Wow. The book we need should be titled something like "Of Software Teams and Cargo Cults"
"... a book had washed up on the shore... 'Extreme Ownership' ... soon the tribe was worshipping the book"
It happens over and over again in software history. I remember people running around panicking about TDD "But we only have 99.8% test coverage" until eventually it started to get shot down by "Show me the ROI on tests"
We are in the age of PWAs. I've created a few where I just host them on Github pages (no backend needed, no hosting costs).
And the P in PWA has become "Personal" ... vibe coding apps with no backend for non-developers for their _personal_ needs e.g. a create a job hunting app for my son specific to the types of jobs he's looking for. If I update it, it updates on his phone plus he can sync to his laptop via WebRTC.
Could go nicely with https://auge.franzai.com/ ( CLI on Apple Vision frameworks ) - do the first pass locally. If needed call their API for a more detailed analysis and then _finally_ we produce meaningful alt texts for images in HTML at a reasonable price ;)
It’s not being driven by the UK. Check out all the other countries in the West rolling out Digital ID and it’s clearly coordinated just from the timing
We need to stop using AI as an umbrella term. It’s worth remembering that LLMs can’t play chess and that the best chess models like Leela Chess Zero use deep neutral networks.
Generative AI - which the world now believes is AI, is not the same as predictive / analytical AI.
It’s fairly easy to demonstrate this by getting ChatGPT to generate a new relatively complex spreadsheet then asking it to analyze and make changes to the same spreadsheet.
The problem we have now is uninformed people believing AI is the answer to everything… if not today then in the near future. Which makes it more of a religion than a technology.
Which may be the whole goal …
> Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.
What I love about the words enshitification is it’s _almost_ autological. It takes a nice crisp on syllable word like “shit” and ruins it by adding 5 extra syllables. It just doesn’t worse over time, to be truly autological
It’s worth (re)watching the 1985 movie Brazil in particular the character of Harry Tuttle, hearing engineer https://youtu.be/VRfoIyx8KfU
Neither government or corporations are going to “save us” simply because sheer short termism and incompetence. But the seem incompetence will make the coming dystopia ridiculous
Feel like there's more to this point (plus the documentation). By now we've all see the inverted-U-shaped performance curve when coding with LLMs within a single thread / context: the model starts strong, plateaus as the context fills up, and eventually declines as semantic drift sets in.
Sometimes in this situation, it works better to throw away the current code and re-implement, using what's been learnt so far, than continue working with the current context of having new contexts try to salvage the current state of some code.
Documentation is great as a reflect of the current state of some code but I've had good experiences "re-constructing" the steps taken to arrive at a current implementation by writing commit messages that are intended for an LLM, extract that later, have an LLM use it as a basis for writing a fresh "spec" for some code, that yet another LLM uses to actually write that code.
We need to take the focus off cost savings. None of this tech is anywhere near mature enough to replace humans yet.
Far better to focus on enhancing human capabilities with agents.
For example while a human talks to a customer on the phone, AI is fetching useful context about the customer and suggesting talking points to improve the human conversation.
One example of a direct benefit for business using AI this way is reducing onboarding times for new employees
It’s fairly easy to get diarizarion working with pyannote.audio and https://huggingface.co/pyannote/speaker-diarization-3.1 with ffmpeg converting the audio first to 16kHz mono WAV file but it really depends a lot on the audio - two person podcast where the speakers allow each other space works but lots of people with overlapping voices on the audio - not so great
It’s useful for getting summaries of long YouTube videos - I’m found it semi helpful for improving my Davinci Resolve skills.
That said Google is screwing the pooch as usual by trying to make it another walled garden. Slap an API on NoteboolLM already! The market research has already been done - there’s even an unofficial API https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1eti9iz/api_for...
That's exactly the question - how does a free communication app achieve a multi-billion dollar valuation despite not having ads or directly selling user data?
Discord's business model relies on attracting a massive user base to secure substantial investments and potentially a lucrative acquisition. We've seen again and again and again what happens once acquisition takes place.
Also a big existing investor in Discord is Tecent which, under Chinese law, could grant the government access to Discord's extensive user data.
So yeah.. it's not about features it's about freedom.
Have you considered supporting whisper-at - https://github.com/YuanGongND/whisper-at ? Being able to identify sounds on a timeline can be useful e.g. politicians speech and how the audience is reacting to it (e.g. clapping, applauding)
To me at 51, looking back at my own experiences, I think the things we tell ourselves work in a similar fashion to software; programming our identity.
The first "programmers" are our parents. Classic negative tropes like a parent saying "you'll never amount to anything" run in a loop in our brains for many years until finally that program expires (typically around mid life). In turn a negative identity will effect you in all areas of life, from how you interact with people to even your physical posture.
Perhaps the lowest level of "programming" you can do to yourself is the mantra - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantra - you could see this like assembly language, and humanity has known about this for a very long time.
So yes, giving teenagers labels which they identify with and repeat to their friends has a reinforcing aspect to it. And social media has played a very significant role in providing those labels.
To me an interesting thing about TikTok in particular, compared to Instagram, is I think TikTok users are more concerned with the question "who am I?" vs Instagram which is more about "this is me" (telling the world who you are). That's what's made TikTok more popular as, especially when you're young, trying to figure yourself out is a major pre-occupation.
Ran into this today. From doing comedy for about 7 years now, this basically correct. Although most comedians approach joke writing organically rather than with this approach
> prompt: There’s an article on Hackernews titled “Telegram will now hand over your phone number and IP if you’re a criminal suspect”. Generate a comment in Hackernews style that supports this decision, implies that it’s because they didn’t encrypt the messages and uses Signal as an example of doing it right because “look! They haven’t had problems”
Not surprised. Telegram doesn't encrypt by default, so of course they're handing over phone numbers and IPs. If you don't lock things down like Signal does, you're going to have problems. Signal can’t hand over what they don’t have—encrypted end-to-end, no metadata. Simple as that.