catdog

Models can ingest up to date documentation, source code and search the web, context windows are big enough these days. Sure at some point retraining will be needed but not every few month and you likely don't have to start at zero every time.

> The fact that we do proves that ICs are equally to blame, because evidently the majority of them love using AI.

Quite true. Although there is a distinction, you definitely can use it as a tool but many indeed just lazily create slop.

There is a difference though. Railway lines and fiber last decades, GPUs will be out of date in a few years and the chips will probably just die at some point anyways. Also datacenters are barely getting finished and GPU clusters sit in storage. They are kind of useless without those datacenters though as they need specialized infrastructure.

The point here is a different one I think. It's not that everyone and their dog will create their own version of things, this will probably not happen at such a huge scale for the reasons you mentioned.

What might change is that the barrier to enter the market is lowered so someone without gigantic investment and years of time could actually come out with e.g. a JIRA competitor ticking all the boxes. This drives the vendors margins down. Also might give the buyer more negotiation power if you can say "then we just do our own version".

There is a lot of vendor lock in the software world just because it's just too hard/risky to do a full featured competitor, that might change and eat into the margins of especially those vendors. For those who also have healthy competition, the relative dynamics probably don't change much, agreed.

> True, with one exception: they do care if people are using the tokens to distill their own models. There is just not that much they can do about it except for clumsy heuristic type protections that will never really work.

Someone stealing from the stealing machine, oh that irony. Also hard to tell if they really have such a huge problem with it as that token spend makes their numbers go up significantly.

> One is competition from "open" models and just the complete lack of any moat for anyone this many years into things, and the second is that if all the software developers who are writing vibe coded clones of commercial software actually do lose their day jobs because the software companies they worked for go under (and if there are no more jobs for them to go to because this is happening everywhere), they eventually won't be able to afford the big lab subscriptions for personal use, so both pools of customers for the AI labs collapse in a related way.

If they hike up prices they kill demand, either because they compete with humans or open weight ... and now it's both actually. If they don't hike up prices they can't pay the bills for their absurd capex and they kill demand long term because there will be no one left to pay for it. Pretty fucked up situation I would say.

On the other hand, we are barely a month in, that thing is still ongoing so it's hard to judge now.

I think this is one of the biggest open questions, not only for cloning software but for "vibe coding" in general. How hard is it actually to turn such things into polished products? Is it even feasiable or are you just drowning in slop at some point?

With that much criminal energy behind it, you might even want to remove the wifi module or ground the antenna at this point.

Maybe, but also, they just hit a few of the largest data centers. Russia simply does not have that many large data centers and it's not so much of a secret where they are located I guess. Such an attack disrupts a lot of things and it's natural that the Russians focus their recovery efforts and the spare capacity they have left elsewhere on more critical services.

There is also the problem, that some OEMs add their own "battery optimizations". If you simply don't run anything its indeed very battery efficient... Forcing push notifications through some central service has minimal benefits at best. Open source variants are forced to publish annoying persistent notifications and ask the user to flip some "battery optimization" toggle deep inside the settings to not get killed, of course this often enough changes with Android versions.

Looking at the amount of RAM phones have nowadays I don't know if this is an issue, desktop Linux runs fine with those amounts. Also Android is not really memory efficient so they needed this workaround.

Related: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-v...

Mythos turned out to be exactly the marketing stunt it smelled like.

There are others like AISLE who seem to be a bit more successful in finding actual issues using LLMs in some shape or form though, whatever they do differently. Chances are high the secret sauce is not so much about the model being exceptionally powerful which would be bad news for the frontier labs.

> That we are finally having a sane pendulum swing towards no copyright is a breath of fresh air.

Might be a short one though if all goes to plan. Just another form of gatekeeping the worlds information and with new gatekeepers replacing the old ones.

> At the same time it's truly baffling going on a site called _hacker_ news and seeing corpo talking points from the 90s/00s regurgitated wholesale. Information wants to be free.

Look at who owns that site, no surprise here.

I'm quite pleased with it. It's also nice that it translates directly to the file system .

Is there money in frontier?

The problem is that the UI speed largely was not kept at that level but considerably slowed down again despite exponentially growing compute power.

Taxis in general are a working and proven business model. You could have been skeptical about the way they approached it but surprise surprise, you can make money providing taxi services. Less so with "AI", it's not proven at all that this can be made profitable in the near future.

> It's doable but has limited benefits when they're limited to 2-4 GB of RAM anyway.

Back in the day there was no real benefit. Today it's different as most Linux distros don't really care much about supporting 32 bit anymore.

I owned a Samsung NC10 which had a non-shitty keyboard as its outstanding feature. Was a nice little Linux machine I used a lot. Only bad thing, those Intel Atom N2xx CPUs are just awfully slow, even back then.

Today realistically I don't think it really makes that much sense to bother with those devices even for small home servers. You can e.g. get used thin clients for cheap which run circles around those old CPUs and support way more RAM while likely being as power efficient if not more. At the bare minimum I would avoid using any 32 bit x86 CPU for running anything modern, even Debian dropped official support for that architecture now.

Sadly even back in the day mostly some very early models shipped with Linux as Microsoft promptly made sure they don't.

Except for the price. Apart from portability and battery life a huge factor was them being (very) low cost.

> Netbooks didn’t need Microsoft’s help in dying. Nobody bought more than one of them, the experience was that bad.

If I remember correctly Microsoft put a limit on the HW specs for getting those cheap Windows copies while simultaneously making sure they all shipped with Windows which did not run that well on that low spec hardware. I think this is a huge part why this category died that quickly.

On the other hand there was also just general technological progress happening, "full size" notebooks were generally getting a lot more compact and lightweight so there was less need for that separate category.

> Proxmox is merely Debian with some fancy curtains.

It's part of the appeal that it is mostly just Debian under the hood. If I want to run containers I would also not see it as the best choice but it really shines in managing qemu VMs.

Also your script often might not be that battle tested, more likely it will have bugs and miss a few important edge cases.

> there's a special place in hell for helm in particular for using text/template to generate yaml

Indeed. Using text templating for structured documents is already quite bad, doing it with a significant whitespace language it's absolute hell.

It's the industry standard for running and shipping containerized applications, at least for the ones which are more complex and/or dynamic than an application container and maybe 1-2 databases. It provides a well defined and stable orchestration API which is also quite capable. It's even sometimes worthwhile to spin up a single node cluster for that reason. Does not mean it is perfect, is it sometimes a bit complex? yes, is it verbose? yes, could the established ecosystem be better (thinking about e.g. helm)? yes. But at some point it's still easier with k8s than without it.

It is of course not the best choice for everything, there are enough things where you better just spin up a VM and deploy directly or with only a simple container runtime if you use containers.

On low power, mostly idle systems that's definitely a downside. K8s is always busy, probably largely because it's whole architecture is centered around reconciliation loops which contentiously compare the actual state to the desired state. It's not much but enough to prevent the CPU from entering its lowest power states.

That's really a huge issue right now (to some extent even before the AI hype) that almost everywhere google is effectively the only entity explicitly allowed to scrape.

Maybe they have just too much money at hand, would not surprise me, people are still investing into gen AI like there is no tomorrow. Also, for the completely criminal operations, you only have to find a way to infect and distribute your bot to, e.g. some common internet of shit device. Scaling is basically free afterwards as you don't need to ask anyone. The article also hints that those are actually the biggest problem.

Then there is probably also a lot of time pressure on the people implementing and operating those scrapers so they have even less incentive to optimize their code.

Same here, the usefulness of the slop machines is quite limited compared to the downsides.

Yep quite useless. It's well known that postgres defaults are tuned for low resource usage, not for max performance. There are calculators like https://pgtune.leopard.in.ua/ to get a better than default config with next to no effort.