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echelon

22,044 karma · joined September 4, 2011

HN contrarian.
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echelon··on Search for everyone
> Kagi is already blocked in my workplace due to their AI features

Can you expand upon this? Why is there an AI block?

echelon··on BYD doubles its Brazil market share to 9.7% a year after opening its local plant
Without pressure, local companies do not compete.

We need to let them in at a limited capacity and our domestic companies need to feel the heat.

The geopolitical risks are real. Stronger foreign companies can kill local ones if there's no stopgap or means for local companies to catch up. The cars are microphones for politically exposed persons (which most of you are not). If there was ever a hot war, these cars can turn into remote bombs and take out key infrastructure.

But in the here and now, we need Ford and friends to grow up and face real evolutionary pressures.

American consumers like big SUVs. But they also want cheap and modern, and once they see what else the market has to offer, they'll use choice to force the hands of American auto.

echelon··on Synaptics Appears to Use Legal Threats to Block Open-Source DisplayLink Driver
I'm not sure patents make sense anymore in the post-AI era.
echelon··on Synaptics Appears to Use Legal Threats to Block Open-Source DisplayLink Driver
If someone can point me to a mirror, I can make a copy in Brainfuck or Prolog or something funny.
echelon··on Synaptics Appears to Use Legal Threats to Block Open-Source DisplayLink Driver
This is going to cause Striesand Effect.

Thousands of developers are going to do this now.

echelon··on Synaptics Appears to Use Legal Threats to Block Open-Source DisplayLink Driver
Streisand Effect.

Now there are going to be hundreds of clones.

echelon··on We're training a Figma-fluent editing model
> Artcraft suite of apps (Figcraft is one of them)

This will be pushed to feature and UI/UX parity. The community has spun up an open source Raft/Paxos collaboration server, and are working to connect it with open source cloud and local compute.

Same thing for Canva.

The community is jumping onto this motion quickly. Just look at how well SolidCraft is progressing.

Companies are not going to be able to lock you into tools anymore.

echelon··on US tech giants' hidden AI debt swells 90% to $3.2T in 6 months
But then they wouldn't be infinite growth tech giants. They'd be value investing.
echelon··on Anthropic IPO filing: $1.7B quarterly payroll, about $107K per employee monthly
The delta between "good enough" and "great" is shrinking.
echelon··on Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?
No way. The parameter count can't fit on consumer devices, and you're not getting orders of magnitude smarter behavior with smaller models.
echelon··on Anthropic IPO filing: $1.7B quarterly payroll, about $107K per employee monthly
It it wasn't for competing models, this would all make sense.

If this was just OpenAI and Anthropic, this money would represent all of your salaries being soaked up and your job functions being privately consumed by two companies.

Fire three quarters of your eng staff and subscribe to Anthropic is a valid trillion dollar business. Scary to say, but that's the value prop on the filing.

Except that there's actually tons of competition and no moat. The math problems are just a distraction from that.

How on earth are you worth a fraction of that when there are a dozen Chinese companies doing the exact same, with half of them just giving away the goods for free?

echelon··on Katamari Damacy but it's The Met collection
This!

You start off small picking up crumbs and trinkets.

You get larger and pick up sports equipment.

Then you start picking up people and they run away from you.

Then cars. Then buildings. Then cargo ships.

Then mountains. Weather systems.

Planets.

And the level designs are fun and intricate. The levels you're inside eventually become the objects you roll up.

You start inside a house at the size of a mouse. Then later you come and roll up that house and its whole neighborhood.

It feels like the horror movie "The Blob", except it's quirky and adorable when you start devouring the whole town.

All of these clones are flat and miss the incredibly good level design.

echelon··on Anthropic's growth just flattened
I now think of software code as DNA.

Your machinery was not written elegantly. It was sloppily assembled via evolutionary pressures.

A gene gets duplicated, mutates, and suddenly you have new functionality and new fitness criteria.

Try something bad and you die without reproduction.

Our code isn't clean. There's redundancy and extra packing and slop all over the human body.

Embrace it. Stochastically hill climb.

Code is DNA. Evolve it, don't intelligently design it. Fit the curves of your environment quickly and use tests to cull bad behavior and the slopes of your domain.

echelon··on OccupySaaS
> however extended usage reveals more and more flaws until it's determined the software isn't really usable yet

> Then begins the long, long, long slog of the work needed to make the software usability and parity, which apparently can't be done by LLM agent swarms yet.

We think it can be. This is just Pareto principle. We're hill climbing the finer curves.

echelon··on OccupySaaS
We have about 50 core developers and we're maturing our processes. If you're interested, you can join us in our Discord.

Each focal area is getting DRIs, and we're doing cross-cutting work to make everything componetizable and cross-platform.

We're scaling up the scope of our mission and ambition, too. We view software freedom as not just applications, but also infrastructure and weights. There are a lot of things we want to contribute to ensure the OpenAIs and Anthropics don't become the next extractive monopolies.

> Does the stability approach, say, Photopea?

We had some debate internally about whether to begin diverging the project from what Adobe does and begin innovating on our own.

We instead decided that 100% feature parity is the goal. Parity is a milestone for us because it validates what we've done, and it also serves the muscle memory of the tens of thousands of Adobe users.

After we hit parity, we can easily turn our applications into entirely new ones with more opinionated UI/UX and net new features.

echelon··on OccupySaaS
> ArtCraft is doing a great job illustrating that for one particular company.

Thank you!

I think many of us as a collective profession are going to be doing this.

We're going to open source apps, then infrastructure, then weights. The hyperscalers created the seeds of their own moat dismantlement.

Web 1.0 was great - forums, personal websites, IRC, a million chat options, RSS, APIs. It was this way because the world was technical and everyone had energy to do things. It was a Wild West, and it was fun. You could buy and own things back then.

Web 2.0 brought on our parents and grandparents to the world of broadband. Most of the new users were non-technical, so the tech of Web 1.0 got simplified into "product". The sharp edges were removed, and everything became simple. Over time the leaders built up their moats, removed APIs, turned into walled garden silos. Companies began to become extractive and enshittify their products.

Today the conditions that led to Web 2.0 are no longer true. It doesn't take a ton of energy to build things, and it doesn't require deeply technical people to do it either.

The entire tech sector is going to be a blood bath. Where there were once moats and monopolies, there's now going to be prolific and wide spread open source and a market rife with competition.

Big tech is turning into the food service industry. Passion driven, distributed, highly competitive, though probably lower margin. Plenty of opportunity for small businesses.

echelon··on TCP Use-After-Free: CVE-2026-98432 / CVSS 9.8
Every time Anthropic limits what we can do, I start switching more of my process to open weights.

Planning with Claude, implementation with Kimi.

echelon··on Norway makes shithouses great again
> Just the worst people

What?

> Carry your trash with you.

What do you think I did with it? I don't litter.

It's just not at all enjoyable carrying two empty bottles for miles with just my hands while I have other things to carry.

echelon··on Restrooms along the Norwegian Scenic Routes
Yet no trash cans. It's a frustrating trade off, especially with all the vending machines. If you don't have a backpack, you're stuck carrying trash. If you do, it gets messy.

Also, this does not hold in Hokkaido. I taught English in Obihiro (well, Makubetsu) and you had to plan your trash and restroom breaks.

echelon··on Anthropic to receive high 'junk' rating from credit agencies following IPO
Users will spill over from shitty experiences to non shitty ones.

It's easier to build everything now.

AI is a catalyst and the activation energy is much lower.

High energy (shitty) systems will not prevail.

echelon··on Anthropic to receive high 'junk' rating from credit agencies following IPO
This is radically different.

This is the Zerg rush era.

echelon··on Anthropic to receive high 'junk' rating from credit agencies following IPO
And they'll continue to get worse because anyone can build this tech and play this game now.

The old moats are falling. The old rent seekers are losing their sway.

You love to see it.

echelon··on Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone says
And this is why open weights matter.

If you can think a thing, you should be able to prompt a thing.

echelon··on Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone says
We demand a second amendment right to access god in a first class manner.

If the people can't access god, then we are living under a dictatorship with aims to enslave us.

echelon··on Northflank Breached
My hate for hyperscalers is greater than my hate of being SRE.

It's time to leave GCP, AWS, and the rest.

Google and Amazon markup can eat it. Fuck those guys.

Let's not forget that Google and Amazon tried to offshore us, played a role in inventing the labor-displacing models in the first place, and that don't give a shit about any of us.

I hope they ossify and turn into the next IBMs.

They thought AI would lead to growth and a greater concentration of wealth for themselves, but it's actually the seeds of their own destruction and dismantlement.

echelon··on Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone says
Anthropic won't let people make video games. They are on the wrong side of history.

They are so going to get disrupted. Chinese open weights models will have no such limitations, and there's no way we'll let Anthropic outlaw or ban them. (And even if they did, they can't police the whole world.)

There is no moat. Anthropic should be playing nice, not trying to create a god while holding engineers under their thumb. We will route around it.

echelon··on elect.horse
The horse version feels more fun and cozy.
echelon··on El Niño is flooding California's coasts with the highest tides to come
Citizens vote for what speaks to their daily lives and fears. Not necessarily academic ideas or concepts.

They'll vote out of pain more readily than out of conscience.

echelon··on We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4
Open weights models in the data center are more important than on consumer devices.

In the future, even consumers will launch weights and fine tunes they own in the cloud.

People don't own the fiber to their home, so why should they expect to run the GPUs? If they want smart coding and video models, they'll need H200s and B200s, and they'll need to rent them.

echelon··on H.264 Is Magic (2016)
I feel as though AI is going to blow these all out of the water soon.

And then we'll get AI-designed hardware codecs for them.

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