This ban isn't about 'fairness' or bot protection; it's about protecting the Impression Funnel.
Marketplaces like eBay are designed to monetize 'Wandering Attention'—sponsored listings, 'customers also bought', and sidebar ads.
An AI Agent represents 'Laser Focused Attention'. It executes a transaction with zero wandering. It effectively turns the marketplace into a commoditized backend database / dumb pipe.
From a Growth/Unit Economics perspective, an AI Agent is a nightmare customer. It has zero probability of impulse buying and generates zero ad revenue. They are banning them to save their business model, not their inventory.
I feel like Claude Code is starting to fall over from being entirely written by LLMs. How do you even begin to fix precise bugs in a 1M+ LOC codebase all written by AI? It seems like LLMs are great for quickly adding large new features but not great for finding and fixing edge-cases.
What I find particularly ironic is that the title make it feel like Rust gives a 5x performance improvement when it actually slows thing down.
The problem they have software written in Rust, and they need to use the libpg_query library, that is written in C. Because they can't use the C library directly, they had to use a Rust-to-C binding library, that uses Protobuf for portability reasons. Problem is that it is slow.
So what they did is that they wrote their own non-portable but much more optimized Rust-to-C bindings, with the help of a LLM.
But had they written their software in C, they wouldn't have needed to do any conversion at all. It means they could have titled the article "How we lowered the performance penalty of using Rust".
I don't know much about Rust or libpg_query, but they probably could have gone even faster by getting rid of the conversion entirely. It would most likely have involved major adaptations and some unsafe Rust though. Writing a converter has many advantages: portability, convenience, security, etc... but it has a cost, and ultimately, I think it is a big reason why computers are so fast and apps are so slow. Our machines keep copying, converting, serializing and deserializing things.
Note: I have nothing against what they did, quite the opposite, I always appreciate those who care about performance, and what they did is reasonable and effective, good job!
I've read their reports before. When there's not enough information to reproduce, they do a good job of asking for more information first, and I've never seen a reasonable good-faith report elicit anything overt.
If you failed to give them proper reproduction information when asked, then yeah, you were wasting their time and they should rightfully close your issue.
I've never seen anyone on the curl team undeservedly "lambast" someone, and for a project that has a quite good reputation, I think the burden of proof is on you. Can you link to these supposedly terrifying comments?
> make sure not to sign into your Microsoft account or link it to Windows again
That's not so easy. Microsoft tries really hard to get you to use a Microsoft account. For example, logging into MS Teams will automatically link your local account with the Microsoft account, thus starting the automatic upload of all kinds of stuff unrelated to MS Teams.
In the past I also had Edge importing Firefox data (including stored passwords) without me agreeing to do so, and then uploading those into the Cloud.
Nowadays you just need to assume that all data on Windows computers is available to Microsoft; even if you temporarily find a way to keep your data out of their hands, an update will certainly change that.
I've been doing something a lot like this, using a claude-desktop instance attached to my personal mcp server to spawn claude-code worker nodes for things, and for a month or two now it's been working great using the main desktop chat as a project manager of sorts. I even started paying for MAX plan as I've been using it effectively to write software now (I am NOT a developer).
Lately it's gotten entirely flaky, where chat's will just stop working, simply ignoring new prompots, and otherwise go unresponsive. I wondered if maybe I'm pissing them off somehow like the author of this article did.
Now even worse is Claude seemingly has no real support channel. You get their AI bot, and that's about it. Eventually it will offer to put you through to a human, and then tell you that don't wait for them, they'll contact you via email. That email never comes after several attempts.
I'm assuming at this point any real support is all smoke and mirrors, meaning I'm paying for a service now that has become almost unusable, with absolutely NO means of support to fix it. I guess for all the cool tech, customer support is something they have not figured out.
I love Claude as it's an amazing tool, but when it starts to implode on itself that you actually require some out-of-box support, there is NONE to be had. Grok seems the only real alternative, and over my dead body would I use anything from "him".
I agree, I’m one of the Very Serious Engineers and I liked Steve’s post when I thought it was sort of tongue in cheek but was horrified to come to the HN comments and LinkedIn comments proclaiming Gastown as the future of engineering. There absolutely is a large contingent of engineers who believe this, and it has a real world impact on my job if my bosses think you can just throw a dozen AI agents at our product roadmap and get better productivity than an engineer. This is not whimsical to me, I’m getting burnt out trying to navigate the absurd expectations of investors and executives with the real world engineering concerns of my day to day job.
Brex literally came to us one day in 2022, and notified us that "We have 6 weeks to move everything off their service" they told us boldly they are refocusing on the enterprise market and we were only a "SMB". The guy who literally told us this framed it as a good thing for us like it was some sort of weird break up.
At the time we had signed a large enterprise agreement not long before that, and we even were advertised as a enterprise customer testimonial. When we mentioned that he said it was final. They ghosted us apparently and from what i heard a bunch of companies were the same somehow no longer acceptable for their services. I had a friend who worked for a very large F500 company who also got a similar treatment.
Ironically i had a friend a tiny crypto startup that somehow was allowed to stay despite not meeting their requirements.
They were arguably right. Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts (Homer's work, Australian Aboriginal songlines). Pre Gutenberg, memorising reasonably large texts was common. See, e.g. the book Memory Craft.
We're becoming increasingly like the Wall E people, too lazy and stupid to do anything without our machines doing it for us, as we offload increasing amounts onto them.
And it's not even that machines are always better, they only have to be barely competent. People will risk their life in a horribly janky self driving car if it means they can swipe on social media instead of watching the road - acceptance doesn't mean it's good.
We have about 30 years of the internet being widely adopted, which I think is roughly similar to AI in many ways (both give you access to data very quickly). Economists suggest we are in many ways no more productive now than when Homer Simpson could buy a house and raise a family on a single income - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
Yes, it's too early to be sure, but the internet, Google and Wikipedia arguably haven't made the world any better (overall).
Famously Steve Jobs said that the (personal) computer is "like a bicycle for the mind". It's a great metaphor because- besides the idea of lightness and freedom it communicates- it also described the computer as multiplier of the human strength- the bicycle allows one to travel faster and with much less effort, it's true, but ultimately the source of its power is still entirely in the muscles of the cyclist- you don't get out of it anything that you didn't put yourself.
Bu the feeling I'm having with LLMs is that we've entered the age of fossil-fuel engines: something that moves on its own power and produces somewhat more than the user needs to put into it. Ok, in the current version it might not go very far and needs to be pushed now and then, but the total energy output is greater than what users need to put in. We could call it a horse, except that this is artificial: it's a tractor. And in the last months I've been feeling like someone who spent years pushing a plough in the fields, and has suddenly received a tractor. A primitive model, still imperfect, but already working.
If you want to try out the voice cloning yourself you can do that an this Hugging Face demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS - switch to the "Voice Clone" tab, paste in some example text and use the microphone option to record yourself reading that text - then paste in other text and have it generate a version of that read using your voice.
It's because a lot of people that werent skilful werent on your path before.
Now that pandora's box has been re-opened, those people feel "they get a second chance at life". It's not that they have no shame, they have no perspective to put that shame.
You on the other hand, have for many years honed your craft. The more you learn, the more you discover to learn aka , you realize how little you know.
They don't have this. _At all_.
They see this as a "free ticket to the front row" and when we politely push back (we should be way harsher in this, its the only language they understand) all they hear is "he doesn't like _me_." which is an escape.
You know how much work you ask of me, when you open a PR on my project, they don't. They will just see it as "why don't you let me join, since I have AI I should have the same skill as you".... unironically.
In other words, these "other people" that we talk about haven't worked a day in the field in their life, so they simply don't understand much of it, however they feel they understand everything of it.
This is directly relevant to my wife's and my reading of the David Tennant & Olivia Coleman vehicle Broadchurch.
David Tennant's character is notably very bad at his job; that's why he got exiled to a backwater town. He bungled his last case so badly it made national news. In an American police procedural, we would either have some mitigating explanation for his failure, or at least some gritty vice or personal demon that was the real reason he got demoted.
In Broadchurch, Tennant's character just sucks at his job. Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent. I have to say, it makes for entertaining television. It also resulted in my wife and I chorusing aloud, every episode, "he's SO BAD at his job!!"
(Minor Broadchurch spoilers) At the end when he finally catches the big bad, it's not because of anything he did. A coincidence and some carelessness on the part of the big bad lead to the mystery being solved. Also, every other character on the show had already been ruled out.
Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype. It's fun to know Adams held forth on the very subject.
You can always count on someone coming along and defending the multi-trillion dollar corporation that just so happens to take a screenshot of your screen every few seconds (among many, many - too many other things)
Had the pleasure of making an Apple account to join our company's developer team. I filled out the form on the website 7 times: Edge on Windows, Edge on macOS, Safari on macOS, using 2 different phone numbers. No matter what, Apple just refused to send the verification code to me.
It only worked after I remember Apple is a dick to the web platform, then I managed to create one from the popup in the App Store.
I disagree: in as much as I have noticed this *far* more with AI than any other advancement / fad (depending on your opinion) than anything else before.
This also tracks with every app and website injecting AI into every one of your interactions, with no way to disable it.
I think the article's point about non-consent is a very apt one, and expresses why I dislike this trend so much. I left Google Workspace, as a paying customer for years, because they injected gemini into gmail etc and I couldn't turn it off (only those on the most expensive enterprise plans could at the time I left).
To be clear I am someone that uses AI basically every day, but the non-consent is still frustrating and dehumanising. Users–even paying users–are "considered" in design these days as much as a cow is "considered" in the design of a dairy farm.
I am moving all of the software that I pay for to competitors who either do not integrate AI, or allow me to disable it if I wish.
I also got banned from Claude over a year ago. The signup process threw an error and I couldn't try again because they took my phone number. The support system was a Google form petition to be unblocked. I am still mad about it to this day.
Edit: my only other comment on HN is also complaining about this 11 months ago
> Obviously forking go’s crypto library is a little scary, and I’m gonna have to do some thinking about how to maintain my little patch in a safe way
This should really be upstreamed as an option on the ssh library. Its good to default to sending chaff in untrusted environments, but there are plenty of places where we might as well save the bandwidth
> 1. Unlike most developed countries, in India (and many other develping countries), people in authority are expected to be respected unconditinally(almost). Questioning a manager, teacher, or senior is often seen as disrespect or incompetence. So, instead of asking for clarification, many people just "do something" and hope it is acceptable. You can think of this as a lighter version of Japanese office culture, but not limited to office... it's kind of everywhere in society.
Way back, when I first started working with Indian offshore teams, the contracting company at the time had a kind of intercultural training that addressed that issue.
> Advice: If you want better results from Indian engineers(or designers or anyone else really), especially juniors (speaking as of now, things might change in near future), try to reduce the "authority" gap early on. Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.
That's exactly the advice they gave. They advised was to try to make your relationships and interactions as peer-like as possible. The more "authority" is present in the relationship, the more communication breaks down in the way you describe.
This sounds like a real cross-cultural mismatch, but it’s doing too much work with nationality alone. In a lot of Indian (and broader South Asian) work contexts, questioning instructions can be read as challenging authority or admitting incompetence, so people default to executing without asking. That’s often reinforced by education systems and contractor dynamics where producing something quickly feels safer than pausing to clarify.
Add in time zones, language friction, and fear of losing work, and "just run with it" becomes a rational strategy. Meanwhile, many Western workplaces treat clarification and check-ins as professionalism, so the behavior reads as strange or careless.
The key point is that this usually isn’t lack of curiosity or reflection, but risk management under different norms. The pattern often disappears once expectations are explicit: ask questions, check back, iteration is expected.
Nothing particularly notable here. A lot of it seems to be 'We have something in-house designed for our use cases, use that instead of the standard lib equivalent'.
The rest looks very reasonable, like avoiding locale-hell.
Some of it is likely options that sand rough edges off of the standard lib, which is reasonable.
Heh. This reminds me of the time when our newly hired "Salesforce Expert" improved our support queue:
Every time Support received a new email, a ticket in Salesforce would be created and assigned to Support
Every time Support was assigned a new ticket, Salesforce would send a notification email
The worst part is he wouldn't admit to the mistake and it took us forever to find where he buried the rule.
The most underreported part of this story is the battery piece at the end. Batteries are beginning to displace natural gas in evening peak hours - that's the exact window where solar critics have long argued renewables fall short. If this trend accelerates (and battery prices are dropping faster than most models predicted), the "intermittency problem" starts looking more like a solvable engineering challenge than a fundamental barrier.
The next milestone to watch: when battery-backed solar becomes cheaper than gas peakers for evening demand across most of Europe. We might be closer than people think.
“The PDF Association operates under a strict principle—any new feature must work seamlessly with existing readers” followed by introducing compression as a breaking change in the same paragraph.
All this for brotli… on a read-many format like pdf zstd’s decompression speed is a much better fit.
“This is the first post in a series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%. Yet when we talk about these periods, we are often focused on aristocrats, priests, knights, warriors, kings and literate bureaucrats, the sort of folks who write to us or on smiths, masons and artists, the sort of folk whose work sometimes survives for us to see. But this series is going to be about what life was like for the great majority of people who lived in small farming households.”
Marketplaces like eBay are designed to monetize 'Wandering Attention'—sponsored listings, 'customers also bought', and sidebar ads.
An AI Agent represents 'Laser Focused Attention'. It executes a transaction with zero wandering. It effectively turns the marketplace into a commoditized backend database / dumb pipe.
From a Growth/Unit Economics perspective, an AI Agent is a nightmare customer. It has zero probability of impulse buying and generates zero ad revenue. They are banning them to save their business model, not their inventory.