vidarh

Your account appears to be shadowbanned (your current comment is visible because people vouched for it). I'm letting you know since looking at your recent comments I can't see any obvious reason. You might want to use the contact link to talk to hn about it.

I like complaining about it too, but it's still a massive step forward from how things were before, where I had no access. Now I at least have access even if it involves going via third parties.

One of my agents has (read only) access to my accounts. I do it via Era, which is quite good, though expensive (they try to justify this with other functionality, but they provide nothing my agent can't do itself other than the API access).

To provide me with API access to my own accounts, Era goes through another third party provider which again connects to my bank. I guess they could eventually get direct connections themselves.

So instead of me get convenient read-only access to my bank, I've ended up giving two separate third party providers credentials I'd prefer they didn't have.

All I'd need was an automated way to get a CSV or JSON dump of my transactions and I'd have been happy, but none of my banks support that without manually logging in. It's infuriating.

On some platforms, like the Commodore 64, this to some extent became automated with freezer cartridges: Press a "freeze" button, pick a menu option, then re-enter the game, lose a life, and press the freeze button again, and it'd look for likely locations in memory based on what had changed and presumably some heuristics.

I don't need to be doing all of these projects, but I enjoy doing all of these projects, much more than I enjoy going somewhere to hang out with people. Not everyone is the same.

Longer. Microtransactions online dates back to DigiCash[1], founded in 1989 and with their first issue online of "CyberCash" in 1994 - I remember testing it at university briefly. When microtransactions quickly started turning out to be cumbersome on an individual basis that quickly made some people pivot to the idea of bundling on the user side and have the system pay it out with microtransactions on the publisher side...

I agree with the caveats you outline, though. I think to work, something like this would need to be a box you'd tick when signing up for your ISP that promised some "ad free premium access to [X number] of sites" or similar, and you'd trade entirely on it being big name sites. Even then I'd expect relatively limited takeup mostly from people unaware of ad blockers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash

This[1] claims the average American is worth about $1605/year in ad revenue. It's a model, so it's certainly possible it is significantly off. That said if there was a credible system like this, I'd happily pay for even the right partial offering.

[1] https://proton.me/blog/what-is-your-data-worth-to-google

This seems like setting money on fire. Nothing stops you from tracking token use on your subscriptions and tracking how much you would spend via APIs for if/when you can't use a sub any more, and taking the savings in the meantime.

It'd certainly be possible to make this work well enough for a lot of us.

Yes, you'd need to sort out pricing. I'm unusually price insensitive, but too many sellers play stupid games and win stupid prizes (me shopping around instead of blindly buying from them every time) by changing unit prices too much too often (e.g. my sons preferred shower gel litre price regularly rotates between prices that adds up to a factor of 3 difference, with any given size container at any given time potentially being a massive rip-off). You could fix that by letting users configure price bands and make it pick from a set of products based on price parameters or give an error. Or only include products where the sellers agree to not play stupid games.

But now your UI is massively complicated and you have error scenarios you didn't have before.

Even then, though, the bigger problem is that there just aren't enough product categories where we frequently order the same thing often enough separately from e.g. the weekly grocery run, to be worth it.

In my household I think it basically boils down to shower gels - because I have a teenage son - toilet rolls, dishwasher tablets and washing machine tabs.

That's not nothing, but it's not going to make me order materially more from Amazon to be able to press a button to reorder vs. pull out my phone, press "orders" in the Amazon app, and find the last order I made and reorder the product.

And I say this as someone who did order a couple of Dash buttons when they came out and promptly forgot to even use them (and I don't even remember why).

It's just such a very minor convenience that to work it'd need to have absolutely zero friction, and even then the revenue it'd bring would likely be totally marginal.

If you pass in (nothing_provided = true), the method received "true" as its argument, not the expression, so it acts exactly as if you pass in true.

Claude (top tier), GLM top tier, Kimi top tier, Codex team w/logins for the whole family. On top of that Atlas and OpenRouter pay-as-you-go. I max out the Claude every week and the Kimi most weeks. GLM is my fallback and used for some of my simpler agents.

I'm using Codex, Claude Code, Kimi Code for different things, but most of my interactions now is with claw-like agents hanging off a self-hosted Matrix server in my VPN, and I expect to migrate pretty much all of my use to that setup because it's a lot more flexible. The agents have their own wiki for orchestration and increasingly I feel complex orchestrators are already becoming obsolete because the agents are good enough at self-organising with very little around them.

I don't use any of the agent platforms you list as it took a Kimi agent about half an hour to build something small and auditable that handles what I want it to do and load-balances/fails over between several providers for the backend.

They handle my finances (read-only), acts as a general assistant (and reads my e-mail), plan out my projects, manages my soon-to-launch podcast setup, runs several websites autonomously. The only reason they don't do more yet is that getting security right without kneecapping their usefulness is still a really hard problem.

There are plenty of languages, like e.g. Ruby, where operators are just sugar for functions or methods. Meaning they can still be partially applied, have their value taken, and/or passed as callbacks.

If your language doesn't allow you to do the same thing with operators as you can do with functions, that's a language design issue and has nothing to do with operators as a concept.

I don't like staring on a monochrome flat background all day. If I can make it prettier without a sacrifice of functionality, I will.

When I used Kitty, I hacked in a shader that'd render a crude glow around the letters so that I could use more translucent backgrounds and still have readable text. I have no idea where that code is - I haven't used Kitty for years. But that's the kind of thing that'd be great to do with the shader support.

Giving away open weight models, if you dismiss altruism as a motivation from the outset, is a way to salt the earth while at the same time building mindshare.

It makes it harder to extract decent margins from models at or below the quality of the open models, and so makes it harder both for new entrants and for any existing providers that are depending on cheaper models for revenue. At the same time you make people comfortable with your product.

It's the IP version of dumping products below cost if you're capital rich and want to winnow down the competitive field while "buying" customers.

There are risks in both cases, but they are very different.

If you're using a closed model, the model provider gets all your data, and can if they want to send back actively hostile tool calls and rely on your harness to catch them without any effort on their side to train that behaviour into their models. The only things you can do about that is to place careful restrictions

If you're using an open model against your own system or a third party provider, the origin of that model could have trained in "triggers" that'd cause the model to produce actively hostile tool calls as well, but they'd have no direct control and would need to train in that behaviour "blind" to how you'd actually use the model.

It doesn't mean you can be complacent about trusting the model, but it does change the likelyhood they'd be able to do any damage, not least because you'd be able to run evals against the model without any risk that the model or provider API could just randomly change on you after a while.

So it takes far more trust to run a closed model than to run an open model even on a hosted third party provider, and certainly far more than to run an open model on your own hardware.

On a whim I looked up the TV series, only to realise there's now a much newer adaptation as well. The one I was referring to is this one from 1971:

https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0QGEAKI5A10J71NPXAXEX4GSHS

Among the more internationally renowned actors in it you'll find Liv Ullman and Max von Zydow. There's a sequel - Nybyggerna ("The New Land", which is not a direct translation; the original title is better translated "The Settlers") - which I also remember as being good, but I haven't watched either since the 1980's.

But there's also this new adaptation from 2022 which I have not seen:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21869680/

When you feel the need to argue and fight with the people who are from the area you want to rename, then you should consider that as much as you're technically free to include whatever you want in whatever words, that also means I'm technically free to mean you when I use the term asshole. That doesn't mean it isn't rude and insulting.

No, the setences are not contradictory. One refers to what Scandinavia includes. One refers to what ignorant English speakers insist it includes.

What you're doing is different to translation, it is insisting on a different grouping. It's rude and insulting.

But even when it comes to translation, then yes, a lot of people take offence at that as well, and you'll notice there is a trend back towards the official spelling of names that has been ongoing for decades for exactly that reason.

In Scandinavia or categorically always includes Denmark.

Only English speakers ignorant of the history of Scandinavia sometimes excludes it.

Tjere is no English language authority that has any business redefining what Scandinavia means at all. It's just insulting when English speakers believe they get to decide to redefine the names of regions that don't belong to them. It's rude.

I don't think it the more common perspective outside of Scandinavia either. It is common, but lots of people from outside the Nordics are perfectly aware that it annoys us.

In the Nordics the terms are not just "preferred" but unambiguously used this way.

The term Scandinavia includes Denmark, which is not on the peninsula.

The use to include any country other than Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, is something that will tend to really annoy Scandinavians, as we're generally consistent in that use and it's foreigners trying to tell is what names to use for ourselves.

It may be a losing battle, but it's not one we'll give up on.

There's a great TV adaptation of Utvandrarna.

In fact, immigration to Norway from Sweden started already back then. My great great grandfather moved from near Bullaren to Southern Norway in the late 1809's. But then emigrated with most of his family onwards to the US a couple of decades later as Norway was also poor at that time.

What was Norway's way out of the worst of that poverty apart from reduced surplus of people from emigration was shipping, and several of his sons, including my great grandfather ended up working on ships (and my great grandfathers family ended up moving back to Norway, supposedly in part because his wife got tired of the warm summers in Brooklyn...)

When I was in Tokyo last year I had cashiers almost mob me for my refuse when they noticed me carrying some from another shop a couple of times.

Iceland is not Scandinavian, but it is Nordic (as a Scandinavian, English speakers conflating the Nordics and Scandinavia is a pet peeve)

Yeah, I specifically had the Culture in mind when I wrote that, because Banks seemed a lot more self-aware of that and playing with and actually telling us fun things about his utopia and trying to actively flesh it out, while to me at least it feels like Roddenberry was caught up in wanting Star Trek to be morality plays in space that had to teach a lesson to the point of getting very heavy handed with it at times (and he might be right the heavy-handedness was necessary given some of the takes I've seen on various episodes), while still telling us frustratingly little about his utopia itself.

I think it's selection bias in what we like to remember too. The 50s has huge quantities of post apocalyptic sci-fi for example...

They used to be more common maybe, but even the titular "Utopia" by Thomas More had slavery. Sometimes the "perfect" settings were imperfect due to the times they were written, often they were intentionally imperfect, and that was the point.

E.g. consider HG Wells The Time Machine, where the future start out seeming quite like an utopia but then we meet the Morlocks.

But lots of books were downright dystopian much earlier. Heck, several of the "standards bearers" for dystopias pre-date cyberpunk by a lot, like Brave New World, This Perfect Day, 1984.

Particularly stories like The Time Machine where the setting as a whole very much was revealed not to be an utopia were among the most common "utopian" settings pre-cyberpunk.

Pure utopias were very rare for a reason: They're really hard to set compelling in stories in, and so most of the ones that do exist tend to set stories on their edges and fault lines.

What changed with cyberpunk wasn't that (surface) utopias went away, or even that we get to see the imperfect underside, but that the script is flipped so that the protagonist isn't a tourist on the underside, but belongs there, and is often alienated from any seemingly perfect parts of the world they inhabit.

Compare settings that do show both sides, like The Time Machine, and a cyberpunk version of The Time Machine would probably have a protagonist that was a Morlock. The world itself wouldn't change, but we'd get to see it from the opposite POV.

The point is that the discussion is essentially entirely meaningless, as it's pretty much hard to implement any simple construct that can make deterministic decisions based on a data stream and wrap it in a loop without ending up with a UTM.

The consequence of that is that the original question GuB-42 raised is pretty pointless too. An "inert" transformer effectively has limitations, but as typically used it trivially becomes Turing complete, and so the class of problems it can solve is the exact same class of problems almost any of our other computational devices can solve.

And if you want to point out that this externalises all of what actually matters if we are talking about e.g. intelligence, then yes, it does. But by extension you can trade complexity of the tape for complexity of the machine, and so you can internalise any part of the problem that can be solved with a finite section of tape as a single state transition (trivial proof: For a given machine M with finite state, you can make your machine N execute those steps as a single state transition by having N run M on a state transition.)

To extend that to where I assume they'd want to go in the first place: A transformer wrapped in a loop with access to "just" a "tape head" can "only" be limited from being theoretically able to get all the way to human level intelligence if human brains depend on computations that exceed the Turing computable. But that is no different from any other Turing complete device.

Of course that says nothing of whether it's a practical way of getting there.

The context can change each time. To implement a UTM only requires 2 states and 3 symbols or the reverse.

So if you use the context not as a tape in itself, but as an io channel to read/write an infinite tape, the context for any given step can remain fixed in size, and so the step itself can be O(1).