Author here: Indeed, 15% is fine. They do provide some services. They provide the CDN for downloading the APK. They handle sales taxes in the various countries, which would be a PITA to handle yourself. Similar-ish services like Patreon charge a fee too. The 30% they charged a couple of years back was bad. But I could live with 15% if the support were anything other than zero.
I don't usually see Claude leaving comments that are obviously out of date compared to the code. The problem is that the comments are just a dumping grounds for Claude's stream of consciousness, verbosely recording random bits of history and context that are true and at least somewhat relevant, but without cohesively explaining why the code is the way it is. And some sentences in the comments will be beginner-style restating what's obvious from reading the code.
I want these things to implement peer to peer caching, so that when 10 people are watching the same video, only one downloads from youtubes own servers.
Then it's just a matter of letting people add their own videos directly to the service and it can become fully independent of YouTube.
Susskind's original paper is shockingly readable, at least the first section. It doesn't use a lot of fancy math or derivations to justify holography. Mostly it uses basic concepts from undergraduate physics to show how the idea of holography is consistent and makes sense, despite it seeming incredibly counterintuitive at first glance.
For instance, figure 3 shows how you can't hide a black hole behind another black hole, which has implications for how a 3D universe can be completely encoded in a 2D region.
> Meta agreed in August to pay up to $18 billion to settle the multistate lawsuit surrounding child safety issues. Buried in the 130-page settlement was an agreement to release Meta from future liability related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach, making New Mexico the only state to pursue a case. Florida was the only other state that did not sign the settlement, saying it was not tough enough on Meta.
This is an inconvenient reminder for people who want more "regulation" and who believe states with high levels of paper regulation like California really care about protecting consumers.
Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs working on the other side.
I had my first kid a couple years ago and found myself spending a ton of time holding my kid while he slept, since it's the only way he'd reliably sleep. I spent a good amount of that time browsing various parenting and new baby subreddits.
One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.
I feel for moms, who in addition to giving birth and having their lives upended to raise a baby, are now told that not only are most men garbage, but their man is garbage too. I feel for the dads, who even if they work hard are told how useless they are, and have to combat a stream of negativity fed to their spouse. It's a divisive wedge thrown into a new family, one that social media algorithms are only happy to encourage for engagement.
When I see instances like the one in this topic, I can see how the default narrative has been applied here. The radio announcers surely aren't aware of the storm they're creating, but it suddenly thrusts two average people into the social media spotlight, where people are happy to assume any missing details to fit their narrative. Everyone is going to apply the default story without taking any time to consider the possibility of other context.
EDIT TO ADD: I know there are manosphere spaces that are toxic too. As a man I've had no problem avoiding them, so this is one of my first extended exposures to this type of content, which is why it stuck with me. Probably also because I felt personally unwelcome as a dad.
> it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store.
The terrible support is really deeper than support. You literally stopped doing business here, because the lack of a feedback channel that allows Google to improve their business (i.e. realize they need a way to quickly correct stupid automated decisions) been Google's worst enemy and best friend. By ignoring support & feedback, the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way), but it leads to I think a lot of Google's products failing because they do not really understand their users, and the why behind the what they use.
I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.
"When attempting to get information from the Census Bureau, for instance, AI agents used tools reserved for software developers to access it, the company said. "
The average person doesn't know how the medication they take works, the mechanics of climate and climate change, how the energy they consume is generated, etc.
Not so long ago I read something on HN which resonated with me: we’re moving into the era that is comparable to car mechanics enthusiasts. You have a previous generation of cars where people just enjoy working on with hand tools, and there’s modern cars where people like to tune with software patches.
From the very start of llms I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with code that was generated for me. Either it’s buggy, it works but I end up losing an evening on some obscure bug, or it’s full of red flags.
My latest hobby project is just in a text editor with markup and that’s it. I’m also done with the augmented assistance in the IDE. I google things I forgot. I constantly read these amazing stories of people vibe-coding some firmware/driver that just works, and honestly I’m starting to question whether I’m reading the posts of some promotional bot.
One thing to keep in mind is that anytime you punt to the LLM (or anybody) for anything, that skill is going to atrophy.
I've seen this happen to myself where suddenly I had trouble planning out the architecture for a very small project. It should have been obvious to me, and I knew that. So it was disconcerting to not be able to suddenly have the answer appear in front of me like it normally would. I thought maybe I would go to Claude and help get some ideas.
But then I stopped myself. I knew I should be able to do this! So I got out a piece of paper and I scribbled ideas until the dam burst and suddenly the entire design was obvious, like it should have been in the first place. It took about 5 minutes.
But those were an alarming 5 minutes. It was like I'd gone blind to the solution.
And I realized that when I asked Claude for a bunch of ideas and then I selected the best one based on my experience, I was exercising that exact skill. I wasn't exercising the skill of coming up with the solution from scratch.
Lots of times we're happy letting particular skills atrophy. Maybe we don't like exercising them and we just don't want to do that anymore. And I think that's valid.
Spent the past 1,5 years building a tool that might be relevant, helping keep durable task state between agent sessions. It is an issue tracker persisting state as immutable event logs, allows you to inspect workflows after the fact, lets you inspect diffs inline in the tickets and it is much more lightweight than Jira/Linear. There is no central service to integrate with, as it is Git-backed and lives with your code in your repo.
I think you were the exception. Most kids never even knew what BASIC was. If there was a game already on the computer, they'd be happy to play it. If they really liked the game they might learn how to start the game if it wasn't already running, but they didn't care about doing anything else. Kids who were into computers looked at a computer and saw endless possibility. Everybody else played sports outside, watched TV, or hung out with their friends.
The problem is that it ISN'T a fee for services as it should be. Their platform power means that they can levy a tax, and they don't feel the need to do anything on exchange for that.
> Who likes typing code, writing boilerplate, reading bad documentation for nights looking for that small thing, asking around in forums, reading dependency source code
Me? I enjoy that stuff for what it is. Reviewing code is definitely not the truly enjoyable thing. Writing code, expressing my logic in code. That is enjoyable to me.
There was a senate hearing a few days ago where this woman testified. Also Benn Jordan and Chad Marlow from the EFF were htere. I was happy hearing them put into words the problems on the national stage.
I feel like most articles challenging OSes have no idea what an OS is.
Sure question what the latest tool can offer and how to integrate with it... but that's just being an app, or a window manager, or a package manager, or a distribution, that's not challenging what the OS itself is and does.
If your OS doesn't change how a computer allocates resources, then you are talking about higher level, and that can be super valuable too, arguably more valuable, but ... that's a different thing.
PS: also chroot (half a century, just checked for the fun of it), jails, containers, VMs, etc limiting how the allocation can be done do exist and have been used for decades already.
That’s all true. But we’ve known police and prosecutors are like this forever. No need to give them tools to be even lazier and that make it easier for them to abuse us.
When people ask me why I don't have any Windows machine at home, I say "for health reasons". It really raises my blood pressure and at some point I realised it's not worth it risking my health over it. You could use the same to get away from Copilot.
The part of "founder-led" companies nobody talks about. For every groundbreaking tech project, there's 100 other people sleeping in conference rooms working on some rich guy's latest brain-fart that everyone knows will never work.
A metaphor I'm constantly drawn to is the transition from agrarian to urban societies following the Industrial Revolution. Somebody who somehow saw the Industrial Revolution coming from the perspective of somebody living in an agrarian society might have envisioned it leading to 'super farms.' And it did.
But the biggest change wasn't what it did to farming, but enabling people and societies to start doing much more than just farming, as well as enabling some great social change as well by simply economically obsoleting slave labor. And trying to imagine all of the implications of this, as well as much society might look like, from the perspective of somebody living in an agrarian society would probably have been simply impossible.
I think people keep ignoring this possibility for things that LLMs will change. There's a vast amount of the 'cognitive economy' that LLMs stand to be able to automate. And I think that will open up a vacuum in society for people to build on top of what LLMs will do (and already are doing). I don't know what that means exactly, but that's because we still live in that 'agrarian society' and trying to imagine what things will look like after the 'Industrial Revolution' is probably just impossible.
I recently (2 days ago) noticed i enjoy it a lot more if i use a super fast model with low reasoning (gpt 6 luna low effort + fast mode). That way, i can still have hands on the entire time and dont have to wait around for 20minutes for it to finish up and have made a bunch of decisions without me.
Also, LLMs are first and foremost excellent at reading ultra fast. Makes it excellent for summarizing and re-representing modules of your code
I am teaching some math courses, and I see how LLMs disrupted all standard approaches, and I don't know what to do.
I rely on written exams that are open book, but forbid any use of computers and smartphones in class.
The university insists that homework can't be optional, but it lost its meaning. I've tried to explain to my students that it's in their interest to think about home assignments on their own, but the majority will obviously use gen AI, and it's such a waste of time to check and grade LLM output.
I just had an experience where all students were given "sample problems" to try at home and prepare for the written test. Many of them just dumped the document into an LLM, asked it to produce some "exam guide", and showed up with that thing printed out, asking me during the test to explain what LLM output meant.
It seems like the university also has many people pushing for AI use for everything, but I teach basic stuff where the goal is to make students think on their own and digest some fundamental ideas, LLMs can produce perfect solutions, but relying on them is pointless.
