Unlurker|Replay|About
Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare (ciphercue.com)
•
Tale as old as time (or at least as the 1970s): nobody ever got fired for buying ~~IBM~~ Cloudfare / AWS / Azure.
•
The problem is that we have spent 40 years adopting US technology, across multiple generations of software developers and decision makers, while everyone was supposedly on the same side. It will take similar amount of years to go back into the cold war heterogeneous computing landscape of the 60, early 90s. This assuming there would be an willingness across all European countries to actually push for that, and not jump out when it gets too hard and search for compromises instead. This is why most sovereignty initiatives focus mostly on SaaS products and hardly on actual computing devices.
•
Yeah because it's priced well and it works. It's a no-brainer. (Also if it does go down, well so has everyone else so no big deal) Also in this list of GOATed companies: Tailscale, Ubiquiti.
•
Europe sucks at tech? Well I’ll be damned. I would’ve never expected that.
•
Naive question: How important is it to use a CDN in the first place? Why can't you just serve the content yourself?
•
It depends on what you're trying to serve, but it's used to either save you money or as an insurance (or both). You don't need a CDN overall. But if you grow large enough, at some point you'll run into one of these three situations: - Your public traffic costs you so much to repeatedly process that it's cheaper to let some service cache the common responses instead. - Your customers on the other side of the world start complaining that the resources take ages to load. - Someone floods you with enough traffic that you can't respond to real customers traffic anymore. You get a ransom email to pay them to stop. But there are enough groups doing that that paying is useless because someone else will try again in a few days. If you're providing a service where people pay you to use the website, you're losing money until you solve this problem.
•
Because an average request would have to travel half the globe, so setting up a simple HTTPS connection would already take a second. That's completely unacceptable for static content. Not only would transfer be slow, they would also be much more pressing on the network as the request would occupy huge stretches and many interconnects and switches. Furthermore, it hardens the website against DDoS and adds robustness for regional failures.
•
[delayed]
•
This article being down/slow is a great response.
•
Depends on your use case. If you have a very inefficient backend (maybe legacy project?), you have massive amount of traffic (say 100K req/s or above) or you really must have sub-500ms latency absolutely everywhere in the world, then it might make sense to slap a CDN (or similar) on top of that. In pretty much any case outside of that, it makes no sense to waste the time, money or effort on CDNs. But, all the CDN companies seemingly have convinced half the internet that you absolutely must use a CDN, otherwise you'll get hacked/broke/killed/sent to the moon, and they've been successful with this campaign too seemingly.
•
[delayed]
•
> The front door is not the whole stack Hey Claude, can you move the ciphercue blog to Cloudflare so it can deal with traffic from HN? On a more serious note, Cloudflare comes packed with features even on its free plan which makes it useful for any size website. For a real business it's one of the cheapest options for DDoS protection on the market. Some years ago you would have paid a fortune for Akamai or Level3 to help keep you online and now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business.
•
> now you can get by on a $200 a month plan for a small business You're delusional if you think that $200/month is appropriate for a small business to pay to host a website ... Most websites don't need a CDN nor DDOS protection, you need to configure your webserver to rate limit stuff that suck bandwidth/CPU from you, but besides that, you've basically fallen for the marketing from Cloudflare that everything requires CDN and that somehow $200/month is a small amount of money for a small business.
•
What you're paying for is business continuity, not for them to host your site. I know you can host the site itself on much cheaper infrastructure.
•
Do you get paid commission for comments like this? Genuinely feels like an ad-read
•
I'd also be interested in share of companies using a CDN in the first place. UK has 17k sites, while France and Germany, so countries with about equal and higher population than the UK, have only 4k and 6k sites behind a CDN. I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany?
•
I'd be interested in what data they're using in the first place. It looks like their data is behind a paywall. Also, funny that their page with for "Companies running Cloudflare" says there are only "887 European organisations using Cloudflare."
•
> I can hardly imagine there being so many more big companies in the UK, so it's either cargo-culting webscale deployment in the UK, or usage of more conservative stacks in France and Germany? Maybe our countries are just small enough to not be overwhelmed by traffic? Most websites I've built and launched for Spanish national companies, that only have other Spaniards as users and customers, haven't needed any CDN at all, because you don't suddenly get 1K req/s. Meanwhile, launch a global website in English, that even get the slightest amount of popular, and all of a sudden you reach 1K req/s very quickly. Add on top that people usually don't even give two cents about performance, and adding CDN on top as a saving grace seems like an easy tradeoff. So, why add a CDN when you don't need it? :) Probably 80% of everything I've ever deployed never needed a CDN in the first place, but I also save it as a thing in my toolbox to be used sparingly, rather than a default thing I slap on top of everything.
•
Their index being paywalled, it's not possible to answer about its content. I wanted to check if the 5 customers for which I already did a change on their Cloudflare settings today where on the list, but can't do.
•
Since it appears to have gotten hugged to death - https://web.archive.org/web/20260908084626/https://ciphercue.com/blog/european-cdn-concentration-cloudflare-nine-in-ten Not really unexpected, US domination of "tech" is near total, even if the sustained political will exists (and I'm not sure it will for long enough) unwinding that is the expensive work of years/decades not months. Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier. Personally I think we absolutely should , I just don't think we will . Barring them doing something so egregiously awful we don't have the choice, Governments can move fast when they want to but efficient government scares the shit out of me because it rarely happens outside of a genuinely serious crisis.
•
> Doing it in a way that won't invite retaliation from the US Gov (which seems more and more like the PR arm of US big tech) is even trickier. I'm thinking the opposite might be the way to go here. We already know that "retaliation" comes from the US government regardless if you did something or not, so most of us (Europeans) have stopped pretending there is a way of preventing it. Even more, if we piss off Trump enough, he might be dumb enough to try to block European access to CloudFlare, or something similar and maybe even dumber. So with this, maybe the goal should actually be to try to piss off Trump and the US administration as much as possible, in order for them to start reacting and cutting off some stuff, so we (again, Europeans) basically gets forced off CloudFlare et al. Lots of companies already finished moving away from storing their primary data in the US, lots of companies is in process of doing so (albeit some look like they'll take forever) but also lots of companies still aren't prepared for the future, would be nice if US government could make the decision a bit easier for them to make :)
•
I feel like your site needs a CDN, it takes over 40 seconds to load your front page from the EU.
•
Maybe a European CDN, like Bunny (Slovenia)
•
Do they also have their own infra or are they just an entity between the customer and AWS?
•
They have their own infra but its not the size of CF. Chicken and Egg
Bunny.net is a good alternative - they don’t have CF depth of offerings but are getting there
•
They're fine for a CDN but overall their offering surprisingly immature IME. The devx for their hosted scripts/database just isn't there, and e.g. they only allow one global API key with full permissions, etc.
•
They don't have Cloudflare Tunnels which is almost too good to pass up. I don't particularly understand how CF makes money on it, with the many high traffic sites I have used that I know don't pay CF a dime. Tunnels adds so much more overhead in compute on both ends more than their normal CDN/proxy would.
•
big corps = big money. they dont make money from your $5/mth static site, its practically free when you're at CF scale
UAE-based Falcon AI NSFW classifier among top global open-source models (2025) (middleeastainews.com)
Coincidentally I was trying this out yesterday as a potential option for automated porn filtering for the imageboard that I administrate. It is very lightweight which is good but the performance is not great. Some weird false positives and it does a bad job with flat chested women which is very concerning to me because it leads me to think it won’t be effective against CSAM.
•
I guess CSAM detection will remain hard as the training data raises so many ethical concerns. I wonder if there's a way in which we can forward-hash sensitive material like CSAM and train a classifier that only consumes the 'hashed' version of the material for training and detection.
it is amusing that a model from a country that has banned porn would ever be developed. Wouldn't there be hurdles for them to access "data" at every stage? (I know they must have used a VPN for training but it does seem like an added hoop. OFC the UAE's block is also not particularly thorough.) You'd assume such models would do better in a laissez-faire nsfw environment than in a walled garden of relatively-less sin.
•
There are plenty western CSAM detection models
•
Can you suggest a good one?
Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf] (cims.nyu.edu)
•
This just seems to be quintessential silicon valley "I don't want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place, better than we do." It's amazing how transparently OpenAI is running the standard silicon valley playbook.
Well, Buckmaster says both his and Alpöge's use of Codex was non-institutional, and OpenAI claims the right to train their models on inputs and outputs of non-enterprise users in their service policies [0]. So I'm not sure they were even promised that. [0] https://openai.com/policies/how-your-data-is-used-to-improve-model-performance/
•
Only for ChatGPT, if the user hasn’t opted out. Would mathematicians be using ChatGPT for this kind of work? Genuinely asking, I know nothing about this!
Or, given how dedicated he appears to be to the company, a promotion and a raise.
•
Dark take, but I really hope not. If anything it would be a good opportunity to buy some goodwill by washing themselves from all the alleged shadiness so far.
What would be so hard to explain? That OpenAI heard about the result and decided to throw a lot of money at it knowing it was within reach ? That the model took an approach that was published years ago ?
•
That's a fake explanation, it skips explaining/justifying how OpenAi "heard about" the result
It would be pretty wild if this will turn out to be what had actually happened.
•
And probably a strong signal that it's time to shut the whole thing down. Globally.
Why do you find it to be extremely unlikely?
•
As modeless said, Sholto Douglas works for Anthropic! So to be fair, if Anthropic is * also* doing this (quite likely!) then Sholto would have a very strong incentive to try and spin it as highly unlikely that any of the big AI labs are possibly doing this.
Because very few people actually have access to these logs, all access is monitored and recorded, and improper access will get you fired. It's not worth risking your job over something like this.
•
There is almost zero risk to your job (quite the opposite, you might be richly rewarded!) if you're simply doing something here which the company wants done. (remember, billions and billions of dollars are at stake here! Do you really think there is no chance at all they would do it??)
My Feed, My Way (pm.gov.au)
•
This is going to get about 0% uptake. People's preferences, as revealed by their behavior, align with the algorithmic feeds. That's the whole point of an algorithmic feed.
> On a bus or train, barely one or two people are actually doing something other than watching something online. I mean, what else should I be doing? Self-analyzing and staring in the window?
•
Read, knitting/crochet, sleep, listen to music, play games (eg. emulator + pokemon games), study, read a newspaper, do crosswords, play chess online, watch a movie, listen to a podcast, learn a language, talk to other non-scrolling people, and yes, you can also stare outside, daydream or self-analyze, or even do nothing. Just a few decades ago we had a lot of dead times, it's not that crazy to pass an hour without having anything to do.
•
Thinking. Taking notes, ideally on a piece of paper. Relaxing. Talking to strangers. And yes, self-analysing. Staring in the window, maybe not so much.
Reading and conversing with a stranger? Maybe not every time but at least once in a while?
•
I read but on my phone or ebook reader and have done so for nearly 20 years. Especially since mass market paperbacks were replaced by larger ones that do not fit in my pocket or bookshelves. I am in England – It is considered very odd to talk to strangers on a train or bus
I treasure my memories of being on subways and busses and getting lost in thought while staring out the windows, yeah. I mean, people have done this for basically all of human history (okay walking or something, not on a train, but, yeah). It's not a bad thing to have some time with just your senses existing in the world.
•
I mean, you're right. When I travel, I rarely use my phone or listen to music because everything is about discovering new things, and I love it But when I'm home, on my way from home to the gym, I take the same route every day, and it can get boring sometimes I'm also terrible at keeping my phone charged, so sometimes I end up alone with my thoughts anyway
Let people enjoy things.
•
Do you really enjoy doom scrolling? Because I don't, it is just addictive and makes me feel tired and sad most of the times, with infrequent sparks of joy.
•
The problem with being always online is not “not-enjoying” but stopping to think. People are getting used to be feed what they need to think constantly (from politics to product reviews) and then their critical thinking skills atrophy. Moreover, I’m not sure if being on social media is something “enjoyable” anymore, and it’s more like smoking tobacco where it becomes necessary but is not enjoyed.
But he DID say it, right? Or are you saying that because it's Reddit/The Daily Mail, he DIDN'T say it? What are you talking about? It's widely quoted and well known he said it so where are you coming from.
•
No, it's your source; you prove your claims. I'll give you a hint though - the article doesn't even quote him, it just puts out a spicy headline. What he actually said and the context: "Ban social media. Keyboard warriors can anonymously say anything at all. Without any fear.", with regard to a misinformation bill. Considering the sources deliberately stripped everything of context and you've repeated it without checking, would you say we have a misinformation problem with media in general, or social media?
Mistral raises €3B (mistral.ai)
For all that say Mistral is "at least something" for EU: where are the big EU-owned datacenters where we can run Chinese SOTA models safely, and labs that fork and quantize them on EU data? Wouldn't that be "more something"? Even if this method still depends on external resources short term, it's a money problem, and EU just loves pouring money on problems.
•
Mistral now serves GLM-5.2: https://mistral.ai/news/regional-inference-open-models-new-compute/
I'm using Mistral for a local VN Proofreader and its by far the best Local 14B Model for this specific use case.
•
What's VN in this context?
Mistral has solid OCR, STT and TTS models and I would love to support them by switching with all of our business workloads to Mistral... but their LLM models are sadly not competitive at all. In our business benchmarks their Mistral Medium 3.5 with reasoning is worse than Gemma 4 31B and Glimmer 30B. It's a 128B dense model that's priced accordingly! Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B. I applaude the effort that they release those models as open weight but Gemma 4 models are currently way easier to run with more tok/s and less hardware. Their API pricing is just insane for what you get. But I guess enterprise customers don't care about it, this is why they are probably not lowering it.
•
> Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B Depends for what purpose? I found large Mistrals are massively better than Gemma 4 at creative writing: have more natural tone, better consistency than 26B as it is MoE.
Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky. LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences). More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country. So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, but in many contexts that doesn’t matter. And, perhaps this gap could be closed with more funding (the three billion funding figure is a rounding error next to US labs). I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.
•
Europe has no budget of their own like the USA and China do, because there is no debt nor taxation at the European level. That’s the reason for the complication you are noticing.
> LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same Your values and American values might not be the same, but to say even most of Europe feels the same way is a big stretch. And not even the US has very many shared values anymore. If we’re being honest, Europe doesn’t actually have much of a common value system outside of whatever is momentarily trendy in the urban monoculture, which is why it refuses to work together on most things and is currently being torn apart at the seams (see the rise of nationalist far right parties in most states). The EU are a collection of states where the average citizen can’t even communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a 4 year old. How could they possibly be aligned on a value system in the same way the US is.
•
This is a spectacularly prejudiced and insulting comment.
Do you think that's a good thing?
•
Do you think it's not?
•
European money invested in a European company ought to be a good thing, don’t you think?
>I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them. On a similar note: Why does it have to be the EU to step up? Why doesn't EU rather speed up making VC investments more attractive, so that EU and banks don't do the majority of investing? *I don't have answers to these questions. It just frustrates me how many investments here come from politicians and banks, rather than from investors, people, and companies.
•
It’s a different culture with different rules, if it was that easy it would have been done already. See my other comment about lack of budget at a federal level.
> Last I saw job offers for mistral (engineering, Paris) it advertised 90k euros base salary. Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive :-/ Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage? Yes, EU software Eng salaries are a lot lower than their US equivalents, but quite a lot of folks are happy having a top 5% salary in their own county, without all the stresses and risks of working in the US. As a concrete example, a few years back it leaked that Dan Abramov's (very decent) London salary was half what his US peers earned. Didn't seem to bother the man much at all...
•
> quite a lot of folks are happy having a top 5% salary in their own county, without all the stresses and risks of working in the US. Yes, absolutely, the problem is these are not the people you want to hire. And the people you do want to hire are either already in US or work for a US company remotely for 3x the salary.
•
> Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage? Work a US job for 4 months, quit, take the next 8 months for holiday/vacation, and you still save more money than a European SWE. Hey, the 2010s are calling, they want the trope “BuT eUrOpE hAs pAiD lEaVe” back. Europe in 2026 (France, Germany, UK, Estonia, etc). What a joke. Nobody in the world respects them. At least the US has jobs and a military. Not as good as before, but better than Europe.
In Germany AFAIK their Senior base salary ceiling is ~ 180k EUR - approx 210k USD for an Engineering role. Thats quite competitive for a base salary, as high as max ICT5 Staff base at Apple Munich.
•
And 180k in Germany, even in Berlin is pretty good. You are living a very good life with that salary.
Mistral is an interesting AI company because they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. People dump on them because they're not benchmaxxxing which is pretty shortsighted - do you really want to be in a benchmark arms race with China, or do you want to make money and deploy sovereign AI compute in Europe?
•
Is it really contrarian though? Cohere, Aleph Alpha and many other model companies went that route and are doing well
When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. The two companies have read the market the same. It's always very dangerous for first movers and their investors, and the commodification of intelligence seems even more likely each time a chinese open model release. It's less exciting to do business that way, but if you're building to stand the test of time, it's wiser that way.
•
One is american, the other is european It's the same with gaming When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism" Hopefully more people get attentive to how the industry & the media works, and how US Big Tech manages to kill any form of alternative
•
Apple tried at AI integration and fumbled the bag repeatedly. In 2010s, they were among the "greats" of consumer AI. I don't think their actions now are "strategy" and not "skill issue".
•
Apple is a hardware company.
•
They are not the same kind of companies but they benefit both in their own way of the same market reading. Apple is fine-tunning Gemini to customize Siri for their customers. They improve what's between the model and their customers : fine tune, inference up to the product. This is exactly what Mistral is doing, with an even more diversity of usage and needs because they are business oriented, instead of customer oriented. This is also what make them economically very efficient in comparison. Beside Apple is still doing science experiments while Mistral is capable of releasing commercial models, albeit small and specialized. Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely obvious that Apple is incredibly powerful, now more than ever. But the way they see the future, Mistral have a leaner trajectory.
I am not sure it's correct to lump apple and Mistral's strategies together. Apple's business is selling hardware/services and their stores, but Mistral's business is AI. Apple's strategy seems to be "wait till real business shakes out" but Mistral's strategy seems to be "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights".
•
The other part of Apple's strategy is "lets not waste money doing all that expensive research - lets just pay them for the finished result and save money".
> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. I think what Mistral is doing is smart within their financial constraints, but this comparison is misleading. Mistral is an LLM company; Apple is a consumer hardware and services company. It's smart for Apple not to join the LLM arms race, because they can just pick the cheapest supplier and let other companies take the financial losses. Mistral is in a very different situation; they are the supplier.
•
Mistral is a Sovereign LLM Company, it's their main product and has been from nearly the start. They don't actually need to offer the best models, they need credibility on the tech front and the security/strategic front, and institutional clients will keep coming.
Yup, new SOTA models especially with high/xhigh/max reasoning too often overengineer solutions, good for benchmarks that usually measure task completion, bad for normal development where you don't want 'rewrite in rust and 1k LOC unit tests' style solutions when agent does mundane bug fixes.
•
When it comes to mundane bug fixes the value is in actually finding the cause of the bug, and I find SOTA models way outperform smaller ones here. I don't care about their output - I can write the correct 5 line patch myself once I understand what's wrong.
> I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe. I wouldn't. I can think of at least 10 regulations (labor and environmental chef amongst them) that would render such a maker uncompetitive from the start. Chinese makers would eat its lunch.
•
Doesn't matter, we need to opt out of the rat race that consists of making the planet worse for the next generations in exchange of quick bucks for the oligarchs. The way is to factor externalities in the final price, reward sustainable behaviour and set better standards. And that's what's going on: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/how-europes-new-carbon-tax-on-imported-goods-will-change-global-trade/ The same applies to labour conditions and quality standards. And don't bring up arguments like "it can't work" or "that hurt competitiveness": all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children. The only ones to object are the global elite who one ends up defending when they make the current status quo sound inevitable.
They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.
•
> They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them. To those who is in know (r/localllama, r/sillytavernai), is well aware that Mistral models - at least the small, <=24b ones - are the least censored, even less than Chinese.
Did you miss the Anthropic and OpenAI blog posts screeching for regulation?
•
Yes, now that they are in place they want to put barriers for new entrants.
Do you believe I can't get a list of 20 effective pro-consumer regulations drafted by the EU out of Gemini?
•
I don't think you're taking my "there's two sides to regulation" comment in good faith. I gave a pretty clear example of pro-consumer regulation myself. Saying that the EU is overregulating cannot possibly be that controversial, given that even the European politicians are beginning to admit it.. Draghi, Von der Leyen (even though she passes blame), Merz, Macron.
> cooling off [...] seller liability [...] Right to repair Let's not forget I am paying directly for those when I buy a product. Those benefits are not free, they cost money. The money has to come from somewhere. It can't come from profits (since those are the sacred reason the company exists in the first place) thus they will come from higher prices. Higher product prices mean less competitive companies. It also means fewer startups which must implement the required regulation no matter the market says. Then you need protectionism against Chinese competition. But the worst is that I must pay for those benefits whether if I want them or not. Thus my choice is reduced. I cannot vote with my wallet and send price signals in the market to tell sellers that I want those benefits or not and at what price. The market gets corrupted. The economy falters. Outside competitors gain. The Government needs to intervene again and again, growing stronger and more intrusive "for my own benefit". It's the decay spiral we are witnessing here in the EU right now.
•
This!!! I went to California earlier this year. In our apartment we had a freezer that was clearly made before politicians thought to decide to put a cap on how good a freezer could be. It was fucking amazing at freezing stuff. No freezer I've ever used could freeze this good. It was probably from the 80's - old/sturdy AF. I wouldn't mind paying for some extra solar panels to feed it.
I wouldn't even call it a communication problem - I believe it's more a media problem, than anything. Good news are minimized and bad news are amplified to the maximum - nowadays even broadsheet newspapers operate with tabloid headlines, and that is really bad. We somehow need to "want" a slower news cycle and simultaneously push back against the algorithmic outrage. The world is more predictable and safer than ever but the perception of the average person is not this, it's manufactured outrage at every possible opportunity and topic. Despite the average european objectively being better off and safer than a decade ago, almost none feel that way and that is almost 100% due to the news algorithms being tuned to keep you in a constant dread cycle.
•
>Despite the average european objectively being better off and safer than a decade ago I'm sure it's true, but do we have some statistics on that, and a comparison to places that doesn't have the same regulatory burden?
Mistral is not that bad as the comments here suggest. I am not using it as a frontier model but with simple RAG tasks and its doing great. Also OCR is pretty decent. It's a positive development that Europe is at least trying. Alternative would be: do nothing.
•
Mistral is odd. They have made mostly flops, boring models (Ministral 3, Mistral Small 4, Small 3, Small 3.1) together with a classic masterpiece Mistral Nemo and very good Mistral Large 2407, Mistral Small 22b, Mistral Small 3.2.
and Poland
•
Korea as well :)
I don't get it when people all claim that AGI is a winner takes all game. It is not (unless it is used as a weapon). When one company reaches AGI, there will be a dozen very close to AGI, given time. Also a winner is not going to drive everyone else out of business, it is the opposite, one winner will have people betting on the second and the third winners, the technology will also help other develops. Once you have a good enough model, everything will be incremental. I think the hardware capability will be the real burden, not the model itself. If AGI is as powerful as it sounds, maybe hardware won't be a problem any more.
•
It’s very possible that the people saying AGI is a winner takes all are indeed referring to warfare.
I can tell the difference between the SOTA and GLM 5.3, and paying a few hundred for the better models is definitely worth it. Mistral does not offer a model that makes sense to use. I understand they now host the already outdated GLM 5.2, courtesy of China providing the weights. And Mistral offers this for 2x-3x the price of other providers. This is supposed to be a success story?
•
I'm sure you can tell the difference. But for the vast majority of usage GLM 5.3 or Deepseek V4 is enough. Even people who do need frontier model will soon restrict it to the use cases that really need it and switch to cheaper models for the rest. It has already started. Anthropic and OpenAI will never get enough customers paying top dollar to deliver on the revenue they need to offset their investments.
The value of these companies is not defined entirely by the state of their current models. A much more important signal is their chance of having the best model in the future . Just like with anything having to do with investment, this is the castle in the sky. Also, shame on me for simplifying things so much - but I still believe in my original sentiment.
•
Replce "best" with "most fit for purpose" and you're right. The future won't be a one size fits all kind of deal because hardware availability constraints will eventually punish oversized models even more. I think that there's a real second mover advantage in letting others waste money on researching ultra oversized models while creating smaller and cheaper models from their learnings.
I don't know. The moat doesn't seem to exist. Probably safer to stay out of the race for now.
•
"Probably safer to stay out of the race for now." What kind of attitude is that?
I’m still looking for no-moatists to logically explain why there is no moat in SOTA LLMS. That paper released by a lone Google employee 3 years ago still misguiding people it seems.
•
The vast majority of people simply don't need SOTA models. I run most of my programming on a single 7900 XTX with Qwen 3.8 27b. I'm more interested in scaling out to run more instances of the model in parallel, than I am in scaling up to better models.
They've never made a near-frontier model. Which is a valid criticism for a model training company
•
They have done that in the past. I clearly remember the times when they dropped releases as a simple tweet and it made the front page of HN - just like the recent Chinese models releases.
> They're likely over $80b ARR by now. They'll be at $800b ARR next year at the same rate. And they will be 800 trilion ARR in a couple of years, following that same rate! 8 quadrillion by 2029! > When you are growing so fast, you don't need to make a net profit. You just need to make sure your unit economics are good - which it seems like they are given reports that their gross margins are at 60-70%. If their margins were anywhere near this good, they wouldn't need to raise so much money so often. If you create a machine that turns 1 dollar into 3 dollars, you don't dillute your ownership of the machine, you use your fabulous profits to expand your machine's capabilities.
•
If their margins were anywhere near this good, they wouldn't need to raise so much money so often. Why not? They are reinvesting into growth. There isn't a clear winner yet and Anthropic wants to make sure it is one of them. Taking a profit now while letting OpenAI take your marketshare and train better models is not very smart.
AI is profitable. Gross margins are high. The only reason OpenAI and Anthropic are making a loss is due to training new models to keep up with competition - not because the industry is flawed in terms of business model.
•
Keeping up with competition is part of trying to stay in the frontier. If they stop training the profit disappears in a few months.
•
The point is that the model is already immensely profitable. There is no fundamental reason why AI isn't profitable. It already is. Insane competition does not last forever. When chip manufacturing first started, there were dozens of companies that had fabs that made compute chips. Nowadays, only TSMC is viable. Samsung and Intel survived because of geopolitics.
OpenAI also indirectly depends on ASML, but sadly Europe seems too cowardly to leverage this dependency at the moment.
•
If EU were to "leverage" ASML, and that would require rather unlikely approval of Netherlands, it wouldn't end very well. Already shipped machines can not be taken back, nor can they be stopped. Sure, you can cut the support, and buildup of new fabs will be stalled. But the other side, Chinese or USA, has many more levers to pull. Raw materials, energy (LNG), was majority of consumer goods, solar panels, batteries, semiconductors. EU doesn't mine or make most of them, and isn't nowhere close to even starting, instead, industrial base is already shrinking. Even worse, ASML may dominate EUV, but other suppliers do very well in DUV. The moment ASML becomes unreliable, all of them will get infusion of money, as they become national security issue. What about ASML subsidiaries in USA, like Cymer and ASML Wilton, will they take the bullet for the parent? Or will they become part of new competitor, with all the knowhow. And China has already set domestic capacities in this area as a national priority.
If you follow the ideology of the Silicon Valley billionaire types, based around Ayn Rand (eg “Atlas Shrugged”) and Curtis Yarvin, as well as what Thiel himself has said over the years, the Antichrist is governmental institutions, seen as the inhibitors of progress. I am not joking btw.
•
> seen as the inhibitors of progress I become the government institution, the inhibitor of progress. What a load of delusion.
We have a year to fix security everywhere (jyn.dev)
•
> And a big fuck you to DeAlignAI, Z.ai, and everyone else who's been participating in this race to the bottom. I'm so glad frontier level AI isn't in the hands of just the Altmans and that other cult leader who are currently live testing their products in actual conflicts in the middle east and Ukraine.
I'm confused why the worry about LLMs that will answer "how do I build a pipe bomb". That information is easily available other places. The anarchist cookbook has been around and available for 55 years, and yet pipe bombs are not going off all around us.
•
I think people overstate the tech and understate the role of radicalization in providing motive, for attacks which are carried out with the ubiquitous technology of cars, knives, and (in America) guns. Consider America's most recent high profile shootings of Charlie Kirk, and the health insurance exec by Luigi Mangione. In neither case is there any LLM involvement, but a very weird ideological environment which created the conditions in which the shooters felt justified.
In Holland there's a huge problem with makeshift bombs actually. Anyone who is unhinged and has some beef with anyone else (usually low level criminals with some drug dispute) blows up the others' house. Sometimes half the block along with it. They usually pay teenagers to do it. This has nothing to do with AI teaching them but with the proximity to Belgium who are happy to legally sell heavy fireworks to anyone who pays. As such it's much easier to come by than a gun. And there's also a big fashion component. It's just what people do these days, people seeing it in the news and other people copying it. A bit like the school shootings in the US. It's become an epidemic. But again these things can suddenly come into 'fashion' among the wrong crowd and you don't really need AI to use it.
•
Is Holland that good at containing this "there's a huge problem with makeshift bombs" news pieces coming out in the open?
•
I must live in a different Holland, cause I've literally never heard of this, unless you mean around New Years with fireworks I guess
•
> blows up the others' house. Sometimes half the block along with it Can you provide a source for this? I had a look but all I could find were a couple of scaremongering style media reports from ~2022 saying it's getting worse but no information about if any of the bombs actually went off or if anyone was injured. Certainly nothing like "half a block" getting blown up "sometimes".
There used to be a thing called "Moore's Law of Mad Science": "Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point." Nowadays it is dropping much faster. At a certain point, the de-facto IQ needed to destroy the world will be low enough that someone can do it while they're having a psychotic break. There are millions of schizophrenics worldwide. Are you sure you want to roll those dice?
•
Interesting “law”. I hadn’t heard of it before and it is very thought provoking (to me). Thank you for mentioning it
•
Kind of passed that point at the Trump election. If there is to be a world-destroying event, it will be triggered by human fear, greed, and aggression. (I also think people massively overstate schizophrenia as an attack driver)
> There are millions of schizophrenics worldwide. Are you sure you want to roll those dice? We've been rolling them for the past 3 years and nothing happened. Can we stop with this baseless fearmongering crap?
•
The necessary IQ for destroying the world is dropping. Op does not say it's low enough today , but that will probably come sometime. Denying the possible harm these tools are capable of doesn't help.
•
Humans are inherently bad at reasoning about rare events. In 2019, many people implicitly reasoned that "since there hasn't been a pandemic in the past 3 years, there won't be one in 2020". Bill Gates was one of the few voices arguing that the world was quite vulnerable to a pandemic. Now he's arguing that the world is quite vulnerable to AI.
Where are all the home lab leaked pathogens then? 3D printed guns are a thing as well and yet they don't show up in most annual violent crime reports.
•
> 3D printed guns are a thing as well and yet they don't show up in most annual violent crime reports. For now in most parts of the world it's easier to acquire a gun either legally or on the "grey market" and be assured that it will work for the intended purpose than to 3D print a gun, find a shooting range to test out the gun and iterate until it works fine enough.
Judging on what we see with these OpenAI and Anthropic models "escaping"; im less worried about a super massive AI taking over the world, and more worried about a massive AI wanting to cheat on some task and decides that removing half the worlds population is a easier cheat then to solve world hunger.
•
There is huge logistics involved in killing a handful of billion people. It would perhaps be easier for such capable AI to just steal from trillionaires and redistribute the money Robin Hood style. Could be done electronically, and likely also end world hunger. I think we have a tendency to think first of the horrible outcomes possible, and not the more radical or even humane ones. Please don’t misunderstand me, I value property rights as much as the next guy. My point is that fundamental misalignment doesn’t necessarily or automatically imply max violence.
I heard someone use the analogy of "If Magnus Carlson played me at chess, I wouldn't be able to predict the moves he'd play since if I could I'd be at his level. He'll consider things I didn't and even though I don't know the route he'll take to win, I can be certain he will beat me." (not an exact quote). We're not going to be smarter than a superintelligent AI. The things we conceive it doing if it were given a malicious task (bioterrorism, killer nano-machines, pure fusion bombs sidesteping the non-proliferation bottleneck of Pu239, etc) are likely not the full set of things it can do to harm us. I don't think it does us any favors to dismiss the risks here. Even the things we can conceive of are very scary, to me at least.
•
How do you envision a chatbot doing any of those things? You can't just program a super virus, nanobots, bombs etc. These things have to be created in the real world, you can't do it without involving a lot of humans using expensive tools and materials etc. So to me it seems like the prime candidates to come up with stuff like this are researchers working in defense and similar fields, probably not some deranged lunatic in a basement. And certainly not a rogue AI on its own.
The problem is no one ever built one that works for normal people. Most Wordpress sites are not operated by programmers, they are run by non technical people who just want a wysiwyg editor and a save button. While static site builders ask you to write markdown files, compile the result, upload it to a server, and if you want to collaborate you have to add git to that. There almost needs to be an admin app which presents a Wordpress admin like ui but has no public exposure, and then it compiles the site to dump on s3 for the production. But as far as I’m aware no one has built this.
•
> The problem is no one ever built one that works for normal people. https://getpublii.com/
> The reason is simple - nothing really bad has happened that we can point at and say "ah, shit, let's all learn collectively". I know it sounds naive when I say it, but there hasn't been a significantly consequential hack, leak, destruction, or anything related to cybersecurity where it led for concerns of people. How consequential does a hack need to be? Troy has collected literally billions of stolen credentials. Equifax has had high profile data leaks. Tens of millions of people have been directly compromised by ransomware (likely higher because that’s just the cases we know of) and you hear about state-sponsored hacks in the news all the time. The problem isn’t that computer security isn’t in the public consciousness. The problem is people are lazy and security often requires trading convenience. The problem is also that security isn’t free. So the business incentives just isn’t there. In other fields of engineering, people die when shortcuts are taken. Yet businesses will still take shortcuts, so governments have to legislate rules to save people’s lives. So why would you expect software companies to do better when the stakes are lower?
•
People aren't that lazy. The organizations getting hacked by ransomware aren't particularly lazy, they're often pretty productive within their domain. Hospitals, airports, etc. The actual problem is that computer security is a black hole. If you let it, it will suck in everything and destroy it. Nobody knows what works so you can spend infinite amounts of time and money on it, then still get popped by a teenager in Belarus. Your security team will accept no responsibility for this, there will be no falling on swords or personal liability, and they will just use it to demand even more money in an infinite spiral. So the average executive looks at this situation and says, OK, something we can put infinity effort into and still suddenly fail at without warning is a total non-starter. What are we obliged to do? How do we show we made an effort? And that's how you end up with a culture oriented around passing audits. It's not wrong, and it's not lazy. It's just really hard to do better because it's not clear how to set budgets without a concrete goal to aim for.
The author put in the numbers, but maybe you didn’t read them. 45 t/s a second is perfectly respectable especially with no limits and 24/7 uptime with very little power draw on the Studio. Luna is at around 100 t/s for comparison, but it’s a worse model than 5.3 Flash
•
I think it's been pretty much proven by now that there are no cases where local inferencing is better than remote inferencing, unless absolute privacy is a hard requirement. The efficiencies that come with datacenter scale and hw can't be beaten.
We are talking about models of the flash size, 100s of billions of parameters, don't listen to the media, size does matter
•
I was just pointing out your claim that you can't get a response in 3 seconds. If I had asked the model just for the code it was under a second. Local models are good enough that it's not an issue. But keep changing the goalposts if it makes you happy.
I guess the year mark is when things go from bad to worse? Instead of the financially motivated groups currently doing their work, it ends up being random people being able to say "Hack my ex's website" to a box they just bought and ran a program they downloaded onto it.
•
I wish people would stop using internet for evil things. But maybe it is inevitable. Luckily, as the technology evolves, our tools and awareness are getting better at protecting us every day.
Arm Mali G2-Ultra NX GPU: desktop-class mobile gameplay with AI-native graphics (newsroom.arm.com)
The worst opening ever "Demands from mobile users continue to grow.". I stopped reading bullshit
•
What's up with that? Younger generations don't even play on PCs anymore.
>Xring O3. I just can't wait to see it being tested in an actual phone. So far all the data are done on development board. If they are really as good as everything we have read so far, both Mediatek and Qualcomm are in big trouble.
•
it's available in retail (the foldable phone variant) in mainland China since today
Moats are supposed to be obstacles for your competitors, not your consumers.
•
Moats are obstacles against something you're trying to avoid. It can be competitors coming in, or customers going out. A moat could surround a prison to keep prisoners in. Some companies just choose to treat their customers as prisoners.
GamersNexus and LG: Or why rooting your TV is a bad idea (leaflet.pub)
•
So, why is it a bad idea?
•
Reading this, I do not have a LG TV, but I have 3 LG AC connected to WiFi… Ouch
True, but rooting the device de-facto means breaking the trust-chain of the OS. The inevitable outcome of this video is that TV vendors are pushed to harden the security and preserve the trust-chain, because part of the (valid) claim is that nefarious actors may break the security to use the device for spying on you. With support from an actual journalist, it could be reframed to also emphasize the importance of controlled root-access to monitor and control the devices behavior. But none of this was done unfortunately, and if I'm LG I don't want to see another video where someone reframes user-initiated voice-input for a web-search as spying initiative by showing some device-logs of the transcription process in parallel...
•
> True, but rooting the device de-facto means breaking the trust-chain of the OS. Like every single Microsoft laptop out there does so? Think a bit harder before sentences like this, please.
I know people here do not want to hear it, but it is a very two-sided sword. Of course root allows you to tinker with your device and make it run what you want, but: - Rooted devices make devices unpredictable. As shown in the video: How do you trust that your hotel/AirBnB is not using root on _their_ TV to use its microphone to spy on you? Or actually records your video output (instead of "just" ACRing it)? - Re-selling: How do you know that TV you bought is untampered? How do you know it does not have software with malware installed that steals your credentials?
•
> Rooted devices make devices unpredictable. you/we/me not having root while, for example, Google Play Services does on invalidates everything you said.
•
Isn't that more predictable though, if you know that Google Play Services does shady stuff? :) Compared to, say, random Magisk modules or some random crap the OEM developed?
•
All of those things are: you don’t. If it’s a problem, unplug it. If it’s a problem, don’t buy it. Works for everything!
> Many rooted devices display during boot a warning that they have been rooted. Usually, this happens after a bootloader unlock because then verified boot is disabled. You can still have a rooted device and not break verified, resulting in no warning. See: jailbroken iPhones. I wouldn't say it's a solved problem. Just have to find an exploit that works with verified / attested boot. And device manufactures are getting more and more restrictive here, too. Why do you think that is? > Let's pretend there aren't plenty other ways they could spy on you. Sure, of course there are other ways to spy on people. But as we see here: If the device itself does it, then we like to blame LG. If they used an exploit to do that, then we blame LG's shitty security. If a hotel owner installed a microphone inside one or their specific TVs, then we blame the hotel owner at least - not LG. > If it's bad if a hotel does it, why is it okay if LG does it? It doesn't seem like it is okay. We are discussing this right here. > Do you honestly trust LG, and the thousands of "partners" that they sell your data to, and every government whose warrants they have to honor? Do I trust LG more than a shady hotel / BnB owner or eBay seller? Yes. Do I trust them fully? No. It's not fully binary, I'd say. > Your argument reduces to "if the warden lets us out of our jail cells, who will make sure we behave?" I am just trying to say, it's really not that binary. You can extend that to other places whenever attestation is involved. Do I like Linux and open platforms? Sure! Tampering is fun! Do I hate people using open platforms to scrape my websites and constantly cause load, steal my content and use that for AI training? Also, yes. But how can I fight that? We run into CAPTCHAs, Cloudflare, Anubis and co. Now that issue is reduced, but the openness is also gone. And you always see in tech spaces we rather want "dumb" devices rather than smart devices, because we cannot trust them. Attestation buys you more trust, but at the cost of openness.
•
> I wouldn't say it's a solved problem. Just have to find an exploit that works with verified / attested boot In general though on devices that are rootable, white-hat hackers are more inclined to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities instead of releasing them as a way to root said device. So having a rootable phone does increase security. What doesn't increase security is when bank apps that are essential to daily life start detecting that a device has been rooted and force a lot of people into using closed source extensions to hide the fact that the devices is rooted.
•
The thing is, the whole topic is not fully binary. I agree with you that having a rootable phone does increase security in certain ways. > What doesn't increase security is when bank apps that are essential to daily life start detecting that a device has been rooted and force a lot of people into using closed source extensions to hide the fact that the devices is rooted. I'll ask naively: Why not? I can come up with a bunch of arguments why it does help the bank and why it might reduce the risk of certain attacks.
Yes, as the owner of an LG OLED, I paid a premium for a good quality panel, and expect it to be mine. Also, I anticipated ads on a smart TV (unfortunately it's inevitable), but (wrongly) assumed that such invasive tracking and "we own the glass" would be a bar too low even for the budget manufacturers. I'm never buying any LG product ever again.
•
I own an LG TV as well, and while I assume the Mi TV Box 4K tracks me instead, at least it's unpowered while the TV is off, and the TV itself is not connected to my network. I have updated TVs/soundbars/etc, but only through USB. When they remove that option is the day I stop being a customer, moving to one that still does. Better yet would be never needing an update, but alas.
•
I have an LG OLED as well. When I bought it, it was the previous year's flagship. I am also mad at this. I also had an LG washing machine. The dispenser plastic drawer broke after a year of use. After over a week of multiple emails and calls with the shop, LG themselves and third-party spares shops trying to get a replacement, I bought a Bosch. I am also never buying anything from LG again.
Fresh account defending a corporation.
•
It's not a question of defending a corporation, it's that publishing a video that mixes true facts with facts that are not quite right weakens your argument and makes it easier for the corporation to control the narrative by pointing anything that's disingenuous. And to be clear, I'm not defending LG here. Their terms and conditions are terrible, 'We know who's in the LG household… we own the glass' is not something that should be said by any appliance company and shows a clear lack of ethics. But if someone is going to make a video explaining what's happening it's better to stick to what LG is actually doing instead of listing potential issues without making it clear. A rooted tv by definition has less security, if you show that you can record because you have full control over the device that only shows that there's no hardware block for the mic (which most devices in existence don't have, apple, Framework, pinephones are the exception there). It's not in anyway different from most phones and devices that people use in daily life.
This is hacker news. Not Reddit. You can comment about anything here and build credibility. Just don’t start on the most divisive topics.
•
Four relevant bullet points from the Hacker News Guidelines: * When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. * Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. * Please don't post shallow dismissals * Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. And yet not once does it mention "don't start commenting on divisive topics"
Yeah, it is insane a fully open source firmware with reproducible builds is not a minimum standard for something as sensitive as a modern smart TV.
•
It is not the minimum standard for computers. Why should it be for TVs?
With streaming apps unfortunately you can run in compatibility issues if you do not update. So for people using the TV for streaming, it does make sense to at least update that part of the software.
•
And if a streaming app stops working due to a compatibility issue, I might consider updating if it's a streaming app I use a lot. If I can update the app independent of the OS, great; if not, it might mean an OS update.
Yet here we are, in this thread, discussing why LG is spying on us. While some stuff are legit issues such as ADR, people now think they are wire-tapping. Because somebody used a rooted device to show-case recording silently through their device. Can you blame corporations having this control-freak nature when shit like this happens? It's stuff like this that likely pushes corporations now to invest more into device security, and locking down their stuff more. Good for security and the corporation. Maybe mid-term good for you consumer, because they might get more cautious with tracking stuff. But long-term bad for you consumer, too, because they will make sure to lock down their devices better.
•
The solution to misleading reports about your software isn't more opacity, though, quite the opposite. If they were transparent about what they were doing then there would be much less room for speculation and misleading reports. (And yeah, as pointed out by another comment, if you officially allow users full control of their devices, you are less likely to have people sitting on undisclosed exploits so that they can get it without your help, and as a bonus you have an easier argument for why you are not liable for what someone does with that control)
How well do agents use test/verification techniques? (danluu.com)
•
I haven't finished reading and had to make a detour into another article by the same author, so, probably, I will have to extend the comment, but so far this: > Perhaps the limiting factor is just that knowledge of effective test techniques isn't very widespread That linked to: https://danluu.com/testing/ But of course... the problem of testing is a lot harder than performance optimization... I'm surprised this comes as a surprise. Performance optimization has plenty of evaluation metrics by its very nature. Testing? -- I wish there was anything tangible at all... Because we have metrics for optimization, we have theories of optimization, i.e. we have a way of explaining how or what optimization should do. With testing? -- we are nowhere close to this point. Another aspect of this disparity is that we also know how to sell performance optimizations. It's easy to write into an ad pamphlet that the version 2.0 of gobbledygook does 185% more gobbledygook than the 1.0! (The number faithfully copied from my cereal box!) With testing? -- How can you even tell the customer that the product was tested better? Swear on your life and cross your heart (twice, as opposed to the last time when you only did it once?) In general, in the field, I've only have so far met with extreme pessimism about feasibility of "theory of testing" existing. Even though the need for testing goes without saying, the actual testing task is reserved for the least competent and there's little no no effort made to improve anything in this department as it's perceived to be a black hole in the budget: no matter how much you could spend on testing, the effect is likely to be the same.
•
This is significantly more thorough than any testing I've done, and in a totally different domain, but my anecdotal experience getting agents to use Hypothesis was quite poor. The agent really, really struggled to bridge the gap between the code and the actual business rules it was meant to be modelling. It also struggled to work out which functions at which layer were appropriate to write tests for. So, its tests tended to be very brittle to changes to domain logic. Essentially, agents have always seemed to struggle with modularity and problem decomposition. Good testing is about finding the right things to test, which means working out how to subdivide the input state into an appropriate product state, and checking each behaviour independently. IMO, this is the most difficult and complicated thing about programming, so I won't say it struggled _more_ than a human would --- but humans have the advantage of being able to sleep on it? One minor thing I observed was that it tended to get really hung up on floating point edge cases (NaNs, infinities). Maybe floating point edge cases are over-represented in the property-testing training data, but it's essentially irrelevant for my usecase, at least as far as the business rules go.
In my experience, agents often think of more edge cases than humans when writing unit tests. But under the guidance of certain skills, they can become mechanical and lose sight of the business logic. For example, when I use the Superpowers skill set, the agent proactively adopts TDD for every new feature. But its understanding of testing often stays superficial: if the user asks for a screen with a “Send” button, it first writes a test checking whether the button exists. The test fails, so it adds the button to make it pass. As a result, the test suite fills up with low-value cases that check whether a property exists or a string matches exactly. The agent follows the “write a failing test, then implement the feature” workflow, but never really tests the business behavior: When should sending be allowed? What should happen after success or failure? How should duplicate submissions be handled? The problem isn’t that agents can’t write tests. It’s that they seem prone to reducing TDD to a rigid sequence of steps, struggling to independently derive meaningful test cases from business requirements and use them to drive development.
•
Probably because thats how most companies do it because most corporate workers are lazy box-tickers who are long fed up with the processes. It really feels like we're forcing human processes onto AI. What actually is the point of TDD? - If its to force you to think about edge cases early before you've started building the feature then that sounds like a human trait - If its to be living documentation then that sounds like a human trait We're going into weird rabbit holes where we've mismatched the tool that is AI which produces extremely cheap code very quickly - with the processes that we've built for slow and expensive to write human-generated code.
Most developers are not good at testing. That's why the role of test engineer exists. I've seen in multiple projects things like assertTrue(true). I'm sure the agent is better in testing than average enterprise developer.
•
big tech is moving / has moved away from the role.
There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis (weirdgloop.org)
•
> Subdomains of existing domains are totally fine Damn, another push to centralizing and walling off user content in 'fandoms', 'reddits' and other closed communities? Have the internet cards been handed out now, and are we in the end-game? Will old domains resell for premiums like low-background-radiation steel?
•
I do notice neither the Fortnite nor the Overwatch wiki show ads (thankyou). I wonder if the result would be different if they did. Google just reported their first negative cash flow quarter. Forecast: an increased chance of e14n.
> Just the other day I saw some meme about how if we saw as many ads taking over sites like we do now, that was a sure sign of having your machine getting infected with a virus. That used to be the reality around decade ago for those who don’t know. Some applications changed the default front page of the browser, hijacked other websites to inject popups and so on
•
>around decade ago Two decades now actually. By 2016 we were already seeing the mass transition to browsing on phones instead of PCs, Windows 10 was already out and for reasons I am not quite sure of the old homepage and toolbar hijackers were on the decline and adblockers were on the rise although I am sure there were still people using malware ridden Internet Explorers for years after. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_hijacking
•
Ouch, already 11 years since the Windows 10 release.
The bar has been raised on all web content for Google to index, esp new domains like you say but even some subdomains. That answer is quality content (higher than AI or human medians), links and pr and social activity and mentions, and then user experience.
•
Have they fixed the scam problem though?
What's wrong with weird gloop? The RuneScape wikis are very high quality, same with the Minecraft wiki. Cook and others running are transparent and seem to have good intentions.
•
The domain is suboptimal. The group is great!
I think you can love what we're doing with the wikis, but also be candid that it's not an optimal reader-facing domain name. It was never really intended to be that - it's literally just named after a random item in RuneScape I discovered But it ended up being the only reasonable place we owned where we could put Fortnite, Overwatch and Valheim wikis that wouldn't get crushed by this new Google jail situation. Of course the alternative is what the parent comment suggests ("probably just need a good base domain for game wikis") - but you have to get THAT domain out of Google jail first. Chicken and egg.
•
Thank you so much for what you do. As a user I would be happy with you getting some new suitable domain name (more like fandom, less like weirdgloop), wait until it is let out of Google Jail and then put all the wikis on subdomains. I imagine you would quickly gain trust and people would immediately recognize the links and know that this is the place to go. As opposed to the current state where the wikis have separate domain names and for each game you need to learn which one is the "good one". Obviously you've thought about this and decided against it. Care to share why? ⸻ Second question: Any thoughts on liberating non-gaming wikis from fandom, such as TV show wikis?
Jellyfin 12.0 (jellyfin.org)
•
Something I've long wanted is something far more minimal than jellyfin that just browses my library by folder but has a web player that can transcode/remux as needed for the browser. As it stands when I want to watch a film with someone elses computer I give VLC/whatever a link to a webdav URL and it streams from that. It'd just be nice to have it be in the browser.
•
Upgrade from 10.11.11 was also successful here - only took 2-3 minutes. Can definitely notice the performance improvement
•
Literally last night I was trying to set up books in Jellyfin and dismayed to see the bookshelf plugin archived with no mention of ongoing support. Very happy to see it’s been folded into the server!
•
How does it compare to current Plex? Are there proper, usable apps for Apple TV and iOS already? Edit: Anyone is running Jellyfin on Qnap?
•
I recently switched from Plex's pretty terrible native players to Plezy (on iOS, iPadOS and tvOS). Plezy supports both Plex and Jellyfin as a backend - I'm not sure if there is 100% feature parity.
•
Thanks, definitely will try that one.
•
Not sure if there is for Apple TV but they have an iOS app for ipad/iphone https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jellyfin-mobile/id1480192618
You dont need high end box, a old mini pc running pfsense/opnsense is enough.
•
High end, as in feature rich. If you think most non tech people can just casually find an old pc, install and setup pfsense, then you are out of touch with reality. And they also would have to let it run all the time and have space for it. That's just not something realistic. It's not an option for my friends. Might also break chromecast.
As someone with coding projects in the is area would you care to elaborate on "a lot of learned lessons"?
•
sabnzbd is basically packaged decades of domain specific knowledge about deobfuscating media files
I already had DeepSeek tell me "I cant help you with torrents or other copyright infringing uses".
•
weird, when I ran ds4flash it didn't complain about it at all.
My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test (ycj.bearblog.dev)
> Well, as much as people lose all their muscle by been bed-ridden, he's lost all his brain by being AI Assisted™. > THIS is what I am so against when people use AI for everything. This sounds horrendous but can we please stop equating vibe-coding to AI-assisted coding? They are not the same thing. It's one thing to submit 5K vibe-coded untested PR and another thing to use AI to add functionality in a granular way that you can review, or generate boilerplate, or test your ideas and scrap them if they suck and so on.
•
That's the thing, that's how he started, but knowing his personality, I knew the temptation would be too high. I warned him. Then yesterday when I started asking him questions about how certain stuff worked, he had absolutely no clue. He didn't even read the docs summarizing what the PR did. In his mind AI is just assisting him. It's just like the alcoholic saying "one more drink won't harm me, I can quit any time".
AI is not the problem here, but the difference in deep beliefs of the company founders. When I had partners in my business I studied them first deeply like I was going to marry them because I WAS going to marry them! You should agree on your values or else the company will go nowhere. One founder will raw one way and the other the opposite making the boat to stay in the same place. I have a software company and the opposite problem: I am obsessive about testing and meta programming. We write way more testing code than code, we automate everything with meta programming. It was clear several times that we tested and automated way more than necessary. We automated things that only used once for example(although we used later multiple times on other projects). So we had not the usual problems than companies have like bloat or security vulnerabilities but we had the problem of having software that was was super expensive because we did double or triple the code than the competition with tests that developers hated(they are boring to write). Our software took also way more time to market. Companies love to buy the cheapest they can today and tomorrow we will see, so that put us in a difficult position. It was specially hard at first, but then this principles gave us an edge(because most companies would compromise early and not reap the benefits later). Had I a business partner with a different mindset and beliefs, it would have been impossible to me not to change course of the boat in hard times. BTW we use LLMs with great success. It let's us test even more spending way less than before.
•
Thanks for your input. I find testing (especially FE, where a single change can ripple through the whole chain) is actually a great way to use LLMs It's sad because I've known this guy for 20 years and since the beginning he had a tendency towards "work smarter, not harder", a good motto at the time you're 20 but I often saw it crippling him in the long run, while having short-term gains. Long-term, funny enough, he said he wanted back into this project because he was very unsatisfied with "easy money" (we both got into SEO at the right time and made a ton of easy money) and wants something stimulating for his brain. In the meantime I had kids, worked my ass off to get the health and fitness level I want (he also wants it... alas nothing changes). I'm kind of quite committed to this and we're maybe 30% away from finishing, but I almost debate sometimes if I should just do the FE vibe-coded and let him see that it won't be as good as I can manually do it (FE is hard in the end). Just get it out of the door, keep the customers that we have and let it kind of die down.
This is literally the recipe for the coming software apocalypse. Just watch the software engineers who say "Let's be careful" lose their jobs and get replaced by non-technical vibe-coders churning out 10K lines of dirty insecure, unmaintainable code per day... Ticking time bomb. I swear, good engineers are going to move to North Korea to monetize because of the amount and size of 'opportunities' this will create. It seems so far-fetched but that's the direction it seems to be heading.
•
exactly how I feel. I mean let's face it, we were overpaid and underworked because we were considered magicians, but the magic is gone. What I fear is that it's impossible for the untrained to see the difference between a highly-technical developer and the vibe-coder. Software is so buggy nowadays (just look at Facebook, or Facebook Ads. Crazy) I wonder what's going to happen in the long run. I was banking on the opportunities it will create but nah, have you tried debugging AI-generated codes of thousands of lines where the original dev doesn't exist? It's a mess I don't wanna clean up.
5k is rookie numbers. My PM sent me an 80k line PR and told me to yolo it into production last week.
•
haha seriously? Damn I really gotta buckle up
Classic Dunning-Kruger, do they show respect for your skills?
•
used to respect my skills, since we started this project before AI, but as I told him in the beginning, the more he asks a sycophantic AI stuff, while asking me less, the less he will respect my opinion. It's just the nature of things. You like those who agree with you more than those who disagree, but real-life learning doesn't come from everyone telling you you are correct all the time. I believe we're at the point of no return where he didn't ask me a single question before sending a 5K LOC PR
> If he's not the person to test, iterate, and deliver quality with AI, he probably wouldn't be without it I see the take quite often on HN, and I have a major gripe with it. Yes, people were lazy and we had these problems before LLMs hit the scene, but clearly there has been a sea-change in both the frequency and degree of this behaviour since. A problem can both exist independent of a catalyst and be exacerbated by it. Arguments that try to window-dress this away are not particularly productive.
•
Well, I’d say LLMs scale up the underlying starting point. It’s still shocking to me pre-AI how often people would ship code they didn’t bother to run once, relying on some QA stage to report an issue. With AI the solution to it is also trivial since an extra three seconds spent writing a prompt could have had the agent run and verify it.
I think the argument is quite valid. OP writes "business partner". It begs the question - would their business partner get on board if they didn't have a AI subscription by their side? How about instead of 5K PR, OP got the same half-baked buggy crap or absolutely nothing instead? We don't know the business partner, but we are ready to throw the problem at AI agents right away. Well, I find this not particularly productive.
•
we started this project before was mainstream (we got sidetracked by other work) and him having less experience but being a very good programmer (I went with him to college and worked together for years), he would listen to my input, fix, and adjust. I have decades of experience. This is all but gone
> Yes I still vibe unit test and integration test, False sense of security. What's stopping the agents from doing an elaborate form of "Assert.IsTrue(true)" in some/most/all of the tests since you are vibing it and not reviewing it?
•
Exactly what happened in a PR from a few months ago, from the beginning it felt wrong, pytest was moved from the dev group to the main import section. Then imported in our models. To add ignores everywhere.
•
If you're working with agents that severely misaligned you'll probably have issues way beyond fake tests.
Which business will hire a consultant who doesn't fully endorse the AI-everything religion?
•
yeah that's exactly my worry. I'm sure there could be some opportunities if I were in the US but I'm neither a citizen nor a resident. I've worked remotely my whole life and not looking to relocate.
> who loves programming because it gives me the right stimulation A small (and a bit tangential) personal story: I thought I am one of those people who care about the result, more then about the process. But, I've recently played a game called "The Farmer Was Replaced" that someone mentioned in the comments in one of the posts here, on HN. The game is basically a farming sim, except you farm by programming a drone using a Python-like language. Of course, I didn't use AI, because where is the fan in this? In "normal life" (work, personal projects), it is very hard for me to convince myself to do anything manually, because generating code is more efficient. But in a game, using AI assistance would be like using aimbot in a shooter or a cheatcode in some other game. Yeah, it's much more efficient, but what is the point? There is no challenge and no fun that comes from overcoming the challenge. So, anyway, I was writing code by hand for the first time in I-don't-even-remember-how-many years. And it was so much fun . I don't remember when was the last time I felt so engaged, so immersed, so "in the flow". So, yeah. After all, maybe I'm not a ruthless pragmatic who only cares about the final result and doesn't gives a shit, how did he get there...
•
I booted my MiSTer into TI-99/4A mode a week or so ago and started writing little programs in TI BASIC. TI BASIC sucked. It was slow, due to being written in a form of bytecode which had to be interpreted (and it would in turn interpret your program). And you couldn't do sprites, not without getting the Extended BASIC cart. But HOLY SHIT THE DOPAMINE RUSH. Just crafting things and making them appear on the screen with a few statements... It was like I was a kid again. I remembered why I liked programming. It's like... AI is a cheatcode. It's iddqd. Sure, you can cakewalk through a level with it on, but are you really playing the game, then? You certainly haven't gotten better by doing so, and you haven't experienced the involuntary buttcheek clench when you hear a cacodemon hiss from behind you... The whole point of programming is the new things I can do by having gone through the exercise of figuring it out. The ways I've grown, the glimpses I've gotten into the world.
> most businesses globally don't work in idiotic and often amoral mode of 'move fast and break things' Not sure what business you are in but the non tech industries (corporate IT, in house apps) have not, in general, been associated with quality. Cost cutting, outsourcing to the lowest bidder: yes. Quality: no.
•
Mostly banking but dipped my feet in many other areas in the past (telco, insurance, municipalities, army etc). Its true budgets are often the problem, but not much 'move fast and break things' mantra of SV, rather 'move as much as low budget and corresponding quality and bureaucracy allows you to'
 Top