could this be the new SETI@home and/or 'blockchain' project? Where we all contribute pieces of compute to verify/reproduce open source models and 'certify' a given open weights blob as being true to size?
2,642 karma · joined July 28, 2017
brute forcing performance optimization for a personal project by having only handwavy tricks ive read about from online and repeatedly setting targets until the magic box gives me what i know it can do means that eventually the game did what i wanted with those. yes baked lighting was needed.
next, i an going to aim for 60fps on a windos xp box just for the challenge. we had quake and such run blisteringly fast on weaker boxes than those, surely my empty museum tour of a 3d game can do the same with the graphical voxel and crappy looking models it does now.
real pro grade work is beyond vibing out and not caring about poor quality. but it scratched my itch and gave me the computer software i wanted and with way less effort than doing it for realz would require. i love programming itself on its own time (going to learn nasm and someday do a hexagonal architecture with actor model in idris just to add up my nerd trophies together) at times, but using llms lets me do my random hairbrained ideas much more easily for what i put into it than not existing in the past.
Unasked-for-story-time: In the early aughts, there was a PC video game called Star Trek: Elite Force. It was a FPS genre game and included a feature called "Virtual Voyager" that at the time was revolutionary because it would let you just freely explore a subset of the Starship Voyager without any linear mission requirements, the closest any Trek fans could get to gaining access to the real Paramount Studios Stage 9-and-friends sets where the TV show was filmed, which for Trekkies with no life is quite the big deal.
Wasting the GPT-6 Astra capabilities over a single month of the $200 plan, I've built out multiple decks of an Excelsior-class starship based on a deck plan of my design, dealing with creative decisions on how to adapt the limited Star Trek canon knowledge about the interior deck sizes and materials aboard an Excelsior-class vessel, and at the end of this project, all I will have will be a graphically crappy but 3d explorable virtual starship I can walk around, look at the interior of, and mentally place my daydreamed Star Trek personal fanfic that I used to pencil in a notebook, and now I direct/dictate/produce using agents to write their crappy sloppy prose, but is tuned exactly to my preferences, and now will be able to have specific camera angles and relative details because I can screenshot the 3d ship explorer I made with the crappy AI.
I've got the pencil, I've got the nerd no social life time for creative projects, and I am still writing the no-AI no-name fantasy novel that nobody will read except my family and AI-data-gorgers, but neither of the two projects above, which have provided me hours of entertainment dopamine, would have happened without AI tooling making it easy enough to be creative without having to hand render every little detail.
Art is produced for arts own sake, right? That's the phrase? Well this vibe slop story and this vibe slop 3d viewer are digital goods / digital art to _me_, because I like them for their own sake. I can't copyright any of it, its all been infected by AI stuff. I can't get a job with it, I can barely orbit in Blender and don't find it worth the time to learn to render drawing in 2d and sculpting in 3d (I've tried both over the years in pre and post AI eras, I'm from a creative family whether I wish it or not), the costs to render skills manually make it not worth my time to do.
But AI makes it worth my time because it is an enzyme that reduces the input cost of me prototyping my creative desire out without having to laboriously create every last everything.
XML Web Services were awesome, but the SOAP and XML (where the hard parts that should have been given some batteries included defaults) I think was too much of a boat anchor to overcome.
And then the ruby/rails wave came and made 'rest' JSON the Silicon Valley hearthrob, and WSDLs were out like yesterdays trash.
Are they still used in businesses IRL? Yes! I worked for one that has probably (probably) moved off of them by now, but as recently as 2023 there were still some bank-facing power with SOAP RPC .asmx endpoint servers.
I follow hypermedia.systems and htmx/datastar/alpine.js because I'm still trying to get back that powerful _web_ tech advancement rather than squeezing everything into the javascript client side workaround. Typescript is great, a good poor man's F# and leagues ahead of ES3 (which I dabbled in / torture LLMs with so my old retrocomputers can still do web things), but its still bringing along so much baggage that could be lighter weight for older devices AND fits the tech utopianist promise of the original web (which is half of why I play with computer stuff).
I hope you are wrong, or rather, that HN's userbase can keep renewing itself on cycles of new users without getting into an eternal september situation. It's none of my affair (and yes, lately HN AI threads read suspiciously airheaded in tone, like they fell out of /r/codex and Grok-heavy online circles) overall, but I'd be curious if dang or whoever can easily get an idea as to what the current population of HN weekly/daily active users are and if that bag of users is similar to a year over year or decade over decade cohort. X% of our users are more than 10 years old, and so on.
But the above is an idle thought experiment, back to your point, there's definitely some bandwagon work going on, astroturfing and bot-controlled no doubts there too, and if I find one more Rationalist / Effective Altruist / AI doomer cult post, I may find a way to ship them 10 virtual spam palettes because there's more to the web than 'AI-chatterbox-class who's never actually read Neuromancer or Snow Crash or the meatier works of Asimov act superior to the rest of us' strawmen I have confirmation bias running into, yet overall, I still find HN has that spark here and there.
> Alice: ABC-library stinks, why did they write it that way? > Bob Reply: Hi there, yak here, I wrote it because Dennis Ritchie was sick with a cold and we needed it for Los Alamos Labs.
Those gold moments keep me here still.
Getting GPT-Live to have unique enough voices and to be expressive with how I imagine the voices going in my head is hard to direct, there's not enough control there.
So this Gemini 3.8 specific large voice library and ability to tightly control (if you are willing to write a script) is nice to find, and while I'm not sure which of the 5,286 Gemini products this is, nor how to onboard and get started feeding this my own text files, nor what training will happen to my data if I did somehow use it, I love that the state of the industry is such that Google can do this and release it publicly, because that means eventually an equivalent product can come from someone else and be used locally / confidently that the generated audio or inputs won't be retained and misused.
and/or local voice cloning is good enough as is so Google doesn't grant a uniquely liable ability?
The title of the video is 'KeenLore - Emotive Audiobook Creator Demo' and it appears to be a web UI and some local stack that reads text files.
I ordered the Astro Slide 5G and never received it, so much for me getting to see what all of the psion fuss was about, so this device is both tempting and making me remember past regrettable experiences.
day 1 the plb is slower than swipe typing because it needs getting used to. But the trick is one can focus one's attention on the content being typed /learn to touch type on a physical keyboard that on screen keyboards cant do, because of lack of consistency of on screen kbs always shifting layouts on you, at least with coming and going but usually also ruining the dot menu for common punctuation depending on if the input field is trying to be an email or a number or whatever.
dont try to help me keyboard, just give me a ctrl character, consistent shortcuts, and don't lag half the time I enter some text input, so I've typed out 4 words before the phone realizes anything has happened.
so yes i think you are right that swipe typing has value and more people should use it. but its lipstick on a pig for most of osks not being reliably static enough to let muscle memory / touch typing grow.
my unihertz titan 2 also has capacitive keys, i turn them off because I want the kb as dumb as possible (though i add keymapper android app to give me vim style arrow keys), but swipe typing would be possible on my or this device with just software support if there were demand for it / someone got their llm to vibe it up.
I'm going to have to think carefully about why I should NOT order this device.
Your web app can be HTML templated pages, with HTMX client interactivity and server interactivity provided by ~~PHP~~ Starlark, which does not have full OS access, but only what ~~CGI~~ OpenRun exposes as possible functionality, all of which happens in-process and per web route.
That's a fascinating new combination!
I would love to create a collaborative repo that establishes broadly common modern day keyboard shortcut mappings for common actions across OSes (copy is Ctrl+C in Windows, Command+C in MacOS, Ctrl+Insert in Linux), as well as a map of keyboard shortcuts to actions/OSes and if said shortcuts are app specific vs system global.
I'm given to understand historically that Windows intended the Function keys to help with this somewhat, you had F1-F12 (or F24 for IBM Battleship model M keyboard owners), Windows would do Alt+F1, Alt+F2, Alt+F3, Alt+F4 (the latter of which still closes most apps today), and in a magical perfect world where A) every keyboard actually had function key rows and B) there was a conventional place for common actions across apps that could be used, users could learn more than Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+O, Ctrl++ to zoom in (oops, not always), Shift+Insert to paste, Shift+F11 for context menu.
I had a similar thought but just for the more conventional 'keyboard shortcuts are not discoverable' problem.
Using the status bar or an overlay showing on-screen-keyboard shortcuts, the app could give visual feedback every time you click a button or slide a widget revealing what keyboard shortcut would have triggered that same action.
I click the "GO" button: OSK overlay or status bar shows [GO] (Ctrl+G)
I slide a widget to turn volume up: status bar shows [Volume 22->37] (Alt+V,22)
You said it. I've wondered if the FTC could run through a process like the below to force market evolutions, but I'm certain there's ways to make this into regulatory capture.
Assuming we want free markets...and enough regulations to keep particular monopoloy/cartel from capturing a given free market...:
1. Identify the market: who are the suppliers, who are the demanders
2. Ensure the ratio of suppliers to demanders is such that there are lots of options for a given demander across local, regional, national, international search scopes, are there 7+ local options, 7 regional, etc.?
3. Ensure a given market is vigorously moving, meaning there is plenty of distribution between new market entrants and established incumbents, gate a given incumbent to a market to heightened scrutiny after 10 years or X percentage of the market
4. if a market has lock-in/network effects/increasing switching costs, discount the relative number of suppliers based on <some napkin math of weighting switching costs based on how often customers switch, if customers cannot switch on a dime, look very closely to see if those are natural switching costs or unnatural ones> and take actions to force all suppliers to lower switching costs
5. treat the medium to larger businesses with the most initial suspicion and danger for regulatory capture and bribery, and soft touch sole proprietorships, small businesses, and (non-LARP) startups with less than X percentage cash flow or years of operation
6. Somehow get regulatorially captured, so reform this process to catch the new failure mode(s) without losing lessons of the past.
Businesses need stable regulatory frameworks to build and thrive, but if they are so stable and so 'cheatable' then businesses become sclerotic dinosaurs who don't adapt to the changing conditions on the ground except to protect themselves and their positions.
US GOP members always want to focus on entrepreneur spirits and the power of free markets, but then don't catch when a given market is captured and held by big businesses (see the smartphone maker oligopoly or Luxottica Optical monopoly), probably for corruption/bribery-seeking reasons as much as failure to imagine the negative externalities.
US DNC members always want to focus on stopping big businesses and the power of good governance, but then don't catch when a given market is gummed up by so much regulation, the only survivors are those in bed with the government (see the banking and hospital certificate of need cartels or M.I.Complex defense contractors), probably for corruption/bribery-seeking reasons as much as failure to imagine the negative externalities.
A given market needs to be closer to buyer beware in the beginning, but as it matures, it needs to discover and stop the incumbents (whoever they may be) so nobody is comfortable to sit around and extract rent or do share buybacks or otherwise be lazy - we get 'efficient' businesses that suffer from MBA / Jack Welch LARPers who immiserate their employeees, vendors, and eventually customers themselves (so called encrapification), the regulators should target those companies for hurting the health of the market by buying out competitors, saddling up with corporate raids, private equity sinking otherwise profitable businesses, and general dangerous financialization.
I think Discourse is the platform of choice right now, and I'm going to get one going for my immediate family / f2 network rather than a public one. If I did a public one, it would be one where each user could only subscribe to it at $5+ per month, then graduate the cost of new sign-ups and monthly costs to be 5+<monthly average users> for each new user, specifically so I could pay server hosting costs, market the site for the target audience somehow (users willing to prioritize long-term reputation and effort posting and pre-eternal-september netiquette) and pay one or more mods to keep the site behaving and on-topic for each given forum.
We can have the flamewars section on politics and religion, we can have the skills section on getting advice from industry experts in their own vocations, we can have the web1 section for hamster dance, retroweb and retrocomputing hubs, web2 section for flash revival and homestarruner and fark and reaction images, and we can have web3 for doing 'people of walmart' but for algorithm meat puppets from social media and short form brains and chat-only sites.
This magical site would have RSS feeds for every thread, easily enable web/mobile posting, support email mailing lists, make it easy to split a thread as conversation diverges, and enable enough social features to have signatures and home pages, but discourage passive likes / empty internet calories. So a mash-up of discourse, LKML, XenForo, and phBB.
The Tech is not the main problem, its the finding of each new user, the site as designed above would stay pretty small as is, it needs to be able to grow to let new users in without growing so far that the core user base dilutes away to let in the 'sociopaths' and the 'groupies' that the old 4chan 'how a space gets ruined over time' edgelord meme images show.
I've started to go to tiny forums like forums.bladerunner.net and hobby-specific forums like rpgpub and vogons to hang out at the water cooler around others.
Awhile back, I dropped into Libera.chat's lobste.rs room and asked about this topic, which got no traction, but we ended up chatting for a bit, I was given the classic noob treatment. One user complained I was a bot at first, then asked me absurdist non-sequitors to haze the newbie, another user complained that they should close membership off from randos like me (and another user argued with him that they need new members eventually), and a third user told me not to post more than a few sentences without using a pastebin because their terminal IRC client looks ugly.
So I had a very nostalgic web 1.0 world: 1)the angry troll trying to kick me out 2) the tired mod trying not to tap the sign 3)the grumpy greybeard who never left emacs and 4) nobody really addressed the topic I was hoping to talk about.
If that's not congealed 199x internet exchanges, I don't know what is! It was very nostaglic and comforting in a way, the only thing it was missing was some erectile dysfunction pop-up windows and a gaudy internet radio widget.
The web as we know it is out there, I saw it on the lobste.rs libera chat just a few weeks ago! So maybe you have to go as far as islands like fediverse and simplex which are so isolated, most of the users there only want to talk about the tech itself, but , fellow web rando, have some hope, because I didn't go out there and I found some true internet recently, it can happen to you too!
Ask your search engine or LLM to help you find small-medium sized forums ased on hobbies you like, and start lurking, just like we used to 20(!?) years ago.
While I'm hoping the AI bubble pops sooner than later, as I still hold out hope that knowledge work will continue to require knowledgeable humans at the helm, I wanted to add on that I think you make a good point.
A lot of users online can't read[1], and between a lack of pure reading comprehension, poor media literacy habits draining one's brains and ability to focus, and finally the increase in AI-enabled content, I'm not surprised at how redditor-cultured netizens love to throw up their hands and say "AI;DR!", as if that makes them somehow morally superior.
These users won't read dense texts or try to elucidate meaning out of human-written works, they ask for AI summaries or manual "TL;DR" entries as it is, now the AI is use is being used as an excuse to enable mental laziness and lack of attempts to read information.
So while I get lost in wikipedia walks because I'm looking for written entertainment for 'learning', they are getting mind-melted by algorithms, therefore, an uncharitable part of me wants to let the meat-proxying continue.
And then the other part of me that gets annoyed by having to sift through AI-slop-infested text to see what if any meat there may be in there decides that perhaps that's not as helpful of an attitude as I should take after all, because if everybody decides to meat-proxy the world away, I'll be unhappier than letting lazy functionally-illiterate-users complain aloud, even as the latter is boring reading as well.
[1] in the https://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-compu... sense
so no they are not archiving their own core books let alone periodicals
I think you make a strong point here. I will add a note of hope.
In my opinion, besides the 'this too shall pass' nature of life meaning this outrage-focused moment, we on HN have hope here.
I've been a lurker for a while around here, IDK when this account was made and I don't care, I feel confident that I've been watching the great techies of our era and HN celebrities and dang and other mods presiding over it all for at least a decade.
It's probably my own media bubble bias, but I have noticed this trend where HN is discussing a given subject that the general public is not aware of, and it after years filters into the greater consciousness. I don't think HN is necessarily magically head of the curve, but I do think it concentrates where curious and possibly-open-minded people's thoughts are at, before internet-point-seeking/popularity echo chamber communities like Reddit/FB/Twitter or algorithm-driven hivemind homogenziers like YT/Reels/TikTok/Periscope all become aware of something.
HN saw the centralization of control with the SOPA/PIPA/encryption in public fight, that has been ongoing since the clipper chip and before, but in this modern form with end-users not needing PGP and friends and just getting to have e2ee with Signal, HN was talking about and using Signal for years before now our government figures and traditional + social media companies have talked about Signal.
Similarly, the broader privacy questions, turning off Google Location History was happening on HN (and XDA back when custom android ROMs were more popular) as soon as Google Reader was axed, people only now have learned to fear 'the internet' because of how many more egregious things have happened across all powerful web platforms.
And of course we can't ignore HN playing with cleverbot and that dall-e precursor who's name I forget, ML models and markov chains and tech beyond my ability to teach about, before OAI ever released a single product like ChatGPT.
HN still has heavyweights of each industry and titans of tech who pop by on occasion to grace us mere plebians, pushing back the Eternal September for just a few happy moments (looking at you BWK, Walter Bright, and other famous names I can't rattle off) to share with us what happened 'in the room'. Just the other day someone posted 'I was the guy who controlled the rollout for Apple MacOS X Snow Leopard, it was a bugfix only release no really' ... only on HN by the power of the internet do we get that, we don't get that on a TikTok. So HN has still got 'it' at least for now, and therefore I can make a broad observation.
If the HN being directionally appropriate even if getting particulars wrong is true, I'm seeing future trends that will lead us out of this populist/blackpill moment.
People will get emotionally overwhelmed/numbed to overwrought angry moments, they will want to move forward. Americans tend to be keen as a people, whatever the 'thing' is. 90s tech utopia optimism was a keen-thing. Support for or opposition to the Iraq War was a keen-thing, whatever we Americans do, we do with gusto.
So right now, we are all in on outraged doom/gloom/anxiety/this sux!! feelings.
I'm hopeful that perhaps we as a people go with a decision to move in what a figure from my current media bubble named Aaaron Renn says where there are New Constructivists, who are intellectuals on all sides of American political aisles looking to revitalize and create new institutions.
I'm fearful that we will have to fall down hard to learn our lessons first and/or learn the wrong lessons where we decide the fix to ennui is to blame 'those' people over there (whoever that happens to be). The fix to the fear and ennui won't come from us fighting with our families, community members, internet strangers, or political opponents, it will come from us choosing to change our media diets away from garbage in/garbage out (I Know, I know, you who read this and disagree with everything I say and my media diet sources want me to change my media diet, that may very well be true) that is focused on emotional inflammation (didn't we used to ban people from our forums for flaming?) instead of genuine debate and encouragement and online civility.
It's boring and its lame, but circling all the way back to the parent comment: the web used to be a homogenous unified place made up of professionals and nerds and group think. We need more diverse opinions than that, but what has happened is that the internet (and its mobile app/web/private chat mediums) has become a borderless place where people who never encounter each other have diametrically opposed views constantly, and so retreat into echochambers and don't get the media literacy experience needed to peacefully coexist with the rest of the online anglosphere without constant acrimony. Grifters feed the flames for likes/subscribes/patreon subs/etc.
> The second group has an experience-first perspective. These workers love the messy middle. They value the journey. They want their organizations to perform well but as a natural consequence of collaboration, debate and shared struggle with people they actually like. Many experience-first people are artists outside of work. Photographers, directors, screenwriters, sculptors, painters, poets, writers. Many are active volunteers. For these people, to be pulled away from their economically unviable passions requires something in return: a company experience with freedom for exploration, creativity, problem solving and cool colleagues.
The first group appears to be correctly compartmentalizing work into its correct location, this is a job I do to meet a goal, how are we doing on that goal, they have healthy limited expectations of the experiences there.
The latter group sounds childish or unprofessional or at least unrealistic in their expectations that a job you do for a living will be all you want it to be. I laud people who volunteer, I do as well, I laud creatives, we need more of them, not less of them, but somewhere along the way, people need to work at the sucky starter job so they grow out of wild-eyed views that all jobs will bring one satisfaction. Some jobs are more cushy and give you more of a sense of fulfillment, true, and those are vocations in the article's sense, but most jobs are just jobs, therefore it seems unrealistic to me to expect them to make one happy.
Satisfaction in life comes from service to others, because said service drives strong trusting relationships with people, you love what you serve, and those trusting relationships mean you get to see more people and they often reciprocate, thus families (in the nuclear, community, and found senses, all apply) are formed and meaning arises as the gestalt of that support and forward progress gets us what we can handle for this-side-of-life eudaimonia.
Beyond that? That's the nature of religion and I know I'm already annoying someone with my too-strong opinions as is, so I will spare you my thoughts there this time.
1. Long Poll the cursor to pull down the latest events
2. Trigger a long-poll even if in exponential backoff because they shot you a webhook saying 'eTag changed!'
> However, the US ban only covers new advanced robot models, not existing products that have already received FCC equipment authorization for sale in the US. The "action does not impact a consumer’s continued use of devices they previously acquired," the FCC says. "Nor does it prevent retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market relevant models approved previously.”
Quality used to take a back seat because there was so much legwork to do. AI has reduced the cost to be excellent, so let's be as excellent as our environments let us.
And poof, we've poorly remembered Web of Trust from 20 years ago!
Overall I do love the idea of HTMP and if we could get it to easily fall back to standard old bad email, I think it could start as a niche and then upgrade towards HTMP over time as more clients adopted support for it.
It's a much better compromise and ergonomics to migrate from IPv4 to an IPv4 respecting successor, where IPv6 is just the academic snobbery and utterly alien mental model for not-enough benefits.
For the same reason Unix stuck around and beat up its own successor Plan 9/inferno. That inertia even decades later is the same reason IPv4 still beats IPv6.
IPv8 is more of a linux to unix than a plan 9.
Not to forget DVD shipping eras (Sony should not discontinue physical game sales, someone needs to get us silicon/holographic/terabyte recording media already), the focus is on the bundling/unbundling of software making. Slack + Salesforce vs 'we vibed our own chat and CRM just for us'...aka a Neo-SAP ERP program.
It's a cambrian explosion of software where lots are going to learn in realtime that the code was never the value of a software engineer / software, the value is in the shared understanding of an information system or workflow or business value stream, that parts of which happen to run through digital information systems.
By the time AI is done with us, its market effects mean in order to stay employable/added value beyond just widget-watchers, we will all be business strategy experts, or we will be algorithm-fed-doped-up mindless beasts, Morlocks vs Eloi, not because of AI itself, but because of the current rapaciousness of business leaders and an assumed trajectory where society doesn't adapt to social movements and actions now made possible by the existence of LLMs.
Sidneote: the LLMs themselves are not IMO going to achieve AGI any time soon. There might be a compilation of disparate systems and LLMs form part of 'tissues' of an eventual AGI, but not currently.
These days? Doing this FE SPA framework for Effect/typescript familiarity or Fable for F# familiarity and a model-view update pattern can help one do CQRS better, force you to think about stronger Hexagonal Architecture patterns, and overall help your application care about long term correctness more without you having to hand code every discriminated union as such.
The LLM can't replace you, but it can be an enzyme that lowers the activation energy required to switch from bad old MVC mutable tag soup to MVU frontends with strong data interface designs held in sqlite-dbs-per-aggregate (if you are of a DDD or event sourcing taste, which this pattern does not require!)