2,552 karma · joined November 8, 2013
On HN we see every day interesting, first page content marked with a title representing its year, sometimes dating back a decade or more. Its age isn't apparently a detracting aspect to this audience if the content is still worth sharing.
And from the article the headline figure also doesn't represent irrelevant/undesirable content either but Wikipedia references, news articles, government pages, along with less unexpectedly ephemeral things like Twitter posts.
We're lucky there is archive.org but since it's not indexed like a regular search engine the only tether to old pages are still-live links found via regular search engines/sites (including HN). Essentially unless sites continue to exist that contain links to archived content the chances of future discovery becomes slim.
My stance is if you find something interesting that you expect is worthwhile sharing try saving it in the most convenient single file page format available to you (MHTML, SingleFile, PDF), to have your own copy. For MHTML at least it also saves the original page URL in its metadata. Saving to online archives is also great but admittedly higher friction (and can sometimes result in things like IP restrictions on archive.org even when saving just a handful of pages in a row, ime).
Since the audience that would benefit the most from actually having their minds changed are (in my experience) already used to hearing the 'normal' positions on these things but have decided to trust a different position more, though various means including familiarity and those who connect more with their state of mind at the time. It's not that such people are necessarily even 'so far gone' to be impenetrable either.
I find many publications that do anything from casual to more robust debunking don't appear to be attempting to communicate with the audience who believe these things, so they write in a voice that is already beginning from a typically condescending place in the assumption their audience is already aligned with their position. I suppose the expectation is those people will then be the horizontal conduits.
I've debunked various things on more personal levels with people but not by linking debunking articles as I haven't found disdain helps at all but rather understanding and then bridging what led to their position and more context that may clarify certain things (also tbf this is more a comment about many other articles I see, rather than phys' quite reasonable tone).
Though by using an online service approach it means providing one's real voice to a service that may be using it for further training. Users have to make the call whether they feel they're good stewards.
It's curious they exclude their music from Bandcamp, which is very different among those other platforms listed and indie-friendly (not to mention far more attractive for customers who want to buy and own lossless music). Yet they then link their entire album for free on Youtube.
And not the scenario where JS is responsible for loading the content but literally when it's just an arbitrary blank viewport-encompassing element covering the already loaded content—all so the site can then add some animation and remove the overlay when they feel the content should be shown.
It's ridiculous for functionality. When I overhauled a wiki for a project it similarly added such an overlay and I promptly removed it. Nothing on the wiki beside the search was functionally broken without JS yet it required both JS and cookies to be enabled before a user could view anything.
It would weigh on me from an empathetic standpoint to not improve upon them if being released to others, so they're not and that's fine. Much like an artist's practice sketches they're intended for one's own private goals only.
The article isn't really framed like that though and downplays the internet as an inherent audience. Improving something even for just a random other person to enjoy/find utility in isn't inherently attention or money chasing, it's just bridging a gap.
I don't understand the equivalence the author is ultimately making in suggesting that creating something with polish is expecting to make money (and fame) from it. Yet notice all the things in the blog post are creations that are exposed to the internet (photography blogging, releasing a program online, making a website), rather than private, non-published hobbies which literally have no audience.
Some prefer to make things polished/more complete as they want others to enjoy something more and polish makes it more accessible/usable/meaningful, or because it's a reflection on them (whether using an IRL identity or even a pseudonymous one) and part of their enjoyment of the process.
Since we all know the audience is whoever will come across it, once something is released in the wild. Might be an audience of one, or many. Which isn't to say people need to care about the output of hobby but I disagree that money/fame is the only motivation in improving something.
A couple things that stand out in discussions about social media negative consequences are: service-led algorithms and UX which actively fuel addictive patterns, an emphasis on a single and often IRL identity (Zuckerberg famously saying there should only be a single user identity[1]) and audience reach which is far too broad for various content.
On Discord people often become familiar with other users via their pseudonymous handles, even sharing IRL details as they're comfortable. However a few things help with this: no leaderboard-style gamification of posts like there is with Twitter or Reddit, chat is inherently lower stakes and the scope is limited to that community not the wider internet.
Traditional forums are interesting since I know various who were addicted but in a user-led rather than service-led way (ie: they've been addicted through habit of non-gamified checking of content/participation). Even expressing having anxiety posting threads due to the expectations of peers. However the benefit is still an awareness that the primary audience is mostly an in-group of (mostly friendly) peers. Whereas on Twitter for example, a user may say something for a specific intended audience but someone in bad faith re-contextualizes it and initiates dogpiling—which is an inevitability of almost any community but for sites with such broad scope is extremely difficult to moderate.
Like you mentioned, on Reddit there is almost zero emphasis on the user, whether as an OP or commenter, so there's much less interpersonal community building but OTOH much easier distancing from self 'performance'/anxiety.
[1] Some critique: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37284960
Third-party tools that restored the W10 taskbar in W11 allowed users to continue having a taskbar that's usable for them yet the latest W11 betas show they're removing that legacy code. It'd be fine if they were replacing it with an equivalent but they're not.
[1] https://www.neowin.net/news/ability-to-move-the-windows-11-t...
Wuala[1][2] did something similar more than a decade ago, in that users become distributed storage for other users which made the service free for those participating (otherwise was a paid subscription). They were then acquired and stopped their most unique feature before closing for good.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala
[2] https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/08/first-look-wua...
My comment was just about the positioning of the key however. I use a keyboard with programmable firmware so I can remap the actual Ctrl key to the same position since it's more comfortable.
With the Caps Lock position one has to use the pinky to hold it down and the index finger has to stretch more to reach Ctrl+V (unless some use their thumb to hit the V key?). While with Mac style placement you use a thumb for holding the key which naturally occupies the bottom-most row for spacebar, so less finger travel and stretching.
Edit: I should mention the kinds of backups I prefer to keep for structured data are in non-binary formats, which helps with searches. Otherwise just keeping organization sensible for future-me helps a great deal.
[1] https://www.svgator.com/help/getting-started/js-animations-v...
I'm jealous. GDI with MacType was so much better than the default DirectWrite rendering.
Quite the leap from existing as an emulator to inexplicably being held liable for some independent leak.
Given the capabilities of audio and text NNs these days, along with such displays, it would actually be plausible now.
It can be removed[5], with some effort, though. Given its use in various electronics it wouldn't surprise me if some other UPSes use it, though have only seen discussions about Cyberpower.
[1] https://sound-au.com/articles/yellow-glue.htm
[2] This thread had various videos from users showing the arcing on Cyberpower units: https://web.archive.org/web/20220715134034/https://old.reddi...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gqBzLNMFe4
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31954938
[5] https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/how-to-remove-the-dr...
[1] One such example, replacing with a generic kind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6qcon76i4s
> Kagi Sidekick is a helpful and cheerful assistant that assists users in finding the information they want on the Kagi website. It is a product feature backed by Kagi Search and large language models. Kagi Sidekick is currently in open beta and is only available to Ultimate plan members. <link to Kagi Assistant page>
The page it linked to was this[2], which stated similarly to the latter line above, except 'Sidekick' swapped to 'Assistant'. I had assumed from this that Sidekick had been renamed sometime recently or something.
> Kagi Assistant is currently in open beta only available to Ultimate plan members.
They skirt around the important details, in that in all those analogies the entire process/field wasn't replaced/impacted by automation, only facets. Advanced generative NNs aren't merely dumb automated tools that still require human craftmanship but rather, at a baseline, take the place of the humans in virtually all respects of design, implementation and continually synthesizing based on others' work.
The analogy presented in your post doesn't account for the designers still involved with the process, the real-world practicalities that involve humans of getting clothing made even with all the automation available. Generative AI doesn't have this goal; it's increasingly allowing for replacement of all humans and processes involved, besides the one wishing upon a genie lamp.
Now one can of course apply their own craftsmanship to such outputs if desired and there are examples of this from existing artists/writers where it fits more like a tool into a workflow (and such analogies would actually apply here), however as we can already observe the vast majority of uses don't and there is still at a minimum a usable result, as the tech advances.
There are also parallels one commonly reads drawn to how humans operate: if a human studied others' artwork then they too would be able to synthesize results. However no human has memory and mind's eye recall like that of advanced NNs, which is plainly observable from the output of human history. It's an unfair comparison. The goal of generative models is to be superhuman yet only human arguments are being applied.
I think there are a bunch of positives and negatives to this but it's hard not to see the impact it will have particularly on human motivation and societal expectations, regardless of financial incentives, apart from the general shut-up-and-take-it attitude one sees. There are some pretty impactful legitimate concerns to be had that warrant thoughtful discussion.