200: The United States Bicentennial is a psychedelic, patriotic animation produced by the U.S. Government with taxpayer dollars in 1976 to mark two hundred years of independence. It is both a trippy lovefest of American iconography and, arguable, a backhanded slap to consumer culture. If nothing else, it tells you something about the aesthetics of the 1970's.
We run https://aero.zip, works fine, not once anyone complained about it being blocked. There was a study somewhere that .zip TLD actually gets less malicious registrations compared to other TLDs.
The whole TLD is blocked by my work firewall. I imagine you don't get complaints because the few people who are blocked just don't know what you do. How would they even complain if they can't access your website?
15 years backend. Ex-Automattic on Jetpack Backup, ex-Media Cloud (Harvard/MIT, ICWSM 2021 co-author). PGConf SV 2018 and APAC 2019 talks on Postgres at scale. Currently running https://aero.zip + https://www.lobsterpack.com in parallel and vibecoding like crazy.
Grug-brain engineer (https://grugbrain.dev) and recovering purist. I'd rather push the needle in the wrong direction fast and correct course than design the perfect thing for six months. AI embracer - I treat it as an exoskeleton, not a replacement.
Not a big fan of: calculator apps on Kubernetes, six-round interview pipelines, unpaid take-homes longer than 2 hours.
End-to-end encrypted, no need to be on the same LAN, upload/download auto-resume, real-time transfers (start downloading before upload finishes), really fast (10 Gbps link, smart chunking).
Also zero-knowledge logins (via OPAQUE), passkey/2FA support, no AI training now or ever, GDPR compatible. 2 GB transfers are free.
Claude Design is just a big opinionated prompt: https://www.lobsterpack.com/blog/claude-design-trenchcoat/. Among other things, it knows it isn't that great at drawing SVGs, so it won't try unless you force it to. For a logo, try drawing it with vanilla Claude Code as if it was a separate project: ask a "design agency" to ask you questions, answer them, then make a detailed brief of what you want to draw, then make it output an exact plan of what and where will it draw, lastly ask the chatbot to do the actual drawing using sub-agents for drawing individual components. Also add a "render it to a raster and make sure it looks right" step as well.
Sure, the blog post is AI generated (I'm not a native English speaker, our bunch is often shy about our English language skills), yet the research I've done there is manual.
I found it interesting that (contrary to the popular opinion) there wasn't some magic, e.g. a novel model, happening with Claude Design, especially magic enough that Figma wouldn't be able to replicate if they felt like it.
Also, apparently human (not artificial) neurons were behind that huge prompt, very well aware of the limitations of the model, cheating here and there to make Design's outputs more impressive, making it "create a (design) plan" beforehand, i.e. all the stuff that we the common laymen could do ourselves with the same tools.
> Also, you certainly got some brass, linking an entirely AI generated article in a forum where extreme distaste is registered for entirely AI generated posts.
> How is your comment not downvoted to oblivion?
I'm sure there's a polite way to say things.
I heavily dislike LLM content, but if you read the content, it's actually got information of value.
That was the polite way of saying things. The phrase "if you couldn't be bothered to write it why would anyone bother to read it" was a saying from usenet times.
The truth is it took the author less time to "write" that piece than you to read it. It's a blog. There's no deadline, and yet they couldn't take the time to actually type out their own thoughts.
> I heavily dislike LLM content, but if you read the content, it's actually got information of value.
If it was so valuable the author would have written it themselves.
I am a Lead/Staff Backend Engineer with 15+ years of experience. I specialize in reducing cloud costs, scaling large databases, and debugging systems at the syscall level.
Highlights:
* Saved $500k/year at Automattic: reduced S3 storage costs by 75% for a 2 PB dataset.
* 26x Performance Increase: Architected a bespoke binary protocol for WordPress restores, eliminating the #1 product churn reason.
* Scale: Managed a 30 TB+ PostgreSQL cluster (Citus) and NLP pipelines for MIT/Harvard for 10 years.
* Recent Build: Solo-founded https://aero.zip - a privacy-first file transfer service with E2E encryption and OPAQUE authentication.
I debug GnuPG with strace, migrate petabytes without downtime, and replace brittle Cron jobs with robust workflow systems. Looking for complex backend challenges.
