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antran22

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Unrelated: the frontpage says: > the root of the name [Akritai] is the same word that gives us critical — which is exactly the software this effort exists to defend.

This is pure corporate slop feels good bullshit generated by an LLM. “critical” comes from “kritikós” which means “related to judgement”. “Akritai” comes from “akron/ἄκρον” which means border.

To be fair the article doesn’t sit well with me on its own, but making crappy, etymologically-untrue claim? Not on my watch.

Now instead of making the comparison with an automatic lawnmower, what would you say if I use your argument when you let a roomba vacuum your room unsupervised instead of asking the neighbor kid to sweep it a broom? This is why it is going to get real philosophical if we want to judge how lazy a person is based on the level of delegation he put on a tool.

The guy is not a software/embedded engineer. He's a bike engineer. He doesn't want to code more than needed to get his idea working. As for reverse engineering, he did plenty of it. He soldered the serial interface into the board, fired up a serial terminal, watch the output & note down the data sent through the wire for each event on the bike. Two things he used LLM for: - Work through the decompiled app & find the commands for controlling the bike - Write an app to run on the CYD.

What would be the things he would have needed to do face if he had somebody work on this project instead of Claude: - Find somebody in his close vicinity, and have him over the workshop everyday, because this project requires access to the hardware. - If he instead found somebody else with another Revo bike, they would have to collaborate really closely & replicate what each other have found to the other person's setup. All that for a vanity, 1-person project?

Absolutely insane how people could have bought a bicycle that will become (partially) useless if they don't connect it with a mobile app. Even if this bike have the build quality of a spaceship I wouldn't even touch it with a stick.

Kudos to Seth for cracking the control on the bike, just so we can reclaim control of an appliance that we paid for with our own money, one that won't work because the maker can't be arsed enough to make it work without a mobile app.

Related: Cory Doctorow's [Unauthorized Bread](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...)

Imagine after mowing your own lawn with a petrol-powered lawnmower, you got some shades from the neighbors for "Robbing the kids in the community a chance for some honest labor. If you don't know how to use the gardening shear, ask the kids to do it instead of using the automatic lawnmower. Would be a win-win for everybody".

Good grief, hopefully in v28 Lemay will also throw away the absolute crap that is Liquid glass. Aesthetically it looks horrible, it slows my iPhone 13 — which never before lagged in all its life since iOS 15 – to a maddening crawl.

Liquid glass should be taught in design school as an example of what not to do when you design UX. And also in business school as a case of how middle management can fudge up something that is working normally in the illusion of progress.

<critique> OP keep saying the backend implementation doesn't matter, it can be trivially switched to something other than Github. It's not. The whole app you write revolves around Github's HTTP endpoints. There's no actual provider-agnostic Git operation in the code (for that you need to use isomorphic-git [1]). So a much more apt title for this should be: "Macaroni - a chat UI in a single HTML file that stores messages data in a Github repo" </critique>

I'm sorry to say this, but this whole thing reeks of vibeslop, and not just the code. The docs, the readme, even the replies of OP are at least Claude-assisted, if not fully Claude-generated.

And I'm trying not to be derisive about LLM generated output anyway. LLM generated output can be sane and meaningful and to the point. This is just a questionably-cool tech demo dressed up under a sensationalistic title.

How LLMs work 2 months ago

It's still predicting the next word. Somewhere in the gigantic dataset that the LLM was trained on, there is a phrase that says "gradient border" being in the vicinity of a CSS code that render the stuff. Therefore when you run it on an inference loop there's a good chance it output that CSS code when you tell it to render a "gradient border"

Multi-modal models that can understand visual input do exists, but no such visual reasoning process happened in the example you mentioned. Not unless you have a visual feedback loop in the coding harness.

I'm not dismissing the capability of "predicting the next word" however. The vast amount of training data enable extremely complex and useful behavior you just described.

They already have that, it's the Apple Support Community. Apple still manages to neglect most complaints on the site.

Honestly, people have been complaining about Apple's decision on every semi-Apple-related forum forever. Still didn't prevent them from rolling out Liquid Glass. Not sure another one would do the job

I have had my fair share of terrible interview as well. The key thing I learnt is that the interview is an opportunity for me to understand the culture of the company and judge my fit there as well. I know that the phrase "dodge a bullet" is used to death in those kind of situation, but if the interviewer is behaving unprofessionally you can safely assume the people in the company will be unprofessional in a lot more other area.

As an instance, I had an interview with a CEO of a consulting firm. He took the interview while on the metro, so half the time on the call I couldn't hear what he said at all. When the call ended, I send a message to the HR person giving quite a critical feedback and stopping any further process with the company. A few months later I talked with one of my friend who worked there for 3 months. The CEO and the legal department overlooked some certain paperworks with regard to employment insurance, and when the taxman came and gave them a heavy fine, they hide the situation from everybody until the situation became unfixable. The company went bankrupt essentially overnight and most of the employees has a 1-year plus insurance gap with no practical way to sue for it back.

Moral of the story: if the interview feels wrong, email them and decline going forward right away. Give yourself the satisfaction of consciously dodging a bullet.

The page doesn’t state that all copy-pasting of AI response is bad. If everybody intend on analyzing the AI output together, definitely do copy-paste it in the chat

The essence of what this page is stating is: “do not act as a reverse proxy between me and a LLM.” That’s rude and shows that the person in question is acting like a brainless automata.

That is propagation of CSAM. We already have way of dealing with people transmitting CSAM, that is to prosecute them heavily.

You won't prevent people stabbing others with knife by banning knife or asking people to wear knife-proof vest going outside. You deter them by making everybody know that the consequence of harming somebody else is going to be a very unpleasant experience.

When I bring my thermos to a coffee shop, brew the beverage in their own mixer before pouring it in my thermos. There is exactly no contact between their equipment and my container, beside the barista hands (which they should periodically wash anyway) and between the butt of the thermos and the table. Also most of them give the thermos a few rinses & wash with the soapy water jet thingy before pouring.

I'm assuming you are much more conscious about this issue than I am (that's fine btw, people have various levels of germophobia) , but practically my whole office block do this without any noticeable health epidemic.

Also standard coffee shops (the Starbucks kinds) always have industrial scale utensil washers that rinse boiling water/UV radiate the utensils. Assuming a government issue the appropriate law, the coffee shops will be able to ensure your container hygiene just fine.

All this greenwashing effort by big brands are laughable. The cost of actually recycle any used cups would far exceed the cost to manufacture them. When just the act of using those cups has already give them all the "environmentally aware" credit, why would they bother follow through with the rest of the process.

The biggest scam is the paper straw. You still need a certain plastic liner, otherwise the straw will melt down in 3 minutes from direct contact with liquid. The amount of plastic you reduce is penny-on-the-100-bucks-note comparing to the amount of plastic waste produced by industrial activities.

The only way to fix the single-use container problem is for governments to ban it. Either the customers bring their own/rent the shops' containers for take away, or drink their beverages in the shop.

Is this doable? I guess. AFAIR the EU are experimenting with laws around this. Plastic bags ban is already visible in many country, even in non-first-world countries.

People are gullible. LLMs generate tokens based on the previous tokens given to it. The LLM in Google's search box doesn't believe anything it was given; it is a Markov-esque chain that go from "Summarize the next sentences: $SEARCH_RESULTS" to the output.

I agree that there's a problem with searching today. The line between actual meaningful content and spam is blurring, all the meaningful indicators of the olden days to distinguish between good and bad contents are now gone/unreliable (polished proses, author's reputation). The signal/noise ratio is decreasing.

The approach to improving SNR should have been reducing/eliminating noise (flag spam sites, reputation system) and boost signal (also maybe reputation system, whitelist/blacklist). It's a hard problem simply because of entropy — the more content you have on the internet, the more random it will all seems from the top down.

I'm not saying I have the answer to this problem, I'm really just a noob when it comes to data science. I'm just thinking that mixing a bunch of text together and let a statistical model rehash that pile of grub into a professional, vindictive sounding response will *not* help providing users with enough signal to make sense of what they are looking for.

A few years ago, when I was kinda active in the startup scene in my area, you have people selling access to cloud credits with penny-on-the-dollar price. The credits are given out liberally to big-corps, organization by AWS/GCP, through workshops, webinars, events. All in the hope of roping the departments into building MVPs, demos on AWS/GCP, but people also find a way to cheat on that system and make some quick bucks.

I know a startup of my acquaintances that have been running on AWS for 5 years straight without paying a single dollar to AWS. When the credits almost run out, they started to migrate their data over to another account with credit. That happened twice already.

It helps to have a portable, replicable IaC config. But also this is sustainable because they are a pretty small struggling shop. You will probably not be able to do this if you are trying to maintain more than 3 nines for an enterprise client.

Railway might not be even in the realm of high-volume clients for Google. For all we know they might be efficient in utilizing Google infrastructure.

But most likely, it's just automations in place without an appropriate human override coupled with gross negligence.

At this point we should be convinced that it's in Github and Macro$lop's narrative to encourage fully automated, LLM-assisted PR bombing, because "muh future of development" and what not. If they do care about combatting spam, they would have already:

- Protect the PR submitting feature behind some CAPTCHA

- Give repo owners some way to manage external contributors, instead of forcing them to do hack like this article

Just move to Codeberg, src.hut, or Gitlab even. Serious contributors will go there with you, the lazy people with LLM farming Github karma probably won't.

Actually, I didn't have any careful planning when I started out self-hosting Vaultwarden. I didn't even have system backup (was just a script kiddie back then, didn't even know about 1-2-3). I have to migrate my instance 3-4 times. But because I'm just hosting Vaultwarden for myself, I can export the whole account from one of the Bitwarden clients (either the extension or mobile app) and reimport it in the new instance. Because I always have at least three devices with active use connected to my Vaultwarden instance, for me this also counts as 3 off-site backup that can be used to re-instate the whole setup.

It is surprisingly very durable and maintenance-free even for a script kiddie like me to maintain. My advice is (at least when it comes to Vaultwarden) don't think too much about this, just selfhost it, at least for yourself. You'll probably be able to manage it when something happen.

When I first learnt about Bitwarden about 3 years ago, I started hosting Vaultwarden right away. Right now I have one instance for myself and another for my friend's company. Everything runs as smooth as butter. If you can self-host something, do self-host a Vaultwarden instance. If you are (like me) somewhat paranoid about the fact that Vaultwarden hasn't got a proper security audit on its codebase, just run it behind a VPN, it will probably be fine.

I'm not particularly worried about Bitwarden going belly up because it has already have such a well-established open-source replacement. The worst-case scenario is that Bitwarden make the clients incompatible with Vaultwarden, and like how OP already mentioned in the post, somebody in the community will fork them as soon as this happen.

Tailwind instead pushes the dev into a CSS-first approach. You think about the Tailwind classes you want, and then throw yet-another-div into the DOM just to have an element to hang your classes on.

To be fair plopping a `div` everywhere started way before Tailwind. I blame React and the mess that is CSS in JS for this.