This hits different when you apply it to chess.

Instead of obsessing with my rating on I just turned on Zen mode in lichees and hid all the numbers.

The game became fun again — Just "oh that was a cool tactic, let me try this weird opening, what happens if I sacrifice my knight for vibes?"

Turns out the rating was a distraction from the actual game.

Same energy as your point about "fucking around" being the point.

The elo was just making me miserable; removing it made me better anyway.

> Simplex is developed by a person who has a rather difficult view of the world. couldn't find it. what's his view of the world?

Antivax neo-Nazi.

Source on the "neo-Nazism"?

And you might want to tell us how this affects the privacy or security of SimpleX why you're at it.

Holding and openly expressing these abhorrent views probably encourages him to focus on security and privacy more than others.

But it does risk his app being associated with that and therefore discouraging everyday users. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up as the next EncroChat.

Focusing on security and privacy is great, but I expected some downsides. I'm glad you decided to emphasize the dedication of the creator of SimpleX instead.

EncroChat was not open-source, so it was much easier to be infiltrated.

You can self-host SimpleX and it is open source, otherwise I have no idea what you mean by associated with his views. If the project is as promised, then why would you care about the views of the developer?

what was his answer?

Every cent poured into this boom is building Google’s future competitors.

Of course he’s nervous - what else would you expect him to say?

From my own entrepreneurship scars, the real curse is never knowing when “enough is enough.”

If I’d pushed a little harder, would it have finally broken through?

Figma, Airbnb, and the other freak successes only exist because they didn’t quit.

You shouldn’t be blinded by survivorship bias either. Some of the best decisions I’ve made is quit my startup or company when I see the writing on the wall that this is not salvageable by my sacrifices

People also waste entire decades because they didn't quit.

Inisisting, trying, experimentation, effort and not giving up makes a big difference.

I suspect the reason is because most of the people, at that time, have surrendered already.

I made $60K since launching a year ago, after 4 years of full time development.

I feel delusional that I still want to keep working on it.

I guess we’ll see how year 2 post-launch goes.

If you take the UTF-8 binary for “hello world” and paste it there, it passes 4 out of 5 randomness tests.

Strange.

(0110100001100101011011000110110001101111001000000111011101101111011100100110110001100100)

It is very easy for short strings to pass most of the tests.

Yes I tried with PHP and it failed with a size of 8800 for the Block Frequency Test, but it was fine at 880. Then I tried another random sequence of 8800 and it also failed the Autocorrelation Test.

It looks like there is some repetition in the binary representation to me. English language phrases in UTF-8 are not going to look random.

Which raises the question: if everything is generated, why bother reading it at all? Just ask the LLM what you want to know—why treat headlines like bookmarks?

One interesting thing about the LLM era is it really highlights what things in life actually add value.

I haven’t had that experience at all. My experience is that if you allow people to be lazy they will be, at the expense of society.

What has your experience been like?

My experience, AI has shown me that a lot of stuff I do online. Watching videos, reading random articles, is mostly vapid pointless nonsense.

AI slop has finally woken me up and I am prioritizing IRL activities with friends and family, or activities more in the real world like miniature painting, piano, etc. It's made me much more selective with what activities I engage in, because getting sucked in to the endless AI miasma isn't what I want for my life.

That’s awesome, really happy to hear that!

Personally I still haven’t run into slop in long form video format, but it’s definitely concerning.

how so, any examples

Personally, it’s highlighted the value of physical books and helped me spend less time getting sucked into rabbit holes on devices. I’ve been much more deliberate about what text I choose to read. Been burning through classics that have been on my shelf for decades.

exactly what we're trending towards.

You can use the LLM, but you don't also have the rest of the data they relied on. A LLM can generate everything if it starts from a minimal prompt, but this is a recipe for slop. If you come with materials, discuss them, their implications, express your POV and then generate, the article will reflect your ideas and the data if was fed.

I know it is fashionable to put everything a LLM outputs in the slop box, but I don't think it reflects reality.

> If you come with materials, discuss them, their implications, express your POV and then generate

Then the LLM can still make shit up and be absolutely wrong.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s wrong as long as the ideas it comes up with are good or interesting, which they often are.

Tried it more than once, still SourceTree is easier to use.

Anyone actually done long-term pair programming and lived to tell the tale? Is it real, or just a utopian fantasy?

It's not for everyone. Some people have excellent reasons why it isn't workable for them. Others have had terrible experiences. It takes a great deal of practice to be a good pair and, if you don't start by working with an experienced pair, your memories of pairing are unlikely to be fond.

However.

I paired full-time, all day, at Pivotal, for 5 years. It was incredible. Truly amazing. The only time in my career when I really thrived. I miss it badly.

I did it at a startup for a few months. The startup failed, but I think it was more of a business failure.

Pivotal Labs was a contracting firm that did it for years. They aren’t around anymore, but they had a good run:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivotal_Labs

With AI based coding (no, i won't use "Vibe coding", thank you) this workflow improves a lot. Instead of jumping straight into code, I have my engineers write a Notion doc that describes what needs to be built. Think of it like an LLD, but really it’s a prompt for Claude-code. This forces them to think through the problem at a low level, and they share the doc with me before sending it to Claude — so I get to review early in the process. Once we finalize this "LLD" or "low-level-prompt", they hand it to Claude. The next time I see the work is in a GitHub PR. At that point, we rarely have to throw everything away and start from scratch.