At this point the barrier for me to install an app is pretty high. If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions. If by extension that degrades the value I get from your site, then I just won't use the site, and I won't be contributing to ADU stats you promote to advertisers.
Every single company has turned this into a situation where I cannot trust your apps with privacy or security, and the risk and hassle isn't worth the install.
This is arguably the most irritating thing with just about every largecorp developer: "os that hasn't been updated in 6 years? Sure boss!". Os that is built specifically around security and privacy with daily updates: "No, you can't do that". Annoying - yes. Safe way to make sure I will stop being your customer - also YES!
This describes my life as an open source maintainer at the moment!
In the first 10 years of the rclone project we received about 20 security disclosures through GitHub. We had to deal with over 40 in the last month! That has taken a huge amount of my time, even using AI tools to triage and come up with fixes for review.
The hit rate for those security disclosures is pretty good - about 75% of them have a nugget of something which needs looking at. The configurations for rclone have got increasingly unlikely so I'm hoping they will dry up eventually.
I was considering just merging the fixes straight to master just to make my life easier rather than holding a dozen independent security fixes on branches and merging them at the point release and hoping not to have too many conflicts to fix up. I've decided to stick with the process for the moment.
GitHub assigns CVEs for the advisories. Before the AI apocalypse they took 2-3 days for an assignment but now it they are running at 3-4 weeks so I have to send the point releases out with CVE-PENDING in the changelog which isn't ideal.
Not sure what the solution is, but it is definitely a problem for us.
Produce working product first, validate the idea, stabilize the business, start generating profit, and then you can start optimizing your costs.
In fact optimization is by far the easiest part of the process because there are many system programming experts on this HN thread who consider these optimizations to be trivial.
> But I also think the demand for "fast/cheap/good-enough" models is just about to take off.
There's a sort of "revelation" I had in ~early '24 when I used a 7B local model with a library called Guidance (initially out of MS, then the team moved) to create a flow where the model would receive pseudocode for tests, first write the tests, and once I approved then started writing code until the tests passed. This was before "thinking" models, and yet using that library I was able to "guide" the model in the required "prompt / instruct" context such that it was working towards completion, and I saw the first things like we see now in the thinking traces "oh, test x doesn't pass because blah, I need to..." and so on.
Anyway, the revelation was "even if the models never improve, I'll have years of fun finding out all the ways I can use these things". And, obviously, the models improved a lot since then. But I think that revelation can still be applied, as a sort of "truism". We have, right now, access to things that 10-20 years ago would be considered magic. We are still finding ways of cobbling together systems with glue, duct tape and prayers and find new things they can do.
I think the "good-enough" stage has come not just for API models (cheap, fast, etc) but for local as well. Even if slower, even if clunkier, but they are good enough for a set of ever increasing tasks, and what's more it's incredibly fun to work with them.
"Quantized models are no longer permitted on the Hugging Face platform. Reduced precision models are a safety hazard and a violation of our TOS. Click here to speak with a sales representative about our many exciting cloud hosting offerings or enterprise GPU packages."
So let's see, in the past few years we've had the Boar's head listeria recalls, Taylor farms lettuce contamination, the McDonalds e.coli recalls in 14 states, now chicken wings...
Defunding the FDA and forcing out 4500 staff via DOGE cuts caused this. Right now we have 400 safety inspectors covering 36,000 facilities vs the FDA's own estimates they need at least 1,500 inspectors.
If your app is just a webpage that forces me to use an app just so you can spy on me I just won't use your product. I've switched brokers over it, I swapped banks, I stopped shopping at certain stores.
I'm done. The only say I have is in how I spend my money. Those companies won't get any of mine if I can help it.
I really like htmx, and intercooler.js before it. It's been a while since I tried to convince a co-worker to use it, it might be time to try again. Either way I can't wait to try out the new version.
I guess this unfortunately means HuggingFace won't be "the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three-letter ticker" as the cofounders originally intended:
"When we started the company, a running joke with my co-founders was that we wanted to be the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three-letter ticker when you go in the NASDAQ."
-- Clem Delangue (https://unsupervisedlearning.substack.com/p/the-future-of-open-vs-closed-source)
I work on ADA a lot for my company. Please put on some headphones, turn on the voice assistant of your OS, put on some blinders, and run your app or website… no mouse, just keyboard.
1. Democracy is about access; make sure everyone has access to your software.
2. The keyboard allows folks with disabilities and power users to fly through your website/app… that being said… the second a tab is off, the person with a disability flies into a wall.
Lol!! Don't forget. This is a modern day class war. This current LLM based so called AI, could have easily used for automating simple tasks and employees could have easily provided with 3 day work week. The goal is to monopolize human knowledge with all the stolen data and make profits from it.
> Clean Air Act (CAA) Acid Rain Program (ARP) does not apply to power generation facilities that are not connected to a public electricity grid, commonly referred to as “islanded” power generation facilities.
This of course makes no sense whatever, as whether or not a power generator is connected to the grid has nothing to do with its environmental impact.
I see this happen from time to time. Lately, almost all of the apps work fine on GrapheneOS. The best strategy is to keep writing the business once every two or so weeks that you can’t log in to and use the app. Don’t go too technical at first, because most of the time, the moment they hear things like “rooted” or “unofficial,” they just say your phone is the issue. To date, I was able to convince, or at least contribute to, making three apps work on GOS.
I was pleasantly surprised when I attempted to scroll down and realized everything the author wanted to present fit on-screen. It's almost ironic that this site is able to make such an obvious, compelling presentation without being overly verbose or complicated (something which LLMs have a hard time doing). I wouldn't read TOO deeply into what is being presented, but the author has done a good job to not inject their own bias into the presentation which works well.
I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs. Something I've noticed in my own writing is that I now present lists of examples in a consistent way: "... such as <example 1>, <example 2>, etc., ...". I started to notice I was using this pattern quite a bit somewhat recently, but I took a quick look at some of my social media posts and realized it's been occurring for a while. I had realized that I grown accustomed to this kind of language because, especially early on, LLMs would focus too much on the specific examples I'd provide when, really, I was just trying to give them a sense of what I was looking for. I just picked up that providing two examples then adding the "etc." worked to get the LLM to not focus so much on the specific examples and to understand that they need to consider more than what I explicitly presented. Of course, now I write like that in my social media comments, in Slack with my colleagues, etc. :>
I'd be interested to see if anyone can identify trends like this, since I think the human-language component of the adoption of LLMs is probably being somewhat neglected despite probably being surely dramatically affected.
In 2011 I got a 143€ reimbursement from Dell for an E6420 laptop that I had bought for 910€.
Maybe I got lucky but I called the customer service, told the lady I did not agree with the Windows license terms, fully ready to argue my case and she just went "oh, ok, let me just edit a new invoice and wire you the money for Windows plus the Antivirus plus etc.".
Which was extra nice because I had no idea I was in fact charged for the bloatware, but I still got ~50€ for it on top of the OS license price.
This being 15 years ago it feels like a forever unsolved issue. My opinion remains the same, that a personal computer should not be tied to a specific OS. But now with smartphones the hardware/software (de)coupling situation seems even worse.
It's hard to read this article and keep track of all the philosophical confusions at once.
Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it. Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of consideration by moral agents) is independent of both human care and consciousness. Of course, we might try to argue that consciousness implies moral patienthood or vice versa, but that's an argument, not a definition.
The short paragraph about Descartes has at least three errors. (1) The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia. (2) The subjective nature of qualia does not imply that they aren't real or that they're socially constructed. (3) He conflates the existence of a self with consciousness.
The core premise is not only dubious scientifically (an alien species can't be conscious until humans discover it?), but also deeply problematic. It would imply that it's morally permissible to torture a sentient being as long as no human cares about it.
To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth. As a developer I keep running into problems that require some measure of creativity to solve or workaround. And regardless of how many years I've been in the industry I'm not running out of issues. They just keep getting more obscure. On the other hand leadership communication and problem resolution seem like the exact opposite of creativity and innovation. Its all about time proven, reliable solutions. Same layoff notices, recommendations, design everywhere. Repetitive, boring, politically correct and therefore easy to automate. Accountability will likely become reason n1 for keeping leadership roles intact that is until people become accustomed to AIs everywhere. After all what's the difference between a bot showing a layoff notice at 5am or an AI generated message/video from a human doing the very same thing.
If you haven’t experienced suica, it’s like magically fast. Faster than NFC, faster than Apple Pay, faster than tap to pay, faster than Disney magic bands, faster than your work badge. It absolutely floored me every time I used it in Japan and it’s a full payment transaction.
The infancy phase of this technology is represented by the pursuit of making wildly grand, wildly expensive, all-purpose models that somehow discern a user's full accurate intent from a lazy, underdeveloped, vague idea that they ambiguously and poorly express in a couple dozen words.
The adolescence will arrive as those outsized and ill-considered ambitions collapse and we instead see a cambrian explosion of restrained but efficient model+harness-tuples that have been distilled, finetuned, and rigged to deliver on narrowly scoped but idiosyncratically-shaped tasks with incredible efficiency and erogonomics.
Who considers PayPal a sweetheart?! PayPal is by far one of the most heinous companies I have interacted with on a regular basis.
Outside the US many banks offer simple QR payment options, the direct transfer difficulties US citizens encounter that make services like PayPal and Zelle necessary are entirely self imposed.
I had to keep accessibility in mind a lot in my previous job (web development for a university). The thing that I consistently found was that, the more accessible a website was, the better the experience for everyone, not just people with disabilities.
> Reading Cognito docs feels like someone took three separate manuals, threw them in a blender, and then sprinkled in some outdated Stack Overflow answers for flavor.
This is my experience with basically all of AWS documentation. It is nearly always either (1) far too high-level to be of any actual use, or (2) far too verbose, with a massive volume of superfluous information I need to parse and discard before I get to the stuff I am trying to figure out.
They are intentionally cruel. Its the point. They aren't even trying to hide it. The posts on official Whitehouse X account are borderline gleeful on topics of deportation and immigration. I'm in dis-belief at times.
Every single company has turned this into a situation where I cannot trust your apps with privacy or security, and the risk and hassle isn't worth the install.