If StackOverflow dies because nobody uses it anymore, the entirety of its knowledge is now only available through LLMs that trained on it.
If a blog dies out because the author gave up writing, the entirety of its knowledge is now only available through LLMs that trained on it.
If people stop writing books because they cant outcompete generated content, that knowledge is also lost to LLMs.
If people stop making art because they can't outcompete generated art, that is also lost to LLMs.
So yeah, they haven't directly taken anything away, but the consequences of what they are doing may still have that outcomes - and it does look like that's the version of reality we're about to get.
> If $X dies because ..., the entirety of its knowledge is now only availabe through LLMs that trained on it.
And archive.org. And scraped copies people have around for various reasons. And libraries. And even in the first-party source, should they just leave it be instead of shutting down and destroying copies in pure spite.
The knowledge did not disappear, and it shows no sign of disappearing faster than it loses value - which is the usual case, as all the examples you gave always come with an expiry date. For StackOverflow, that's measured in low years; for blogs, high years to a decade. Past that point, we enter the realm of curating and preserving knowledge past its commercial utility expiry date, which is a separate endeavor, and one that LLMs not only don't threaten, but actively aid.
It's just a local minimum. Things today are generally pretty good, and work generally well.
The only issue is that things work well all in the same way, and deficiencies are also shared.
Things will improve as creatives try far-out ideas outside of the local minima. But all those ideas will then be copied into the mono-thing.
At the end of the day, if this isn't about art, I don't see the issue. If your website exists to perform a function, I would rather it looks and acts like all of the other websites in the world.
What the author suggests is remarkably close to the proposition of OpenViking. I've been testing a few memory solutions and OpenViking is one of my favorites so far.
If the problem is scalability, just rate limit git commands on free accounts already. Nobody realistically need to push multiple times per minute, and that alone is bound to trickle down to anything that triggers on commits and pushes.
My point is: they blame it on scale. If that's the story they want us to believe, then they have to explain WHY such a simple fix isn't possible.
There may be non technical reasons for it, even: legal, or PR, but if they want me to believe the "scalability excuse" they need to convince me they're trying.
I don’t know, but typically when orgs don’t make logical decisions, it’s because internal politics are incentivizing something else.
I suspect that rate-limits would fly in the face of a lot of narratives like “Azure is ready for hyperscale”. And getting eyes on Github is probably a part of their Copilot product strategy.
There are other options. I worked for a startup called NVXL and we were programming DNNs into FPGAs using OpenCL, on custom boards we built to plug into NVME. It worked great, but it wasn't fast enough at the time to compete with Nvidia, or even Intel AVX512. Ultimately the company failed, but maybe some hybrid like that could work for LLMs? I haven't been up to date on how DNNs and LLMs look like under the hood these days, but there's got to be someone doing something similar.
He’s trying to do his job and the angry mob predictably came in to bully an easy target about unrelated things. Just take a look at some of the (thankfully flagged, mostly) responses.
I'm going through and flagging the guideline-breaking comments (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348639) - I'd encourage you to do that, too, to help preserve the quality of HN.
Thanks, every Musk-related thread on HN is like this, it's very tiresome. We get it, the man is controversial but I'm not on HN to read reddit-like kneejerk comments, I want to read insightful and technical ones.
We don't get to use technology for technologies sake, and pretend it doesn't have social and political consequences or connections. Musk touched a lot of lives when he ransacked the federal government. A LOT of lives. Expecting people forget that because of some SaaS dev tools, or even a new EV, is a lot to ask.
Seeing the low-effort Reddit-tier snipes on every single post remotely related to him is tiring. I don't think it's a lot to ask of the supposedly intelligent, logical HN crowd to keep the outrage limited to posts that specifically discuss those topics.
Have you never heard the expression don’t feed the trolls? If you actually have a problem with the tone and not just the content, ignore them and move on
I hope you don't actually believe that USAID helped lives, it's literally a propaganda arm of the government directly intervening in the politics of other countries and being a covert operation for murder and financing dictatorships. That Americans think that sacking it costs "millions of African's lives" is the pinnacle of comedy.
Lancet is run by left-wing academic ideologues who do not practice medicine clinically, the publication advanced untested theories as policy during COVID and then recommended exceptions for BLM protesting.
> We don't get to use technology for technologies sake, and pretend it doesn't have social and political consequences or connections.
Nobody is """pretending""" that in this thread.
The reality that is being asserted is that (1) politics doesn't have to be on-topic for every forum, (2) it's very explicitly not the focus of HN, and (3) even if it were on-topic the guidelines are very clear about ways to engage in a civil fashion and a very large number of comments on Musk-related posts are extremely clearly not doing this and breaking the guidelines.
Hence, downvoting and flagging are the correct things to do.
> politics doesn't have to be on-topic for every forum
The idea that you could separate “politics” from a topic as broad as technology is almost laughable. Yes, this is a bad place to discuss election outcomes and candidate nominations. But tech and its social implications are wrapped up in ways that can’t be separated.
A quick skim of your comment history shows you’re very happy to wade into politics, so I feel this is a bad-faith admonishment that attempts to point at guidelines to discourage opinions you disagree with.
Can you please not cross into personal attack? You're right, of course, that technology and politics cannot be separated, and your point about (I'm paraphrasing here) horse-race politics being off topic is well taken. But the last bit was over the line, and not necessary to make your substantive point.
Point your ire towards actual decision makers and leaders who aren't making themselves available for questions. Trying to gotcha a IC who is bound by non disparagement clauses and risks loss of employment for speaking out over the decisions of those far above him is ridiculous.
you are asking a presumably IC or IC-ish worker on decisions that are out of their control or things that should be directed to sales people or the legal people
we all have worked on software. we all know we aren't exactly the best people to point to ToS or how decisions are made higher up from us
"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). "
To me the Saturn made the absolute best choice. The whole game's OST would be burned as audio tracks. I used to - and still can - just drop a game CD into an audio player and enjoy emblematic OST's like Daytona USA, Sonic R and many others in full 44100Hz 16bit audio.
I recall a few PC games did that too: Total Annihilation comes to mind: I also still own the physical media and still can listen to the OST that way.
PlayStation games had that too - not sure if all, but at least some of them. It was especially funny if the game disk failed to load as a game, but opened just fine in the PlayStation's built-in music player.
A fair amount, but far from all of them. AFAIR it was largely a technical decision with trade-offs; games that did it could offer CD-quality music, but wouldn't be able to read data from the disk and play music simultaneously.
I have never, ever, bought anything on TEMU, because anytime I open the website it gives me a gambling roulette for some supposed discount thing. I hate gambling, so everytime I see the roulette I just close the webpage and go do something else.
Well, the whole cheap-generated content craze feels basically like gambling to me to this point, too. Folks are just randomly generating content: books, videos, articles, even applications, and gambling that something will pay for itself.
So now we have Enshitification, Eemufication and Gamblification of the Human Society. Damn I might write something on Substack about that.
The gambling roulette is triply annoying because it will inevitably start walking you through some flow where you're supposedly ending up with a big discount or free items or whatever-the-fuck. And if you're encountering it for the first time, you'll think "ah cool, i can get some cheap chinese gewgaws for free with the thing I actually wanted to buy." And then 10 minutes has gone by and 5 roulette spins and there's $400 worth of bullshit in your cart.
And the thing is, Temu - I was going to buy something from you. I saw an ad or whatever and thought "sure, I'll pay $13 for that keyboard." But then you get pulled into the dopamine labyrinth hell-realm and by the time you're out they've wasted 15 minutes of your time and you don't even remember what you came in for.
For sure, the ridiculous promo games are best skipped (when even possible to skip!!) as 99% of the time they're just that you win the right to get a discount on a future order based on this next order. And those discounts are always described as like "a $400 credit" ... when it's really the sum of "50 cents off of $5, $1.50 off of $10... $30 off $250" and so on, so you will have to place like 8 orders of increasingly hilarious value to "use" all of your "$400."
All that said, there have been a decent number of things that I bought from them which I've found incredibly useful. Just like, phone stands, ODBII reader, sticky notepads that look like Windows 95 Notepad windows, teeny tiny wireless earbuds I use while sleeping, etc.
I draw a line on advertising for myself: if it's just letting me know a service or product exists, it's fine. It's a business necessity. If I ever start a business, I need a way to communicate to potential customers that my business exists, that's fair use.
When the ads start being misleading, manipulative, emotional, irrational - then we're out of the fair use field and into the "this should be a crime" field.
the typical phrase in English, "I draw the line at advertising for myself" would mean that is the thing that has gone too far, something you will not accept. you used a slightly different phrase, but it is still where I draw the line.
I'm with the developer here. At some point the effort is just not worth it anymore.
Facebook, as a platform, has long since lost the relevance as a social network, it is basically just an ad platform these days. So why keep wasting resources on trying to block ads from an ad platform? A user who does not want to see ads on Facebook probably should just stop using Facebook altogether.
I get the appeal for staying on Instagram, Youtube, Reddit and other platforms despite the ads: these provide some sort of - maybe controversial - value for the user, even if it's just cat videos or whatever. Facebook has lost its value proposition so long ago it's hard for me to understand why would anyone tolerate using it to this day.
uBlock's resources are much better allocated into other initiatives: like Chrome .
At some point facebook has switched gears to be more about public/semipublic forums and marketplace. If you wanted the old facebook that was for your immediate family/friends/acquaintances then it isnt really relevant anymore compared to group texts.
I just gave FB a few screenlengths of scrolling. There was one post from a family member and about 20 from people I am not friends with and groups I do not follow. I used to use an extension to get rid of that extra stuff (Purity) but at some point I stopped fighting it and stopped visiting too.
> it's hard for me to understand why would anyone tolerate using it to this day
Apparently, they have 3B MAUs and 2B DAUs. So you are in some real bubble. While I don't use it, my parents and all their friends use Facebook to share pictures and exchange messages.
If StackOverflow dies because nobody uses it anymore, the entirety of its knowledge is now only available through LLMs that trained on it.
If a blog dies out because the author gave up writing, the entirety of its knowledge is now only available through LLMs that trained on it.
If people stop writing books because they cant outcompete generated content, that knowledge is also lost to LLMs.
If people stop making art because they can't outcompete generated art, that is also lost to LLMs.
So yeah, they haven't directly taken anything away, but the consequences of what they are doing may still have that outcomes - and it does look like that's the version of reality we're about to get.
reply