HN user
Anthropomorphizing big matrices is how those "labs" managed to sell and advertise LLMs for more than what they are, and convince investors to shovel trillions into it. Really Claude should be looking for incentives NOT to do that, and with the American regulator sleeping at the wheel/having its hands greased they probably don't see any reason to change course.
That's gross, distasteful. I love it.
that are lacking outside of US companies.
Sheesh, I wonder why.
US-made... Cloud products? Like there's anything US-specific or unique about Taiwan made/China assembled computers the instant it's sold by a US corporation?
Not OP, but your comment had me looking into it: the fact that it's Firefox-based is reason enough to give it some consideration: the Chrome monopoly we are currently under is not compatible with a healthy and neutral web.
I didn't mean that you were nonfactual, only that you overgeneralise.
That may sound obvious to you, but it's not for many, and this opinion of yours is shared by fewer and fewer people.
Haha, same vibe! Mine was running mandrake/mandriva + kde. Also programming on such a low specced device gave a superpower (and good coding hygiene): you would immediately spot memleaks and inefficient code because you would feel it as entire seconds of slowness and unresponsiveness. Like, none of my GUI apps had work happening on the event thread, but I could immediately tell which ones would.
Did my whole engineering curriculum as my single computer, ran MATLAB and other JVM GUIs/IDEs on 1GB RAM/Atom N450. The build and display were horrendous, but that was a good companion to take notes during lectures and in the lab.
Except there's no way for the Unicode standard to be prescriptive enough for the different implementations to express identical intent. And that's before the politics get mixed in (e.g. Apple's water gun). That's why you see many chat services and social networks shipping their own whole and opinionated emoji font: at least on their platform every user sees the same glyph and although there is still room for interpretation and misunderstanding, that's not by having too many font designers.
I'm a hobbyist and know the programming trade to a certain extent, but at work I'm "the client" and I have my employer contract developers to address all kinds of needs that I represent as a "business interface".
I'm with you on LLMs being in a different league than good developers curating a fine design with attention to detail, soundness and maintainability. It's just that 1- not all software/components within require that same amount of care: many capabilities are already commodified (as library code or boilerplate, or frameworks, or prior art in the training data that LLMs could easily parrot), and 2- till now, the financial calculus was leaning strongly towards "new developments are expensive, let's use restraint" (irrespective of the actual effort/ratio of commodified code).
So long story short, I don't see LLMs taking out skilled and caring developers: I'll still be reaching out to them for the critical/strategic projects, but on the other hand, I appreciate that the "ancillary" or "fancy" stuff can be cobbled together with the LLM glue gun and remove the impression to my management that engaging with software development is necessarily a costly/risky/exposing endeavour. Some software is to be treated like pets and cherished, and the new reality is to accept that we might have cattle software too, with swaths of prototypes, one-off's, very specific and niche and disposable, and it's fine because this no longer represents an unsustainable financial burden (my bean counting management already likes to kill useful software on a pure spec-sheet matching exercise and shovel everything into large "do it all" systems like ERPs: the fewer things the cheaper, right? Except for those underrepresented users thrown under the bus and their effective productivity).
Are you more deterministic than an instruction-following black-box? I doubt it.
I think I am, because I want my referenced notes to be typed. And the depth and accuracy of those types defines the extent of the knowledge being keept track of, considering that it also evolves and morphs over time. If I don't care to have categories of notes that I comprehend (Persons, Projects, Vehicles, …) and curated and up-to-date properties for them, I don't even know what kind of content is there and what kind of queries/answer I can expect out of my PKMS. I want determinism on a formal, fundamental level.
and it's not an outliner
We probably have that in common that I went through a pretty long and exhausting journey of looking for the right note-taking app/PKMS, but while I started with the conviction that I needed an outliner, I landed elsewhere.
I do appreciate the theoretical beauty of "everything is a block" (and for the record, that is approximated pretty closely in Trilium by "(almost) everything is a note"), but the execution is often messy (tags/models hierarchies are hard to build and keep consistent/up to date, there is always the duality between embedding and referring because sometimes a sub-block is a block, and that forces you into defining more types or risk losing context and not being able to find the note but by name, if you can even remember it, etc). Tana and its "supertags" comes pretty close to the perfect outliner because it has a convenient UX around all those pain points, but I find it exhausting to use over time/as the PKMS grows.
I think Trilium saves me from a lot of cognitive burden by keeping the shape of the notes collection explicit and visible at all times (via its hierarchy). Also for the record, I'm not trying to brainwash you, only describing that there is a journey into and out of outliners :-)
Except that the notes don't organize themselves, you just offload to a non-deterministic black-box to "lose them for you". Many (although, not all, true) give their PKMS a very opinionated shape, because the way knowledge is organized and structured matters as much, if not more, than the sum of the individual facts.
Personally, I'm not interested, but to each their own.
What does that mean?
I needed the "edit anywhere" capability, too, had a keen interest in logseq as a result, and now can't recommend Trilium more.
It can be both: I love being able to use Trilium "as a website" to check out my notes on other's (e.g. employer's) devices, and as a local first/fully offline/totally synced app during e.g. a flight trip or in case of an outage. The two just coexist and sync like a mesh.
You can apply tags to blocks, which make them a kind of thing (a project, an author, a quote, a thought)
FWIW, needing typed notes is what settled me on Trilium Notes after a foray into a bunch of alternatives, including Notion, Anytype, Obsidian, etc
I realized that efficient note taking and knowledge management generally means (to me) having "dimension lists" (collections of places, people, projects, ...) being referred to in topical notes/journals/events, generally organized as a hierarchy (but not always). Once you come to that realisation (and that your notes system is essentially a glorified RDBMS), you want a system that ensures that "notes of the same type remain as consistent as possible", which Trilium makes easy via Templates and/or Inheritance (attributes can be inherited in the OOP sense, or composed like traits), collections to represent, manage and edit large amounts of notes at once, and emacs-levels of scripting if that's your jam.
An edge that dates back to the late 60's/early 70's? How soft is that edge by now?
Which seems reasonable. And those who care deeply will have no problem configuring it the specific way they want on their own project. Win-win.
The paradox of them selling "intelligence on demand" or "coding agents rivaling the best developers" and yet having dumb as fart bots/scrapers is lost on many. But not all.
LinkedIn has always been a weird and uncanny place, LLMs somehow managed to make that effect much worse and unsettling.
One front-end for multiple servers is how you end up reimplementing XMPP (bar federation) before you know it: servers are not guaranteed to run identical/compatible versions -> you bake versioning at capability level in the protocol -> you make clients and servers degrade predictably when that happens -> you write a standard to document it formally -> you invite around the table those authors of alternative client and server implementers and boom, you've got the X in XMPP, and the XEP standardisation process and the XSF to support it.
I'm saying that if Service B is under a jurisdiction that has export control regulations (i.e. all of them) and somehow decides that "users from country X are non grata" ; or under a jurisdiction that oppresses on the basis of your political beliefs, skin color, sexual preference… (both of which characterise the current Trump administration, under which Signal operates) then the service operator has no choice but to lock you out of your account, making the whole cypher/crypto argument moot.
I'm not sure Slick is still maintained. Recently I depended on https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/scalasql#simpletable-variant-... for small CRUD stuff and liked it quite a bit. These days there's a whole boulevard through the Scala ecosystem that doesn't involve typelevel pedantry and obscure DSLs just for the love of hieroglyphics.
I genuinely do not understand where this impression is coming fron.
I don't want to engage in a citation battle, I just can't care enough for that. Having read those posts about Matrix, XMPP (OMEMO) and a couple others, many months/years ago, they really came across as "screw those amateurs for even trying, Signal is great, and by my very definition of it, only Signal can be".
Again, those are not your words, but something about the tone and the way you compare them made it sound that way.
Also, even if that's besides the initial point, I firmly disagree with the premise of the post you just linked. For the same reason mentioned in a sibling comment stating that the real world isn't binary even though IP addresses might be: A centralised service is political no matter what. If not their admins, their hosing provider or executive power may decide to censor you based on your country of origin, political beliefs, ideological activism or any other reason out of your control. Signal's crypto protects what's in the envelope, but does little else (neither can it) against a motivated state-actor fingerprinting you beyond the service boundaries, and guess what, we know it to be a fact for the jurisdiction Signal is operating under.
disabling it if you don't keep updating
yep, it's almost like "Open Source" "non profit" and "we are the good guys, trust me bro" doesn't matter nearly as much as "open, federated, standardised protocols".
I've been self-hosting Jabber/XMPP for a very long time, now. There's nothing I feel I'm missing out from signal and others. Not to sound like I'm preaching, I generally tell the curious to give ejabberd a spin.
Does one have to be nuanced in everything one says?
no, but unlike a computer, the real world isn't binary, and recognising that it's flawed and full of compromises generally heightens your chances of affecting it (by your ideas or actions).
I'm not a fan of Signal's threat model […] but Signal's main protocol seems pretty solid, especially compared to some other systems.
My main gripe with Signal is that no amount of protocol sophistication can undo the problems linked to it being a centralised service. Soatok seems unable to acknowledge that centralisation is a real (privacy, security, reliability, political, …) concern here, nor to see value in the decentralised (federated/P2P) alternative protocols implementing the same double-ratched/PFS crypto primitives.
Maybe I shouldn't, but I stopped taking the author seriously for their lack of nuance/extremely biased views favouring Signal in every article about E2EE applied to IM. But I do agree that threat modeling is just a support to formalize and document the variables in the threat equation. It doesn't say anything about whether the threat is reasonable, legitimate and grounded in reality, so it's only knocking the subjectivity can a tad down the road.
What do you believe is so unique about US cloud providers? True, it's a de facto triopoly of American-incorporated businesses, but then what? It's not like computing is alien tech that only the US can own. The US doesn't even make the chips. It's commodity at scale with a bit of convenience sold at a steep premium.