1,749 karma · joined May 21, 2014
If I had an app, I'd have to pay Apple whatever they want to charge in order to get access to one part of all mobile phone users and Google whatever they want to charge in order to get access to the other.
Maybe calling that a monopoly wouldn't be good enough in an economics paper, but I don't see much of a practical difference. I get to accept the price or not do business.
And to set off some more bots: We desperately need regulation in this space.
Imagine if all streets were owned by two large companies who charged you enough to use them that you'd be paying as much in fees as you are in paying for gas. People would still use cars. The streets could be in horrible condition, the two companies would be making an insane amount of profit, but there would still be people out there saying that if it wasn't for those companies we wouldn't be getting anywhere and it's just business.
Looked into rooting - my old firmware would be ideal, but other than a native ambient lighting tap I don't really see anything worth my time. That model probably doesn't have a wide field mic yet to use for home automation.
I very rarely re-watch movies within a few months. So if I buy one, I want to know that I can watch it again in one, 10 or 30 years (if the format can still be played). Which is not guaranteed even with blu-rays mostly thanks to DRM. But what I'd be buying is not having to think about any deadlines.
If I'm okay with a deadline, I might as well rent the movie for a weekend, in which case I expect it to be less than $12.
My experience was about antihistamines, which are definitely effective.
I took antihistamines basically throughout my 20s. My allergy specialist said there's no reason not to. I developed some other issues and wanted to stop taking antihistamines to see if that would help (or get a hint whether they were causing it) - but that got me into itching hell for weeks.
In some online forums people reported the same and shared ways to get out of that "addiction" without going insane from itching.
My doctor didn't want to believe it and there was no research on it. That only appeared a few years later in the form of a paper called "Unbearable Pruritus After Withdrawal of (Levo)cetirizine" (2016). In the US, the FDA issued a warning in 2025, which is also the time when I heard about it. None of the doctors I went to back then reported this to anyone, so I'm surprised it got discovered at all.
As for my other issues I have no way of knowing whether they had anything to do with long-term antihistamine use. I'm a sample size of one, and none of the other stuff is quite as clear-cut as "unbearable itching".
I've had other issues with prescription drugs that didn't make the official list of side-effects and sometimes those side-effects don't just go away once I stop taking the drug.
That's why I'm very cautious when trying drugs I never had before, and even more so when it comes to taking them long-term.
(Technically that also applies to MS Teams, Google and so on and not just AI)
It's pretty exhausting to be honest. In the past I didn't have to know how the entire app was supposed to work. I would plan a bit, then code for a long time, test, plan some more. Sometimes I would get lost in some (enjoyable) architecture nonsense.
Now I just read and write regular text. Instead of exceptions I'm avoiding misunderstandings. It can almost feel like a flow state, so I have some hope that it'll turn into that once I get more used to it.
I agree it's dystopian, but I live in Germany and we have a similar thing called "Schufa". For most people it mostly means that if they default on a credit, they'll be less likely to find an apartment. It differs from the US one in the sense that banks don't require you to get into debt before they trust you, that whole "build your credit score" nonsense.
You might want to switch from "social credit" (which was a failed local project from over a decade ago) to "blacklist", or just criticize the overall surveillance system, which is pretty invasive.
I'm getting a bit tired of people posting on social media websites and then pretending they are not a part of them. "Reddit" did this, "HN" did that... let's just admit that we're all chronically online people who get irritated whenever we stumble out of our bubble and more than one person dares to disagree with us.
Sure, we can ban users and we can revoke tokens, but those assume that:
1. Something potentially malicious got access to our credentials 2. Banning that malicious entity will solve our problem 3. Once we did that, repaired the damage and improved our security, we don't expect the same thing to happen again
None of these apply with LLMs in the loop!
They aren't malicious, just incompetent in a way that hiring someone else won't fix. The solution to this is way more extensive than most people seem to grasp at the moment.
What we need is less like a sturdy door with a fancy lock, and more like that special spoon for people with parkinson's. Unlimited undo history.
To me it's like giving your dog a stack of important documents, then being worried he might eat them, so you put the dog in a crate, together with the documents.
I thought the whole problem with that idea was that in order for the agent to be useful, you have to connect it to your calendar, your e-mail provider and other services so it can do stuff on your behalf, but also creating chaos and destruction.
And now, what, having inference done by Nvidia directly makes it better? Does their hardware prevent an AI from deleting all my emails?
For example, "work ethic". Correct me if I'm wrong, but you could write "worked very hard every day" on someone's tombstone, and almost every American seeing it, regardless of politics, will think "That was a good person". Someone to look up to.
Not "did good work", not "their work helped many people", definitely not "lived well". Even "was very productive" sounds too suspicious - being productive is great and all, but a productive person might be doing 10h worth of work in 5h and then call it a day, and that's just unacceptable, so that's not going on your tombstone either.
Just... work hard. The protestant ideal. Going on vacation and being too sick to work is literally the same thing, because it stops you from working hard.
Although to be fair, nothing above regular (that I'm aware of, it's been a while) requires infinite space, just unlimited space... you can always make a real Turing machine as long as you keep adding more tape whenever it needs it.
As a reader, I can't get over the fact that I'm supposed to read a text that nobody could be bothered to write.
I wonder how often we waste energy nowadays by telling an AI to turn a one-sentence-prompt into a full e-mail, only for the other side to tell the AI to summarize it in one sentence.
I'm personally not interested, but I also would never make fun of people expressing themselves.
On the other hand... mandatory fun, mandatory self-expression, any anything that takes something very personal and turns it into official or unofficial company policy makes me sick. I'm glad it's not too common here in Germany.
It's like HR forcing you to listen to punk songs because the company wants to promote a rebellious spirit as long as it's compatible with "disruption". It's also a bit like being asked "why are you so quiet" by someone who said everything worthwhile 5 minutes after getting out of bed but never stopped yapping.
But in the past 20 years I tried using Linux on the desktop a couple of times.
It always ends the same way - out of the blue it refuses to boot. Of course there's usually a solution, but I just really don't like that my PC can just suddenly decide that I'll be troubleshooting for the rest of the day, usually in front of some very minimal "maintenance" CLI. And that's if I got the time - I may have to use my laptop for the rest of the week, now dreading the weekend instead of welcoming it.
Right now I'd have to do a bunch of research first. Would I still be able to play all the games I play with my friends once a week? I have 3 monitors, one of them has a different DPI than the others, did they fix that by now? I got a stream deck, will that be essentially useless? Is my webcam / mic supported? Do I need to learn about various audio architectures before I can ever use a mic again? Which ones of the dozens of apps I use every day can be made to run under Linux?
It'll probably take a 40-hour work week to get to like 90% of where I was on Windows, and then I'd consider myself lucky that I got that much to work at all. And then I'd start waiting for the first "troubleshooting day".
With all that negativity I have to also say that I adore Linux on the server. When all you need in terms of hardware is basically a CPU and any number of storage devices and all you get in terms of UI is SSH, Linux is far superior to anything else.
You have to very good at writing tasks while being fully aware of what the one executing it knows and doesn't know. What agents can infer about a project themselves is even more limited than their context, so it's up to you to provide it. Most of them will have no or very limited "long-term" memory.
I've had good experiences with small projects using the latest models. But letting them sift through a company repo that has been worked on by multiple developers for years and has some arcane structures and sparse documentation - good luck with that. There aren't many simple instructions to be made there. The AI can still save you an hour or two of writing unit tests if they are easy to set up and really only need very few source files as context.
But just talking to some people makes it clear how difficult the concept of implicit context is. Sometimes it's like listening to a 4 year old telling you about their day. AI may actually be better at comprehending that sort of thing than I am.
One criticism I do have of AI in its current state is that it still doesn't ask questions often enough. One time I forgot to fill out the description of a task - but instead of seeing that as a mistake it just inferred what I wanted from the title and some other files and implemented it anyway. Correctly, too. In that sense it was the exact opposite of what OP was complaining about, but personally I'd rather have the AI assume that I'm fallible instead of confidently plowing ahead.