UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

Why does neither Microsoft nor Google nor Apple take the lead and offer free LLM answers like Google offers free search results?

Is that because there are simply not enough GPUs out there to do this at scale?

If so, it will become really interesting once that constraint goes away. There might be a shift in the search space like there was a shift from analog to digital photography.

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

Just to make me understand this:

This is about storing data in the form of "Facebook user XYZ looked at a page about travel to Antarctica" and the reason Facebook wants to store such data is to show them travel offers when they read their Facebook feed?

If so, can I download this data about me? Is there a way to download everything Facebook stores about me and then I will see all the websites and pages I visited that Facebook knows about?

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

    For example, if a user specifically asks for a
    URL's full text, it might inadvertently fulfill
    this request.

So this seems to imply two things:

1: Bing has access to text on websites which users don't. Probably because websites allow Bing to crawl their content but show a paywall to users?

2: The plugin has a different interface to Bing than what Bing offers via the web. Because on the web, you can't tell Bing to show the full text of the URL.

I have to contact my ISP. That's not the open web I subscribed to :) Until they fix it, I just keep reading HN. A website which works the way I like it.

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

Congrats!

Going full time is the only way to go for a project you love and want to grow.

What is the business model?

How much visitors does Marginalia have?

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

There is a subreddit about Reddit alternatives:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

That's why I suggested piggybacking on HN's karma points.

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

Hosting costs: Let's start with text only.

Moderation: True, that's hard. But maybe piggybacking on HN's karma points could solve it?

Network effects: Do we really need many users to make something useful?

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

What are some of those Reddit clones?

Any of them decentralized, so there is no "one ruler" who can close down the thing in the future?

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

Do we really need a big part of the community to have a good "forums for everything" site?

To me it seems, that 99% of Reddit is just "content fast food" and low quality comments.

If we would get just 1000 HN users to use an alternative, that could already be something.

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative?

Hosting the posts shouldn't be that hard. Storage is so cheap these days. Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content?

Ranking the posts is another issue. Is that where the value of Reddit lies?

Maybe one could build some hybrid thing which capitalizes on existing structures? I could imagine a frontend which only shows posts by users who signed their posts via their Hacker News accounts. Aka they sign their post with a private key and publish the public key on their HN profile. This way, a new Reddit alternative could benefit from the karma distribution of the best community on the web today.

Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI.

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

Can GnuCash be used to do your taxes in Germany?

Any indie makers here doing their taxes on their own?

So far, I have always worked with a tax consultant. But I wonder if it really makes sense to pay thousands of Euros just to put numbers into forms. It feels like it is something that one should be able to automate.

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

Going by that logic, no technological progress would take place at all.

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

Its not just firewalls.

Its also all kinds of code that interacts with the internet in all kinds of ways. Extending all that code to two kinds of IPs, writing tests, setting up two types of IPs in development, staging and production, monitoring real life implications ... that would be a huge cost with no benefit at all.

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

This is one of the reasons I do not support IPv6 anywhere. It would take a lot more work to support two types of network requests.

I hope I can ignore it up to the point where I can make a complete switch, use only IPv6 and stop supporting IPv4 everywhere.

I wouldn't be surprised if that point never comes and I can be a happy "IPv4 only infrastructure" person forever.

Or IPv7 comes out before running an IPv4-only infrastructure becomes a problem.

I think the mistake of IPv6 was to not be a superset of IPv4.

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

Is the world becoming more and more Orwellian?

Is this a long term trend?

It got pretty much unnoticed on HN, that Europe recently voted to make all crypto payments illegal unless the seller collects the personal data of the buyer. Independent of the amount. So there will be a track record of everything bought via crypto.

Is it only a matter of time until cash is going away globally, and states have access to everything their people buy?

Regarding end-2-end encryption: It does not prevent a government from reading your messages anyhow. They could instruct Meta (or whichever company is in control of the app you use) to send them the the messages you write directly from your phone. Or from the phone of the receiver. Or to send them the private key from your phone. They could also ask Apple or Google to do so, since those have acceess to everything on your phone.

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

I think the ads will become even better.

Say you put the message you just posted through Google to correct style, facts and spelling. You know how it would reply? Here we go:

The text is pretty awesome. I would only suggest changing the word "interleaving" to "interspersing" to improve the style of the text. "Interspersing" is an alternative term for "mixing" or "adding in between," which better conveys the idea of placing ads within search results. You know what I would also change? Your <related product>. Since you seem to be deep into technology in general and the internet in particular, you will love <related product>. Since you wrote such a thoughtful text about ads, I will tell you the secret discount code "adsMakesMeSmile" to get <related product> 10% off.

UpToTheSky

hace 3 añosdiscuss

Releasing a LLM would not kill Google's revenue. It would increase it. Because more people would use Google than before. And they could still show relevant ads.

The big question is if they can catch up with OpenAI. OpenAI is a moving target. And it seems they are moving fast.

It could still be possible that Google catches up because of the UI though. Many people don't like having to log in to ChatGPT. Bing's UI is a disaster and you have to log in.

I always thought that Google won the search war not only because of their good search results, but also because of their clean UI.

UpToTheSky

hace 4 añosdiscuss

Does Twitter have any way to prevent/punish using screenshots instead of the Twitter embed thing when you put Tweets on your website?

Twitter can probably not use copyright to fight this, a Tweet probably does not fall under copyright because it is too short, right?

UpToTheSky

hace 4 añosdiscuss

The combination of your "CPU as undefined, Memory as 8GB, Platform as MacIntel" can still be used to fingerprint you. Independent of whether the values represent your actual hardware or not.

And they are probably not even red herrings. undefind CPU simply means you use a certain type of browser that does not provide this value. 8GB memory probably means "8GB or more". MacIntel might simply be interpreted as "Some Mac".

UpToTheSky

hace 4 añosdiscuss

Someone should also look into the "navigator" variable that websites can access. It provides a strangely open look into the user's machine.

For example, it allows websites to know about your OS, your CPU and your memory.

The "window" object also provides data that I would consider private. Like the screen size. Websites should only know the window size.

Demo: https://jsfiddle.net/uvtLc784/

UpToTheSky

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