Why do you pretend that laws matter when the current government is showing every waking second that they do not? To the extent they've been called back by judges dozens and dozens of times, for breaking the law? Yet they keep breaking new laws?
The comment you replied to, but didn't respond to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47717422), refuted your attempt to reduce vigilante group actions as "telling people where the police are" and raised the violent incidents officers have encountered from vigilante groups.
You ignored both points and are apparently asking about the government interacting with judges.
Well, they're not all men and they are meting out plenty of violence, civil rights violations and lies in court that are getting cases thrown out left and right.
Lying about killing civilians, lying about being assaulted with a sandwich, lying about a college professor trying to move a gas canister away from someone in a wheelchair.
ICE should be abolished and they should all be barred from future public service.
There are four ̶s̶i̶x̶ ̶(s̶e̶v̶e̶n̶ five counting the web version) maintained Outlook variants on Windows 11, last I checked and I have issues with each one. Search especially, but then that has remained an unsolved problem for 30 years. I am sure "AI" will finally solve this.
Edit: Have checked and found that two I thought were still maintained (16 and 19) were EOLd in October.
It's a shame too, because the two subjects appear eminently linked, and not just for the distraction effect. There's no real reason people can't be condemning this ill thought out war as being an outright result of the kompromat Mossad has on Trump.
> or the longer term risk of the iranian nuclear programme.
According to Netanyahu himself the state of the Iranian nuclear programme has been the same for 30 years: "they're right on the cusp of nuclear weapons". The logical conclusion is then that there is almost no risk, quite the opposite - there is stability.
Note how completely different this is from e.g. NK. Despite being even much more closed off than Iran, the progression through the years was pretty accurate. Went from "they will want to get nukes" to "they've started working on nukes" to "they're close to nukes" to "they have nukes".
I don't follow that conclusion - just because Israel has said there has been a risk for 30 years clearly doesn't mean that there isn't a real risk now.
> That agency has been defanged by putting a pro-deregulation loyalist in charge but the bigger problem is that some or all of these people will be buying pardons before the president leaves office. And the president can no longer be prosecuted thanks to the Supreme Court inventing presidential immunity.
This is not a "bigger problem".
> the president can no longer be prosecuted thanks to the Supreme Court inventing presidential immunity
In 2015, there were a hundred things you could've inserted into "The US cannot ___" or "The POTUS cannot ___", that have happened since. Things "can't" until they can.
> I don't have any hope that anyone will ever be prosecuted for any of this.
Agreed, but this is _solely and entirely_ due to a lack of will to do so, not because of any laws.
What the comments here fail to understand is that even if 80% of these is vibecoded slop, 20% of them isn't (classic Pareto), and that's still a ~17% increase of non-slop. Quite a lot.
An LLM being used to generate the code doesn't say anything inherent about the quality of the app. It just changes the distribution. It's like how knowing a person is a man makes it a lot more like they're into watching team sports, but it doesn't mean they actually are. Or that a woman isn't. As of April 2026, an app's code being primarily LLM written it's a lot more likely to be slop, but there's plenty that aren't slop. Similarly, there were millions of slop apps out there before anyone out there was using LLMs to code.
More and more people will start agreeing with this take and admitting it over time as the Overton Window shifts and it becomes more acceptable. But this has been true for 2 years now. The distribution has shifted, ironically towards a higher % of slop, because 2 years ago harnesses and other tooling weren't good enough yet to allow people with zero coding experience to build an app. It still took more effort, higher barrier. But people were already generating useful code with LLMs, and yes, even creating useful, non-slop, thought out apps whose code was majority LLM-generated.
"Show them! Where are they!?". Look at these comment sections, then take a guess why we aren't linking them everywhere and shouting it from the rooftops. Because it hasn't reached mainstream acceptance, so it's bad for business. People immediately associate it with slop, and they're not necessarily wrong in doing so because as said, 80% is slop. So for us 20%, who didn't vibecode something in a day but worked on it for months to produce something actually valuable, all it does is invite negativity with business impact. In offline, informal settings you'll find way more people who are willing to say it and indeed show.
You fail to take into account that both the Apple app store AND the Google Play Store are very far along in enshittifying.
You will never be shown the apps you want. Only the apps that maximally exploit your wallet. There will be attempt after attempt after attempt to make you click the revenue generating apps instead. Do an experiment. Search of "OpenAI ChatGPT" on the App Store and the Play Store.
Play Store: can I just start with making the remark that now even Google has decided allowing for search is wasting money. I mean. At least their search works (as opposed to ...), but obviously they don't want you to search for an app. They also openly deceive their users. The search on the web is very different in results from the on-device search (which is at least easier to find, but works way worse and this just isn't an accident)
Top links the search returns on mobile: "Praktika - AI Language Tutor" "Open Chat - AI bot app" (with an icon very close to ChatGPT), then the actual ChatGPT app, then "ChatOn - AI Chat Bot Assistant" (also with an obviously deceptive icon)
The Apple App Store is the same shit. Obviously Apple is no longer about actually giving users the Apps they want, but the apps that make maximum money for Apple.
In one of the niches I'm in, the top apps that do rank above us are entirely free (we're freemium), so that doesn't entirely track. Your premise holds some merit, but it's not as extreme as you're saying besides extremely saturated fields.
All you're saying is really "app store search is not a viable day 1 strategy for user acquisition". In general you're right! It also has nothing to do with my comment, I didn't "fail to take it into account" because it's completely unrelated to my comment. Which is about this headline also including a significant increase of non-slop, good apps, whereas (at time of writing) this comment section mostly pretends it's all slop.
Unicorn is indeed an exaggeration but 1-5M ARR doesn't need funding. Most in that range weren't VC funded, as by VC metrics that's considered a failure and they shut down if they can't get past it.
The problem still holds: how do you expect to make money by putting together something that anyone with no software development expertise and a $20 subscription is also able to put together?
So I’m in this situation. For the last nine months or so, I’ve been growing a super niche SaaS app in a non-technical industry. I’m right around $325k ARR right now, and I’m quite worried about defensibility. Not really worried about my customers vibe coding their own solution, or vibe coding competitors, because there are some non-trivial parts of the application that they probably couldn’t do yet. I’m more worried about other senior software engineers who might be able to catch me with AI now in a way they couldn’t have a few years ago. How do you build a software company if software becomes a low-value commodity that an experienced engineer can recreate in a month with $10k in tokens? I’m still trying to figure that out. I think sales and marketing are still pretty key skills that many engineers lack, but is that enough when you suddenly have a dozen competitors trying to undercut you on price and features? I don’t know, but I’m doing all I can to stay ahead on AI while grabbing as much market share as possible.
Among all apps that do $1M ARR, the share that got there through particular software expertise that only few people had, has been exceedingly small for a very long time now.
Another similar but different point: no software development expertise doesn't mean no other expertise. As an extreme example, good luck building tax software with zero tax expertise. This applies to tons of niches.
A third point - lots of this increase in apps is from people who do have software expertise. They're now just able to create things they didn't have the time for, despite their expertise.
I think the counterpoint to that is if a tax expert and 1 coder that vibes can now compete against TaxActOnline or FreeTaxUSA (or any number of large ones out there today), whereas those existing companies built their solution with hundreds of developers.
I mean someone can literally make a tax app now asking the user to just snap a picture of their w2 and any other tax forms from banks they received, and submit in 15 seconds.
But that's not a counterpoint at all, that's exactly what I'm saying:
"Among all apps that do $1M ARR, the share that got there through particular software expertise that only few people had, has been exceedingly small for a very long time now."
There are basic flashlight apps, file explorer apps, qr code scanner apps and so on making lots of money. Note taking apps, calendar apps, a billion tile-matching games, we can go on and on. The fact that they're easy to code and lots of SWEs could code one, doesn't mean none of them are making good money. LLMs change nothing about that concept, it just expanded it to more fields.
> I think the counterpoint to that is if a tax expert and 1 coder that vibes
Sure, tax is one where there is a huge population of "tax experts" who could help with this, though I don't think that combination is even close to being enough FWIW. Plenty of niches where this population isn't this big and the pie is a lot smaller, yet still big enough for one person to earn a very sweet living.
This is so disappointing. Finally we had a fantastic, fully OSS, non-profit harness. Very extensible, well-made, minimal, untainted. None of the baggage of OpenCode both in terms of codebase as well as its.. "passionate" leadership, to put it mildly.
> Earendil is a public benefit corporation
Ah, so like OpenAI then.
> But I've also learned what I do not want. I do not want to build my own company around pi. We have a four-year-old kid. I want to watch and help him grow up as best as I can. This is, first and foremost, what I want. Everything else is secondary to that. In the past 2 months, he cried a lot because "daddy isn't here". I never ever want to experience that again.
That's completely fair. And above it, you sketch exactly what you could've done instead to solve this:
> I mostly handed over the reins to a beautiful team of core contributors in 2016, who to this day keep the project well maintained. I never commercialized libGDX, unless you consider it commercialization to build a proprietary piece of software like Spine on top of it.
Sounds like the above worked great, and this would've been the obvious option to do once again.
> part of me wants to take this further. That includes building a team. It also includes commercialization to feed the team, done in a way that doesn't repeat the shit I lived through with RoboVM.
So this is the only part that really answers the "why" - you want to earn a living from working on Pi, and presumably (?) believe you can't achieve that with OSS. I think you're wrong, and belong to the 0.001% of OSS projects that can earn a very nice living from working on Pi without taking this step. I'm not exaggerating, I would fully agree that the number of OSS projects where this is possible is exceedingly small. But this is one of them. If you don't believe that then fair enough, I guess, though I'm curious why you believe that. Because there clearly exist a good number of OSS projects that make their lead developer a very comfortable living. Which condition do those projects satisfy that Pi doesn't?
If that's not it, then the article doesn't really answer the "why" despite lots of text that appears to do so.
You obviously owe me, or anyone really, nothing. So far all you've done is contribute for free. But if you're going to write this kind of article to clearly do a little bit of soul searching, assuaging fears and "make things public" to stop them weighing on your mind, then it looks better to go all the way and state things in plain terms.
> So this is the only part that really answers the "why" - you want to earn a living from working on Pi, and presumably (?) believe you can't achieve that with OSS. I think you're wrong, and belong to the 0.001% of OSS projects that can earn a very nice living from working on Pi without taking this step. I'm not exaggerating, I would fully agree that the number of OSS projects where this is possible is exceedingly small. But this is one of them. If you don't believe that then fair enough, I guess, though I'm curious why you believe that. Because there clearly exist a good number of OSS projects that make their lead developer a very comfortable living. Which condition do those projects satisfy that Pi doesn't?
Because he wants to have tons of money in the bank and get up every day to go do anything he wants with his four-year-old kid when he wakes up. Building something in a couple months that got popular enough to be able to this is amazing. Not check GitHub issues and PRs from ClawdBot5000 and hope he'll make some money from it in 5 years.
We're entering a new world of software development that allows people with no coding experience to do things like build their own mobile apps, websites, and all sorts of other things that were previously reserved for only technical people. The gap is closing quickly. At this point, if you're a "real" developer and have an app that somebody wants to purchase, you'd be crazy not to take the offer if it's a good amount and have cash in the bank that would allow you to do your own stuff in the future without worrying about $dayjob.
> So this is the only part that really answers the "why" - you want to earn a living from working on Pi, and presumably (?) believe you can't achieve that with OSS. I think you're wrong, and belong to the 0.001% of OSS projects that can earn a very nice living from working on Pi without taking this step.
He already has a GitHub sponsorship with lots of sponsors himself. The problem is they get to set the price and the minimum is at least $1. This tells me that he believes he is not earning enough from OSS sponsors.
So with that, how do you even start with answering this:
> It also includes commercialization to feed the team.
The author knows that in his case, OSS does not pay the bills and certainly won't pay for his staff.
Armin from Earendil: At the end of the day there is nothing I can demonstrate to you now that we will be doing a good job here. But I want to be able to put back at comments like this in a few years and be able to demonstrate that we made the right calls for everybody involved.
Please do provr me wrong! I closed with the "you don't owe us anything" because I mean it, not to hedge. Even if it goes wrong, I don't think Mario is a bad guy, neither are you!
It has just become impossible to believe this kind of thing unless IMO the post is even more transparent than this. That was my point, if you really do mean the best and want to show that to the world, then even this (while much more transparent than anything with investor involvement) I don't think reaches the bar. So that's something I think that could've been done to demonstrate that this was a good call.
If you can demonstrate a few years from now that my disappointment was unwarranted, then everyone's a winner :)
> and it is basically impossible to stop direct imports like that
How so? Is there a particular characteristic of the US that makes it so, or of the channels through which this is done? I get that in general it's impossible as with recreational drugs, but when you look at cocaine then at least to traffick it to most wealthy countries it takes a large amount of resources and is at high risk of getting caught. Which is why they're increasingly starting to use narco submarines. This greatly increases the price of the product. Why can't the same happen to peptide imports?
The US is a rather dysfunctional country along many axis and an inability to stop imports is one of them. The difference between drugs and peptides is that by weight peptides are much more valuable. 1kg of cocaine is $28K, fentanyl is $150K, and semaglutide is $500K.
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