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tarsingeon SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

I have been using DDG for years and even with Google quality having plunged it is neither better nor less expensive (nor the default when non technical users just type in the search bar of their browser). Yahoo has shown that even with immense brand recognition people will still switch if the alternative is really better. And if Google was 2x more expensive than DDG they’d switch too.

Regarding Microsoft it’s not as easy to switch as going on another website, OpenAI doesn’t have that ecosystem lock in.

tarsingeon SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

This argument regarding brand loyalty gets repeated but it’s really weak to me. The immense majority of people don’t tie their identity to the software services they are using. Without network effects or an ecosystem locking customers will switch as soon as there is a less expensive and/or better alternative, as the history of software has shown countless of times.

tarsingeon Sam Altman's pants are on fire

I don’t buy this argument about brand, in tech history has showed customers will switch overnight if a better option appears and there is no network effects or ecosystem lockin. BlackBerry had a brand too.

tarsingeon A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'

Keep in mind the FB algorithm is likely showing you that content more than to others since it might have detected it’d be annoying to you (and that results in better engagement metrics).

tarsingeon Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

Maybe because there are other usages than business data entry and programming? I don’t think I’d be more productive when say editing pictures/movies or producing music with a text interface. Maybe it’s because I grew up with classic Mac OS but computers were not only about productivity, they were a place, and UX peaked with Spatial Finder. Nowadays I spend my working days mostly in text mode and I feel like I’ve lost something.

tarsingeon OpenAI signs $38B cloud computing deal with Amazon

And when everything is a bubble then it’s simply that money has just less value overall. Remember asset inflation is not accounted into CPI, the money surplus/devaluation can take a long time to trickle down into the consumer economy.

tarsingeon Backpropagation is a leaky abstraction (2016)

I disagree in the case of LLMs, because they really are an accidental side effect of another tool. Not understanding the inner workings will make users attribute false properties to them. Once you understand how they work (how they generate plausible text), you get a far deeper grasp on their capabilities and how to tweak and prompt them.

And in fact this is true of any tool, you don’t have to know exactly how to build them but any craftsman has a good understanding how the tool works internally. LLMs are not a screw or a pen, they are more akin to an engine, you have to know their subtleties if you build a car. And even screws have to be understood structurally in advanced usage. Not understanding the tool is maybe true only for hobbyists.

tarsingeon Tech companies are firing everyone to "fund AI", spending money on each other

Isn’t the problem rooted in stock buybacks? Making it illegal could bring dividends and realign incentives.

tarsingeon StageConnect: Behringer protocol is open source

Apart from the cheap plastic case their circuits actually sounded exactly the same that the stuff they cloned, but it took awhile for forum users to publicly acknowledge it.

tarsingeon The gaslit asset class

It’s because in investment it’s not about being right. Thats why I invested in it. Also gold is the same, makes no sense on paper, still works. Second effect is it made me lean left economically realizing how flawed are liberal economics basic assumptions about rational actors and efficient markets.

tarsingeon EU age verification app not planning desktop support

For now, there is an increasing number of banks and government websites that are broken if you are not using Chrome or full on requires it.

tarsingeon AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

Sure it’s a lot of work, but the noob in question has all the internet knowledge and can write multiples times faster than a human for a fraction of the costs. This is not about an individual being more productive, this is about business costs. Long term we should still hire and train juniors obviously, but short term there is lot of pressure to not do it as it makes no sense financially. Study or not the reality is there is not much difference in productivity between a senior with a cursor license and a senior and a junior that needs heavy guidance.

tarsingeon The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

Are you sure about this? I always heard about Australians (especially surfers) that had a high melanoma incidence and that it had made it clear that even if you are adapted (tanned) cancer risks still rises with exposure time.

tarsingeon When the job search becomes impossible

On the hiring side too, and I really don’t understand the fake resume with AI trend. How can they possibly think they’ll pass the interview? Because when I’m hiring I find it very easy to spot someone lying when questioning to go into the details of past experiences. Maybe they are betting on a broken process? Maybe you can pass (dumb) HR filters with lies, but not real interviewers, at least from what I do and have seen.

tarsingeon Tesla changes meaning of 'Full Self-Driving', gives up on promise of autonomy

Humans have a brain though. Current AI is nowhere near that as every engineer know it but common people seem to forget it with all the PR.

tarsingeon MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

Ironically there should be another study of how not using AI is also leading to cognitive decline on Reddit. On programming subreddits people have lost all sense of engineering and have simply become religious about being against a tool.

tarsingeon A bubble that knows it's a bubble

What’s the intersection between the current LLM driven bubble and robotics? Apart from Tesla’s PR?

tarsingeon Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

If you’re talking about limiting the power through ECU it can be interesting for engine longevity. If I’m buying used I’d avoid the typical downsized turbo engine pushed to its limit and prefer the artificially limited one as it’ll have prevented the previous owners to have wear it out too much.

tarsingeon What does Palantir actually do?

I heard in reality there was no "tech" but very good PR for consultants ("forward deployed engineers" I think their term was) doing standard data engineering?

tarsingeon Gemini 2.5 Deep Think

If that’s the price to pay avoid poisoning myself with food to name only one thing that’s maybe not that bad.

tarsingeon Microsoft became incompetent in IT

Bureaucracy didn’t emerge in the 21th, contrary to lack of customer support for big companies. Bureaucracy is a symptom part of the enshittification, the root cause is Monopoly (direct or through organized shareholders across an industry). You don’t need support or good service when customers don’t have the choice to go elsewhere.

tarsingeon Ozzy Osbourne has died

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K3b6SGoN6dA

The greatest heavy metal performance to me. Sounding so heavy 55 years ago with primitive PA and a crappy recording, I’m amazed every time I watch it.

tarsingeon Unsafe and Unpredictable: My Volvo EX90 Experience

The relative ranking may hold, but the problem nowadays is all cars are unreliable due to software. Sure a car letting you down because the engine is blown up is bad, but a car failing unpredictably in the middle of nowhere due to software issue a pretty serious issue to. I’m not sure Japanese are better on this.

tarsingeon Unsafe and Unpredictable: My Volvo EX90 Experience

From what I’ve read, and what I get in the comments here, these too are plagued by electronics and software issues. I’m not sure this category of issues, especially software ones, are correctly taken into account in reliability scores. Ironically my current car (from 2010) doesn’t score too high in reliability, but not having a screen makes that whole class of problems go away.

I hope my current car makes it so that I can entirely skip the current gen cars to hopefully the future one with these issues sorted out, including physical buttons.

tarsingeon Stellantis declares bankruptcy in China, with $1B in debts

You forgot the largest factor for price increases: manufacturers positioning all models as luxury ones. All the while cutting corners on quality control. Take French ones, they went from not the most well built but affordable cars for the masses to pseudo luxury expensive cars that still fall to pieces after 5 years. Who’s gonna buy that?

Stellantis for example knew about the problem of their engine blowing up since before 2020, but they chose to ignore it. Small turbocompressed engines are or new at this point and how to make them reliable is known too.

Or take VW, cheating before 2015 so regulation is not an excuse, and since a decade most failures are parts like coolant circuits because of cheap plastic, gearboxes, and a lot of non safety related electronics features. And what is the replacement for family mmovers? Luxury SUVs or 75k€ iD Buzz.

Edit: So in short multiple things can be true: legal reasons for price increases, but also bad marketing choices.

Edit2: actual study showing at least half the price increase was chosen: https://institut-mobilites-en-transition.org/publications/le...

tarsingeon Claude Code does our releases now

You are not the target. This is marketing content for their tool, aimed at semi technical people with buying power but not actual developers.

tarsingeon Bond rout starting to sound market alarm bells

> the strategic cost-benefit analysis

Is there anything pointing to this supposed thorough analysis really being done behind the doors? Genuinely asking, because for now in my opinion from POTUS communications I don’t make me think there is and this comment is another instance of trying to make something irrational rational.

tarsingeon The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide

Problem is the latter group includes Ycombinator and their investors. The hypocrisy is many are actively meddling with politics and working with the current administration.

tarsingeon Carlos Slim cancels his collaboration with Elon Musk's Starlink

Looking at his mental and physical health I'm inclined to think that people just fantasize way too much about what wealth can really buy.

tarsingeon We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

Exactly, enshittification is creeping everywhere, EU should not follow a model that is breaking up in front of us.