This is terrific work. Thank you for writing and sharing it. It captures the unease I have felt about UBI. It describes the feeling of regret I get about the state of public works. I'm sure I'm going to keep coming back to this.
How do you deal with two people bidding to replace the same message?
I'm most curious about your development process. This has a very strong feel of being vibe coded, which I have nothing against. And your replies here also sound heavily LLM influenced. I als have no issues with that. I am more interested to know if my instinct about these things is accurate. Has developed in this way, over engineered as you say, essentially because the cost to do so is practically nothing with the advent of LLM coding?
Heya! I'll answer each question individually, definitely let me know if you'd like any clarification though :P
TL;DR:
Concurrent bids: First payment to complete wins; everyone else gets auto-refunded and notified. Uses version checking in the database so no one pays for a post that's already been replaced.
Vibe coding: Started from a half-finished project by a dev team that ghosted. Took over and built the rest with Claude Code, but spent roughly half the time on security, performance, and privacy compliance — not just generating code.
LLM content: Uses LLMs to draft technical/promotional writing, then edits and fact-checks. Natural writing style is similar to LLM output anyway.
3AM breakages: Mostly from experimental automation tooling, nothing production-critical.
Now for the full answers:
1. Two people bidding to replace the same message:
- Simple explanation: Optimistic locking with automatic refunds.
- A bit more detail: The first payment to fully process wins. The second (third, fourth, etc.) person gets an automatic full refund and a notification explaining that someone else beat them to it. Under the hood it's a simple "check before you activate" on the actual message acceptance. When you start paying, the system notes which message is currently live. When the payment completes, it checks whether that same message is still there. If someone else already replaced it, the payment gets refunded instead of going through. Realistically, this shouldn't be happening in any normal situation as the backend is quite responsive. But if I got heavy enough traffic (specifically paid message submissions), I'd likely tune the behavior to refresh frontend values even more frequently, same with optimizing the backend to reduce latency.
- Techno-babble: When you initiate payment, the system snapshots the current post's version number and stores it in the Stripe PaymentIntent metadata. When the webhook comes back confirming payment succeeded, it does an atomic PostgreSQL UPDATE ... WHERE id = $1 AND version = $2 with an increment. If updated.count === 0, someone else already won. The payment gets automatically refunded via the Stripe API, and the user gets a real-time WebSocket notification explaining what happened ("Someone else posted while your payment was processing. Your payment has been refunded."). There's also a per-user Redis distributed lock (SETNX with TTL) to prevent the same person from double-submitting, and post numbers use a PostgreSQL sequence that's only consumed after winning the activation race, so there are no gaps in the numbering. The whole activation path is idempotent, so Stripe webhook retries are handled gracefully.
2. Vibe coding: The initial project referenced to build the site was hand-built, unfortunately by a dev team I paid who basically ghosted me halfway through. I got my money back and there's a whole story behind that but basically I got sick of waiting for their bug fixes and was spending so much time troubleshooting, I figured I may as well take full charge. Claude Code got me from there to here. But frankly, about half the time I spent building the site was spent on performance optimization, security hardening, and aligning with GDPR (and California's) privacy standards.
3. LLM influenced responses: Your instinct is fairly good on that! For more technical breakdowns and generic 'promotion' stuff, I draft with LLMs and then adjust based on my own preferences (and after fact checking where relevant). To that end, my natural writing style is a bit stiff/serious so it ends up sounding about the same. You'd be right about it being overengineered due to the low barrier to entry as well. I'm far from new to containerization, but stepping into the K8S world and configuring everything manually was outside my scope when the ends were more important than the means. Not that I don't make significant efforts to learn about the stack I'm using every day I work on it.
4. 3AM breakages: Haha.. a decent chunk, but nothing critical fortunately! Mostly various tools I've been testing out to help with automation/management of the stack. For such testing, I'll sometimes half-build out scheduled/automatic workflows without giving them the same polish I do production stuff. Had a lot of fun fighting Flux between codebase changes, automated dependency PR merges, etc.
Sorry for the wall of text by the way, I haven't received much in the way of genuine intrigue (i.e. things worth responding to in detail) and as you can tell, I'm quite passionate.
Well congratulations! You've produced the thing you wanted to make and that's awesome! And I bet you learned heaps along the way.
We're moving into a really weird time where this grade of thing you have made with its robust infrastructure is going to be absolutely everywhere. Those things won't be the differentiating factor. It will be taste, opinion, and passion.
I'll probably be a meme in ten years for this but I don't think this is the one that's going to take off and make you wealthy(er?). People's brains are too addled by strobing media, mine included, for a simplicity to hold on to them. But I do think you have shown really valuable traits in shipping this that indicate you will have success sooner or later. And you can be proud of yourself for this. Well done.
Much appreciated! It really is quite amazing how 'easy' it is to get going without what used to be multiple textbooks' worth of foundational knowledge. I will say, having reasonable technical background, that I do totally get the hate people have towards vibe-coded apps. I wish maybe they were more discerning with it over blanket-rejection but with some of what I've seen out there, many concerns are quite valid.
I too highly doubt my site will be any significant money maker but despite it being part of the core mechanic, I'm mostly just happy realizing a shower thought in a way that was previously completely unattainable haha. If nothing else, the EFF will be getting at least $17.77 at the end of the month so I can say some non-personal good came of it.
Do you really think that when people make things that have risks associated with the use or misuse of those tools that they have no responsibility to mitigate those risks or prevent misuse?
Yes. I do not believe tool creators should limit or censor their users. I do not think word processors should ban you for writing something bad about the government or against a policy the company does not like. I do not think a paint program should ban the user because they drew a penis and that could cause for brand damage if people knew they used a company's program for that. I don't believe that web browsers should prevent users from committing copyright infringement if they see you going on a site known to host pirated material. I don't believe your operating system should lock you out and delete all of your files if it detects that you might be developing malware.
I think it gives too much control to businesses which do not have a near exact market replacements and let them dictate too much of culture.
There's nothing stopping any tool maker from doing those things. In fact, they do those things all the time! So if tool makers and tools are all limiting use in a self-serving way anyway, why should we not also expect them to limit use in a way that protects children from sexual exploitation through the use of those tools? I respect the principle but I think this is an idealistic extreme and not really based in any practicality or realism.
It may be legal to add such features, but that doesn't mean I think it is a good thing. This is a modern problem. Shovel manufacturers were never able to have power over what you could use shovels for so the idea of making laws around it made no sense. It's possible to be in a world where to print out a political flyer you have to find a politically aligned operating system and install a politically aligned web browser to go to a politically aligned web retailer who will sell you a politically aligned printer using a politically aligned payment processor with politically aligned banks. And if no one is aligned with you offering one of those services I guess you are just out of luck. This example isn't even touching the point that AI filters are not perfect and will flag false positives.
>they do those things all the time
They actually don't. It's highly irregular, usually only when the law requires such censorship functionality do they get included in products.
>idealistic extreme
It is not an extreme position. Practically every other tool other than AI is not locked down. AI is by far the exception here and is a step back from the freedom of everything else.
This is the kind of abstraction I was hoping to avoid. It's obviously intellectually dishonest to compare AI to a shovel. I'll not bother with more. You're not in the market for thinking.
> it is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. It helps, but not much.
The lipstick helps? This had me in stitches. Sorry for the non-additive reply. This is the funniest way I have seen this or any other phrase explained. By far. Honestly has made my day and set me up for the whole week.
There's something about this that stands out as very concerning for me.
This, clearly very clever, young man is 14 years old. The article says: "Wu had always been fascinated with the ancient Japanese art of origami, but he really began indulging in it as a hobby about six years ago."
At eight. He was *indulging* in a hobby at eight years old. Indulging in a hobby should be a pre-retirement activity. What an incredible weight the attitude of the writer puts on kids.
I've heard/read the expression "to indulge in a hobby" many times and never thought it was pejorative or paints hobbies as extravagancies. If you google indulge hobby, there's plenty of hits. Strangely though, ChatGPT says it does sound negative. It had never occurred to me, and probably not to the author.
Just because ChatGPT says it sounds negative doesn’t mean it is. I didn’t think of it negatively either.
Who knows how ChatGPT made that suggestion [this time around]. Maybe 30% of the English-speaking population thinks it’s negative, or 60%, or perhaps someone simply wrote a high-profile negative op-ed that included the phrase in its title.
Anyways, not that you did this, but we need to be careful not to use LLMs as the deciding factor in how to feel about things. :) It gives too much power in swaying our thought to those who build the models.
Same with me. It's just an expression. One definition of "indulge" is "to take unrestrained pleasure in" (MW). I just read it as an activity the kid really really enjoys.
I apologise for you misunderstanding my example as a strict definition?
For anyone who hasn't understood my meaning:
Indulge is a word that implies that you're allowing yourself something that you might not ordinarily. The point being: it is (or should be) silly to suggest that a child can be said to indulge in a hobby. This is because the further implication is that an eight year old might show some restraint and focus on their book learning and networking.
I'd argue that kids should be generalist, as in learning diverse set of experiences rather than spending years honing a single craft. This is peak time where brain can quick adapt to new novel problems (like language learning) and spending this time to perfect a single niche feels counter-productive if not straight unethical. Kids should only specialize when they become grown enough to idependently decide on what they want to do.
I think about this sometimes. On one hand, is it really "right" or net positive for adults to guide children into some specialized craft at a young age? Even if the kid shows some prodigal predilection (haha) for it, maybe it is the responsibility of their guardians to expose them to a number of alternative interests/possibilities?
It's interesting because the approach of encouraging your kid to foster highly specific skills fails to satisfy the categorical imperative: if everybody did it, nothing would work. Or at least it seems that way... it's probably a safe bet that having a sizable majority of adolescents who are somewhat flexible/aimless and can respond to a variety of market demands in terms of career specialization is a good thing if not a necessary one.
On the other hand, manipulating (not to be taken with a necessary pejorative connotation) a child into this kind of specialization is almost certainly a necessary precondition for greatness. If you aren't a competent musician by the time you're 8 years old it is vanishingly unlikely you are ever going to be a true orchestral soloist. Ditto for something like chess. So if we want a world with those heights of greatness in it, we need to accept that some people are going to compel or allow their kids to be specialists rather than generalists.
> If you aren't a competent musician by the time you're 8 years old it is vanishingly unlikely you are ever going to be a true orchestral soloist. Ditto for something like chess
To me this sounds like an exception to the rule than rule itself. Our society would be perfectly fine to not have this type of entertainer "greatness". I mean, we got rid of castrados because it went too far but the line between cutting kids testicles off vs making them play some useless game 12 hours a day for a decade is quite blury.
I'd argue this extreme specialization of children is fundamentally unethical and should be shunned or even made illegal but it'll take decades if not centuries for our society to realize this because we just value this type "greatness" too highly.
Ok sure but in this sense it is already a rule (most people do not either prescribe these things to their kids or allow them to indulge in them) and what we're debating is how firm that rule.
As it happens, I think I disagree with you. I do value greatness. I value a culture that lauds greatness. The point of virtuosic musicianship isn't entertainment, or at least not a banal thoughtless kind (a symphony is not a substitute good for ragebait podcast clips with a subway surfers overlay), it's inspirational art. The examples I chose are particularly evocative, but there's no real difference between that and a parent who compels or allows their child to become ridiculously capable in some kind of mathematics or literature. Imagine if Terrence Tao's parents had insisted that he carry on with a typical pre-university series of broad survey courses for the sake of making him a generalist! Imagine all the less high-profile examples who were maybe even more important to pushing some practical effort forward.
Making it illegal is a nonstarter because I think it runs afoul of the categorical imperative in exactly the same way. I'm a strong believer in the idea that most progress (again, not intended to have a positive connotation) is made by a small group of people who were almost never generalists. Einstein was not a generalist. Kant, who I've been referencing throughout this conversation, was really not a generalist. The possibility of greatness is just as necessary as a certain number of pliable generalists.
What would the point of living in a world without greatness be? Since I meant that question rhetorically: is there a way to allow such greatness to be achieved without manipulating young people into obsession?
I think we have different undersrand of what greatness is. Being the best paperclip making machine is hardly meaningful. True greatness is in balance and virtue. A truly great person is well rounded and plays to true human strength- adaptability.
I'd be willing to bet everything I have that our society on average would be better at every single specialized thing if everyone was well rounded generalist with minor specialization instead of niche expert and it's incredibly easy to see why given the era of technology were living through right now. After all, all best in anything are finally defeated by a few years of collective technological progress.
Now what's the meaning of life if we have no treadmill to run on indefinitely? Well that's for each to figure out but what a sad meaning it would be if it was just to be slightly better at one niche activity for a very short while?
That last line was humor. Those are recognised "productive" activities. I guess if I had to really explain it, I was trying to offer a rephrased take on what I saw as the meaning of that line in the article. And so highlight that expecting children to do strictly productive things is silly. Dunno. Does that make sense now? I guess I've learned my lesson about my sense of humor not travelling well.
But you didn't say that. You just said I didn't know what 'indulge' means. Although I'm sure the irony of your final quip has escaped you, you have editorialised it into a valid criticism of my take, which I totally accept. Not everyone reads and uses the word with the tone it conveys in my vernacular, and which I'm sure must be, at least implied, in any respectable dictionary definition. Fair enough. Out of curiosity, do you think this is a geo-cultural difference? I am Australian. I imagine most commonwealth and formerly commonwealth countries read it the same way. Where are you from?
> But you didn't say that. You just said I didn't know what 'indulge' means.
Right. My objection was that you projected a negative meaning, which in my view was not demanded by the author. I could be wrong about what the author meant, but I didn't pick up any hint of "incredible weight the attitude of the writer puts on kids". So yes from my perspective that suggested that you probably didn't know the meaning of the word or didn't consider that there was another way to interpret it.
> Although I'm sure the irony of your final quip has escaped you
No, that was the point. The word can be used more than one way.
> Out of curiosity, do you think this is a geo-cultural difference?
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