I used to be excited by these kind of tools, I love to self-host stuff. When I clicked on the link, I had this hesitation, suspecting "maybe it's LLM generated". And sure enough, coming back to HN, description says it is.
File sync can't be that hard! Enters the first 3 way conflict and everything explodes.
Dont misunderstand me, this is a cool idea. But if your rotation time between ideating a project and pushing it to HN is a week, you don't understand the problem space. You didn't go through the pain of realizing its complexity. You didn't test things properly with your own data, lost a bunch of it and fixed the issues, or realized it was a bad idea and abandoned it. I have no guarantee you'll still be there in a month to patch any vulnerabilities.
Not that any open-source project had these kind of guarantees until now, but the effort invested in them to get to that point was at least a secondary indicator about who built it, their dedication, and their understanding of the space.
not picking on you, specifically, but i wonder how many people could roughly draw a cardboard box template correctly. It is an easier object than a bicycle, which people routinely have issues drawing, too.
generally, there's not "missing pieces" in a cardboard box.
Fair, that template resolves to a box but it's missing stuff like tabs to make the bottom properly stick ; and it's probably not optimal in its use of cardboard. Also it was design in a minute in draw.io to make a stranger on the internet chuckle, so lots of constraints to fulfill.
It will sound like finessing on details, but details are important in these kind of claims, and this seems incorrect
> Microsoft has 33,000 employees and a $15 billion legal budget
Microsoft has more than 220k employees (it's hard to follow with all the layoffs), and the G&A in which bankrolls legal expenses (but not only - it also contains basically every employee who's not engineering or sales) was only 7B in 2025 - so legal budget is much lower than that.
My camera started malfunctioning lately (because tropicalized doesn't mean you can use it in tropical weather). It worked, but when I switched batteries I had to wait a minute for whatever capacitor was blown to discharge before it would boot again.
I sent it back for repair to the manufacturer, they gave me an "estimate" that it wouldn't be repairable, and generously offered a replacement with a refurbished one, at $10 off the price of new (plus shipping, of course). I declined the "repair" and asked for the camera back.
When it arrived, the stickers I had put around made it clear it hadn't even been open. Having seen enough Louis Rossmann, I brought it to a camera shop around which is doing microsoldering. They replaced a single capacitor (after making me sign papers that it would probably never work again, and charging me quite a bit - still better than wasting an otherwise perfectly functional camera). The unrepairable camera was repaired.
It is so disappointing and unsurprising that a manufacturer wouldn't put even remotely any effort into actual repairs, that a street shop with actual expertise will happily do. I've come to expect no expertise from any service department I communicate with. Sending something for repair is almost a sure way that it will be broken even further. When even replacing the top case in the example of that mac seems overkill, when they could probably replace the faulty key with skill and will.
I guess that's a matter of incentives, given that in mass market, repairability is not something people look into when shopping.
I had the opposite happen to me. I made the same assumption when my GPU broke (it was 2-3 months old). I thought I'll save time and spend some more money to have it repaired in a local shop instead of sending it back to the manufacturer.
Turns out it was a fatal irreparable failure. A capacitor overheated and left a small crater on the surface. Because I took it to the shop, the warranty sticker was void. Had to buy a whole new GPU :(
While I do agree generally, there are a couple things to note
1. Author was made to pay for the bureaucracy and a rigid rule, and found a way to revert that. Now Karen pays the price for the bureaucracy. In the end Author made it a 0 sum game while there was not necessarily a need... and yet fair is fair, he was entered in the game without asking, and he played it.
2. > She has no power, absolutely no power
I doubt if this is true. In the end she said "fine we'll mark the file as updated" while having received only partially what Author sent. This shows she had permissions to change the status of their file, and agency in determining if she should.
In the end I'm not sure if it was worth making someone else suffer, there was probably that 2 pages file that they needed to send, which would have been enough to send everyone on their merry way. Beyond just creating suffering to someone else, that could have very well ended with "fine, we'll review those 500 pages, I'm not sure if we can do that by the deadline".
This shows she had permissions to change the status of their file, and agency in determining if she should.
Concluding she had permission and agency suggests she had intrinsic motivation to not apply that agency. If we assume the motivation is nefarious, then the main character is the victim. However, quite more likely, she is also a victim of the system, whereby were she to apply her discretionary agency to reduce the burden on the main character, she takes on an equal or greater burden herself. Once the burden had already shifted onto her, she accepted that she doesn't have any options to prevent it.
It's an interesting state that you can force someone to unlock their phone with biometrics, but you can't force them to reveal a pin.
Anecdotally, I have been to the US a few times in the past year, and seen no change myself - where are you going and why? Thanks have a good trip. It was for short business trips, and I'm white with a number of documented entries/departures, so my experience might be very different from the next person though.
File sync can't be that hard! Enters the first 3 way conflict and everything explodes.
Dont misunderstand me, this is a cool idea. But if your rotation time between ideating a project and pushing it to HN is a week, you don't understand the problem space. You didn't go through the pain of realizing its complexity. You didn't test things properly with your own data, lost a bunch of it and fixed the issues, or realized it was a bad idea and abandoned it. I have no guarantee you'll still be there in a month to patch any vulnerabilities.
Not that any open-source project had these kind of guarantees until now, but the effort invested in them to get to that point was at least a secondary indicator about who built it, their dedication, and their understanding of the space.
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