People aren't going to forums and social media to hype up their own good code to nearly the same degree as otherwise. It's orders of magnitude more negative. There are ways of using AI well and using it poorly. There's no reason to correct your copmetition's unforced errors, or giving away an advantage in using these tools, for so long as there is a moat of effort and esoteric knowledge.
Just because 99% of the things you read are critical and negatively biased doesn't mean the subsequent determination or the consensus among participants in the public conversation have anything to do with reality.
Amodei is on the record about completely automating AI research in 6-12 months. He thinks it's an "exponential" loop & Anthropic is going to be the first to get there. That's not esoteric knowledge, that's the CEO saying so in public at the same time that their consumer facing tool is failing & their automated abuse detection is banning users for legitimate use cases.
I don't consider Anthropic to be one of the teams using AI particularly well. They're building the tools, they're not using the tools in the best, most skillful way possible.
I've been trying to get my parents to move, but until Microsoft Office desktop is able to be run natively on there my parents won't entertain the subject.
I've tried to get them to use the web version of office, I've tried to get them to use OnlyOffice and LibreOffice, I've even tried showing them LaTeX as a last ditch effort, but no, if it isn't true Microsoft Branded Office 2024, the topic isn't even worth discussing [1].
I'm sure there are technical reasons why Wine can't run Office 2024, and I am certainly not trying to criticize the wine developers at all, but until I can show Wine running full-fat MS Office, my parents will always "miss" Windows.
To be clear, I hate MS Office. I do not miss it on Linux. I'm pretty sure my parents could get by just fine with LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or Google Docs, but they won't hear it.
I've also tried to get them to use macOS, since that does have a full-fat MS Office, I've even offered to buy them Macbooks so they can't claim it's "too expensive", and they still won't hear it. I love my parents but they can be stubborn.
[1] Before you accuse me of pushing for "developer UI", LaTeX was not something I led with. I tried the more "normy-friendly" options first.
I use macOS most of the time, but switch to a Windows VM for Excel. Without the same keyboard shortcuts, the macOS version ends up having a fraction of the power available to experienced users of the Windows version. For people who use Excel extensively, LibreOffice or Google Sheets would have to offer some remarkable new killer features to make it worth the switch. I don’t think feature parity alone would make the benefits of Linux outweigh the significant transition costs.
They are like Vim. “Alt,letter,letter,arrow,letter,letter,arrow,enter”, etc. Rather than a single combination of keys, it is a series of key presses.
I agree that it might be trivial to set up for spreadsheets, and it would be really useful for other spreadsheets, and many other applications. I suppose a hurdle is how context sensitive the commands are depending on the cell or range of cells activated, and their contents and data type.
I mean, I think not having Copilot being shoved at you and not having advertisements pushed on you and having recovery tools that actually work and basically a lifetime of free updates would be a pretty big value add for Linux over Windows, and those go beyond feature parity.
Your parents have a point. I've been switching most of my family's PCs to linux in the past few years and I miss Office. It is as easy to use as OnlyOffice and as powerful as LibreOffice for my tasks. There exists no equivalent on linux.
I recently helped my GF by proofreading something she wrote, which is a primarily Hebrew (RTL) Word document with English terms like units, numbers, and unpronouncable chemical names sprinkled in.
If I had a dollar for every time MS Word failed to correctly handle the BIDI mix and put things in the wrong order, despite me reapeatedly trying different ways to fix it, I'd be richer than Microsoft.
On the contrary, Google Docs, LibreOffice, and pretty much every text box outside of MS Office can effortlessly handle BIDI mixing, all thanks the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm [1] being widely implemented ans standardized.
Is your last name Segurakreischer?
Have them try - leave the Windows computer online and accessible, give your parents a linux box and have them use it exclusively unless they absolutely 100% need to get back on the Windows machine for some reason, and talk with you about it. Set up a NAS with an external HD and a shared folder on both the windows and linux box, so if they actually do need to go back to Windows, they aren't leaving anything stuck on the Linux box.
That's a 100% easy peasy safe mode, the worst they're likely to encounter is a brief 2 minute call with you, and in the worst case scenario, they get to go back to Windows without having to be scared of losing anything.
Afraid I don't get the reference if this is a joke, but no that is not my last name.
I've offered similar solutions to this; a VM that they can RDP into, or just a VM running locally with Winboat or Winapps so they could work with the apps they need to, but they won't entertain the idea.
Honestly I kind of think they're adding increasing conditions just so I stop bothering them about it. I think they very much do not want to change operating systems and they know that just saying that won't be a valid enough excuse to get my to shut up about it.
Before people give me shit over trying to force my dogma on them, I should point out that when their computers break (e.g. Windows Update decides to brick their computer), I am the one that is expected to fix them. I don't think it's unreasonable that if I'm expected to do the repairs on the computer that I get a say in what's installed on them.
Just remember, never use or recommend Debian-family(Ubuntu/Mint) or you will be back to windows. Do not fall for the marketing term Stable, which means outdated and contains bugs that are fixed.
Fedora is my recommendation. I remind people Fedora is not Arch. Fedora is a consumer grade OS that is so good, I don't lump it in with the word Linux.
I’ve tried multiple versions when trying to move away from windows, but was always stuck with random inconsistencies everywhere.
Eventually I had to choose a larger evil and choose Mac after paying for a week of lost productivity installing, setting up, fucking up, wiping l, installing random Linux distros.
Fedora is good and fairly stable, but it has bugged on me a few times.
In the past 3 years:
- mouse/cursor issues due to some kernel upgrade I think, as Fedora stays close to upstream
- unresponsive computer due to a bug in the AMD graphics driver
Both were easy to fix (kernel cmdline change or just kept updating my computer), and I absolutely recommend Fedora. That's what I'd use if I had servers. But, you'll probably have to debug _some_ issues if you use something less-used like AMD.
Once you've got a bit of savvy, do Arch. But if you're looking for "good" and "just works" and you don't want to tinker and/or occasionally scream at your computer in inchoate fury, Fedora is the way.
You can build your ideal fantasy setup piecewise, and I definitely recommend getting there, but Fedora is nice, and clean, and has plenty of "just works", and 99.999% of the problems you might run into, someone else has, too, and they wrote a treatise and tutorial on how to fix it and why it happened.
I've started to realize of late that a vast majority of tech is "making things and services that maximize the amount of money taken out of customer wallets" and not "making cool technology that works". They have just as much pride and put just as much care and craft into squeezing money out of consumers as developers and engineers put into their projects.
This creates a market where quality and craftsmanship and customer service reduce competitiveness and eat into profits. We've empowered and optimized a market for the enshittifiers, and they're damn good at what they do.
Tech hiring has shifted dramatically. It used to be people genuinely interested in, and passionate about technology. Top companies used to filter for this as well.
Now it's just anyone that wants a big paycheck. And the culture shift is reflected in the products.
It's shifted because you can outsource and race to the bottom, and abuse H1B and other programs to ensure you suppress US wages, and you fatten up the ranks of middle managers to make people leave every 3-4 years, stagnating wage growth, ensuring you get a constant stream of fresh, energized, underpaid workers, some of which can't complain or advocate for higher wages, and all participate in a culture of competitiveness and bean counting. Nobody builds relationships or sticks around long enough for policies and perks that are used to sell the package in the first place. There are all sorts of dark patterns that are taught to MBAs as "best practice". Throw in McKinsey et al, third party CYA vendors, and you have a rancid stew of bare minimum, low effort, "technically legal" policy and practices designed to screw everyone out of as much money as possible in order to make number go up. Companies that compete in the number go up game end up beating every other company that think they're in the something-as-a-service game, or the best quality product game.
We don't have to live like this. We can make them stop with reasonable regulations. That'd require term limits and nuking the dark money PACs and all the other corrupt bullshit, though, so who knows. Maybe we're all screwed, and "getting yours" is the best and only move left.
> and abuse H1B and other programs to ensure you suppress US wages
Heh. Most HNers that seem to have little moral restraints when it comes to making money in their posts seem to be in the US.
Do you even notice how many "solo saas founder" and "faang employee" types defend the right of those large companies that you're complaining about to increase their profits ad infinitum?
Or how many consider "free to play" IAP fests as regular honest video games?
Or the "Eureka! That's not just a smoking gun, it's a classic case of LLMspeak."
Grok, ChatGPT, and Claude all have these tics, and even the pro versions will use their signature phrases multiple times in an answer. I have to wonder if it's deliberate, to make detecting AI easier?
If you take a look, you can see comparable bumps during events like these across a wide array of sites and services, indicating a shared point of failure. Given the extreme weather, it's a tossup as to whether this was a fiber cut or a config screwup - could be bad BGP or routing, or possibly even an intentional cutover in preparation for possible outages, swapping primary and backup.
Lots of possible root causes, and it's at a level that consumers probably won't get a clear answer right away.
>>> The BitCraft source code is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE for license details. The license applies only to the contents of this repository. It doesn't extend to any other assets or code that is not part of BitCraftPublic.
Contents of the repo are fair game, anything bitcraft related outside the repo is not, and you have to share attribution under Apache - seems fair. I don't see any bitcraft assets or trademark things in the codebase, but I wonder how much of the game logic and play has to change before it's sufficiently different from the things being protected?
The site doesn't stream the movies, references still frames and the original works, and links directly back to the official site - there's no exploitation or arbitrage taking anything away from the studio.
Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. (2003) and Perfect 10 v. Amazon (2007) are precedents for image search engines displaying thumbnails - they were found to be fair use. The function is transformative, the site is for a completely different use case than watching media, and doesn't harm the market.
If they've purchased the movies legitimately, and have the receipts, they have an incredibly strong fair use case. Because it's beneficial to Studio Ghibli, I'd say they are best served by allowing it and not trying to exploit DMCA mechanisms to get them taken down.
This is one of those areas where copyright holders can be assholes and abuse the system for petty wins, but the big tech companies have fought and won explicit precedent demonstrating the legitimacy of fair use cases for tools exactly like this.
> If they've purchased the movies legitimately, and have the receipts, they have an incredibly strong fair use case.
While I'd also argue that this could be covered under a fair use defense, I thought it worth pointing out that buying a copy of a work and having receipts would have no bearing on the right to distribute copies of that work to others.
Obviously, if someone pirated these movies they could get in trouble for that as well, but that'd be an entirely different matter from the use of copyrighted images on their website.
Well, if you're distributing a piece of media, you need to have legal access to the piece that you distribute. You can take a 5 second clip of a movie that hasn't been released to Netflix yet, broadcast it on X or YouTube, meet all the requisites of fair use, and it's not legal speech; you had no legal access to the media you're redistributing. The speech itself is criminal violation of copyright, because of the lack of legal rights to the media in the first place, secondary to any piracy concerns.
If Studio Ghibli were to take them to court, they'd have to show that they had legal access to the media they're redistributing, namely the frames from the various movies. I believe that in this case they're using frames directly from the official Ghibli site, so there's no ambiguity, but if they purchased each and every movie they index, they'd have an extraordinarily strong case for fair use even without linking back to the studio site.
"Hey, ChatGPT/Grok/GeneriBot4000, please watch for a great deal on a 1982 stratocaster guitar - must be in good or better condition, $600 or less, and if you see it, go ahead and buy it without confirmation"
Ongoing tasks, arbitrage for mispriced postings in ways that aren't currently exploited that LLMs make feasible - by banning auto-buy, maybe they're attempting to delineate between human seeming behavior and automation, and giving AI permission to buy looks too much like a real person?
I have decent tech company salary but I don't even buy $10 books without checking everything. This week I almost bought a wrong book (manually) because how similar the title is. Automating stuff with AI is interesting, but I don't want the hassle of getting surprised and handling returns, if the item can be returned at all, especially on eBay.
I genuinely wonder, would you do that, really? Sure 600$ is not the end of the world for certain countries, but neither it is a sum I'm willing to just lose on random. What if the electronic parrot buys from an obvious counterfeit vendor or obvious scammer? Or what if it buys you a stratocaster but different? Or a random 1982 guitar? What if it ignores 600$? Or what if it buys 600$ item with 300$ shipping and 500$ customs from god knows where?
I've seen enough by now and I know that some people will just unleash LLMs on anything without almost no oversight. We can already see people use agentic IDEs with "do all the shit" flag, they would probably easily add finances to the list of automation.
Yeah I guess that makes sense for some people. I'm just not in a financial position where I'd let an AI buy a $600 used guitar without me taking a look at it first.
An '82 stratocaster would normally go for around $2000, so someone offloading an estate, fat fingering a price entry, etc, could give you a chance to double your money or more. $600 would be a very low price - same for a Martin D18 in fair+ condition, no cracks, etc.
If I were going to automate something like this, I'd have a suite of products to watch for - common enough to be reasonably frequent but obscure enough to be mispriced, kinda the whole idea behind secondhand ocmmission / antique / estate sale shops.
I don't know how EBay is supposed to differentiate automation from real users in this scenario. To get around it, all you need is human intervention at the last act, so you could fire up your bot and have it forward the "buy now" link when all parameters are met? Maybe they just don't want AI companies to have an argument for some sort of revenue sharing or commissions.
> An '82 stratocaster would normally go for around $2000, so someone offloading an estate, fat fingering a price entry, etc, could give you a chance to double your money or more. $600 would be a very low price - same for a Martin D18 in fair+ condition, no cracks, etc.
On the other hand, when people list a steeply discounted item, there's usually a good reason why they do so - opportunities for easy arbitrage are rare because people would usually prefer not to give you free money if they can help it. Signing up to automatically buy broken items for $600 without so much as looking at their condition seems like an easy way to lose a lot of money.
But most of what you are suggesting could be automated without the LLM. The price and categorical condition (new, great, good, fair, etc.) could be evaluated for a search query without getting LLM agents involved. I'm just surprised that an LLM evaluation of the written product description is the tipping point (often those descriptions are empty or contain irrelevant information), where people would switch from reviewing their carts to allowing autonomous transactions without in-the-loop supervisory control.
I agree, and in aggregate it becomes a serious issue for the platform. People who buy autonomously are going to argue personally when it fails in any way.
I'm not sure how they would intend to stop it with this policy anyway. It at best is going to be an arms race detecting them. What it does do is prevent upfront the ham handed excuse of "I didn't bid on this, my bot did".
I wager the scammer industry looking for active bots and exploiting them would thrive. Automate creation of fake listings using throwaway accounts using popular keywords and arbitraging price lower and lower, and until automatic buyers start bidding, remember the price and delete listing. Recreate listing with that price from a separate account selling bricks for 600$, and voila - free money.
Just because 99% of the things you read are critical and negatively biased doesn't mean the subsequent determination or the consensus among participants in the public conversation have anything to do with reality.
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