rpdillon

Reading through the post, it was clear that the author wasn't very familiar with Emacs. I'm a huge fan of the undo model of Emacs, especially with tools like undo-tree (although cycling through with M-y is basically as good for my use cases). The "replace the clipboard" bug doesn't exist because Emacs has a killring (I'm such a fan I bought killring.org years ago!), and the "text reflows" problem is completely solved use C-u C-space to traverse the mark-ring. His final point, that it is multiple operations, I simply disagree is a bug...multiple operations is fine, because I can compose them in a way that suits my workflow. Of course, in Emacs it would be trivial to write Ghost Cut (though it would only work within Emacs...).

Totally in the same boat, passkeys seem to massively increase the risk that I will lose access to my data.

My project for the past few years is called AppDeck, collection of self-contained HTML files that know how to save themselves back to the AppDeck server, which is just WebDAV. AI has been enormously helpful in building out a suite of apps that can do this. So far I have a diagram editor that can produce SVGs, a multi-document editor that backs everything with markdown, but supports Kandan boards, documents, logs, and calendars. I also have a work flowy clone that I've really been enjoying organizing ideas with at work. There's a gallery app that inlines all of the images and can display them full screen in a light box and with a timed slideshow that also supports captions and encryption.

All of it just runs out of a folder on disk and can either be deployed locally or on a server behind a login. I intend to open source it, but I'm not quite proud enough yet of some of the implementation aspects to do so. Hope to do it this summer though!

You're confused about what was actually illegal and what the industry wanted you to believe was illegal. They didn't want to take anybody to court for actually ripping a CD because they didn't want to lose and have the precedent set like it was in Sony versus Betamax. This isn't "bigger fish to fry". This is "terrified of the precedent".

The dispute arises from a suit the RIAA filed against a man in Arizona who bought CDs, copied them into his computer as MP3 files, and then put them into a shared folder that other people could access through Kazaa, a computer program for sharing music. He's being sued for that last part.

Then they state what they wish were true:

But according to Marc Fisher, legal documents and some statements by industry officials make it clear that the industry regards the simple act of copying a CD onto your computer or your iPod as illegal.

But just because they wished it to be did not make it so. Trillion-dollar companies have provided end-users with software to rip CDs (including iTunes), and there's never been a court case over it.

I like paying to invest in a new sustainable ecosystem. Using SERP API doesn't feel like that to me. See Brave for a counterexample.

They're still ultimately scraping other engines pages to get the results though. The last time this was discussed an engineer on their team told me that they were building their own index internally, but I couldn't get any additional information about that and it doesn't appear to be in their docs.

That's actually pretty cool. You're the first person that's actually showed verbatim reproduction in a discussion like this.

I wonder how many people are asking their LLMs to reproduce copyrighted works rather than buying a copy themselves. Or, more realistically, just going to Anna's Archive.

LLMs are just tools wielded by humans. There's always a human behind whatever is done.

This is not backed up by any evidence. Ripping CDs was never illegal. The DMCA made the circumvention of an effective copyright protection mechanism illegal, which made ripping DVDs and Blu-rays a crime. But that's separate from copyright itself. The RIAA sued Napster users not because they were converting files, but because they were obtaining them from others without a license.

Nope, that's a little bit of sloppy writing on the part of Ars. I am not a lawyer, but I'll be happy to discuss the technicalities with anybody here. I'm fairly passionate about the technicalities of copyright.

You're mistaken.

The transformativeness of the use is independent of the destruction of the books. The destruction of the books allowed them to argue that they had not duplicated them, and was instrumental in the argument supporting the legality of scanning them. But that's entirely upstream of the way the data was leveraged, which is what is critical in the argument about the use being transformative.

I was reading The Souls of Black Folk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Souls_of_Black_Folk) written in 1903, so about 38 years after the end of the Civil War. And the opening essays talk about the incredible climb that freed slaves had to endure to try to take care of exactly those responsibilities. I think it's a case of freedom and responsibility going together and that freed slaves were never given the tools to assume those responsibilities quickly and seamlessly.

The HN crowd is generally skeptical, but "shallow dismissals", which are specifically called out in the guidelines, are still extremely common. These dismissals are not as clever as they tend to seem to those skimming the comments, but folks have developed a bunch of thought-terminating cliches to empower this: calling anything involving AI "slop" is the most common, but more catchy (but fundamentally incoherent) phrases have also emerged:

If you didn't take the time to write it, why should I read it?

I mean, fundamentally you read things if they bring value. It doesn't actually matter if a human wrote it. It matters if it is correct and useful. One implementation is to have a human review, but you can imagine others. Fundamentally anyone who reads and leverages the output of AI knows this. The phrase seems reasonable because it is a good refutation of folks literally copying and pasting AI output from their ChatGPT session in the comments, which I think everyone agrees isn't good hygiene for online discussion. Because the guideline is "right" in that case, it seems easy to apply everywhere, but I think that's overly broad.

I have tokens, too. Just give me the prompt.

As if everything generated with AI is created as a one-shot with ChatGPT. I feel like half the people writing this stuff have no clue how professionals are using AI. The model, reasoning level, skills, tools, harness all matter, and that's even if the whole thing is a one-shot and we ignore all the server-side variables (inference engine, temperature, top_k, quantization level, etc.). If not, it's the product of a (probably extensive) back-and-forth with an AI, possibly changing models for various subagent calls (Kimi K2.7 Code for the plan, MiniMax M2.7 for implementation, Deepseek v4 Flash as advisor, etc.), etc. Orchestration is as important as prompt and context, but the space has a lot of dimensions. This is why you get radically opposed takes on models, harnesses, and the even the utility of AI: everybody is doing different stuff, solving different problems, and reporting results all over the spectrum. There was a guy just today on HN claiming Opus 4.8 was terrible at agentic development, for example, with half a dozen responses asking how s/he could possibly say that.

Anyway, my post was controversial, but overall negative on points. I just don't understand how anyone can actually use these tools and then post in such a black-and-white way about AI use. I spend a ton of time refining my use of AI and I'm getting better over time, but it's a lot of trial-and-error trying various combinations of tools and trying to match them to tasks. Appreciate your response and the discussion.

You think if he gave you the "prompt" you'd be able to produce that book?

Heck, I should put money on this. Start a competition: I give folks a prompt, and tell them to write a book about a subject with AI. I'm the sole judge of quality. Winner gets $2000. Then let's examine the variance in the entries.

In short: using AI is a skill. It's silly to pretend otherwise.

That's worth discussing, but you recommended a repeal.

Yes, I believe Senator Slotkin was recommending that we remove the cap on Social Security so that folks making more than $180,000 continue to pay Social Security tax on the income above that amount.

When I worked on recommendation systems 15 years ago, I learned about the "banana problem", where bananas are so commonly purchased, they tend to be the top recommendation regardless of other foods in your cart. The solution, of course, was to bias for less commonly purchased items, but it was my first run-in with the weird statistics around banana purchasing patterns.

Exactly this. The date has been very consistent for many years, and the math checks out. 2033 unless something significant changes.

This is fantasy. There's nowhere for the money to come from. They're going to raise the age, reduce benefits.

Not OP, but I tend to use Kimi 2.6/7 more than other models, works great with omp.

Indeed. Power management alone is a massive research area with never-ending complexity across a bunch of domains. And nailing the ecosystem correctly is very hard (both devices and software). Security is another bottomless pit of research and improvement. When trillion-dollar companies like Amazon and Microsoft ceded mobile to Google and Apple, it was a good demonstration of how hard a successful mobile platform is to get off the ground.

...and that can be changed at-will.

Section 230 is very important for all website operators. It doesn't just protect big companies. If you repeal it, now you're making every blog owner responsible for whatever some idiot says in the comments section.

It was an emoji solution for Emacs that only worked on Mac. RMS basically said:

"If the point is to promote Free Software, we do ourselves a disservice by making our Free Software work better on a proprietary system than a Free system. Let's include this support when it works on the Free platforms as well."

FSF is political, but only about Free Software. Their goal is to promote it, and I think RMS has shown very clear thinking in this regard. I don't love the decision/outcome (someone did work to make something better and it was rejected), but I get it in service of the larger goal.

To flip the pschology, you could imagine a world where Emacs did way more awesome stuff on Windows and Mac, and the ensuing HN discussion where the obvious snipe appears a dozen times: "lol they keep talking about free software but their own products work better on windows lol".

Real people think in concepts and experiences instead of words.

I learned about this opinion recently. It's interesting to me, because I very much think through words. I have an internal monologue that is running most of the time, and I often talk to myself, just start writing, or even record myself and transcribe to work through ideas, proposals, risks, etc. My understand is that some people don't have an internal monologue, and think purely in concept form. I was never like that.

I didn't use Claude for a long time, but my coworkers did, so I got infected through a side channel: I ended up reading their vibed docs, noticed "load-bearing", kind of liked it, and started using it in conversation, until I got feedback that I was "talking like Claude", so now I avoid the phrase entirely. The intersection of language and social norms is interesting.

I'm a "FOSS person" and spend a fair amount on apps that behave well. Just bought Brave Origin for $60 on Sunday, as an example.

I've been in the room when companies talk about web vs. app. It's always a business decision that basically comes down to "The LTV of app users is higher, because we live rent-free on their home screen and we can push notifications to get people to re-engage." Doesn't matter what company: apartment searches, rideshare, communications app, etc.

The reason I will always prefer web experiences is because:

* I have a user agent that I can configure the behavior of. I can examine, and even change, app behavior to suit my needs. I can intercept and black-hole telemetry. I can remove distracting UI elements. uBlock Origin allows me to do this. Vimium gives me a keyboard-centric interface to help avoid mouse usage, since lots of mousing gives me RSI.

* I write web apps that are self-contained HTML files. These are awesome because they endure. An app written that way will open in 20 years just as well as it does today. Tiddlywiki is a living example of this.

* Browsers provide a baseline of functionality: selecting, cutting, pasting, and editing all work the same (or can be made to). Apps randomly prevent me from selecting text, or pasting a password.

* Apps are a constant treadmill. Staying up to date with APIs and app store fees and reviews all cost money, which means apps have to make money. This discourages hobbiest coders from releasing cool tools like the did 15 years ago, but it's those apps, the ones made for fun or utility, not for profit, that tend to behave the best. App stores are selecting against the very thing that brings me the most value, in favor of what brings them the most value.

* Finally: control. App stores increasing think they should not only vend money-making software, but they should be the only source where users can go to get functionality. I reject this outright; it's my computer, I decide what runs on it. The web is the last bastion of this on mobile, so I prefer the web.

It blocks the cookies and the banner. Ideal solution.

This is exactly what I've been observing as well. As soon as the App Store became a cash cow, the incentive to support non-commercial development went away. It's now a place constructed by a giant company, for giant companies.

I don't find this argument compelling because you're selectively applying logic.

Okay, so you don't like AWS or Google. Fine. What about the thousands of other hosting companies that use Linux, Apache, Nginx, PHP, Ruby, Python, and Perl for their offerings? Are Yunohost and Dreamhost evil for using Postgres and not open-sourcing their orchestration layer?

The precise reason I build my sites on top of Linux and Apache and Postgres is because I can switch hosts at any time. But what you're advocating for is being completely locked in to the hosting service that is controlled by the company that happened to have authored the database. I would never use a product from a company that had that attitude because I would be completely beholden to them.

I get your frustration that AWS and Google make it hard for database vendors to release their work under a truly open source license. But what you're advocating for would destroy a huge amount of the value of self-hosting and open-source.