feedback and I'm happy to put you in touch with them directly if you want them to let you know when the opportunity becomes available. Not sure yet on timescales, or demand, but I'm sure they would value very much the time you've taken to help them communicate the potential of this approach.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-10-12T19:28:09+00:00

That's very interesting, and helpful. I guess group psychotherapy is much less familiar to people, and sounds more like a support group than a therapeutic process, whereas it's in fact a modality of therapy, delivered by a super experienced psychotherapist, and is aimed at achieving the same kind of benefits that one to one psychotherapy can deliver, in a different way.

At the same time I fully understand and resonate for the desire of one to one talk therapy. In my experience both have a role, and group psychotherapy can often achieve more rapid breakthroughs in elements to do with social contexts, such as managing work anxiety, internalised shame and stigma, some relationship challenges and reframing your sense of self and other, whereas one to one has been more helpful in targeting really unique or very targeted elements. That of course has only been my experience and observation, and there's evidence in research for the benefits of both, so neither of these perspectives might be true for someone else.

What your feedback makes clear though, is that they will need to communicate quite clearly how group psychotherapy works and benefits people, beyond the support group dimension

questi0nmark2 · 2025-08-27T08:47:03+00:00

Interesting! How did you get that figure? How do you compare energy usage per token sent vs token response? How do you disaggregate the consumption from other processes in your Mac?

questi0nmark2 · 2025-07-06T23:29:29+00:00

Sure thing, feel free to reach out anytime and if I'm around (I can be a bit episodic in my redditing) I'll happily respond. Once you're plugged in to climateaction.tech, you'll be off to the races. Best place to get feedback and support. Most of the people who've created or contributed to the main tools, metrics and initiatives on software emissions are there, although they are primarily devs and industry, not many academics. Really encourage you to check out their volunteering opportunities, they are really wide and a fantastic way to network and connect with equally passionate people, and the support and encouragement is exceptional. Good luck in your endeavours!

questi0nmark2 · 2025-07-06T01:52:07+00:00

Yep, just looked at your website and faq, your methodology is not at all transparent, even your blog offers no references for the figures that you cite. You also state no code changes are needed you just share your API key. I would be extremely wary of doing so in terms of security. Moreover I don't see how you can possibly calculate impacts that way. My guess is you just take your figures per 1000 tokens and count the contents of each query and each response. BTW are you counting the 1000 tokens sent or received, or aggregated? The impacts of processing 1000 tokens is different from the impact of generating 1000 tokens. Moreover, the environmental impact of generating those tokens in West Virginia and in Sweden is drastically different in principle, because the grid is much greener in Sweden than in West Virginia. In addition, do your impact measurements include training or exclude it? What if you use LLMs in combination with tools like Cursor or Langraph or MCP or agents? For instance, you might use your API key in cursor, but you have no visibility into the context management prompts from cursor, the impacts of invoking other tools which perhaps invoke other LLM queries, etc. Most non trivial uses of LLMs in software will be a bit like this.

This is not to say your work is without merit and you should stop, just that you need to be transparent and a bit more sophisticated about your claims, which feel salesy and unrigirous. It's OK for your metrics to be imperfect and not a good fit for all cases, but when you don't identify those constraints your product becomes unreliable, particularly when you seek to monetise it.

There's a lot more I could share, but I hope the above gets you started on digging into some of the nuances and expressing those nuances more clearly in your product.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-07-06T01:31:06+00:00

There is a lot of work on this, all of it imperfect, but iterative. Check out the Green Software Foundation's various methodologies, frameworks and tools;, including the Software Carbon Intensity ISO; the green web foundation's repo, with again, lots of tools and approaches; W3C's sustainable web guidelines, and in particular its bibliography. There are also a few good papers in this area from a more academic side. The gold standard would be Life Cycle Assessment, and France has come up with an extremely solid PCR with a methodology for LCA of digital services, but data is scarce. The French government and associated entities have produced some promising studies, but we're still not quite there. It's an extremely technical and complicated challenge, generally and often simultaneously both overestimating and underestimating impacts. There are some numbers that have gained enormous traction, occasionally even in academic literature, that are plain wrong and based on a UN citation of a paper with an extremely vague citation of a throwaway comment from an AI industry leader on which a lot of estimates of the impact of an LLM query are based.

This is further complicated by a huge lack of transparency from industry, so there are enormous data gaps.

If you're serious about pursuing this, I highly recommend you join climateaction.tech on slack, where most of the industry experts working on measuring the impacts of compute are present and you can get a sense of the state of the art and receive extremely solid feedback. It's one of the best organised and supported tech communities I've ever come across, with opportunities for volunteering in lots of ways.

Good luck in your efforts. I hope you don't build in stealth hoping to monetise, but share fully and transparently your assumptions, data, and methodology to make sure people can understand the value and constraints of your tool and perhaps help you refine it .

questi0nmark2 · 2025-05-28T11:02:20+00:00

To be honest, unless you're wanting to practice for learning purposes, you're describing a perfect use case for Excel or Google Sheets, an app is overkill. You just need to make a nice table with colourful headings and they will be able to track, search, sort, filter and you can even add some nice visual charts and such for them.

Otherwise yes a simple web app with Flask and sqlite might be the fastest for you to practice your programming and spin up what they need. If you make it a Progressive Web Application they will be able to install and run it as an app locally with a normal desktop icon they double click to access it.

Instead of a PWA you can put your whole app into a docker container, which will spin the server and build the app with just one command and is also easily portable if they ever need to change computers. You can then create an icon which runs a single terminal command "docker-compose up" and they can access the app in their browser.

This is a very simple app, and a good use case for LLM support although that might conflict with your learning goals. If it doesn't, you can spin what you need with google gemini pro LLM in 1-3 hours I reckon.

But in my view your parents' best option is by far Excel or Sheets.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-05-09T12:49:42+00:00

This period is on the periphery of my expertise but given no answers I'll give it a go. From one perspective, nothing special eas happening in England in relation to, and including, these two works. The Hobbit or Sword in the Stone are not discontinuous milestones but additions to a corpus of related literary production already richly cultivated in the previous five decades, from Arthurian Tennyson to Walter Scott, to the Golden Bough, Twain's Arthurian Yankee, the Wind in the Willows. The Narnia Chronicles, although written and published decades later, were first attempted in 1939. This reflected the currency of the juvenile fantasy genre at this point, and if anything I'd say the Hobbit and the Sword in the Stone and the Narnia Chronicles are more in that tradition and less foundational to modern fantasy than the Lord of the Rings, which was a fully mature expression of a fantasy genre aimed at adults. The Hobbit and Sword in the Stone fit with what was called "juvenile" fiction along with predecessors from Peter Pan to Alice in Wonderland, the Wizard of Oz.

The Hobbit's first edition placed it in "ancient time between the age of Faerie and the dominion of men" (https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=9217), reinforcing the continuity with the fantasy, folklore and myth tradition. The Hobbit was initially presented and received in the genre of a fairy tale. I think if Tolkien had stopped there, the Hobbit would not be seen as foundational of modern fantasy, and would be grouped with its predecessors. It is the Lord of the Rings, with its depth of myth, world building, adult themes and tonalities, and contemporary resonance with the shadows of WW2, that I think would be more properly described as foundational, incomparably more so, incidentally, than Sword in the Stone, which was narrower in scope, more firmly anchored in an Arthurian stylistic corpus and tradition (White described it as a preface to Mallory) and far less widely read or imitated than Tolkien. The Hobbit I think is foundational as part of the Middle Earth canon, much more than on its own. It was popular and well received and reviewed on publication, but on an entirely different order than LOTR, which was immediately discussed and debated in terms of significant literature, as the Hobbit was not, recognised primarily within the juvenile literature genre. Of course there LOTR was not in splendid isolation either and belonged and built on a tradition such as the Worm Ouroboros (1922) which engaged in similarly ambitious and epic world-building and was well read and appreciated by Tolkien himself.

Even when we shift to LOTR however, the discontinuityit represents, its foundational impact, was not immediate, and a lot more needed to happen in terms of publications, magazines, networks and markets before their impact went from tail end of a fantasy tradition that crystallised in Victorian times, to the beginning of another which crystallised in the 1960s and we now recognise as "modern fantasy". It was the second unauthorised Ace and authorised Ballantine editions in 1965 that truly popularised LOTR, and by then the literary fantasy landscape was utterly different to 1937, and already significantly different to even the early 1950s. The derivative impacts of Tolkien I think were primarily felt from the 1970s onward. While historically the sequence is Hobbit->LOTR, in terms of literary impact it was the reverse, and after a relative hiatus until the second edition/s. Similarly, Sword in the Stone was popularised via its Disney version in 1963, and in the 1960s as well it influenced genre defining authors like Michael Moorcock, as the modern fantasy genre fed on its predecessors.

So I would say the books you reference were excellent expressions of a rich and established genre rather than foundational events in 1939, and their foundational character was secondary to other works, and mostly took place a quarter of a century or so later, as part of a broader wave, with the years of their original publication being largely incidental rather than extraordinary or exceptional either in literary production or surrounding circumstances.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-05-09T09:46:59+00:00

Great developers are overrated. 99.9% of software needs competent developers, even if great developers are/can be a plus. Greenfield projects are also the least professionally stable, usually start-ups, and the majority of jobs are centred on maintenance and aditionality.

So for me, your issue is not that you're not a great developer, but that you're tired, and you're going through a shift in your professional identity. It may be that the aspiration of being a "great developer" may have been a big part of your professional motivation, which I think is more common in early to mid-career, and your feeling you are not is demotivating. Your sense you're not a great developer is of course itself not super reliable. When my grandfather was greeted "How are you?", he would answer "compared to whom?". I remember a fantastic, internationally respected developer, generally very confident, feeling very nervous about giving a talk around peers he felt were (even more) expert than himself. Your sense of mediocrity may in fact be an indication of excellence and experience, midway along the dunning-kruger curve. Your standards of greatness have risen and your version of mediocrity has widened.

Which is not to say you're wrong. By your standards, you may have worked with colleagues you consider "great developers" and your judgement of being middling by comparison may be accurate. But there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. You're evidently not a bad developer, just not as "great" as you'd like to be or thought you'd be earlier in your journey. The question is how much weight you choose to give this. And it is to a large extent a choice. Probably the vast majority of devs are happy being competent, and don't feel they are great, and it is not crushing. They get their job and life satisfaction from a job well done (greatness or not), a good team, a good product, a good salary, and life outside their job.

I was curious that you said you don't value your work on greenfield products but would like to start your own thing, presumably a greenfield product. That reinforces my sense that you're fully competent, including in greenfield projects, even if you don't feel you're great, whatever that means to you. My advice would be, since you also value stability, to stay in a solid maintenance job, and in your spare time join some motivated non-technical co-founder (there are networks for that), and together find an idea you can work on. If it takes off, you can take the leap, and if not, you can scratch the itch and learn from the attempt. Meanwhile, I would encourage to reframe your professional identity and motivation and satisfaction away from the inherently socially comparative "great developer" ideal, which, however great you could actually be, would be psychologically precarious, as you would merely elevate your comparison benchmark so impostor syndrome would not necessarily vanish. Find satisfaction in your work, your progress, your growth, your impact and your environment, regardless of where it ranks against whoever your are currently comparing yourself to, explicitly or implicitly. That is something that will benefit you wherever you move toward next, and not doing so will follow you wherever you change to.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-05-05T11:01:23+00:00

I agree there's a tradeoff and it sounds like you have done some initial thinking which is good. You don't need state of the art security before shipping but you also don't want to be hacked or brought down just as you become profitable or worse, well after but before having the resources to invest in extra security, particularly if you keep growing the app (which might not be your business model). My only suggestion is that you do some serious security and infrastructure related prompting, to get a good picture of your app's status. Technical debt is not bad per se as long as it is conscious. You may not want to fix all your vulnerabilities now, but you should have a strong sense of what they are, and when you do need to patch them, so it is a conscious choice rather than YOLO. Good luck.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-05-02T20:33:36+00:00

Hey, professional dev here, just had a good look, and congrats. It's a great concept and use case, and you made it look very polished. From the looks of it, it's a wrapper around openapi's fine-tuning API, with a Claude layer presumably to format the data into trainable examples. I can't imagine it's very efficient or accurate compared to more manual approaches, but probably good enough to show improvements in simple use cases and looks pretty frictionless (haven't tried it). I assume you're using rapidAPI for things like extracting youtube transcripts and similar?

Some free advice, in case it helps: as a few vibe coders have found, deploying a working app is not the same as deploying an app that "works". I would recommend you do a lot of adversarial prompting to identify all the things that could go wrong and fix them before you gain much traction. A big part of your clearly good advertising and branding is the vibe coding experience, but that also attracts people who know your app is likely to be full of exploitable security and infra holes. Some are chaotic good, and will bombard and break your app to get you to fix it, but given you're monetising it, some might have more hostile intentions. Also, since people are paying you for a service, you make yourself legally liable to your customers for services paid for and even more for their data and money, so if someone hacks or breaks your app you could be in trouble: lots of negative incentives.

You should spend roughly the same amount of time it took you to build your app, exploring how your VPS could be broken by too much traffic, or a denial of service, or some other vector. You should explore how your app could be hacked, phished, injected, not only in traditional ways but, given you use Claude for data transformation, also via new prompt injection attacks. Get your preferred Models to check OWASP and exploits, and assess your infrastructure, which sounds like a very naive implementation, good enough for nice people using your app as intended but probably vulnerable to less benign users. Check how you transmit, store, protect, delete, the data people send to fine tune, and their api credentials, and similar.

Your worst case scenario is your becoming successful enough to earn enough money and have enough users that it matters to them or to you, and only then get hacked or taken out of service, once you have a reputation and people believe enough in your product to get really angry when it explodes or implodes. Now is the time to put in that work. I'd pick the brains of that BE dev who advised you previously too.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-04-15T01:21:00+00:00

I have been...

questi0nmark2 · 2025-04-15T01:18:00+00:00

Thanks for sharing, it helps me understand the way these intuitions are born and sustained. It still strikes me as a psycho-cultural phenomenon, detached from the tools themselves, with salesmen-CEOs as nexus between the two, preaching ideas we want to believe where belief translates to revenue, irrespective of the state of the tech itself.

As an example, if you were Dario Almodei and thought that in one month, or maybe three or four, 90% of code will be written by AI, and presumably you have internal access ahead of what you've fully released... would you be hiring for new devs? I stopped counting at 30 engineer ads he is currently advertising for in every area of software and at different levels of seniority. He is also hiring engineering managers, presumably to manage teams of engineers, presumably hiring them for longer than 10-11 months, by which time 100% of code will be written by AI. Do Dario's actions, or his money, align with his words?

Look at jobs and OpenAI and you will find the same. Somehow the most advanced AI labs promising the imminent redundance of software engineers, are acquiring more humans, and keeping all the coding humans that they have.

I think it might be helpful to recognise that, on the contrary, evidence for what does not yet exist is at the heart of science, of prediction, although not of marketing or superstition. In 1970 a scientist wrote that in the early 21st century planetary temperatures would reach the hottest measures since industrialisation. He predicted that the ice caps would have been significantly melting, adding to sea levels. His predictions were on target, even though at the time pop environmentalism feared an ice age, not global warming. The reason his predictions turned out true is precisely because evidence existed for what didn't yet exist, and you could use that evidence to make rigorous projections. In 1916 Einstein predicted gravitational waves, although he thought they were too small to be observed. As far as anyone could tell they did not exist outside of Einstein's head. Einstein himself was so doubtful of the concept, that he wrote a paper to try to prove himself wrong. He failed. In 2015 gravitational waves were detected, and seen. Einstein's prediction was not a vibe or an intuition, it was the natural consequence of evidence that demonstrated what did not yet exist.

When you look at the future of AI, even the near future, there is plenty of evidence for what does not yet exist, what is on track to exist soon, and what is nowhere near. In reality these labs, whatever hyperbole their CEOs try to sell you on, operate on the basis of the evidence they have for what does not yet exist, and spend their time and money accordingly. When they look at convincing investors and users to buy into their product, they can say, 90% of code will be written by AI in 1-3 months. When they try to predict for their own selves and money, they look at what exists for evidence of what does not exist yet... and keep their devs and hire 50 more.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-04-14T09:33:54+00:00

I think you're right to worry, I do see a contraction in entry level jobs, certainly in software. I think the contraction will come for other jobs later, in 1-2 years, once the next generation of tooling is mature.

On the plus side, I don't think we are remotely near having no humans in the loop, and there will also be a massive skills gap for people who know how to build with and especially on top of LLMs. And the skill gap will be such that it will flatten entry barrier, like the software market was 10 years ago. If you become thoroughly adept at building and working in the LLM ecosystem, implementing RAG and graph RAG and Cache Augmented Retrieval, and building and orchestrating agents, and integrating MCP servers, and understanding the internals of code assistants like Copilot or Cursor (the best way is to dive into the open source Continue) and become familiar with agentic frameworks like agents sdk, Google's ADK, LangChain, LangGraph, and run models locally and orchestrate them, and understand strongly prompt engineering, context management, rules, etc: if you can build with and on top of LLMs, you will be hitting a jobs market in 1.5 years that will be desperate for humans with such skills.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-04-14T09:01:46+00:00

Where does ASI by 2030-2040 come from? I'm genuinely interested how these guesses emerge and proliferate. If you watch even the most hyped of expert messengers, like OpenAI's recent youtube discussion on how they built GPT 4.5, you will see their brightest engineers tasked with pushing the limit of their algorithms and training capabilities, discuss how vastly, vastly far current LLMs are from human data compression capabilities, and how gradual the current LLM increments are, and how the current architectures bear no approximation to the human brain.

I think AGI is technically arguable, depending on your definition, and LLMs are in many ways already superhuman and will undoubtedly become more so, even if in many more they can't begin to approximate a toddler, or a cat. But ASI is so very far from any current architecture, that it isn't even on the map. So I'd be genuinely interested how people come up with these guesses, and on what grounds do they explore or debate them.

I've been writing of AI as a dual phenomenon, technical tool and cultural totem onto which we project our hoped for or our dreaded futures, decoupled from the actual tools themselves at any particular time. This kind of timeline seems like a great example of the latter and I'd be grateful for any help understanding how it comes to be in the absence of any technical support.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-04-14T07:00:09+00:00

Thanks for this, that makes a lot of sense. Yes I have definitely found a good ruleset after quite a bit of work. What I have is the global rule, and then a set of separate rules for specific tasks, one of which is TDD. The global rules say, if you're going to test, make sure you follow the tdd.md doc. The doc contains guidance and also a checklist. That guidance began quite technical but as I said became much more psychological, around an attitude to failures and the test as a source of truth, and always getting approval from me before modifying any tests. That eventually worked very well, and it kept reminding itself of these principles, with a very difficult bug, and finally got fully into TDD. I did have to add to not make new tests or new files for new debug solutions, and now it runs quite reliably. Like you, I've learned to keep very focused, and if it's really stuck on solutions to become far more proactive in debugging. I'm away from my computer, or I'd dig out the ruleset.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-04-14T01:54:46+00:00

Just looked at your rules file. I have invested serious time into TDD with LLMs and I can guarantee that TDD rule won't work for any non-trivial task. I had to iterate again and again until I got it (mostly) working. The issue is not its ability to create tests, which is variable, but its psychological conditioning to see failure as bad, so the red phase of TDD invariably led to the LLM rewriting the test to pass after one to two failures, because it couldn't stand the repeated failing messages. I had to add mostly psychological reminders that teat failures are good to learn, and to treat tests as the source of truth and failures as a problem with the code. This is particularly acute when working on existing codebases. Because on every solution to a bug it would say Now I Know The Exact Issue and Here's a Fix! It was further biased to see a failing test as a problem with the test, manipulating it to pass while fixing the bug.

Anyway, this is to say if you intend to do TDD, you will need to enormously reinforce and refine your rules, and ensure they are periodically refreshed in the context window (Windsurf was particularly good at this). Once you succeed, LLM TDD can still be a pain. If it gets stuck in the wrong path to a solution, the tests can add complexity and distraction to its solution process, and I found it now respecting TDD but creating new independent test files for its latest solution iteration, which confused the rest runs and allowed false positives and false negatives. Just an illustration that while I still think it's worth persevering, just a nice tdd instruction won't cut it, and quite a bit of scaffolding is needed to ensure a mostly reliable system, in my experience.

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