This is lovely, but in certain life circumstances I've found it more useful to have a to-dont-list, as in: list of things I would really like to do, but shouldn't because there are more pressing matters to attend to and I need to pace myself, otherwise things will turn ugly really quick.
Example: day before Christmas eve - the last workday in this region I found myself standing in line to a car wash. There was just one guy ahead of me, but those who were already soaping up their vehicles didn't seem to be in a hurry and it was already 4pm, so sundown over here and I still had other errands run that day.
I turned around and the car is currently still dirty, but it'll remain so until I can make time for that, so in 2026.
The list has helped me plan as its forced me to cut things, and just admit I won't have time to do them. For example, I took about fifty books off my shelf and to the little free library. They've been sitting there for years.
As an outsider, to me the framing that USA is "car-oriented" was always off the mark. Cars are just a tool, which people would rather use as little as possible (I mean, who actually enjoys sitting in traffic or having a long commute?).
The real issue is the notion that everyone needs crazy amounts of space inside and a yard. I've found this calculator[0] that says that for my family I would need 2280 sq ft to "live comfortably", which to me is an absurd amount, as I live on a third of that and was only ever considering apartments with at maximum half the mentioned square footage.
You can't reasonably organise public transport over such a sparsely populated area. Over here we have districts of detached houses and they're notoriously difficult to get in and out of.
I've settled in a city 60% smaller than the one I grew up in. It's still a full-blown city, but there's way fewer of those competitive types - they all moved to where I came from.
I don't know about you, but every laptop I've had suffered some sort of malfunction sooner or later and I never bothered to have them serviced because it was too much of a hassle - especially seeing how a friend of mine outright battled Lenovo support over mundane things like a failing keyboard despite everything being still in warranty.
Specific issues by laptop:
1. Pressure marks on screen, failing USB ports, cracked hinge after three years.
2. Pressure marks on screen, failed battery, failing power supply socket after seven years.
3. Warped reflective layer in screen, rattling fans, overheating despite fan replacement (which I did at home and it took three hours) after five years.
I also broke the butterfly keyboard on a 2019 MBP I was using at work.
With the Framework I can address each and every one of the mentioned problems myself - just need to order parts and spend half an hour or so per item.
Guess my normal usage is more destructive than your trips. The main driver of wear in my case was always commuting with the device and thus also plugging/unplugging things several times a day.
Also if you hold a 2kg closed laptop with one hand - you're going to have pressure marks and I learned that the hard way.
Anyway, all around me people have always had hardware issues - also with Apple products. I recall replacing the battery in a late 2011 MBP because it was swollen as it failed from age alone.
Bottom line is that I believe you, I just think you're an outlier.
Similar here. When I trade in my old MacBooks after 4-6 years of use they function like new and look almost new, and I do plenty of moderate-heavy dev work and traveling.
I have a nearly 5 year old ThinkPad that's in great condition too. Never needed a repair, though it's had a couple of spells where it acted funky that resolved themselves.
In Australia, all of these things would be returned for a full refund under Australia Consumer Law as a major fault, there is no time limit, just expectations of a reasonable consumer.
Would really have to come down what a reasonable consumer would expect; that is part subjective and part objective. If you could show an experience of having laptops for various lifetimes, some extending beyond 7 years some below, none having a failing power socket, that might be sufficient to convince that it is a major fault. If it is a cheap laptop maybe you don't have a chance, but a premium product you could argue that it failed to be durable.
(I read this as the power socket in the laptop, not so much the power supply, obviously you'll have less luck there.)
> Maybe I feel the satisfaction of clicking them together as I clean them up. Cleaning becomes a little like playing.
My preschooler daughter got Magna Tiles for Christmas and she's cleaning them up herself, which is a first for her.
I'm surprised the Minecraft blocks feel less strong - Magna Tiles seem to be using standard AlNiCo magnets and I expected, given the price, that the Minecraft ones would be using neodymium magnets, but apparently they're not and this weakness comes from magnets being only at the corners.
I don't recommended getting a Framework to anyone who isn't interested specifically in repairability, as it has its quirks and doesn't feel like something which should cost this much. I've broken something in every laptop I've ever owned (+the butterfly keyboard in a company 2019 MBP), so to me it's an important feature.
That being said my previous device - a "gaming" laptop - was essentially e-waste two years after purchase because firmware updates stopped despite there being unresolved issues and the official parts store didn't even have basic items like fans, which I had to get from AliExpress instead. Eventually it was the cheapo Intel SSD which did it in, as it slowed to a crawl from being 80% full for too long.
I think there's a problem with my 1yo FW16's keyboard as during intense gaming the "D" key temporarily just stops responding, but if it ever fails completely I can order a new keyboard and once it arrives replace it literally within a minute.
Other parts take longer, but the general idea is that any sort of malfunction is manageable.
> This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't sitting in the bottom right corner of your eye when you look at the display.
This is about the power LED and it makes me wonder how dark is the author's environment? Is that healthy?
I’m even very content with Windows in desktop using komorebi tiling manager. And macos compared to windows is still far ahead regardless of recent constant shittification.
The thing about Macbooks is people tend to compare them with all of the regular laptops, of which 95% are in entirely another market segment. Even worse, some regular laptops can vary from "cheap shit" to "good machine" under one name, depending on the options selection (looking at you Lenovo). Hats off to Apple, having very narrow selection of models with very limited customization options helps them greatly.
There are models from Dell, Lenovo, and ASUS which have better screens than Macs, better design and build quality (subjectively), on-par performance and just slightly worse battery life. It just takes time and effort to find them.
(also, am I the only one who finds Apple trackpads _uncomfortable_ to touch?)
Take screens for example. Sure OLED is nice (if it won’t burn in or have terrible PWM on low brightness), but most of them in past years couldn’t afford custom resolution with great DPI: 220-250.
No, those fuckers will install you either full hd or 4k resolution which is only good for movies.
In every other case you’ll need to use fractional scaling that will make your UI, fonts, what have you look like blurry shit.
—
The list goes on for battery life (google how many milliwatts apple consume during sleep), performance (full regardless whether they are plugged-in), etc.
Mind you, I would love to see apple-quality hardware with linux on it.
> repairability in a sense you’ll always find parts (albeit not cheap) and someone to service it
I'm sorry but that is just false. Various organisations assessing repairability consistently give MacBooks poor scores for having soldered components, glue everywhere and complicated assembly.
Meanwhile I have one screwdriver for my Framework, which came with the laptop and I can use it to replace any part, including those which are soldered on the MacBook.
That’s why I specifically told what I meant: it is not about being able to swap SSD, but that for at least 5-7 years you will be able to repair it (expensively).
Moreover in basically every corner of the earth there will be either authorised service or local one that will help you if soak your laptop in thailand or what have you.
And that’s only a subset of the engineering failures with MacBooks. You even bring it up in your post: the only reason they have “dead silence” is because Apple is literally baking your laptop and leaving you to pay the bill.
I’ll give Apple that their custom chips are pretty great for power and efficiency, but their actual product design is bad. I mean, who designs a laptop with the fan pointing the wrong way?[0] Or a power bus alongside a data bus?[1] These are literally basic errors that go into production for a company that is far too big for this to be happening.
They’re not. The MacBook Air can easily thermal throttle under any sustained load because they went with a fanless design. It may work for casual usage, but it also negates at least half of your claims.
Screen cracking was ~4 years ago for M1 laptops, which also included Apple making screen repairs far more difficult, exacerbating the problems they’re currently being sued over.
They did separate NAND from the rest of the board in recent models, but NAND on the board was only a problem because A) bad engineering & B) greed. Thay’s not even getting into MacOS overwriting to NAND and wearing it out.
“Engineering is hard” is not an excuse for a company that’s worth $4 trillion. With flexgate they cheaped out on shorter flex cables. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of flex cables knows that’s a recipe for disaster. And while Flexgate itself is an older case, it’s a clear example of their profits-at-all-costs approach.
For that ~$900 M1 Macbook Air, you’d get:
- an old laptop, nearing its end-of-life, with:
- a fragile, expensive-to-repair screen, plus:
- thermal throttling on any decent load
All for $1,000, which by the way is not “low-cost”. That same $1,000 can buy you far better machines. Genuinely, it doesn’t fit any realistic use case. Casual users? A Chromebook or cheaper Windows laptop suffices. Productivity? It can’t sustain loads, so heavy workloads are out of the picture (and can be handled more effectively by newer hardware). Its only clear benefit is the battery life, but that’s not enough to spend $900 on a 5yo laptop with known issues.
M1 macbooks are known to have fragile screens, there are multiple class action lawsuits over it. Just because you, anecdotally, have not had issues does not mean they don’t exist.
And the average Joe is far better off with a newer laptop with the same performance for 1/3rd the price. The M1 Air will be out of updates in 2 years, requiring whoever’s listening to your advice to either suffer with an insecure laptop or to spend another grand or more on a new laptop.
Apple has no unique benefits for the average person, and in fact a Chromebook fulfills the average user’s needs perfectly fine.
> Consider the number of m1 laptops manufactured and then the number of claims.
Consider the fact that most consumers wouldn‘t file a claim even if they were eligible—the FTC finds that only about 5-10% of affected consumers actually participate in class actions. And considering there‘s multiple class actions over different models of the laptops, that signifies a decent chunk of users.
> Regarding, the “fragile screens” — find me one that ended at least with a settlement and not dismissed.
Hmm, I'm not a C++ programmer, but I do that in the projects I write by hand as well. I haven't found many other ways to organise C++ code, so whitespace is the one thing I do do.
So did you really write this, as claimed in the title, or did you vibe code it? If the latter, how much of the code did you review? How much of it do you understand and could rewrite by hand if necessary? How much of it are you confident you can find and fix bugs and exploits in?
If you think that asking “how much of this thing you claim to have written did you actually write and understand” is comparable to the Spanish Inquisition, it seems fair to assume that you probably wrote and understand close to nothing of it. Thank you for clarifying.
Surely you’re doing nothing to dispel the notion. If it isn’t true, say it. My questions were genuine, I don’t understand your defensiveness. Either you understand the code or you don’t. There are people who will be fine with it and use it anyway, and people who won’t be and will use something else. But they all will benefit (and temper expectations) from an honest answer.
my favourite thing about the present is how entirely people have lost their minds with LLM-augmented work, to the point that they'll openly interrogate people who have obviously been writing software for three decades about how much of their personal project's boilerplate is TrUlY ThEiRs.
if someone chooses to use an LLM in 2025 and they're not fresh out of boot, it's simply good manners to assume that they're doing so responsibly and transparently.
i think the most annoying thing of all is when people openly volunteer that they have used an LLM to write something and it opens up a front of ideological warfare for people who are simply terrified of losing their livelihoods.
Your HN account is from 2013. You have one comment, this one in this thread. You also have one submission, which is to the website of the author of this tool. What an amazing coincidence that in 12 years of HN, your only two interactions were promoting and defending this person.
rofl, what does any of that have to do with what i'm saying, detective columbo?
wait, i need to _use_ more _italics_, that's how we know we've made an _excellent point_
i only have one post on deviantart too, shall we get into that? come on lets have a fireside chat and settle your nerves as you tremble before the inexorable weight of technological change.
If _you_ can read the code, and it's of reasonable quality (I can and this code appears to be), then what exactly is the point of this argument?
Before the authors work, however you choose to define that word, this did not exist. Now it does, and it isn't slop. Why then does it matter how it came into existence?
This feels like a petty attempt to diminish the fact that someone just gave us a piece of useful open source software.
> This feels like a petty attempt to diminish the fact
It feels that way to you because you misunderstood the point and are outright assuming bad faith (as evidenced by sibling comments).
> I can and this code appears to be
Yes, appears. To know for sure you’d have to read more of it. You’d have to spend time to understand it. If you know the author and know they have been writing code before LLMs and they tell you they have written it all themselves or at the very least reviewed it all, you’ll place a certain amount of trust in the code based on the author. If, however, they say they vibe coded all of it and verified nothing, you’re no longer trusting the abilities of the author but the random musings of LLMs.
Those two scenarios entail different levels of trust and verification and they affect how much time you yourself will decide to spend on doing your own review to go from appears good to “I’m confident it is good”.
This is not hard to understand. All you have to do is not assume that everyone who makes a question about LLM usage is immediately bashing the project. In other words, don’t engage in bad faith and don’t assume motivation from strangers.
> Yes, appears. To know for sure you’d have to read more of it. You’d have to spend time to understand it. If you know the author and know they have been writing code before LLMs and they tell you they have written it all themselves or at the very least reviewed it all, you’ll place a certain amount of trust in the code based on the author. If, however, they say they vibe coded all of it and verified nothing, you’re no longer trusting the abilities of the author but the random musings of LLMs.
Dude you are taking this very simple piece of software way too seriously. Not everything requires this level of attention or effort. This is a Bluetooth controller adapter, not a an O2 regulator on the ISS. My criteria here are quite simple:
* Is the code readable, so that _if_ I ever have to actually modify it I can? Yes.
Before LLMs, did you ask maintainers how much of the code they wrote themselves, vs how much of it did someone else write, and how well they reviewed the code? Because I haven't seen this ever, everyone just went by "does this library work for me? If not, I'll fix it or stop using it".
It's only now, with LLMs, and particularly on HN that we're so all up in arms about authorship all of a sudden.
Yes! It’s insane to not worry about how well a maintainer reviews submitted code. Every semi-competent open-source developer understands that merging code they do not understand is a recipe for disaster and maintenance burden. Furthermore, they understand that not doing so is how you get malicious vulnerabilities merged. Have you truly not seen any such cases in recent memory? The fact you don’t think good reviews are important is worrying and puts into question all your repos.
Don’t. It’s a cool idea and vibe coding it doesn’t make it less interesting. You don’t owe anyone anything and the mean behaviour you’re in receipt of says more about them than you.
Please stop assuming bad faith. I didn’t complain about anything, I asked a few questions to make an initial call on the level of engagement I’d want to have with the project. I even openly said I’d have just moved on without further reply if it was admitted to be entirely LLM generated with no review.
If multiple people are assuming bad faith: perhaps you should adjust your communication in future rather than trying to change their mind. An apology wouldn’t hurt, either.
It’s not “multiple people”, I asked that of one person multiple times.
And respectfully Mike, you’re not the person to be schooling others on respectful communication and requesting apologies. You are incredibly abrasive, often rude, and the reason many people avoid Homebrew altogether. You’re repeatedly criticised for “being a dick” or an “asshole” (I personally would use neither), including on HN submissions. You are very far from the paragon you are exalting.
I used to defend you when I contributed more regularly to Homebrew, but as time went on I now only ever find you in contexts of trading insults and never giving an inch or admitting wrongdoing. Even when it seems you are, you always find a way to end with some subtle jab at the other person.
For sure I could do better. I try and often fail, and that’s how we grow. But it is profoundly hypocritical of you to act like you are an example.
No shade on most other Homebrew maintainers, though, and thank you nonetheless for all the work you do.
You will find many examples of me apologising and changing on Homebrew’s issue tracker, they just tend to not be the cases that people decide to bring up here. It’s unsurprising to me that 16 years of working on Homebrew most days has a bunch of suboptimal communication in that time. I am not perfect but also never claimed to be.
Attacking my communication here doesn’t help you. I got involved in this thread after seeing someone saying they regret sharing this (interesting) project from your reaction and feeling the same way after your reaction to something I’ve shared. Feel free to ignore me as is your right.
Ignoring the specifics, your first paragraph applies to me. You simply decided to assume it doesn’t and stoke a fire which, as far as I was concerned, was already out.
Please don’t do that. It’s not the first time I see it. You come in, say what you want, then leave and say “you can ignore it”. So can you! You could’ve ignored it. I guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of times you do that, you’ll just make the other person mad and the situation worse. If you want to do better, and I believe you do, those backhanded dismissals need to stop.
I did not reread the whole thread before replying and should have done that at which point I would have seen your apology. I apologise for not doing that. Good on you for apologising. I will ignore more in future.
Can you explain why it makes a difference what the answers are?
When using an open source library assumptions should be:
- The code does what it advertises.
- The owner is responsible for the functionality.
- The owner's reputation is based on the quality.
You're making it sound that you're more sure for the above when the code is "hand-written" than LLM-driven. Why exactly? Do you tend to deeply understand the strengths and limitations of every coder whose software you're using in your projects?
As long as the owner is responsible for the quality of a project why does it matter how it was executed?
> Can you explain why it makes a difference what the answers are?
You answered it yourself:
> the owner is responsible for the quality of a project
If you didn’t write, review, or understand the code, then you cannot be responsible for its quality. If you don’t have the skills to write it by hand and understand it, you don’t have to skills to properly address bug reports or understand and prevent malicious submissions.
All of those are legitimate concerns and considerations when deciding if you want to invest your time in a project.
Honestly, if the author had responded “I vibe coded it and didn’t review any of it, but it’s been working for me for <however long>”, that would’ve been fine. It would have been a clear, honest answer that would let everyone decide how they want to proceed.
No, I disagree with the premise, that's why I don't want to answer. I am responsible for the quality of the project by virtue of publishing it, not because I wrote it in a way you agree or disagree with. Your questions are irrelevant. The only thing that's relevant is whether my name is on the repo or not.
If I didn't think it's good enough to release, I'd say something like "I vibe-coded this and didn't check it, use at your own peril". How much of the code I understand and how much an LLM wrote is entirely irrelevant.
What premise?! I made general questions that I want to know for myself. They were questions, not accusations. The fact you saw then as such says something about you, not me. You flipped out for no reason.
> that's why I don't want to answer.
Then you could’ve said that too, instead of dismissing it with a sketch and lamenting without any clarification.
> Your questions are irrelevant.
That’s not for you to decide. Silly example: Imagine you have a peanut allergy and go to a restaurant. You ask the waiter if some dessert has peanuts in it and they answer “that is irrelevant”. Questions are relevant to the asker. You didn’t even try to understand why I made the questions, you simply assumed bad faith.
> If I didn't think it's good enough to release, I'd say something like "I vibe-coded this and didn't check it, use at your own peril".
And how is anyone supposed to know you’d do or not do that? If you had been upfront about using LLMs from the start, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
> How much of the code I understand and how much an LLM wrote is entirely irrelevant.
No, no it is not. It may be irrelevant to you, but it’s not to everyone else. You don’t get to decide what other people think is relevant.
I think I saw one as a child in the mid 90s - it belonged to an upper-middle class Kuwaiti whose at the time preschooler daughter was approximately as tall as the device, which was laid on the carpeted floor.
At the time there were a lot of private import items in Kuwait - particularly cars - so it's not impossible it was this particular model. I mean, what other TV could boast being the height of a four year old?
AFAIK, the brine pits are pretty economical, they just require ocean access.
What I'm somewhat surprised about is that we've not seen synergies with desalination and ocean mineral extraction. IDK why the brine from a desalination plant isn't seen as a prime first step in extraction lithium, magnesium, and other precious minerals from ocean water.
As I understand it (which is far from perfectly) it's still not using ocean water, because you can get so much higher lithium concentration in water from other sources. But it's a more environmentally friendly, and they argue cheaper, way to extract the lithium from water than just using the traditional giant evaporation pools.
Do you know how much magnesium you find with silicon and iron as olivine?
It's just the silicon that we haven't yet tamed for large scale mechanical usage that makes them uneconomical to electrolyze.
likely a matter of location. desal tends to be on the coast and near cities which tends to be pretty valuable land, making giant evaporation ponds a tough sell.
You don't use ponds, you run the desalination to as strong as practical and follow up with either electrolysis or distillation of the brine.
But once summer electricity becomes cheap enough due to solar production increasing to handle winter heating loads with the (worse) winter sun, we can afford a lot of electrowinning of "ore" which can be pretty much sea salt or generic rock at that point.
Form Energy is working on grid scale iron air batteries which use the same chemistry as would be used for (excess/spare) solar powered iron ore to iron metal refining.
AFAIK the coal powered traditional iron refining ovens are the largest individual machines humanity operates. (Because if you try to compare to large (ore/oil) ships, it's not very fair to count their passive cargo volume; and if comparing to offshore oil rigs, and including their ancillary appliances and crew berthing, you'd have to include a lot of surrounding infrastructure to the blast furnace itself.)
It will take coal becoming expensive for it's CO2 before we really stop coal fired iron blast furnaces. And before then it's hard to compete even at zero cost electricity when accounting for the duty cycle limitations of only taking curtailed summer peaks.
Not that it's super relevant to this discussion, but I think the largest individual machines operated would probably have to go to high energy particle accelerators like the LHC at CERN or those operated by Fermi Lab.
Billions of dollars in cost, run 24/7 with virtually no downtime during regular operations, in underground tunnels with circumferences in the tens of miles, and all throughout is actively-coordinated super conductors and beam collimation in a high-vacuum tube attached to absurdly complex, ultra-sensitive, massively-scaled instrumentation (not to mention the whole on-site data processing and storage facilities). Certainly open to bring convinced otherwise, but aside from ISS in pure cost, so far it's my understanding that those are the pinnacle of large-scale machines.
Example: day before Christmas eve - the last workday in this region I found myself standing in line to a car wash. There was just one guy ahead of me, but those who were already soaping up their vehicles didn't seem to be in a hurry and it was already 4pm, so sundown over here and I still had other errands run that day.
I turned around and the car is currently still dirty, but it'll remain so until I can make time for that, so in 2026.
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