bartread

Nothing clever about it: it’s a simple and unethical parlour trick.

Every news website does it and, in the UK, the local news outlets are amongst the worst.

The thing I don’t get: many of these sites are running Google Adsense, amongst other ad networks. Adsense Ts & Cs specifically forbid site behaviour that deliberately causes users to misclick on ads.

So why aren’t these sites being banned by Adsense?

The answer, I suspect, is follow the money: it seems likely that they bring in too much money for Google to ban them even though they’re overtly and outrageously breaking the rules.

I will do almost anything to avoid flying, at least short haul. I don’t mind flying: I have no fear of it at all in fact. But I absolutely despise the airport experience, and consider it to be so unpleasant as to be worth avoiding whenever it’s at all feasible to travel by other means.

I think it’s entirely possible for someone to clone an app with Claude without realising they’ve done it, if they don’t do your due diligence on it. I.e., if they don’t make any effort to dig into and really understand what they’ve built.

But I also think this is an extreme example of a much more general problem of provenance.

There are a lot of people vibe-coding apps who lack the “basic” skills needed to do this due diligence at even the coarsest level that we arguably see here (not making any comment either way on this specific author).

Does that get them off the hook? I don’t think so. They’ve created a thing and they are naturally responsible for whether or not that thing involves theft or appropriation of IP from other sources.

It’s an “ignorance is not an excuse” kind of thing.

This scales all the way up to agentic development in large organisations, but it also becomes much more granular and subtle, which is perhaps where it becomes more interesting - and certainly a lot more challenging. Where has that chunk of code come from? How do you know where it’s come from? Is there even a feasible way of finding out?

Enormous monitors aside it's funny, even though more than a quarter of a century has passed, how contemporary those office scenes look. Even the on point trendiness of the "unfinished"/exposed industrial aesthetic really hasn't changed.

In recent years I've stepped into quite a lot of offices that look a lot like the Blueberry office circa y2k. And, in fact, all of the trendier offices I've been in since I started work at around that time have looked a lot like the Blueberry office circa y2k.

Why that strikes me as slightly odd is that if you rewound a further 26 years to 1974 I suspect things would probably look very different. And, of course, the past 26 years have had quite an impact on the way I look.

I notice the Cold Fusion book in the second photo didn't get a mention but I can't overstate: that was hot shit back then. If you knew Cold Fusion in 1999/2000 you could pretty much name your day rate contracting in the City of London. Sadly I did not know Cold Fusion and graduated into the ongoing dotcom crash during y2k so I took what I could get job-wise.

We're not talking about the friend. I'm talking to the person I responded to: I'm saying they should have recommended a better tool to their friend.

My HR friend found Lovable off her own bat. I imagine she probably Googled or asked ChatGPT something like, "How do I build a website to do BLAH without knowing anything about building websites?"

The point is people talk, they ask questions, they Google, they talk to ChatGPT, and if they have a problem to solve they're often quite motivated to find a solution to that problem off their own backs.

If someone asks me for advice on how to get something built then I'm going to recommend a tool that suits them and their situation, whatever that may be. In this specific situation, if they know nothing about building software, I'm certainly not going to sit them down and have them try to follow the most jank-ass way imaginable of building software with an LLM when I know much better tools exist that are built with people like them in mind.

Seriously, what is with the overly narrow assumptions in the replies I'm getting this morning? You're the third person who's tried to set this same fraying paper tiger on me. Can we all just wake up and think about the issues a bit more in the round, please?

> how could you possibly know to go search for Lovable, let alone figure out agents?

Is this an actually serious question? Am I losing my mind here?

I didn't tell my HR friend about Lovable: she found it on her own. Of course someone's not going to Google for Lovable if they've never heard of it, but they might Google for "how do I build a website without knowing anything about it?", or ask ChatGPT the same question.

They're also, most likely, getting endless ads for AI services that help you build various kinds of software shoved into their faces all the time - these ads may not couch the value ad in exactly these terms, but that's fundamentally what they're advertising.

Not everybody is like this but there are plenty of people in the world who, when they have a problem, are quite motivated to find ways to solve it off their own backs.

No, not really. My HR friend went out and found Lovable on her own. You're acting like people can't Google, or even ask an LLM via a Chatbot interface for recommendations for tools that would help them build an application as an absolute beginner. They can and do. People have agency, which is exactly why this person's friend asked them for help.

Interesting, but... wrong tool, wrong job. And by tool, I mean web based chat interface, not LLMs in general. (Maybe wrong delivery mechanism, if you like.)

Your friend needed an agent, not a chatbot. I use Claude within VS Code (as per many others) but I certainly wouldn't recommend that for a beginner. They needed a tool that's specifically aimed at people who want to build software but don't know the first thing about how to do it. I think there are a bunch of these now but the one I'm most aware of is Lovable, and I'm pretty surprised you didn't recommend one of these.

An HR person I know was searching for a way get something build, found Lovable, and managed to build a somewhat functional application with it on their first attempt within an hour or two. It was full of holes and far from perfect but they got something working - at least the outline of a potential solution.

As I say, you should have recommended your friend to try building with a tool like that: a tool that they're a member of the target market for. They would have got a lot further. I'm not vouching for the quality of the result, but they would have got something.

Even for experiened engineers, chatbots have always been a pretty grim experience for software development: from the mind-numbing drudgery of endlessly copying and pasting code, commands, and prompts around, to the fact that they just can't see enough of what you're doing to generate the best quality output or advice. You can do software development with a ChatBot but it seriously sucks, and better tools are (a) probably being shoved at you day in, day out via ads, and (b) only a Google search or a ChatGPT recommendation away.

(Obviously, nobody's going to search for "Lovable" without knowing about Lovable, but they might search, or ask ChatGPT or whatever, something like, "How would I build a website without knowing anything about building websites?", which might get them an advert or recommendation.)

> I don't think the average person has to be taken into account all the time.

This needs to be said louder and more often whenever this "average person" argument is trotted out.

Except for the very largest technology businesses, like the FAANGs of this world, relatively few technology companies are offering products and services aimed at the "average person".

No business I've ever worked for has had the "average person" as their customer. They're all aiming for particular market segments and positioning their products and services to meet the needs of those market segments. I spent a lot of time working on software developer tools that were only of interest to software developers working on the Microsoft stack, for example. Java, C++, and Python developers wouldn't have known or cared about these tools and that was just fine.

So, like you, I couldn't give two hoots what the "average person" thinks of RSS, whether they find it useful, whether they understand it, or whether they've even heard of it.

Whereas there are in fact loads of people who aren't sat on the average (whatever that means) who do find RSS incredibly useful.

If there’s a big difference then it will certainly impact on willingness (and ability) to pay, depending on the cost of premiums, so I’d say it’s very relevant.

What’s the salary difference between doctors and cops of similar experience levels on average in the US?

OK, this was fun.

But I think the real problem is that we’re pushing carbon into the atmosphere that has hitherto been sequestered for upwards of millions of years deep underground and under the oceans. I.e., nothing that’s been a part of a plant, or involved in any ecosystem, on the surface or underwater for a very long time.

Do we even have enough land on the planet to grow enough plants to sequester all this additional carbon? If we reforested the whole earth, would that be enough (and over what time period)? Can enough plants grow in the oceans without turning them all into a giant algal bloom?

I don’t know but I certainly would like to see the maths that answers those questions.

I like your way better. I like your way a lot better.

A: It’s actual justice, and

B: Otherwise it just becomes another way for insurance companies to make money - in this case by charging swingeing fees that will come out of public coffers.

> not mobile friendly.

It’s not what I’d call mobile unfriendly either.

I had to zoom in slightly but then it’s perfectly readable in landscape.

Some very basic inline responsive CSS would make it work great in portrait too.

But the thing is, with no ads, complex layout, or other bullshit, it’s perfectly usable on mobile as is.

I’d certainly take this over any website from any major media outlet, other than those that are publicly funded like the BBC (and, even then, only in the UK because they show ads everywhere else).

> I wouldn't

I'm not talking about you though, am I? I'm saying that there are people working in this field who will do exactly that.

We are now going in circles.

No, I absolutely realise that: but it's irrelevant. It doesn't make them safe.

And after reading the linked BBC article, along with the article linked from the discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997548, I struggle to grasp the failure of imagination that doesn't see or accept that going further and allowing an LLM to control something that acts physically in the real world could be incredibly dangerous.

It really doesn't matter whether that behaviour results from "intelligence" or "awareness" or merely a stochastic quirk of a particular run of the model(s) and their orchestration: a dangerous machine is still dangerous.

It's odd that you would try to dismiss that concern with a non-argument.

> was being tested in a controlled environment, but found vulnerabilities and managed to escape.

Uh-huh.

It's worth keeping in mind that we are here talking about people who simply will not be satisfied until they have built Skynet[0]. They will then no doubt experience some very brief satisfaction before we are all annihilated.

I can't help thinking the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

I'm not sure what the alternative is or how to change course unless and until it becomes unambiguously apparent that such a thing is not possible. Currently it seems like we still think it might be possible, so that's where we're heading because if "we" don't do it, somebody else will.

[0] How feasible this really is, or on what timescale it might be possible, I don't think anyone can really say. But, at least for now, this is clearly the aim and trajectory we are on.

Yeah, what convinced me was seeing friends’ setup that they’d had for 10 or 15 years still working flawlessly.

As someone who watches a reasonable amount of PoV outdoor activity footage shot on helmet cams and the like (base jumping, mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding, etc)… I don’t love watching 360 videos uploaded in the raw because of the perspective distortion.

I’m assuming it must be possible, if the resolution is good enough, to post process a portion of each overall frame into an undistorted 1080p (or better) view of the key view of the action, but a lot of people don’t do this (perhaps it’s much more difficult or time-consuming that I’m imagining, or perhaps many viewers enjoy the distorted 360 view more than I do).

Just my two cents, YMMV, etc.

Yeah, we ordered a double width pax with sliding doors, drawers, shelves and lighting, plus another half wardrobe with a mirror door, shelves, and lighting.

I’m fairly handy and quite enjoy putting things together so it never crossed my mind to use IKEA’s assembly service, but I did notice they were offering it for £300, which I took as a signal that it would take a while.

In the end it took 12+ hours over the course of a weekend. I reckon I’d be faster if I did it again, and maybe if I did it enough times I’d be able to half that, but the problem is, how many fully spec Ed pax wardrobes + ancillaries are you really going to assemble in your life?

With bigger orders, depending on how you value your time and want to spend it, maybe paying for assembly makes sense. I reckon 2 people would have had it done in a morning if I’d paid.

I just noticed that by around 2015 it had got super toxic and snippy.

Usually I’d find answers on SO. Relatively rarely I’d ask questions but, when I did, I’d always try and follow the netiquette rules of yore, and think in terms of, if I was a support engineer trying to help with this, what would I need to know?

Because I have supported products, and we’ve all seen enough bug reports and questions come in that we can tell when someone is going to be easy to help - even if they have a particularly tricky problem - versus someone who’s going to prove more challenging.

So I had this question about Elasticsearch, and it was at a time when the documentation wasn’t great, and you were actively encouraged to go on SO and tag your question to get help.

I wrote out in detail what I’d done, where I’d got stuck, what I’d read and tried to get unstuck, etc. It probably took me 30 minutes or more to pull everything together into a coherent post.

The very first comment was from some insufferable bellend saying, “Oh, so you want us to do your work for you, are you going to pay us too?” or words very much to that effect.

Literally, WTF? Why even post that? If you don’t want to help the option to simply go away without getting involved is always available.

IIRC I didn’t actually end up finding a solution via SO and instead layered some godawful hack on top of Elasticsearch to get what we needed - because I simply had other work to move on to and I’d already spent a lot of time on the problem.

But I think that was the last question I posted on SO, and maybe the last time I posted anything on the site.

As the years wore on I simply started finding it less and less useful, with often incorrect answers marked as accepted and - if you were lucky - the correct answers marked might be buried further down.

And then there’s what they wanted to charge for job ads versus how effective those ads actually were - again, this was better in their earlier years.

SO started out well - genuinely a breath of fresh air - but as time went on it felt like they thought their model was the last word in online help forums and they didn’t want to evolve to address its flaws, even if that had just been dealing with the toxicity, and the karma farming.

And so this is the result - a site that, like the dinosaur in A Sound of Thunder, is dead but perhaps hasn’t realised it yet - and, at this point, the way I feel is simply good riddance. It’s a shame, but - as you said - they did it to themselves.

It’s also practicality and ergonomics: old furniture is nice to look at but it’s often awkward to use (e.g., squeaky wooden drawer runners that require periodic waxing to keep them running smoothly and quietly, lack of sliding doors, dark corners at the back of wardrobes, etc.), and wastes lots of internal space.

Drawers with wheels and bearings and soft closers on their runners are simply a lot nicer to use on a day to day basis, particularly when they’re used frequently.

I do have quite a strong preference for older furniture from an aesthetic perspective, and we certainly have some older pieces as a result. But it’s often functionally deficient, and so we don’t tend to use older furniture more complex than a table where the functionality is frequently used. In particular, any kind of heavily accessed storage means ergonomics and usability win every time, tending to steer us toward modern options.

> piss easy to assemble

Sure, it’s not hard, but if there are a lot of steps it’s still going to take longer.

A fully specced up pax double wardrobe with drawers, sliding doors, and lighting is made up of hundreds of parts, so does take a good amount of time to put together even though it’s not difficult per se.

It’s also made up of many different SKUs so you get dozens of boxes turn up and it takes a little while to figure out what everything is and get organised. Again, it’s not difficult, but it takes a little time.

Weekend HN is definitely where the more interesting and offbeat content lives, and I often find myself enjoying it significantly more as a result.

During the week, well, it would be unfair to call it LinkedInified, but it can often feel like a somewhat higher tier of that sort of strata. Plenty of good stuff in there still, but much more “serious business”.

It's a brave new world, etc., isn't it?

One does find oneself slightly askance at one's own thinking sometimes, that's for sure.

But I suppose, is it really so different? I mean, back in the day moreso than now, a lot of the valuable IP in any system was in the design and specification of that system - the problems usually solved within the design and specificaion (use X algorithm, etc.) - and the code was "just" the implementation of those solutions.

So perhaps it's more of a regression in some ways: the value is in the specification (the prompt) once again.

Your point about stochastic behaviour is well made though, and there is no way to 100% guarantee or formally verify the behaviour of a system that relies on an underlying technology whose behaviour is fundamentally stochastic.

I don't know how you'd enforce that unless it was something you could mandate at the level of the API call, and then the API call is rejected if the customer hasn't configured it for "no transcript".

It sort of feels like an area of friction even still.

I imagine this will be because a decent chunk of the IP in Codex is probably within its prompts, how they're built, and how they're sequenced and orchestrated, rather than in the codebase per se.

We had this discussion a few months ago where we talked about allowing people to choose an AI provider and provide their API key, thinking about enterprises with "preferred" (read: mandated) AI suppliers. We also wanted to offer the kind of very simple pricing that this is one way of enabling. But we realised pretty quickly that this would/could lead to leaking our back end prompts to customers and, although those prompts are only a part of the value add, if you could build a detailed trace of them then you'd be able to relatively easily reverse engineer a lot of what we're doing.

So we quickly dropped that idea.

> humans will forget to replace the placeholders

I think you're right.

Or people screw up the placeholder content and call you by the wrong name, wrong job title, wrong company, whatever (off by 1 errors in some columns in their automation sheet?).

It's already happening with outreach messages on LinkedIn. Gets an instant block.

> He seems to understand humans.

Yeah, I think this is it. The humans were the point, not the minutiae of the tech.

(Btw, I hadn't noticed you'd responded whilst I was editing my comment to express myself a bit more clearly - I hope anyway - so the quotes don't quite match but I don't think it matters, because the sentiment is hopefully clear enough both ways!)

It's funny... I enjoyed Neuromancer, although I didn't read it until about 15 years ago.

And, yeah, the memory thing hasn't aged well. Thing is, 1984 was a funny time in computing, particularly when you consider the kind of computers normal people had access to.

At that point even things like PCs and the new Mac had 128 or 256K of RAM[0], so I get that 3MB must have seemed like an ocean of memory at the time. And, realistically, more than 1MB of RAM in machines you'd typically see sat at home or on a desktop was uncommon until the beginning of the 1990s.

And, although Moore's law had been around since 1965 it's hard to know how aware people outside of specialist circles would have been of it in 1984.

I suppose Gibson must have done some pretty in depth research for Neuromancer, right? But the memory thing is sort of ancillary to the story, so how much would he really have focussed on that? Probably not much.

And then do you really want to harshly judge the book on that one slightly laughable thing, in other ways, it was incredibly forward looking and almost prophetic? Doesn't seem right.

I think the sensible position is you have to let it slide and see it as a possible alternative future that never quite came to pass in that way but that which we can see strong echoes and foreshadowings of even still.

[0] In 1984 microcomputers, as opposed to, cough, "serious" computers like the PC and Mac, with 128K of RAM were still very new, with 32 - 64K being the entry level, and if you had one with 128K you were king of the hill. 128K in 1984 seemed like a ton of memory to most of us, but it's worth bearing in mind that only a handful of years before computers like the ZX81, which had only 1K of RAM, were the common entry level, so the progression was already clear if you looked at the situation in the right way, but you had to have been paying attention for a while to have noticed. I remember the first time I used a machine with 4MB of RAM in, maybe, 1990 - an Archimedes at school - and feeling like it was just this absolutely inexhaustible ocean of memory. In 1984 3MB would have felt almost inconceivably huge unless you were in the high performance computing, or maybe the mainframe, worlds.