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OpenAI engineer arrested in bugging of executive conference room (sfstandard.com)
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seeedstudio getting some impressive pr here for those xiao boards.
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Sounds like fair use to me! Information wants to be free, remember?
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Part of the evidence was his wife's chatgpt logs. Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.
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True of any cloud service. If you are involved in a criminal investigation, they can get access to your data. They can confiscate your computers, too.
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Uno reverse card - you can send Uncle Sam whatever you care to. No need to specify an address.
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> ... a chatbot account associated with Alfozan’s spouse (which shared multiple identifiers and attributes with Alfozan’s own chatbot account) submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 related to building, customizing, installing, audio recording, testing, obfuscating, and remote accessing a device, including inquiries about “build[ing] a continuous audio recorder,” “customiz[ing] Wi-Fi . . . connectivity,” “improv[ing] audio and live listening,” and “encrypt[ing] the SD card,” among other things. The same chatbot account also submitted prompts specifically related to Recording Device 1, including its custom header and unique MAC address, between Sept. 27 and Sept. 28. The justice.gov article doesn't specifically say it was an OpenAI account, but I think, based on the fact that they have logs including MAC address corroboration, that we could probably assume that. The alternative is that other chatbot account providers are collaborating.
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Man really switched to his wife’s account and thought no one would be able to track him there. Calling this amateur would be an insult to amateurs.
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How does someone this dumb get hired at openai?
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You might want to have a seat first if you want this explained.
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There’s absolutely no way Abdulrahman did this. This was a setup.
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In case you need to sweep your area a decent review of anti spy devices by project farm https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1reman2waLs
I have seem some articles which reference allegations from court documents / complaint, but I haven't been able to find the primary source. Do we know if that's publicly available yet?
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Too often official sources posts get flagged or suppressed, but see other post here - it all is on justice.gov
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https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/saudi-national-arrested-installing-surreptitious-audio-recording-device-openai
A camera behind every TV in the office would be something… But no the boring answer is that after they found the device they left it in place and planted the camera to see who came looking for it.
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That does make more sense. But if any company were to take surprising security measures, it should be the frontier labs.
I imagine they found the device and then planted a camera to catch whomever came back to get the original device
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Free startup idea: Anti-espionage cameras for corporate offices. Put it behind TVs and plants etc. and it will notify the security team if it detects new objects.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50077703
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We've merged that thread hither, since current article has more background.
Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, was arrested Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078141
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More here too: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/saudi-national-arrested-installing-surreptitious-audio-recording-device-openai
Interesting that they have a camera behind the TV, I suppose for this exact purpose.
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They left him as an employee for the FBI to continue investigating; likely they setup cameras to get hard evidence he was tampering with them.
Between this and the Ledger implants I wonder if AI companies will have a supply chain risk in the future where their models get exfiltrated over 5G. Good time to start a company that builds giant Faraday cages over data centers.
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I could've sworn I read about Palmer Lucky was making comments in the last few days about hardware coming from China with wiretap implants in the last few days. Funny coincidence eh?
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Would be better to build the data centers under water than to build giant faraday cages. Free cooling, safe from missile attack, and safe from some types of electronic spying.
> We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from Did OpenAI do a marketing bit in the middle of an espionage accusation?
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They are applying the “turn troubles to opportunities” very well :)
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> Did OpenAI do a marketing bit in the middle of an espionage accusation? Yes, they did. The people who felt it was totally normal to add that would no doubt be surprised how desperate and cheap it makes them look.
Can you blame one for mixing them up at this point?
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Yes? I mean, I don’t think it’s a character flaw to not know things, but their rivalry is extremely notorious and relevant. Someone who can't keep them straight won’t be able to understand what’s going on in AI.
The Four Colour Theorem: The first time machines mogged mathematicians (newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org)
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I think a lot of great ideas like tree-width were developed in hope of simplifying the proof.
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the title made me think of a much older machine that was used for calculating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
The problem of the proof was that we knew that FCT was true, but we had no idea why. A good/elegant proof teaches us something new about how that problem is related to other problems. It isn't just about getting a true/false answer to the conjecture.
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> "The problem of the proof was that we knew that FCT was true" Citation needed.
Indeed, and the computer aided proof discouraged research into the insightful proof a lot of mathematicians think is probably out there to find. "Proved but not insightfully" is a problem status some mathematicians are starting to think of as closer to "open" than "closed", which is a good thing IMO. (I am not a mathematician, though)
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Maybe the new heuristic auto tactics will lower the cost of finding the human proof of the four color theorem enough to be affordable in the current environment.
Show HN: Guitoro, a virtual guitar you strum with your keyboard (guitoro.com)
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Very nicely done, at first I thought it was gimmicky but it's actually playable
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This was much better than I expected. Nice job.
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Been working on something similar (a DAW, to learn more about music) - and just wanted to say that your guitar voice is quite good! Bravo
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In solo mode, there should be a horizontally flipped version, such that such that the 0 key plays open E on the 1st string, and the 9 plays F on the 1st string, etc. That would allow me to hold my wireless keyboard backwards, facing the screen, rely on the muscle memory of my hands.
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There was something like this that came with an old Sound Blaster card back in the day that I spent quite a lot of time with. It had something like this, where you could pick individual strings with the number pad and change chords with the F buttons.
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This is really good.
Really really enjoyable, but how do I turn on drive for the electric guitar?
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Thanks! Click Sound button on the right nd pick one of the electric presets. For more control, open Amp & FX in the same panel and choose Overdrive, Distortion or Fuzz.
What an insightful contribution.
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I said it's kinda cool. Like what more do you want? I could point out how useless it is in general, I can't say it would make a good learning tool, because it doesn't. But it is a novelty site that does make sound and show correct chord positions. Can you use it to compose something? Sure but the sound cutoff between chords and the need to pick a chord that strums down first before you can strum up means you'll always produce a sound you don't want and you can't even replicate picking. It's not a tool, it's a toy man. Chill out.
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Naw man, I'm taking this to my next gig! You are right, but it is fun.
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> I could You did , not could . All those things that you said you could do? You literally did them.
" matches what a right handed player sees looking down at their own guitar: low E on top, neck on the left" no, it's wrong
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Yeah, and I would rather see the “normal” presentation of chords. At least provide a selector to be able to toggle the view.
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Okay, it’s not just me. It was breaking my brain trying to understand the chords on the screen vs. when I play.
A plea not to use uv-build (blogs.gentoo.org)
It is still a problem where there are no binaries for platforms otherwise supported by the distro, and in fact supported by the package being built - because uv-build is the only part that does not run on given platform and can't be reliably built for it
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I agree that they exist. My 2c: the wheels in that link of manylinux, musl linux, Windows, and MacOS will work on 99.9% of users' OSs.
You think Gentoo isn't important, they think the build backend doesn't matter. They're asking. Nobody's compelled to listen.
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> they do request nicely, but they also present the drawbacks for them as if they are absolute, and even claim that "its benefits don’t outweigh the drawbacks".
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for some people the benefits absolutely do outweigh the drawbacks. Maybe not for you....but on the whole I don't know - if the whole issue had been solved without being given attention would you have ended up caring which way it went?
Yes, optionally apparently but I think we'll end up with forks of Python if the Rust enthusiasts push it any further. I think the option will be off for me.
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Only at the beginning, as someone points out, it doesn't scale to always write a C and Rust versions of new modules.
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I presume that those who don't want to have to build rust just to get python will stick the rust code into an LLM and get out an acceptable analog in C.
If it compiles then people like me can get it to work. What we cannot do is build an entire rust toolchain to make it compile.
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There’s a very large body of closed issues on most popular open source projects showing that “it compiles” is nowhere close to “it works.”
> The Ubuntu users are only there because I started using linux in 1994 with slackware. Nowadays I use ubuntu, I've spent too many hours of my life tweaking my linux installs.
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SLS for me. haha. :-) But now at least you have the choice! It's great really. I can use Artix because I like being nearer the bleeding edge but even that is really a lot easier to use than Linux was in the days when I had to compile my kernel. Nevertheless I remember lots of my friends who started off saying Linux was hopeless and ended up using it and Ubuntu was their gateway. The Linux world now is full of people who are fairly conformist and don't care about how it all began and who don't value the idea that open source has margins from which who knows what world beating things might eventually come. The fact that margins can exist is what makes open source great.
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/May/20-years-of-gentoo/#antireason-performance > In the early days, there was much promotion of Gentoo as being “faster”, because you could compile everything based on your particular processor, etc. And you could increase the optimization level for a boost. Their web site still touts this as a reason to use Gentoo. > In reality, the performance is more or less the same as on any other distribution. The folks who stick to Gentoo tend not to care about performance as much. Unfortunately, this perception of Gentoo remains, and I wish they would remove the verbiage from their site.
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> Unfortunately, this perception of Gentoo remains, and I wish they would remove the verbiage from their site. Based on what I can see after putting a minute or two into searching, that verbiage being referred to only appears on the About page. [0] The distro's home page says Welcome to Gentoo, a highly flexible, source-based Linux distribution. and has used those words since at least January 2023 [1]. Its home page has spoken about flexibility and has not spoken about performance since the big redesign in April 2016 ... seven years prior to the publication of that guy's blog post. [2][3] And -speaking as a Gentoo user since 2002- neither the user community nor the maintainer community hold the opinion that Ultimate Maxxximum Performance is the distro's goal. Trouble reports that come from "ricers" pretty much always get told "Set your compiler flags to something sane (try '-O2 -pipe' or '-O2 -pipe -march=native') and rebuild. If you can still repro the problem, file a new report because this one is getting closed INVALID.". And -while the old Gentoo Wiki burned down so I can't prove it- [4] the advice about GCC optimization in the wiki has always cautioned against using aggressive compiler flags and warned that doing so will -among other things- not substantially improve performance. The advice about reasonable compiler flags has pretty consistently been "Use -O2, -pipe, -march=$THE_CORRECT_SETTING_FOR_YOUR_CPU, and maybe -fomit-frame-pointer"... though the "-fomit-frame-pointer" advice has always come with a warning that doing that may make debugging either extremely difficult or impossible, and the "-march" advice the warning that this may make it impossible to run those binaries on another computer. Anyway. There's only so much you can do to erase an -allegedly- pervasive myth. The fact that some folks have the belief that Gentoo Linux is all about Maxxximum Performance doesn't change the fact that nearly all of the people who use it and -almost certainly- all of the people who maintain it strongly disagree with that claim. The distro is and always has been about flexibility, user choice, and having fun. And it's a nice bonus if building for -say- -march=athlon-xp instead of -march=i586 happens to get you a bit of extra performance here and there. [0] < https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/about/ > [1] < https://web.archive.org/web/20230101024843/https://www.gentoo.org/ > [2] < https://web.archive.org/web/20150406115846/https://www.gentoo.org/ > [3] That year's April 1 redesign was a bit cool, IMO. [4] The oldest copy that I can easily find is from mid 2013 [5], so you'll just have to trust me that this has been the long-standing opinion of the overwhelming majority of users and maintainers. While you're there, take a minute or two to skim the prose and notice how it consistently warns against using aggressive compiler flags. [5] < https://web.archive.org/web/20130829083155/https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GCC_optimization >
A friend of mine got me on Gentoo in 2004. He spent all of his time tweaking compiler flags like -O3 -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops and running into so many issues in the process. I think he only lasted about 9 months on Gentoo. To this day, he's the only person I've ever met that was there for performance. I'm still on Gentoo 22 years later.
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> A friend of mine got me on Gentoo in 2004. Good timing! If memory serves, you missed the Big Libpng Upgrade that either got the concept of Package Slots into Portage or convinced everyone that they were a _really_ good feature to have and use where appropriate.
i guess gentoo is rolling-release, vs something like debian where every package is frozen in time (+ backports), and debian does seem to largely solve the coordination problem by making everything on the system use a fixed version of some package; with rare situations allowing >1 version of the package at a time. my take on linux distros being annoyed by their own policies is that perhaps they should change the policy. in this case, perhaps they should pretend uv-build updates once a month or something. for example, they seem to be fine doing a quick sed on pyproject.toml ( https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/dev-python/parse/parse-1.22.2.ebuild ) or patching stuff for compat ( https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/dev-python/astor/files/astor-0.8.1-py314.patch ) This is what i mean when it seems typical for a distro to monkey around with packages and/or their build system. These were just the first two packages i clicked on in dev-python. maybe others are "pure upstream", but there's definitely the capability here to just... not have the problem?
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> my take on linux distros being annoyed by their own policies is that perhaps they should change the policy. in this case, perhaps they should pretend uv-build updates once a month or something. Thing is, that won't work. From [0], with some more discussion starting at [1] > > I don’t understand why Gentoo needs to rebuild every single release of uv-build. > Because if you don't pin a version of uv-build in your project, that means "use the latest version available". Gentoo can't second guess you--even if it were able to verify somehow that the new version of uv-build that just got released will end up producing an identical wheel for your project as the previous version, without actually using the new version of uv-build. [0] < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50077466 > [1] < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50077553 >
> It’s the obvious way to implement backend resolution. If a compatible version is already present, yes, a frontend can just use it if it's within the semver range specified. But in many cases, builds are done in a fresh virtual environment that has nothing installed. In such a case, the only option is to download the latest version that's in the semver range specified. That's how the "build" frontend works, for example, unless you specify a flag to keep it from creating a fresh virtual environment.
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Is that what Gentoo is doing here? I thought the whole point of the distro doing any sort of Python packaging is that they can pierce abstractions like virtual environments where it suits them. (But also: if we’re talking virtual environments then we’re firmly in Python land, not distro land, where the correct answer is “use a wheel” instead of building it yourself.)
Sure, but again, you could in theory distribute said builds and stop wasting compute compiling yourself. I know nixpkgs, for example, builds with very generic targets and not super aggressive compiler flags, but at least the machinery exists to do this.
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> Sure, but again, you could in theory distribute said builds and stop wasting compute compiling yourself. Here are three links that you will find informative. [0][1][2] While I'm not using the official Gentoo binhost, I've had one running on my LAN for my own personal use for roughly a decade now. It has been possible to set up a binhost for quite a bit longer than that... that's just when I got multiple machines with the same CPU in them, so it made sense for me to set one up. [0] < https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Binary_package_guide > [1] < https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Installation/Base#Optional:_Adding_a_binary_package_host > [2] < https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Binary_Host_Quickstart >
They basically started it all, that was what made Gentoo different from everyone else.
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I wasn't there when it started but wasn't the raison d'etre was the GCC fork that eventually became the new upstream for GCC. Because the fork was faster Gentoo got the reputation that compiling from source was to get faster executable. This is a misunderstanding imho, as the greatest strength of Gentoo the level of customization enabled by use flags.
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I would not call egcs that fast, nor do I remember it having any role with Gentoo.
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Gentoo was the first distro to use egcs as part of their default toolchain. Not sure if it was the only, but it was the only one I heard to had done so.
Gemini 4 Argon (deepmind.google)
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It's nice to have it available for more complex tasks, but I'll stick with 3.8 Flash thanks to its high output speed. I really like it for fast iteration and prototyping.
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The should ask Claude to make the page scroll faster.
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Is this supposed to be the new Gemini Pro?
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I can’t try it because it’s not available on the free tier and no way in hell I’m tying a credit card to google, I’ll wait for argon-lite.
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Put it through my standard benchmark, a six step explainer... yes, in 3D. Very fast. Makes mistakes. Corrects the mistakes quickly with direction. Google Argon 4: https://share.gemini.google/T9r6tr2dDaTE I didn't have time to make it into a full blog post yet. Here is a previous one. https://generative-ai.review/2026/07/kimi-k3-rush-test-vs-claude-fable/
I haven't tried it for coding yet, but I ran a couple of my recent curiosity driven queries from Claude (mostly used Fable and Opus 5.5) through it. This is a clear step change, I'm genuinely amazed. Its answers are to-the-point, logically structured, clearly written. Like a really well made mini essay on your question. It also really likes to build little simulations / models that you can tweak the parameters on. Amazing to explore how different assumptions affect economic scenarios, for example. It's also great at picking (sourced) illustrations. I'll be using this for everything that isn't coding from now on.
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I've found it on par with Opus 5.5, what don't you like about it for coding?
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> I'll be using this for everything that isn't coding from now on. why? is it not so good on that? or is there something better performance, or better price for same performance?
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I'm not the poster you responded to, but I can tell you that historically the Gemini models have lagged behind Anthropic (the clear leader) and OpenAI's best models where coding in particular is concerned. Opus 5.5 is, right now, the consensus best coding model. That said, I'm extremely impressed with Argon thus far. I take back everything bad I've ever said about their AI strategy. Argon is very good and very fast. It might be competitive at coding, but it's too early to say.
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We have this same point made every release. I wonder if models actually are getting better or if these companies are just secretly hamstringing the previous models before releasing a similarly performing model
I just created a Google account, which was a hassle. I tried to find an app and found AI Studio, but I’m not sure what that is. Then I found Antigravity, which apparently is Google’s alternative to Codex, and I installed it. Then I tried to buy the small Gemini AI Ultra package, but it didn’t let me pay. It accepted neither my credit card nor my PayPal account. It’s crazy how bad the Google experience is nowadays. You don’t know what to use or where to find it, and the security measures seem totally overkill. Am I really the only one having these experiences? Is Google aware of that?
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I recently tried to create a new Gmail account for a small app I've made. I wanted a way for users to get hold of me other than my personal email address. They now ask for your mobile number during signup. And it wouldn't let me register any more accounts with my number. So frustrating.
I'll believe in AGI when Google can figure out how to leverage their model to make their user experience not suck.
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But will it bring more profit?
Reminds me of that email from Bill Gates about trying to install Movie Maker.
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This is the first time I'm hearing about this email (thanks!) and I'm wondering: If it was already known in 2003 how bad Windows was, how did we end up with a Windows that's so much worse ? Bill said it was his job to send such emails but apparently he didn't do his job well… For the lazy: https://www.osnews.com/story/19921/Full-Text-an-Epic-Bill-Gates-e-Mail-Rant/
Also "available today for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers". I have AI Pro, but AI Studio tells me I can "unlock" Argon by upgrading to Ultra.
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I have AI Ultra and agy wants me to upgrade to... AI Ultra.
Why do these benchmarks often show models running on Max i.e. Opus 5.5 (max) is on the frontier? I would think it is never really economical to run max
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By definition, the model with the best performance (regardless of cost) will be on the pareto frontier.
It's a great model. I have had it trying to decrypt the Voynich manuscript for the past couple of days without being biased by other research/other people's attempts. If anyone is interested: https://github.com/d2kx/voynich-research
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How ironic that the Readme is completely unreadable, like gibberish rivalled only by the Voynich manuscript itself. But id the progress of decoding it is legit, you should write something properly about it!
Front bicycle wheel in all Argon examples is still wrong. This bicycle will not be stable. Axis of rotation of front wheel needs to be in-front of axis of rotation of steering wheel. Frontier VLMs still do not understand how bicycles work.
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Check the "high" thinking output again. For what it's worth, it's there. However, how the front fork rake affect stability is I believe a little complex. I doubt this old article is the last word on the subject, but it's a great read nonetheless, and note especially the ultra-stability of the reversed fork bike! https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/from-the-archives-the-stability-of-the-bicycle
Yeah, that's a good point. My basic pelican test doesn't allow the model to render their work and iterate on it. The 3D models all come from agent systems that are rendering with Blender or screenshotting with Playwright along the way.
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If you allow rendering and iteration on the basic pelican test, does it improve the final output?
That's exactly what I was thinking when I saw https://www.assbench.com/ posted a while back: "oh no, this is going to be somebody's job".
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Unfortunately, for me the renderings crash or hang in both Firefox for Android and Chromium/Vanadium on a Pixel 10 Pro. :\
>I for one don't want a whole app for that Everyone says that until ms, apple, google, etc introduces this polished feature as part of their tablet imaging editing/document collaboration office suite. Then everyone can;t get enough of it. > It's a small task whose result is an input to something else - ideal for a tool for LLM (or script) Have you actually tried this? If it's a small task then why can't LLMs actually do it? Kind of like the pelican test. Every LLM can do a SVG pelican but most of the results are unusable in practice for production/productivity purposes. Every LLm can extract some half-broken SVG hallucination of your jots, but I'm asking for an app that's polished and works accurately 99% of the time, which means a dedicated app/model tuned specifically for this task, and nobody makes this yet.
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> Everyone says that until ms, apple, google, etc introduces this polished feature as part of their tablet imaging editing/document collaboration office suite. Then everyone can;t get enough of it. I don't feel like I'm a representative sample of general userbase, so I won't dispute this too hard. For me, it's rare but it does happen. Still, 90% of my mobile experience is "how is this so broken, why is it missing the obvious follow-up feature that completes a workflow, and why, again, am I not using a laptop for this?". > If it's a small task then why can't LLMs actually do it? What if they actually can? This is exactly what Karpathy was talking about the other day[0]. If your only LLM experience is the default chat app in chat mode, then this doesn't make sense. If your experience includes using agentic harness like Claude Code/Cowork / Codex/ChatGPT Work, then it's obvious. The LLM app in "chat mode" will just zero-shot you a pelican, or digitize your notes into SVG, and maybe improve on it a bit if you complain about the result. The same app[1] in "agentic mode" will digitize your notes, refine the SVG against the original image, reduce it to probable strokes based on high-frequency patterns in the photo and knowledge of how people write, OCR it, save both the text and SVG to your library, then extract parts you wanted and insert them into a document, typeset the rest of it, and print it on your printer - all in response to a single prompt. LLMs in agentic mode are very good at stringing long and advanced workflows; today, if you give them shell access or computer use, they will use regular apps for you if that's the easiest way to accomplish the goal. > Have you actually tried this? Yes![2]. That's why I can confidently say: there is no limit to this pattern. LLMs can handle apps just fine; giving them tools just saves time and tokens . Another example: I'm currently resurrecting a 30 year old game, and the other day I asked Claude to hack on a way to run it headlessly, so I can use my computer while it plays with it. It did, and then immediately leveraged it to just causally run several instances of the game in parallel, entirely in the background, whenever it needed to playtest something. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50047422 - was on the frontpage two days ago. [1] - Claude and ChatGPT now have both modes in their mobile, web and desktop apps. I personally use Claude Code a lot, but exclusively through these surfaces (I can't be arsed to deal with TUI at home anymore). IMO, these tools are already within reach of regular users - the users just didn't notice it yet. [2] - Not with SVGs, but equivalent with voice recordings, and yes, Claude Code set up and is managing the whole local processing pipeline. Recordings go in, Markdown (or more advanced signal processing) comes out, and in itself, it's not a task, but merely a step .
It attracts at least one comment like yours on every single thread , so I guess the main purpose is to kick off a race to see who can post that comment first.
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it actually makes a lot of sense that this is an elaborate troll account
> The model launches today at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens (with cached input tokens at 95% off). Couldn't you just say what the price will be after the introductory period and when it'll take effect? Do they have some SKILL.md for these blog posts that requires the most important information to always be buried ten levels deep and hidden behind a login page?
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Me, watching the AI world from the sidelines while using DeepSeek at $0.15($0.003 cached)/$0.60 - still bitter about the pricing changes. It might not be as smart, though my employer gives me access to Claude, so I tried giving the same task to Opus 5.5. Both DS4.1 Flash and Opus5.5 produced nearly identical outputs. After that, my company switched the entire engineering department to Azure hosted DeepSeek4.1 and costs were cut by 3/4. So far, no one has really noticed the change.
To be fair they dramatically improved how annoying Claude is with Opus 5.5. It's not perfect but it's not nearly as awful as it was.
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Opposite for me. Output of 5.5 is better but its safety and moral standing skyrocketed. I am constantly hitting refusals for simple tasks, which previous generations (like 4.8) do without giving me a tirade. Anthropic’s vision of “safe” is so frustrating to deal with, it makes me want to go back to ChatGPT.
I'm using this model via API. I am most excited about its ability to write the english language (or any language). My least favorite trend on twitter has been people posting 2D illustrations/3D renders as a proxy for model capability. Well-written prose is far less likely to go viral but far outstrips the importance rendering a fantasy world in one shot. I've been trying it out via the API and the model has been a delight so far. Clear in the head, not RL-fried, distinct writing style, and big model smell. That said, the em-dash is back w/ this model. That said, I would be so frustrated with Sundar Pichai if I was on the Google team. The botched rollout of this model seems to be entirely a matter of capacity, and Pichai has been more than happy to give it to anybody but his own team.
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I added Gemini 4 Argon to our video creation benchmarks. The results are a bit disappointing given Googles scale and training data. The results are on par with cheaper Chinese open source models to be frank. https://cliphou.se/benchmark/
Em dashes are underappreciated — they are visually pleasing, not cluttery like semicolons or definitive like colons.
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Em dashes are commonly used in most countries that speak English. I get the feeling that people from the USA don’t use them often and now have tarnished the use of them.
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Do you remember when the AIs were all writing with bullet points all the time? I miss that! I'd prefer that to the current more-information-density-than-any-human-would-ever-muster approach where sentences are packed so deep you can't get any meaning by skimming.
AI writing style comes from post-training, which is entirely under the control of the labs. It's not copying it from any public sources.
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I didn't say it's copying anything. It's learning styles - all of them - in pre-training. Post-training is just about giving it the right defaults. Doesn't change my point anyway - even if post-training, labs naturally want the LLM to come off as smart (well, except for Grok). Post-training is where they "untrained" em-dashes and such, due to complaints of users.
I feel Argon is about as good as Opus 5.5 but I find Opus annoyingly sarcastic and incomprehensible. I know it's a matter of personal taste but it reminds me of a grad student that tries to sound smarter than he is by being dismissive and opaque.
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Opus 5.5 has the personality of a proud righteous nerd, definitely incomprehensible at times, unless you explicitly tells it to slow it down, it crams information far too dense. Great model to architect and resolve eng. problems in a harness loop tho. Poor handoff.
Agree I do not like the way Opus 5.5 communicates with me. It feels like it is trying to act superior in a condescending way. DO NOT LIKE. I have not used Argon yet but Gemini 3.8 Flash has been a joy to use in comparison (and so fast!) as a daily driver.
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>...trying to act superior in a condescending way... Strange. I wonder why? Have you adjusted 'roles', added 'ask clarifying questions'? This is most peculiar.
There was some backlash around the pricing changes - the $200/month tier offers less usage now, at the same time as the launch of the $500/month tier. Reddit thread with 247 comments here: https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1wtgv3z/dev_day_l/ Aside from that I'm not sure what was "disastrous" - maybe the lack of a new model release to compete with the just-released Claude Opus 5.5?
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"Disastrous" is obviously a loaded term, and it can be debated, but from what I collect, the reasons are - Dots. People don't understand it. Their presentation didn't explain it properly at all. Additionally, many people thought it's stupid, and that the cutesy mascots are dystopian. - Voice mode didn't work in their presentation. The demo failed. - 200$ plan goes 20x -> 10x usage. 500$ plan introduced, 25x usage. The contrast is stark. - "Ultrafast": 8x pricing on subscription plan (6x API). That's 80$ input, 400$ output, 100$ cache write. Hello?! Additionally, since it generates 8x faster, it consumes your quota 8x faster. Per wall-clock minute, it's 64x more usage spend per minute of generating. People report that on the 500$ plan, their weekly usage is gone in 40-100 minutes. - People believe gpt-6.1-sol was planned to be released as astra-minor, but OpenAI renamed it at the last possible time, because gpt-6-sol is a disaster (this I can get behind)
The sense I get from your comment and the GP comment is that OpenAI’s pricing changes alienated individual users for the sake of the enterprise market. I live in the enterprise market, and was quite pleased with the changes. We don’t really use Sol 6.1, just Astra. $500/month for 40+ hours a week of Astra usage, with ultrafast mode available when you’re near the weekly reset has made our jobs so much easier. Our product has some sciencey bits as well, ands Astra kills it as a rubber duck in this area. As a consumer whose 20x account got downgraded, I am a bit sad. I can’t justify $500 a month on personal AI spend. As an engineering manager, I could not be happier with OpenAI’s services. Also, Codex App Server is amazing.
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> Also, Codex App Server is amazing. Hey, account created 39 days ago. Did you really have to tag that on after all the other stuff? Could you make it any more obvious? That said this thread is hilarious because it's just an open ai sales manual debating with an anthropic sales manual. It's funny, but it's not, because the truth is that you people are just shitting all over the commons. Someone needs to kick you out but that's not going to happen here.
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:shrug: I spend a lot of those token make local models better, resurrecting old hardware to make it more accessible and usable. Frontier models and AI is cool. This is my lived experience doing real systems engineering projects. My real sales manual is: https://stealthgoat.com/deepswe-flash-next.html local models are kind of awesome now and everyone should be using them in addition to frontier models. I will build the stuff I want which includes optimizing local inference engines until they are at my hardware ceiling. I use this capacity in my house to do reversing, security research, and internal OpenClaw type stuff I find useful.
I agree that reply was unnecessarily rude, but... idk man. I'm a huge cheerleader for Google [1], use 3.1 Pro via AI studio, I'm on a Pro plan... and I can't access this model? Not even a "4 chats per hour" type thing?? I mean, I have video generation access for some reason (no good for me), but Google's policies are baffling to say the least. Ofc I know this isn't your fault in person, but I really wish Google would get its shit together. ...As a long time tech enthusiast I should probably stop being so delusional. Heh (cries internally) 1: lol I know who cheers for a trillion dollar company but I'd rather not cheer for OpenAI
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Yeah, what I was trying to say is "the criticism doesn't make sense to me because I forget because I have access to the good stuff." As a Google employee my defense is it's hard for a company this big to move fast, but I can understand how Google customers would be annoyed.
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Didn’t check agy or AI studio, but at least Argon is available in Gemini page/app.
Well, I have to change the way I write at times because my comment gets automatically flagged. :/ Not fun.
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this happens to me as well, meanwhile Pangram claims their false positive rate is 1 in 24000 as if that should be practically negligeable
Are you suggesting it’s BETTER than their competitors? Because if it’s not, and it’s not available to all paying users (Right now, it’s only available to Ultra users), then they are behind the curve if they’re treating it like Fable. It’s tone deaf.
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FWIW, it's available via API to everyone. (I just tested it out via OpenRouter). Whether it's actually better than OAI/Anthropic offerings, probably not, but if Google has managed to get back to parity, that's good for competition, prices, and increased model performance in the future. Three strong western competitors is better than two.
Redesigning source control at Anthropic (anthropic.com)
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How much is the sheer volume of slop code that AI generates reduced by if you simply specify that you want it to be both minimalist and readable, getting it to think hard about architecture and completely rearchitecting requirements change? Surely if AI is so smart and useful it should be able to manage that?
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> As our monorepo grows, it increasingly doesn’t fit that design space. The history of our main branch alone is almost 100 GB The first thing that hits me is, did you consider not going all in on a monorepo? I know it has been the trend in general, but it seems a bit of a red flag when you go from "let's have a monorepo it will make merging easier" to "let's redesign version control because merging is too hard now" without the middle question "should we really have a monorepo?" As a derivative thought I'm curious if AI tooling is tipping people more towards monorepos now since it gives the agent the whole context of the app in one go? Or is this independent - I can easily check out 5 repos in one directory and run an agent there.
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The Scion project seems like a great example of identifying and addressing scaling issues (just in time, it seems). Just 7 engineers! It makes me think I'd pay Anthropic $300K/year to work on such problems. But it's a sad example, for open-source and for small engineering companies. Instead of infrastructure being more easily shared with the collective, or valued enough to build a business, now companies can tailor even major infrastructure to their own needs, and avoid all that coordination. I'm glad they publish their notes to encourage others, but I suspect we're entering an epoch where confidentiality matters most. Anthropic's problem was merging code at scale, but the scale problem I have with SCM is really merging all the related docs; these get lost in a stream of a forest of comments, PR's, and documentation, all of which (like a wiki) goes rapidly out of date before anyone notices because none of it is automatically correlated.
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> As our monorepo grows, it increasingly doesn’t fit that design space. The history of our main branch alone is almost 100 GB, and a compressed working copy is over 25 GB. We perform on the order of 25 million code checkouts per day for CI, before counting developer environments, agent sandboxes, and research jobs. Fetched naively, that would be over 600 PB of git traffic per day. I read this and wonder what their agents have committed into the repo that people aren't looking at for _that much size_? Do they have a ton of binary assets in there or something??
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I suppose massive churn in commits would also bloat the history. Not sure they should be proud of these numbers, they’re a sign of dysfunction.
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This sounds more like a trash pile than a source control system. Anthropic is spewing out code for codes sake. They cant possibly manage it, the more they generate the more they will realize they are just regurgitating training data for no real purpose that can serve anyone. And for this they buy disk? Maybe this is irresponsible use of technology.
My first real job was at Oracle. At the time Oracle started to write their own source control system (and move off of clearcase, which was a very reasonable thing to do). The guy who ran that project called it his "$LASTNAME law" that every large company will at some point write their own source control system. I laughed. About a year later I went to Google, and within a couple of years Google also did the same thing. Not at all surprised. Git was just good enough (and cheap enough) the companies didn't need to do this to escape the {phsyical scaling, cost scaling} problems that most commercial SCM systems had.
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Cursor's blog on scaling Git makes me think that Anthropic just likes reinventing the wheel with their infinite token capacity: https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale Cursor scaled git to way more writes/s than Anthropic did with their rewrite.
I guess Anthropic are not IEC-62443-4-1 compliant, because I doubt a human reads and understands every single line of those 30,000 merges a day. What then?
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Simple - hire 30k Indians, tell each of them to understand one line of code.
This is... surprisingly small? From what I recall, Google's repo is closer to 80 terabytes.
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The issue is the growth rate; we'll approach that size in a (relatively) short amount of time if it keeps up and we have to be ready. It's also self-fulfilling in a way, since Scion was so much faster, we are able to write more code...which puts more pressure on Scion.
This article doesn't do a very good job of convincing me that git is technically incapable of handling the described workload. There are a lot of steps between vanilla git and building your own VCS from zero. If I was an investor I would be on the phone with Dario asking why we are wasting engineering talent on reinventing source control and churning the product with 30k pulls per day.
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>If I was an investor I would be on the phone with Dario asking why we are wasting engineering talent on reinventing source control and churning the product with 30k pulls per day. To be able to write PR pieces, like TFA.
Slightly OT, but it‘s interesting and nice to see that Anthropic‘s own blog posts don‘t have many AI prose tells (or Claude-isms) in them.
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100% handwritten!
I don't get one thing, if agents are so great at developing software at massive scale, why wouldn't Anthropic, instead of just selling tokens to other companies to use its agents, let those agents develop highly profitable services for Anthropic to support their IPO valuation or not require raising money at all? For example, a competitor to Google search.
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Same reason banks sell mortgages rather than just buying all the homes.
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Probably because the shovel Anthropic is selling may not be as good as they claim it to be.
If investment managers are so good at investing why don’t they just make money for themselves instead of trying to get people to invest with them?
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Leverage. Because fees as a manager of someone else’s money can be higher than the full amount of the returns if it were just your own money. Fees on someone else’s capital: 1% of 20% of 1bn = 2m Returns on your own capital: 20% of 1m = 200k
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> If investment managers are so good at investing why don’t they just make money for themselves instead of trying to get people to invest with them? The good ones do. Citadel Securities, Renaissance, Jane Street, HRT, Jump, consistently do 50%+ annual returns over the past 15-20 years. They obviously don’t accept outside investor money. Now, hedge funds that accept outside money like DE Shaw, Bridgewater and shit, yeah, they barely outperform S&P500.
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Well that's actually true though. The very very few investors that are good at investing do invest their own money. The vast majority of investors are no better than index funds.
> 30k merges per day > 25 million CI checkouts 833 checkouts for every merge? That's quite a few. Even accounting for multiple environments at different stages of production readiness, that's pretty weird.
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In a repo these large, there are a lot of tests and pipelines that need to run as this code is tested, built, and deployed. Each test shard we run in parallel needs to check out the code, for example.
How about 100GB disk space for a checkout. That's pretty weird too. Makes you wonder if they're the best stewards for code. Makes you wonder about turning claude loose on your codebase.
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The build directory for compiled code probably gets accidentally checked in and then removed 10 times a day.
So it's a SVN/Perforce style server based VCS with a more modern design. Sounds exactly like Lore from Epic Games but with zero production use outside the company and no support for non text assets. And they won't release the code.
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> And they won't release the code. This is the weirdest part, because you know, coding is solved, so anyone could create their own one, so why not publish it?
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They want you to vibecode this using Claude.
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Yeah pretty much Perforce.
Perforce was fine. It just had a terrible ui and didn’t allow me to code on the beach. If I were still manually merging conflicts the p4merge tool was GOAT I used it in git
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https://git-scm.com/docs/git-p4
What is are the benefits of supporting extremely high churn rate in version control? What is the code doing ? What problems are being solved? Are changing requirements the driving factor, and if so, why are requirement changes accelerating? > ..., the latent demand for merging code is practically infinite, and every bottleneck we remove immediately leads to a further increase in the amount of code we produce. If the goal is to write software which solves real problems, how can the demand for code grow infinitely?
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I think that they're essentially solving the wrong problem. Imagine that you have git but you don't even have a concept of programming language more complex than assembly. All your commits and git history are pure assembly. Everything is cool, until one day C++20 randomly spawns into existence, and a bunch of guys decide to use it in the company. The issue is, the compiler generates so much assembly, that your existing workflow cannot keep up with it. Your assembly git repo grows into hundreds of gigabytes, with PRs that are pretty much complete rewrites coming every single day and there's no way to review any of that shit. What Anthropic is doing is redoing git from scratch so that it can handle all that assembly, while the correct thing to do is to commit C++ code into the repo, with deep trust that you'll never hit a bug in the compiler - basically impossible for initial versions of compilers, taken for granted nowadays. What I'm saying is, Anthropic should create a versioning system for prompts, because they are the true "source code". Given the same prompt and the same sequence of random numbers, LLM will generate exactly the same code, which sounds awfully close to how compilers work. Once in a while put the generated code as a point of reference+ caching and presto.
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Except they don’t right? They aren’t deterministic. All the hypemaxxers over at twitter keep saying you need a way for the agent to verify the result itself. Would that be another prompt then?
I agree with the sentiment, and the answer to all these questions is usually ‘just wait 6 more months’. Like what is tangibly, actually better in the real world right now with AI? Whenever I ask this question people pipe up with a side project or a new SaaS, but that stuff is just not very important compared to the things you called out. Food, services, QOL. It seems to me like the AI labs are just pushing the envelope with blind faith that”something” will happen if they just get enough development speed. Nobody seems to have a coherent idea of what that something is.
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> Like what is tangibly, actually better in the real world right now with AI? I took a photo of a tree with chatgpt recently and asked it what species it was. That was kinda neat I guess. Someone forked a ps4 emulator with a bunch of Bloodborne specific improvements so its more playable on my setup. It's kind of okay for medical stuff.
It took a long time for the internet to result in things that improved life for in tangible ways.
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But the old internet never had so much negative impact on the world with so little upside.
Excuse me for throwing up this stupid idea, but if code changes per unit of time keep growing at this rate and are not slowing down with infinite merging demand, it seems that this repo will be in a constant state of continuous change and we constantly roll forward with automated code and obviously no direct human supervision, then why even have source control? Why not just let software be fluid and, like Heraclitus river, never step twice in the same repo.
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Funny you mention that, that’s actually the direction I’m taking with the architecture that I’m building In fact most of the architecture work I’m building, assumes that there will not be a human reading code, they read (effectively) UML and data diagrams so most of the interesting parts I’m working on now are how do you make code blazingly fast, formally verified and memory safe if you remove the constraint of human interpretability of machine instruction
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My mental model, for what it's worth, is this: - deterministic foundation - non-deterministic on top of it operating against (and building) it That is, the deterministic part is the platform that is being built and that non-deterministic agents will use and build it, but that layer is a key part of how they do work and will continue to be.
Perhaps I'm dense but I don't see how any of that answers the question "why even have source control?"
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I think the answer is that they don't, indeed, need source control but just a way to let their agents resolve editing conflicts. It's basically yet another message board.
But Piper is a reimplementation of perforce which makes me wonder why they couldn't just license it. Why does it make sense to do this. Perforce should scale to the level they're talking about. Google were using it even when they had many tens of thousands of developers and multiple changesets per second and presumably it got better since then
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Google implemented Piper because Perforce simply didn't scale well. In the years since, P4 has barely improved at all. Licensing P4 would not help and Google doesn't offer Piper licenses.
Agents use source control, too. It's a pretty important part of the development process to understand how code has changed. For example, you can imagine, at the extreme, that agents could get caught in code change loops: a code change seems appropriate, it is implemented, it turns out there's some external factor which makes it not appropriate, the change is reverted, then that same code change seems appropriate again, etc. Obviously you can prevent that from occurring with some extra infrastructure in-place, but at that point you're basically creating source control.
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I’m not advocating for no source control, but you can avoid loops like this with Architectural Decision Records. If you’re real lazy, let the agent maintain the ADRs and they will usually call out when these “painted into a corner” scenarios happen and you can then reason them around it.
> Agents use source control, too. This is true, but at 30,000 merges a day we're talking about nearly 1 million merges a month, and purely autonomous agentic merges tend to be noisy. Is this still a tractable problem, even for an agent? Do revisions older than a few days, other than perhaps release snapshots, have any relevance for such a process?
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Not all merges are equal, even if it's a monorepo, it's probably rare that you'd have to look at the whole codebase to implement a new feature or find the root cause of a bug. Once you start looking at the history of a specific folder, it becomes more tractable. Of course that does require some folder structure, and agents are not necessarily great at that, but they're still decent enough that you do end up with many folders not being impacted hour or even daily.
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I am not sure that I can agree with this at this scale, especially for the hotspots in the code. But I admit that I am speculating here.
> the operator would have to be more interested in understanding the root cause than in fixing the current form of the bug... Can you even do the latter without the former?
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You can "fix" it (make the current reproducer not reproduce it anymore).
Honest question: at this point, what do people do at Anthropic? It sounds like Claude loops on itself and must be pushing millions of lines of code changes per day. Even the humans can’t type commit fast enough. Are these people soon to be laid off?
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It's a daycare for software developers so that they don't get laid off/quit and go to a competitor
I'm also a bit confused what Anthropic needs all this code for. Their main product is selling access to their model, but the model isn't comprised of code, it's a bunch of weights right? So the code is for the stuff around the model, claude CLI, the website, the API... that probably shouldn't be infinitely growing right? Is there a bunch of code they are using as part of training, or as pre-processing or post-processing the requests to the model?
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I did RL and evals at Amazon for a bit on Nova Forge (laid off in July! :D). I would have to push several thousand lines of code a day in new evaluations that our applied scientists requested since new ones are always being made along with having to create custom ones for whatever new model they were working on. Also, in RL, adding new environments for the agents to actually complete activates was also a shit ton of lines of code. So if I had to guess, just adding new stuff around model training and testing alone accounts for a ton of these changes.
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Probably lots of internal competitor apps ready to release to wipe out SaaS/Adobe/etc. companies.
The last jobs left for humans will be those dedicated to keeping AI under human control. By definition, that's the one thing we can't delegate to AI.
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aren't many harnesses designed to have agents police each other?
Sitting over an Anthropic (TM) developed, specialised 2 button keyboard accelerating the development further: [Yes] [Yes, and don't ask again]
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[fan out agents]
We're trending towards just building the thing fast and getting feedback sooner on it. It's interesting to see end users actually trial a UI very early on instead of just being shown designs.
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In addition to that, solving for every approach to a problem to see what wins is also very interesting. The key, still, is shipping far less, too soon, to minimize cruft.
That many commits in a day I wouldn’t call it engineering. That’s basically brute forcing.
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Its gradient descent all the way down.
> as of September, we merged over 30,000 per day. Their Website/CLI seems keeping the same? What did they do?
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Presumably all the internal research and evaluation work. I imagine for each released model they have uncountable unreleased ones.
I though the basic idea was reasonable, until: > So we asked ourselves: if we designed source control with the fact that agents are always online in mind from the start, what would it look like? And > In Scion, every commit, rebase, or merge happens on the server I’ll pass. A big part of the theses of git and, even more so, jujitsu, is that you can build up a history entirely locally, making it reasonable to make tiny commits locally and then rework them, push them, or throw them away. Sure, in Anthropic’s world, it’s completely impossible to do anything without access to the inference API, so why not add another mandatory API? But I think this model sucks even in a pervasive AI world, and I don’t want to dig in deeper. This also sounds like a great way to have yet more security problems where your swarm of agents start cooperating more than you want them to. By all means, built a better system than git. In many respects, git sucks, and git upstream is not solving the major problems. But don’t lose the actual benefits of git! For that matter, I’ve seen the crap that the latest models will commit. Why on Earth should one’s VCS force the per-agent-instance system to upload the crap before even contemplating locally whether it’s a good idea? Maybe this is why Anthropic has so many commits per day. (Am I the only one who feels like most of the big AI labs are rapidly gradient-descending toward something that is nowhere near a globally optimal stack?) P.S. Only 30k commits per day? That’s not actually very many per employee. I’m suspicious that Anthropic’s real issues are that too many of them are giant cross-cutting messes and that git clone is too slow.
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One benefit of uploading things immediately is that you can launch a research job, run CI, or share code between all of your developer environments absolutely trivially. The commit hash "just works everywhere". There is a major benefit here and Scion does have some extra features not listed in this blog post, such as the ability to bundle these commits into useful, shareable workspaces that track the heads dynamically.
> "fetched naively" here means doing a full `git clone` on every need for `git checkout`, which of course nobody should do, It can be cheaper to do a full clone than a shallow one, because with the shallow one, you can't re-use packfiles. GitHub has fairly regularly asked people to stop doing shallow clones because it's harder on their servers than full ones.
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Makes sense. I wasn't suggesting that one should do a shallow clone though. If your company repo is 100 GB, it seems sensible to keep it cached locally on each machine once (100 GB isn't large for current NVMe disks), and `git fetch` the updates the normal way. Then checkouts don't fetch anything large.
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Ah, yes, you can do stuff like that too, for sure. At some point you still end up running into the issues the article talks about, all of these approaches only get you so far.
Often, I see 50 people all recording the same exact thing on their iphones. Rather than a single 200MB video, we create 10GB of data. Then I think about how many people are paying a subscription to Apple for icloud storage. The amount of photo storage being used is impressive. Automatic backup to icloud and server provisioning to reliably store it all is also impressive. I just wonder if it makes sense.
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Instead of 5 people buying 5 copies of a t shirt that they only wear once a week, why don't they just buy 1 copy and share it?
I posted to HN, and then my website was flooded with AI bot traffic (sammystraus.com)
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I am trying to do the same thing, but on purpose for https://notforhumans.pages.dev/
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I have tried a ton of stuff (Cloudflare, Anubis, fail2ban...) to combat the bots lately, but they all have their downsides, and users complained too much, so I just gave up. You simply can't win this arms race. So I have resorted to performance improvements on my server and serving every single request. Things are way smoother now.
> valuable traffic What's the value for the website maker in these? There's user value to it (rather than just value for Anthropic/OpenAI) but the whole point of these bots is to make sure nobody ever needs to visit your website.
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Tons of people click from ChatGPT! It's now the top referrer on most of my websites, and seems to be on path to overcoming Google soon (a ton of traffic from Google has vanished since the AI Overview rollout...).
It worked fine... on a small scale But it's one thing to swat flies versus fighting swarm of yellow jackets. Serving a 1MB file a million times a day on a small digitalocean droplet is not feasible. Let's just say it didn't scale. And AI bots usually come with beefier machines, and recover faster after a bomb.
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Why did you serve it from DigitalOcean? Why not a CDN?
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It's the content of the page, the raw html, that is replaced with a zipbomb. Example: https://example.com checks if you are a malicious bot, depending on the result, it will send you gzip html or gzipped bomb. So that can't be swapped or redirected to a CDN. The bots would simply ignore the redirect.
What is that improved strategy? :pray:
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Not telling you this time, Mr. Bot
Having the same issue with Bing bot. No idea why it's so eager to not behave.
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Microsoft has never understood consent
it's org-html-export-to-html babyyy lmao
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I've wanted to work with org mode for so long, but I can't simply bring myself to use emacs. Nothing personal. Org mode is awesome, tho.
haha im not naming names
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Is it SpokenFeeds?
The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s (ourworldindata.org)
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There's lots of amusingly Telegraph-esque outrage being posted here. But the article makes it clear that the reduction is due to reduction in demand, due in part to welcome improvements in efficiency, but also regrettable deindustrialization, and (neutral?) increased importing of electricity. Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies. I also wonder what the contribution of domestic solar and on-site industrial generation is? I'm a dev in a large manufacturing business and two of our three factory buildings are now covered in solar cells which power a lot of our operations. Some big industrial sites have on-site wind-powered generation too. Is that counted as generation in these stats? Or is it just manifested as reduced demand? (Edit: added "being posted" and "welcome" for clarity)
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> There's lots of amusingly Telegraph-esque outrage here. But the article makes it clear that the reduction is due to reduction in demand, due in part to improvements in efficiency, but also regrettable deindustrialization, and increased importing of electricity Right – those things aren't great. What's so amusing or outrageous about pointing that out? > Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies. Did the link say they were? Maybe I missed it.
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There are comments here saying yes, rationing is planned.
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I don't see any evidence for that. Just people saying it.
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The Telegraph-esque outrage in the comments here is explicitly people complaining about the idea of rationing their electricity, which as you point out is not suggested by any part of the article.
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> Did the link say they were? That seems like a red herring. By "here" I meant posts on this thread, not in the content of the article.
I was at a conference last year where one of the speakers was from National Grid. Not only these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease (even before AI, it was obvious that demand would go up as we are moving away from fossil fuel with both heating and transportation going electric). But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress. I saw the same messaging in France where the current president started his mandate with a grand programme to switch off a third of nuclear power plants. If anyone thinks adults are in charge, let alone engineers, you are greatly mistaken.
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Thanks. We have insane stupid politcians in charge of our energy, like the Tories and Ed Miliband who recently failed upwards into the Foreign Office. These guys couldn't care less about consumers and are obsessed with the enviroment and carbon. On the surface it sounds like a good thing to worry about the enviroment, but in reality government policy is insane and stupid. As one example, the UK in it's wisdom don't allow North Sea oil extraction, the Norweigans do. And guess who we are buying electricity from? On top of that, the UK's overall contribution to carbon emissions are insignificant compared to China. We just pay more money for electricity for no good reason. Obviously we use less electricity, we can't afford it. And Labour enviromentalists see that as a win.
Privatization might be an avoidable disaster, but nationalization is virtually guaranteed to make things worse. See: every time anything has ever been nationalized. There was a reason these things were sold of in the first place.
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Nationalization might be an avoidable disaster, but privatization is virtually guaranteed to make things worse. See: every time anything has ever been privatized. There was a reason these things were owned by the government in the first place.
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> There was a reason these things were sold of in the first place. Privatize profits, socialize costs. That is the main reason for nationalization. Western nations would not be so much in debt if they had assets. All assets were sold during neoliberal policies and the state was stripped from income. That is not going well, is it? Re-nationalization is the only option to have solvent states.
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>Privatize profits, socialize costs I hate that as well, it's anti free markets. It will always exist to some degree since infrastructure is necessary, but there has to be more accoutability. But i'm a Thatcherite in that I believe government should be as small as possible. They have no business being employers, owning property etc. Whatever they do own should be justified, and you cannot justify having a major proportion of the population and national industries and companies run by government as was the case in Britain in the 70's and early 80's. The alternative philosophy, basically socialism and socialism adjacent ideas that all critical national infrustructure should be run by the government imho relies at it's core the idea that it's just and proper for this to be the case since the government is the collectivevoice of the people, and the government owning something is as though the citizens of the nation own it. Which is... for lack of nicer words, major copium. Then you have the other point, which is connected with the first, that more often then not nationalized industries are terribly run. And that's by design. In some cases nationalizing something may be necessary, but that should always be veiwed as a last resort, something to be avoided.
> "I was at a conference ... these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease" For a long time (several decades) electricity demand has been decreasing in the UK, largely due to efficiency improvements. But now days pretty much everyone agrees that electricity demand will increase significantly in the future due to electrification. The UK has been planning for this for some time so if this guy was really from National Grid, he sounds like a bit of a rogue! > "their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like" No, nobody is suggesting that the grid will ever cut off power to anybody - certainly not domestic customers. The idea is that in a smart grid, big industrial customers often have the ability to temporarily reduce demand for heat or cooling or whatever. So if there is a signal from the grid that demand needs to be cut, automated industrial systems can (and already do) do that. The same goes for your car charging, water heating, etc. These things can automatically slow down during demand peaks in response to a signal from the grid, and you probably won't notice or care. You'll still be able to wash your dishes any time you want! This is all definitely a good thing. A huge part of the cost of running the grid is in handling the biggest demand peaks, which might only occur for an hour or two per day a few times per year. If the peaks can be reduced and demand becomes smoother, then energy becomes cheaper.
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Here is a recent article about a small town in western Massachusetts. The headline is about the natural gas feeds be at saturation for the town. Buried in the article is a comment about our electricity also being bumping against capacity. National Grid is the electric provider. I have been expanding solar thermal because it’s free of both of these constraints. https://www.iberkshires.com/story/83932/Williamstown-s-Gas-Supply-Is-at-Capacity-and-Economic-Development-Is-at-Stake.html H
Why is it inevitability? Couldn't we just use our tech advancements to move to cleaner energy, move heavy industry to the moon, and clean up the planet?
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I was thinking more disassembling the planet for a Dyson swarm myself.
> "I want to use my washing machine whenever I want" sounds like a very poor reason to destroy the environment. What the heck? Where is your evidence that using washing machines at inconvenient times is going to destroy the environment? If your argument is that any use of electricity from fossil fuels is destroying the environment, then nobody should even be charging their phones at night. Time-shifting washing machines isn't going to fix carbon emissions since they're going to be emissions at any time of the day. I don't know how you guys in Europe managed to gaslight yourselves into justifying regression of social and technological development. A lot of these moral arguments do not make sense. You said it yourself -- industry is incentivized to convince the public to use less electricity during peak hours so they can pay less. It's pretty much a psyop by capitalists. And for some reason you're shilling for them even though presumably you're paid exactly zero buckaroos
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> I don't know how you guys in Europe managed to gaslight yourselves into justifying regression of social and technological development Many of us believe that the alternative is a serious risk of severe climate change that would be much more disruptive. Not being able to use your washing machine at night is going to seem like the smallest of minor inconveniences if crops start failing and we don't have food, or cites end up underwater triggering mass migration into neighbouring areas and that leads to large scale societal conflict. Of course, if you don't believe that those things will happen then caring about climate change seems irrational. But belief in (anthropogenic) climate change is the mainstream view on all sides of the political spectrum in most of Europe.
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I've been receiving tons of free or negative rate energy for the last few years because of time of day pricing and as a result have driven thousands of miles at near zero fuel cost. It's automated for me so all I have to do is plug my car in. I certainly don't view the windless day where the price is a little higher than average as a cause not to use my washing machine as on average I win out. I'm not sure it's useful generalising a continent of peoples political opinions but I see renewables, storage and smart grids as really new tools that society previously had no access to, it's a massive carrot not a stick.
There's a weird "degrowth" mindset that has taken hold in progressive circles in many countries lately. I don't understand them at all, trying to communicate with them is like dealing with an alien species.
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It's not weird. Not politically. They know since the 80s they can't match growth of a capitalist society, they don't want that kind of society, so instead of considering their priorities, they market disadvantage as advantage. It makes perfect sense if gaining power is the prime concern.
Here in the UK the debate around energy is really unbelievably stupid. It's not just degrowth mindset, but the dogmatic refusal to be pragmatic on energy. Given most UK homes are heated by gas and we have a lot of gas-powered power plants, it makes no sense for us to import natural gas where we can avoid it (especially LNG) as it's more costly and less green than domestic production. Plus, domestic production means more domestic jobs and additional tax revenues. It seems to me there's basically no upside of us refusing to exploit what we can of the North Sea. It's just people taking an ideological dislike to us doing it domestically because "fossil fuels = bad". Some people also just seem wildly misinformed. For example, our media seems to think 50% of our energy problems stem from it being priced wrong. I guess we have the same problem with housing – maybe everyone could have a home if we just sold them for less. It's really very stupid.
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The North Sea is a mature basin and there isn't that much gas left in the UK sectors
> add some insulation to your house, Adding insulation is expensive, and awkward. If you have cavity walls that are uninsulated, it needs to be done right. If you have single skim walls you either do external cladding (and change the outside of your building), or build an internal stud wall and insulate that, which is very effective but costs a decent amount, reduces internal floor space, and requires a full redecoration after.
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Lime plaster with cork in it works, it's just a messy retrofit Lime render with cork is the outside version
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> Adding insulation is expensive, and awkward. Expensive short term, life saving long term. > requires a full redecoration after Tell me that you are rich without telling me that you are.
>This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me. I assume you're in good health, not poor, in a stable living arrangement, etc. The burden of "minor personal inconveniences" depends greatly on how many inconveniences you already suffer. Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use.
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> Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use. That is exactly the people reducing expenses even when they know that will be extremely painful. That is why the poor are poor, because they cannot afford that kind basic expense. They need to choose between heating and food. "Let's consume more" for the poor. It is a grotesque argument.
> Somebody working two jobs doesn't have much spare energy for optimizing utility use. Most of us don't. But smart meters are free in the UK, and if there was a way for my washing machine to have a 3h window overnight to run in to be done for 7:30 I'd do it in a heartbeat. Same for my dishwasher. Heating is a bigger issue.
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> and if there was a way for my washing machine to have a 3h window overnight to run in to be done for 7:30 I'd do it in a heartbeat. I think most of these appliances sold today have at least some sort of "delay start" function. We use that to do exactly what you describe. Not even for nght tariff, it's just convenient to time it like that.
You probably want your washing machine to finish when you'll be ready to take the clothes out, rather than leave them sitting damp in the machine. There should be plenty of opportunity to load shift with other things though, a dishwasher as you mentioned, or a fridge or a storage heater or a charger for your electric car. All can be done with minimal inconvenience to the user.
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> leave them sitting damp in the machine. Rinse hold solves this. Even the cheapest machines have it.
> "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house" The UK has the oldest housing stock in Europe, and most likely in the world. [0] Roughly 30% of the stock is single-skin, without a cavity. While it's not impossible to insulate such walls, it's generally inadvisable for many reasons. The same goes for the roofs of these houses; although you will find many companies willing to spray your roof with foam or other forms of thermal sealing, those roofs were never designed to be insulated, causing other potentially catastrophic problems once it's been done. Generally, the poorest and oldest people in society occupy these houses, but no matter; the government will ban the sale of gas boilers to coerce them in to installing heat pumps, despite them being incompatible with the existing pipework and radiators. 0: https://files.bregroup.com/bretrust/The-Housing-Stock-of-the-United-Kingdom_Report_BRE-Trust.pdf
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> While it's not impossible to insulate such walls, it's generally inadvisable for many reasons Lime plaster with cork in it is fine way to insulate these buildings. It won't be as good as modern materials but is an improvement and is breathable > Generally, the poorest and oldest people in society occupy these houses, I own one of these houses – single skin, 200yr old farm workers cottage – I'm neither poor or that old Much of the expensive old housing in London, Bath etc is single skin too
Nobody is talking about banning the sale of gas boilers. What is happening is that new builds will have to be built with heat pumps from (if memory serves) 2035. Please don't scaremonger. Further, it is possible to run a heat pump at high temperatures: some use refrigerants specifically designed to do this relatively efficiently.
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> new builds will have to be built with heat pumps from (if memory serves) 2035. England: from 24 March 2027 Scotland: since 1 April 2024. The legislation doesn't mandate heat pumps specifically, it mandates >=75% lower carbon emissions than homes built to the 2013 standards, which effectively requires heat pumps, solar panels, and significantly improved insulation. Build and running costs aren't measured, it's quite possible new homes will cost more to buy and run, and could be smaller to compensate. You remember "2035" because in 2021 the government announced it "wanted" to ban gas boilers entirety by that date: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58959045 ... but as far as I know, never enacted legislation to ban their sale or fitting in existing houses. And that aspirational policy has been announced as dropped multiple times, at least since last July, most recently today
> Nobody is talking about banning the sale of gas boilers. Several energy suppliers websites have pages dedicated to this very topic. The current 2035 target originates in the ministerial Heat and building strategy policy paper (2020): "Our ambition is to phase out the installation of natural gas boilers beyond 2035." In the Annex: Aiming to phase out the installation of new and replacement natural gas boilers from 2035, once costs of low-carbon alternatives have fallen, in line with the natural replacement cycle, including any hydrogen-ready boilers in areas not converting to hydrogen, to ensure that all heating systems used in 2050 are compatible with Net Zero. Given the energy policy of the UK, which to many engineers makes absolutely no sense at all, it's impossible to predict what will actually come out of the policy sausage factory next.
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Hydrogen is a dead end for domestic gas Eventually everyone will need to switch from gas because as the number of heat pumps rise then number of gas consumers fall and the infrastructure costs for them will become uneconomic
How exactly would a heatpump be incompatible with existing pipework and radiators? I see them installed into all kinds of houses, summer cottages and whatever no problem.
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What the other comment said, but more technically, the amount of heat transferred is proportional to delta-T. So older radiators have less surface area, relying on hotter water to transfer enough heat energy to make up for the heat loss of the building. Meanwhile the efficiency (COP) of a heat pump drops the higher its temperature differential is. So trying to keep the water loop temperature the same is a non-starter. (The same problem can happen with high efficiency condensing natural gas boilers which have much lower flue temperatures) (From an American perspective although I'll convert the units) - older radiator systems were designed for water temps of around 80C, room temp around 20C, so that is 60C (60 K/Kelvin, really) delta-T. Whereas if a heat pump wants to put out 50C water for half the delta-T (30K), you then need twice the amount of radiator surface area to transfer the same amount of heat. The system will work fine in the shoulder seasons when not much heat is required, but at the coldest nights design temperature it will not be able to keep up and your indoor air temperature will then drop despite the heat being on. (Pipe sizing enters into it as well but isn't as straightforward to explain)
Wow. Obviously there are humidity differences during different seasons, but 23°C is probably the limit of "this is uncomfortably warm" for me if I set my thermostat above that.
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Me too, but my husband and guests are clearly uncomfortably cold at my preferred 66/67, and my sister with poor circulation just about has her hands go numb.
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And to what temperature do you set your AC in the summer?
> Would it really have a strong negative impact on your life to run your dryer overnight Absolutely. That thing is loud .
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That's a pretty solvable problem, since we're spending money to solve problems.
Finally a reasonable objection. What if manufacturers developed quieter dryers?
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If you live in a small house or condo it's still going to be loud enough to wake you up in the middle of the night when it starts. It's a bit more difficult than making a quiet dishwasher (which I'd still find too loud to start running in the middle of the night) since a dryer has to move a bunch of heavy, wet clothing around and run a fairly strong fan to avoid starting a fire.
Notably low pressure sodium is more lumens per watt than a typical LED. The main energy saver is simply that the newer LED lights are dimmer!
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Why there weren't dimmer low pressure sodium lights?
It’s just plain expensive thanks to the shitty price everything by most expensive source method. Of course people minimise use Currently paying 0.33 usd a unit.
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The spot price is set according to the most expensive source but that is not the same thing as the price the consumer pays. So for example, for wind power the consumer effectively pays the CfD strike price, largely irrespective of the spot price. Fwiw, I do agree we have a problem with power being too expensive, but it's more complex than just the consumer pays the most expensive source.
Look into a battery + inverter + optional solar on a time of use tariff, you can be always off peak. Payback probably isn't very long.
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Can't - building prohibits everything along those lines
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Has anyone done this on the cheap? I've gotten a few quotes with a payback period of 8-12 years, which isn't great.
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Yeah, I bought an inverter from eBay, and a battery from AliExpress. Also signed up to axle energy to reduce payback period. Most people would need an electrician to connect it though. If you just asked an electrician for a new circuit with a simple route to an isolator, it wouldn't be expensive.
Solar is great. I'm highly skeptical that a battery + inverter (w/o solar), using time-of-use for payback would ever make pure financial sense. In fact, if it DID make financial sense, wouldn't companies already be buying up empty/cheap space and then turning a profit after the payback period? Why aren't they? There are other reasons to do this, but purely on the financial side, I'd want to see the numbers on this one. Again, this isn't about solar, the claim was about battery + inverter + time-of-use paying for itself.
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> I'm highly skeptical that a battery + inverter (w/o solar), using time-of-use for payback would ever make pure financial sense. Ever? Batteries are 10x cheaper today than they were ~a decade ago. If that trend continues for even a little longer, they'll be absolute no-brainer like solar is today within the next 5 years. 2026 seems to be roughly the break-even point. And whether it's worth it depends on where you live (greatly affects the cost of both installing a system, and buying energy from the grid).
Balancing auctions are pay-as-bid, the alternative is lights-off. Capacity auctions are iirc pay as clear. Maybe day ahead as well. One thing to consider as well is that without some external stimulus scheme all of the fossil/nuclear (even ignoring CFD schemes) would immediately go bust IIRC if the market was solely pay-as-bid because wind and solar are cheap but extremely spotty so the price would either be 0 or 1000, probably not the latter long enough to keep the gas plants we currently rely on in business => no more power on cold calm nights.
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Well whatever the hell they're doing on pricing it's not working. Having huge amounts of wind, strong interconnects, gas fields near by and still ending up tied for 3rd most expensive elec is ridiculous. Especially given how good storage is looking relative to gas lately [0]. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/ [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1x0tds4/4hour_battery_storage_is_cheaper_to_install_than/
Electricity in the UK has been reliable my entire life. Lived in the UK for 30 of the last 50 years and can remember four or five power cuts.
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We’ve had 5 that I know about this year (village)
They arent going without. Blackouts/brownouts are exceptionally rare in the UK.
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That's not the only way to go without. Cutting back on your electricity usage because your utility bill is getting too high is another way to do it. Sometimes that's fine if you're just reducing waste. However other times it could mean that you can't keep your house at a reasonable temperature because you can't afford to run your heater/air conditioning enough. That's a form of going without.
No it's a catastrophic failure of planning and institutional nerve.
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There are so many great companies that were in existence in Britain that were as good as any company in the world. And most of them have folded up like a cheap suit. Note: the Brits aren’t alone. The thing that hurts is that Great Britain had access to the North Sea oil and basically squandered it. Their partner/peer across the North Sea, Norway, had a plan and they executed very well to the derision of many economic purists/conservatives even today because they didn’t give the gentry class the share they wanted. There are many companies that have folded or who are in reduced circumstances in the United States. Many of them were dominant after the war. And they were on top of their game, but despite being on the top, the management team wanted to set themselves up and just wanted to milk the proceeds and primarily stick them into their pockets. US Steel, Xerox, Kodak, IBM, Intel Microsoft, Motorola Schaumburg, Illinois let’s be honest, most of these companies stagnated at the top, in many areas of modern technology, being on top isn’t the end it’s just the start. of an endless process on a treadmill for as long as you are in existence, as a company. Which is the main reason why Apple had better take the design and engineering of memory in house the treadmill never stops.
Isn’t most of the housing in the UK from the 1970’s too?
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About half the homes I've lived in (maybe a dozen?) were built before WW1. Lots of Victorian conversions.
Thunderbird for iOS (blog.thunderbird.net)
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Are you guys using emails?
What exactly is the Thunderbird team doing that I can't vibe-code with my special friend Claude? Why does this software justify a blog post about a "first look". What am I missing that is so exciting? I don't understand what is going on here that is so neat. There's nothing here I can't pump out in a week or two at worst. I'm confused at everyone's excitement because it's become a lot cheaper to write software like this. Maybe for all the folks world-wide that aren't up to speed with modern practices, it's helpful to have an iOS app. Am I talking like the guy that dissed Drew Houston, saying oh I can put together sshfs and a couple other things and build out Dropbox. Drew rightly corrected the engineer on ycombinator many years ago to say that end users want a finished product not a bunch of tools. But this is a new era where you can vibe-code this very quickly for iOS.
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I am confused by your comment. Is it modern practice to vibe code everything these days instead of installing an app developed and maintained by a team? Do you expect everybody to be vibe coding their own software now?
Do most Apple users not just use the Gmail apps and web app? I haven't set up an email client in 20 years
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I don’t know what most do, but I certainly prefer the default Mail.app over the vendor-specific mail apps. If you’re already using one of the major providers (GMail, Outlook365, etc.), there isn’t much to configure; you go to Mail Accounts , click your provider like Google or Microsoft, and login on their website to authenticate.
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Oh for sure. Huge assumption on my part. I just feel like 90% of people I work and interact with have a gmail account, and the last 5 companies I've worked at used gmail. I think the last time I setup Apple Mail was for my Grandma so she could see her old Cox account emails and Gmail emails in the same app.
From what I've heard though, Mail has pretty horrible searching in Apple land. Just for that, it may be worth it to look at alternatives.
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It depends on your provider, unfortunately. If you use their iCloud mail service, search works fine – it appears to have some way to do server-side search for their own email.
If this supports JMAP (I hope so since its aimed to be a Thundermail client) then I'll give this a whirl with my Fastmail account
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I tried but got an oauth error :-/ Hopefully it works soon!
why do people use Thunderbird in general? i never found a use for it. now that there's IOS app, maybe.
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On my desktop, because I download my mail, store it on my laptop, backup it. Nothing is left on the servers of my email provider.
Editable from field is also the only reason I was using it with protonmail. I can't remember if it was a protonmail limitation or a Thunderbird one that meant I had to pre-add any email addresses before I could send any messages from them though. Now I'm on fastmail, the from address is an input box that I can put anything into.
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If by "input box" you mean "drop down list" and by "anything" you mean "any of my account's configured email addresses" then yes.. but FastMail doesn't just let you put anything in the From field - on the web or Android as far as what my subscription shows me.
Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome (9to5mac.com)
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I had to quit using desktop Safari because it essentially quit working. The problem had something to do with icloud. Apple assumes everyone is using icloud I imagine and does not handle corner cases for folks with full icloud disks or improper setups. I have an paid icloud subscription now, but I haven't looked back.
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Why don't they just say "c'mon, get us even more than $20B per year please". That's really whats going on here. source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-dodged-a-20-billion-hit-thanks-to-google-antitrust-ruling-163056806.html
I use all three browsers on a daily basis. Chrome for accessing google owned properties and things I click on from Google search, Safari for reddit and hacker news, and Firefox for everything else. Safari is always the best on my Mac, but my complaint has always been the lack of plugins. But just now I ported one of my favorite plugins from Chrome to Safari using ChatGPT. I told it I already have it installed in Chrome so it can get the source code there, and then told it to port it and install it. After 20 minutes and few bucks in tokens (estimated, I actually used my 6% of my $20/mo plan), I have Session Buddy in Safari. So maybe the plugins aren't a problem anymore...
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I ported one of my favorite plugins from Chrome to Safari using ChatGPT. Why use ChatGPT? Safari has a built-in plugin builder now.
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1. I didn't know it exists. Now that I do and I looked into it... 2. I have an M1 chip and I'm not sure it's supported. 3. ChatGPT can open both browers, not sure if Safari plugin builder can But if it does all those things, great. My point was more that plugins won't be a problem anymore because AI can build them.
It was to Mojave, and downgrading was a whole task in itself, apple really did not want me to do it.
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[delayed]
How many people in this thread would dump their Android for an iPhone if they: - allowed real 3rd party browser engines - let you uninstall all the apple bloatware apps
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let you uninstall all the apple bloatware apps Which Apple apps can't be removed?
I use safari regularly and it has not really kept up. All kinds of stuff that is partly broken for rendering. Especially on heavily dynamic sites. Chrome at least works for any web standard which IE did not.
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I have never cursed at a website for a rendering issue. I have cursed too many websites to count because of their broken form designs (like assuming a particular postcode format) or reliance on cookies from ad vendors for basic functionality. If your website needs to generate “a new google recaptcha cookie” (whatever that means) before I can enter payment info, then sorry, no es bueno.
Why don't they lean into ad blockers and making the web less shitty? Is it because the web staying shitty makes people use apps instead?
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It's because with the way that the most capable adblockers are built, they can't function without injecting code into every page and intercepting traffic. The privacy implications for someone installing an adblocker extension with malicious intent (or more commonly, a formerly legit blocker gets bought and gets turned malicious in an update) are dire.
First let us install other browser engines on iOS, and then we can talk. Safari has the most obscene monopoly of any browser ever. IE 6 came pre-installed on windows machines, but you could always install Mosaic or such. Google Chromebooks come with Chrome as the only default browser, but you can still run Firefox on Chromebooks just fine (even in two different ways, the supported android app version, and the semi-supported linux terminal + launching firefox that way). Heck, iOS's monopolistic behavior is so bad that multiple regions (the EU + Japan) have already ruled against their behavior, though in reality Apple has complied in a way that makes it impossible to actually make a second browser engine for iOS still (going against the spirit of the law, but the courts haven't caught up to them yet). Safari is also an awful browser in that it requires someone to buy an expensive machine to see if their site works on it. I can run a windows trial copy in a VM to see if my site works in IE, I can run Chrome or Firefox on linux to verify if my site works in them. I can install a free android emulator on any common OS to see that my site renders right in those. But Apple doesn't give me a legal way to freely run an iOS simulator nor even a macOS VM on my linux machine, I have to pay money, to buy their hardware to see if my site will work on Safari. And even worse, Safari is the browser with the largest number of rendering bugs and quirks currently, while also having a huge number of users (since iOS users can't install another browser), so any web developers are basically forced to shell out for apple hardware.
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The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice. As the only major platform that hasn’t been functionally taken over by Chrome/chromium, iOS represents the last real defensive line against Google owning the web. Remember, you are a web developer, not a chrome platform developer. Don’t be complicit in Google’s slow-moving coup. The only people who complain about Safari are lazy web developers who fail to appreciate what it means for the web to be an open platform. Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.
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Safari is a dirty monopolist on mobile just as much as Chrome is on desktop.
>Safari is also an awful browser in that it requires someone to buy an expensive machine to see if their site works on it. I remember a long time ago they used to make a Windows version of Safari you could download and install, but at some point they stopped.
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They still have webkit builds for Windows, and you still don't need to buy anything special to run it. I think they also have a (mostly?) headless one, and a mini-browser which is intended to test the engine (so it doesn't have things like bookmarks or profiles or anything like that, a good fit). Similar options exist for FireFox and Chromium so it's not really a Safari/Webkit special. Usually gets used when you use a standard containerised browser testing CI step. Either way, if someone is still manually testing their website instead of using a standard automated testing system you're probably not really in a league where this matters anyway.. and if they are, you probably have a device farm already. Not sure where the "it is so important, I have to buy a device -- oh wait, important thing might require me to spend money, how will I survive!" niche is.
Agree that it should be easier to test on safari from other platforms. But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS. I can’t make it website owners problem that their site doesn’t work on non-Google browser. Apple can. Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything. Im happy if Google never has that amount of control. We don’t know how bad it could have been, we have enough privacy issues already.
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> But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS. Easy. Just legislate that the only browser allowed on iPhones is Firefox. That way, Chrome can't monopolize the web, and iPhone users get to have a decent browser.
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> But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS. It's my device. I should be able to whatever the hell I want with it.
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You bought it knowing that you couldn’t.
Apple isn't the most dominant business on earth, so maybe they can't do anything in violation of antitrust? Not how it works. You define a relevant market, and the market of iPhone users (which a stable market, there are barriers to just switching to android tomorrow) can be used for evaluation.
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> and the market of iPhone users (which a stable market, there are barriers to just switching to android tomorrow) can be used for evaluation. Which legal framework does this perspective come from? Maybe Europe? Do you have a reference for this? It goes against case law [1]: > Judge Rogers concluded that Apple was not a monopoly and mostly a duopoly alongside Google, with potential competition to come from Nintendo and Google Stadia, and while Apple "enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinary high profit margins", that type of success was not an illegal monopoly. Would your definition also say that the Sony playstation store is a monopoly? Or that my local bakery, that only offers the bread they bake, is a monopoly? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple
But you can install other OSes such as Graphene on Android phones, I dont think you can do that on iPhones can you? https://grapheneos.org/
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On a lot of Android devices you can't install ANY other custom OS because of locked down bootloaders. If you want GrapheneOS specifically that list is even narrower due to 1. official support 2. hardware security features just missing from the devices.
I was building an pdf export feature for one of my projects the other day. And safari still behaves differently than my other browsers. I usually try to give safari a chance whenever I’m working on Macs. I’m always forced to install chrome for some reason or another. Until the random compatibility quirks stop I don’t see myself returning to safari.
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Safari has two types of PDF export: One is through "Export PDF" and should be a faithful copy of how the browser renders the HTML. The other i through the Print menu item and will be the text and images put onto paper sized sheets.
I have a paid sub, and runs youtube without any ad blockers on chrome and FF. The issue happens only on FF
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Yeah, I would not be surprised at all if there's "if not Chrome UA, show popup" code somewhere.
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