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socrateslee

19 karma · joined April 11, 2013

personal blog: https://valarmorghulis.io
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socrateslee··on Polanyi's Paradox
> We can know more than we can tell.

The paradox arises when humans develop SaaS, apps, workflows, etc. The question is "will AI simply do things or know things more than we can tell?"

socrateslee··on Geo Is Not the Next Generation of SEO
SEO became a standardized industry discipline pretty much after Google dominated the market and stabilized the rules of engagement. The search engine giants evole their ranking algorithms mostly to fight exploiting of their mechanims, the core principles of SEO don't change much.

In contrast, LLMs are still constantly evolving. Not only the models, the way of agents doing things, the tools/skills agent shall use, the whole system may be completely different next month. GEO is merely an attempt to ride the LLM hype,clumsily stitching together unrelated concepts.

socrateslee··on A guide to local coding models
Gemini 3 on Gemini CLI (free version) would meet quota limit for about 3-4 messages, but it will take much longer time since it responses pretty slow.
socrateslee··on Keep Android Open
in https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/09/lets-talk-... install an app via adb is not affected, seems that means the wrapper software of adb will prosper.
socrateslee··on Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
Just to think about the blocking of installing apps from unverified source on Android by Google, isn't this an exclusive contracts upon users?
socrateslee··on Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
It's like double "double the dose"
socrateslee··on Call MCP Server(stdio) directly in the shell
This article will show you how to call a MCP server in the shell, without mcp dev or any third party tools, only with echo > or copying/pasting JSONRPC message directly.
socrateslee··on Show HN: Open-Source MCP Server for Context and AI Tools
For the OAuth part, the access_token is all an MCP server needs. So users could do an OAuth Authorization like in the settings or by the chatbot, and let MCP servers handle the storage of the access_token.

For remote MCP servers, storing access_token is a very common practice. For MCP servers hosted locally, how to deal with a bunch of secret keys is a problem.

socrateslee··on Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?
https://crt.sh can find your subdomain only when it doesn't have a wildcard certificate(*.somedomain.com)
socrateslee··on Yuval Noah Harari on Why Technology Favors Tyranny(2018)
> In the late 20th century, democracies usually outperformed dictatorships, because they were far better at processing information. We tend to think about the conflict between democracy and dictatorship as a conflict between two different ethical systems, but it is actually a conflict between two different data-processing systems. Democracy distributes the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given 20th-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place.

> However, artificial intelligence may soon swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. In fact, it might make centralized systems far more efficient than diffuse systems, because machine learning works better when the machine has more information to analyze. If you disregard all privacy concerns and concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, you’ll wind up with much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people.

socrateslee··on Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers
May be the case is that filtering user by browser UA is no longer a feasible solution(new browsers and alike are growing), and neither running javascript(headless chrome everywhere).

For local physical store, geo-location is a naturally filter for customers as long as beaming a person from a spaceship to earth is not invented. For web, a equally effective solution is very hard to find.

socrateslee··on Google "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI" (2023)
The VCs thinked that the scaling law may build a moat for very large computing powers like Google and OpenAI, and VCs rushed into the area the foundation models.

The emerging of DeepSeek V3 and DeepSeek R1 somehow make the moat vulnerable with their much smaller training cost. The fact verified the claim of Google.

socrateslee··on Ask HN: What do you use for content moderation of UGC?
I agree that LLM could do most of the moderation work. You could use a multi-modal LLM for image moderation.
socrateslee··on AI founders will learn the bitter lesson
AI code copilot like cursor provide a immersive context than most of other AI products.
socrateslee··on Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
or saying that most of the Google engineers are using tools like copilot, and they use the copilot just as everyone else.
socrateslee··on The contextvars and the chain of asyncio tasks in Python
When we say “the contextvars is somehow like thread local, but mostly for coroutines”, we think that coroutines are just another types of threads. But actually we are not right. The coroutines are not threads. A thread has its own life cycle and its own stack space, so a thread local storage actually belongs to a thread. But a coroutine is just a function that can be paused and resumed, scheduled by a loop. So the context of a coroutine belongs not to the coroutine itself. When in a chain of coroutines, like the calling chain of Tasks, we need to be aware that the consistency of context are manually kept by the users, not automatically kept by the system.
socrateslee··on Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
Anyway, just note that Google do encourage RSS with the Google Discover feature

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/google-...

socrateslee··on How is GPTBot allowed or disallowed?
ChatGPT only swallows data or content but bring back no traffic to content creators. Maybe this is how Google is different from ChatGPT. But what will become of Google if the experimental generative AI's answer replace all the SERPs? An closed web where no search engine no AI can actually enter?
socrateslee··on Thoughts on the fading away of the age of IE
I have been thinking about two questions for a long time. First, why the market share of IE is so resilient to die? Second, why did IE lose to Chrome from the position of market domination while Windows has always been dominating the desktop OS market? Now I realized that the answers to the two questions are the same — the mechanism of the software update.
socrateslee··on AI-generated content, SEO, and Embeddings
metadata like keywords and description is for machines to parse, and AI-generated or AI-assisted content is for humans to read.
socrateslee··on Create a temp file within the scope of a script(even the script crashes)
# create temporary file tldr: tmpfile=$(mktemp /tmp/abc-script.XXXXXX) exec 3>"$tmpfile" exec 4<"$tmpfile" rm "$tmpfile" # rest scripts
socrateslee··on Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels
It just seems that when compared with TikTok, Instagram Reels is still much smaller as a short video platform. Where the creator communities is yet to be built, the data is probably weighted heavily on the Instagram followers, what do we do on such a new but may be potentially large platform? how do we cold start based what we already have? We snap some historically hot videos from TikTok. I think that's why videos on Reels are kind of old.

A new platform is not built on a single day. Even creators found a new platform and decided the first thing they do should be re-posting their old works.

socrateslee··on Deactivation of Flash may have crippled Chinese railroad for a day
The story sounds like joke but it states that most of traditional industry projects will underestimate the maintaining cost of softwares along with its dependencies.
socrateslee··on Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH
so employees from Dropbox have to use Dropbox to share theirs files...
socrateslee··on Rclone – Sync files and directories to many cloud storage providers
deployment using rclone is really convenient, releasing packages could be synced into a bucket, and then from the bucket into servers.

rclone also works smoothly with CI servers.

socrateslee··on Faster Python in Docker via disabling some Docker security settings
- On an Ubuntu host, the benchmark execution time in Docker was about twice the native time; this difference could be negated by modifying the security settings of the container - The difference was much smaller when running well-optimised code — rather than code with (unnecessary) for-loops - On a Windows host, Python code actually ran faster inside Docker, and the container security settings did not appear to affect execution speed as much
socrateslee··on Little Free Pantry
two questions: 1. how the pantries get cleaned? 2. how to deal with expired foods?
socrateslee··on Android Q Beta
After upgraded my Pixel XL to Android Q, found weixin crashed.
socrateslee··on Can Science Fiction Predict the Future of Technology?
Quote from the article: A fundamental change in human thinking about the future began in the 18th century, as technological change accelerated to a point where its effects were easily visible in the course of a single lifetime, and terms such as progress and development entered human discourse…Speculation about the future became more common as human beings increasingly reshaped the world during the 19th and early 20th centuries, though it was seen largely as entertainment, a diversion from the often stark realities of everyday life. Yet some of that speculation proved surprisingly close to the mark.
socrateslee··on AWS gives open source the middle finger?
Scaling mongodb is not easy, and may this is why AWS DocumentDB is built instead of providing an RDS version of mongodb?
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