Closi

What if there isn't a feasible path for expansion and growth? Vimeo already has contracting revenue, it's either in the maturity or decline phase.

Some customers will churn, some will stay, Bending Spoons are the masters of this model so will have made an assumption on how revenue will change across the next 5-10 years+, but I would assume that they aren't forecasting extreme growth, and instead are calculating that net profit can be changed from c$30m to c$139m within existing revenue, so if they can keep revenue at/near current levels without growth, they can end up with a much more profitable business.

Bear in mind that same revenue doesn't necessarily mean the same number of customers - it can also mean raising prices and having less customers. Bending Spoons might estimate that if they double prices, half their customers might leave - this would still be BRILLIANT for profit, as while revenue would stay the same, some costs would half, and thus profit might jump from c$140m to c$250m based on some napkin math!

This was an argument that was used to not ban smoking for kids in the UK back in the day. From the parliment debate...

> [banning smoking would] afford a direct encouragement to children to smoke. Most boys of a tender age who might be seen smoking in public places did so, not because of any attachment to tobacco, but because they considered it a practice in advance of their years, and something moreover which their elders told them not to do, affording them, therefore, the added pleasure of disobedience which was so dear to boys of their age.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1908-10-13/debates/6aa...

Perhaps it does make it cooler - but undoubtedly the restrictions reduced availability and reduced the number of children being addicted.

As for the actual age cut-off, it's always going to be fairly arbitrary, or a 'balanced judgement'.

They are 100% different and yet kind-of-the-same.

They can function kind-of-the-same in the sense that they can both change things written in a higher level language into a lower level language.

100% different in every other way, but for coding in some circumstances if we treat it as a black box, LLMs can turn higher level pseudocode into lower level code (inaccurately), or even transpile.

Kind of like how email and the postal service can be kind of the same if you look at it from a certain angle.

In practice, this is managed by:

1) Making the application small enough, and breaking it apart if needed (e.g. I've refactored my old 'big' app into 10 micro-apps).

2) Selecting an architecture that will work, looking after the data modelling and architecture yourself rather than delegating this to the LLM (it can implement it - but you need to design it).

3) Trusting that the LLM is capable enough to implement new requirements or fixes as required.

If requirements change so substantially that it's not possible, you can write new software as requirements change - as per point 1, you will have made your application modular enough that this isn't a significant concern.

For day-to-day coding, why use your own half-baked solution when the commercial versions are better, cheaper and can be customised anyway?

I've written my own agent for a specialised problem which does work well, although it just burns tokens compared to Cursor!

The other advantage that Claude Code has is that the model itself can be finetuned for tool calling rather than just relying on prompt engineering, but even getting the prompts right must take huge engineering effort and experimentation.

A human is effectively turning complete if you give the person paper and pen and the ruleset, and a brain clearly stores information and processes it to some extent, so this is pretty unconvincing. The article is nonsense and badly written.

> But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.

Really? Humans don't ever develop memories? Humans don't gain information?

It also has a 99.5% confidence that it has uniquely fingerprinted me, and says I have had 677 visits to the site, including Vietnam & Sweeden...

I think the 'unique' part of fingerprinting here isn't working unfortunately.

Try learning to vibe code on something totally greenfield without looking at the code and see if it changes your mind. Ignore code quality, “does it work” and “am i happy with the app” are the only metrics.

Code quality is an issue you need to ignore with vibe coding - if code quality is important to your project or you then it’s not an issue. But if you abandon this concept and build things small enough or modular enough then speed gains await!

IMO codebases can be architected for LLMs to work better in them, but this is harder in brownfield apps.

I guess the lies were useful until she got caught?

Looks like the pricing is free or $4 per month - sounds reasonable?

Thanks! It's in a very narrow domain (Handset UI flows in Warehouse Management Systems) so i'm hoping that helps, but it's very domain specific and certainly not anything mainstream.

My personal sense is business logic which involves processes with lots of steps rather than data transformation.

I’m unconvinced that code is the best way to describe business logic, so here we are! :)

(Code is probably the best way to encode business logic, but most users can’t read it or edit it, which makes it bad)

Let's see! I'm actually working on a node-based programming LLM paradigm for an app I'm building.

The idea is that you can write the 'nodes' in plain english rather than pre-written blocks, and then the arrows indicate the flow but don't need to absolutely encode everything (closer to a flow chart). The process of writing the flow chart helps define and document the business logic, and the flows are totally clear because everything is encoded into a state machine.

100% agree - If this app gets any traction at all, it's only a matter of time before someone's crypto wallet gets leaked and emptied.

If you want to be handling peoples secrets, you have to make sure you know what you are doing and build something bombproof (bombproof from a mathematical perspective, rather than relying on your server being secure)

I've posted elsewhere, but I still have lots of issues personally:

* Your deletion policy says you delete images instantly and via the UI in settings, but I've checked and they are retained in the object store. You need to update these policies to be honest and say that the images aren't deleted, and that you currently retain them and just delete the reference to them.

* Your privacy policy says you can't see user content, but you clearly can (as you have both the data and the encryption keys). You might not have developed the functionality to read it yet - but it is trivial to do. Just be honest and say 'your data can technically be accessed by us, but we promise not to look at it'.

* Your privacy policy only limits your access to 'what is allowed by law' - which is clearly the absolute minimum!

I think your policies currently say how you would like it to be, rather than how it is. You need to be honest with users about how their data is actually processed.

On the site:

> So while the image URLs aren't encrypted, they're still secure. Only you can access your images.

This isn't true though - and presumably you know it isn't true?

You would be able to access and download all the images if you wanted to.

> But we can't read the actual content of your encrypted items without your encryption key, and we don't have a reason to try.

This is also misleading - because you do have the encryption key, so you can read the content if you want to. "We won't read the content even though we could, because we don't currently have a reason" is the actual state of affairs.

Extra further finding!

Deletion policy says:

> 2. How to Delete Your Account and Data You have several options to delete your account and all associated data: Through the App: If you are signed in, you can delete your account directly from the Settings page. This will permanently delete all your data including [...] all uploaded images and files

... Although I've confirmed that the reality is that it only deletes the reference to those files from your account, and the actual files are still sitting on the server (I've just saved the url and checked the file still exists after deletion).

Even after it throws a message saying everything has been permanently deleted...

This thing is an absolute security and privacy nightmare - I would not rely on any information on the website about how they handle your data, considering they said it was e2e and that was not truthful, and they have said they delete the images and that isn't true. How can anything about this be trusted after repeated untruths about how our data is handled?

Also the app seems to send several MB of data back/forward every minute when doing nothing across a socket connection which is another red flag.

I think the challenge is that you are potentially storing some of the most secret things for users here - passwords copied from password managers, bank details copied and pasted into forms, private photos, corporate secrets and designs, medical records... And even your revised model shows a completely careless approach to security and is entirely insufficient considering the data stored.

Encrypting images is too slow too? Poor excuse - it probably takes milliseconds. If you are asking people to trust them with their nudes and photos of bank documents, you need to store them in a way that you can’t see them.

You having access to all user data stored with a tiny privacy policy that basically boils down to “we can use your data as long as it’s not illegal for us to use it” is not sufficient!

I wouldn’t be this harsh on the security of another startup or app just because most startups don’t start asking users to store their secrets with them - because you will be storing secrets, that puts you into a category of people who need to be careful and not careless - at the moment you are demonstrating the latter.

It’s entirely possible to do everything end to end by the way (imo this is the only way this should be done considering you will be storing passwords) - see how 1password does it and copy them if nothing else: https://1password.com/files/1password-white-paper.pdf

This is true, although maybe if an “AGI” invented us, it might say “It’s strange how these humans are so good at driving, but so bad at protein folding and playing Go”

Very abstract, but I think it’s important to remember that human intelligence also has jagged edges.

I think your definition of it being 'human level' is sensible - definitely a lower bar to hit than 'as long as people can do work that a robot cannot do, we don't have AGI'.

There is certainly a lot road between current technology and driving a car through a construction zone during rush hour, particularly with the same amount of driving practice a human gets.

Personally I think there could be an AGI which couldn't drive a car, but has genuine sentience - an awareness of being alive, although not necessarily the exact human experience. Maybe this isn't AGI, which more implies problem-solving and thinking rather than sentience, but in my gut if we got something sentient but that couldn't drive a car, we would still be there if that makes sense?

In the 'purely rational' crimes, it's going to be some sort of function of both right? The expected benefit, the risk that you get caught, and the severity of the punishment.

While I agree that people conducting corporate fraud think they will get away with it - I don't agree that the long sentences won't act as a deterrence. If you set the sentence for these sorts of crimes to 1 year rather than 15+, that completely changes the risk profile for people who think there is a 90% chance they will get away with it.

Completely disagree - Your definition (in my opinion) is more aligned to the concept of Artificial Super Intelligence.

Surely the 'General Intelligence' definition has to be consistent between 'Artificial General Intelligence' and 'Human General Intelligence', and humans can be generally intelligent even if they can't solve calculus equations or protein folding problems. My definition of general intelligence is much lower than most - I think a dog is probably generally intelligent, although obviously in a different way (dogs are obviously better at learning how to run and catch a ball, and worse at programming python).

Just comes down to your own view of what AGI is, as it's not particularly well defined.

While a bit 'time-machiney' - I think if you took an LLM of today and showed it to someone 20 years ago, most people would probably say AGI has been achieved. If someone wrote a definition of AGI 20 years ago, we would probably have met that.

We have certainly blasted past some science-fiction examples of AI like Agnes from The Twilight Zone, which 20 years ago looked a bit silly, and now looks like a remarkable prediction of LLMs.

By todays definition of AGI we haven't met it yet, but eventually it comes down to 'I know it if I see it' - the problem with this definition is that it is polluted by what people have already seen.

Anecdotal experience, but when bugfixing I personally find if a model introduces a bug, it has a hard time spotting and fixing it, but when you give the code to another model it can instantly spot it (even if it's a weaker model overall).

So I can well imagine that this sort of approach could work very well, although agree with your sentiment that measurement would be good.

> There is no research I’m aware of on people for whom the prospect of punishment did act as a deterrent (i.e. people who decided not to commit the crime).

Surely this can’t be true - as a trivial example I would be surprised if removing parking fines wouldn’t increase parking violations, or if Singapore stopped punishing littering that it wouldn’t affect the amount of littering etc

Maybe the difference between a 10 year or 20 year sentence for murder doesn’t make much difference, but if murder had no punishment at all I would be very surprised if that wouldn’t raise the murder rate!

> The combination of coincidences is striking

It would only really be a striking coincidence if each of these elements is a rare occurence - although if the site has a poor safety culture and this sort of stuff is happening all the time, it becomes less of a coincidence and more of an inevitability.

In the UK for example sites generally mandate hi-vis vests, establish pedestrian walk routes, ensure visitors can't walk straight into the warehouse without supervision or training, and ban using mobile phones when using any form of MHE - so if sites had good safety standards and enforced all this, then the chance of it happening would be much smaller than a site that didn't enforce all this (Just saying this is how it is in the UK as my experience all this is less common in the USA - although no doubt many sites operate the same).

If a site lets people wear what they want and does not stop MHE operators from using phones and lets a visitor freely walk around the warehouse... I don't know if a person getting hit at that stage is a coincidence IMO (regardless of the eye patch).

The concept of recording a macro (telling a computer the steps you want it to do, and then it repeating it) is very different to telling the computer the outcome you want and it working out the steps.

Going back to the 'help me calculate the financial implications of a house purchase' example - making a macro might make your work repeatable, but doesn't avoid users needing to learn excel or needing to put in the effort to build the spreadsheet.

It's not bugs that is the barrier here. Maybe functionality is the wrong word as I'm talking about something higher level than individual features, and maybe 'user stories' better represents what I'm getting at...

What I mean is that 'old' software has focussed on giving users lots of tools for users to complete their tasks, and when we talk about UI's we are talking about how to arrange all those tools in a way that is easy for a user to navigate. Users usually have to learn about all the tools that are there, so they know which ones to use (and over time the ones that learn about the existence of all the tools become 'power users').

But 'new' software might be more about completing users tasks for them, and these higher level tasks are the ones that are hard to define because there are so many permutations of what a user might want to do. As the software is helping users more, end-users might not ever need to know about the existence of all of the tools as they are abstracted away.

I would argue the opposite - the premise actually accepts that software developers and product owners can't always know how their software will be used by end users.

Besides, HCI will inevitably change because after 30 years of incremental user interface refinement, your average person still struggles to use Excel or Photoshop, but those same users are asking ChatGPT to help them write formulas or asking Gemini to help edit their photos.

I don't accept the premise that the interfaces were ever actually that good - For simple apps users can get around them fine, but for anything moderately complex users have mostly struggled or need training IMO. Blender as an example is an amazing piece of software - but ask any user who has never used it before to draw and render a bird without refering to the documentation (they won't be able to). If we want users to be able to use software like blender without needing to formally train them then we need a totally different approach (which would be great, as I suspect artistic ability and the technical ability to use blender are not necessarily correlated that strongly).

I think you are right in the 'current paradigm' of what software is at the moment, where users are using a fixed set of functionality in the way that the developer intended, but there is a new breed of software where the functionality set can't be defined in an exhaustive way.

Take Claude Code - after I've described my requirement it gives me a customised UI that asks me to make choices specific to what I have asked it to build (usually a series of dropdown lists of 3-4 options). How would a static UI do that in a way that was as seamless?

The example used in the article is a bit more specific but fair - if you want to calculate the financial implications of a house purchase in the 'old software paradigm' you probably have to start by learning excel and building a spreadsheet (or using a dodgy online calculator someone else built, which doesn't match your use case). The spreadsheet the average user writes might be a little simplified - are we positive that they included stamp duty and got the compounding interest right? Wouldn't it be great if Excel could just give you a perfectly personalised calculator, with toggle switches, without users needing to learn =P(1+(k/m))^(mn) but while still clearly showing how everything is calculated? Maybe Excel doesn't need to be a tool which is scary - it can be something everyone can use to help make better decisions regardless of skill level.

So yes, if you think of software only doing what it has done in the past, Gen UI does not make sense. If you think of software doing things it has never done before we need to think of new interaction modes (because hopefully we can do something better than just a text chat interface?).