HN user
is there an enshittification watch site? or something to track acquisition and red flags in products/oss projects? itsenshittifiedyet.info if not, what would it take to do that? i think it can be vibed in a weekend.
edit: s/of/and
good prices, but I don't see info on the token cache hits prices (in/out), are they available?.
in the meantime im having lots of fun coding and using AI, reinventing every wheel i can. 0 stress cos i don't do it for money :). I think a lot of people are having a tantrum because programing is not sexy anymore, its getting easier, the bar is lower now , the quality is awful and nobody cares. its like any other boring soul crushing job.
also if you want to see the real cost (at least part of it) of AI coding or the whole fucked up IT industry, go to any mining town in the global south.
just want to say that, to self host feels like the 2000's, and that's a refreshing good thing, you feel in control, away for all the enshittification we are experiencing right know. I'm having a blast with a group of friends with netbird/tailscale, creating little projects in our forgejo instance with full CI/CD for the infra, and day by day we are adding more and more stuff, our own little internet. we learn things and talk about technical stuff while setting up and implementing them, its my favorite social network now. also f big tech.
how to flush all this shit away? so they will have to learn to swim.
I remember one of the students in our school replaced the Windows 95 startup logo with the goatse.cx picture of every computer of a new lab, the rector of the moment called an emergency gathering in the gym BEGGING the students to change it back . promising that there would be no repercussions, he was sweating blood, because authorities picked our school to inaugurate the computer national program that made the lab possible, the next day. nobody talked, they had to change the inauguration to another school, fun times.
Q: any resource to learn about modern approaches for real time game protocols?
oh the memories, the CTCP ping with the string "+++ATH0" string on the message, or the `/skin "/con/con"` command on Quake2 online games, and the ";cat /etc/passwd" on old Unix's finger services, fun simpler times, what a mess.
When I read about Markov Chains and hallucination of LLMs, the first thing that comes to my mind is Reggie watts [0] performances, also remind me i used to do the same thing when i was bored in the classroom, but on my paper notebooks,just nonsense that seems plausible, it was kind of entering in a meditative state, it felt good. when i discovered watts i thought to my self, 'what?! I cloud have done that for a living?'.
I agree with your sentiment and resonate with some of my opinions on languages (been reading about TT and abstract math in general for a while as a hobby)
my opinions so far (subject to change as i read more):
dynamic typing = just one type [0]. yes, good to test ideas quick, to develop quick gigs that i don't care about and tiny snippets/scripts, i use js for that.
gradual typing = guaranteed mess evolving large code bases, I guess the gradual typing thing in practice never happen and when it happens your IDE becomes red and your compiler errors explode, i don't recall where i read about that but it made sense to me, i used groovy to take advantage of the optional typing but i was the only dev in that project.
sound type system + parametric polymorphism = the best thing around, although i prefer to have explicit type annotations.
no formal math object behind a language = the language does not exist, just , absurd rules ,idioms and syntactic mess that you have to remember and tied to specific monkey patched implementations to compensate incoherent foundations, sadly unavoidable, as most, if not all popular languages do not exist,.
Yes, I've been reading Harper a lot.
[0] https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/dynamic-lan...
edit: formatting
What's preventing it from happening now?
Just improvising with the idea and trashing more on big tech: I would say, nothing, if something like that gets to happen, my guess, it will be silent, away from the noise, would not be a sexy tech headline, kind of what is happening with mastodon, there is no big names, personalities or numbers with tons of 0s behind it, just an interoperable protocol, you know, real tech. it does not need marketing or infinite scale, dependent on FOMO or other social phenomenons, its just pure value for its users, also, as Cory Doctorow said somewhere, as instances of mastodon, ideas like that are going to come and go, and that's fine, that's the process of finding the next valuable thing that will stick with us, it should be organic, the next big thing will not come from the silicon valley casino like esque. An "IT person" would be just a job. pretty much as any other craft, what happens its that some of the most noisy parts of our industry are sick, feverish, delusional and full of their own bullshit, and we have in our subconsciousness that everything needs to be flashy, glorious, amazing, disruptive, big, competition proof and fast (in terms of success), not sustainable at all.
(im just going to ramble about it, cos im really mad about the state of IT right now and i cant articulate some ideas well) sometimes i fantasize about the concept of "your IT person", kind of your local barber, general practitioner, tailor or baker. that is on charge of some aspect of your digital life with their own local little infra, tailoring personalized feeds and takes care of privacy/health issues, and provides you with their own simple interfaces or "speak" open protocols that connects with your feed reader, from movies, written articles to memes and funny videos. the thing is to have a human being to talk about this. not an dark algorithm that is adjusted constantly for profit for a soulless company. Some other ideas revolt time to time on my head : community run local data centers(kind of libraries) or providing simple content services from your home internet connection (that's why i loved this idea: https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid). Your personal digital human(but maybe AI assisted) curators,all part of a idealized "virtual solar punk world", sustainable, private and healthier with humans put first, far from the toxic fascination with disruption , profit, perpetual and global growth and all of the startup toxic crap, we have everything we just have to glue it, and i see people thirsty for a digital world like that.
its not the first time i hear about feeling healthier after moving to the feediverse. i have my own set of scripts and mini apps running on top puppeteer with a local llamacpp for summaries and recommendations, its not perfect but im planning to put more effort on this and maybe look for OSS projects that are aiming at that (ie. (*arr suites, nostr, activitypub, veilid).) and offer that to friends and family members to see if they like the idea, also i have a name for all those scripts: "not a browser" the web without HTML CSS and JS served along with the data, just provide the data, how you displayed, its the user concern.
nice to see effort to shake a little the terminal space, and that you can receive 6MM dollars to play with it, but, having tried things like nushell i came back to zsh after i realized that is too much of an investment for something that can disappear in 5 minutes, get poisoned by VC money or be out shined by the next bright thing, and you are competing with 100s of little binaries and ways to do things that have been around for decades here. also i find those star graph so cringe, who cares?, is someone going to decide to use this based on that?, i mean that trend can be cause of a marketing move, that is.it says nothing about the project it self.
nice to know, kind of suspected that. for me, a good non sleep night = bye cockroach mode and hello overenthusiastic maniac for a week. quite a ride. 100% recommended.
as a it contractor for financial institutions i would say that we earned a lot of money just filling holes made by the previous ones and making our own in the process for the next one. that's what it is, make up problems to solve it later. hell, this whole fucking cursed industry is just that. making holes to fill them up later to keep the wheel of incompetence and delusion spinning. sturgeon law all the way.
every 'Every X will become a Y sooner or later' title will become 'Every X becomes a monoid sooner or later' sooner or later
shocking, bullshit tech for bullshit people improves bullshit.
in my experience all middle management people that wants everyone to go back to the offices are useless pieces of crap.
this has nothing to do with bad engineering, it's about stupid greedy investors/managers with to much power on decision making, decisions that they should not make. this is sad and an embarrassment to tech people. this industry is a joke.
i always had this question: how realistically is to, having an standard spec and interoperable protocols, for toxic apps of big international tech companies that provides """services""", so instances of implementations can be maintained by municipalities or local tech business and talent with 100x less employees and money? what policies should be in place to achieve that? what would be the challenges? it would be better/healthier? is someone researching such things like transition to sustainable digital services? (sustainable in terms of local labor, privacy, economy, accountability, etc...)
i mean if you think about this as public services not as a business, profit is secondary, and first is just to make the thing better and better for the users, no need for spying , no advertisement, no need for a rich piece of shit somewhere getting a piece of the money paid in your city for every taxi drive, food delivery or to give up privacy to a soulless/faceless entity just because you want to say something publicly or keep in touch with people. there is no disruption from their part, its just an old thing put on the internet, they are just in the middle of everyone's life, just sucking everything they can. is the actual state of affairs "efficient"?
there must be fed up engineers and tech people everywhere with the sad state of IT industry.
is there a thing like rlwrap or "kakkeys" for zsh (or in the browser like vimium)? i use kak as my main editor, but i don't like to mentally switch to vi keys for anything else every time.
just curious: what would be the answer from FSF/OSS people to , cheating and opensource games/libraries?. i mean if for example dota2 were open source it would be fairly trivial to make scripts to send commands on events (even closed source games get cheat mods!).
off topic : on the other side, i think is inevitable that at some point in the future players will have AI assistants looking at their screens , making decisions and inputs just like a real human, (heck! you can sort of do that now with linux/x11 , screen grab and proton very easily), i personally would love to see competitive gaming involving AI agents and assistance.
The recent news and hype around AI motivated me to create a project on my personal computer with limited resources, using minimal code[0] to combine ChatGPT[1] with computer vision. This efficiently extracts structured data from virtually all websites I visit regularly, even though the resulting text may be somewhat poorly formatted. Despite the text's imperfections, ChatGPT is still able to provide me with summaries and insights. For instance, it can compare prices from various e-commerce sites, detect discounts and different payment methods, analyze soccer match results, and even generate humorous morning news summaries based on the top headlines in spanish!.
However, the recent "letter of warning against AI" penned by Elon Musk and other influential individuals has led me to question their motives. I suspect they may be losing the competitive edge they once had, as users can now effortlessly obtain information in ways that were previously unattainable. It's possible they are seeking to lobby for new laws that restrict this kind of data extraction. With such simplicity, I can envision a future where people no longer need to browse web pages, ultimately making ads and the whole business of treating your users like crap irrelevant.
[0] 10 lines to screenshot with puppeteer, tesseract to OCR and a clustering algorithm, add to this whisper and a nanotts to get an enhanced Unix philosophy+AI experience
[1] Im pretty sure i can use low resource models to do the summaries and insights, any recommendations?
* edit,im pretty sure that could have done this PoC years ago without GPT.
I thought the same, modern c++ (>=11) felt like a new start for the language. it's a complete different beast nowdays.
for this kind of errors is why you always leave a comment on your code
when you have no money, all ads are irrelevant. it made me be ad blind, so I block them all.
I came to the conclusion that anything that involves speculation on any market is unethical. maybe it was necessary before , but today is just not efficient.
tangential : Two weeks ago (and for a while) our country's twitter-sphere (Chile) was completely and obviously dominated by bots, they were starting and inflating trending topics with absurd lies, spreading fear and chaos in favor of "Rechazo" (the option against our new constitution in the next ballot) or echo chambers for republican and extreme right associated politicians.. What happened? a self organized group[1] started to do data analysis of the trending topics and delivering the results to the people showing who was behind the campaigns and synthetic likes, after this, prominent and public figures from that sector started to cut funding for bot networks (because of the public shaming and media attention they were receiving) and is so pathetic now ,they can't even get more than 100 likes and often the most popular response is a refutation or the very same analysis showing the bot network working with substantially more organic likes. I think is a very interesting phenomenon to watch. Note that this lies/fear/chaos campaign is transversal, from rural AM radio to tiktok, but is not working at all. People is very aware of these campaigns and knows how to defend against. Truth is stronger than money.
coop game EXACTLY like wow (5/10/20) instances, with time runs, achievements and item progression, etc. and where you have to think very well your strategy in every pull.
edit: typo
anecdote time - Months ago this same question arose in my head reading something about graphs of cause and effects over other dimension (like time), If I remember well, they mentioned something about information pockets and how you can take advantage of them to change the course of events if you are an almighty observer, then searching about it I read something about daemons being things that changes things and move through those pockets.