safety1st

In the 90s I knew a guy in high school who walked around the school in a black trenchcoat with portable speakers tucked inside that were continuously playing Western movie themes. I can only imagine how that bit of creativity would go over these days.

Why does it need to grow? Not trying to be a curmudgeon here, I'm just trying to explain the philosophy because I think it's totally alien to some people. And I mean actually this HAS grown. Just pointing out that as far as I still know, guys like Aaron and Tantek are still doing their thing, scratching their itches, being indie, and the framework is there if anyone else wants to also scratch their personal itch.

What it isn't: a service working on perfection and maximizing consumption, as for example a commenter (Andrea Zanchetta) seems to expect. "What they built isn't suitable for me" simply isn't a relevant statement. You can build the thing you want, or have a nice day.

The point of these movements is that people are doing things for themselves, not for you, and not for the mass market. They are generally quite friendly to other people who create their own things. They are not doing it however to engage a consultant, a collective, a central authority, or pursue market share. They're just being themselves and making. Opinions that aren't backed by creating your own are just not really part of the picture and that's OK. We don't need to respond to the collective zeitgeist. We don't need to listen to all the opinions of other people online. We can just make and appreciate it as its own reward.

Occasionally these people get sponsored, and then you end up with miracles like the Linux kernel. Most times they don't and they just tinker and they're happy. It's all good.

They realize it's "unworkable for 90% of users" and they don't care.

Part of the Indieweb philosophy, like Libre software, is to "scratch your own itch" - no one's paying you. You do the stuff that's interesting to you. It's not a business. The point is not to take over the market.

The planet needs fewer marketing pinheads, not more. I would like it if we passed various laws that killed off a lot of the marketing pinheads, basically eliminating their jobs one way or another, and encouraged more people to create the things they want, rather than submit to the things that are popular.

The pinheads rarely create much of substance and mostly just sit around strategizing all day on how to rent seek. They have a lot of free time and money they can use to lobby the government and make it worse. They dress this all up as capitalism though it isn't really. We should strike back.

This is purely my experience but the difference between reading a good book vs consuming any other kind of media has been night vs day. I don't think any long article has thoroughly altered my perception about something important in my life. Certainly no Instagram reel has. Short form has been mostly useless, long form has sometimes been useful. But multiple books have had a life-changing impact on me over the course of my life.

I read a lot of books in my 20s. Many were forgettable, but a couple totally realigned my view of reality and what was possible and I went off to create a highly unconventional life because of them.

I then stopped reading books in my 30s - that time mostly got spent reading web articles and social media instead. This was a stagnant period of my life in many ways.

In my 40s I started to wonder if there might be a connection and I started making a conscious effort to start reading books again. Surprise surprise, a few years later I'm experiencing one of the most creative and productive periods of my life.

A great book will take a big idea and expound on it from multiple angles. It'll build both a logical and an emotional case for looking at the world differently. For me at least this type of shift in thinking takes reading multiple chapters worth of good arguments get it fully embedded in my brain.

Remember, the author of a great book may spend _years_ researching it before he even gets started on the writing part. The best books are next level stuff and I feel no other medium compares.

There will of course be many books that don't have this impact and end up being throwaways. I will buy them and if they aren't hooking me I simply don't finish them.

I think this all applies equally to fiction and non-fiction.

I think there might be some people out there who've experienced this degree of personal change from interacting with certain online communities. That's the only analogue I can think of. For me though it's books.

Far be it from me to defend Big Food, but let's play devil's advocate for a moment, just facts with no LLM slop.

Hyperbole aside they created a new product category which has less milk fat, and adds more air and gum/gelatin.

It tastes similar to ice cream at half the calories, not so insignificant in a world where obesity is the #1 public health crisis.

Their labeling is technically compliant with regulations but converting classic ice cream brands into these "ice milk desserts" was unpleasantly sneaky of them.

Are we 100% sure all the consumers eating these desserts have been fooled? We're sure no one's choosing them because they're lower calorie, lower fat, lower price, tastes good enough etc.?

If it tasted good, a dessert that's 99% air and ice would be a public health win would it not? That's pretty much what bingsu is, I don't care for it, but many people love it.

Haagen-Dazs is still there on the shelves and still good ice cream.

I don't know, I think the outrage is a little overblown. "Tastes better but is twice the calories" is a very significant consumer choice. I bet many will say they want the "real" stuff, but when it comes to purchasing decisions, buy the "fake" stuff more often.

There may be better windmills to tilt at than lecturing people on which type of milk dessert is the right choice. The brand shenanigans aside maybe we are in a better position having both options on the shelves.

We launched an AI feature and there was immediate blowback in the form of negative feedback.

We then rebranded it as "Advanced Search," kept the sparkle icon and everything, literally just a find-and-replace of instances of "AI" with "Advanced," pretty much.

The negative feedback stopped. The very next day someone wrote in and said it was an incredible feature.

Branding is wild. The modern media environment is wild. I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong to hate on AI. But when you use the term at least with some people it activates the "Those bastards are coming for my job" light in their brain, even if the discussion in question has zero bearing on their job. There's polling on this and job security is far and away the populace's biggest concern related to AI.

Thanks guys!

It's happening! We can see it! The future is somewhat legible and in it we don't all die! (Well we do, but mostly for the usual reasons)

We just gotta keep getting out of bed and making a smart choice or two between now and then!

Honestly I am burned out on public discussion of AI. There are so many hot, low info takes on both sides. All the dumb stuff revolves around this imbecilic notion that AI will take your job.

In that sense Altman and Dario et. al. were extremely successful in their cringeworthy campaign to establish themselves as priests of a new machine god religion. Even the people who don't want it believed them.

The good news is at least this year companies are starting to get a little more thoughtful about why they're paying for AI and what specific business function it serves.

Realities:

1. AI is a tool. You don't replace a job with a tool, just like you don't replace an apple with a sock. It was always an error of classification to think this way.

2. AI is a useful tool. For every CEO who thinks it justifies mass layoffs, there are dozens of people who don't want to admit that it does have a lot of utility. Anyone who isn't figuring out where this tool can make them more productive will have a hard time down the line imho.

3. We can infer from the priors that jobs will continue to be a thing, just like they still were after the inventions of printing presses, cars, power looms, etc. but there will be some pretty massive churn, some roles maybe disappearing entirely, new ones getting created, same goes for skill sets.

4. Businesses will use this churn to the best of their ability to either reduce costs or increase output. That second part is the key the AI haters don't seem to recognize. Thanks to competition, not every business wants to just fire everyone. Yeah, America's financialized and monopolized and less competitive than it used to be, but still, plenty of businesses will repurpose their budgets to produce more and expand.

So in terms of real specific and concrete things I've seen so far.

If you're in customer support that's a pretty rough spot, a well designed RAG system can turn 20 minutes of research into 20 seconds. Customer support budgets flow downstream from actual usage/customer base so if they can do more with less people will get laid off, they don't expand scope, they automate and cut the budget.

If you're a developer, your position's a lot more secure than that, coding agents are pretty incredible but they are simply not at a point where they can think through architectural decisions, and they occasionally go off the rails and trash everything. These things need to be operated and steered. Yes that's 100% the future of the profession and I'm sorry if someone doesn't like that, being a blacksmith who forges metal things by hand is also very niche these days, kind of sad if you loved blacksmithing but it happens. Devs also have to be aware that a PM/product owner can likely do some of their job now and I think any dev whose preference was to avoid thinking about customer or business requirements is going to find his utility is shrinking. A mass shrinking of the profession is unlikely but things will change and the only rational paths forward honestly are to retire or to figure out now how you fit in, it's a career opportunity if you get ahead of the curve even.

Lastly there is a whole other domain now which for lack of a good term I'll refer to as "prompt engineering," it requires some level of systems design thinking, but basically no programming expertise. The best candidate for this work is a person who possesses business process knowledge as well as systems oriented thinking. Maybe these jobs will end up finding a home in the IT department or something. As an economy we're barely recognizing them yet but I see that in engineering we can increasingly implement places for a prompt input, and then hand some workflow/business domain decisions off to someone who understands them better and they just tweak their prompts over time to get a great system. Pretty sure new jobs will be created and formalized around this over time.

It needs to be said that this article was written by the Browser Choice Alliance, which is funded by another convicted monopolist, namely Google.

So this is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, and the conflict of interest is obvious; Google paid for this article because they want to preserve their own anti-competitive monopoly position.

It's unfortunate that this is where we are with American business in 2026, basically one mafia taking shots at another, but that's what you get when the government gives up on enforcing the law.

Yes 100% this. A lot of people keep talking about how OpenAI and Anthropic will need to raise their prices. What is less discussed is how they CAN'T raise their prices because competition exists, and sure it's not SOTA, but it's literally an order of magnitude cheaper in many cases and the drive to figure out how to make it work well enough is going on right now (and will only intensify when the SOTA models raise their price).

It's a given that the SOTA models need to raise their prices. It's also a given that they can't. The more they raise the more customers will move to their competition.

So what happens next? Well I think it will suck horribly if you can't move off of SOTA sooner or later, because the Big Two are going to lose customers, and therefore have to raise prices on the locked in customers even more than these projections suggest.

Beyond that if you're looking to start a business, figure out how to use cheap models in new scenarios. Build software which does that and license it. This is kind of contrary to the idea that you shouldn't over optimize for deficiencies in the models that will likely go away in the next generation - for instance a lot of problems were solved when context windows got way bigger. So it's a thin line to walk but I think it's there because a lot of orgs are using Claude today for pretty basic tasks.

The dev who's addicted to SOTA models honestly is going to have to settle for less or get totally screwed. Most applications within business from what I see aside from complex research do not require SOTA. They summarize, they classify, they transform, and doing that accurately has been cheap for a while.

My parents were broke. I grew up on food stamps. Mom worked retail. Dad had a few good years, his business went bust and we spent a decade below the poverty line.

It was a public high school in the USA. It was in a rich neighborhood on the other side of town; our neighborhood was below median income and had one of the worst high schools in the state. My parents encouraged me to apply for attendance at the school across town via a magnet program. I got in and took a public bus 80 minutes each way for 4 years.

I'm not relating this in order to validate precisely what my Privilege Index was. Rather to relate how public investment in resources which were available to anyone who was willing to make a bit of extra effort transformed at least one kid's life. It seems these days that public resources go mostly to those with the most money, or maybe those who were born into the politically correct group du jour, but almost never to the random kid who just wants to take a shot at doing something bigger.

I'm glad I was born when I was. Public policy has changed, that magnet program is now gone, that rich kid school is now for the rich kids only, and it has gone to the dogs in terms of academic performance.

I essentially owe my career to two great strokes of luck.

The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s to help out with his self-employed publishing business, and like most PCs of the time, it came preloaded with QBasic and the source code for a couple of games like GORILLA.BAS that an introverted kid with a lot of free time could mess around with.

The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded computer lab and an unusually open minded computer teacher. If you demonstrated that you were dependable, he'd basically let you do whatever you want. While my school was mostly a Mac shop, I was a bit of a Microsoft shill in high school so by graduation I'd figured out how to stand up and run a Windows NT file & web server for our school newspaper. Another guy was a Linux nut and had been allowed to do something similar with RedHat for the school's drafting lab.

Inclination met opportunity, one thing led to another, and I went on to work with technology for the next 25 years of my life.

What worries me now is that so much technology is so locked down. It must be a very rare school today that allows the kind of freedom we had. There is no IDE preinstalled on a phone, and even merely installing an "unapproved" app is under fire.

If for no other reason, for the sake of the kids the industry, the tools, the operating systems need to be more open. They need to be tinkerable. That's how the most motivated kids tend to learn. Our best and brightest are not being made because we've closed things down to maximize some hedge fund's ROI somewhere. The financialization of America was a grave error.

I ended up at the same conclusion as you guys but implemented in yet another way: my home office has a desk for digital work, and a 'study nook' for analog (mostly reading, but it has its own little desk as well).

If I had a larger home, a dedicated den or study room would be a pretty high priority for me. I want my office to be a minimalist, businesslike space with no distractions that focuses me on the screen where my work happens. But the study is a place for clearing my head, thinking and reading, more about comfort, dimmer lighting, familiar objects, and no screens unless I bring in a small e-reader.

Seems far less scary to me than, say, building an electrical grid in a cold climate, where if it fails for a few days people start to die. Oh wait...

While I agree, I think there's a better way to frame this with the public. We don't need to bring in pedo references. That looks very unhinged to most people.

There's already a lot of support out there, in both public opinion and the law, for the idea that if I pay for something physical like a device, I own it. Any substantial alteration in its functionality, especially a reduction in what it can do, requires my consent. Reduction in what it can do should require my consent. Just because tech made it possible for the manufacturer to brick my phone or my car, start charging me extra for certain features I already paid for, or block the apps the OS vendor doesn't approve of doesn't mean they should or that it's even legal to do so. Additionally once I buy the device the vendor has zero business telling me how I can modify it, or whether I can repair it.

I own the thing I bought, fucker. It's my property and I have property rights. The corp has no right to steal away part of the thing I bought or change the terms after the fact. It's potentially criminal if they try.

This framing resonates with a lot of people.

The guy who really exemplifies this positioning at the moment is Louis Rossman and by focusing on these widely understood and popular concepts, he's gained the ability to direct an enormous amount of attention to an issue. He can absolutely swamp a legislature with letters from angry constituents for example when he gives an issue visibility.

Frame it as theft because it is. If they push an update without my consent that removes functionality or sabotages my ownership of the device, it's theft. At the very least product liability laws should apply. Some part of what I bought stops working, that goes to product liability. But I'd take it a step farther and say we're dealing with straight up theft.

That said, you might be surprised to learn that some of the models from 3b-9b could probably replace 80% of the things nonvibe coders use chatgpt for.

Really? I'm a total amateur when it comes to doing anything with local models but I tried a few in this range using ollama at this point, and they didn't seem to know much about anything, and I couldn't figure out how to get them to search the web or run other tools, so that was where the experiment ended.

A small local model that can use bash would be a bit of a game-changer for me.

I'm no fan of car culture but I think to say it's the primary cause of living a sedentary life at home is an overstatement. I deliberately moved somewhere where I could walk to everything I needed including a fantastic central train station, I no longer even own a car, and yet... over the years my habits changed and I now spend a ton of time at home. My motivation to go out has simply declined.

There is a relevant concept in psychology called activation energy, James Clear provides a good introduction to it. Certainly in recent years screens seem to be incentivizing more stay at home behavior. People used to not own a TV, many quite intentionally, before our other screens were invented. But it is a very complicated topic.

There's a pub in my city where the staff greet you when you walk in and actively encourage you to sit at a table that's already occupied. If you come in alone you'll probably end up sitting at a two person table where inevitably there will be a stranger right across from you, with a couple similar tables right next to it. Of course if you want to be alone you can go sit in a corner somewhere.

Needless to say everyone starts talking to each other after a drink or two. This bar is enormously popular. I've never seen it not be packed. It's an incredibly successful strategy for them. With all the complaints about the death of third spaces, I'm baffled that more places don't do this. I see no reason a cafe couldn't do it as well.

All this to say I think it's a great loss that younger people aren't going to bars as much. I wouldn't say they're the best way to form deep connections, but I have zero fear of ever lacking random social interactions, because I know I can just go to a reasonably busy pub in the evening, sit at the bar, and sooner or later either I'll start a conversation or someone else will. It's also a great way to get good at handling opinions that are different from yours - if you have a thin skin or live in a bubble, being subjected to drunk people from every walk of life will rectify those issues quickly lol.

To be fair, ShellGPT does a lot of heavy lifting for me. Weird thing I need to do, ask it a question in my terminal, it suggests a bash one-liner.

I haven't looked into voice/dictation yet. I'm dumber when I talk and smarter when I type so while it's super cool I imagine the net productivity gain may be a little overstated. Probably pretty straightforward with OAI's API.

How did you know that I use i3 on all my non-Omarchy machines? :D

- very little of this has ever extended outside Chinese borders, apart from the extraterritorial policing of Chinese nationals; they've not "gone global" in the way the US did

I would dispute this. They just use tools that most Westerners are not familiar with. Take a look at how most of Southeast Asia's economies are organized, and at the top, you'll find a whole lot of Han Chinese families. In many cases these families emigrated generations ago, put a fair degree of effort into keeping their bloodline Chinese, still build shrines to their ancestors, and still maintain deep ties to the mainland. Dhanin Chearavanont, who runs the largest monopoly in Thailand, is Chinese-Thai and holds Shenzhen's Foreign Investor license #001. Probably half of the Cambodian economy is Chinese-owned at this point. The list goes on.

The Chinese do it through family and blood and assert a lot more control than most Western onlookers realize (but Southeast Asians are well aware). Outside of an invasion every few decades, the US exerts a weaker level of control on a greater number of countries. US military influence crumbles once they leave, whereas Chinese family influence endures for centuries.

The peak of TUIs is now. Take a look at Omarchy, an entire operating system built around terminals and config files, it's nirvana. I can only imagine how much farther down this road things may go as we enter a world where the primary interface is conversation with the machine in text. I'm sure I'll get downvoted for that last part because Reddit -- (cough) I mean Hacker News - hates AI, but I'm genuinely excited for the future.

Their solution will be to push mandatory and nonconsensual updates to your devices which limit your device and your freedom in the name of security. Like Google is doing to Android in September. You will no longer be able to install "unverified" software on anything. To address prompt injection attacks they're probably working on an approach where your data all has to be in the cloud and subject to security scans. That's already basically the model for Google Workspace, Google Drive and Chromebooks.

The model will get full access to your data, but in the name of security, you will only be permitted to have data that is cloud-hosted; local storage will effectively just be cache.

The era of the general computer will end, and the products you purchased from these companies will be nonconsensually altered and limited.

I'm so glad I switched to Linux more than a decade ago. At least on the PC there will still be an open source ecosystem for a long time to come, it may have less features but I'm willing to accept that.

Knowing that they can change what you bought overnight with a single nonconsensual update, think very, very carefully about who you purchase all of your future technology from. Google's upcoming nonconsensual degradation of Android should be a lesson for everybody.

Tell this to my banks (whose apps are the only way you can even pay at some businesses nowadays)

What follows is the "advanced flow." I feel like there should be a class action lawsuit in response to this as when I purchased my device I had an expectation that I could install apps without this insane limitation

    Enable Developer Mode ↗ by tapping the software build number in About Phone seven times

    In Settings > System, open Developer Options and scroll down to “Allow Unverified Packages.”

    Flip the toggle and answer a scare screen confirming that you are not being coerced

    Enter your device unlock pin/password

    Restart your device

    Wait 24 hours

    Return to the unverified packages menu at the end of the security delay

    Scroll past additional scare screen warnings and select either “Allow temporarily” (seven days) or “Allow indefinitely.”

    On the next scare screen, confirm that you understand the risks.

    You can now install unverified packages on the device by tapping the “Install anyway” option in the package manager.

Oh good grief. This is such an uninformed and unnecessarily belligerent take.

We can and do have public nuisance laws which kick in when an individual is impinging upon the health, safety, comfort etc. of other people. This exists in jurisdictions all over the world for all kinds of things, the penalties are usually minor and applied only to repeat offenders. It is completely reasonable for someone to support the idea of these applying to marijuana use, in fact, in most jurisdictions where marijuana is legal, they probably already do. Yes, repeatedly stink up your neighbor's apartment and you may get a warning followed by a fine, deal with it. Your parent is not a Nazi and is not throwing stoners in prison. Perhaps go touch grass instead of smoking it now and then.

Not only that, but music generated by AI is not copyrightable. If it's truly 100% AI generated, you can redistribute it to your heart's content without infringement. (IANAL)

Someone will surely attempt some kind of end-run around this, perhaps through ToS alterations at the service you obtain the music from, but it's undoubtedly a problem for the labels. In the meantime they have a strong incentive to keep human creativity in the loop.

To me the anti-AI crowd is looking at this through the wrong lens, it's now possible to generate an infinite library of music that isn't copyrighted, and can be freely shared, some of which is quite good. There is a pathway all the way from conception to mass distribution that doesn't require the major labels. Whatever else happens that seems like a silver lining at least.

I agree it makes no sense. The whole point of chunking is to handle large documents. If your chunking system fails because a document is too big, that seems like a pretty glaring omission. I just chalked it up to the tech being new and novel and therefore having more bugs/people not fully understanding how it worked/etc. It was a vendor and they never gave us more details.

Not all problems have to be solved. We just fell back to using older, more proven technology, started with the simplest implementation and iterated as needed, and the result was great.

We were given a demo of a vector based approach, and it didn't work. They said our docs were too big and for some reason their chunking process was failing. So we ended up using a good old fashioned Elastic backend because that's what we know, and simply forwarding a few of these giant documents to the LLM verbatim along with the user's question. The results have been great, not a single complaint about accuracy, results are fast and cheap using OpenAI's micro models, Elastic is mature tech everyone understands so it's easy to maintain.

I think this turned out to be one of those lessons about premature optimization. It didn't need to be as complex as what people initially assumed. Perhaps with older models it would have been a different story.

We anthropomorphize these agents in every other way. Why aren't we using plain ol' unix user accounts to sandbox them?

They look a lot like daemons to me, they're a program that you want hanging around ready to respond, and maybe act autonomously through cron jobs are similar. You want to assign any number of permissions to them, you don't want them to have access to root or necessarily any of your personal files.

It seems like the permissions model broadly aligns with how we already handle a lot of server software (and potentially malicious people) on unix-based OSes. It is a battle-tested approach that the agent is unlikely to be able to "hack" its way out of. I mean we're not really seeing them go out onto the Internet and research new Linux CVEs.

Have them clone their own repos in their own home directory too, and let them party.

Openclaw almost gets there! It exposes a "gateway" which sure looks like a daemon to me. But then for some reason they want it to live under your user account with all your privileges and in a subfolder of your $HOME.