The parent poster is saying (and I agree) that Airpods and Airtags are only superior because Apple anti-competitively privileges their integration with iPhones. It's not that they are better at the hardware level by itself.
And since iPhones form the largest single company's device network in the rich countries, that is a pretty big advantage.
Bad take. Each of these offered novel user experience improvements at launch. Yes they leveraged ecosystem (and yes I agree ecosystem lock-in does move devices) but thats also exactly what unlocked the better UX.
In your other thread you mentioned people don't necessarily want iPhones but they buy them to not be excluded from iMessage. I think you vastly underestimate how much regular people want low-bullshit tech experiences and are willing to pay for that.
Netflix uses FreeBSD specifically for their custom-built CDN/streaming servers, which are hosted directly with ISPs … not on AWS. Their user-facing catalog app, however, runs on Ubuntu servers hosted on AWS.
Yes, that's correct. They're not idiots and realize that spinning up FreeBSD instances in EC2 can be very useful for development purposes -- the largest EC2 instances can run a buildworld very very fast -- but they have no need for FreeBSD/EC2 for their production workloads.
A lot of people seem confused about how they raised the money, but it’s actually a pretty easy VC pitch.
- It’s from one of GitHub’s cofounders.
- GitHub had a $7.5B exit.
- And the story is: AI is completely changing how software gets built, with plenty of proof points already showing up in the billions in revenue being made from things like Claude Code, Cusor, Codex, etc.
So the pitch is basically: back the team that can build the universal infrastructure for AI and agentic coding.
I think I have just as good a shot at building what comes after git as their team does, and perhaps quite a lot better.
I'm not famous though, I'm just a good engineer who is patient, inquisitive, and determined enough to spend the last five years of my life on nothing but this.
My question is: say the investor believes that some new platform will win out over Github. How do I make the case that it will be mine over a famous person's?
I understand that money is at the root of the question. I don't see any problem with my strategy for making money, which is to win over all their users with a wildly better product.
Github itself basically followed this route. They didn't built Git on top of SVN. They built a much better product (than Sourceforge) and they used network effects (particularly their free-for-OSS offer) to grow their userbase until they could start to land corporate contracts.
Yeah I know that they didn't. Even though they didn't invent it and don't own it, it's still the cornerstone of the wall that has become the Github empire.
The specific problem is that all the competitors to Github have to use git, and that limits how different they can really be than Github and thus how aggressively they can compete to win users
Problem for whom? Users who are happy using git? Or conartist86 who is thinking about how to get money?
> the competitors to Github have to use git
Why? Syncing between various VCSes has been a thing since forever. If you can't handle a compatibility layer to support git+new-better-thing, you don't have the technical chops to build new-better-thing in the first place.
I do want forwards compatibility, I don't want backwards compatibility.
The way I think about it, if I make a backwards compatible product I might end up with users who never really wanted any change at all, and those people would be almost impossible to make happy. Those are the "faster horse" users. What I need is to find the people whose life would be changed by a car!
Why would users who never wanted change proactively switch to your product in the first place? And putting them aside, you haven't listed a single concrete technical idea that would indicate you have the vision for a car. Maybe you should spend more time on that than drumming up your grift-adjacent persecution complex.
They wouldn't. Every adoption curve needs early adopters, who will be people not satisfied with the current state of things. But obviously most people aren't early adopters.
If you would like me to list a single concrete technical idea, I am pleased to oblige. The idea is: universal gaps. Our syntactic-semantic documents can have holes in them, places where we know some content is missing. That allows a document to behave like a template which lets us fill in the blanks. In a text-editor-based IDE there is no equivalent, which means that when I go to make a new sticky regex in Javascript I type //y and the IDE thinks I meant to comment out the rest of the line. It has no way of expressing the concept that between those two slashes something is known to be missing, which is exactly what I want to be able to tell it so that it can understand the difference between the state when I'm about to write a regex body and the state where I'm about to write a comment body
That idea has nothing to do with source control that would replace git. It also already exists in the form of TODO tags and is handled exactly as you describe in JetBrains IDEs[0] (plus helpful semantic highlighting), and probably others as well.
I'm talking about a universal placeholder, something that you're free to use anywhere, in any language, for any part of a syntax tree that is missing.
A TODO comment can't do that because the syntax conflicts. For a regex the conflict would look like `//* TODO *//`, and for a comment it would look like `// /* TODO */`. Both have an existing meaning, and in neither case is that the meaning I want.
If I could have a magic "stuff goes here" character this would be solved. I often use · to represent the idea of this magic character. That gives you /·/ and //· at least, but of course it isn't safe to assume that no language will ever assign meaning to the · character so we can't literally use it as the universal gap. To get something universal, you need to move from using a sentinel token to using embedded/encoded data.
Maybe, but the way they captured the market was by offering a differentiated product. We already had cabs and buses, yes, but Uber wasn't just summoning cabs and selling bus tickets, where they? The core experience was still A to B but Uber discovered that there was a lot more consumer innovation possible within the confines of the A to B problem...
Yes, exactly? And closer competitors to Uber came later and are I assume successful. Just like there is Gitlab, Bitbucket, sourcehut, and several others all 'within the confines of the hosted git problem'.
There were players for hosted SVN too before git and Github came along. Github got big in part because they weren't in the same crowded market. That others eventually emerged to play in the market with them did little to hurt the return on their initial investment...
That is an empirical question answered by the market. The way you get your answer is to build it, get it in front of people, and see if they use it. Then you will know.
Note that if you want to be the answer, then you have to prioritize other things than the technology. You can have the best product, but if nobody knows about it you're stuck.
Sadly you can't, and this is a huge flaw in the venture capital model. They invest in people that they think other vcs will invest in. More often than not who your parents are matters more than anything (unless you've had a huge exit like the OP). They'll also throw money at you if you come from a rich family, not because they think you'll succeed, but because they want your family's money as LPs in their funds.
Well regardless of whether it's hard or impossible, I'm doing this. I'm going.
The problem they have is that they're betting git is a solid foundation to build on. A tectonic change like git actually being replaced wouldn't just eliminate their moat, it would leave them trapped on the wrong side of it.
It's been my username for 20 years and I'm not changing it to be more corpo-propriate now. I think it makes more sense if you know that my name is Conrad.
It's pretty easy to find out who I am in the real world too. For one thing I'm a private pilot and for 10 years I had an airplane personally registered to me, making my name and address a matter of (open) public record.
> I'm not changing it to be more corpo-propriate now.
Look, I'm not wanting to be rude here, and this is obviously all hypothetical since you're likely not actively pitching to investors, but if you were, being stubborn in this way would be a deal breaker for me as an investor.
I see all the reasons you have for keeping it, and they're reasonable, but the mere idea that that's a hill you're willing to die on is a red flag. I'd see this as one of many potential points of friction. Where else will you choose to not make compromises?
Maybe it's not rational on my part, but you're trying to convince irrational entities to part with their money.
You could look at it this way: if someone offered $17M to change it, would you?
I kind of am actively pitching to investors at this point.
I wouldn't say the username is a hill to die on. I can't hide that this is the online identity I used while working on this project. Trying to hide it would just feel sketchier, no?
And yeah, for 17 mil I'm willing to talk about most anything, but I still see a conversation with investors like going on a date. The red flags can go both ways...
I don't blame you for not wanting to change your name.
But fundraising is a game to be played, and part of playing the game is building credibility with VCs. It may be that a quirky name helps with that, but probably not.
From the classic baseball movie Bull Durham, where the old veteran is explaining to the newbie how to be successful:
"Your shower shoes have fungus on them. You'll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes. Think classy, you'll be classy. If you win 20 in the show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press'll think you're colorful. Until you win 20 in the show, however, it means you are a slob."
If you already have a track record, then you can have a quirky name or personality. Until then, you've got to play the game.
I agree completely. However, this mentality is why honest people like you get pushed to the sidelines, and manufactured, perfect imaged, 1000+ referenced in LinkedIn types are more successful in getting VC funding. If this is seriously your goal, you are going to have to play the game. Remember, even when perfectly playing the game in your position you will likely fail. If this is what you want to do, do you want to be taken out of the running for something like a username?
I'm mystified by this argument, that the best way for me to play the game is how others are playing it. Investors don't all make the same bet, nor do they want to, so I'm going to do what only I can do.
Sure some people will rule me out for superficial reasons, but I also get some benefit in screening out people who want to kick the tires but aren't interested in building a real relationship, just like companies do when they screen job candidates.
Reach out to investors that you or your friends/family have an existing relationship with. If that's not an option your odds of being funded are slim. Consider going to Stanford or networking with them another way; the latter being much easier if you're already wealthy.
This might sound like a joke or overly cynical but I'm being totally serious. Merit and product quality are only very loosely correlated with funding success at this stage.
The vast majority of projects don't get VC funded and of the small number that do most have some sort of relationship or other in into the funding world.
This doesn't mean you can't get funded, but it's a huge longshot. If you already have an income and some savings consider bootstrapping the project yourself, at least until you have some traction in the market.
I appreciate the advice, but I'm a couple steps ahead of you. I spent 10 years mastering my trade (UI) working in San Francisco and Palo Alto and Menlo Park, and that's when I saved enough money to allow myself to work on this for the last 5 years.
And fortunately I don't need anyone's permission. It's just too late to stop the wave of change that's coming now. After 5 decades, the punchcard is finally going to be retired as the primitive at the heart of all programming.
It's not that other people are famous. They have a track record in this exact field, where he produced results and made money for investors. His results help to shape how software development gets performed.
They are using fame and past success as a proxy. You would need to do it on the basis of your ideas and the work that you have done. Someone really knowledgable would need to dig deep on your work and then the VCs will need to trust these person(s). The other alternative might be to try to get traction with users like Linus did with git and hope that they like it enough that it becomes popular. But Linus had the advantage of being famous and highly respected already,
No offense, but why should I believe you? The guy is famous because he has a track record of success doing similar projects. Of course that doesn’t guarantee success, but I’d wager it makes it statistically more likely than a random person. Starting a successful company is not all about good engineering.
Have you built a prototype and tried to pitch any VCs? Or are you just asking rhetorical questions?
I built a prototype, and then I rebuilt and rebuilt it and rebuilt it, and somewhere in there my understanding of how to think about what I was building completely flipped on its head. Then I rebuilt the version flipped on its head another several times until I finally understood it. You can see that on my Github, it's all public: https://github.com/conartist6 (public devlog on Discord).
It's a pretty serious claim to know what comes after git, and I have a whole array of criteria I evaluate claimants on:
- Will their version control solution fall apart if there are not enough line breaks in the code?
- Can they solve the rename-function/add-usage conflict? Git normally can't surface this conflict at all.
- Can the system maintain authorship attribution at a fine-grained level (per-second resolution)
- Will their solution's performance break down if there is too much code in one file?
- How will the solution handle change notifications? Is the filesystem watcher the de-facto coordinator?
This GitButler thing fails all my tests for a thing that's serious about replacing git; it just seems like they haven't thought about any of that stuff, well, at all.
The reality is that none of that shit matters if you can build a product that people use and want to pay for. I would back someone who has made a dollar off of a product over someone who has built a great product that no one uses 100% of the time.
The reality is that you can make a successful business with okay engineering and great product insight. It's much more difficult to build a successful business with great engineering and poor product insight. Getting people to use and pay for what you've built gives you the product insight that you need.
Yeah but that's the advice for 99% of people. The craziest things: things on the scale of digging through 50 years of compounding tech debt, they take time. Have you by any chance seen this talk? https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world
If yes, and you’ve solved them, people should be very interested in using what you’ve built. If people are using what you’ve built and are willing to pay for it, VCs will be interested.
If you haven’t solved them, but can validate they are real problems people care about, and have a path towards solving them, this should make a compelling VC pitch.
If they are real engineering problems but no one seems to care much about them, then it’s just a hobby.
I use Git as a deduplication compressing backup tool. Git is fine and useful for a multitude of uses both manual and automated. Maybe the UI aka. porcelain is a bit clunky, but Git was explicitly intended to be separated into porcelain and plumbing, so that you can use the plumbing to make your own porcelain.
From git(1):
LOW-LEVEL COMMANDS (PLUMBING)
Although Git includes its own porcelain layer, its low-level commands
are sufficient to support development of alternative porcelains.
Developers of such porcelains might start by reading about git-update-index(1) and git-read-tree(1).
The interface (input, output, set of options and the semantics) to these
low-level commands are meant to be a lot more stable than Porcelain level
commands, because these commands are primarily for scripted use.
The interface to Porcelain commands on the other hand are subject to change
in order to improve the end user experience.
The following description divides the low-level commands into commands that
manipulate objects (in the repository, index, and working tree), commands
that interrogate and compare objects, and commands that move objects and
references between repositories.
I watched video to see where my prompts etc are stored in a way that makes sense. But no, this is just a nicer git. We need a solution to all these 10k loc PRs.
One of the most idiotic things about the whole LLM craze is the idea that we have to change all of our infrastructure to accommodate LLMs instead of figuring out how to train LLMs to make better commits.
Put another way: the idea didn't raise $17M, the team did. That's usually the case but you can fully expect a pivot in their future.
Once open source spreads into an area, it tends to kill (commodify) commercial software in that space.
For example, with databases, MySQL and Postgres "won". Yes, there are commercial databases like SQL Server and Oracle but they largely exist through regulatory capture and inertia. It's highly unlike anyone will ever make a commercial general purpose database again. There are always niche cases.
Same with operating systems. Yes we have MacOS and Windows but what are the odds we get another commercial mass OS? I'd say almost zero.
It's the same for source control. Git "won". There are a handful of others (eg Mercurial). But gone are the days of, say, Visual Source Safe.
But when people talk about "what comes after Git" they really mean (IMHO) "what comes after Github", which is a completely different conversation. Because Github absolutely can be superseded by something better. Will it though? I don't know. It has an incredible amount of inertia.
As for AI and anything related to source control, I'd have a hard time betting against Anthropic. But remember the exit could be an HN post of "We're joining Anthropic!". Side note: I really hate this "we're joining X" framing. No, you took the bag. That's fine. But let's be honest.
For people with a proven track record, AI is a gold rush of acquisition more than creating a sustainable business, let alone an IPO. I think that's what this bet is.
Makes sense to me. The new coding agents are drastically changing software development, and I think there's a lot of space for innovation in how version control tooling works in this new world.
Another commenter explained it: It's about working on multiple branches in parallel. You can only check out one branch at a time currently in git - but with "but" you have all the changes just in memory so different agents can work on different branches at the same time.
Working on multiple branches in parallel is literally what Git was created for, and how it's been used since the very first version 20 years ago.
Other commenters mentioned worktrees, which let you check out different branches at the same time from a single local repo. That's convenient, but not required.
Git always supported "fast cloning" local repos as well. You just "git clone" from one directory to another. Then they are independent and you're free to decide what to merge back.
These days, agents can also fork their containers or VMs as often as required too, with copy-on-write for speed.
So that's four ways to work on multiple branches in parallel using Git that we already use.
put differently: there's already a lot of money moving from A to B as people use AI & agentic coding. Find a way to get yourself in the middle of that cash flow and suck out a few percentage points of it .. profit!
Apple is doing everything they can to ensure it doesn't appear as a premium product.
A decade ago, they had the 12" MacBook (not Air, just "MacBook") it it felt super premium because it was lighter and smaller than any Air/Pro ... and used by executives (because it targeted that use case).
By having this product:
- called "Neo"
- thicker
- as heavy
- limiting RAM
And marketing this towards kids and lower grades, they are avoiding any mistaking this product as premium.
Yeah that’s totally reasonable. I’m just curious about how do they make a thicker and heavier laptop with less capabilities… do they intentionally make the case thicker or something?
The MBA is an absolutely solid product that is actually sufficient for the large majority of full stack devs. I use it (MBA 15" M3) with a large complex TypeScript code base, and it is fast and amazing at 24GB of ram or more.
PS. The biggest speedup I got this past year (10x) was switching to native TypeScript (tsgo) and native linting (biome or oxlint).
> absolutely solid product that is actually sufficient for the large majority of full stack devs
Worth pointing out that the same thing is true for a $350 windows box. The news here isn't "The M5 Air is a disappointment", it's "Laptops are commoditized and boring".
Were you 3x as productive though? That's the analysis "they" tend to be doing.
I don't even use windows (beyond gaming). The Jedi and I are just off on the ends of the bell curve pointing and the stupid numbers on the stupid price tag.
And I repeat, you're doing a meme like performance art:
Me: The windows junk is three times cheaper and does the same thing.
You: "You should look at the total output of the human / cost + equipment. If the output of the human is 10% higher but the cost is only a fraction of their monthly salary, then it is worth it"
Jedi: The windows junk is three times cheaper and does the same thing.
I mean, I'm not actually as dumb as the chad in the meme. I know how to do division. I'm just unwilling to accept your framing like "10% higher output" without evidence, and am pointing to the bleedingly obvious and extremely large signal (price) that I can measure.
99.999% of the time, the obvious hypothesis is the right one. And the obvious hypothesis is that macs are outrageously overpriced and you should just by an Asus Whatnot instead.
There are only a couple of relatively niche spaces where things like cpu performance are really the bottleneck right now.
Hell - RPi 5 is perfectly fine for a huge range of development tasks. The 8gb version is very reasonable $125.
Can you find things that these boxes can't do? Absolutely. Do most developers do those things? ehhhh probably not. Especially not in the webdev space.
Would I still pick a nice machine if given the chance? Sure, I have cash to burn and I like having nice laptops (although not Apple...).
But part of the "AI craze" is that hardware genuinely is commoditized, and manufacturers really, REALLY wanted a new differentiating factor to sell people more laptops. There's not much reason to upgrade, especially if the old machine was a decent machine at time of purchase.
I have 8 year old dell XPS laptops that do just fine for modern dev.
> Depends. Are you doing dev on Microsoft's stack, or are you doing dev on all of the other stacks?
You can run docker in WSL better than you can on a Mac. You can run Linux natively on that box, too. "Stacks" is sort of ambiguous (my world is embedded junk, and the answer for using a mac with these oddball USB flashers and whatnot is pretty much "Just No, LOL"), but to claim that the mac is more broadly capable in these spaces when it is clearly less is.... odd.
Macs are popular among the SV set, so macs are strong in whatever the SV set thinks is important (thus "I bought a Mac Mini for OpenClaw!"). And everything else runs on $350 windows garbage.
Makes sense; according to Geekbench, 9955XX has about a 25% lead in multi-core over the base M4, and about a 5% lead in multi-core over the base M5. And more cores, so better for parallel Rust compilation.
I'm comparing it to my M2 laptop, but in practice the 9955HX is substantially faster than even the M4 Pro I have in my Mac Mini, about 30%~ or so in wall clock time for Rust compilation.
Yep, Pro only has 12 cores, and a third of those are efficiency cores. Even the Max loses some of its performance to efficiency cores. This is why I was so upset to see Intel replace a bunch of performance cores with efficiency cores. (Remember how Intel used to offer enthusiast chips with up to 18 full fucking cores? Now they think 8 full cores + 16 small useless cores is the answer? I am appalled. Even aside from HEDT they used to offer up to 10 full cores.) More, and more performant, hardware threads is almost always the path to faster Rust compilation. Lose a few of those to efficiency cores and even Apple can fall behind.
Why is the finder the way it is? Is it actually easier to use than (whatever the normal file browser windows and linux uses is called) if all you ever use is macs?
Most of the other quirks I can work around (though the default alt tab behavior not picking up windows of the same app is an insane default) but the finder is just unusable.
As much as this saddens me I think its because most computer users these days never think about files. Everything we do on a day to day basis exists as database records, either in sqlite databases hidden away in application data directories, or in the databases behind a million SaaS products. Music is done in Apple Music, photos are managed in iPhoto, and so and so forth.
In which way are other GUI “finder-equivalents” better? I’m not invested either way, but I’m quite curious. It would be a great biz opportunity to make an aftermarket replacement if there is huge gap.
Snarky but I agree. I dislike how much MacOS changes with each version. My kids have a Linux box (NUC). I wish we could have Linux on a late model Mac Mini
The amount of people that know how to and also want to replace their operating system is effectively a rounding error in the consumer electronic market in general.
I like Linux and had Linux laptops before, but can’t comprehend why anyone would go as far as replacing MacOS on an Apple laptop. The OS is just fine, there is nothing superior about Linux Desktop environments. And you can easily run Docker containers for work that needs Linux.
Oddly, except for font sizing, it's OK on the iPhone, and fine on the iPad, too, but it just bothers me endlessly on MacOS. I'm glad Sequoia still works well.
I don't get it either. I've rolled out well over a hundred of these in a higher education setting and I have never had one have a hardware issue or needed to retire it other than wanton damage. I still have a ton of M1s in circulation and they are great still. I had to just replace a Dell with only 2.5 years of service, they tend to fall apart.
Twenty years ago, I worked at a Dell laptop repair facility, which primarily supported education customers.
>other than wanton damage
Some fairly clever students read their warranties closely and figured out how to get annual upgrades without violating warranty exclusion clauses. Very clever. Very annoying.
> The MBA is an amazing value, and appears to have only gotten slightly cheaper.
Looks to me like the base model went up by $100, no?
The whining is just whining. It's a fine laptop, but it's not significantly improved from the one they shipped a year ago. Add to that the fact that laptops as a whole are well on the way down their commoditization slope and the general HN desire to cheer about Great New Apple Devices, this is for sure a backwards step.
I retired my M1 MacBook Air last year, really out of power greed. I wanted to play with local LLMs (lol).
I seriously never had issues with my m1 in my workloads. Dev stuff, docker, etc. editing 30min 4k GoPro videos. I probably would these days with rust dev stacked in there but yeah. Can’t agree more, they’re an amazing value.
The MB Air M line is a personal contender for best product of all time: Fantastic performance without fans, amazing battery life, high res display and build quality at that price point.
When the M1 came out it was quite frankly unbelievable. And, even after all these years, I still don't see who would beat it across those dimensions.
My M1 Air is going strong as my travel & about-town laptop. It can do everything I do on my vastly more powerful M4 mbp, aside from compile multiple mobile apps simultaneously in less than a minute. Absolutely insane value and anyone who says otherwise has no idea what they are talking about.
I have an MBA15M3 that is lovely. With 1mm thermal heat pads (internal, CPU|case), I was able to increase the run-time before throttling significantly.
Among my favorite evening companions. Much more durable than initially conceivable.
Could be worse. OpenAI is asking for ID verification to use Codex 5.3, through Persona, which was just exposed as doing extremely dodgy surveillance stuff.
- Apple Watch
- AirTag
Those are a few that come to mind. All do multi-billions in revenue per year.
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