DJHenk

My guess: no-one needs it.

Originally, iframe were the solution, like the posts mentions. By the time iframes became unfashionable, nobody was writing HTML with their bare hands anymore. Since then, people use a myriad of other tools and, as also mentioned, they all have a way to fix this.

So the only group who would benefit from a better iframe is the group of people who don't use any tools and write their HTML with their bare hands in 2025. That is an astonishing small group. Even if you use a script to convert markdown files to blog posts, you already fall outside of it.

No-one needs it, so the iframe does not get reinvented.

More and more I start to realize that cost saving is a small problem for local LLMs. If it is too slow, it becomes unusable, so much that you might as well use public LLM endpoints. Unless you really care about getting things done locally without sending information to another server.

There is another aspect to consider, aside from privacy.

These models are trained by downloading every scrap of information from the internet, including the works of many, many authors who have never consented to that. And they for sure are not going to get a share of the profits, if there is every going to be any. If you use a cloud provider, you are basically saying that is all fine. You are happy to pay them, and make yourself dependent on their service, based on work that wasn't theirs to use.

However, if you use a local model, the authors still did not give consent, but one could argue that the company that made the model is at least giving back to the community. They don't get any money out of it, and you are not becoming dependent on their hyper capitalist service. No rent-seeking. The benefits of the work are free to use for everyone. This makes using AI a little more acceptable from a moral standpoint.

Still, it burns money like nothing has in history.

'Wildly optimistic' is a very fitting categorization for Altman/OpenAI.

That is not relevant to the argument. Censoring limits possibilities. While that sometimes has its uses, the overly puritanical approach American companies generally take degrades the value of their products.

The argument is that it simply improves the product. For instance, Github Copilot is apparently refusing to do anything with variable names like "trans" and anything related to sex or gender, regardless of the intended meaning. That is a serious flaw and makes the product less useful.

See this: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/72603

The regular forges have just as many obstacles. You have to register an account, figure out whether the button you need is 'Pull Request' or 'Merge Request', and what the exact flow is.

The only reason things appeared simple in the past is because of GitHub's monopoly. As soon as you want to get rid of that, life gets more complicated. That is just another tradeoff you have to make.

I think bundling links is better than just throwing one out whenever you find it. If you get one link at a random time, you probably skip it. Unless you are a dopamine addict, in which case I just broke your concentration and fueled a bad habit.

A weekly, or monthly collection is something a reader can take their time for. Or put aside for a moment and come back later to it.

A downside of link bundles is that on an average blog, each installment becomes a page, and one has to click a lot before one gets to the interesting part.

My linkblog therefore sends a collection of links every week via RSS (and others like Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. will follow, if I ever take the time to implement it), but on the web it is just one long list, ready for consumption: https://ewintr.nl/linklog/

I do find it interesting that so many people have such great problems with their searches

Even ignoring the quality of the results, the idea that people refuse to pay 10 dollars for something as essential to life as a search engine continues to baffle me.

I think we can all agree on a couple of points:

- Information shapes our thoughts and our behaviour.

- Search engines provide and direct us to the majority of the information we consume.

- Thus, search engines have a significant influence on our thoughts and our behaviour.

How anyone can then conclude that the search engine of a hyper capitalistic ad company is the best alternative, just because it is 10 dollars cheaper, is beyond me.

Because you cannot freely say no to that. They have authority over you. Even if they promise it won't affect their opinion of you, you never know if that is actually true. So you are forced to play along.

Ads are a cancer. They take valuable resources from legitimate functionality just to multiply and multiply, until the host is starved to death.

Monero is nine years old, Bitcoin is fifteen years old.

I looked up the history of the credit card on Wikipedia to see how fast that caught on. It seems it had a slow start as well. Things only changed when a big bank put all of its weight behind it. I don;t think something like that will ever happen with cryptocoins, since there are no big institutions that would benefit from it becoming widespread.

For extra fun, add a rewrite rule to change every result from reddit.com to old.reddit.com: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html

I thought that the dutch would be more ... modern?

As a Dutchman: no, we are not when it comes to businesses software. Dutch companies are very conservative and always choose the safe option. They are modern in that they updated the slogan 'Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM' to the current century.

It is the main reason that I have only worked at companies with a healthy mix of different nationalities for the last ten years. Doing software in a Dutch monoculture is suffocating.

Ironic.

Not at all. When you're the underdog, it makes perfect sense to be open because you can profit from the work of the community and gain market share. Only after establishing some kind of dominance or monopoly it makes sense (profit wise) to switch to closed technology.

OpenAI was open, but is now the leader and closed up. Meta and Google need to play catch up, so they are open.

Is it really the same input? An argument could easily be made that as you’ve gotten accustomed to ChatGPT, you ask harder questions, use less descriptive of language, etc.

I don't have logs detailed enough to be able to look it up, so I can't prove it. But for me learning to work with AI tools like ChatGPT consists specifically developing an intuition of what kind of answer to expect.

Maybe my intuition skewed a little over the months. It did not do that for open source models though. As a software developer understanding and knowing what to expect from a complex system is basically my profession. Not just the systems I build, maintain and integrate, but also the systems I use to get information, like search engines. Prompt engineering is just a new iteration of google-fu.

Since this intuition has not failed me in all those other areas and since OpenAI has an incentive to change the workings under the hood (cutting costs, adding barriers to keep it politically correct) and it is a closed source system that no-one from the outside can inspect, my bet is that it is them and not me.

I'm almost certain this is because you're getting use to chat bots. How would they honestly be getting worse?

People say that, but I don't get this line of reasoning. There was something new, I learned to work with it. At one point I knew what question to ask to get the answer I want and have been using that form ever since.

Nowadays I don't get the answer I want for the same input. How is that not a result of declining quality?

I think this should be of particular importance to the US which has fudamental rights protecting freedom of expression.

It is important for everyone in the world and most nations have already wrestled with this problem. The US is not special. The only reason the US is starting to wonder about the influence of other states on such a critical piece of infrastructure is because they are not dominating it anymore and only now are beginning to find out that there are other nations present that have different cultural norms.

Laws like the DSA are exactly created to address this problem. If you want to operate in the EU, you have to adhere to European laws and values.

I'm very worried about co-ordinated lawfare against Musk-operated companies being used as a tool to force his compliance with systems that exist to get around laws against the US government's direct involvement in censorship. I'm also worried about the EU's lurch towards Chinese-style censorship of social media. And, I think we should be able to talk about it now while we still can.

Well, other people are very worried about companies exploiting exploiting every technique they can think of to fuck their users and make more money. Trying to prevent that is not even remotely close to Chinese-style censorship.

Why is discord any different than other platforms like office365 or AWS? Do you feel the same about companies using those platforms as well?

The difference is that Microsoft and AWS don't take on an active role in moderating what happens between the company and its users.

But yes, in a way they are similar and I do feel uneasy each time we take on a dependency on some AWS-specific feature where we could easily have build the component to be independent.

No one else seems to care though. Even worse, the CEO wants us to dig deep into AWS, because that somehow will make the customers trust us more.

I tried something like this with the LinkedIn timeline, where they suggest a popular post from a stranger "Because you are interested in topic X". You can indicate that you are, in fact, not interested in topic X and tailor your timeline that way.

But the next day they will show you something "Because you are interested in Topic Y". Where Y is very closely related to X.

I religiously indicated I didn't want to see X, Y or whatever, because I am just not interested in posts from strangers at all. It took two weeks. Then apparently they ran out of topics for me and started right back at the beginning and showed me something for X.

What is this article about?

It is not an article, it is an essay. Wikipedia defines an "informal essay" as: characterized by "the personal element (self-revelation, individual tastes and experiences, confidential manner), humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc.

What did the sex part of it actually involve?

The reason that this part is left to the imagination of the reader is that A) it is more powerful that way and B) the details don't really matter anyway to get the message and image across.

These things should have been covered in your creative writing class too.

Most of peoples' problem is watching the AI type, it's not instant, but then not all (or even most) applications need to be instant. You can also avoid that by having it return everything at once instead of streaming style.

Funny, for me it is the complete opposite. I created an interface in Matrix that does just that: return everything at once. But the lag annoys me more than the slow typing in the regular chat interface. The slow typing helps me keep me focused on the conversation. Without it, my mind starts wandering while it waits.

You’ll cave eventually, they know this.

I caved in years ago and registered. Only to find out that the site was still horribly broken and it was impossible to get any information out of it. Truly a 'Fuck You' pattern.

This is insane. So that rain doesn’t destroy it? So that spilling a drink doesn’t destroy it? So that dropping it in the toilet doesn’t destroy it?

If rain destroys your phone that is just plain incompetence from the design department. Or rather, they were not incompetent, but other forces made sure they were not paying much attention to water resistance.

My wettest experience with a smartphone was when I got surprised by heavy rain when walking to the hair dresser. I arrived soaking wet. Got the phone (a HTC Desire Z) out of my pocket, water was running out of it. I opened the battery lid, the hairdresser blew with the hairdryer for a couple of minutes and all was fine.

One advantage that I hope a paid version of GPT4 has (like ChatGPT Premium) over a free one (like Bing), is that it is a matter of time before the Bing answers will be polluted by whatever an advertiser is willing to spend its money on. Whereas with ChatGPT I am the paying customer.

I say "I hope", because time and time again it was shown that companies happily take money from both sides and skew the product to the wishes of the one that pays most, i.e. not me.

And since the results of AI are way less transparent than the appearance of an ad, the user will be screwed. If anything, GTP is a master of undetected product placement.

So in the end it will all be in vain, but for now, the paid version looks better than the free.

This is not about technical superiority. This is about big corporations using their size and money to abuse a market. Watching a movie is not a human right. Selling barely functional products (or non-functional products, or products that destroy perfectly fine and paid for other products, as I have experienced myself) by tactics as dark patterns, blatant lies and scams is not a corporate right. Both sides are in the wrong here. Pretending that one is fine and the other is not is in itself a double standard.

Years ago I transitioned from a developer role to a manager role and suddenly I had to do a lot more talking. Not all the talking needs to be a deeply involved exchange of complex ideas, a lot of it serves a different purpose. Sometimes it can be a simple as filling up the time in a pleasant way with a group of people that may or may not know each other that well.

After getting some experience with this I noticed that I had developed a talking on/off button in my head. I could just simply turn it on and start talking. I could generate words that sounded good together and fit the purpose of the moment. But They just seemed to come from a different place in my brain than my conscious mind. Because that was not involved in this process at all. The only job my mind had was to turn the button off again at the right moment, for the rest it was free to think whatever it wanted.

(I transferred back to development a couple of years later.)

Having lots of alternatives is not always beneficial for society as a whole.

It goes beyond languages. Yesterday I was editing a markdown file that was to become a post on a static site with movies. After I entered the title of a Taiwanese movie from the eighties, I jumped to the frontmatter to add some metadata about it. It autocompleted the director even before I typed the first letter of his name.

It was so unexpected for me that I had to pause for a second to process what happened.

I agree. There are sites and apps where I need to make a conscious effort to put my mouse pointer in that one place where it does not trigger any hover actions, so I can just read the text. Incredibly annoying.