pocketarc

You’re running 48GB now but imagine a future where everyone has 512GB RAM or 1TB RAM in their computers (it might sound like a lot but also 20 years ago we had 512MB PCs).

It’s not hard to imagine what 5-10 years of pressure to increase RAM will do to specs, on top of the normal tech improvements.

That’s worth bearing in mind when thinking about local models.

Plus, local models keep getting better and better; 2 years ago what you could get out of those 48GB of RAM was embarrassing compared to what’s doable today.

We’re getting there. Just takes time.

In the olden days, I enjoyed Opus 3 because it was easy to have it sound way more human than GPT.

Nowadays, with the focus on agentic use and coding, it seems models have all been RLHF’d to death, it’s so incredibly hard to have them write in a different voice than their default. I put together a skill to review its writing and have it edit its own output (e.g. code comments), which does make a difference, but isn’t perfect.

What, if anything, do people do for writing? That feels like a neglected side of LLMs. They’ll make 100 Bash calls referencing ancient commands without batting an eye but heaven forbid they use something other than “load-bearing” while talking. For something trained on “all the human knowledge” it’s incredible how limited their default vocabulary seems to be.

They were definitely proudly boasting being a certified UNIX OS (and macOS still is), it goes deeper than just software licenses: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable.

That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge.

In Carolyn Porco's words: "These beings, with soaring imagination, eventually flung themselves and their machines into interplanetary space."

When you think of it that way, it should be obvious that LLMs are not AGI. And that's OK! They're a remarkable piece of technology anyway! It turns out that LLMs are actually good enough for a lot of use cases that would otherwise have required human intelligence.

And I echo ArekDymalski's sentiment that it's good to have benchmarks to structure the discussions around the "intelligence level" of LLMs. That _is_ useful, and the more progress we make, the better. But we're not on the way to AGI.

"open source" has a specific definition[0], which this project does not meet. When people say "open source", that is the definition that they are referencing. It's the reason why there's been endless discussion about "open weights" models not being "open source".

"source available"[1] is a different thing, and you're right that this project is "source available".

[0] https://opensource.org/osd

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

Yeah like I remember prior to reasoning models, their guidance was to use <think> tags to give models space for reasoning prior to an answer (incidentally, also the reason I didn't quite understand the fuss with reasoning models at first). It's always been XML with Anthropic.

I think I've read the reference a hundred times throughout my time on HN, but had _never_ actually seen it, thank you for the link!

I'm a dev, not a salesperson, but let's be realistic. A company tells you "yeah we're interested in signing at $1M/yr, but we really need this feature, when will you have it by?", to which saying "eh we don't know - it'll be done when it's done" will lead to the company saying "ok well reach out when you have it, we can talk again then" (or just "eh ok then not a good fit sorry bye"), and in the meantime they'll go shopping around and may end up signing with someone else.

Having a promised date lets you keep the opportunity going and in some cases can even let you sign them there and then - you sign them under the condition that feature X will be in the app by date Y. That's waaaay better for business, even if it's tougher for engineers.

I use this approach for a ticket based customer support agent. There are a bunch of boolean checks that the LLM must pass before its response is allowed through. Some are hard fails, others, like you brought up, are just a weighted ding to the response's final score.

Failures are fed back to the LLM so it can regenerate taking that feedback into account. People are much happier with it than I could have imagined, though it's definitely not cheap (but the cost difference is very OK for the tradeoff).

I agree - and it's not just what gets you promoted, but also what gets you hired, and what people look for in general.

You're looking for your first DevOps person, so you want someone who has experience doing DevOps. They'll tell you about all the fancy frameworks and tooling they've used to do Serious Business™, and you'll be impressed and hire them. They'll then proceed to do exactly that for your company, and you'll feel good because you feel it sets you up for the future.

Nobody's against it. So you end up in that situation, which even a basic home desktop would be more than capable of handling.

I've seen that in a few places, yeah! I think I personally would just put something in the footer and have a specific page for it that I can link people to.

I really hope that I never end up in a situation where someone tells me "well the conversion rate would be much higher if you just stopped fighting it and put up the damn banner".

includes some breaking changes

Most of the changes are completely reasonable - a lot are internal cleanup that would require no code changes on the user side, dropping older browsers, etc.

But the fact that there are breaking API changes is the most surprising thing to me. Projects that still use jQuery are going to be mostly legacy projects (I myself have several lying around). Breaking changes means more of an upgrade hassle on something that's already not worth much of an upgrade hassle to begin with. Removing things like `jQuery.isArray` serve only to make the upgrade path harder - the internal jQuery function code could literally just be `Array.isArray`, but at least then you wouldn't be breaking jQuery users' existing code.

At some point in the life of projects like these, I feel like they should accept their place in history and stop themselves breaking compatibility with any of the countless thousands (millions!) of their users' projects. Just be a good clean library that one can keep using without having to think about it forever and ever.

I love the interview at the end of the video. The kubectl-inspired CLI, and the feedback for improvements from Claude, as well as the alerts/segmentation feedback.

You could take those, make the tools better, and repeat the experience, and I'd love to see how much better the run would go.

I keep thinking about that when it comes to things like this - the Pokemon thing as well. The quality of the tooling around the AI is only going to become more and more impactful as time goes on. The more you can deterministically figure out on behalf of the AI to provide it with accurate ways of seeing and doing things, the better.

Ditto for humans, of course, that's the great thing about optimizing for AI. It's really just "if a human was using this, what would they need"? Think about it: The whole thing with the paths not being properly connected, a human would have to sit down and really think about it, draw/sketch the layout to visualize and understand what coordinates to do things in. And if you couldn't do that, you too would probably struggle for a while. But if the tool provided you with enough context to understand that a path wasn't connected properly and why, you'd be fine.

This might mean deriving data when possible; for example, computing totals rather than storing them.

Fully agreed. This might be one of those areas where people not knowing it's possible can lead them to far worse solutions. Generated columns in databases, computing things based on row data, and things like materialized views, are so, so useful.

https://pocketarc.com - Personal blog, where I've been trying to write more. I've recently started keeping a personal devlog there as well.

lg:dark:hover:bg-red-500

on large screens

in dark mode

when hovering

bg should be red-500

The above is an unrealistic example, but, you can't achieve that with the style attribute. You'd have to go into your stylesheet and put this inside the @media query for the right screen size + dark mode, with :hover, etc.

And you'd still need to have a class on the element (how else are you going to target that element)?

And then 6 months later you get a ticket to change it to blue instead. You open up the HTML, you look at the class of the element to remind yourself of what it's called, then you go to the CSS looking for that class, and then you make the change. Did you affect any other elements? Was that class unique? Do you know or do you just hope? Eh just add a new rule at the bottom of the file with !important and raise a PR, you've got other tickets to work on. I've seen that done countless times working in teams over the past 20 years - over a long enough timeline stylesheets all tend to end up a mess of overrides like that.

If you just work on your own, that's certainly a different discussion. I'd say Tailwind is still useful, but Tailwind's value really goes up the bigger the team you're working with. You do away with all those !important's and all those random class names and class naming style guide discussions.

I used to look at Tailwind and think "ew we were supposed to do CSS separate from HTML why are we just throwing styles back in the HTML". Then I was forced to use it, and I understood why people liked it. It just makes everything easier.

HN goes through hype cycles, I suppose. Remember when it was all about crypto and every conversation ended with "we could use blockchain" and we were all fed up? Remember when everyone was an Elon Musk fanboy and Tesla was going to save the world? I'm sure there are more, but that's just off the top of my head.

There's always going to be a prevailing zeitgeist, and that's always going to dominate people's focus.

But by and large, HN is the most intelligent, thoughtful community I've encountered, with people going out of their way to be kind and thorough in their replies, discussing things maturely, disincentivizing unhelpful and low-effort behavior. Not to mention the dizzying wealth of knowledge and experience the people here have.

Obviously it's not 100%. There are plenty of harsh people and attitudes. But there's a lot of good discussion happening here, and that's what I try to focus on. I can only hope one day to be as interesting/inspiring a member of the community as some of the people I've seen on here.

a vitamin is something you can't live without

They are talking about vitamin supplements, not literal vitamins that you need in order to live. Vitamin supplements do not survive in a budget reduction spreadsheet - they're easy to let go of for a while. On the other hand, if you're in pain, you need painkillers, and you're not going to be thinking about your budget, you're just going to go get some to get rid of the pain, even if it's just a temporary fix (and even better for the business if it's just a temporary fix - recurring revenue!).

That's the whole thing, the whole "solve a real problem" thing they keep talking about for startups.

I personally think this could pop up as policy at work. I'd personally push for that. "If you're pasting AI responses without filtering through the lens of your own thoughts and experience..."

Like, it's fine for you to use AI, just like one would use Google. But you wouldn't paste "here are 10 results I got from Google". So don't paste whatever AI said without doing the work, yourself, of reviewing and making sense of it. Don't push that work onto others.

Others have already said it, but it needs to be said again: Good god, stop treating LLMs like oracles.

LLMs are not encyclopedias.

Give an LLM the context you want to explore, and it will do a fantastic job of telling you all about it. Give an LLM access to web search, and it will find things for you and tell you what you want to know. Ask it "what's happening in my town this week?", and it will answer that with the tools it is given. Not out of its oracle mind, but out of web search + natural language processing.

Stop expecting LLMs to -know- things. Treating LLMs like all-knowing oracles is exactly the thing that's setting apart those who are finding huge productivity gains with them from those who can't get anything productive out of them.

I wonder how many of us think we're above all this but still come to HN religiously. I definitely do. Every damn day.

Is it https://howisfelix.today, by any chance? I remember that being here.

Is it the AI industry or just VC in general? YC quite famously invests in founders, not ideas. Other accelerators are similar. They start with a pile of money and the vague notion of a startup idea. Usefulness comes later, after however many pivots, before they run out of the pile of money.

No, I agree. This new version looks like someone using a cheap template with cheap gradients (I don’t know how else to describe the gradients), and it immediately makes it look less trustworthy.

the desktop appearance zeitgeist has skewed so flat and dull that the extra pixels make no material difference

Yeah, this is definitely one of the saddest things about modern UI fashion. We have the highest-resolution, highest-DPI, cleanest-looking extra-bright, extra-deep-black HDR OLED screens, and... we've got flatter UI than ever, UI that would've looked dull even on a 90s CRT.

It was the same thing with MySpace vs Facebook. Removing user customization may be better for... I don't even know what reason, but it has made all tech feel just a little bit more sterile.

We now praise dark mode as some big achievement, but... we -had- dark mode, before. The Mac Themes Garden has countless "dark mode" themes.

should be frowned upon as hard as table-based layouts

I absolutely agree with you. I've been very very keen on CSP for a long time, it feels SO good to know that that vector for exploiting vulnerabilities is plugged.

One thing that's very noticeable: It seems to block/break -a lot- of web extensions. Basically every error I see in Sentry is of the form of "X.js blocked" or "random script eval blocked", stuff that's all extension-related.

There is a big difference between storing your data in the same cloud as millions of others, and having someone individually unlock and look at your phone.

My phone has:

* Photos going back 10+ years

* Emails going back 10+ years

* Messages going back 10+ years

* All passwords (restricted, but if you're at the border and the person tells you to open it, you'll have to)

* Access to all files on my home NAS

If you got access to my phone and wanted to snoop around, you'd get... everything, all at once, all right there for you to see. There's SO much personal data. Even in airplane mode. It's all local.

Some of it is stored in companies' clouds, but surely you see the difference between my having my emails with fastmail, files on iCloud Drive, passwords with 1Password, and... "you have direct physical access to a fully unlocked phone and can force me to unlock any part of it, and you have no restrictions, and you don't have to 'collaborate' with Apple or any other company to get that data part by part".

...because, its obviously not any better than the 'tool use' API that everyone was already using. It can't be. It doesn't do anything differently.

Instead of you writing tool use code (which requires you to know how to write code, and to put in the effort), you spin up a server that provides that tool use code for the LLM.

As an example, you could hook up an "email" MCP that connects to your email provider and provides a "get_unread" tool and a "send_email" tool, and then go nuts having a chat with your LLM saying "hey let's work through our unread emails, bring up the first and then come up with a draft response for it, for me to review before sending". Hook it up with the "linear" MCP, and tell the LLM to also raise tickets with all the relevant details in your project management tool.

Of course you could write those tools yourself, and control all of the prompting, etc, but the point of MCP is so you don't have to write anything.

That's the ELI5, I think. "pre-built tools for the tool use API".

Sibling mentioned nativephp, but PHP-GTK[0] was also a thing in the past!

[0] https://gtk.php.net