netdevphoenix

We're choosing to call LLMs (and the little "harness" programs that query them in loops and execute their output) "AI", even though it doesn't make much sense.

Most people are laypeople who have no idea what's on the other side of their fave chatbot page. As far as laypeople are concerned, AI has always been a talking machine. The literature and filmography has reinforced this idea. So as soon as a talking machine emerged, people applied those fictional concepts onto reality.

Tech people should have known better than to jump on this bandwagon.

When you used google 10x a day, you saw, at a minimum, 20 ads/day

That's assuming a user with no ad-blocker which is an ever diminishing number of users

Does anyone want to use a tool that is capable of disguising an ad as a geniune recommendation at anytime?

It depends on the economics and usefulness of the tool. Google Search got away with it because it was useful AND trading zero cost of usage for ads was worth it for most.

Whether LLMs can get away with it seems very unclear now as they don't seem as popular as search engines.

(I want to spend no more than $10k. And I want to run a model comparable to today’s SOTA.)

The question is, will you want to run a model comparable to today's (meaning 2026) SOTA in 2028? Humans always want the latest shiny LLM model.

I would imagine no mainstream model allows this easily and at scale for obvious reasons.

I am calling it now. LLM hosting is the new web hosting. You will have a market of hosting providers offering you access to LLM compatible hardware (the Hetzners of the LLM world) as well as virtualised LLM access (the Heroku of the LLM world). These will compete along pricing, ownership axes while frontier labs will compete mostly on performance, integration and ease of use (think Wordpress).

That's the only way I can see frontier labs charging high enough to sustain the cash flow needed to operate as racing to the bottom is not possible for them.

It is interesting to think whether this is another "Cambrian" era like the smartphone OSes when you had Symbian, Android, iOs, Windows Mobile and so many others competing.

It's Proof of (human) Work. Much more useful than having a sticker saying "Done by a Human".

Yep, this tracks. Open source models seem to be getting more and more attention.

This was inevitable. The better question is if AI related hardware costs drop after the AI bubble implodes, will Apple drop the prices? My answer is negative.

The economic reality is that none of the social media websites would pass the test without a significant hit to their profits. If you want to see the long-term economic projections of a social media website without the younger market see Facebook.

It's like asking tobacco companies to reduce the toxicity and addiction of their products, inevitable collapse.

The reality is that the business model itself is inherently toxic.

How so?

Those 2 browsers used a rendering engine developed by Google. It would not be wrong to consider them partial chromium reskins with all the technical dependency it entails.

I would guess because "so good" does not equate with 100% and presumably the user's needs fall in that 5%.

Linux has been usable for non proprietary software for decades now. The fact that people are refusing to jump ship even when Windows actively undermines them and itself speaks volumes of people's aversion (or inability) to switch OSes.

That isn't relevant

Most people listen to music in their car.

Most people don't have cars

Why not just try and see?

There is a difference between trying something and performing a test whose results are meant to be representative of most setups. A lot of people (in tech surprisingly) who see themselves as practitioners of applied science, apply flawed methodologies and try to generalise the results.

Just because testing is fast, it does not mean that it is free or cheap. Plus time is money and verifying every LLM setup every koolaid dev is proclaiming on bluesky could easily be a full time job.

Digital systems don't necessarily deteriorate immediately after the causal factors. Like technical debt, issues grow unnoticed and become visible gradually.

The constant deliberate conflagration of LLMs with general intelligence is so grating.

Successful and profitable are not the same thing.

The personalised feeds is the whole point of their reason of being. No personalisation no profits. There just isn't a world where these huge companies can exist without personalised feeds. Meta platforms as well as YT would die and you would have instead something like Nebula which you pay for like Netflix but offers content creators content. Most people wouldn't pay for Nebula and so, you are back to the original point. People would put pressure to restore personalised feeds. Everyone supports these bans until they are the target of them.

This isn't a technological problem but a human one. The fundamental problem is that we haven't developed generalisable, scalable and profitable business models on the internet that aren't toxic.

What happens when you have a codebase made with claude using this setup and claude is down for let's say 8 hours? Are you able to efficiently, smoothly and productively take over the codebase?

The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.

Maybe, but compare the monthly cost of a ChatGPT subscription to the cost of a face to face CS education, the cost of a dev machine, the cost of spending your time building the software that you want. The subscription easily wins. And yes, yes, overtime the sub is more expensive but the point is that your average layman is not going to front five figure amounts in costs in something like this just like most people don't buy a gym's worth of fitness equipment, they instead go to their local gym and pay monthly. Now think of all the things LLMs cover even if unreliable and low quality and you can see why the fast-food/fast-fashion era of software is upon us. People won't be experiencing the software equivalent of Michelin rate restaurant food or wearing Gucci but they will certainly be having their needs met in a way that they didn't use to before.

Grandma likely isn't able to use most existing web apps beyond facebook, her default email client and little else either.

Uncle Bob on the other hand will stop nagging you to make him those apps you never have the time to make him and will do it himself. He is a handyman, literate and numerate and able to use a computer like most middle age folks outside of tech can. Uncle Bob's mates at the local bar will see the software he wrote and will get into it themselves.

The Gen X+ non-techie population is made up of more than just grandmas.

What is "VLM"?

Exactly this. Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI.

No one is going to vibe code a Photoshop replacement just like no average smartphone user is going to take prize winning photographs with their phone or directly compete with professional photographs.

What is going to happen is what happened to videographers and photographers and what is happening to record musicians: the medium is going to become more accessible by reducing the cost and skill required to make lower quality items.

Just like random selfies don't need you to be a photographer, neither will the one off random app that only your household uses require you to be a programmer.

Making a music video of a trip doesn't require you to know technical knowledge of video recording nor basic music theory. You click buttons and it is done. It won't win prizes but it will be satisfying for the use case it occupies: a one off low scope purpose.

Making tiny one off apps is definitely going to become a thing among people beyond tech and tech adjacent fields. It won't be code clean, it won't be code reviewed or even code versioned but it will be useful and that's what matters ultimately.

Hasn't Anthropic being experiencing issues due to extremely high usage? Being their investor, you would think Amazon wouldn't do Anthropic dirty by weakening their ability to handle user traffic

Backups are not encrypted by default. It just takes a single person on the other side of the chat not enabling e2e for your messages to be readable.

Meta data is also not encrypted. Your messaging graph is known to Whatsapp including message timestamps.

Also, IIRC, they (Meta) could also partially bypass the e2e (they can't access past messages but they can receive future messages) without you noticing (unless you have certain settings on whatsapp enabled, settings most people don't even know they exist).

The new feature of sharing past messages with new arrivals to a group also further widens the potential scope of messages leaking.

Your approach is good for catching stuff that human reviewers might miss not as a first line default-only unit. The whole reason this is happening is because humans are not doing their job. Your solution (humans not doing their job) is just increasing the scope of the problem.

All the companies involved in PRISM made public statements saying they ceased participation. Google undertook a costly initiative to add encrypted connections over their datacenter circuits

This is as helpful as Whatsapp's so called E2E encryption comms (that just happens to not be applicable by default in certain situations).

Cloudflare would face a near-total loss of customer

I think more people than you would expect would be happy to accept that as the price for protection against malicious actors