low_tech_punk

Exploring implications of an absolute physical address. FSF basically claimed a physical "domain name" and no future organizations will be able to reside in that address. FSF can move out and ask USPS to do a 301 Moved Permanently or 308 Permanent Redirect.

Smelling bitter lesson... but what if the auto-regressive architecture is actually a form of Redux?

This might be a good successor to comic sans. Readable but still fun to look at.

The X in JSX stands for HTMX.

Is this a flux pattern for LLM? reminds of me https://cycle.js.org/

The photo titled "Thief, outside of mosquito-net." really piqued my interest.

Of course, there is Ironwood announce too: https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/ironwood-tpu-age-o...

But, why do they launch Firebase Studio (https://firebase.blog/posts/2025/04/introducing-firebase-stu...) on the same day? I wonder if this is a timed.

And interesting comparison between Web search vs Gen AI.

Web search seems divergent: the same keyword leads to many different kinds of results.

Gen AI seems convergent: different keywords that share the same semantics lead to the same results.

Arguably, convergence is a feature, not a bug. But on the macroscopic level, it is a self reinforcing loop and may lead to content degeneracy. I guess we always need the extraordinary human artists to give AI the fresh ideas. The question is the non-extraordinary artists might no longer have an easy path to become extraordinary. Same trap is happening to junior developers right now.

OP highlights application problems, and RAG specifically. But that is not an LLM problem.

Chat is such a “leaky” abstraction for LLMs

I think most people share the same negative experience as they only interact with LLMs through the chat UI by OpenAI and Anthropic. The real magic moment for me was still the autocompletion moment from the gh copilot.

The problem with en and em dash is that

1) they are too hard to type.

2) using them without surrounding thin space or hairspace breaks the horizontal rhythm and draws unnecessary attention to the punctuation; but thin and hair spaces are equally hard to type

3) Most people write markdown with mono space fonts, making these dashes and spaces indistinguishable.

Apple needs to admit, a product is either new or improved. It is never new and improved.

OpenSeasame would be a great project name!

I'm curious how the lifetime pricing model work for you as a founder. Are you able to bootstrap this yourself and stay within budget with all the compute and hosting cost?

This might be a contrarian take: the improvement against gpt-4o and gemini-1.5 flash, both of which are general purpose multi-modal models, seem to be underwhelming.

I'm sensing another bitter lesson coming, where domain optimized AI will hold a short term advantage but will be outdated quickly as the frontier model advances.

I'm curious too. I want to understand "Figma is destroying the design world on unprecedented scale by normalising bad UX, UI and product management found in Figma itself".

I think this post is related: We are destroying software (https://antirez.com/news/145)

I don't disagree that software engineering is not as rigorous as it was. But software has also spread into much wider area, allowing many more people to participate as programmers, all thanks to abstractions.

I'm drawn to the romantic/pure/spartan aspect of low level programming too but I also need to make a living by solving problems in practical and scrappy ways.

I think the issue is that the font used by the author does not support fraction pixel sizing. I changed the body font size from 1.2em (16.8px) to 16px and the issues are gone. I'm curious too as for why it happened. I'm guessing the font was originally designed for Japanese, not Latin. See: https://fontmeme.com/fonts/m-plus-rounded-1c-font/

I'm actually glad AI use is revealing misalignment:

If the AI is so good at it, why are we still hiring human to do the job? It just shows how the interview process is not measuring the right thing to start with.

We are approaching a singularity where we actually want to hire the cheating tool, not the cheater.

Looks like a very high quality library, great work! I wonder if it will eventually support auto truncating tab titles when the tabs fill up the horizontal space, just like how chrome display large number of tabs.

  Despite fewer clicks, copyright fights, and sometimes iffy answers, AI could unlock new ways to summon all the world’s knowledge.

Maybe a better title would be AI menas the end of knowledge as we've known it

  Because Clojure treats data as first-class citizens, we could build our own lightweight conflict resolution system using pure functions that operate on these transactions.

What does it mean to say Clojure "treat data a first-class citizen"? I understand FP would treat function as first-class citizen, but the statement seems to mean something different.

but you might have to change it back to main when the next president shows up.

The visual design details make it feel like the navigation system of Elite Dangerous! Well done!

A sound effect would be nice. Just an idea.

UW's slogan is "Be Boundless". This is the polar opposite of that.

UW has missed a great opportunity to show its current and future students and faculty that innovation is valued there. Their management decision will shutdown the minds of so many brilliant hackers, as we have already witnessed with the OP's decision to back down. I really hope the school can re-evaluate their decision and more importantly, the faculty should support the students, as they are together pursuing the goal of learning by doing. That's what higher education should offer, not conditioning people into rule makers and rule followers.

Thanks! The 0.1B version looks perfect for embedded system. What is the key benefit of attention-free architecture?

I wish the author considered https://wails.io/ for UI. Why all the effort with Go and ended up with Electron?

Going off a tangent, I wonder if the market reveals survival bias: companies and products that did respect privacy practice (e.g. by asking explicit permission) were not able to harness enough user data to compete with other bad players, and as a result, any company would eventually end up like Facebook or go out of business.

Sadly privacy is not a marketable feature, or at least it does not have the ROI as Apple originally believed. I feel the only way to level the play field is to reconsider our regulation framework and treat privacy as a fundamental benefit for consumers.

This is what Meta Portal could have been. It's not about going high tech and fancy UI. It's the human kindness that makes tech beautiful.