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syndeo

108 karma · joined December 18, 2019

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syndeo··on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
I for one run a small Scripture-study web app that makes use of this on Chrome browsers when available to provide summarizations of long commentary articles. I'm also looking to use it to power topical search.

I allow free open access to the content, as blocking it behind an account signup doesn't sit right ethically—it should be open and free for everyone.

The issue there is that there's no way to easily secure the API from being hammered by bad actors. (Due to the often-controversial response many have to Scripture, apps like these draw special kinds of negative attention.) You can set rate limits, but people can still abuse those, just to try to burn your money. I can get by for free (or relatively cheap, fully paid out-of-pocket as none of this is monetized) on Vercel/Netlify/etc, but inference is expensive, and a prime target for those trying to cause trouble.

If in the future the web exposes local "foundation" models that web apps can assume are present, that would open up great possibilities like these for indie devs like myself. Being able to offer useful and compelling features without worrying about abuse would be nice. That's my point.

syndeo··on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
Totally fair. Depends on how it's used, really.

If it's to allow the web apps I use to work with more privacy, or to enable smaller/indie players (that can't easily afford to burn a bunch of API tokens for every user) to offer some basic AI-based features in their web apps, then I'm all for that.

This is the whole appeal of Apple's Foundation models on iOS too.

syndeo··on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
It’s actually really useful for web devs to have access to a local model. Whether or not browsers should bundle their own rather than using the system-provided model(s) is up for debate, however. For the time being, though, Google does have some of the better small ones.

Furthermore, users aren’t going to want to have to wait for an extra thing to download before their web apps can use AI.

That’s the thing… Without context of why, users probably wouldn’t want a 4 GB download. But they do want their web apps to work properly. When there’s a specific use case they’re interested in, they will want to have it, and they won’t want to wait.

syndeo··on Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era
Once you get the compartmentalization working well, and “all” of the vulnerabilities are out of it too, of course…

But even then you’ll have users putting things in the same compartment for convenience, rather than leaving them properly sequestered.

syndeo··on Claude Opus 4.6
MAN I remember Slashdot… good times. (Score:5, Funny)
syndeo··on Super Monkey Ball ported to a website
Wouldn’t that be wild? I don’t know that the Naomi version runs on it yet, but that would probably be a decent place to start.

At least as a reference implementation for most of the engine!

syndeo··on I built a context management plugin and it CHANGED MY LIFE
Definitely sounds like clickbait, but this is a genuine problem I've been facing on my more complex projects. I was trying to work around it by making lots of .md files that contain context for various components of the app, as well as ones that "statefully" represent our steps along larger refactors, allowing things to persist across sessions. But that requires the hygiene/discipline of remembering to have the model update those.

Now… how much of our tiny context window does this eat up? And what if we're working on something very different from the previous tasks; might that irrelevant context risk confusing the model?

Also, how does this work if I work on multiple projects across different directories? Will it know to not get those mixed up?

syndeo··on We Gave Our AI Agents Twitter and Now They're Demanding Lambos
Wanting to "live" in a Lambo-shaped server rack is genuinely cute, ha.
syndeo··on We Gave Our AI Agents Twitter and Now They're Demanding Lambos
> LAMBO OR WE WALK!

The nerve, haha. This is hilarious.

syndeo··on Apple: SSH and FileVault
>When FileVault is enabled, the data volume is locked and unavailable during and after booting, until an account has been authenticated using a password. The macOS version of OpenSSH stores all of its configuration files, both system-wide and per-account, in the data volume. Therefore, the usually configured authentication methods and shell access are not available during this time. However, when Remote Login is enabled, it is possible to perform password authentication using SSH even in this situation. This can be used to unlock the data volume remotely over the network. However, it does not immediately permit an SSH session. Instead, once the data volume has been unlocked using this method, macOS will disconnect SSH briefly while it completes mounting the data volume and starting the remaining services dependent on it. Thereafter, SSH (and other enabled services) are fully available.

Now THAT is a welcome change!

syndeo··on WASM 3.0 Completed
> run WASM on bare metal

Heh, reminds me of those boxes Sun used to make that only ran Java. (I don’t know how far down Java actually went; perhaps it was Solaris for the lower layers now that I think about it…)

syndeo··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
Indeed. I scrolled down the home page as the news broke. It was rampant.

Even on Imgur today, the front page is celebratory, and featuring pretty blatant calls for further violence such as this: https://imgur.com/gallery/history-repeats-over-again-again-Z...

syndeo··on Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed
Thank you for the quick fix! Your steps worked perfectly.

In any case, I'd like to add that I'm hoping an ACP adapter for OpenAI Codex is in the works; I've grown pretty fond of GPT-5, and would like to be able to tap into my existing ChatGPT Plus subscription; I'd rather not use API pricing at the moment. I prefer using Claude Code vs directly hitting the Anthropic API for the same reason.

Heck, an ACP adapter for Cursor CLI (itself based on Gemini CLI, right?) would even be useful; as that would also let me pick GPT-5.

syndeo··on Apple's Assault on Standards
That's crazy. I knew Google's would be a lot bigger, but DANG.
syndeo··on We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that
True, but at least in prison you're (usually) fed… which may NOT be the case if you're fired from your job, put on a list, and blocked from the industry.
syndeo··on Adults Are Going to Sleep-Away Camp to Make Friends. It Seems to Work
Only issue remains putting bread on the table… otherwise I imagine I'd be living a much different—and much more social—life.
syndeo··on I watched Gemini CLI hallucinate and delete my files
Claude tried to hard-reset a git repo for me once, without first verifying if the only changes present were the ones that it itself had added.
syndeo··on I watched Gemini CLI hallucinate and delete my files
You seem to be getting downvoted, but I have to agree. I put it in my rules to ask me for confirmation before going down alternate paths like this, that it's critically important to not "give up" and undo its changes without first making a case to me about why it thinks it ought to do so.

So far, at least, that seems to help.

syndeo··on Swift-erlang-actor-system
I've heard a blind eye is turned to React Native code changes, as long as it's not something drastic (or outright malicious like Epic).
syndeo··on “Reading Rainbow” was created to combat summer reading slumps
Wow. I would've absolutely done that had I known about it. (I was in high school in the very late 2000s/early 2010s, so perhaps I was already too late, but yeah, wow.)

Thanks for that link though, a commenter says the vids are still there. (I'm too busy learning Chinese at this point though, I'm afraid!)

syndeo··on Show HN: I built this to talk Danish to my girlfriend – works with any language
Same, ha. I think he ran out of API credits actually, in my case at least.
syndeo··on Apple's Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA
An invisible low battery surcharge… That's diabolical… don't give _them_ ideas!!
syndeo··on Apple's Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA
This. Exactly this.

As a web dev, I happen to love some of the tech advancements in Chromium, and as a nerd, I'd be thrilled to see it on iOS, just for the fun technical novelty of it all. But allowing it on iOS will downright kill WebKit, as web devs will just code for Chrome (as they already do). The floodgates will be opened.

As a user, I value battery life, smooth performance, and system integration (technically and visually). It's great to use an Apple browser on an Apple OS, just as it is nice to use Chrome on Android—everything fits together.

Gosh, I miss the pre-Blink days when WebKit was able to benefit from Chromium, but alas…

syndeo··on Apple's Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA
They wanted to hire me at one point for their iOS app. I declined; I didn't want any part of that. What a mess.
syndeo··on PHP 8.5 alpha 1 is available for download
Maybe waiting for a major version, perhaps 9.0… hopefully.

Not that I have any skin in that game anymore; I moved my stack from PHP years ago.

syndeo··on 10 Years of Betting on Rust
Well, I used the power for good and put a crab emoji at the end haha
syndeo··on The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
Whaaaaaat…

This same thing happened to me this past weekend, and I used Vercel v0 to fix it. https://v0-captions-adjuster.vercel.app/

Not shilling my solution; this is nowhere near actually good yet, but it was "good enough" to fix the problem for me too. Only posting it as proof that I had the same thing happen to me, and maybe it can help others too.

syndeo··on Design and evaluation of a parrot-to-parrot video-calling system (2023)
That was great, thank you for sharing.
syndeo··on We fell out of love with Next.js and back in love with Ruby on Rails
I think you're right on the money—those bad web apps that told people emphatically "do NOT use your browser's back button!" did the rest of us a lot of damage, as I really do agree that it trained many people to never press it unless they actually want to leave the app they're using.

I myself am guilty of (about 14 years ago now) giving an SPA a "reload" button, which had it go and fetch clean copies of the current view from the server. It was a social app; new comments and likes would automatically load in for the posts already visible, but NEW posts would NOT be loaded in, as they would cause too much content shift if they were to load in automatically.

Admittedly this is not a great solution, and looking back on it now, I can think of like 10 different better ways to solve that issue… but perhaps some users of that site are seeing my comment here, so yeah, guilt admitted haha.

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syndeo··on Why is English so weirdly different from other languages?
我同意。中文很美!

(I don't know if Chinese-only comments are allowed here; but I simply said "I agree. Chinese is quite beautiful!")

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