About: Hey, I'm Marciano. I'm a product designer and developer who builds things end-to-end, from first concept and interface design to working production code. 7+ years of shipping apps, platforms, internal tools, and consumer products.
Some recent stuff: I built Stembuswijzer.nl, a polling station finder that went viral during Dutch elections last year. I've built Campfire.gg, a watch-together video platform. And I'm currently building Vit (joinvit.club), an all-in-one health tracking app covering food logging, workouts, habits, and body measurements, recently accepted into an incubator program.
I'm looking for a part-time engagement (roughly 16 hours/week) contributing to something meaningful in health, sustainability, or community tech. I work fast, think in systems, and care a lot about clarity, quality, and usability. If you're building something that should actually get used, let's talk :)
This thing where [person good in one thing] thinks they are great in [all the things] is so, so stupid. And the blame is to it's inner circle who are just yes-folks saying yeah to all the things. Sure you don't introspect! Definitely not in the interviews where your think back on your Netscape times and what you could have done better! There are plenty of episodes on that! Sure introspection is a new thing! Definitely Marcus Aurelius, Seneca or Epictetus mentioned anything of the sorts!
I'm bullish on Claude. It will see a surge in users, and will likely surpass Perplexity this year. However I don't think it will catch up to even Meta AI (which had 10x the number of users) this year.
I use Claude. I use Codex. I've never heard of or used Meta AI. Nor do I have a Facebook account. Never have, never will.
I am also a software developer. So while the numbers of "people" that use one AI or another may be higher than either of these, it's not a useful metric for myself.
That's fine. I'm not making a value judgement about which LLMs you should use, if any.
I'm only pushing back against someone thinking "oh HN talks about Claude a lot, therefore Claude must be extremely popular". The information bubble is a real problem.
It's probably true that Anthropic's revenue is booming. But we need massive grains of salt:
a) they are private and revenue numbers for private companies are hopelessly unreliable, and
b) they are planning an IPO, so there's an extra incentive to big up the numbers. Anthropic always brings up ARR, which is very gameable when the year hasn't ended yet
Talk about a bubble. No one outside of programmers know what the heck is Claude. In Asia, ChatGPT and Gemini dominates LLM usage, followed by Perplexity.
Microsoft released a report with some numbers on Deepseek adoption globally. They say it's got ~90% market share in China, and is growing in popularity across Africa.
This is marketing. The same way Apple cares about your privacy so long as they can wall you in their garden.
Not a value judgment, just saying that the CEO of a company making a statement isn't worth anything. See Googles "don't be evil" ethos that lasted as long as it was corporately useful.
If Anthropic can lure engineers with virtue signaling, good on them. They were also the same ones to say "don't accelerate" and "who would give these models access to the internet", etc etc.
"Our models will take everyone's jobs tomorrow and they're so dangerous they shouldn't be exported". Again all investor speak.
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