vohk

I think open source will remain competitive among smaller players and adjacent industries wanting to avoid lock-in with the majors. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc are all out to win - they require profit extraction from their R&D. China seems to have, over the near term, accepted that they can not (or at least have not) pull ahead and so open source collaboration speeds the collective development, keeps them close to the frontier, and ensures their industry has access to learn from and implement. The USA playing export controls games with Fable made that aspect very stark.

But I agree that's the catch - it doesn't make sense to throw money at open source models in hopes of direct return, so you need a nation or conglomerate to do it so as to control the technology they rely on.

I think that's just a natural part of the times changing and generations having their own icons. In contrast to the shambling undead of Mickey Mouse and other eternally recycled franchises, I think it's OK to for things to fade a little. If nothing else, it leaves things for future generations to rediscover and make their own.

Not the OP, but I appreciated its attempts to declutter and rethink the layout. It encourages a full screen, minimalist style, and jumping between workspaces for different task sets. Hovering and slide out menus rather than permanent bars (although those are still an option). It also brought in some features like Split View before they hit mainline Firefox releases.

Unfortunately, I found it had some unfortunate video playback bugs for me on Linux, so I ended up bouncing back to Firefox. I'm also bit leery of relying on smaller projects with all the supply chain issues these days...

I think your analogy makes the opposite case better. A Rolls-Royce and a Pinto have the same real commute time because horsepower isn't the bottleneck, and they both get passengers from point to point. Sure the Pinto explodes a bit but much like the actuaries at Ford, you might well judge the cost of an occasional explosion to be a trade-off you can easily compensate for.

I would argue the process these days has more to do with the harness than the model, at least when we're talking about the SOTA options. Claude Code's biggest advantage isn't Opus, rather it's the shared knowledge the community has been building and sharing around using it effectively. Almost all of the out-of-the-box tutorials and skills and frameworks are build for Claude first, then Codex maybe.

I'd go further and say that CC and Codex are not even the best harnesses available, they just offer the most subsidized rate plans.

The AHSTF performed poorly because successive Albertan provincial governments slashed contributions to it, not because of the ghost of the NEP. It was established in 1976, then contributions were cut in half in 1983, and eliminated entirely in 1987. The NEP was gone by 1985.

What hurt Alberta was every cyclical crash in oil prices, and their steadfast refusal to implement additional revenue streams like a provincial sales tax while spending instead of saving their resource-boom surpluses.

Oh, that's promising, thanks! I've just been using the npm version.

Dang, I thought this was going to be integration for Codex Cloud, not the (still not available for Linux) Codex App. Not even Codex CLI, alas. You can still access the Cloud option from a mobile browser well enough but I prefer an app UI for poking at the things on the go.

I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. Or rather turn them into little better than comment sections on news sites; thriving but worthless.

I'm active in a number of online communities that are doing just fine but the difference is those all involve ongoing relationships, built over time and with engagement across multiple platforms. I've no doubt this clock is ticking too but it's still harder to fake a user across a mix of text chat, voice and video calls, playing an online game, etc and when much of the web of relationships extends back into real life activity.

But I agree the golden age of easy anonymous connections online has ended.

That's likely a factor but Deezer reports that's it's 28% of their ingest as of last September. Being a smaller target doesn't account for all of it, or that openly AI "artists" are not being delisted from the larger platforms, nor are they providing ways to filter them out.

https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/09/28-fully-ai-generated-mu...

I don't have a ton of hope just yet because I think it's still an incentives problem rather than a technical one.

I got tired of the increasing AI slop in my YouTube Music feed and switched to Deezer a few months ago. Since then, not a single AI artist I've been able to spot. If a relatively marginal player like that can manage it, why can't Spotify or YTM? My suspicion is simply that Deezer actually actually tries.

It's the same problem with Google and search. Kagi and others have demonstrated that you can produce better results with an infinitesimal fraction of the budget, and Google is still plenty competent where they care to be. This won't start to get fixed until they see a financial incentive to do so.

I'm not about to put any money down - I lack that degree of confidence in my prognosticating - but I doubt the terminal will ever really vanish, for much the same reason that 20 years of touch screens hasn't really put in a dent in a keyboard and mouse for serious work, and game controllers have barely changed despite multiple attempts at VR and other interfaces, and why the stylus is still going strong after more than 5000 years. Sometimes you just get it right.

A text interface is just really damn good at efficient and precise information delivery and interaction, in a way that takes a lot more work for a GUI to match, and they are composable in a way GUIs simply are not. Most users won't - and currently don't - care about terminals, but I doubt it will ever stop being a standard tool for power users.

I don't doubt we'll see new paradigms emerge, but I think they'll come in the form of higher level abstractions for certain classes of task rather than a replacement for the sort of TUIs and GUIs we have today.

I think that's part of the way there, but I think you would need to go farther. The main failure state I anticipate is the appointment of a designated fall guy to be responsible. The person would need to reasonably be considered qualified for starters, so you couldn't just find someone desperate willing to take the risk for a paycheck.

And it shouldn't just be one person, unless they are at the very top of a small pyramid. Legal culpability needs to percolate upwards to ensure leadership has the proper incentive. No throwing your Head of Safety to the wolves while you go back to gilding your parachute.

As already mentioned, this is the noun use but also different connotations.

To my thinking, to orchestrate or steer suggests a conductor or driver, an outside entity providing direction. A master agent creating and directing subagents could reasonably be called an orchestrator.

A harness is what the horse wears to pull a cart, or what connects a pilot to a parachute and provides the controls to tug on and steer. It might provide guidance or capability, but not active direction. It's also a fairly common use in hardware ( a wire harness) and software (a testing harness) already.

I can't offer an example of code, but considering researchers were able to cause models to reproduce literary works verbatim, it seems unlikely that a git repository would be materially different.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/ai-memorizati...

I think that becomes more common with income brackets that can start to feel like "enough".

If you've spent time struggling to make ends meet, even median income can feel like previously unimaginable wealth and security, and workplace satisfaction is rarely something that you had a great deal of choice around. If you've spent most of a decade making six figures with benefits, it's easier to decide an extra 10k or even 50k isn't worth the added stress.

Cost of living and personal situation (dual incomes, dependents) can shift that needle around quite a lot too.

Put a different way, would you say Fiverr enables people to be more creative?

Using AI to create an artistic work has more in common with commissioning art than creating it. Just instead of a person, you're paying the owners of a machine built on theft because it's cheaper and more compliant. It isn't really your creativity on display, and it certainly isn't that of the model or the hosting company.

The smallest part of any creative work is the prompt. The blood and the soul of it live in overcoming the constraints and imperfections. Needing to learn how to sing or play an instrument isn't an impediment to making music, it's a fundamental aspect of the entire exercise.

I had the same association but interestingly this version appears to be a "remix" of TigerBeetle's style guide, by an unrelated individual. At a glance, there is a lot of a crossover but some changes as well.

I think the point is well made though. When you're building something like a transactions database, the margin for error is rather low.

I keep a home server for exactly that reason but I still use cloud for some things to have an off site copy as well. There are some things I don't want to risk losing over burst pipes, a fire, burglary, power surges, etc.

Nah.

Actual engineers have professional standards bodies and legal liability when they shirk and the bridge falls down or the plane crashes or your wiring starts on fire.

Software "engineers" are none of those things but can at least emulate the approaches and strive for reproducibility and testability. Skilled craftsman; not engineers.

Prompt "engineers" is yet another few steps down the ladder, working out mostly by feel what magic words best tickle each model, and generally with no understanding of what's actually going on under the hood. Closer to a chef coming up with new meals for a restaurant than anything resembling engineering.

The battle on the use of language around engineer has long been lost but applying it to the subjective creative exercise of writing prompts is just more job title inflation. Something doesn't need to be engineering to be a legitimate job.

Because consumers have less disposable income with all the AI-enabled layoffs, the bigger bonanza will come if OpenAI creates educational pathways via AI to enable more people to make money with AI.

Who do you imagine will be throwing money at all these side-hustle "make money with AI" business you envision? No doubt there will be a few- there already are a few- but as the market gets increasingly flooded with AI slop enterprise with very little value add, that well is going to dry up quick.

It's not different than all those content creators making videos offering to teach you the secrets to easy money... instead of just making all that easy money themselves.

Regarding the bookmarks bar, Settings / Appearance / Show Bookmarks Bar. If the setting is off, the bar only appears on new tabs. I found that by accident.

The problem is when using a model hosted by those labs (ex: OpenAI only allowed access to o3 through their own direct API, not even Azure), there still exists a significant risk of cheating.

There's a long history of that sort of behaviour. ISPs gaming bandwidth tests when they detect one is being run. Software recognizing being run in a VM or on a particular configuration. I don't think it's a stretch to assume some of the money at OpenAI and others has gone into spotting likely benchmark queries and throwing on a little more compute or tagging them for future training.

I would be outright shocked if most of these benchmarks are even attempting serious countermeasures.

Mainly I don't think Proton is serious competitor here. I'm not sure there is much of a market demand for mediocre white labelled LLMs priced at a premium. I can see it carving a bit of a niche with privacy-focused customers already in their ecosystem, but I don't see this taking off for them.

I echo the parent comment. I'm really on a Proton user for email and VPN. The quality drops off rather quickly after that. Calendar, Drive, Pass, and Wallet are all adequate at best; their primary selling point is not being Google rather than being particularly well built or supported. I would rather see them focus on being a truly competitive ecosystem.

I'm also not terribly impressed at the way they've positioned Lumo as a separate service from the existing Scribe AI features, and so conveniently not part of Ultimate plans.

I've not gone looking for videos specifically, but my experience there is that Kagi seems to focus on what you've explicitly searched for, where Google and others have increasingly leaned into interpreting your intent.

Google's approach works well enough when you're searching for a commodity and you don't care terribly much about the specific source. I get the impression Google, especially post-LLM, wants to divorce satisfying your question from the underlying sources.

I find Kagi is better at finding a specific thing, especially if you're willing to engage with it as a tool, ye olde search engine style. If my query doesn't find what I want, it's usually apparent why and I can reframe it.

I think there will be solutions, although I don't think getting there will be pretty.

Google's case (and Meta and spam calls and others) is at least in part an incentives problem. Google hasn't been about delivering excellent search to users for a very long time. They're an ad company and their search engine is a tool to better deliver ads. Once they had an effective monopoly, they just had to stay good enough not to lose it.

I've been using Kagi for a few years now and while SEO spam and AI garbage is still an issue, it is far less of one than with Google or Bing. My conclusion is these problems are at least somewhat addressable if doing so is what gets the business paid.

But I think a real long term solution will have to involved a federated trust model. It won't be viable to index everything dumped on the web; there will need to be a component prioritizing trust in the author or publisher. If that follows the same patterns as email (ex: owned by Google and Microsoft), then we're really screwed.

I think I agree with the general thrust but I have to say I've yet to be impressed with LLMs for web search. I think part of that comes from most people using Google as the benchmark, which has been hot garbage for years now. It's not hard to be better than having to dig 3 sponsored results deep to get started parsing the list of SEO spam, let alone the thing you were actually searching for.

But compared to using Kagi, I've found found LLMs end up wasting more of my time by returning a superficial survey with frequent oversights and mistakes. At the final tally I've still found it faster to just do it myself.

I will say I do love LLMs for getting a better idea of what to search for, and for picking details out of larger blocks.

That's a two year old release now. I think Notion may have a fair point on this one.

I think you're anthropomorphizing there. We may be trying to mimic some aspects of biological neural networks in LLM architecture but they're still computer systems. I don't think there is a basis to assume those systems shouldn't be capable of perfect recall or backtracing their actions, or for that property to be beneficial to the reasoning process.

There, the phone addiction crisis solved.

I think you're putting too much emphasis on The Algorithm. It's a problem, and I agree it's probably the worst offender, but similar problems were observed decades ago with children (and adults...) allowed to watch too many hours of uninterrupted TV. Cutting back to chronological feeds might improve some things but I don't think that's the root of the issue.

I would suggest the primary difference between then and now is accessibility. As a kid, my screen time was limited not just by my parents indulgence but the social pressure from using a shared device. Smart phones let you carry your personal distraction with you.

I agree they are a wonderful invention but I'm not sure grade school students need to be connecting to anyone, anywhere throughout the entire school day.

The justification is Trump wants to do to Canada much what Putin is doing to Ukraine. Russia being allowed to take Ukraine legitimizes world powers engaging in conquest within their sphere. It's really that simple.

The talk about fentanyl, the supposed trade imbalance, and all the rest is just smoke and noise, because if he said that he wanted to raid Canada for resources and Lebensraum it might actually threaten his support.

He's not being subtle in this. He and his people have made constant comments that Canada doesn't work as a nation, that the border is artificial, and even explicitly that the tariffs would just go away if Canada became the 51st state. This is economic warfare driven by manifest destiny.