Live data from Hacker News

The Sideprocalypse

johan.hal.se

101–110 of 132 posts

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#101
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed I loved it! Right up until they turned it into a musical for some reason. Me and my wife call it "doing a magicians" when a TV show suddenly starts singing for no reason. But yeah up until that point it was great!

It's a whole thing. The Magicians was just following a trend that genre shows need a musical episode if they've been on long enough. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MusicalEpisode

Damn I had noticed a lot of series doing it, but I guess it's wider than I thought!

The Magicians overdid it though. It's not a musical episode, iirc it's like 2 seasons

Edit: just to be clear, I still watched those 2 entire seasons, because the story is genuinely that good, plus I was invested. But I really wish they hadn't gone musical, it really messed with the mood of the series.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#102

> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service. When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in. When millions of dollars in production data is los…

> thousands of people ... millions of dollars in production data Doesn't sound like a hobby side project. Sounds like a business. And then yeah, you get all that comes with it.

it was not clear enough, you need quality if you are running a business, the risk is too high in many cases

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#103

> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service. When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in. When millions of dollars in production data is los…

> thousands of people ... millions of dollars in production data Doesn't sound like a hobby side project. Sounds like a business. And then yeah, you get all that comes with it.

As a Saas or tool company, you’re a manufacturer or maybe a wholesaler.

Your customers are paying you $1000 a month to handle a process that is worth $10k to them and might be worth $50k to their customers. If you lose that data you haven’t lost $1000 of data. Even if you only made $100 off of the transaction.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#104

>Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. Quality will matter the most in 2026. Specifically because the barrier-to-entry for making software…

Just like the tide of fast fashion caused people to seek out local-sewn clothes made from high-quality materials, right? Right? Quality isn’t a differentiator if the market is saturated with indistinguishable garbage. Everything is made in sweatshops out of the cheapest plastic available, and I don’t see why software isn’t next in line.

Exactly - it turns into a market for lemons, where the customer is unwilling to make a bet or even invest in an evaluation if there's an overwhelming amount of crap and little ability to differentiate. Amazon is turning into this with QWENFOING everything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#105
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If someone pitched you a book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers, makes friends and enemies and ultimately battles evil, you might shoot down their dreams because "some cocaine-addled sales critter" already had that idea, and she's called J K Rowling and she's worth billions and shes so successful she can't even be cancelled because she makes so much money. And yet…

Is TNotW really the same concept as Harry Potter? It has a university in it, which I guess is similar to a school, and after a while the main character ends up there, but it's a very different concept - it's classic high fantasy that includes a period of learning and study, whereas HP is primarily boarding school fiction with magical elements. Similarly, The Magicians, as I understand it, is also more about a univers…

Harry Potter has much better writing and morals than Percy Jackson. I had to stop reading Percy Jackson to my kids.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#106

> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service. When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in. When millions of dollars in production data is los…

I'm sure "bad quality" will soon be classified in the "cost of doing business" section like fines for not respecting laws. That's why AI is hurting us so much right now. We were always trying to have quality in our project, whether it was for readability or for code evolution. No, Steve, you don't name your 42 variables with only two letter and no you don't use Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructur…

> I'm sure "bad quality" will soon be classified in the "cost of doing business"

But that cost is not trivial. In some topics (but not limited) like medial devices, the legal liability would just bankrupt the company. Not so cheap compared to hiring a few humans. I’m picking an obvious cases here, but there are many others.

> Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructure

Ouch, yeah seen this a few times, outside of Scandinavia.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But… distribution is so much harder?

There's legions of companies that will do warehousing and shipping for you. Definitely costs though. That's what I mean by margins being a significant difference.

A friend of mine dabbles in niche hardware products. The amount of work he has to put in to get the CE and other certifications is significant. That’s before assembly, shipping (including customs shenanigans) and… returns. For a software guy like me, digital products seem much less daunting… and of course they scale “perfectly”. Nice smokers though, must be nice to earn money from something like that, congrats!

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#108

> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service. When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in. When millions of dollars in production data is los…

I just sat on an enterprise onboarding call where their success engineer did in fact blame the AI and the client said "OK"

Not a good look lol.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#109
post #79
post #8

I wish i could take back the view i gave to this article, it says nothing. Is there such a thing as an inverse hype machine? Where people take the opposite side of a hyped product and then hype that view just as much but for the same purpose? His footer even admits he's basically just trolling for views so he can reach the status of "thought leader". btw, someone else having the same idea you have for a saas company…

The whole premise is very unimaginative. It just takes one step on the infinite series and does not ask what the asymptote is (if there even is one). If every coked up SDR can build a tech stack, then every junior SWE can get superhuman SEO. If every product has superhuman seo and engineering, and there are 10 or 100x more products, then probably everyone uses the exact right one for their needs, and quality for your…

The edge is ownership - of GPUs, capital, connections and distribution channels (this includes SEO). Also, SEO will be meaningless if LLMs will be the main discovery channels. Much less transparent, and we are already seeing that, for example the "what about South African ***code" grok system prompt manipulation from a few months back.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#110
> Listen: every idea you've ever had, every single one, some cocaine-addled sales critter has had too. And they're better than you at SEO.

On most days I am resistant to stereotypes about "the welfare state" eroding incentives for entrepreneurism and innovation. But if you're going to wave it in my face like that, I might have to reconsider.

Post reply on HN