Unlurker|Replay|About
The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling (politico.eu)
•
Infinite scrolling combined with the algorithmic feed is the real nasty. Feeds should be heavily regulated, effectively they are a (personalized!) broadcast, and maybe the same strictures should apply. Definitely they should be transparent (e.g. chronological from subscribed topics), and things like veering more extreme in order to drive engagement should be outlawed.
•
Facinating that they landed on infinite scrolling as the problem to spend time and energy on instead of all the other things happening online that have an impact on society.
•
I admire the EU's attempts at things like the cookie law, age verification, and tackling the addictiveness of infinite scrolling, but the implementation is pure theater. Trackers have much more effective techniques than "cookies", kids trivially bypass verification, and designers will make a joke of tell me you have infinite scrolling without telling me you have infinite scrolling. When you are facing trillions of dollars of competition to your law, what do you think is going to happen? Maybe if there was an independent commission that had the authority to rapidly investigate and punish (i.e. within weeks) big tech for attempting engagement engineering practices it might actually have some effect. But trying to mandate end user interfaces is wasting everyone's time putting lipstick on a pig.
•
I don't know how the EU has time for this kind of thing right now. Honestly
•
Does this only apply to companies the commission doesn't like or will it apply to the hn app I use, my email clients, shopping sites, etc? Because it seems like the actual concern how good the algorithms are and not the UI.
•
Here's the actual statement from the European Comission: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_312 It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling , but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it. The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do. My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?". Everything I thought of would have some way or workaround that could be found, and equally would have terrible consequences on situations where this is actually quite valuable. IE if you disallow infinite scrolling, what page sizes are allowed? Can I just have a page of 10,000 elements that lazy load? Regardless of your take around whether this is EU overreach, I'm glad they're not implementing strict laws around what you can/can't do - there are valuable situations for these UI patterns, even if in combination they can create addictive experiences. Still, I do think that overregulation here will lead to services being fractured. The regulated friction of major platforms (ie discord w/ ID laws) is on a collision course with the ease of vibe coding up your own. When that happens, these comissions are going to need to think long and hard around having a few large companies to watch over is better than millions of small micro-niche ones.
•
Jesus the EU is becoming a dystopian nightmare.
•
Were are you suggest we move to escape this dystopian nightmare?
•
Dunno about using legislative moves, but yes please. The stupidest solution to a problem no one had. Moving layouts, unreachable footers, no or unsatisfactory indication of one's position. All just to remove navigation clicks no one minded and reduce server loads, in exchange for users suffering laggy lazy loading (or, what a hate-inducing pattern!) inability to preload, print, search or link.
•
Given how badly scrolling has cooked the brain of the average American, seems like a smart thing for the EU to ban.
•
And based on some of the replies in this thread we better act fast before it's too late.
•
Would it affect HackerNews? The list of topics on the main page is a form of infinite scroll.
•
No it's not? It's paged.
•
another cookie warning disaster incoming hopefully AI will wake them up and save us from all this nonsense
•
Watch what governments do, not what they say. This isn’t about addiction, it’s about censorship. If you limit the amount of time someone can spend getting information, and make it inconvenient with UI changes, it’s much harder to have embarrassing information spread to the masses. Amazingly, the public will generally nod along anyway when they read governmental press releases and say “yes, yes, it’s for my safety.”
•
Scrolling through an infinity of AI slop videos can't really be classified as "getting information". If you want to read the news and stay up to date with the "embarrassing information" there's plenty of news websites out there.
•
I see some synergy between this and the "iOS keyboard sucks" thread. Maybe they can regulate that next. I'm curious how they plan to pretend to enforce this. Will you need a loisence to implement infinite scroll?
•
I hope this goes through. Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. It isn't a fair fight and the existence of infinite feeds is bad both for people and democracy. Regulating consumer products that cause harm to millions is nothing new.
•
I do so too. Dark patterns should never be acceptable. The amount of paid shills opposing this is a good indicator that it's the right move.
•
> Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.
•
You could say that about literally every single type of addictive behavior present on the face of the planet. You could just stop smoking and/or not buying cigarettes. You could just stop drinking and/or stop buying alcohol. It's a completely pointless observation. There's a reason why these are addictions.
•
Engineering addiction should be a punishable offense. It already is if you’re a chemist.
•
"Just" is the all time champion weight lifter of the English language.
•
Just stop using heroin. Just stop eating fast food. Just stop going to the casino. Just don't smoke anymore. We know plenty of things are quite bad for us, and yet we find them difficult to stop. Somewhat famously difficult to stop. I think telling people, "just don't..." trivializes how difficult that is.
•
It's a phone. Put it in the trash. You will not go through physiological withdrawal symptoms. The amount of people in here right now clamoring for legislation to keep them away from electronics which they themselves purchased is mind-bogglingly insane.
•
Drug stores should stock morphine available without age restriction and if you don't want it, just don't buy it.
•
Yes because smartphones are exactly like narcotics. DELUSION. Are you suggesting we should require prescriptions to purchase them?
•
If a UI element crushes your democracy, that democracy wasn’t very strong to begin with.
•
No. It's us humans that aren't very strong to begin with. To not admit it is to deny reality at this point.
•
I imagine there was a similar argument a century ago about how if alcohol kills your marriage, it wasn't a very strong marriage. I wonder if we'll get speakeasies where people can get endogenous dopamine kicks from experiencing dark patterns?
•
Ah yes, let's destroy all the weak democracies; they're not strong to begin with.
•
This. If all it took was a $300k ad campaign on tiktok to get the population of a country(Romania in this case to be specific) to vote for a shady no-name candidate that came out of nowhere, instead of the well known candidates of the establishment, that should tell you the politics of your country betrayed its electorate so badly that they would rather commit national suicide instead of voting the establishment to bend them over for the n-th time. Tiktok only exposed that, it didn't cause that.
•
> tiktok only exposed that, it didn't cause that Actually both can be true.
•
Romanian people hated their corrupt politicians way before tiktok was invented. Tiktok only acted as release valve for that pent-up anger, but it's not the cause of it. The cause is 35+ years of rampant theft and corruption leading to misery and death of taxpayers.
•
Eh, its not like it is happening overnight. Its like a cancer that slowly spreads without much notice and then one day the democracy collapses and its too late to do anything about it.
•
I have a proud European coworker trying to get their H1B... They talk about how great Europe is, how they like their 1-2 hour coffee/smoke breaks... These kind of moves give me that same vibe. But why are so many Europeans trying to move to the US? Why isn't the opposite happening? My hypothesis is that these kind of popular policies are short sighted. They are super popular, they use intuition and feeling. But maybe there is something missing. The unadulterated freedom has led people to enjoy these platforms. Obviously it affects the economy. So much so, even the US military has moved from Europe to Asia. I don't typically like fiction, but it seems "I, Robot" was spot on about Europe. (Maybe mistaking new Africa for Asia)
•
Well, your freeeeedooooms include having to pay taxes when living outside of the US. I'd say that's a pretty big factor in deciding if it's worth it to leave the country.
•
> But why are so many Europeans trying to move to the US? Why isn't the opposite happening? Citation needed. I took some minutes to try and find statistics, and also ChatGPT claims that the EU simply doesn't collect or publish that kind of data, so I'm wondering how you think you know.
•
Its addictive design in general, but only for Tik-tok. If it works and is applied to others it will be the best thing the EU has ever done.
•
This sounds like a type of insanity. Why would anyone care about something like this to the degree they feel like expressing the opinion publicly let alone in a political regulatory body is beyond me. Whatever happened to freedom?
•
>Why would anyone care about something like this to the degree they feel like expressing the opinion publicly Why would anyone publicly express any negative opinion about the effects of doomscrolling? I don't think I'm uncharitably paraphrasing, right?
•
We have great freedoms in Europe. We just need to apply in advance with our detailed plan, in three copies and the Commission will decide whether to deny our application or to deny it and fine us for unhealthy thoughts, too. Sarcasm now, but maybe the near future.. More to the point: this is indeed a massive overreach with the Commission being the police, judge, jury, and executioner... what could go wrong? Exactly what we are seeing is taking shape, precedent by precedent.
•
it turns out that all those jokes about EU regulating the curvature of the cucumber were on to something
•
Why would someone care about a destructive addiction that's plaguing the lives of the majority of the planet, leading to mental health issues and proliferating massive levels of misinformation. I wonder. Freedom to be manipulated by algorithms, yay!
•
Maybe you're not the type of person who's struggled with addiction, but it can do awful things to you. Yes, including being addicted to scrolling social media. It screws with your head to the point where you don't know how to live in the moment anymore. IMO it's a feature that's not valuable enough to justify the fact that it contributes to poor quality of life for people who can't put it down.
•
Social Media companies have actively and intentionally tried to make their products more addicting... now they have to face the very obvious consequences of that decision.
•
> Whatever happened to freedom? Freedom from, or freedom to? ‘Freedom does not consist in doing what we want, but in overcoming what we have for an open future; the existence of others defines my situation and is the condition of my freedom. They oppress me if they take me to prison, but they are not oppressing me if they prevent me from taking my neighbour to prison.’ -- Simone de Beauvoir
•
> Why would anyone care about something like this ... Because it is a dangerous addiction [1] with recognised adverse effects on human health. Like sugar, tobacco, or drugs. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46959832
•
Lets do the nanny state! (As I get older, unironically. I want my productive worker bees to be drug free, addiction free, enjoying simple pleasures that do not put me at risk. They pay Social Security. Everything is nice and safe. Freedom? Yeah no thanks, get to work and pay your taxes.)
•
The thing is, why do you care? We like it this way. These companies are a cancer and they should be erradicated. You think that attacking these horrible companies is bad for our freedoms, we think our freedoms are fine with it.
•
I mean, lets do the opposite where a large corporation gets people intentionally addicted to drugs and then bilks them for every penny they have until they are husks. Remember, free market comes first!
•
Thank you from talking about the Holy Freedom, my brother. Looking forward to enjoying further freedoms thanks to laws that protect me from behavior that makes me unfree and in need to constantly control me and my surroundings!
•
While I agree it's not a net positive, I find it dangerous to equate all addictions.
•
He’s not equating all addictions beyond saying they are all addictions and should be treated as such.
•
But that's the problem - different substances require different solutions. You reduce sugar intake, not eliminate it. You eliminate cocaine intake, not just reduce it. Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.
•
> Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me. As it should, because there's a really obvious "slippery slope" argument right there. But… it can kill people. There is a certain fraction of the population who, for whatever reason, can be manipulated. Social media… actually, worse than that, all A/B testing everywhere, can stumble upon this even when it isn't trying to (I would like to believe that OpenAI's experience with 4o-induced psychosis was unintentional). When we know which tools can be used for manipulation, it's bad to keep allowing it to run unchecked. But… I see that slippery slope, I know that any government which successfully argues itself the power to regulate this, even for good, is one bad election away from a dictatorship that will abuse the same reasoning and powers to evil ends.
•
It looks to me like you're adding the conflation to "all addictions" because you can clearly distinguish between "sugar" and "cocaine" as both forms of addictions. Why would you not be willing to include "scrolling" as another form of addiction? Just because it's labeled the same way you yourself are demonstrating that we handle that in different ways. Social Media is being treated as "sugar" in this instance instead of as "cocaine".
•
Have you been under a rock the past 15 years?
•
Forcing designs on companies... wtf is going on here
•
I mean, clearly the companies at the top can't be trusted to do what's in the best interests of the users. So at some point someone has to do something. If this is the correct something that remains to be seen.
•
is this your first year on the internet?
•
So, like https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/07/12/2021-14674/submission-of-plans-for-cigarette-packages-and-cigarette-advertisements-revised-guidance-for ?
They should move to kill the cookie popup
•
ahhhh, every time the same discussion 1. GDPR consent dialogs are not cookie popups, most things you see are GDPR consent dialogs 2. GDPR consent dialogs are only required if you share data, i.e. spy on the user 3. GDPR had from the get to go a bunch of exceptions, e.g. you don't need permission to store a same site cookie indicating that you opted out of tracking _iff_ you don't use it for tracking. Same for a lot of other things where the data is needed for operation as long as the data is only used with that thing and not given away. (E.g. DDOS protection, bot detection, etc.) 4. You still had to inform the user but this doesn't need any user interacting, accepting anything nor does it need to be a popup blocking the view. A small information in the corner of the screen with a link to the data policy is good enough . But only if all what you do falls under 3. or non personal information. Furthermore I think they recently have updated it to not even require that, just having a privacy policy in a well know place is good enough but I have to double check. (And to be clear this is for data you don't need permission to collect, but like any data you collect it's strictly use case bound and you still have to list how its used, how long stored etc. even if you don't need permissions). Also to be clear if you accept the base premise of GDPR it's pretty intuitive to judge if it's an exception or not. 5. in some countries, there are highly misguided "cookie popup" laws predating GDPR (they are actually about cookies, not data collection in general). This are national laws and such the EU would prefer to have removed. Work on it is in process but takes way to long. I'm also not fully sure about the sate of that. So in that context, yes they should and want to kill "cookie popups". That just doesn't mean what most people think it does (as it has nothing to do with GDPR).
•
Well then where would be the incentive to download apps/not clear your cookies...? :-)
•
and then the inventor should go to prison along with the guys who design the UI of microwave ovens (joke)
•
Simply banning most forms of advertising would be extremely welcome and might largely solve the cookie-popup issue, too.
•
Kill cookie pop up dark patterns*
•
But that would require directing the anger at specific companies (and their 2137 ad partners) rather than at an easy target of the banana-regulating evil authority. Sadly whenever this kind of discussion pops up it's usually a very unpopular take.
•
It is up to the websites to do that, and to the users to boycott those websites showing cookie popups.
•
The regulatory body could clarify that a DO NOT TRACK header should be interpreted as a "functional/necessary cookies only" request, so sites may not interrupt visitors with a popup modal/banner if it's set.
•
The do not track header was good enough in this German case: https://dig.watch/updates/german-court-affirms-legal-significance-of-do-not-track-signals-in-linkedin-case Having the EU decide on a technical implementation is more of a last ditch effort, like what happened with more than a decade of the EU telling the industry to get its shit together and unify under a common charging port.
•
You don't have to have a cookie popup if you don't do stupid stuff. Don't use anything other than strictly necessary cookies and you are good to go. Disclaimer: I anal and this is not legal advice.
•
Having worked at multiple companies and talked to multiple legal teams about this, they tend to be very conservative. So the guidance I've gotten is that if we store any information at all on the person's computer, even to know whether they've visited the site before, we still need a cookie banner. Basically, the law created enough fear among the lawyers that software developers are being advised to include the cookie banner in cases where it isn't strictly needed.
•
> even to know whether they've visited the site before So uh, don't do that. You don't need to notify if you use cookies for required functionality like login sessions or remembering a functional setting. If you're tracking whether they're returning or not your activity is exactly the kind of behaviour the rule is covering because, in legal terms, it's skeezy as fuck.
•
> You don't need to notify if you use cookies for required functionality like login sessions or remembering a functional setting Nobody wants to be the EU test case on precisely how "required functionality" is defined. Regardless of what the plaintext of the law says, it should be self-evident that companies will be more conservative than that, especially when the cost is as low as adding one cooke banner and tracking one preference.
•
It's a site where they log in and we store a cookie.
•
"Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are necessary should be explained to the user." https://gdpr.eu/cookies/
•
So? You're not arguing that we should get rid of 'reasonable' laws out of misinterpretations of them, are you?
•
Laws should be evaluated on the effect they actually have on society, rather than the effect that we wish they had on society. I am very critical of laws that fail this test, and I think they should be updated to improve their performance. We want the right outcome, not the right rules.
•
But it should not be obnoxious, look at steam how is a small banner with two simple actions, vs all other cookie banners.
•
Agreed! Many sites don't actually comply with the GDPR because they don't provide simple tools to control the cookies and instead force you through a flow. Part of my gripe with the law is the way those violations are not being systematically cited.
•
Just so long as that means killing all the tracking, not just going back to hiding it.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Building a TUI is easy now (hatchet.run)
•
Do we want tuis? I can’t stand Gemmin-CLI. That tui gets in the way constantly I’m mixed in jj’s tui. It’s better than no ui tho Mostly tho I’m curious when I’d want a tui. Most of the time in a terminal I don’t want one
•
Charm looks good. What is the TUI library of choice for python these days?
The thing with TUIs is that, using mobile native virtual keyboards, it's apparently quite impossible to make them behave in a sane way in browsers! I think the only reasonable option seems to be reimplementing one yourself, which is massively stupid.
•
If you have a TUI the correct way to support mobile browsers is to 1-shot a React page equivalent. Trying to make the mobile keyboard work for this would be silly.
•
Mobile is not for TUI
•
More specifically it's an interface designed for a physical keyboard. Or even more specifically it's designed for precise and easy human text input.
11.8M EU citizens pay taxes to governments they cannot vote for (homolova.sk)
•
I kinda agree, we should allow people to vote in a country they live in and contribute to. There should be a reasonably difficult process where you show you have strong ties and commitment to the country and you get the voting rights. You should only have one at a time. We could call it a citizenship or something. Jokes aside, I don't understand what they are asking for. "Allowing people to vote where they live would be a good start." After how long? Should I be able to vote in a foreign county if I move and work there for a month? If anything, complain about specific citizenship process if it's unreasonable, but you have to respect that it's role of the citizens to define what are the rules.
•
At least we now know who is responsible for Fico constantly winning, dammit!
As far as I know lots of EU countries don't allow double citizenship. This implies that, even when having the prerequisites, acquiring the new citizenship for the sake of voting also mean losing the old citizenship altogether. At least for me this is too much to ask. I am happy with my life in my new country of residence, but I am still very connected to my heritage. On the other hand I would be quite happy to give up my _voting rights_ in the original country in exchange for local ones. I do understand that allowing double voting would give mobile citizens an excessive amount of weight, but letting each individual choose would seems quite reasonable to me. And in any case, might the EU live long and prosper.
•
Sorry, but this is horse droppings, there seem to be 9 countries doing this. https://bestcitizens.com/2024/11/08/list-of-eu-countries-prohibit-dual-nationality-for-naturalization/
Note that they can vote in local election (municipal and regional) and for the EU parliament, the article does mention this, but it is a bit hidden. I think that Brexit illustrates exactly why you need to be a citizen for elections of that type. It seems unfair to let the large number of other European living in the UK have influence on whether or not the UK was to stay, as they are still guests. Same for government election, you are a valued and wanted guest, but you are still a guest. The complaint, to me, has some value, because the EU countries are making it fairly hard to chance citizenship. On the one hand, they are also completely free to move, if they don't want to pay taxes to a government they can't vote for, on the other, ensuring that these people has the option to say: I'm planning on staying for a very long time, I provide value, I want to be able to vote, should be a priority.
•
> I think that Brexit illustrates exactly why you need to be a citizen for elections of that type I'm a UK citizen who was denied the right to vote in the Brexit election. I normally choose not to vote in any UK elections, because I haven't lived there for 36 years and have no intention to return. However, Brexit was a different kettle of fish entirely, and Cameron promised that the "gone for 15 years, no vote" rule would be repealed before the vote. It was not, and tens of millions of UK expatriates were denied the right to vote on their ability to live in the EU. Absolutely disgraceful.
It's a challenge for sure. The problem is that some EU countries aren't that big, and moving the government in one direction or another is entirely possible if you can just move a small amount of people to that country, which they are free to do. E.g. moving 50.000 Hungarians to a Nordic or Baltic country can change governments. If we assume the best, there should not be a problem in letting people vote for the government in the country their reside, if we assume the worst, it's a massive problem.
•
you will be shocked to discover that no one is an island but ok you send 50 000 Hungarians north, they live through the 9 months winters, i guess they find a job, learn the language, marry the people and then what's the plan? for them to suddenly make hungarian the official language? let me guess you've never left Nebrahoma? this is laughable
So a permanent resident who has lived in a country, for say, 10 years? You don't think they're committed at that point and should have a right to vote on the society they are contributing to?
•
I can vote in local elections, eg for people that spend my council tax.
>One of the best arguments against immigration is that, if you allow people to move to your country, even as non-citizen guest workers, they will eventually demand political rights in your country using their physical presence in a democracy as a moral justification That could just as easily be an argument against democracy. The Gulf monarchies have large numbers of non-citizen guest workers, in the case of the UAE over 80% of the population, but they don't have any of the problems western countries have with migrants, because migrants have no political power and aren't eligible for welfare.
•
Yes, it is an argument against democracy. Or, more radically, an argument against the entire system of Westphalian states that control swaths of territory on the Earth's surface and that human beings are legal citizens of, as the way that human political organization is done. > The Gulf monarchies have large numbers of non-citizen guest workers, in the case of the UAE over 80% of the population, but they don't have any of the problems western countries have with migrants, because migrants have no political power and aren't eligible for welfare. Sometimes pro-immigration economic liberals cite the Gulf experience with immigrants as an argument for why western democracies should have open borders or at least much more liberalized immigration policy. The pro-open-borders libertarian economist Bryan Caplan has made this specific argument for instance. Setting aside the fact that these countries are not democracies even for their own citizens, if 80% of the human beings physically resident within your borders are non-citizen guest workers, I would be worried about the possibility of formally-illegal violent uprising.
For Austria and Spain this would mean 10 years (at least) of not being able to vote and THEN renouncing your birth citizenship. Not sure this is a very pragmatic solution, unless the goal is to keep immigrants from voting.
•
The goal is to have a country not just a piece of land.
This data seems to suggest something completely different than that people are associating as citizens of EU instead of citizens of their respective countries. 93% of respondents are correct in that you become an EU citizen automatically by living in an EU country, and 87% "feel" that they're EU citizens.
•
I am not saying that European citizens are saying they are saying they are European over their nationality, but that the trend towards a European identity is going up over time.
Puerto Rico pays taxes to the U.S. government, yet its residents cannot vote in federal elections. Additionally, the Jones Act increases costs even more than on the mainland.
•
That's not entirely true. Yes, Puerto Ricans do pay some federal taxes (tariffs, FICA, gift and estate taxes) but do not pay federal income tax unless they have income from sources outside Puerto Rico. Anyway many Puerto Ricans probably wish they were subject to federal income tax: As the cutoff point for income taxation in Puerto Rico is lower than that imposed by the U.S. IRS code and because the per- capita income in Puerto Rico is much lower than the average per- capita income of the US states, more Puerto Rico residents pay income taxes to the local taxation authority than if the IRS code were applied to the island. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Puerto_Rico
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Show HN: Moltis – AI assistant with memory, tools, and self-extending skills (moltis.org)
•
Very nice. Though, I am looking forward to the next generation of AI agents that aren't named after a lobster
•
Hello! I tried to run with podman but it get stuck in the login of my bot :( Would check it out later on the development.
You should not be limited, which provider do you use?
•
For the models? Directly from Anthropic and OpenAI. I'm running moltis via the docker container edit: There is a gpt-5.3 model, but selecting that gives me the error: Error The model `gpt-5.3` does not exist or you do not have access to it. Provider: openai I don't see a 5.3-codex, and no opus 4.6...
•
oh so those are issues from the provider itself, you get to choose between model the provider advertise for you, meaning: - you can have models you can not actually use (that gpt-5.3 response) - you can have model non-listed. Those are all coming from the provider with your API_KEY.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Do Metaprojects (taylor.town)
•
I feel that a lot of the above comments are missing the point. To me, the article reads like the experience of a curious person, living in an age where the world is literally at their fingertips and how that is both overwhelming and awesome. I thought it was beautiful and relatable.
•
This article does not make it clear what a metaproject actually is. That said, I _believe_ the author is describing a concept similar to something I do. Choose a very small number of open-ended, broad projects. Each project should basically be an endless well of work. Moving the metaproject forward involves finishing several sub-projects, each of which is a respectable weekend or holiday project all on its own. A good choice for metaproject allows for a choice between a wide variety of new and interesting things to work on. Get bored or stuck? Do something else. There’s so many things to do. You’re still working on the same metaproject. Find something cool online that you want to experiment with? Find a way to frame it as an experiment or project under the umbrella of the metaproject. For example, my overarching project is to develop my own computer system, from the custom CPU, up to the operating system and applications, as completely from scratch as possible. This has led me to learn more about Verilog, electronics, soldering, computer architecture, RISC-V, emulators, you name it. At one point, I decided I needed to design my own high-level language for this thing. The compiler has itself become a metaproject where there’s always something to work on: parsing, lexing, optimization passes, experiments in syntax, garbage collectors, writing a debugger, etc. Someday soon, I hope to be able to start a project to build video hardware with a sprite engine, like in those old 8-bit and 16-bit game systems. I’ll mentally bill this under the umbrella of “working on my computer project.” I’ve been thinking of “that computer project” as a kind of life project that I’ll plug away on here and there until the day I die. I wonder if this is how those old men who build boats feel about their boat. Hey, there’s my own catchy phrase right there: “Build your boat”
•
Makes sense. I've been discovering that components of ideas I've had would make neat reusable libraries on their own.
•
> For example, my overarching project is to develop my own computer system, from the custom CPU, up to the operating system and applications, as completely from scratch as possible. This has led me to learn more about Verilog, electronics, soldering, computer architecture, RISC-V, emulators, you name it. How long do you estimate is going to take you to complete?
•
The article defines it through an example: > You've been wanting to take cooking classes, but you've also been wanting to join an improv group. If you don't have time/resources for both of these projects, you might choose a metaproject like "weekly dinner party with funny friends" -- it doesn't strictly meet the requirements from either project, but it might fulfill some deeper desire. So the idea is to extrapolate a new project that satisfies some core aspects of multiple projects you dont have time for.
•
That example was not there when he wrote the comment :) I snuck it in after all the helpful feedback in this comment section haha
•
Reading this felt like talking to myself…get out of my head! With that being said, I have so many projects, so little time, but I’m prioritizing the ones that both fulfill me and have a decent chance at replacing my $DAYJOB. Also, having a schedule so I don’t burn myself out. It’s been working well for about a month so far.
This shit is sickening. I'm nauseated by this generation of wannabe entrepreneurs who have decided to disable their amygdala and conscience.
•
did we read the same post? none of what was mentioned was even in the realm of entrepreneurship or anything ethically hairy.
•
Good sir, cut that fellow some slack - they’re clearly venting some steam, and in doing so they’re not saying anything particularly harmful or wrong. The part about disabling conscience feels like a huge stretch (I don’t see it there, not explicitly for sure), given how the article is just some personal rant about task and goal management.
•
> I want freedom, money, affection, play, power, validation, fulfillment, etc. Of course I already have these things, but enough never seems enough. > My brain came pre-installed with Human OS; loss aversion will squander CPU until I install security patches (e.g. Taoism, Zen, stocism). > But I think I'm allergic to enlightenment. Meditation is difficult, quiet is boring, courage is scary, desire is addicting, etc. This is just sociopathic. More more more. Turn off my loss aversion with stocism, etc.
Ouch! Honestly, I'm probably all those things (and worse). But I found the concept of "metaprojects" helpful for shrinking the footprint of my ambitions. Instead of wanting everything , now I'm happier pursuing fewer things :-) At some point, I'll hopefully learn to let go even more. I hope other folks can learn/resonate from my particular brand of crazy
•
As someone who takes on _a lot_ of side projects, I like your idea of a metaproject! I often wonder what draws me to pick up so many interests and goals. I used to think its leading me towards something but after so many years I have started to wonder if that is really whats going on. Maybe there is something more essential I can tease out of all my side projects that reveals what I am really after..
Can you give us examples of metaprojects?
•
You are the project, and getting through your idea to something, is about building a better you. Which points back to the beginning: -- Publish that novella, build an OS, converse in Mandarin, release an indie game, publish that other novella, dominate a continent -- -- Seem to be a lot of complaints about this post, I'm enjoying it. Interesting flow of thoughts and share similar frustration with all my ideas and trying to channel them, and get to something. If I get to something close to my thoughts that's a huge win for me.
Example: You've been wanting to take cooking classes, but you've also been wanting to join an improv group. If you don't have time/resources for both of these projects, you might choose a "metaproject" like "weekly dinner party with funny friends" -- it doesn't strictly meet the requirements from either project, but might achieve something deeper you're looking for.
•
Thank you! That is an actionable example that would be helpful if it was in the actual article.
•
That example is in the article, but typeset differently.
•
The example wasn't in the essay when he wrote the comment :) I just added it thanks to the helpful feedback
GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics (openai.com)
•
Many innovations are built off cross pollination of domains and I think we are not too far off from having a loop where multiple agents grounded very well in specific domains can find intersections and optimizations by communicating with each other, especially if they are able to run for 12+ hours. The truth is that 99% of attempts at innovation will fail, but the 1% can yield something fantastic, the more attempts we can take, the faster progress will happen.
•
5.2 is the best model on the market.
AI can be an amazing productivity multiplier for people who know what they're doing. This result reminded me of the C compiler case that Anthropic posted recently. Sure, agents wrote the code for hours but there was a human there giving them directions, scoping the problem, finding the test suites needed for the agentic loops to actually work etc etc. In general making sure the output actually works and that it's a story worth sharing with others. The "AI replaces humans in X" narrative is primarily a tool for driving attention and funding. It works great for creating impressions and building brand value but also does a disservice to the actual researchers, engineers and humans in general, who do the hard work of problem formulation, validation and at the end, solving the problem using another tool in their toolbox.
•
> for people who know what they're doing. I worry we're not producing as many of those as we used to
•
We will be producing them even less. I fear for the future graduates, hell even for school children, who are now uncontrollably using ChatGPT for their homework. Next level brainrot
•
> The "AI replaces humans in X" narrative is primarily a tool for driving attention and funding. It's also a legitimate concern. We happen to be in a place where humans are needed for that "last critical 10%," or the first critical 10% of problem formulation, and so humans are still crucial to the overall system, at least for most complex tasks. But there's no logical reason that needs to be the case. Once it's not, humans will be replaced.
•
The reason there is a marketing opportunity is because, to your point, there is a legitimate concern. Marketing builds and amplifies the concern to create awareness. When the systems turn into something trivial to manage with the new tooling, humans build more complex or add more layers on the existing systems.
•
I'm not sure you can call something an optimizing C compiler if it doesn't optimize or enforce C semantics (well, it compiles C but also a lot of things that aren't syntactically valid C). It seemed to generate a lot of code (wow!) that wasn't well-integrated and didn't do what it promised to, and the human didn't have the requisite expertise to understand that. I'm not a theoretical physicist but I will hold to my skepticism here, for similar reasons.
Actually, the results were far worse and way less impressive than what the media said.
•
the c compiler results or the physics results this post is about?
The headline may make it seem like AI just discovered some new result in physics all on its own, but reading the post, humans started off trying to solve some problem, it got complex, GPT simplified it and found a solution with the simpler representation. It took 12 hours for GPT pro to do this. In my experience LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things but I haven’t been to get them to do something totally out of distribution yet from first principles.
•
Hmm feels a bit trivializing, we don't know exactly how difficult it was to come up with the generic set of equations mentioned from the human starting point. I can claim some knowledge of physics from my degree, typically the easy part is coming up with complex dirty equations that work under special conditions, the hard part is the simplification into something elegant, 'natural' and general. Also "LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things" Doesn't really mean much, what is a linear combination of things you first have to define precisely what a thing is?
When chess engines were first developed, they were strictly worse than the best humans. After many years of development, they became helpful to even the best humans even though they were still beatable (1985–1997). Eventually they caught up and surpassed humans but the combination of human and computer was better than either alone (~1997–2007). Since then, humans have been more or less obsoleted in the game of chess. Five years ago we were at Stage 1 with LLMs with regard to knowledge work. A few years later we hit Stage 2. We are currently at Stage 3 for an extremely high percentage of knowledge work. Stage 4 will come, and I would wager it's sooner rather than later.
•
With a chess engine, you could ask any practitioner in the 90's what it would take to achieve "Stage 4" and they could estimate it quite accurately as a function of FLOPs and memory bandwidth. It's worth keeping in mind just how little we understand about LLM capability scaling. Ask 10 different AI researchers when we will get to Stage 4 for something like programming and you'll get wild guesses or an honest "we don't know".
•
Chess grandmasters are living proof that it’s possible to reach grandmaster level in chess on 20W of compute. We’ve got orders of magnitude of optimizations to discover in LLMs and/or future architectures, both software and hardware and with the amount of progress we’ve got basically every month those ten people will answer ‘we don’t know, but it won’t be too long’. Of course they may be wrong, but the trend line is clear; Moore’s law faced similar issues and they were successively overcome for half a century. IOW respect the trend line.
> but I haven’t been to get them to do something totally out of distribution yet from first principles Can humans actually do that? Sometimes it appears as if we have made a completely new discovery. However, if you look more closely, you will find that many events and developments led up to this breakthrough, and that it is actually an improvement on something that already existed. We are always building on the shoulders of giants.
•
> Can humans actually do that? From my reading yes, but I think I am likely reading the statement differently than you are. > from first principles Doing things from first principles is a known strategy, so is guess and check, brute force search, and so on. For an llm to follow a first principles strategy I would expect it to take in a body of research, come up with some first principles or guess at them, then iteratively construct and tower of reasonings/findings/experiments. Constructing a solid tower is where things are currently improving for existing models in my mind, but when I try openai or anthropic chat interface neither do a good job for long, not independently at least. Humans also often have a hard time with this in general it is not a skill that everyone has and I think you can be a successful scientist without ever heavily developing first principles problem solving.
Go enough shoulders down, and someone had to have been the first giant.
•
Probably not homo sapiens.. other hominids older than us developed a lot of technology
I am not a scientific historian, or even a physicist, but IMO relativity has a weak case for being a completely novel discovery. Critique of absolute time and space of Newtonian physics was already well underway, and much of the methodology for exploring this relativity (by way of gyroscopes, inertial reference frames, and synchronized mechanical clocks) were already in parlance. Many of the phenomena that relativity would later explain under a consistent framework already had independent quasi-explanations hinting at the more universal theory. Poincare probably came the closest to unifying everything before Einstein: > In 1902, Henri Poincaré published a collection of essays titled Science and Hypothesis, which included: detailed philosophical discussions on the relativity of space and time; the conventionality of distant simultaneity; the conjecture that a violation of the relativity principle can never be detected; the possible non-existence of the aether, together with some arguments supporting the aether; and many remarks on non-Euclidean vs. Euclidean geometry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity Now, if I had to pick a major idea that seemed to drop fully-formed from the mind of a genius with little precedent to have guided him, I might personally point to Galois theory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois_theory ). (Ironically, though, I'm not as familiar with the mathematical history of that time and I may be totally wrong!)
•
Right on with special relativity—Lorentz also was developing the theory and was a bit sour that Einstein got so much credit. Einstein basically said “what if special relativity were true for all of physics”, not just electromagnetism, and out dropped e=mc^2. It was a bold step but not unexplainable. As for general relativity, he spent several years working to learn differential geometry (which was well developed mathematics at the time, but looked like abstract nonsense to most physicists). I’m not sure how he was turned on to this theory being applicable to gravity, but my guess is that it was motivated by some symmetry ideas. (It always come down to symmetry.)
This is the critical bit (paraphrasing): Humans have worked out the amplitudes for integer n up to n = 6 by hand, obtaining very complicated expressions, which correspond to a “Feynman diagram expansion” whose complexity grows superexponentially in n. But no one has been able to greatly reduce the complexity of these expressions, providing much simpler forms. And from these base cases, no one was then able to spot a pattern and posit a formula valid for all n. GPT did that. Basically, they used GPT to refactor a formula and then generalize it for all n. Then verified it themselves. I think this was all already figured out in 1986 though: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.56.2459 see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHV_amplitudes
•
I'm not sure if GPTs ability goes beyond a formal math package's in this regard or its just its just way more convienient to ask ChatGPT rather than using these software.
You're right. Parke & Taylor showed the simplest nonzero amplitudes have two minus helicities while one-minus amplitudes vanish (generically). This paper claims that vanishing theorem has a loophole - a new hidden sector exists and one-minus amplitudes are secretly there, but distributional
•
> simplest nonzero amplitudes have two minus helicities while one-minus amplitudes vanish Sorry but I just have to point out how this field of maths read like Star Trek technobabble too me.
•
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn4fW0EInqw
Don't underestimate the willingness of physicists to skimp on literature review.
•
After last month’s Erdos problems handling by LLMs at this point everyone writing papers should be aware that literature checks are approximately free, even physicists.
“They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle
•
"For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." — Carl Sagan Shall we snipe each other with quotes neither of us came up with all afternoon? Bonus points for whomever's LLM researches the most pithy one!
•
I read the narnia series many times as a kid and this one stuck with me, I didn't prompt for it. I have no real way to demonstrate that I'm telling the truth, but I am ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No it's not like saying that at all, which is why Open AI have a credit on the paper.
•
Open AI have a credit on the paper because it is marketing.
Some of these were initially hyped as novel solutions, and then were quietly downgraded after it was discovered the solutions weren’t actually novel.
•
Yeah that was also my take-away when I was following the developments on it. But then again I don't follow it very closely so _maybe_ some novel solutions are discovered. But given how LLMs work, I'm skeptical about that.
Why I'm not worried about AI job loss (davidoks.blog)
•
The article frames the premise that "everything will be fine" around people with "regular jobs", which I assume means non knowledge work, but most of public concern is on cognitive tasks being automated. It also argues that models have existed for years and we're yet to see significant job loss. That's true, but AI is only now crossing the threshold of being both capable and reliable enough to be automate common tasks. It's better to prepare for the disruption than the sink or swim approach we're taking now in hopes that things will sort themselves out.
•
Ordinary people aren't even ok now. Lest we forget, software engineers aren't exactly ordinary people: they make quite a bit above the median wage. AI taking our jobs is scary because it will turn us into "ordinary people". And ordinary people are not ok. They're barely surviving.
The take that I am increasingly believing is that Software Engineers should broadly be worried, because while there will always be demand for people who can create software products, whatever the tools may be, the skills necessary to do it well are changing rapidly. Most Software Engineers are going to wake up one day and realize their skills aren't just irrelevant, but actively detrimental, to delivering value out of software. There will also be far fewer positions demanding these skills. Easy access to generating code has moved the bottleneck in companies to positions & skills that are substantially harder to hire for (basically: Good Judgement); so while adding Agentic Sorcerers would increase a team's code output, it might be the wrong code. Corporate profit will keep scaling with slower-growing team sizes as companies navigate the correct next thing to build.
•
Is AI filling in for all those COBOL programmers they needed yet?
It's not binary. Jobs will be lost because management will expect the fewer developers to accomplish more by leveraging AI.
•
Big tech might ahead of the rest of the economy in this experiment. Microsoft grew headcount by ~3% from June 2022 to June 2025 while revenue grew by >40%. This is admittedly weak anecdata but my subjective experience is their products seem to be crumbling (GitHub problems around the Azure migration for instance), and worse than they even were before. We'll see how they handle hiring over the next few years and if that reveals anything.
I mean, what is the validation system? Either it exists in code, and thus can be discovered if you point the AI at repo, or... what, it doesn't exist? For the UX, have it explore your existing repos and copy prior art from there and industry standards to come up with something workable. Web scale issues can be inferred by the rest of the codebase. If your terraform repo has one RDS server, vs a fleet of them, multi-region, then the AI, just as well as a human, can figure out if it needs Google Spanner level engineering or not. (probably not) Bigger picture though, what's the process of a human logs an under specified ticket and someone else picks it up and has no clue what to do with it? They're gonna go ask the person who logged the bug for their thoughts and some details beyond "hurr Durr something something validation". If we're at the point where AI is able to make a public blog post shaming the open source developer for not accepting a patch, throwing questions back to you in JIRA about the details of the streaming validation system is well within its capabilities, given the right set of tools.
•
Honestly curious, have you seen agents succeed at this sort of long-trajectory wide breadth task, or is it theoretical? Because I haven't seen them come close (and not for lack of trying)
For 1, unless you already have an self-sustaining underground bunker or island, you will be affected. No matter how much savings and total compensation you have. If you went out to get grocery in the last week, it will affect you.
•
What shall I need the bunker for?
I lost my job as a software developer some time ago. Flipping burgers is WAY more demanding than I ever imagined. That's the danger of AI: It takes jobs faster than creating new ones PLUS for some fields (like software development) downshifting to just about anything else is brutal and sometimes simply not doable. Forget becoming manager at McDonald's or be even good at flipping burgers at the age of 40: you are competing with 20yr olds doing sports with amazing coordination etc
•
Ugh.. sorry to hear :( I am myself unemployed right now. Its really hard to land a job in tech.. Luicky, I dont need to flip burgers for now...
Of course, I think about this at least once a week maybe more often. I think that the technology overall will be a great net benefit to humanity or I wouldn't touch it.
•
Genuine question: how? I’m younger than most on this site. I see the next decades of my life being defined by a multi-generational dark age via a collapse in literacy (“you use a calculator right?”), median prosperity (the only truly functional distribution system we have figured out is labor), and loss of agency (kinda obvious). This outcome is now, as of 2026, essentially priced into the public markets and accepted as fact by most media outlets. “It’s inevitable” is at least a hard point to argue with. “Well I’M so productive, I’m having the time of my life”, the dominant position in many online tech spaces, seems short-sighted at best. I miss being a techno optimist, it’s much more fun. But it’s increasingly hard.
Show HN: Skill that lets Claude Code/Codex spin up VMs and GPUs (cloudrouter.dev)
•
Nice, we build something similar at dstack We recently also added support for agents: https://skills.sh/dstackai/dstack/dstack Our approach though is more tide-case agnostic and in the direction of brining full-fledged container orchestration converting from development to training and inference
•
It's a cool idea, but personally I don't like the implementation. I usually don't use monolithic tools that cram a lot of different solutions into one thing. For one thing, especially if they're compiled, it's very hard to just modify them to do one extra thing I need without getting into a long development cycle. For two, they are usually inflexible, restricting what I can do. Third, they often aren't very composeable. Fourth, often they aren't easily pluggable/extensible. I much prefer independent, loosely coupled, highly cohesive, composeable, extensible tools. It's not a very "programmery" solution, but it makes it easier as a user to fix things, extend things, combine things, etc. The Docker template you have bundles a ton of apps into one container. This is problematic as it creates a big support burden, build burden, and compatibility burden. Docker works better when you make individual containers of a single app, and run them separately, and connect them with tcp, sockets, or volumes. Then the user can swap them out, add new ones, remove unneded ones, etc, and they can use an official upstream project. Docker-in-docker with a custom docker network works pretty well, and the host is still accessible if needed. As a nit-pick: your auth code has browser-handling logic. This is low cohesion, a sign of problems to come. And in your rsync code: sshCmd := fmt.Sprintf("ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o ProxyCommand=%q", proxyCmd) I was just commenting the other day on here about how nobody checks SSH host keys and how SSH is basically wide-open due to this. Just leaving this here to show people what I mean. (It's not an easy problem to solve, but ignoring security isn't great either)
•
Ah, just one step closer to a model with it's own weights file can bootstrap and run itself.
CBP Signs Clearview AI Deal to Use Face Recognition for 'Tactical Targeting' (wired.com)
SmartCheckr was founded/owned by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz. So they transferred the assets of a company they already founded/owned to another company that they founded/owned: "Clearview AI was founded in 2017 by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz after transferring the assets of another company, SmartCheckr, which the pair originally founded in 2017 alongside Charles C. Johnson" [0]. Other notable white supremacists with material ties in the article: Chuck Johnson [1] collaborated with Ton-That and "in contact about scraping social media platforms for the facial recognition business." Ran a white supremacist site (GotNews) and white supremacist crowd funding sites. Douglass Mackey [2] a white supremacist who consulted for the company. Tyler Bass [3] an employee and member of multiple white supremacist groups and Unite the Right attendee. Marko Jukic [4], employee and syndicated author in a publication by white supremacist Richard Spencer. The article also goes into the much larger ecosystem of AI and facial recognition tech and its ties to white supremacists and the far-right. So there are not just direct ties to Clearview AI itself, but a network of surveillance companies who are ideologically and financially tied to the founders and associates. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Johnson [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglass_Mackey [3] https://gizmodo.com/creepy-face-recognition-firm-clearview-ai-sure-has-a-lo-1842740604 [4] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-immigration-ice-fbi-surveillance-facial-recognition-hoan-ton-that-hal-lambert-trump/
•
Again, if you want to allege that these other people are white supremacists go right ahead. But you wrote that "Clearview AI was founded by white supremacists". Even after your new set of links, this remains unsubstantiated. None of your links allege that the Clearview founders are white supremacists, they make an attempt at guilt by association.
•
You're right, my apologies. I've edited the original from "Clearview AI was founded by white supremacists" to "Clearview AI was founded by people with close ties to white supremacy and even employed some." Thanks for the correction!
Or heroes, if they win.
•
No, I will continue to call them terrorists or war criminals. You can feel free to lick their boots though.
Putting a rock in your shoe instantly changes your gait signature.
•
Thank you Corey Doctorow and "Little Brother". That book was prescient. And free. Frankly, I never imagined when I read that decades ago, that it could be underselling the horror.
I subscribe to keep the reporting going. Journalism costs money. Most Americans don’t pay for news and don’t think they need to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982633 - February 2026 (ProPublica, 404media, APM Marketplace, Associated Press, Vox, Block Club Chicago, Climate Town, Tampa Bay Times, etc get my journalism dollars as well)
•
>Journalism costs money. They've sold out for years already, maybe decades. Why fund them now when the corruption is out in the open? AP is really one of the few places I'd even consider donating to at this point.
The difference is that a government can take personal liberty away from people in the most direct way. A private company can't decide to lock somebody away in prison or send them to death row. (Hopefully anyway.) So we put a higher standard on government. That said, I do believe there ought to be more restrictions on private use of these technologies.
•
Cops are legally forbidden from surveilling everyone at all times using machines. Explicitly so. Yet, if a company starts up and surveils everyone at all times, and their only customer is Cops, it's all Okay somehow. The cops don't even need a warrant anymore. What's worse, is that third party doctrine kills your rights worse than direct police surveillance. Imagine if you will, back in the day of film cameras: The company developing your film will tell the police if you give them literal child porn but otherwise they don't. But imagine if they kept a copy of every picture you ever took, just stuffed it into a room in the back, and your receipt included a TOS about you giving them a license to own a copy "for necessary processing". Now, a year after you stopped using film cameras, the cops ask the company for your photos. The company hands it over. You don't get to say no. The cops don't need a warrant, even though they 100% need a warrant to walk into your home and grab your stash of photos. Why is this at all okay? How did the supreme court not recognize how outright stupid this is? We made an explicit rule for video rental stores to not be able to do this! Congress at one time recognized the stupidity and illegal nature of this! Except they only did that because a politician's video rental history was published during his attempt at confirmation. That law is direct and clear precedent that service providers should not be able to give your data to the cops without your consent, but this is America so precedent is only allowed to help businesses and cops.
The point is that "who gathers it" should be irrelevant. The government shouldn't be able to buy data that would be unconstitutional or unlawful for them to gather themselves. On the other hand if a company is just aggregating something benign like weather data, there's no need to bar the government from buying that instead of building it themselves.
•
> The government shouldn't be able to buy data that would be unconstitutional or unlawful for them to gather themselves. Now that sounds like a good argument to make in court! How do we do it?
> I don't think there is an expectation of privacy for things you literally post to the public, like social media Neither is there an expectation that automation would slurp it up and build a database on you and everyone else. Maybe the HN crowd is one thing, but most normies would probably say it shouldn't be allowed. > Even the government doing the scraping directly I believe would not violate the 4th amendment. Every time I see someone make a statement like this I think of the Iraq war era when a Berkeley law professor said torture is legal. Simply saying something that clearly violates the spirit of our rights is ok based on a technicality, I would not call that a moral high ground. > The sensitive data needs to not be collected in the first place via technical and social solutions, At this point and points forward I think your comment is much more on the mark.
•
I think we clearly both agree that mass surveillance is problematic regardless of whether it is done by the government or corporations. With that said > normies would probably say it shouldn't be allowed Despite knowing about this, most continue supporting the various companies doing exactly that, like Facebook and Google. > Neither is there an expectation [...] Expectation is not law, and it cuts both ways. The authors of the 4th and 5th amendments likely did not anticipate the existence of encryption - in their view, the flip side of the 4th amendment is that with a warrant, the government could search anything except your mind, which can't store that much information. We now get to enjoy an almost absolute right to privacy due to the letter of the law.
Good Riddance, 4o (mahadk.com)
•
Ah, the 4o, the first beer bottle for humans. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/06/19/193493225/the-love-that-dared-not-speak-its-name-of-a-beetle-for-a-beer-bottle
You can answer any public policy question, any of them at all, by saying "It's simple; first we create a utopia, and then...".
•
I didn't state we create a utopia, I just pointed out what our current dystopia looks like.
Enthusiastically matching the energy of an anxiously attached partner is a rite of passage many would rather not have walked.
•
That's a pretty fair point to what might explain why AI relationships are so appealing to some people. I'd be a fun observational study to survey folks in AI relations and see if anxious attachments are over-represented.
Well. Huh. Without regard to whether or not it was basically healthy to get that emotionally dependent on the bot… you’d think that if they could manipulate people into being so attached to the things, they’d also be able to manipulate people into accepting the end of the situation.
•
> you’d think that if they could manipulate people into being so attached to the things, they’d also be able to manipulate people into accepting the end of the situation. That seems like a very unlikely conclusion to me. Why is it your prior?
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Sandwich Bill of Materials (nesbitt.io)
•
This is fantastic, now, after implementing SAP home edition at your house, you’ll be able to use the procurement module and leverage EDI to source the ingredients of your sandwich while maintaining full traceability according to the relevant ISO standards.
•
So is "toasting the bread a little bit" in the semver for the bread? Is this part of the integrity hash? Where are post assembly instructions stored? Panini and croque monsieur sandwiches are left out of this spec. Author didn't post the repo so I don't know where to submit an issue.
If The Princess Bride is to be believed, MCP stands for the "Mutton Context Protocol".
•
When the tokens are nice and lean.
> SHA-256 hash of the ingredient at time of acquisition I put mayonnaise on my RAM but I don't know how to hash it.
•
Dice the mayo and sticks of RAM and place in a cast iron skillet over medium heat. Turn it every two or three minutes. Remove when you can smell the magic smoke.
I spent two days gigging at RentAHuman and didn't make a single cent (wired.com)
RentAHuman. What a boring misanthropy. It's work. You're hiring qualified people. For qualified work. You're not "renting a human." Which is just an abstract idealism of chattel slavery, so, is it really a surprise the author made nothing?
•
It's just a little bit of grift, probably nothing to worry about since it looks like it's not going to take off anywhere.
What sort of interesting human activities have RentAHuman humans been asked to do by your customers besides marketing?
•
[Redacted for legal reasons]
And.. it's been remastered in 4k!
•
Wait, what?? I loved Colossus as a kid, read and enjoyed all three books, and still have an original movie poster I got at a yard sale when I was a teenager. I read the books again a couple years ago, and they're still enjoyable, if now quite dated.
My issue with RentAHuman is it's marketing and branding. It's ominous, dark on purpose. Just give me a task rabbit that accepts crypto and has an API.
•
would you pay a $50 signup fee?
The sci fi version of the alignment problem is about AI agents having their own motives The real world alignment problem is humans using AI to do bad stuff The latter problem is very real
•
> The sci fi version of the alignment problem is about AI agents having their own motives The sci-fi version is alignment (not intrinsic motivation) though. Hal 9000 doesn't turn on the crew because it has intrinsic motivation, it turns on the crew because of how the secret instruction the AI expert didn't know about interacts with the others.
IronClaw: a Rust-based clawd that runs tools in isolated WASM sandboxes (github.com/nearai)
•
I built myself a docker container for openclaw which has an X server inside with VNC access. Openclaw only has access to a single folder on my machine that is shared with the container. I'm currently using this for social media research via browser automation, running as a daily cron job. Given I have VNC access and the browser is not in headless mode I can solve captchas myself as the agent runs into them. Apart from a known issue with the openclaw browser which the agent itself was made aware of so it could work around it, this has been working well so far. I'm thinking of open sourcing this container at some point...
the power of openclaw is theres no sand boxing
•
Or you design the sandbox so smartly that is seamless...
Does it isolate keys away from bots?
•
Yes exactly, keys are only injected at host boundary
looking at the feature parity page, i realized how big openclaw ecosystem has become. It's completely crazy for such a young project to be able to interface with so many subsystems so fast. At this rate, it's going to be simply impossible to catchup in just a few months.
•
Idk this seems to be gaining momentum and with devs being able to leverage their skillset via vibe coding anything seems possible really.
I'm getting tired of these vibe-designed security things. I skimmed the "design". What is sandboxed from what? What is the threat model? What does it protect against, if anything? What does it fail to protect against? How does data get into a sandbox? How does it get out? It kind of sounds like the LLM built a large system that doesn't necessarily achieve any actual value.
•
I mean it is described somewhat succinctly no? Potentially untrusted tools are isolated from the rest of the system - there were recently some cases of skills for openclaw being used as vectors for malware. This minimizes the adverse effect of potential malicious skills. Also protects from your agent to leaking your secrets left and right - because it has no access to them. Secrets are only supplied when payloads are leaving the host - i.e. the AI never sees your keys.
•
And what do those tools access? How? If I ask the agent to edit a CSV file, what’s the actual workflow? What prevents it from editing a different file due to a prompt injection attack?
•
We have a different security model. SEKS — Secure Environment for Key Services We built a broker for the keys/secrets. We have a fork of nushell called seksh, which takes stand-ins for the actual auth, but which only reifies them inside the AST of the shell. This makes the keys inaccessible for the agent. In the end, the agent won't even have their Anthropic/OpenAI keys! The broker also acts as a proxy, and injects secrets or even does asymmetric key signing on behalf of the proxied agent. My agents are already running on our fork of OpenClaw, doing the work. They deprecated their Doppler ENV vars, and all their work is through the broker! All that said, we might just take a few ideas from IronClaw as well. I put up a Show HN, but no one noticed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005607 Website is here: https://seksbot.com/
Interesting approach. It requires a Near AI account. Supposedly that's a more private way to do inference, but at the same time they do offer Claude Opus 4.6 (among others), so I wonder what privacy guarantees they can actually offer and whether it depends on Anthropic?
•
Afaik Anthropic is not giving pretty much any provider model weights, so any inference of Opus is certainly not private. Either going through Anthropic or Bedrock, or Vertex. Of the three Bedrock is probably the best for trust, but still not private by any means.
•
They do verifiable inference on TEEs for the open source models. The anthropic ones I think they basically proxy for you (also via trusted TEE) so that it cant be tied to you. VPN for LLM inference so to speak.
•
Can you link to the verifiable inference method?
Sandboxes will be left in 2026. We don't need to reinvent isolated environments; not even the main issue with OpenClaw - literally go deploy it in a VM on any cloud and you've achieved all same benefits. We need to know if the email being sent by an agent is supposed to be sent and if an agent is actually supposed to be making that transaction on my behalf. etc
•
That's why I'm developing a system that only allows messaging with authorized senders using email addresses, chat addresses, and phone addresses, and a tool that feeds anonymized information into an LLM API, retrieves the output, reverses the anonymization, and responds to the sender.
Sure. If you treat "guard model" as diversification strategy, it is another layer of protection, just like diversification in compilation helps solving the root of trust issue (Reflections on Trusting Trust). I am just generally suspicious about the weak-to-strong supervision. I think it is in general pretty futile to implement permission systems / guardrails which basically insert a human in the loop (humans need to review the work to fully understand why it needs to send that email, and at that point, why do you need a LLM to send the email again?).
•
fair enough
Open Source Is Not About You (2018) (gist.github.com)
This is the attitude that made me keep my patches to myself. Hey, you, FOSS maintainer, whoever you are: - If you make your project public, it means you want and expect people to use it. You could at least write some documentation, so I don't waste my time and then find out, days later, it isn't capable of what I need or I simply don't know how to use it. - If you set up a bug tracker, then at least have the decency to answer bug reports. Bugs make it unusable. Someone took the time to write those bug reports. I'm not asking to fix them (I lost that hope decades ago), but at least you could give a one line answer or 2-line guidance for some another person that might want to try a fix - "I don't have time to fix it, sorry, but it's probably because of <that thing> in <that file>." I mean, you wrote the stuff! One minute of thinking on your part is the same as 6 hours of digging for someone who never saw the code before. - If you open it up to pull requests, it means you want people to contribute. Have the decency to review them. Someone took time away from their jobs, families or entertainment to write those PRs. Ignoring them because you don't need that feature, not affected by the bug, or simply because of code aesthetics is an insult to the one who wrote it. PS: - And no, don't expect someone else to write the documentation for your code. Same as the bugs: 1 minute of your time is 6 hours of work for someone else. If you can't do at least these things, just say it's abandoned on the front page and be done with it.
•
> me keep my patches to myself. Exactly. Nobody is entitled to your patches.
I can't tell if this is satire or not. I fear that it's not. "If you make your project public, it means you want and expect people to use it. You could at least write some documentation, so I don't waste my time and then find out, days later, it isn't capable of what I need or I simply don't know how to use it." WTF? If I make it public it's because I think other people might like to see it. That runs the gamut from "this is a production-ready project that solves a major problem" to "this is useless but shows some interesting techniques you might like to learn from." If you spent days fiddling with an undocumented project that turned out not to do what you need, I'm not the one who wasted your time. That would be you. If you want to limit yourself to only looking at high-quality projects with documentations and active bug trackers and PR reviewers, go for it. That's probably a good move! But putting some source files on a web server does not imply any further obligation, in those areas or any other.
•
I sing in the shower all the time. I'd rather have my fingernails pulled out one at a time and the video sold to psychopaths than go to an open mic night or participate in a talent show. I know what I am and I know the degree to which people suck. Don't walk into abuse teeth first and then make a surprise Pikachu face about it.
> no, it doesn't, maybe I have a github project, I want to easily share it with ten of my friends for something, Then make it private. > I don't particularly care if other people see it, so I make it public. Yeah, I see someone else made the same argument. It's a reckless disregard of other people's time and nerves. Build labyrinths and scatter them around the internet. Leave manholes uncovered. Markov chains to trap humans. You could at least say it's not maintained - no, not in the disclaimer. > maybe the author had time and energy to answer bug reports a few years ago and maybe right now they don't. Then close bug tracker and post "Abandoned" on the front page. > counterpoint, people who barge in on your project with huge PRs for features or changes that were not discussed at all Then say so and then reject them. That's what PR review means. I don't have a problem with rejected PRs. I have a problem with ignored PRs.
•
Anything you in a public space, will be made social by someone eventually. If you (GP) don't like it then tough shit. That's a You Problem, not an Us Problem. And you can make github repositories that others can see but not the rest of us, it just costs a little money. You can host a book club at your house too and not have to listen to other people snicker at your friends' commentary on the book at the coffee shop. But if they're gonna keep saying stupid shit in the middle of a Starbucks, then someone is going to butt in.
•
Making a PR is also in the public space, and if your PR is lazy spam, you deserve a less generous response than the one Hickey gave.
> [...] you have wrong expectations. I did. (Past tense.) I'm calibrated now. > You don't get to decide that. You're exactly right. I only get to decide what I do with my own toys. And I've decided I won't waste any of my time. If you (plural) can't write a one line answer to a bug report or click a reject PR button, then why should I put any effort? Isn't it nice "git clone" was invented?
•
Just sounds like you've moved the goal posts to something completely different. This entire statement is addressing people frustrated with their half broken PRs being closed. It has nothing to do with "not clicking the reject button"
Now imagine I make a weird cake and I think it's interesting. I put up a poster with a photo and a recipe and say "thought this was cool, try it if you want." And then some nonce comes along and tells me off for a reckless disregard of other people's time and nerves. Compares it to an open manhole cover that could get somebody killed. Throwing some interesting code onto a web site isn't like setting up a booth at a community event. Its not even really like putting up a poster, since posters get seen by whoever happens to come nearby whereas web sites only get seen by people who seek them out, but it's about the closest you'll get to a real-world analogy.
•
Probably won't get anyone killed, but I've seen loss of data. Valuable data. And now you're going to point to the disclaimer and 321 backups... Websites are seen by everyone seeking not a site, but a feature, via search engines. Same as a poster if you look in that direction.
Counterpoints: - You are entitled to human decency. Maintainers don't get to be rude just because they run a project. This is a common thing in a lot of projects; maintainers have power, and this allows them to be rude without concern. Not ok. - As a maintainer, if you publish your work as open source, you already acknowledge you are engaging with an entire community, culture, and ethos. We all know how it works: you put a license on your work that (often, but not always) says people need to share their changes. So those people may share their changes back to you, assuming you might want to integrate them. So you know this is going to happen... so you need to be prepared for that. That is a skill to learn. - Since maintainers do owe basic human politeness, and they know people will be interacting with them, maintainers do owe this culture some form of communication of their intentions. If they don't want to take any changes, put that in CONTRIBUTING and turn off GH PRs. If they want to take changes, but no AI changes, put that in CONTRIBUTING. If they don't want to do support, turn off GH Issues. If they require a specific 10-point series of steps before they look at a PR or Issue, put that in CONTRIBUTING. It's on the user to read this document and follow it - but it's on you to create it, so they know how to interface with you. Be polite, and tell people what you will and won't accept in CONTRIBUTING (and/or SUPPORT). Even if it's just "No contributing", "No support". (My personal issue: I spend hours working on preparing an Issue or PR to fix someone's project, and they ignore or close it without a word. Now I don't want to contribute to anything. This is bad for the open source community.)
•
> Counterpoints: > - You are entitled to human decency. Maintainers don't get to be rude just because they run a project. This is a common thing in a lot of projects; maintainers have power, and this allows them to be rude without concern. Not ok. There is a subtle line here and I have some sympathy for both sides of this debate because for a long time there, and in some ways is still happening under different names now, we conflated decency with respect. So it gets a little weird. We treat the guy ringing our doorbell with decency. We treat our new boss with respect. We treat the person spouting nonsense with decency, not respect. Free Speech says I can say anything I want but it also says that you can call me names for doing so. That's the difference between decency and respect, and it's important everyone knows what they mean when they say 'decency', instead of what they think they mean. I honestly wish there were more women participating in these sorts of conversations because they have to deal with weaponized politeness on a daily basis, and I suspect the correct line for open source is a little closer to their definition of decency than mine.
What’s the solution then? This is one of those emotional-labor questions. Who is responsible for new contributors having a good experience? Especially thousands of eager, misinformed contributors? It’s a DDOS that exhausts and burns out the maintainer even while the supply of newbie contributors is rarely meaningfully impacted by maintainer conduct. The world has givers and takers, and we are all both at different times. The newbie thinks they are a giver, but mostly they are a taker.
•
I've also seen maintainers complain about "drive by contributors" where one complaint is that the submitter has provided a good patch/PR, but doesn't stick around to support it. From the submitters point of view, why /would/ you stick around if your first (and only) interaction with the project is less than "ideal" FTR I absolutely understand the "burnout" maintainers experience dealing with contributors that drain energy as well.
It's an interesting world for sure, I maintain a somewhat popular package and got a form to fill from a Deloitte consultant about security once. They seemed genuinely confused when I told them I was not going to fill compliance form and make patching commitments for free. Really makes you wonder how many maintainers are letting themselves be taken advantage of.
•
> got a form to fill from a Deloitte consultant about security once. It could be someone trying to extract free work, but in my experience this person was probably trained by someone else about how to handle vendor compliance for contracted vendors. Some times the people in these grunt work consulting positions aren't really knowledgable about the space. They're in those positions because they can follow directions and will diligently grind out billable hours. Their default mode for getting things done is to try what worked last time, and if that fails they just start looking for names to send the request to until someone does it. As others mentioned, you could have said "Compliance forms are $1000, payable to ____" and the consultant may have diligently gone through their mental process about where to direct invoices for work.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Faster Than Dijkstra? (systemsapproach.org)
•
The underlying argument this article seems to be making is that an appropriate algorithm for any given application isn't always the one with the most efficient asymptotic performance for sufficiently large n -- for a given application (in this case routing), we have data on typical values of n that appear in reality and we can choose an algorithm that offers good enough (or optimal) performance for n in that constrained range, as well as potentially having other benefits such being simpler to implement correctly in a short amount of engineering time. This argument is very much in line with Mike Acton's data-driven design philosophy [1] -- understand the actual specific problem you need to solve, not the abstract general problem. Understand the statistical distribution of actual problem instances, they'll have parameters in some range. Understand the hardware you're building writing software for, understand its finite capacity & capability. It's common that new algorithms or data-structures with superior asymptotic efficiency are less performant for smaller problem sizes vs simpler alternatives. As always, it depends on the specifics of any given application. [1] see Mike's CppCon 2014 talk "Data-Oriented Design and C++" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
An aside, but I recently learned -- if one is willing to use a very modest amount of memory -- summing floating-point numbers with no loss of precision is effectively a solved problem with the XSUM algorithm. https://glizen.com/radfordneal/ftp/xsum.pdf
•
That paper explains some useful optimisation details, but obviously since the floats are all (either infinity or) some multiple of a known tiny fraction (their smallest non-zero number), we can definitely sum them accurately.
This is news to me. Source?
•
"The children were sorted in to two lines by gender then ordered by height" You might substitute "sorted by height" but its certainly not a correction. While "ordered into lines" would be an error.
I think you're making some assumptions on n that I'm not making. I'm considering it to be the number of elements to sort, not the size of the input.
•
Suppose you have n elements to sort and you don't have duplicates. Each element is a string of L fixed size symbols (bits, bytes, whatever). And suppose that there are at least n/10 unique elements. You may replace 10 with any other constant. This means that, as you add more elements, you are not just adding more duplicates of the same values. In order to have n/10 unique elements, you need to be able to construct n/10 different strings, which means that L needs to be at least log_(base = how many distinct symbols you have)(n/10), which is O(log n). So you have L * n = O(n log n) symbols to write down, and even reading the input takes time O(n log n). As a programmer, it's very very easy to think "64-bit integers can encode numbers up to 2^64, and 2^64 is HUUUUGE, so I'll imagine that my variables can store any integer". But asymptotic complexity is all about what happens when inputs get arbitrarily large, and your favorite computer's registers and memory cells cannot store arbitrarily large values, and you end up with extra factors of log n that you need to deal with. P.S. For fun, you can try to extend the above analysis to the case where the number of unique elements is sublinear in the number of elements. The argument almost carries straight through if there are at least n^c unique elements for 0 < c < 1 (as the c turns into a constant factor when you take the log), but there's room to quibble: if the number of unique elements is sublinear in n, one might argue that one could write down a complete representation of the input and especially the sorted output in space that is sublinear in L * n. So then the problem would need to be defined a bit more carefully, for example by specifying the the input format is literally just a delimited list of the element values in input order.
Apple, fix my keyboard before the timer ends or I'm leaving iPhone (ios-countdown.win)
•
The most frustrating one for me is how in safari in the address bar the keyboard changes and drops '.' to the right of the spacebar in the exact spot I usually hit the spacebar with my thumb (because I'm just tapping the edge, not stretching to the middle of the screen). This means in the modern mode of using the address bar as search, and not to type a domain manually (which is what I believe most people are also doing) I just end up with a search string separated by dots which I'm sure Google can deal with but is just very annoying. I see threads on the internet going back years complaining about this issue and yet there's so configuration to change it. Which is a bit baffling.
•
Reading everyone’s comments it looks like there is a lot of rant with current iPhone state. I’m also feeling last releases introduced huge regressions. I bought an iPhone 16 seen many issues including keyboard ones. I do hope Apple’s iOS 27 will be focused on fixes and optimizations. Apple Intelligence isn’t useful if the basic experience is mediocre —— Sent from my iPhone sorry for the autocorrect
•
I thought this was just me! Every now and then, I feel like I simply cannot tap the correct keys. Things I do from muscle memory are jumping to the next letter over. This isn't just a temporary problem. It lasts for days/weeks. Then suddenly, it's fine again.
•
I thought i learned to forget how to type. knew i wasn't going crazy. edit: another apple issue i have been hearing about recently is that the apple watch alarm just doesn't work some days. i have no idea why. i don't have silent mode on when it happens. i have tried so many different settings to fix it. ended up buying the hatch alarm.
•
I'm thinking of switching to iPhone after always having and Android. All these negative posts are really making me reconsider though.
•
Yeah, text editing on iOS has gotten progressively worse and worse. It's astonishing how much it has degraded in usability compared to the earlier versions of iOS. "It just works" is no longer a phrase I would ever consider saying about iPhones or Apple products in general. Pretty disappointing as they used to be quite an inspiration for quality software design.
•
Reminds me of some research I once did in order to reduce typos on low-end Firefox OS devices. The capacitive touchscreen had horrible limitations, especially for typing. It had bands across the screen where it could only detect one finger at a time. Once you picked up typing speed it ended up in similar misses you see in the YouTube video, albeit even worse (you end up with a letter between your two fingers). Eventually found two simple but effective ways to improve autocorrect/typing performance. First build a personalized and adaptive touch model trained on the device itself, mainly to fix simple typos. Second to fix low end screen limitations, use simple heuristics based on touchstart, touchmove and touchend [1]. Anyways, I'm no iPhone user but interesting to read. It would drive me nuts. [0]: https://www.brianweet.com/2015/03/24/implement-touch-model.html [1]: https://www.brianweet.com/2015/04/08/low-end-touchscreen-limitations.html
•
The actually issue according to another comment [0] is this[1]: > Around iOS 17 (Sept. 2023) Apple updated their autocorrect to use a transformer model which should've been awesome and brought it closer to Gboard (Gboard is a privacy terror but honestly, worth it). > What it actually did/failed to improve is make your phone keyboard: > Suck at suggesting accurate corrections to misspelled words > "Correct" misspelled words with an even worse misspelling > "Correct" your correctly spelled word with an incorrectly spelled word Which makes me wonder: is Transformer model good with manipulating short texts and texts with errors at all ? It's kind of known that open weight LLMs don't perform well for CJK conversion tasks[2], and I've also been disappointed by their general lack of typo tolerances myself as well. They're BAD for translating ultrashort sentences and singled out words as well[3]. They're great for vibecoding, though. Which makes me think, are they usable for anything under <100 bytes at all? Does it seem like they have a minimum usable input entropy or something? 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006171 1: https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-apple-inc/ 2: The process of yielding "㍑" from "rittoru" 3: No human can translate, e.g. "translate left" in isolation correctly as "move left arm", but LLMs seem to be more all over the place than humans
•
This is my number 1 complaint with iphone, even above battery life with their new crappy 3d effects. I bet these issues have actually cost a bunch of lives, given that people type while driving, and this nonsense makes it far harder. It can't be that hard to do this.
It will be hard, but I’m transitioning out of Apple ecosystem regardless of whether they improve. Just like Windows 11, I get ads whether I want them or not - just got a push notification for a new financial product (!!!) despite going out of my way to opt out. iOS 26 made my 16 Pro, practically brand new, feel slow. I upgraded because my 13 mini was slow, and I chose Apple in the first place because they had some of the best performing phones (especially cpu/gpu; they always had less ram but before llm it didn’t matter). The keyboard is horrible, but I don’t trust Google or Microsoft keyboards either; I think my next phone will be graphene; just waiting to see who their new hardware partner is. I loved Apple TV because it was fast; under 26 it is slow. I chose Mac for best in class hardware. That is unfortunately unchanged; really hoping snapdragon X 2 elite has good Linux support. My Apple Watch, despite doing nothing new it didn’t used to do, has also become slow and annoying, and its battery was never as good as it should have been. When I jump to Android I think garmin is probably the best choice, but maybe there are good wearables now. Unfortunately Android doesn’t have its act together re:built in health data database. Replacing Athlytic and keeping my history will be one of the biggest challenges in the transition. Competitors unfortunately still have huge blind spots even if some of the core experiences are better.
•
> When I jump to Android I think garmin is probably the best choice, but maybe there are good wearables now. Unfortunately Android doesn’t have its act together re:built in health data database. I have a Garmin Fenix 8 - the latest flagship. I love the look of the watch but it does not feel snappy to use in any way- significant lag after each button press. Not enough to make me immediately go back to an Apple Watch but I do miss the snappiness. But the Connect app is actually pretty good in terms of a central place to look at the stats.
•
I'm curious why my experience with Windows 11 is so different from what I regularly read. It was some years ago now, so I don't remember exactly what configuration steps I went through, but presumably I turned off ads when I first installed. And so, I don't get ads. I don't recall ever seeing an ad embedded in Windows. Are people talking about Edge (which I don't use) or inside the Microsoft Store (which I very rarely use, but I presume does have sponsored apps or whatever)? Or is this mostly people who don't use Windows, repeating what others have said? Or are these ads targeted at users who aren't me?
•
There is a setting that turns off many of the notifications that irritate people. Settings -> System -> Notifications. Scroll to the bottom, expand Additional settings. Uncheck "Suggest ways to get the most out of Windows and finish setting up this device" and "Get tips and suggestions when using Windows". I get more prompts from macOS about Apple products than I get from Windows about Microsoft products after unchecking those two settings.
•
I've also never seen an ad in windows 11. I did uninstall all of the weird apps like "News" "Weather" etc.
•
I've been an Android & Mac & Windows user for the last 15 years, (Windows just for gaming), iOS only on an old iPad, and have no plans to change that, but while I do have frustrations with all 3 systems, iOS is wildly irritating to me. Thankfully I've only been forced to use it on a phone for a short term work requirement, but my god I was happy to not have an iPhone in my life after that. Keyboard and notifications were unavoidably annoying to interact with. I've always loved Apple hardware though, and hope that they can turn things around on the mac software side
•
With Android (GrapheneOS), I can customize stuff on the phone that you can't customize with iOS. It reminds me of Apple's 1984 commercial, except that Apple users are the ones sitting down, all looking identical, drinking the Kool-Aid from Big Brother.
My guess is that the 'wrong letter entered' bug is by design. The keyboard animation happens on the touchdown event, whereas the letter is entered into the text box on the touchup event. Between the two, more information might emerge about the touch - for example the exact shape of the touched area, and movement during the touch, etc. I would guess the keyboard sees a down in one spot, and an up in a slightly different spot which falls into another letter.
•
I tested this, and if I have slide-to-type disabled, and slide my fingers, then every letter I slide over will highlight, but only the letter I let my finger up on will show up in the text input box. If I don't have slide-to-type enabled, then only the letter I press down on will highlight, and what shows up in the text input box is pretty inconsistent for horizontally adjacent letters.
Are you a swipe typer or a tap typer?
•
Both
I see where you’re coming from, this was an impulsive creation after months/years of frustration without any expectations. For anyone curious of my experience here are my main pain points: - autocorrect failing to correct minor mistakes - autocorrect “correcting” a mistake with another mistake - autocorrect “correcting” correctly typed words - swipe to type is painfully behind Gboard (third-party keyboards are universally under-supported and inferior to Android equivalents) - “Select All” is often hidden away - Selecting/unselecting text in general is a pain - keyboard seems to run out of steam after hitting a certain word count in applications such as Apple Notes or iMessage and take forever to register taps - The Big Daddy: key taps registering incorrectly in one of two ways: 1. Clearly tapping a letter “taps” a different letter (hot spots poorly calibrated) 2. A correctly tapped letter (keyboard highlight indicates correct letter) but incorrect letter is rendered on document Anyone irl I’ve discussed the iPhone keyboard with has described frustration so I figured this as more a “some of us are annoyed” flare than a technical manifesto. As another commenter noted I put a tiny link to my slightly more detailed blog post once this started gaining traction but I’m just having fun here really. Happy Friday the 13th everyone!
•
> Clearly tapping a letter “taps” a different letter (hot spots poorly calibrated) FWIW I encounter this in Android every so often (using gboard). Anecdotally I don't know what causes it (I swear sometimes it's worse and sometimes it's better), but Android isn't entirely problem free.
My fav is when iOS autocorrect corrects me AFTER pressing send. Be glad you only type in one language and that it is US English (probably) ;)
•
Try typing Other times were not so bad.
> - autocorrect “correcting” correctly typed words This brings up so many emotions. I disabled autocorrect. I don't give a damn if my words are spelled wrong but they should not be words that I did not type! I will add: text prediction was so much better before that I could be very sloppy and it would still figure it out. Now I have learned to be more careful with the keyboard.
•
I got anxious about autocorrect potentially inserting the wrong words and what kind of social fallout that could cause, so I just disabled it entirely. Takes longer to type everything manually but at least my anxiety has gone down.
It turns out he posted a better example in his blog post about it - https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-apple-inc/ - which is technically linked to in the bottom of the site. I guess if you spend your life learning UX from Apple this is what you get...
•
Thats a pretty snarky thing to say about Apple. They were arguably the pioneers in OS UX... granted, its not the end all, be all, but still. You could do worse.
•
> You could do worse. Perhaps you shouldn't encourage them. Based on recent software releases from Apple they might see it as a challenge.
I'm typing this disagreement to your statement on a touchscreen with fingernails only
•
Did you use metallic nail polish? Or is your skin just barely not making contact with the screen?
It's not just apple - windows and android autocorrect are more auto incorrect these days.
•
Your statement isn't incorrect - but I think it needs a slight qualification of "And none of them are acceptable". Both Apple and Android have regressed in quality and it's only possible because of a duopoly.
I know when I was on Android they'd do some smarts to detect stuff like that (handy for copying links) But I swear if that's what they're trying to do here, I've never seen it work properly once. It's always just a random substring of the sentence.
•
It works surprisingly well on Android; expanding to grab a full address, for instance, or complete phone number. Sometimes it needs tweaking, but mostly it's directionally correct and helpful rather than harmful
lol, no, they sucked even more in the 1980s. Did you ever notice that "About this software" is the first thing on the first menu of every application? Is that because people have to know what version of the software they are using every time they start it? It's still like that today, and it's very very stupid. Other OSs get it right and put the version information on the last menu, where it doesn't clutter up the most prominent area in the most used menus. Finder was crap in the 1980s. Still is crap, but it used to be crap too. The window system in the 80s and 90s was also crap. Could not resize a window from any side or corner of the window except the lower right. Windows has had resizing from any edge or corner since forever. Apple "design" is just not as good as people seem to think it is. They've also had plenty of weird and unloved hardware designs... the infamous trash can, the clamshell laptop, the weird anniversary macs, a mouse with a charging port on the bottom so that you can't use the mouse while it's charging, and the list goes on and on and on.
•
As someone who has switched from Windows to Apple recently, my God the Finder is terrible. I can't understand how people aren't flipping tables over how bad it is.
I love the fervor with which this is written, but the threat is so weak I literally chuckled. Imagine your an exec or manager on the team for keyboard development. You read this, get to the end to discover the user is gonna switch devices for... 2 whole calander years? What's that amount to? Maybe 2 device upgrades on If your a die hard gotta have the newest latest model phone each year. Then what? you'll be back? The threat doesnt even carry the weight losing a user for a 2 year blip, registers more as a dropped ping request then a drop in revenue. If meant to be whimsical sure nailed it. To be fair I mean any boycot with a large scale mfg carries about the same weight. just thought it fell flat as much as anything.
•
Counting the spark while the house is on fire.
•
I don't think the threat is to leave for 2 years then come back. He just doesn't want to commit to leaving forever . Who knows if in a decade it'll be Android with the shitty keyboard (or Apple will have the better Direct Brain Interface, or whatever). Most likely though, if someone switches ecosystems for 2+ years, they're going to get used to the new one and stay there.
I think you’re projecting. How is mentioning a counter once in one comment “obsessing”? I’m glad this post is getting traction, I’m pretty open about my disdain for Apple’s declining software quality and Tim Cook’s management, I welcome posts that shine more light on it. > Realistically, another post about Apple's borked keyboard should create zero emotional response Of course that is not true. That is trivial to disprove. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46232528
•
The linked post is from two months ago.
Apple has a privacy setting for each keyboard that restricts if they have network access.
•
Glad to learn this! I didn't know about it but I also double-checked the UI and it says in a warning dialog that the third party will be able to see everything I type and the network setting isn't mentioned there. Anyway, my point regarding the UX still stands. Apple's UX is barely as good as other major player's - not great, not terrible. Mediocrity isn't what Apple should be aiming at.
This is a bold statement - care to elaborate?!
•
I think they mean worse at generating services revenue. Everyone knows that’s the iPhones primary goal and purpose.
As a lifelong Android user (in the EU, where Apple hegemony is not as strong) I always saw Apple as the "pay more for more polished ecosystem UX" option. So it always surprises me when things that are trivial on Android/Linux are sticking points on iOS/macOS. Worse, it seems that proprietary means you can't do anything to fix them yourself.
•
More like, "everything is proprietary, so you get locked in".
Do you mean that new action button thingy above the volume controls? You can reassign to perform something else in the settings. Only a few options to choose from, but it's totally possible. As for powering off, you can tap the ⏻ symbol in the upper right-hand side corner of the control center.
•
You can assign the action button to run a shortcut, which opens up thousands of possibilities for what it can do.
'Lots of people say this, but I don't agree' really doesn't logically lead to 'therefore, the majority of people probably agree with me'. Lots of people say they love in India, and that is not true for new. That doesn't make the likeliest fact that a majority of the world lives in the UK and, while India is an oddly vocal 'minority'.
•
What?
I'm getting a strong feeling that the first generation of really, really talented people who built iOS in the 2000s have now to a substantial degree moved on/retired. Similar feeling with OS X/macOS. Please correct me if I'm wrong - it is after all just a feeling.
•
I think the problem is actually political capital. Someone who deeply understands how to qualify the product. But with enough political sway to tell entire orgs of 1000s employees to shred their timelines and planning docs and go back to the lab until it’s right. Without those two pieces, the problem is that individual devs and leaders know that there’s a problem. But the KPIs and timelines must lurch onwards!
If your "friends" care enough about small stuff like that to cut you out of their conversations, they're not your friends.
•
You're misunderstanding the situation and reading malice into teenagers who are living in a world of decisions that were made before they were even born. It's not "small stuff", it's the entire medium through which the conversation happens. It's the entire thing. Do you "cut" your mom out of your group chats with your coworkers? Do you "cut" your coworkers out of intimate chats with your partners? Of course you do, because people maintain multiple overlapping group chats. In group chats with your blue-bubble friends, they will be easier to read (because of the shades of color), media quality will be better, you can add more people to the group chat after it's made, you can text people from your iPad or Macbook, you can text people over WiFi even when you don't have service. When each text used to cost money, it was also a huge deal that iMessage (on WiFi) was free. This is on top of all the other chat features like playing games, pins, etc. A lot of these limitations are intentional so that Apple can make more money, some of them are just limitations of SMS / RCS. But the point is that this is not the kids faults, this isn't bullying.
•
I am not misunderstanding the situation. If you omit me from a group message with our circle of friends because of the color of my speech bubble, you are not a real friend. Full stop.
 Top