foxylad

Conversely one leg would be cheaper and lighter. I look forward to welcoming our hopping robot overlords!

Perhaps he does - dontgive.af does not resolve.

The golden age of the internet was when it was an enthusiast's space. It is now almost entirely a corporate space, where the remaining enthusiasts' content is scraped 100K times a day and sold without attribution by the corporates.

The fediverse is a step in the right direction, and Meta charging may create another wave of converts there. It has a lot of growth pains to endure yet, but the ability to painlessly spin up your own instance could be very attractive to young people looking for their own non-corporate spaces on the internet.

We may also see some renewal via large companies (Meta in particular) imploding, from mismanagement and disenchanted users. My experience marketing a new product is that online advertising is completely ineffective now the web is filled with slop, no matter how well targeted it is. We've recently pivoted to optimise for word-of-mouth with orders of magnitude better results. I think any adtech company without a solid alternative profit stream is in for a rough ride (and no, AI is not a solid profit stream for anyone but Nvidia).

Ed Zitron https://www.wheresyoured.at/ has done the math, and it's pretty bleak. His somewhat voluminous rantings contain raw figures on investments, data centre builds, energy availability and depreciation.

He believes Oracle has already signed it's own death warrant, and that Meta is close behind. MS, Amazon and Google have massive revenue streams to sustain them, but looking at the numbers, each has to earn from AI the equivalent of their existing real revenue. I can't see that happening.

And he believes from multiple perspectives of the data that Nvidea are either massively overstating their GPU sales, or that there are warehouses full of unused GPUs. There just isn't the energy capacity to run them all, let alone data centres to put them in.

Did you find a credible solution for heat dissipation in the papers you read? I fear the laws of thermodynamics will kill this project.

What users want...

Take a step back. What users want is to be able to use the machine they bought the way they want. The outrage is because Bambu are doing a bait-and-switch: selling an autonomous 3D printer, but switching to a 3D printing service. Enshittification pure and simple.

Same, but the first printer was an Anet A8. Moving to a Prussa Mini was a breath of fresh air, going from 35% to 95% print success.

I only open VSCode when I need to resolve a conflicted merge. The Zed interface is basically diff2, and doesn't show character-level differences.

Apparently Zed was working on a better diff viewer, but that seems to have been shelved.

I prefer the Fediverse to BlueSky, because it solves your three problems.

I choose to see every post on my (small country) instance, so if there is an echo chamber, it's an instance-shaped one. Which I like - I see the range of views prevalent in my small country. "Elite" posters depend on posting good content and are rewarded only by other people boosting their posts.

I tend to use Mastodon which makes finding a post's popularity a click away, and so emphasises posting for interest instead of outrage. This may also be an artifact of living in a small country that expects more civilised discourse from it's citizens.

Having no algorithm definitely makes the Fediverse more "boring" - I had to persevere after moving from Twitter. But I soon realised this was due to the lack of outrage, and that that was what I wanted, and what I was seeing was far more "real". Big fan now, and it's made my social media consumption a lot healthier.

His (compelling) evidence for that assertion is that printers still jam after 40 years. For humans, writing something on a piece of paper is absolutely trivial, and if something goes wrong, grabbing a new piece of paper or a pen is also trivial. Computers _can_ now write on paper tolerably fast and well, but they absolutely can't handle even simple failure modes. And the real world is _massively_ failure-prone, in contrast to the digital domain.

Think about Tesla's pivot to "AI robots". My guess is that they'll get to something that can very slowly pick up a dropped sock and put it in the washing basket. But that it will fall over occasionally on the stairs, wrecking your kid's photos and the vase standing at the bottom, and dinging the wall. It might do a passable job of picking up the shards of pottery, but gluing the picture frames together, plastering the wall and repainting it... well maybe in in Elon's chemical dreams.

This article (and holiday spare time) made me update and check zed again. I really liked it when I tried it a few months ago, but it failed miserably when doing work on remote code. It would hang, and I couldn't find any diagnostics to debug it's fairly complex remote agent to find out what went wrong.

But now it works fine! Remote work is noticeably snappier than via mounting the remote server as a drive, and remote git seems to work nicely. A very nice Christmas present - thanks, Zed!

Good job Zed!

Your "About" links seem not to work. In my case I was interested in where data is hosted, and the only information I see (from your HN post) is that you are from Paris. Does this mean EU hosting (which is good)?

This will kill open source. Anything of value will be derived and re-derived and re-re-derived by bad players until no-one knows which package or library to trust.

The fatal flaw of the open internet is that bad players can exploit with impunity. It happened with email, it happened with websites, it happened with search, and now it's happening with code. Greedy people spoil good things.

Or use the API to program in anything you want. We use Google Sheets for our accounting system, loading data via bank APIs and a cron-driven python script. We used to use Xero, but it couldn't handle the different tax regimes we operate in.

I own my company so have no fear of losing my job - indeed I'd love to offload all the development I do, so I have no resentment against AI.

But I also really care about the quality of our code, and so far my experiments with AI have been disappointing. The empirical results described in this article ring true to me.

AI definitely has some utility, just as the last "game changer" - blockchain - does. But both technologies have been massively oversold, and there will be many, many tears before bedtime.

I'd be suspicious as hell of any insurer offering cover in the current chaos.

As an example, I'm pretty sure I just took up some of the slack here in NZ. I've been looking at installing solar for a while, and a particularly good quote for a Chinese system (Sigen) recently made me go ahead. I strongly suspect the unusually good price and fast delivery were due to cancelled US demand.

OT: Solar is awesome! 18 panels are generating 2/3 of our load, despite it being late winter. And a 16kWh battery means the grid power we import is all off-peak. In summer we're going to be exporting enough that we may even cover our winter grid import. Plus it gives us the best UPS system we've ever had, including zero-second cut-over (c.f. Tesla's half-second glitch).

Cory Doctorow has a compelling theory that the megatech companies have to appear to be startups, or else their share price reverts to normal multiples. Hence the continuous string of increasingly over-hyped "game-changing technologies" they all (not just Meta) keep rolling out.

VR, blockchain and LLMs have their value, but it's a tiny fraction of the insane amounts of money being pumped into these bubbles. There will be tears before bedtime.

Seems to require an app. Which instantly gives ChangeFly my PII. Nope.

Anonymized identity requires some entity to certify that a given token proves what it says it does. That is an awesome power, and given the abuse of that power by private companies who have gained it in the past, I'm not going to give it to ChangeFly, whoever they are.

Which begs the question of who we DO trust enough to do provide this service. Perhaps our banks?

Yes - title should be "Passkeys are just passwords your granddad and the websites he visits can't stuff up". Passkeys will do for authentication what TLS did for transport.

You seem knowledgeable in the domain, so I hope you don't mind me picking your brains about the two things stopping me switching to Wayland.

1. Autokey. I use this to expand abbreviations for long words and phrases I use often. This relies on being able to insert itself between the keyboard and all userland apps, and this is apparently impossible under Wayland.

2. SimpleScreenRecorder. This relies on being able to access the window contents for all userland apps, and again this is apprently impossible.

Would I be right in thinking that both trip over because Wayland enforces application privacy, so preventing applications accessing other applications resources? And if so, why isn't there a "user root" level for apps that do need to interact with other apps?

I use Kagi, and it's worth every penny. Google has enshittified itself into irrelevance, and ChatGPT is too ponderous.

Kagi is like Google in it's prime - fast, relevant and giving a range of results.

We rolled our own VAT/GST handling. We use Stripe to bill the total amount, and generate our own invoices so we can break out the tax as an item. Doing our own tax and invoices means we're not locked in to Stripe, which is pretty good but will enshittify when they have enough of us in thrall. It also means you can do bank transfers which many customers prefer.

VAT/GST handling is not that complicated*, and our system spits out the numbers to fill in UK, AU, NZ and CA tax returns, which can all be done online.

*Except Canada... HERE BE DRAGONS! Each of the 13 provinces/territories has different rates and rules, despite the optimistically named "harmonised sales tax" (HST).

This. We've used GCP Appengine for years and it is rock solid. Their SRE game is top level, and when there is an outage, they do a serious investigation and make it fully public, even if they screwed up badly. Including the vital "this is how we're going to stop this ever happening again". The last outage (that we noticed) was several years ago.

Look at what they are ACTUALLY doing:

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...

The change removing "Does Firefox sell your personal data? Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise." makes it pretty clear that the intention in the changes is NOT just covering their bums for using your input to provide the webpage you wanted. They are positioning to sell your personal data.

That promise to never have, never will sell your personal data was highly valued by many Firefox users and Mozilla must be pretty desperate to break it.Particularly given online privacy is suddenly crucial for many out-groups in the US - and pretty much everyone outside the US. The biggest marketing opportunity for years just landed in Mozilla's lap, and they spilled it.

Your list of "already uncovered" fraud seems more like a list of RW hot-buttons: Clintons - check. Transgender - check. Various lame-stream media - check. Covid bats - check. Muslims - check. Incest movies - check. I'm just surprised they haven't turned up the payments for the NASA movie studio where they faked the moon landings.

But not a single administrator skimming off their department's budgets, which I would imagine is 90% of government fraud.

Also no-one is shooting the messenger. Mainly they are complaining that completely unauthorised people are rooting through all government data with no oversight. No matter what your politics, the president should have got these people vetted and followed the carefully designed processes to keep this data safe. If you're not seriously concerned that one day your tax info is going to turn up in an unsecured AWS bucket, then I can offer you a unique video of out-takes of Neil Armstrong falling off the LEM ladder for just $5,000.

As someone who runs mail servers, I wish they'd be MORE strict to stop the drive-by spammers. Every so often our servers get blocked because someone starts sending spam from a machine on the same netblock.

It might be good point-of-difference for some hosting service: have brutal KYC so your netblock is well regarded.

CNN is on https://lite.cnn.com/. The home page is a single 30KB HTML file (my browser also insists on downloading their 6KB favicon).

A thing of beauty, compared to their normal home page with 90+ files of 12MB.

I moved to the fediverse (a Mastodon instance) over a year ago. I found it less exciting at first, before realising that Twitter was only exciting because I could get outraged at the a*holes it insisted on exposing me to.

Now I love the fediverse. Local instances mean more local news/gossip, but at the same time I can follow global interests (just saw a post from Brian Krebs, for instance) just as easily. Hashtags let me follow my interests, and comments are more constructive and perceptive because there is no reward for provoking people. I don't doom-scroll any more and I don't have to filter out advertising - I'm much more efficiently informed.

Or anyone with gold teeth.