On the subject of metrics, better user-facing metrics to understand and debug usage patterns would be a great addition. I'd love an easier way to understand the ave cost incurred by a specific skill, for example. (If I'm missing something obvious, let me know.)

Baking deeper analytics into CC would be helpful... similar to ccusage perhaps: https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage

My taxes are rather complex, so I ran the same exercise to see if Claude agreed with my accountant. An automated second opinion, so to speak. Spent about 6 minutes analyzing all the PDFs and basically nailed it perfectly in one shot.

My only point here is it sure seems the same activity / use case can have wildly different results across sessions or users. Customer support and product development in the age of non-deterministic software is a strange, strange beast.

What does nailing mean when you ask whether it agreed with your accountant?

Given the same inputs but not provided the results (output) from our accountant, did it come to the same conclusions or have good analysis as to why it differed?

Obviously, accounting is "spreadsheet math" intensive, so Claude wrote some python scripts for that which kept the math very stable. But there were some complex nuances that had taken the accountant and I quite a bit of work to track down and clarify. Claude quickly had a very accurate read on the situation and knew all the right clarifying questions.

I'm not yet ready to ever sign a return that's been entirely AI prepared, but I left the exercise pretty impressed.

> it works by simulating a trackpad swipe with a large amount of velocity

Damn, that's rather clever.

I'm a little afraid of the failure modes, frankly. Clever, but that seems like it would b likely to exercise some under-tested timing situations. I'm not familiar with that API, so take the hunch with a grain of salt.

It's also hilarious that it works this way

I'm surprised others didn't pick it up sooner https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36938663

Also with this approach, you actually have a real collection and it's fun to collect things.

My son has autism and viewed his Netflix homepage as his personal curated collection. But then, of course, Netflix renegotiates licensing deals and entire seasons or shows just go away. And it really crushes him because it's like they were stolen from his personal collection.

So now when I hear him play, the super villain trying to destroy the world is always named Reed Hastings.

> So now when I hear him play, the super villain trying to destroy the world is always named Reed Hastings.

That is absolutely hilarious and it totally sounds like a villain's name

I understand his frustration : I have a similar issue with video games - Xbox gamepass games sometimes leave the service. So I built an app that takes all my games across the various gaming services ( steam etc ) including the Xbox gamepass ones, and it grabs them from the achievements ( games I have played ) on top of the catalog ( available games )should they have left the catalog

That way games that are gone remain and I have a Netflix like interface to view all my games past and present

It is interesting that Netflix alone gets blamed, as opposed to the parties they are negotiating with.

Netflix is ultimately responsible for what they put on the platform, for delivering a consistent product to their users, and for setting expectations.

Netflix is exceptionally shitty at letting people what is leaving their platform and when, and even letting them know when the shows they saved or were in the middle of watching have been removed. Netflix has been around for ages but we still have to depend on third party websites to tell us what's coming/leaving. Some items will have a "leaving soon" banner on the thumbnail, but that's only good for shows netflix decides to push at you. There's no section or search that will find all that stuff (searching for "leaving soon" will show you some of them)

They can only deliver things that are possible to deliver. There is nothing they can do to negotiate a forever licensing deal with a content provider, other than buying the content provider, which is also not possible unless they jack up prices 100x and somehow still keep all their users.

Netflix chose to negotiate revocable licenses to save money and draw in users, so it does seem valid to assign blame to Netflix for signing such contracts.

> it's like they were stolen from his personal collection

They were.

There are some easy optimizations wins for this page but none of the top ones are framework related. Maybe with the faster build times they can easily optimize images and 3rd party dependencies. As someone else pointed out, nearly half that data is unoptimized images.

For the curious, google's current homepage is a 200kb payload all in, or about 50 times smaller.

Who remembers sprite sheets? Does that give my age away?

I did an optimization pass for a client once where I got rid of a ton of the sprites but didn't have the energy to redo it all, so it just had huge sections that were blank.

Super snappy loading afterwards though.

Yes, good times! With http2/3 they don't really matter anymore though, you get similar benefits from request pipelining.

Spriting is actually harmful for performance except in specific HTTP-1 scenarios.

Doesn't McMaster Carr still use sprites? Is that like the one optimization they managed to get wrong?

Looks like it, but isn't this site famous for being a "classic" storefront?

Some CMSs would auto-generate sprites. If you are showing most of them, it's still a positive, I'd assume. And, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I indeed remember.

HTTP 2+ (supported by every web browser) obviates sprite sheets.

They were a useful hack, but still a hack.

Question: since they've rebooted their approach to AI... have they given up on open models? There's no mention of open source or open weights or access to the models beyond their hosted services.

Alexandr Wang on Twitter [0] mentioned open source plans:

"this is step one. bigger models are already in development with infrastructure scaling to match. private api preview open to select partners today, with plans to open-source future versions. incredibly proud of the MSL team. excited for what’s to come!"

https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/2041909388852748717

So the answer is: no. lol. Remember Llama 4 Behemoth, and how we were supposed to get more great models from it?

This may be too large to run locally anyway. Maybe they will distill down some smaller open versions later.

You joke but as a parent, I’m so sick of the gem packs, etc. they try to push on the kids to obfuscate your actual spend on games in real world money.

And now it feels like the are gamifying the compute we use for work for all the same reasons.

I refuse to play games where you pay real money for consumables.

I hate that pattern so much. It’s also not just to obfuscate the spending - it’s also to ensure you already have some amount left over in your account, so that it feels like you’re not spending as much to just “top up” and afford that one thing you want this time.

If you have some left over that you can’t spend, it feels like you’ve “wasted” them.

Board games do not have this problem.

wow that's fascinating

Why are all these checks still performed on an authenticated, paid user?

Paid users?