HN user
My employer: https://www.cpr.org My blog: https://troyvit.net My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/troyvitullo/
meet.hn/city/us-Longmont
Oooh I didn't realize there was a grand scheme of things! I thought it was just a bunch of douchy SaSS guys who are burning coal as they feel their way along.
trying to secure funding under the guise of sovereignty to protect their market power in Europe.
That's kind-of what sovereignty is: protecting European market power from external forces. It sucks that the funding is coming from US oligarchs though.
Fallen way behind in what, exactly? Before you answer it might be a good idea to look at what Mistral's core competencies are look at what Chinese models do, and decide if they are even in the same race.
It's a different scale. This is a French company that is about 1/10 the cost (and inference window) of the US SOTA players. They also diversify their stakeholders more and in general just have a different focus than your OpenAIs and Anthropics.
There's always public radio.
* If you're in your 50s and listening to the radio you're probably rich and we want you!
* More live DJs for sure
That said, if you're going to listen on your iPhone there are plenty of good DJs there too. dandelionradio.com for me.
Kagi likes to hear of searches that don't work well and it's worth sharing on their discord[1]. I have problems with searches there too, and I'm too lazy to share, so I'm kinda being a hypocrite but maybe it'll help.
There were 3,905 words above any mention of an RCE. Can you blame them?
Somebody on HN recommended drip awhile ago:
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.drip/
It's not mentioned in the article.
Like Euki it's local-only. I don't know how they compare as far as features but it's cool that there are two good apps out there.
I see a lot of people saying 7 letters is too long, but I feel like the additional hints about where to go when you guess wrong helps make up for that.
It took me a minute to get what was going on and I wasted a few guesses but I like that it requires a new strategy.
I was able to adapt my first go-to wordle words to 7 letters and realized that they should be different because of what you learn from guess to guess.
I suck at wordle and got this in like 7 guesses. Is your model to keep it on your site or do you plan to license the game?
After two years your battery will be almost unusable so genuinely it doesn't matter.
Is this a new thing with newer OnePlus phones? We've had a OnePlus 7 and OnePlus 8 in our house for years and their batteries still work fine.
Most AI is SaaS, so in a way this whole argument is circular. It's just one SaaS product gobbling up some other ones.
That said, "White Bread" is a fun book about the enshittification (not using that word lightly) of bread: https://biblioreads.eu.org/book/show/13122087-white-bread
A lot of what the article describes about SaaS is also in the book: the convenience, the standardization, the offloading of time, etc. The article doesn't really talk about the rot that has been going on in the SaaS realm though while the parallels in "White Bread" do.
The article talks about the high standards of bread making in the 12th century and then fast-forwards to the 1960s with a brief stop in 1928 to celebrate slicing tech. It leaves out the dangerous working conditions, the poisonous additives used to save money on bread and the cut-throat competition between U.S. bread companies that spurred those things on. Even ad campaigns that (much like this article) belittled baking bread yourself. Those same things are going on in the SaaS industry, but with software instead of food.
So why do people buy their bread and use SaaS?
because it was easier, because it was consistent, and because the alternative cost time and attention they’d rather have spent elsewhere.
And just look at where we're spending that time and attention. Maybe it's different for businesses, but consumers are more miserable than ever because they rent garbage and eat bread where high-fructose-corn-syrup is the third ingredient.
I think the SaaS companies that survive will be the ones that understand they sell convenience and accountability.
I think we've seen, whether that's with our phones (now basically a SaaS platform), our news, our health care, or our entertainment that convenience is enough. Accountability still counts for some b2b SaaS platforms, but the reason why the largest ones have so many lawyers is to get out of that accountability every time they can. And they do.
So yeah I guess I'm depressed that the article is mostly right. I think where it diverges though is that AI has helped me bake a lot more of my own software. It has put me in a place where I spend more time and attention on quality deliverables than I have before. It's too bad SaaS in its current form won't die, the same way it's sad that people are so caught up in their virtual lives that they won't bake a little of their own bread, especially when there's a convenient machine sitting on their counter ready to go.
I sure hope you're right though. To me x402 can subsidize the cost of producing and serving content with payments from the systems that are using it and giving the least back. It can mean more free content for humans with the right payment model.
Saving me 10m in the store 15m of driving both ways and 2-3m of transit is worth more than most items i purchase.
It's the opposite for me. The walk to the store, screwing around in the aisles, dragging my dog into the dressing room, the walk home enjoying the sunset, those things mean so much more than cracking open a box I found on my stoop.
And good for them. If you have the freedom to follow your virtue, no matter how you gained that freedom, why not follow it?
If it sounds like hypocrisy, why? They gained the freedom from the grind and would have stayed if they believed in what they were doing.
That's a great reminded that any Google Doc with a shareable link is basically a public document for all intents and purposes.
I read that as "for all indents and purposes"
Oh man thank you for the clarification <3
That's only the consumer side of it though. As the post states:
Should a developer[...] elect to register themself with Google as a “verified” developer, they should expect to sign up for an account and pay a fee, surrender detailed personal information and upload government-issued identification, and then proceed to register the identifiers and signing keys for all the apps they intend to distribute (now or ever).
Those are big impediments to open development. The agreement developers sign states:
6.5 If You violate any of the Terms or if You distribute malware or other harmful applications, Google may terminate Your access to the ADC…
But they don't actually define "malware" anywhere in the document. Search HN if you want to hear horror stories about how google handles loose definitions and peoples' accounts.
I'm not familiar with that system. Here in the US I can go to the bank and do anything I need personally with an ID. Is that not doable where you are?
Yeah I think I agree.
The big difference I see is in the chip. The PowerPC arguably had its benefits (vectorization) which made it super attractive for bioinformatics, etc., and a lot of that software was Linux-based. People could either buy a super-computer or a G4 (or a cluster of G4s) and get the work they needed done for a fraction of the cost. MacOS (and OSX) were behind on a lot of this stuff compared to Linux then.
Today from what I see the M3-M5 chips are a big leap forward compared to their competitors, and it just happened to hit at the same time LLMs became popular. I imagine there are some similar, specialized needs with the M[1-5] chips that might benefit from Linux but with OSX's stronger BSD underpinnings it's a different world.
There is information and images that are developmentally harmful to children.
Yeah it's called "advertising."
They've been like this long before they were a digital services company. 25 years ago Yellow Dog Linux (another RPM based distro) had the same challenges working with PowerPC. The scientific community was clamoring for an open platform to use their native Linux software with the PowerPC, YDL filled that niche, and Apple watched their struggles supporting Linux on their platform with detached amusement.
Mistral is generally winning the fights it chooses to fight and that's what they need to do.
Instead of looking at what EU's economy could contribute towards a SotA model it's more accurate to look at what France's economy could contribute, then compare that to the US or China. The scale isn't there. Instead what I like to see is what they can accomplish with that lower scale, and it's stuff like Leanstral, Voxtral and other niche products.
We are not Mistral's target audience. For instance I don't know if Leanstral performs the best as a "formal proof engineering model optimised for automated theorem proving and autoformalization" because I don't even know wth that is or who else does it.
Mistral themselves focus more on b2b; financial services, manufacturing, stuff like that, and they get some big clients that way.
Despite not being their target, I started using them because they have many open models. I continue using them because, yeah EU, but also because the community is great and the tool makes me think more than Claude does. Last, I stick with them because they are one of the few AI companies that are up-front about their environmental impact and are actually trying to minimize it while still providing a decent product.
I don't know about LineageOS, but there is crowd-sourced list of banks that work with GrapheneOS: https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report
More info here: https://grapheneos.org/usage#banking-apps
My credit union wasn't on the list, but it works.
How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?
Like ... a lot? Now if RFC 2549 had been around back then you could get the same point across without trying to describe how information, rather than nectar, might flow through the equivalent of a butterfly's proboscis that happens to stretch around the world.
I think the takeaway is that swarming behavior is not difficult. It's relatively simple, it's cheap, and it's going to grow in effectiveness and smaller actors are going to gain access to it. That's going to be a problem for war-makers who don't take it into account. I think the pilot expressed awe at it because it was part of what beat him.
Man I despise Facebook, no two ways about it. But one time our dog slipped her collar and escaped while we were out of state. We got back late in the evening after she had bolted. We were up all night searching for her and we posted to the Ft. Collins Lost & Found group. We got a few hits that night, and by the next morning there was so much participation that we could trace her movement through town with an accuracy rate of a few blocks. The latest picture was at the intersection of a side-road and the state highway as it left town, so I was down there, looking around and freaking out that she was street pizza, when she booped me on the back of the leg. Don't know how I missed her but I sure am glad she found me.
When social media works right it's an amazing thing. It's just too bad that we don't use 90% of it right. As an example I've never given back to that commons when I see a stray pet.
So you can just use Firefox and turn off all the Mozilla-related junk you don't like. Best of both worlds.
Apple market share (whether by hardware or operating system) was that low for awhile there and by some estimates OSX even dipped down to 2.29%:
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/
And that doesn't even count the dark years of OS9 in the '90s. Have they lost the operating system wars?
It's probably too annoying for most, but I had a similar problem with KoReader and library books because those too depend on DRM. I ended up keeping KoReader as an app, then just not loading the app when I was reading a library book. It wasn't too bad.
KoReader also gave me a lot of freedom to manage the bad battery life of my Kobo Sage before it died of other causes. Definitely worth the extra cognitive load of dealing with the two experiences.