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The other day, I saw a clone of OpenRouter pitched as a "superior" alternative simply because they were "European" only to find out their entire stack was dependent on Cloudflare. That's why I'm always sceptical of providers who claim superiority just because they want to "escape" US control because that's rarely the case.

So, we're just going a full circle back now. Interesting.

_tailwind_ was the full circle. We had individual controls. We went to semantic controls, then back to individual controls a la tailwind.

Hope so. I’d like to be able to read the HTML templates again.

Yep. Every 7 years.

Here's something better than that:

https://github.com/plausible/analytics

Elixir.


I'm the main contributor to Traceway, I LOVE Elixir! Traceway is strictly for monitoring your app, not the actual usage/product analytics. It's for making sure you know how well your backend is performing and to be able to quickly fix issues that show up.

Hey, thanks for responding! I was just pointing out to the parent comment that going by a programming language to judge app quality is a very relative metric, so I just used Elixir to help them understand. Thanks again for your hard work on the project!

Why is it better? On the internet it is not enough to just say something. You need to deliver some facts and / or a comparison. Please try it.

Do you have any proof of that?

Nope. On the internet, I don't owe anyone anything, especially to someone who created a new account just to argue. Do your own research. And using your real account will elicit better quality responses. Please try it.

> No one is doing that, these people don't exist.

"I don't personally know enough people doing what a mega-corporation with a massive market research team with multiple layers of market research audits has concluded people claims to want, so I'm just going to diss the product"


We are going to be seeing a lot of these moving forward. It's the easy way out. If you've worked with Google, you will know that it's an environment where accountability doesn't thrive. You will find people who know nothing about Google's product portfolio hold advisory roles around the products. They don't care, there's no one to even question them. They just know to make colourful graphs with the most useless metrics to justify they "add value" to the company. Expecting them to take accountability is like trying to mix oil and water.

> It's additional software that many users didn't ask for, don't want and will not be aware of

You mean like Siri? It does the exact same thing and no one asked for it, either. That shit barely works too.


What you are describing is a the role of a manager, not a software engineer. Software engineering has very little to do with writing code, but more on architecting at the higher level on what needs to be done. The code is just the executional part. LLMs can code? Ok good. Without a clear architectural pathway / direction, that code is just useless. It's not tech debt. It's just a bunch of random strings. You can argue that Claude code and others do create a plan of attack - but still, it's not at the architectural level, but rather executional level.

To me, architecture starts all the way from the top - even before you write a single line of code, you do the DDD (Domain-Driven Design) and then create a set of rulesets (eg. use the domain name as table prefix) and contexts and then define the functionality w.r.t to that architecture. LLMs can do all this - only if you ask them to explicitly. So, they are pretty useful to brainstorm with, but not autonomously design reliably and push it to production with your eyes closed and support a 100,000 user base. It's a far cry from that.

But sure, you can upsell to management about the vanity metrics like lines of code and get that promotion with LLM. But, it's still not software engineering.


That is why we have SWE bench pro, they test architecture design too, turns out 1000 dollars of tokens outperform 10k dollars of labor in meta design.

That's just not accurate. I haven't studied SWE Bench Pro in detail, so I can't tell you exactly what the flaw is, but SOTA models routinely make bad architectural choices I have to intervene to fix.

You can read the paper here: https://labs.scale.com/papers/swe_bench_pro

TL;DR its very effective as it directly tests model on REAL codebases: "The benchmark is constructed from GPL-style copyleft repositories and private proprietary codebases". The use case is very real.


It doesn't sound to me like this benchmark is attempting to measure architecture design. As far as I see in the paper, they do not evaluate the architectural quality of a task completion, only whether the model is capable of completing it at all.

1000 dollars of subsidized tokens.

Eh.

It's "not software engineering" but neither was what most people writing code did before LLMs.

> Without a clear architectural pathway / direction, that code is just useless. It's not tech debt. It's just a bunch of random strings

This is pretty clearly false. It's a bunch of random strings that you can compile and run to do what you want. It's more akin to a black box. A compiled closed source dependency.


Agreed. I never considered myself an "engineer". Honestly just a regular code monkey. Software Engineer was just my job title. Folks higher up the ladder did engineer software. You know what? It sucked. Was always broken, we were always patching, we never saw around corners. But hey - they software engineered it.

> People who don't pair caffeine with nicotine simply have no clue what they are missing ;)

We do, and that's called cancer;)


Is there research that links nicotine to cancer? I’m unable to find anything that would suggest nicotine as cancer causing.

Are you researching whether you'll get cancer if you are extracting 100% pure nicotine and ingesting it? Who does that?

Most nicotine users today? Everyone’s using the pure nicotine pouches like zyn and such. I didn’t really find it enjoyable at all

> Most nicotine users today?

I did use pure nicotine and it was very bad for my health, probably due to high dosage, but still.

I've used heavy stimulants, benzos, opioids, dissociatives without an issue, but nicotine is in a class of its own in terms of how insidiously addictive it is.

But just from a health point of view: extreme arm and hand joint issues, forearm vascular issues that made my hands numb at night, palpitations/arrithmia like I was about to die when I used nicotine before sleep and I was drifting to sleep -- it really felt like I was about to die, like my heart was mangled up.


A lot of people consume nicotine. It has been isolated and used in products for a long time. There's no clear link to cancer, but it could impact cardiovascular health (like all stimulants seem to).

Some research indicates that nicotine can influence how existing cancer behaves and spreads, so that's worth considering.


Right, point taken, but I wasn't following how nicotine properties were connected to coffee's health benefits.

He was suggesting— jokingly— that maybe coffee cancels out the deleterious effects of smoking, because indeed coffee + a cigar or pipe is truly an excellent experience.

Mentat-mode engaged

zingababba started this thread talking about mixing caffeine and nicotine.

It's the endothelial dysfunction, oxidative stress, increased arterial stiffness, and accelerated atherosclerosis that turn me off.

> I’ve always been struck by a recurring trend: whenever a customer throws a tantrum, threatens legal recourse, or takes things to an extreme, they are almost invariably another business owner.

If a business owner threatens legal recourse, then, probably it's them. If multiple business owners threaten legal recourse, it's definitely something you're doing wrong. And that usually is along the lines of over-promising and under-delivering in an agency context.


It's always the MBAs. The organizational structure incentivises them on the wrong metrics. So they adapt and optimize for that. In real life, after a while, you hit a plateau with features and market demand. What these MBA clowns love to do is take what's already perfectly fine and mess it up and create a road map for it to fix something to being it the way it was, so they can justify to their higher ups they are "adding value" to the company. And half way through this, they leave the company. Now some other new employee comes in, has no idea why this had to be reworked and messes it up even more. You have this loop enough times, you end up with how software engineering works in the fortune 500.

The moment you hear "let's circle back" enough in meetings, that's your tell tale sign to quit the workplace infested with MBAs. A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.


> A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.

I wish this were true, but unfortunately, I've seen enough evidence otherwise to strongly disagree. MBAs weren't born evil, they were made that way in business school. The same corrupting process works on engineers and can happen outside of business school contexts (one common corrupting force is Hacker News comments). An MBA-brained engineer as a manager is orders of magnitude worse than a regular MBA.


They want to be Apple. Apple sells hardware, services, and takes a huge cut being a software store.

Microsoft sells software. They turned office into a service but it's still software. Nobody really wants to use their store. Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.

Microsoft's strategy for turning into Apple is kneecapping their own software.


> Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.

Considering that at this point most Microsoft OEMs are failing, Microsoft should just start building a lot of consumer hardware.

Apple makes more money selling consumer hardware than the entire PC hardware market combined. I'm exaggerating, but only a little. This would have been unimaginable in 1999.


>Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.

It didn't have to be. The same toxic dynamics that compromised their software poisoned their hardware, but they had too many products, or eras of a product, that Just Worked(TM) for it to have been a fluke. Someone knew what they were doing. They were screwed over by competing interests.

Zune people loved their Zunes. Windows Phone 8 people loved their Nokias. I've seen Surface Pro 2s "boot" to the same session for half a decade (that is: put it to sleep, stick it in a drawer for a year, take it out, plug it in, turn it on, all of the same files and folders and apps are open; I've NEVER seen this happen with any other device, they always lose state after enough time unplugged). And it's crazy how badly the Courier/Surface Duo was botched, given the excitement for it. Even newer Surfaces are great for the first year, before all of the compromises and poor engineering decisions make themselves known.

Imagine if it had been managed by someone who actually cared about their users, instead of people who treated them like marks and rubes.


I got a Zune on clearance when they were shutting down the whole mess (a nice fugly brown one for 80% off).

Build quality was rock solid, UI felt premium, and it mostly just got out of my way/let me play tracks. They were great little media players, as good as or ahead of the equivalent iPod.

Hardware was really good out of MSFT at the time, although when mistakes were made (e.g. the RROD Xbox 360 debacle), the broader organization seemed allergic to making thing right.


And that’s without mentioning XBox, a brand they built up to be pretty good over many years, and now they don’t seem to know what to do with.

They have a HW+SW+store ecosystem right there. Gently stagnating.


I dunno about "gently". The XBone was a pretty major face-plant and so was the Series S/X split. The only really successful Xbox was the 360, and that's mostly because Sony went mad with power while designing the PS3. It also helped that PSN was a disaster compared to Xbox Live in a generation where every game had a multi-player mode side-car'd onto it.

D'oh, that's the most obvious example and I completely missed it. Even then, they were somewhat hamstrung by weird decisions - RROD as mentioned, but also remember their hard drive/memory card scheme for the 360? They HAD their family room Trojan horse, at the nascence of streaming and HD broadcast - imagine if they had gone full Nintendo and pushed a TV tuner and/or integration with cable networks? Truly an Xbox, the only one you need under your TV.

It's crazy how the corporate machine just chews up obvious courses for sustained profitability and customer delight and spits out expanding batteries and DRM.


Not sure why you are downvoted.

> Nobody really wants to use their store. Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.

*XBox and Microsoft gaming's $23.5b revenue (~10% of MS's total) enter the chat*

You were saying something about not letting facts get in the way of a preferred narrative, I believe?


xbox is a catch-it-umbrella that includes all the studios bought, and game pass. The xbox hardware sales are beyond appalling[0], $220m a quarter, and it'd be below $1b yearly. That's revenue - the consoles have pretty terrible profit margin by design. (likely negative when it comes to xbox)

No need for snarky remarks.

[0]: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/111349/xbox-hardware-revenue-...


You realize it's a whole thing, right?

Being a console ecosystem owner doesn't work if one doesn't have a console?

Hence why it makes sense to look at their gaming division revenue as a whole: a large part of that revenue is attributable to shipped to date XBox units.


I wouldn't be surprised if most of that revenue is PlayStation. That's why they've been porting their entire catalog over, claimed the end of exclusives etc.

Last I heard the current Xbox generation has sold less than the last, at approximately 30 million. This gives it about 1/3rd the sales of Sony.


Which company would you say is the example(s) of the latter? Sounds like utopia I'd like to be a part of.

Different sector, but I'd say Blackmagic Design seems to be run by people who actually use their own products and care about both product experience and engineering.

In the creative industry there is a bunch of these "boutique" companies that places great care on the final experience. Probably Blackmagic Design is no longer "boutique" to be fair, but seems they still got the culture right.


Valve and the few sane startups / small/mid sized companies you can be lucky enough to end up in.

I was part of the transformation of a healthy mid size engineering led startup company that got taken over by MBAs and Indian employees and saw the whole lifecycle.


I don't use its products myself but Apple fits this definition perhaps; its current CEO is a former engineering head, the previous CEO was a former operations head and the one before him was Steve Jobs.

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