star-glider

100% software doesn't take up space; there's always something more that can be automated or improved: https://loadhigh.jtylergriffin.com/devs-are-fine/

It seems that a certain kind of person cannot separate the following things: 1) I dislike AI as a technology 2) I dislike the people and companies that profit from AI 3) I think AI is useless

These are three completely separate positions to have. You can think AI is incredibly useful and also dislike it because it will, for example, reduce your relative status in society. You can love the tech but think that Sam Altman is a dishonest person, etc. But for some reason, most anti-AI commentators feel compelled to present all three arguments.

Which is even sillier when you think about it, because if it's useless, then you really shouldn't care: the markets will eventually find out that it's useless, and everything will go back to normal, and the people you don't like will have lost money, so there's no point in being outraged. Of course, I don't really believe that they think it's useless. I do think they're worried about what it'll do to their prestige, though, and they're just hoping beyond hope that somehow everyone will one day "wake up" and share their belief that LLMs are just "stochastic parrots" with no utility, despite the fact that people are using them every day and can watch in real time as they improve.

I'd argue that a lot of knowledge workers in general are about to experience a similar rude awakening. To the clear benefit of society as a whole, who are spared rents, but it won't be fun for the entitled.

Longshoremen are anti-cranes. Same thing.

Just turn off JS

I started my career in finance, and I used scroll lock constantly. When you're spending twelve hours a day in Excel, moving around quickly with just the keyboard starts to matter.

Even today, my keyboard remap file swaps it with "insert" to put it in easier reach (it's also far less potentially destructive when pressed accidentally).

This is literally what's happening to Apple right now. Instead of focusing on innovation and research, they're just skimming their 30%. Works out great for the share price until something like LLMs come along, and oops you have no innovation muscle left.

Just to clarify how outrageous the Mozilla CEO compensation is, consider that Tim Cook makes 0.019% of Apple's revenue in compensation ($75M on $391BN of revenue). For Sundar Pichai (Google), it's 0.003%; Samsung is 0.0001%; Nadella at Microsoft is 0.032%.

For Mozilla? 1.18%! That's almost FORTY TIMES these other companies. Apple revolutionized mobile computing; Google revolutionized search, Microsoft owns enterprise software, and Samsung is one of the largest hardware manufacturers in the world. Mozilla makes a second-rate web browser whose sole distinguishing feature is supporting a community-built addon that does a great job blocking Youtube ads.

I could give $100k per year to Mozilla for the rest of my life, and my lifetime donation would cover less than half of the CEO's salary.

heh I really enjoyed reading this because I went on a RPI-fueld CEC deep-dive about a year ago when we put a gym in our house. I wanted a simple media center control for the TV/Receiver we had in there. An RPI sits at the center of the thing, and by reading the CEC bus I can respond to various remote commands to launch the media center, bring up security camera feeds, switch the receiver to Bluetooth, start Spotify Connect, etc.

It works well, but CEC most definitely is the buggiest part of the setup. It's a reasonably elegant system, but it's just not implemented very well by most electronics. I ended up putting in a lot of retries: stuff like "send active source command; wait five seconds and send it again." Still, if you're willing to dive into the weeds, you can do some nifty stuff.

Sure, because I think that, ultimately excessive regulation stifles innovation. I mean, heck, the EU is looking to effectively dismantle GDPR because they're worried that it's going to cause them to miss out on the AI boom.

My point was just that Apple is such an outrageously bad actor (and the USB-C and Airdrop rules so beneficial) that these rules were getting even a very pro-market person like me to at least be open to the idea of regulating some of these out-of-control giants.

Bingo.

I'm libertarian, but I have to say watching the EU torment Apple has been delightful and one of the stronger arguments for muscular regulatory action.

The USB-C thing just made everything better. It cost Apple basically nothing---maybe a few million/year of profit, which for a company that's worth $3 trillion is nothing, and it made my and many other people's lives quite a bit more convenient.

Same with this Airdrop thing, and same with RCS (although there's some reporting that RCS had more to do with China than the EU).

Eventually, someone is going to break open iMessage, and poor Apple will actually have to compete again for customers. Maybe they'll innovate something more interesting than Airpods Ultra Mega Pro Max or a thinner phone.

They're also literally just not pushing code to AOSP anymore. QPR1 still isn't available. It probably will be, eventually, but this year it's two months late, next year it's six months late, then nine months, then "eventually" and then finally only to OEMs.

I don't think Google looks at any of these forks as threats; they just don't care.

Yeah I mean it's literally what the term "open source rugpull" means. Every business will ultimately renege on their open source promises. It's literally against their fiduciary duty to shareholders not to, once they've run out of actual growth ideas. Even if current management is idealistic, eventually, they will be replaced with "real leaders" who know that they need to make money.

But, ideally, it's not that big a deal, because the community (or even newer non-calcified businesses) can fork the last open source branch and continue development.

Unfortunately, with something as complex as an OS, that's incredibly difficult. It does seem regrettably unlikely that, for the foreseeable future, there will be no practically usable open-source phone OSes.

Taxis have a powerful local lobby; Google/Waymo doesn't.

It's honestly even dumber than this, because most of these countries are on the knife's edge of 50/50 popularity between the nominally progressive party and the nominally conservative party. So the odds that your opponents come into power within your lifetime are approaching 1.

I think it's less that HN users profit from privacy invasion as much as some of them aspire to run companies that do so. Perhaps a distinction without a difference.

Linus finally relented and changed it to "everything is a stream of bits." Still, it's a useful metaphor and way to think about interacting with bits of the OS.

Hey, if it still works. . . .

Just don’t connect it to the internet.

Geez I feel like a (more subtle) version of the Ron Desantis Maneuver would be a heck of a lot less invasive.

Agree--ABP is not the most sympathetic defendant here, but I don't see how good actors like uBlock Origin wouldn't also be caught up in this.

Granted, I don't know how they'd actually enforce an adblocker ban, but this is a country in which it is illegal to call politicians "idiots," and they will literally break down your door and arrest you if you do: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/man-s-home-raided-after...

So, while I don't think it's likely, it's certainly not outrageous to think that a publisher could detect that you're not downloading certain content (just like how various anti-adblock scripts function) and request that police go to your address, arrest you and check your computers for "illicit adblockers."

About the only thing they've gotten right recently was forcing Apple to switch to USB-C.

I recently got back from Europe; rented a car. This "feature" is _insanely_ dangerous. Whatever idiot bureaucrat decided that having crappy machine vision software jerk the steering wheel around while you're driving should be sent to an island somewhere.

The damn thing tried to kill me every time we came up on a construction area on the freeway, because it got completely flummoxed by the lane realignment. I couldn't turn it off until we parked the car, and we were on the freeway. Fighting that piece of crap for an hour made for the most exhausting drive of my life.

Far from being mandated, I can't believe that safety regulators allow _anything_ to jerk around the wheel at 60MPH.

Beaches, parks, and playgrounds were routinely closed. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/us/newsom-beach-closing-c...

This isn't effective at a large org, but if you're running a small company/startup, just have an engineer "help out" with support every so often. We'd ask devs to run the support desk when the person was on vacation and also had a general rotation through.

It's good for building customer empathy but also for helping the people who build the product understand how it's used. The intuition you build up from those experiences is very powerful.

Also, about two hours into handling support tickets for the same issue, 99% of devs will just fix the problem. So you create a very elegant incentive structure for bugfixing that circumvents a lot of the traditional structural issues.

Of course you can't do this in a big company, which is one of the structural disadvantages that come with size.

This is my favorite thing about Kagi; you can do both. If you just append a question mark, it'll run the search through a simple LLM and give you those results (with citations) right before standard search. From there, you can proceed into a more sophisticated frontier model if that's more effective.

"Search" can mean a lot of things. Sometimes I just want a website but can't remember the URL (traditional); other times I want an answer (LLMs); and other times, I want a bunch of resources to learn more (search+LLMs).

This analysis strongly suggests an Eastern European locale masquerading (with occasional oversights) as Chinese: https://rheaeve.substack.com/p/xz-backdoor-times-damned-time...

Oh, my suggestion is simple: use words people understand and stop arguing over terminology. No goal is achieved browbeating people over terminology. Oh, and whatever you do, don't _make up words_! Talk about inaccessibility.

This community needs to be more open and more welcoming, not more esoteric and closed-off.

This is another huge problem with RMS: the nitpicky obsession with language. Although, in fairness, this seems to be an issue with a lot of technically-minded people. Words are not like code; a word can be imperfect but work well enough in context. Code isn't like this, of course. Even if it's obvious from context that you're writing a conditional, using "=" instead of "==" won't work. But language isn't like that; "close enough" can be just fine, and over time, meanings can evolve.

"Open-source" is a term that a lot of people know and use. It's fine. It's not perfect, and its meaning does not perfectly encompass everything that FSF stands for. Who cares. It's good enough. These arcane, pedantic debates about "libre" (not an English word) versus "FOSS" (an acronym that must be learned) versus "free" (a word with a confusing valence of connotative meanings) are off-putting and distracting.

A lot of activists get distracted by this kind of nerd-bait. Somehow, smart people get convinced that if only we can get people using the right words "I call them used not users" then we'll win the argument via some linguistic cheat code or something. It just doesn't work like that. Here's a good discussion of how climate activists can't get out of their own way on natural gas terminology and some evidence for why the entire debate is pointless: https://strongmessagehere.substack.com/p/words-arent-magic

Maybe I'm out of the mainstream, but his dogged insistence on it is pathetic. It actually annoys me when I see "GNU/Linux" every time I log into Debian. It feels less like a tribute to the GNU project and more like giving in to his browbeating.

Honestly, if RMS were less of a jerk about it, I'd feel the other way: he and his organization did a lot, and it'd be great of Debian to credit them. But his juvenile bizarre obsession with it, at least for me, is a perfect example of the backfire effect.