I thought HN was mostly people who hated doing 'the thing' and would procrastinate until they build a system that does 'the thing' and then they would work tirelessly to never do 'the thing' themselves ever again.
This looks pretty neat, it looks like the shape of something I want to use. I'm having trouble managing my entire project, and from reading Buzz' project description, I think I understand what my issue is: a lack feature channels. I'm purely using claude-code and I use a bespoke session-wrap command at the end of every major development or as I approach 50% context window. And then in a fresh session I use a recontextualize command to figure out the trajectory of the prior work.
I think Buzz' use of channels and rooms is better, since each feature/concept has its own development pace, velocity, and history. I'll give it a shot.
Do you have any examples comparing different agent workflows vs Buzz? Would love to understand more how you foresee people using this.
For interactive agents (ie ones working with you/your team) there are two general approaches I've seen
A single agent that you work with directly. Go back and forth with. Like a teammate, message to message.
Or, an agent that leads a team of other agents. An orchestrator that you give directions to and then it delegates the work, testing, review to other agents that are in the channel. This is really why we have infinitely nesting threads. Deep threads are hard for humans to engage with, but when the agents are working with each other autonomously over the course of many hours, they're a huge help for their self-organization.
I believe there's room for a short-form, raw, AI-free, audio-only platform organized around continuous streams of 5-10 second audio clips.
But before I build the real thing, I'm running a validation to test the core question: will strangers actually record? I'm trying to validate one single prompt "I love you", anonymous, 5-second cap. The clips get mixed and published to a listening page when the window closes. You can enter your email to be notified when the experiment is over. I try to make the recording process as low friction as possible, so give it a try.
The accounting only works if you assume the counterfactual is "same industrial civilization, minus fossil fuels." But there's a strong path-dependency argument that cheap hydrocarbons were the bootstrap not just for energy, but for the plastics, fertilizers, and chemical feedstocks that made modern manufacturing and agriculture possible in the first place. Renewables are downstream of that industrial base. You can't net out the externalities against a baseline that wouldn't exist without them.
Right I'm not saying that they were historically a bad idea, I'm saying that the future value of the industry is probably negative now that we're past the bootstrap to major alternatives in some areas. I don't see a way to get out of the energy trap of an early industrial revolution without concentrated combustion sources.
One does need carbohydrates for industrial bootstrap. Germans during WWII produced liquid fuel from coal. Modern version of this process becomes competitive with oil-base fuel around 80 USD/barrel.
Yes, this process is very energy intensive and generates like twice CO2 per energy used. But in a hypothetical world without oil and natural gas it may lead to earlier start with electric cars and renewables so the total amount of CO2 put into atmosphere would probably be the same. Plus, as coal is much more evenly distributed, there would be much less reasons for wars.
This only works up to a certain volume. The world economy requires about 38 billion barrels of oil per year. If you processed 100% of all grain, sugar crop, tuber and oilseed on Earth into liquid fuel, leaving zero for food, you'd get about 6 billion barrels of oil-equivalent in liquid fuels. Since it has to compete with food, the actual number would be much lower. It's not even close to being able to sustain our civilization.
There is absolutely enough coal to make liquid fuel for the current civilization. But if oil/gas would not exist, then electrical cars would be on the road much earlier as burning coal to produce electricity is much more efficient then converting it into liquid fuel to burn in a car engine. As electrical cars produces roughly the same amount of CO2 when using electricity from coal as ICE car running on gasoline, the climate impact would be roughly the same.
Then in a hypothetical scenario of 20th century without oil/natural gas nuclear energy would be much more widespread at this point and CO2 impact would be lower.
Just to be pedantic: I think you mean hydrocarbons (just carbon and hydrogen) rather than carbohydrates (carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen).
You could probably do it with carbohydrates (starches, sugars) or related molecules (wood, alcohol). But I'm pretty sure that hydrocarbons is what you intended there, and it's easier to dig that out of the ground.
Excessive speeders in the absence of speed-limit enforcement just creates neighbors that don't mind their neighborhood being consumed by speed bumps/dips, I think there's an analogy here in residential areas. And if you have a lot of children in your neighborhood, there IS a 'xx-phobia' for speeders. But speed bumps and dips are an absolute nuisance and sometimes dangerous, so just having cameras identify and a system willing to punish speeders would absolutely be the preference.
