chromacity

> Everyone who depends on the good graces of a cloud provider for something (not just Google, but Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, whatever) needs to at the very least, take a moment, and figure out what their plan is when they are suddenly banned and locked out permanently, without any way to contact the company.

This is one of the most common sentiments I hear expressed on HN, next only to "if you're not building your software business around Claude Code, you're gonna left behind".

Yes, totally. I was about to undero surgery but found out the doctor didn't even know about Laplace transforms. He small-mindedly spent his formative years learning anatomy, never benefitting from the knowledge of frequency-domain derivatives. I dodged that bullet by storming out.

It probably has to do with the fact that we condition children and adolescents to consider white-collar jobs as more noble than blue-collar jobs, then we tell them that to get a good white-collar job, they need a degree... and then we make STEM degrees hard by subjecting students to more math than most people realistically need. So we have a lot of frontend developers who know calculus and an oversupply of people with humanities degrees.

With that degree, you're generally pushed toward jobs in journalism, publishing, graphic design, teaching, administrative functions, and so on. Most of these pay relatively little.

It's a meaningless, feel-good rule. Every country has countless carve-outs. To give you a trivial example: in the US, you can't get a passport if you owe more than $2,500 in child support.

> Delve doesn’t even have the ability to claim anything they’ve done as original, unless you count fraud as a service.

I'd wager there's some prior art...

I think the simple reason why small web / webring sites don't work is that if you're in the mood of "let's pull the handle on the internet slot machine and see what it surprises me with today", then social media does a better job. Without fail, it gives you something to be outraged about or impressed with.

And if you're looking for something specific - "I want to learn category theory" - then you don't visit a small web site because the content you're looking for is probably not on any woefully short, hand-curated list of URLs. So you do a normal web search (or ask your chatbot).

Another problem with web rings is that if you're hopping sites at random, you more often than not end up someplace weird in 3-5 hops. I guess it's the internet version of six degrees of separation: you're always at most six clicks away from neo-Nazis or SEO spammers.

As the article says, there are companies seeking royalties for both of these codecs.

It's a great introduction, but I find the premise a bit funny. It starts with Russell's paradox, insinuates that solving it within set theory makes set theory complex (it doesn't, you basically just restrict what can be used to build a set), and then introduces a system that is fundamentally more complex.

Not everything is about money. People were doing it, so they clearly had a motivation of some sort. I'm sure that some folks did it for themselves - just like writing a diary - but many others wanted to make new friends, earn praise, teach others, and so on.

If nothing else, LLMs have an indisputably negative impact on the second part. Fewer people will make it to your website if there's an AI digest on top of search results (or if they can skip search altogether by asking ChatGPT).

Yes, but here's the realization I had some time ago: no one cares. The billions of people online don't care. The internet is overwhelmingly accessed from mobile devices and used chiefly for shopping, scrolling through TikTok, watching Netflix, swiping on Tinder, and so on. More importantly, we don't care, not really. We pay lip service to it, but what have we done to foster the open / small web today?

Many of us work at companies that aren't moving the needle in the right direction, and in our free time, we seem to be content debating AI-generated think pieces and press releases from AI vendors. As I write this, in the top ten HN stories, I see press releases from Deepmind, Cursor, Tailscale, and Qwen. Even when commercial interests don't dominate and someone's passion project makes it to the top, how often do we offer meaningful encouragement or support?

The "old web" is something we like as an abstract idea, but in reality, we don't lift a finger to preserve it. I'm guilty too. When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.

IIRC, web chat often uses tools / code without surfacing this information in any obvious way.

Judging from the fact that 99% of the list seem like data-mining scam apps or spam tools, I suspect that's the answer in these cases too.

If LinkedIn really wanted to profile your religious beliefs, they would presumably go after the most popular religion-related extensions, not some "real-time AI for Islamic values" thing with 6k users.

> people will finally understand that security bugs are bugs, and that the only sane way to stay safe is to periodically update, without focusing on "CVE-xxx"

Linux devs keep making that point, but I really don't understand why they expect the world to embrace that thinking. You don't need to care about the vast majority of software defects in Linux, save for the once-in-a-decade filesystem corruption bug. In fact, there is an incentive not to upgrade when things are working, because it takes effort to familiarize yourself with new features, decide what should be enabled and what should be disabled, etc. And while the Linux kernel takes compatibility seriously, most distros do not and introduce compatibility-breaking changes with regularity. Binary compatibility is non-existent. Source compatibility is a crapshoot.

In contrast, you absolutely need to care about security bugs that allow people to run code on your system. So of course people want to treat security bugs differently from everything else and prioritize them.

The real story is what's going on behind the scenes. The charges are relatively flimsy (for the reason I mentioned in my other comment). But here's the cool thing: the site is basically taken from Microsoft's playbook. For years, they pretty transparently bankrolled shadowy, single-issue "grassroots advocacy" groups that went after their competitors under flimsy pretenses. These organizations attacked others but somehow never had an opinion about stuff like Windows Copilot.

This feels very similar, except now it's taking a swing at Microsoft. It's apparently paid for by some mysterious "trade association and advocacy group for commercial LinkedIn users" that runs out of a private PO box in a small German town - uh huh. I'm not going to feel bad for Microsoft, but I would love to read some investigative reporting down the line.

> I’m not deeply familiar with what APIs are available for detecting extensions, but the fact that it scans for specific extensions sounds more like a product of an API limitation (i.e. no available getAllExtensions() or somesuch) vs. something inherently sinister

This seems like a really weird argument to make. The fact that the platform doesn't provide a privacy-violating API is not an extenuating circumstance. LinkedIn needed to work around this limitation, so they knew they're doing something sketchy.

For the record, I don't think they're being evil here, but the explanation is different: they're don't seem to be trying to fingerprint users as much as they're trying to detect specific "evil" extensions that do things LinkedIn doesn't want them to do on linkedin.com. I guess that's their prerogative (and it's the prerogative of browsers to take that away).

No. Many hobbyists default to SBCs whether they need them or not. No one defaults to FPGA if they don't need it.

That kind of money, even if it goes to a single person, doesn't get taken out of the economy. No one puts it under the mattress. It's invested, so it's basically given to other people in exchange for a promise of equity / future returns.

It might not be the allocation of capital we like, but it doesn't disappear.

Even before the hikes, SBCs were $50-$100 a pop, compared to pennies for basic MCUs and maybe $4 for high-performance ones. People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem ("hats", forums, etc). I don't know if 300x is going to make more hobbyists see the light, or just result in fewer of them being able to afford the hobby?

I'm not sure your criticism is quite fair. I think everyone here is willing to cut more slack to the underdog. But when your company represents an outsized chunk of the digital economy and employs 10k+ people, and only then says "sooo, let's try to build some sort of a profitable product here", I can see why people are rolling their eyes.

OpenAI also burned a lot of goodwill by pretending to be a nonprofit foundation focused on the betterment of mankind and then executing one of the most spectacular rugpulls in modern history. So yeah, people will be giving them a hard time even if it turns out that the valuation is justified.

How does this follow?

There's nothing "basic" about Calculus II. Calculus is uniquely cursed in mathematical education because everything that comes before it is more or less rooted in intuition about the real world, while calculus is built on axioms that are far more abstract and not substantiated well (not until later in your mathematical education). I expect many intelligent, resourceful people to fail it and I think it says more about the abstractions we're teaching than anything else.

But also, prompting LLMs to give good results is nowhere near as complex as calculus.

Conversely, some people feel entitled to 100% of the value created by others. Oh, you wrote a book? Too bad, it's a part of my training data set now.

Downloading public stuff off the internet with no regard for the creator's wishes or license is bad enough, but we have many people here who defended AI companies seeding models with pirated content.

The internet is a social contract. AI is not the first thing to try and erode it for profit, but it's by far the most aggressive one.

> I want to argue that AI models will write good code because of economic incentives.

The economic incentives on the internet by and large favor the production of slop. A significant proportion of the text-based web was content-farmed even before LLMs - and with the advent of LLMs, you now have slop-results for almost every search query imaginable, including some incredibly niche topics. We've seen the same trend with video: even before gen AI, online video consumption devolved toward carefully-engineered, staged short-form bait (TikTok, YT Shorts, etc). In the same vein, the bulk of the world's email traffic is phishing and spam.

None of this removed the incentive to produce high-quality websites, authentic and in-depth videos, and so on. But in practice, it made such content rare and made it harder for high-quality products to thrive. So yeah, I'm pretty sure that good software will survive in the LLM era. But I'm also absolutely certain that most app stores will be overrun by slop, most games on Steam will be slop, etc.

And speaking of product names, I hope no one here is using Claude.

> I don't think the point is that the transition isn't difficult. It is that there is an overall benefit that outweighs the challenges of the transition.

In the abstract, sure. But not when you're on the receiving end. It's like with NIMBYism: we all roll our eyes at NIMBYs until it's actually our own backyard. You're not going to convince a coal miner that they're better off learning to code. You're not going to convince a software engineer that they're better off in the mines.

Are you serious? People get upset about losing jobs because they need jobs to pay their bills. Further, we often build our life identities around work; if you're a good car mechanic or a successful restaurant owner, you're proud of that. It's a part of you.

Having to repeatedly restart your career is risky, painful, and demoralizing. I have no problem seeing why people don't like that and why it can lead to populist backlash or even violent revolutions (as it did in the past).

By the way, to address your closing comment: people don't like dying either and tend to get upset when others die?

Which I find funny in a way: I'm sure that almost no one here understands the article, grasps the significance of this problem in mathematics, or can meaningfully comment on the difficulty of solving it. But we'll still have opinions because the article mentions a popular tool some of us like, some of us dislike, and some are ambivalent about.

It would be surreal if a carpentry forum was regularly abuzz about mountaineering because climbers use a hammer-shaped tool.

> How can you seriously think you've created something when you're just using someone else's software?

It talks to you like a real human. It expresses human emotions, by deliberate design. It showers you with praise, by deliberate design. It's called "artificial intelligence". Every other media article talks about it in near-mystical terms. Every other sci-fi novel and film has a notion of sentient AI.

I know of techies who ask LLMs for relationship advice, let them coach their children, and so on. It takes real effort to convince yourself it's "just" a token predictor, and even on HN, there's plenty of people who reject this notion and think we've already achieved AGI.

I can't imagine why a 100 MHz digital signal at 2.5 V would be even particularly challenging on a small two-layer PCB. A lot of signal integrity lore has to do with passing EMI compliance (this almost certainly wouldn't), as well as with people extrapolating from Rick Hartley videos without pausing to think if it really applies to hobby stuff.

> If you're only talking specifically about your program that no one else has access to, I don't think there is any battle? Do whatever you want, no one cares nor would even know about it.

Can I do it on my phone?

I think that theoretical math and physics are special, but probably not in the way you assume. It's just that there isn't a whole lot of grant money, prestige, or influence associated with them (unless you accomplish something truly exceptional).

Computer science is very close to math and should be even easier to verify, but there's plenty of dubious results published every year, simply because it's more profitable to game the system. For example, I'd wager that 50%+ of academic claims related to information security are bogus or useless. Similarly, in the physics-adjacent world of materials science, a lot of announcements related to metamaterials and nanotech are suspect.