I've been considering VTV lately, it's somewhat close to what you're describing. It tracks CRSP US Large Cap Value which has more rules in place to be considered for inclusion than S&P 500, but isn't crazy exclusive.
My dad was a software engineer when he was younger, but his skills atrophied over the decades as he worked his way into upper management and spent all of his non work time caring for the family. For the past 8 years or he's had an app idea for something he wants himself on his phone that he's been dying to make, but just didn't have the means to do it. He tried no code/lo code options, but they were just to limited in their API coverage. Finally though in the past 3 months he's been able to fulfill his own personal dream to make that app with an AI driven platform. He has been thrilled and I think he's done a great job developing it. It's an incredibly niche audience and he knows that, but just thought I'd share that for some people out there it's legitimately a dream come true to be able to make and publish an app, while still being clear eyed that it's not going to make you any money.
For those that are curious, it is an alarm app with natures sounds instead of dings and beeps or jingles. As he puts it "none of the other existing apps have good enough sounds or interfaces".
Two things to call out: the first is it does not work if your phone is on do not disturb or silent/vibrate. He's aware of this and it's a permissions thing you need an exception for. He's applied for the exception but it's unlikely he'll get it because it's supposed to be for stuff that's like life or death. I think for his usage he's OK with that, and he has spent a lot of time working on it the past months so he just wanted to ship it at this point. The second is that it's obviously paid. I think that's fine if he had gotten the permission unblocked but I'd be a little hesitant to recommend buying it right now.
This is one of the cases where I do think AI development is handy. There are loads of simple apps (like in your example, an alarm with custom sounds) that someone could crank out if they take a couple weeks to learn some frameworks and a language. Or they could get some ad-filled slop app from the App Store that'll harvest their personal data and send it off to some foreign intelligence agency to spy on them and share it with spammers. Neither option is appealing to most people.
But AI can churn it out in a few minutes, and a human can go in to tweak things manually to their needs.
I recently did it with a little audio editing app. I needed something to edit sound effects for a game in a specific way. Learning about audio programming and whatever would've taken me a lot of time, and I put it off forever since even figuring out where to begin was a hassle. I asked an AI to make a basic app that did what I wanted and I put on a few finishing touches. Took about 10 minutes and works fine for my purposes.
I've been wondering how they've been able to be so generous with Composer usage with it still making business sense. Seems like this is the answer: presumably they think they'll have a competitive advantage in not just the UX space but the model space as well soon. It's a great strategy, but I do wonder if the moat will be big enough with how fast things are moving and how competitive the model landscape is.
After seeing the last few releases for GPT and Claude, I’m not sure how anyone (else) is gonna build a durable advantage on proprietary model quality.
The capabilities of the top labs’ models have improved so much in just the last few releases, and I definitely foresee a world where they gate those models away behind 1st-party harnesses/tooling.
Across my 4 different gpt subscriptions (personal, personal cursor, GitHub Copilot and cursor) all gpt5 models are junk compared to v4 - constantly ignore prompts, skills, can't write c# or powershell properly the first go, up to 5 tries. Qwen3 hands down beat it on a ryzen 5800 and 6700xt GPU even though it's slow it got the code right first try.
I feel like the v5.0 preview did ok but it's slid all the way down the hill to gpt 2 or 3 levels for me.
I'm glad AI curmudgeonry on HN has shifted from "it doesn't work, scam, they made the deployed model worse with 0 communication" to something more akin to "why does anyone use mac or windows, nix is peak personal computing"
Yeah these are pretty common in the US, but they're just not ubiquitous. Many airports will still have a CT machine next to the old one and it just depends on what line you get out in.
I've worked at a couple of companies with pay scales on part with FAANG, as well as a startup that was extremely selective in hiring. We rarely looked at GitHub, and never used it as a in a situation where someone got hired. I could see a situation where someone had good open source contributions it might help them get noticed by a recruiter, but that's so incredibly rare and hard to discover that it's kindof the last place people look. Having a good GitHub profile can't hurt, but LinkedIn is still king here
Having been to both Indonesia and Myanmar, I can say confidently Burmese food is much better. The one exception is the dessert Martabak you can get in Java is to die for.
I think Jerk might be too specific of a term. You probably just want to be looking out for someone you don't want as a coworker.
My goto question is to ask people what motivates them. There's a wide range of answers, but I usually find that what people disclose often helps me understand them better even if they may appear a bit like a jerk, and I can consequently give them more targeted feedback or coaching. I think spending 30 minutes to get to know someone is worth every second and can really help team cohesion and productivity.
I think the idea is that perfect is the enemy of good here and that getting from 90% to 100% involves tradeoffs that aren't actually worth it from a language ergonomics point of view.
reply