Dan Luu

Blog: https://danluu.com
Patreon: https://patreon.com/danluu

Last Notes

2026-05-22 08:18:33 UTC

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If you read widely cited folks saying AI economics are bad today (e.g., Ed Zitron from the quote), they're not credible. Sure, Ed writes rants, swears a lot, and throws the word "scam" around, all of which gets a lot of clicks, but the reasoning seems wrong.
If I were going to be skeptical about the economics of AI, it would be some kind of reasoning about how cheap models keep improving, so the frontier labs need to stay ahead (I don't follow it closely enough to know if that's plausible).

2026-05-22 08:06:16 UTC

Why are so many people so sure that the big AI providers are losing money on inference? It reminds me of the comments about how Uber can never make money. Their unit economics were fine and they were only losing money because they chose to do so on customer acquisition.
In this case, I don't think it's even obvious that inference should be money losing today. API cost for frontier models has gone way up and the people claiming some cost for inference are relying on made up assumptions.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/617/165/666/552/364/original/607d038ab7db9c7a.png

2026-05-03 08:00:36 UTC

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I was wondering why I was seeing so many "Co-authored-by: Copilot" commits recently. It turns out VS Code added a "feature" that inserts that into your commits automatically, even if you're not using Copilot.
It looks like people complained about this, which went nowhere until this hit the front page of HN. After this was the top HN story Saturday, an MS engineer submitted a PR to switch this feature to default off an hour ago (midnight Redmond time).
What will they think of next?
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/509/582/916/936/129/original/09dd76ef83f691cf.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/509/583/244/537/175/original/ae5daa458443ddb0.png

2026-05-02 08:32:00 UTC

This shutdown of Ask Jeeves (ask.com) is pretty great. There's a reasonable shutdown page (better than most, imo), but that's not what's great.
ask.com is now hosted on github pages and you can see the commit history, with commits like "Remove text about search not being a strategic focus". That's not even the best part!
The best part is that they seem to have forgotten that they own askjeeves.com, so ask.com has the shutdown message but the service is still live on https://askjeeves.com.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/504/042/681/909/094/original/f243012bff4f5601.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/504/043/772/838/084/original/2b80f555d9d9e3ab.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/504/044/060/180/968/original/3f0f6ec6ba769b57.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/504/072/974/441/232/original/21a0461cb0795d33.png

2026-03-30 08:00:29 UTC

Interesting to see Copilot injecting ads into PR descriptions. Although there are a handful of older instances of this, if GitHub search is working properly, it looks like this started happening at scale around 10 days ago with more than 1k injections of this particular ad per day since then
https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+copilot+coding+tasks+from+anywhere+on+your+macOS+or+Windows+machine+with+Raycast%22&type=pullrequests&s=created&o=asc&p=1
What will they think of next?
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/316/995/876/013/772/original/0e1d6fe804a155f7.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/316/996/264/770/284/original/b4a07509e1cdc8b7.png

2025-05-26 05:46:39 UTC

Interesting story about Google publishing someone's phone number when they gave it to Google for account verification/security:
https://danq.me/2025/05/21/google-shared-my-phone-number/
Reminds me of the time a company I worked for (AFAIK) accidentally used phone numbers obtained the same way for ad targeting and got fined $150M. Scaled by company size, the equivalent find would be ~$10B.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/572/548/187/932/591/original/76550031a16dde86.png

2024-11-22 22:41:22 UTC

A version of Missile Command for the Commodore 64 where the bottom of your screen is the game state in memory and missiles cause memory corruption, which eventually causes you to lose: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=135463.
In the video below, a missile broke my controls and caused my cursor to move down and to the left so I couldn't stop other missiles.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/528/994/760/698/312/original/89af61339f14e57b.mp4

2024-10-28 21:07:41 UTC

Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
https://danluu.com/ballmer/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/387/083/505/711/558/original/cc0e6d86f10e1d7f.png

2024-09-19 18:16:45 UTC

What do people like about Telegram? I keep seeing people mention how it's nicer than Signal or WhatsApp. I recently tried it out to talk to someone who isn't on Signal or WhatsApp and the main "feature" I've noticed is that I get way more spam on Telegram than on other services.
I haven't tried replying to any of the spam, but from reading about it, it seems like the spam is generally from scammers.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/165/581/720/031/978/original/bf9cfebc01af0a1c.png

2024-08-19 07:16:11 UTC

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Also, a few random comments about audio quality on calls:
1. With a few exceptions, the best audio I get is from people who do their calls outdoors without wind. Nearly everyone else is in a too-reflective room
2. The worst audio tends to be people using non-mac laptop mics, then airpods, and then fancy mics in bad rooms. In a normal room. The macbook mic is way better than all of the above
BTW, some people I know A/B tested macbook vs. airpods and the macbook won handily

2024-08-19 07:07:39 UTC

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Ironically, I bought these speakers on the theory that it would make people easier to understand on calls. I don't think this was prima facie stupid since a $40 pair of speakers/headphones makes it much easier to understand people who have really bad audio setups (for video calls or w/e).
But it turns out that a more expensive pair of speakers, on average, makes speech harder to understand (though, on the rare occasion I listen to good audio, it sounds much better).

2024-08-19 06:48:20 UTC

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Another surprise was that getting a halfway decent pair of speakers that can emit bass (but aren't particularly bass heavy) made a lot of audio sound worse without EQ.
The problem is that a lot of audio sources contain a huge amount of low frequency garbage, which most speakers don't reproduce. If you get speakers that actually reproduce the garbage, that audio actually sounds much worse. I don't remember this being an issue the last time I had speakers with bass, but

2024-08-13 21:33:44 UTC

A former Apple engineer discusses their Google culture shock experience:
> My director wore an Apple Watch and had an iPhone ... my VP too. Nobody was expected to eat the dog food and so few did. This was crazy to me coming from Apple ... several internal sites would ask you to file [a bug report] on why you switched to chrome [if you used chrome]. So many crazy issues I saw and reported didn’t actually matter to many high ranking members of the pixel team because they didn’t use the devices
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/956/842/169/165/551/original/5f9fbbfe6464d1cd.png

2024-06-26 22:44:13 UTC

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In practice, I don't think this makes a difference for any use case I'm concerned with, but it's really noticeable if you layer a bunch of tracks on top of each other, which some people have reasonable reasons for doing.
You can try to subtract this noise out in post, but that generally sounds significantly worse than not having the noise there in the first place (to the 1% of people who notice kind of thing).

2024-06-26 22:40:55 UTC

On testing this, I was surprised to find that there's a real, measurable, difference between a "good" ($15, Mogami or Canare) XLR cable for my microphone and cheap cables ($8, Amazon Basics or Monoprice) or fancy but not good cables (Rode, $40).
I always thought of "good cables" as audiophile nonsense, but I guess microphones are different in that you're taking any noise and then giving it 30dB of gain or w/e, plus my mic cable runs past a lot of big noise sources.