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drowntoge

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I hate tech

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But that's not how the law sees it, and I grudgingly accept that

I think that is sort of their point. There was one thing that you, I, and millions of others would call infringement, (scraping the whole Internet to train proprietary models) but the law deemed it "fair use", and they got away with it with impunity. Now there is this other thing that we'd all (easily) call infringement, and I understand why people doubt that this time will be any different.

Being a for-profit company does not automatically give you a free pass to do anything in the name of profit and claim immunity if your actions harm certain people. Individuals can (and will) expose and condemn for-profits for policies they believe cause them harm in order to attach some semblance of accountability to a corporation that would otherwise completely ignore their interests. This is effectively a way of exerting some form of voting power over the decision-making algorithm of the profit-driven body. And something that might make an entity solely focused on profit reconsider running over the concerns of those affected, precisely because they made taking that route less profitable for it. This is not only perfectly legitimate, it is also one of the most powerful ways for consumers to challenge plutocratic forces.

Knitting bullshit 3 months ago

It feels like I will forever mourn the totally self-inflicted loss of the Internet. I feel like I will never get over it, so much so that I wish I had never experienced its (brief) moment of brilliance. I feel sorry for my younger self for thinking it was here to stay.

To me, Tim Cook has turned Apple into a company that is both “doing amazingly well” and “in urgent need of a radical change in direction” at the same time.

We’ll see how the new CEO sees it.

I'm not sure what these people who have strong opinions like this think Openclaw is, but to me, it's a product with 1) a somewhat easy to setup prompt passing wrapper that can span many channels like Telegram, Whatsapp etc. 2) A (at least optimistically) plug-n-play, configurable architecture to wake up to events (cron entries, webhooks etc.) and fire up agents in order to get 'proactive' behavior, with the flexibility to integrate models from a gazillion providers. Pretty much everything else it's bundled with is general purpose tooling that does or could easily exist in any other agentic tool.

It's a rather simple framework around an LLM, which actually was a brilliant idea for the world that didn't have it. It also came with its own wow effect, ("My agent messaged me!") so I consider some of the hype as justified.

But that's pretty much it. If you can imagine use cases that might involve emailing an LLM agent and get responses that share context with other channels and resources of yours, or having the ability to configure scheduled/event-based agent runs, you could get some use out of having an Openclaw setup somewhere.

I find the people who push insanity like "It came alive and started making money for me" and the people who label it utterly, completely useless (because it has the same shortcomings as every other LLM-based product) like Mr. "I've Seen Things. Here's the Clickbait" here, rather similar. It's actually hard to believe they know what they're talking about or that they believe what they're writing.

Totally agree. Speech is powerful and it will always have its place. It will continue to evolve and become far more useful than it is today. But at its core, it remains a highly lossy medium compared with text, especially when it comes to expressing (and consuming expressions thereof) ideas. Even the best voice memo cannot rival a clear, well-structured email when it comes to explaining something even moderately complicated.

Voice assistants, AI pins, and whatever other speech-based interfaces they come up with next will always be "nice to have", but I don't think anybody should be throwing away their keyboards anytime soon. We may have transformed how we make computers work for us, yet the ways we interact with them are much harder to revolutionize, because they are grounded in the physical, neurological, and habitual constraints of human existence. All of which is to say, when I look at the future, I still see a lot of typing.

I always scaffold for AI. I write the stub classes and interfaces and mock the relations between them by hand, and then ask the agent to fill in the logic. I know that in many cases, AI might come up with a demonstrably “better” architecture than me, but the best architecture is the one that I’m comfortable with, so it’s worse even if it’s better. I need to be able to find the piece of code I’m looking for intuitively and with relative ease. The agent can go as crazy as it likes inside a single, isolated function, but I’m always paranoid about “going too far” and losing control of any flows that span multiple points in the codebase. I often discard code that is perfectly working just because it feels unwieldy and redo it.

I’m not sure if this counts as “vibe coding” per se, but I like that this mentality keeps my workday somewhat similar to how it was for decades. Finding/creating holes that the agent can fill with minimal adult supervision is a completely new routine throughout my day, but I think obsessing over maintainability will pay off, like it always has.

Although Flash really sucked as a technology, it did inspire a lot of visual artistry on the web. Half of the cool stuff you saw on StumbleUpon was made with Flash by people who weren't proficient with JS/CSS, which weren’t capable enough to achieve the same results anyway.

This website has been temporarily rate limited

Although being stuck at loading something was reminiscent of my early internet experience in a way, the site’s backend seems to be rate-limited and unable to serve. Will check back later!

Open Dylan 2 years ago

You beat me to it! Old enough to remember reading about this in the tech press back in the day.

I hang up the moment I realize it’s a sales call. If I’m in a particularly great mood that day, I might mutter a quick “No thank you I’m not interested.”

The way I vindicate myself morally is by knowing I’m not wasting their time this way. People like me are dead ends —— I know that I’m never going to be convinced to buy whatever they’re selling in a million years. By ending the call quickly, I feel like I’m doing them a favor. They can move on to someone who might actually be interested.