In general, I'd say it's always wise to follow individual people whose knowledge and expertise you know and trust rather than browse a platform. HN is one of the few exceptions I make, because I'm very likely to find quality people/content that I just wouldn't have otherwise. So yeah, blogs are great if you choose wisely.
Btw this was the cool thing about blogrolls -- if I trust someone's opinion, I'll likely trust the people they trust. You can replace "trust" with "be interested in".
It's not going to make sense for every company to release an MCP server. If you count use/integration in their internal workflows and agentic dev as adoption, it's probably near 100%.
Several economics Nobels and EU leaders have voiced concern about the impact stagnation will have. It's not a made up issue, there's a ton of discourse around it.
Also, I'm an American democrat raised in Spain and I have no idea what Fox would have to say.
Fair critique. The GDP growth gap is real — the US has outpaced the EU in real GDP growth for most of the last 15 years, and the Draghi report laid out the competitiveness problem clearly.
A few things I'd push back on though:
Growth rate ≠ outcome. The EU's GDP per capita (PPP) is lower than the US, but the gap hasn't widened as dramatically as headline GDP suggests once you account for population growth, exchange rate swings, and purchasing power. The US grew faster partly by adding more people and more hours worked — Americans work ~1,800 hours/year vs. ~1,500 in many EU countries. And GDP per hour worked (labor productivity) in France and Germany is actually comparable to the US — Europeans aren't less productive, they just chose more leisure time. Whether that's a loss depends on what you're optimizing for.
The trend isn't uniformly bad. Some EU economies are growing fast — Ireland, Poland, the Baltics, Spain, Portugal. The drag comes mainly from Germany's industrial model hitting a wall (energy costs, China competition) and Italy's structural issues. Treating the EU-27 as a monolith hides a lot of internal dynamism.
The quality-of-life metrics aren't just a snapshot — they've been stable or improving for decades. EU life expectancy, safety, democratic quality, and environmental metrics have held strong even through the 2008 crisis, the euro crisis, COVID, and the energy shock from the Ukraine war. These aren't fragile numbers that collapse the moment GDP growth dips. They're the product of structural choices — universal healthcare, labor protections, public education — that are funded by the existing tax base, not by marginal growth.
The US growth story has its own fragilities. US GDP growth is heavily concentrated in a handful of tech megacaps, funded partly by $36T+ in federal debt (120%+ of GDP vs. eurozone ~89%). Strip out the top 10 companies and the picture looks different. And that growth hasn't translated into broadly shared prosperity — US life expectancy, inequality, and safety metrics have stagnated or worsened over the same period that GDP surged. An Oxford economist recently proposed measuring poverty as a spectrum (average time to earn $1, accounting for distribution) instead of using arbitrary poverty lines. The result: it takes 63 minutes on average in the US vs. ~26 in Germany and under 31 in France. Despite higher average incomes, the US is poorer by this measure — and has been getting worse since 1990, because inequality has risen faster than incomes. In most European countries, this metric improved over the same period. GDP growth that only accrues to the top isn't the win it looks like in the headline number.
That said, I take the point seriously. But it's also worth noting that the EU isn't standing still on the growth front. Recent years have seen major new trade deals (Mercosur, Australia, India, Chile) that secure access to critical raw materials and rare earths. Horizon Europe is the world's largest research funding program at €95.5B. Defense spending jumped 11% in a single year with an €800B mobilization plan on top. And the momentum is toward deeper integration — reducing cross-border frictions for businesses, harmonizing startup creation, building a real capital markets union. On top of that, the decoupling from US tech dependency is accelerating European alternatives in cloud, AI, payments, and defense. The trend story isn't just about GDP growth rates — it's also about whether the EU is making the structural moves to close the gap. Increasingly, it is.
I'd like to use Opus with OpenCode right now to combine the best TUI agent app with the best LLM. But my understanding is Anthropic will nuke me from orbit if I try that.
You can use Opus with OpenCode anytime you want, just not with the Claude plan. You can use it via API with any provider, including Anthropic's API. You can use it with Github Copilot's plan. The only thing you can't do without getting banned is use OpenCode with one of Claude's plans.
If you want to use Opus with a different coding harness along with a coding plan, you can use Github CoPilot. It even has built in authentication with OpenCode.
I'm looking at their plans (https://github.com/features/copilot/plans) it seems like the limits might be pretty low, even with the Pro+ plan which is 2x the cost of Claude Pro. It seems like Claude Pro might be 10-20x the Opus tokens for only twice the price.
Copilot has a totally different billing model. It's request based rather than token based. Counter-intuitively, in our case at least, it is way cheaper than token based pricing. One request can sometimes consume 2-4 million tokens but is billed as a single request (or it's multiplier if using a premium model like opus).
Perhaps, but one would think those aren't the prime issues meriting first mention. I went in hoping for details of what Palantir is doing wrong _in Europe_, but all I got was some rallying the base cliches.
Kind of. I'm finding that my terminal window in VSCode went from being at the bottom 1/3rd of my screen to filling the whole screen a lot of the time, replacing the code editor window. If AI is writing all of your code for you based on your chat session, a lot of editing capabilities aren't needed as much. While I wouldn't want to get rid of it entirely, I'd say an AI-native IDE would deemphasize code editing in favor of higher-level controls.
The two large projects I've worked as a consultant were structured in milestones.
The first client had a structure they'd used previously that I just inherited -- I believe it was agreed amount / 4, each paid for delivering 1) full spec, 2) wireframes/ux, 3) MVP and QA, 4) Beta that addressed major issues identified from 3. After each stage I did the presentation and invoiced.
I borrowed their same structure for the next gig. It worked well in both projects.
However, it was very clear going in that both of these companies were going to pay me.
(quick note: i'm the OP, original account launchstack_dev got locked so posting from this one)
yeah milestone-based billing is solid when both sides are acting in good faith. the tricky part is exactly what you said... "it was very clear going in that both of these companies were going to pay me." that's the luxury. a lot of freelancers don't have that signal upfront, especially early on when you're taking whatever work comes in.
the gated delivery thing isn't meant to replace milestone contracts for enterprise clients. it's more for the situation where you're working with a smaller client, no procurement department, no established payment culture, and you need some structural protection without making it weird. appreciate you sharing the milestone approach though, that's genuinely the gold standard when you can get it.
I'm writing this from CT. There are absolutely door to door solar salespeople (they don't work for the manufacturer, they work for a local distributor/installation service), and they absolutely tell you how many people in your neighborhood have bought from them.
Pretty much every time a contractor does something to any of my neighbors homes, they knock on my door and say "2 or 3 other neighbors are doing X (pesticides, windows, landscaping, new water heater, power washer, etc. etc). Your home was built around the same time as theirs. Because all of my crew is already in the area on (date) I'm offering half off if you agree to service".
The fact is that these contractors really do have significant efficiency gains if they can get multiple neighbors to agree to similar work. So it behooves them to do at least a bit of door knocking.
I'll be sad when Google Fi is eventually killed. It's honestly amazing to have a service that's purely transactional. No notifications, no upsells, no "oops we had a data breach" (except the time it happened upstream), no roaming. Just a monthly payment exchanged for service.
The big thing keeping me from switching from Google Fi is how easy international roaming is. For every country I've been to, I've just had it automatically work within ten minutes of landing, at my regular price, without buying any addons
Except if you happen to travel for more than 45 days, in which case Google Fi will promptly tell you to get fucked and cut off your service without warning, advanced notice, or spelling out anywhere when you sign up. Not my idea of a carrier I can trust. I deleted my account and service with them to move to a carrier that I can trust and actually respects me as a customer.
tbf, that was because a lot of people abused it by being permanently outside of the US and relying exclusively on the roaming for all their data. I know because I was one of those people for 6 years.
I've switched to US Mobile. I haven't used it on an extended basis internationally yet, but I am about to travel internationally, so will find out soon. That said, the reviews are pretty good by people that use it internationally for an extended period of time.
I got bad speed even with perfect signal in malls and any place that is more crowded than a Costco. Google Fi doesn't have that problem. I blame it on T-mobile but I would rather Google Fi survives.
Fi’s customer service has long since turned to shit, but the things keeping me on it are the data sims, simple international roaming, and international calling. That trifecta is pretty hard to find a match for. Especially the data sims. But if you don’t need that, I probably wouldn’t recommend Fi. My wife had endless trouble with multiple bad sim cards and the customer service experience was just as dreadful as every other carrier.
I left fi because the service was bad outside of Metro areas and didn't trust them to not arbitrarily shut down. It felt stagnant as a service which implied it was coasting along with no one at the helm
I've listened to several of his antichrist talks and remain confused by his stance. He's imprecise and rambles, but IMO it boils down to one of a few options:
1) These are actual good faith views that are inspired by his own piety
2) This is some chess game he thinks he's playing in which he erects the world government/ totalitarian state as signals of the antichrist, with Thunberg and other "woke" leaders as candidates, because they pose a risk to his business interests. "Peace and safety" is a guise and a front, but conveniently, are just bad for Palantir.
3) He is too disconnected for too long and has disappeared up his own ass
For anyone considering investigating, I wouldn't advise it. He's given huge liberties by interviewers to give vague non-answers and is never (rarely) pressed about reconciling his actions as an investor with his alleged concern for humanity.
Btw this was the cool thing about blogrolls -- if I trust someone's opinion, I'll likely trust the people they trust. You can replace "trust" with "be interested in".
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