What's interesting is that in this article, the author describes making an understandable mistake (accidentally deleting Trunk aka main from source) and how their team was able to easily recover from that due to the nature of SVN.

The actual "AI deleted my database" story is really more of a "Railways' database 'backup' strategy is insane and opaque and Railway promoting AI infrastructure orchestration without guardrails is dangerous."

If removing Trunk had irrevocably deleted it from a single centralized server and also deleted any backups of it, there would have been an "SVN and the CLI destroyed our company" article back then.

As a Railway user, I appreciated that information and have changed my strategy when using them.

> "Railways' database 'backup' strategy is insane and opaque and Railway promoting AI infrastructure orchestration without guardrails is dangerous."

Yes. However, if you choose to build on their platform you bear the responsibility to understand how it works. You could have chosen a different platform, or no platform. Instead you chose Railway. Given that, it's your responsibility to know how to use it safely.

Meta-ignornance

Imo both share fault. Railway purports to be an abstraction anyone can use without expertise. Without expertise, how can a customer determine if Railway actually is an "expert".

In other areas like medicine, engineering, and trades the government or private entities step in with licensure or certification to act as an intermediary.

Yeah, Railway are clearly lying. You can't do software engineering without expertise, even with an LLM. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. As an engineer, you need to be able to check your vendors' claims. Signing up to use a vendor that straight up lies about what their product can do is incompetence. Both things are bad!

That comment seemed to revolve around consent. Willful, nonconsensual dosing of anyone with any drug is a violation, and yes doing it and bragging about it is reprehensible.

To be clear, as far as I am aware, there was nothing that I heard or saw that would be remotely considered non consensual dosing.

Fun, but the way they fly doesn't quite match my intuition. Why would an object curve when I send it out on the tangent? Wouldn't that be a straight line unless it's affected by a different gravity well?

Yes, you have to imagine a much bigger star beneath the viewport.

I imagine it as slingshotting my way up a tree.

Wooooow, I LOVED this site when it first came out and I still reference it when I talk about the early web and how it enabled me to learn things I never would have otherwise. I can still picture the animation of the wankel rotary engine from this site whenever I think about it.

This and howstuffworks.com made me so hopeful for the future of the web when I was young

This is so lovely! If the original author is here in the comments, some feature requests that would absolutely make my day, presumably from easiest to hardest :)

I love this so much, thank you for sharing!

* Slow down the motion to about .5 of what it is currently, with easing/acceleration on the speed to emulate the camera dolly and jib effects used in the film

* Add a random motion setting that allows me to run it full screen just sliding through the aisles, banking around turns, flying up and then back down the aisles.

* optionally lock the framerate to 24fps to give it a film feel

* optional shaders on the main viewport to emulate lens distortion, film grain, etc

* raytracing with reflectivity on the glass, refraction, diffusion, etc.

I think this is a good example of something you can vibe-code today. (though maybe not as good)

I went to gemini, picked "cavnas". used this prompt

> There's a famous CG scene in the movie Hackers where they "Hack the Gibson". It shows a bunch of translucnt cubes with glowing edges. The textures on the cubes are live computer text. The camera slowly flyies between the cubes tilting gracfully and it searches for the main one.

> Reproduce this scene in Javascript. Be sure to include each of those features

> 1. live computer text which you can simulate by drawing to a canvas offscreen and uploading to a texture, adding more output as it goes. You can even use "function.toString()" of the code you write as input

> 2. a post processing step so we get a glow

> You can probably use three.js for this

Here's the result.

https://codepen.io/greggman/pen/XJKPBZW

No, it's not as good as the site linked above and it's unlikely it would be. On other hand, it got this far on the first try. Maybe a few more iterations and it could get the stuff you want.

For anyone taking this comment seriously, please research and understand the potential long term impacts of GBL before going near it. It's neurotoxic and can cause brainfog and lowered cognitive ability. It's also lethal in the wrong dose, with a tiny margin for error.

It's by no means a safe alcohol replacement

Your response feels like a gut-level averse reaction, not an actual weighing of the harms against alcohol, which is about the most harmful drug ever for every system in your body, and also has a relatively small margin between lethality and and recreational doses.

> which is about the most harmful drug ever for every system in your body

I am not saying that alcohol is good for you or anything, but that is not even wrong. It’s trivial to find drugs that kill you or nuke your liver if you get a few milligrams.

> also has a relatively small margin between lethality and and recreational doses.

Unless by "recreational dose" you mean a whole bottle of 40% ABV spirits, not really. And even then. IIRC the lethal dose is around 7g/kg, which is more than a pint of pure ethanol for someone weighting 70kg, or twice the amount of alcohol in the bottle. This is not a particularly small margin of error, particularly considering that the hypotheses were conservative.

It is possible to kill oneself with alcohol. It is nowhere near the dose commonly taken for recreative purposes.

Awesome to see real UX experimentation, and this elicited a strong response from me at first "oh I haaaaate that".

On further reflection, this is very interesting and I understand where the drag and drop interaction breaks down on long lists. Some additional UI affordances to communicate what's happening may make it intuitive and clear.

Things I'd want to experiment with if I was implementing this:

* A "wheel" effect where the items in the list grow slightly as they near the chosen item which stays locked in the interface at the center, popping into place at at each 'click'. Somewhat like the Price Is Right wheel flipper

* Making the interaction entirely scroll based once I click. Setting the item in place can be done by any other click or keypress, and cancelled with the escape hotkey. My interaction is pick, scroll, click (without having to aim back at the thing I just placed by scrolling)

I believe this was a statement on cost per token to us as consumers of the service

Training cost-effectiveness doesn't matter for open models since someone else ate the cost. In this case, Chinese taxpayers.

Deepseek is a private corporation funded by a hedge fund (High-Flyer). I doubt much public money was spent by the Chinese state on this. Like with LLMs in the US, the people paying for it so far are mainly investors who are betting on a return in the long to medium term.

It all reads like hallucinated slop from top to bottom

"I've been tracking software quality metrics for three years" and then doesn't show any of the receipts, and simply lists anecdotal issues. I don't trust a single fact from this article.

My own anecdote: barely capable developers churning out webapps built on PHP and a poor understanding of Wordpress and jQuery were the norm in 2005. There's been an industry trend towards caring about the craft and writing decent code.

Most projects, even the messy ones I inherit from other teams today have Git, CI/CD, at least some tests, and a sane hosting infrastructure. They're also mosty built on decent platforms like Rails/Django/Next etc that impose some conventional structure. 20 years ago most of them were "SSH into the box and try not to break anything"

"barely capable developers churning out webapps built on PHP and a poor understanding of Wordpress and jQuery were the norm in 2005"

It was the norm in 1998 also, based on the "dotcom" era code I saw.

PHP was created in the first place because writing slop in Perl was too hard.

I have no way of knowing, but I will say I'm already fatigued with comments claiming something is AI slop. It's only going to get worse.

You're so quick to be dismissive from a claim that they "tracked" something, when that could mean a lot of things. They clearly list some major issues directly after it, but yes fail to provide direct evidence that it's getting worse. I think the idea is that we will agree based on our own observations, which imo is reasonable enough.

go to tax.gov

You'll identify on id.me

People have just gotten used to this sort of thing unfortunately

That’s a different issue, though related.

For password safe users, auth being handled entirely on a different origin is completely fine, so long as the credentials are bound to (only used on, including initial registration) that origin. The hazard is only when login occurs via multiple domains—which in this case would mean if you had <input> elements on both tax.gov and id.me taking the same username and password, which I don’t believe you do. Your password safe won’t care if you started at https://tax.gov, the origin you created the credentials on was https://id.me, and so that’s the origin it will autofill for.