MonkeyClub

The top reply there goes right for the gut:

"Rebranding surveillance capitalism as ethically driven is one of the more cynical takes I've seen".

Black Mirror has unwittingly been offering a lot of nice, horrible ideas.

Cyber ransom or LLM heist? Perhaps a combo.

TFA’s description of how the author had to debate this with the AI was fun.

Back in the day, your OCR would just OCR things. Now it has opinions, and you have to fight to convince it.

- I’m thirsty.

- It’s not your time to drink yet.

I got the same sense, but nowadays I can't be sure whether a text is AI or the writer's style has absorbed LLM tropes.

> Physical businesses have liability if they provide age restricted items to children.

Ok, suppose the strip club is the website, and the club's door is the OS.

Would you fine the door's manufacturer for teens getting into the strip club?

> but something only the full terminal can do what you need it to do

There's always `M-x term` for a full terminal.

> 4. Is it just me?

It's not just you.

I've been on HN since about 2008, and the change is steep.

Since the site acquired social clout, status seekers have swarmed in vying for status, and an opinion orthodoxy has formed that's becoming increasingly intolerant.

Pity, but it's a natural progression.

Whoever needs more slop faster can easily find it elsewhere, if PostmarketOS doesn't want to follow the trend, that's well and good.

> Alternatively they might build specialized branded hardware which people could only use for what corps allow them to do for nice monthly fee.

That's why I'm still holding on to a bulky Core 2 Duo Management Engine-free Fujitsu workstation, for when personal computing finally goes underground again.

Cf. "Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145963)

> and who knows how long GitHub will be free?

Apparently for as long as it will enable Microsoft to profit by training its LLMs on people's code.

For people uncomfortable with working on free/libre stuff with git directly I always suggest Codeberg as an alternative, but hands on git is also an excellent option.

He's not out of touch: the FB situation is optional, Merz wants to make this mandatory.

Strong reminiscences of "I am not a number, I'm a free man!"

I am reminded of "turn on, tune in, drop out".

> Why would any species take effort to [...]

Because Market Forces said so :(

That would diminish archival accuracy, an outlet could amend the text without third party proof.

I expect this will be challenged and overturned as unconstitutional as the similar effort was in 2021, however it's insane as it stands, especially coming from a caretaker government.

Within software engineering circles, the idea of the engineering notebook was reintroduced in Hunt and Thomas' The Pragmatic Programming, where (Topic 22) they call it an "engineering daybook".

Personally, I've been using one form or another of journals and notebooks for over three decades. I did go through the "plain text is king" .txt phase, but, while search is useful, I always revert to a handwritten notebook.

I find that I have a sort of visual memory of the location of a note or scribble, and can sort of easily find my way back to it "in the lower-right side of the page near the end of the notebook".

Another meta-metric that's interesting to access and is lost when typing is the changing quality of my handwriting, and how it exhibits the underlying mental state.

The notebooks/journals started from standard local composition books (B5) to narrower 14x21-ish cheap hardcovers. There's also dates (manual), titles or topic tags (manual), page numbers (manual), cross-references with arrows (which do stand out amongst the handwriting, e.g. -> p. 20, or -> C/20 to xref back to notebook C when you're on notebook E), indexes (also manual), earmarked pages, and a physical bookmark string. I've also reverted back to pencil, which I find more "quiet" a medium - I've been using Faber Castell's sleek TK4600 since elementary school, and it was quite interesting to return to it a couple of decades later.

Plain text is still king nowadays, but it's also diagrammatic, and hyperlinked, the only difference being it is manual, and seems to assist immensely with the memory and personal internal coherence. I can write down a note to myself, working something out, and then return to it a couple of months later, cross-reference it and expand it, gradually reaching new understanding.

No need for slip card boxes when you have a running log of your thoughts and works that can be referenced and cross-referenced, nor is there a need to limit the length of your text because of the medium - write a bullet list if you want, checkbox it, or a 200-word vignette, or just let loose over a few pages, it's all good: a plastic medium for a plastic mind.

In all, for me journaling/notebooking is highly recommended. And for the younger folk who are keyboard-first, perhaps the deliberate slowness and scratchiness of this quaint medium will reveal a meditative quality.

> the purity of "working with what's installed".

Oh, a kindred spirit!

I too absolutely love the notion of the base install, and what can be done just by means of its already available toolset.

(Fun tidbit: Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain, with csc.exe, and even vbc.exe and jsc.exe?)

I'm sure eventually it will, it's law:

Every text editor, if it survives long enough, will end up implementing a partial, bug-ridden version of Emacs.

Similar anecdote here.

I still use daily the Timberland backpack I got in 2009. Again, some wear and tear (actually just wear, thankfully no tears) but works great at the 17 year mark, even though it has gone through anything from daily use to travel to trekking.

Other backpacks have come and gone when I thought it'd need replacing, but kept trudging on. Now I don't want to have to let go of it, even though it looks "a bit" old.

I know it's not good for business to have long-lasting products. But some items like this backpack, a 2008 Fujitsu workstation, or a 2013 MacBook Air (not to mention the Faber Castell TK 4600) that simply keep on working become something akin to lifelong companion tools.

It goes to show the benefits of deep forethought and good design. And, I guess, the stubbornness of some users :)

Anyone can convince themselves of anything, the only thing that varies is the complexity of the rationalization.

Same thing is said about peddling drugs. Profit doesn't push ethical problems aside, though, or at least shouldn't.

At least nobody peddling drugs tried to convince anyone they're doing it to "save the planet".

>> You are seemingly overriding the wishes of the community

> That's false. The overwhelming sentiment of the community is that HN should be free of LLM-generated content or content that has obvious AI fingerprints.

Yeah it is indeed, and for good reason: why would I spend time reading something the author didn't spend time thinking through and writing?

It's not that people don't like Postgres articles (otherwise, the upvotes would be much lower), but once you read a bit of the article, the LLM stench it gives off is characteristic. You know: Standard. LLM. Style. It's tiresome. Irksome. Off-putting.

What I'm wondering is, if LLMs are trained on "our" (in the wider sense of the word) writing style, and spew it back at us, what data set was it that overused this superficial emphatic style to such a degree, that it's now overwhelmingly the bog-standard generative output style?

But that's sort of the author's job: if they wish to publish an article on a topic, they should make it both comprehensive and comprehensible.

Yes I think so as well, as one comment on the Reddit thread mentioned, increased prices and lack of new features on Arm may have driven such decisions.

I did enjoy the few Arm servers and VMs I got to work with, and the software ecosystem wasn't in any way lacking for Java and Python deployments. However I did encounter absence of SIMD support in SBCL.

Although the Reddit thread is from a while ago, the situation is still current.

From https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-rx/:

"Unfortunately, we are currently unable to offer any RX servers."

NetCup still offers Arm VPSs, but similarly no managed servers.

Are the recent improvements in x86 getting us back to an architectural monoculture, at least until other Arm providers step up?

> (in fact it made us money)

And caused a global recession along the way. The loan repayment interest didn't (and couldn't possibly) cover even a fraction of the backlash, which includes lives destroyed world-wide.

Externalities?

Yep the wordplay made me chuckle too :)