rablackburn

> On-device AI excites me far more than relying on yet another cloud-based API.

Agreed. The huge leap-forward in capability already boggles my mind, the fact that I can run it _on my desktop cpu_ and have an interactive, natural-language oracle of the internet in a mere ~11GB file.

Everyone seems to be chasing the network-accessible API approach because lock-in is easy and if you're at the bleeding-edge (training) you've got the compute for running it anyway.

But now with accessible, local models my bet is on bored young hackers coming up with the best use cases and killer apps, not Microsoft.

Which explains why it's a playful name - the old Internet culture still shows up.

And let's be honest, it's a great name when the lowest free options are 419 or 420.

Some may roll their eyes at it, but it would certainly be a memorable status code.

> And yes, that would be way more useful.

...that sounds like an example use case for the proposed status code.

420: Requester Impaired - Infinite loop

It would allow you to signal to the requester that while their individual responses are fine, their session behavior is incoherent.

You appear to have skipped the introduction (which comes before the statement about this being useful for non-human operators like bots) where it says:

>> This request code may be used to provide visibility in cases where one or more valid requests create a dangerous situation, there is a pattern of erratic requests with the potential for danger, or the requester is otherwise detected as impaired.

Why this is considered necessary is explained in the next sentence:

>> Network-controlled devices are being used for beneficial but potentially dangerous activities such as construction and remote surgery. Identifying requester impairment is important for both accurately assessing the risk a given requester presents and preventing damage caused by a high-risk requester.

The progress is looking great so far.

And good timing, I was just digging through some of the older/current-release cosmic code to hack the light/dark theming settings panel to have a toggle for “change at sunset”.

I don’t suppose that’s been added to the new Rust Cosmic DE yet, but one can hope.

Most investors back companies with a kind of “extraction” mindset. They only want to Solve The Problem in so far as they can turn that into a stream of income.

Why would they give that to the employees to improve The Solution? It’s already solved as far as The Market is concerned. That would be Bloat

I think the only way is aggressively simplifying your solution, documenting the hell out of it (playbooks for rebooting, exporting data, etc), and leaving a notebook of passwords in a safety deposit box/safe.

They have, check out IQOS. Its been huge in Japan (and other parts of asia?) for years now. It heats the cigarette but doesnt actually burn. Same as the “dry herb vapes” that get used for cannabis.

Theyve started making moves to roll out it further internationally - big tobacco has been pushing “smoke free” nicotine products for a few years now.

A combination of enclosures (which had be going on for centuries and peaked in the 18th century with the Inclosure Act), and the Agricultural Revolution which greatly reduced the labour required in the fields (so if you had transitioned from working the commons to getting wages for working private land, you just stopped getting enough work).

So you had industrialists setting up factories needing cheap labour to run the machines, and a mass exodus of the countryside population to the cities desperate for work. Hello Dickens.

This is how you get an explosion in petty crime, disease, poverty, hulks, and eventually, transportation of the troublesome poor to Australia.

The industrial revolution was so destabilising to society that colonialism was a very convenient solution. Just go somewhere else, shoot the natives who resist, and the poors can have that land.

I read it as you need to stop consuming and start creating _something_ if you’re ever going to get noticed (we all need to be noticed, humans die when they are alone).

But creating something doesn’t guarantee you’ll succeed. A “You’ve got to be in it to have a chance at winning it” kind of message.

> Ironically, I feel like I've experienced more bugs after the switch than before

Not ironic, expected. When you do a refactor like this any good PM knows you’re creating a bunch of new bugs, and the ROI of the rewrite should consider this.

Unfortunately the way it goes most of the time is “ok, what if we’re really careful not to write any bugs? Then it’s all upside!”

…and now your dark theme is broken

Not put words in OPs mouth, but saying they “just want to control people” is perhaps not what they’re going for.

Since you raised the valid point of “why make everyone pay”, it seems they (OP) are concerned that currently _everyone_ is paying for the externalities of shitty electronics and the associated ewaste.

Of course these kinds of externalities are impossible (or just really hard?) to rectify at the individual-action level, its a collective action problem.

So they raised the interesting point why not target the specific companies who manufactured this faulty product and require them to clean-up the problem they’ve created.

If nothing else, it’s a useful conversation to have?

If it bumps it up the queue at all: I’ve been wanting to read someone pitch this way of thinking for what feels like an age.

Personally, I went all in on border-box as agency work is always design-lead. When the work is “make this picture in css”, anything other than border-box will drive you insane.

But it’s been a few decades of us pushing responsive design, so I’m curious if content-box doesn’t have its merits. I still don’t quite grok it from your explanations here (though I will re-read them), so would love to read that essay.

> its actually a "Sequential Dichotomizer" and works by dividing the data into subsets based on their similarities until each subset contains only items that are very similar to each other.

As someone who was considering this exact problem about an hour ago, thank you for handing me the exact term to look up!

Web 3 seemed silly enough that I didn’t bother really following it. I know that there is probably some very good work going on around blockchain stuff, but NFTs ain’t it.

LLM assistants is genuinely just moving _very_ fast, so if you don’t pay attention every day you just miss things.

I’m just enjoying having my interactive rubber-duck tbh

> It's one thing to criticize a specific aspect of digital culture, and maybe come up with some facts; it's another to just put everything in a blender and pretend there is wisdom in calling it terrible.

May I ask why not? Why does the critique have to be a specific aspect? How specific does one have to be before it’s “wisdom”?

The author appears to be trying to articulate a common pattern across behaviours that our culture and technology enable at the moment. To reflect on how our behaviour and lifestyle has changed drastically and its hard to see the big changes because they happen so slowly.

That some people are thriving is obvious (to you), but many obviously aren’t (to the author). One group’s experience doesn’t mean the other’s doesn’t exist.

For PWAs you could simply not expose a hook to the developer that initiates the install process? It would be like if App Store pages didn’t have URLs. Have the install functionality added to the browser UI instead.

If PWAs weren‘t arbitrarily restricted there’d be no reason to link to the app store because…you’re already in the app.

Spamming users to hit the install button would be like spamming users to bookmark your website. That doesn’t seem to be a problem (though that’s probably because people don’t keep their bookmarks on their home screen)

I’m curious to the reasoning behind a decision like this.

Part of what Akamai bought was the Linode brand name. Anecdotally as a user Linode’s brand seems to have a fair bit of value and positive reputation. Havent they just written off a non-trivial amount of value from what they just acquired?

Or is it as simple as they really want brand consistency?

That depends, what’s the rate of hallucination compared to your coworker whose microdoses are a little too macro some days? :)

I wouldn’t say it necessarily correlates with validity - Darwinism is about one thing: fitness of survival.

I feel like if you squint a little you can see all the positive-memetic adaptations that get bolted on to organised religion.

A commandment to “worship no other god but me” is a classic example of something that seems less like profound revelation and more like an effective memetic adaptation.

The effect is probably more that everyone in your life makes time for it.

There’s no scheduling conflicts for work, there’s nothing to get done…except getting together and appreciating each other.

…which can be its own mission. The holidays can be stressful, but the important thing is the time we spend together.

And yes, depending what you believe there can be a lot of symbology overlaid onto it. Ymmv on the symbology.

It’s almost as if the war on Christmas isn’t really a policy of liberalism ;)

Most people eventually recognise that intent matters. Consider that the people you see who mock Christmas are probably a younger demographic realising for the first time that the date might be a little arbitrary - but that doesn’t mean the spirit of the holiday isn’t real.

Sorry to hear about your family - I hope you have some community around you.

Being the “uncle” of the community (who isn’t related to anyone by blood) is actually a pretty fulfilling role sometimes.

Merry Christmas from the airport bar!

May your 2023s be full of family, grace, and good fortune.

I knows it’s becoming a bit of a meme now that modern software development is just rediscovering approaches from the 70s…

but it has really hit me recently how so many “indispensable” projects are just something that’s existed for decades re-written at a higher abstraction-level with a nicer UX.

I wish I had more classic Unix sysadmin experience. But unfortunately the gains are real, and I can’t justify investing time into learning the older tech (let’s say, using chroot instead of docker), when the newer is so much faster to learn, and has (comparative to modern hardware) such small overhead (if you’re not on MacOS :P)

I am excited about the rust-rewrite movement for shell though - precisely because it’s a chance to bring all the ux lessons we’ve learned in the last decades to cli-tools.

Stuff like charm.sh is super exciting.

It’s uncommon? It still happens to me every time I’ve used a different windows laptop, and I haven’t even been on a MacBook for more than 6 months, so not legacy hardware.

That being said, it happened on my m1 MacBook a few weeks ago - so seems like Apple is no better ;)

The issue is the Iron Law applies to the unions as well.

Given enough time unions tend towards bureaucracies dedicated to serving the Union, not its members.

Frankly I think saying the Iron Law is inevitable is a little too pessimistic for me, but it’s definitely something that needs to be consciously monitored/managed.

Interesting, that’s basically the model a lot of Japanese towns use.

The difference is, if you leave garbage without the right bag/on the street your neighbours are going to dump it back on your front door.

Larger item dumping is still a problem though. Some places issues coupons for a certain number of trips to the dump/year for local residents that can help.

I’ve followed a few of your posts on this and I’m sorry that things have worked out this way.

I think there were always some nay-sayers around in replies, but I appreciated what you were trying to do and despite the negative outcome am glad you at least gave it a shot.

Thanks for sharing your story on hn, I feel like I got to learn a lot vicariously.

There is a fantastic Australian film called “The Castle” (that you won’t regret watching!), but there’s a line from it where the main character is facing failure (and about to lose his entire neighbourhood)

“I don’t know what the opposite of letting someone down is. But you’ve done the opposite.” T Thanks for fighting to do the right thing. The world needs more people like you.

That was an excellent read. Thanks for sharing.

Always love blog posts that cite Knuth.