_verandaguy

The economics make the reasoning obvious, though.

With closed source IP, every bit of support, from bug fixes, to feature requests, to compatibility fixes to integrate with newer mainline/foundational tooling, costs money.

With open source projects (and in particular ones like Linux where there's a huge number of contributors and interested parties), support for would-be niche facilities can keep going as long as there's someone with the knowledge and spare time to do it.

Open-source is heavily community-oriented, and yes, I think that subverting the contributions of the community like this (and honestly, just kind of being a dick about it) is unethical, yeah. It erodes the fabric of open source, and will be detrimental not just to OSS, but to the field of software in the medium and long term for the reasons I stated earlier.

To your side note: "take" is a very common synonym for "thought"/"opinion"/"view" in the version (dialect? I guess?) of English I grew up with. If you're unfamiliar with it, that might be a regional or generational effect. I don't know. I'm not a linguist.

This is an unethical take, and long-term and at scale, an unsustainable/impractical one. This kind of mindset results in tool fragmentation, erosion of trust, and ultimately worse quality in software.

I don't think it's fair to say that HTML's less structured than Markdown. Markdown is derived from a simplified subset of HTML, and having myself cut my teeth on HTML5 when it was still new, there's been a huge emphasis on the idea of the semantic web conveyed through HTML.

You might be joking, but frankly, I wouldn't mind.

Though this is undermined somewhat by stories like this one[0], where an AI runs a "slow life" store catering to a lifestyle that specifically tries to disconnect from technology.

It's incredibly perverse.

    [0] https://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-market-launch

This still doesn't really answer my question, though. This is like telling me my old blog posts can't be parsed by your regex.

Like... yeah, no shit; I didn't build it for your regex. It's not the target audience.

Plus, isn't the appeal of LLMs broadly that they can do somewhat-useful things with mostly-arbitrary input (if you ignore the risk of prompt injection)?

Conspicuously missing: why should I care?

I have reduced my online presence to much less than it once was partly because I don't want to feed this machine training data that I've worked hard to make for a human audience.

Thanks for the link; this seems like an insane way to warn potential users of the risks associated with this thing.

For context for those of us who don't follow these things very closely: where exactly did this "WARNING DANGER CAUTION" stuff show up?

I agree that those are all ways of preserving knowledge in a somewhat inter-generational way, a few thoughts.

- None of these are as flexible as writing. They're more expressive, more engaging (arguably, at least to some), and might even be good at succinctly saving certain specific types of knowledge.

  Knot systems typically parallel the abacus, having been used for accounting and to keep a record of tax levies. Certainly this isn't the *only* thing they were used for, but this was the case in a number of indigenous civilizations in the Americas, as well as in some Asian civilizations. Certain dances might be good at representing the motions you have to go to while working fields or performing other societal tasks, sure. But a good writing system, in its relative blandness, is incredibly versatile, and can encode not just a wide breadth of information, but also include information about *why* the information is what it is, to the extent that the authors knew.

- Many of these systems tend to either disappear or change over time while relying on largely-unwritten rules, implied social context, and other informational artifacts that themselves don't have a very long shelf life in the event of significant social change. Where destroying the written word (especially in the wake of the invention of the printing press) is a long-term, conscious, coordinated action; dances, songs, and stories can fall victim to everything from fashion, to counterculture, to human migrations, to hostile invasions.

- I don't understand what you mean by things like "stories with self-correction." In many cultures with an oral tradition, the stories do get distorted because of people misremembering, or through conscious changes in response to social conditions at the time of a retelling; if a 1,000-year-old story with no written record backing it is told today, it's almost certainly not the original story, but the culmination of a thousand years and dozens of generations of sometimes-subtle, sometimes not reinterpretation.

While I agree with your rebuke of the GP, Socrates was materially wrong about writing (or at least, about the ability to persist information beyond any single human lifetime).

Cumulatively, knowledge work (including, in particular, curating knowledge) is exceptionally energy intensive from an evolutionary standpoint. It does pay dividends, clearly, but to get compounding effects from it, being able to efficiently pass down big corpora of facts, ideas, processes, etc., is an absolute necessity.

Writing systems are the fundamental way through which we can do this. They worked for us for millennia, and we eventually built upon them to develop encodings used today to store information remarkably densely.

It doesn't help that Microsoft seems to be doing everything in its power to alienate Windows users.

    > context exhausition attack

Can you give a high-level overview of how this AV works? I'm a bit of an infosec geek but I generally dislike LLMs, so I haven't done a terribly good job of keeping up with that side of the industry, but this seems particularly interesting.

These april fools jokes keep getting lazier every year.

To clarify: this is the terminal's scrollback buffer vs one managed by the application in the alternate screen.

When I scroll up in nvim, it will keep the editor frame in place (that's the top bar and bottom bar showing things like open buffers, git status, the scratch buffer or whatever it's called), but the file contents will scroll by because nvim at that point has exclusive ownership of the entire screen and can do anything with it, including repainting parts of it in response to motions or a mouse scrolling (if your terminal supports emitting mouse events).

This is in contrast to the `rmcup` "normal" terminal mode where it will scroll back in the terminal's history.

The best analogue I have for that last one is to use tmux with nvim open, and have a tmux visual selection going. You can scroll up and out of nvim, and keep scrolling to whatever was executed before neovim, and when you get out of tmux visual mode it'll snap back down to the bottom of your scrollback buffer, nvim (nominally) taking up the entire pane like nothing happened; but we can probably agree that outside of a few narrow use cases, this isn't a very desirable way to manage scrolling in a terminal.

The other part (which IMO is more consequential) is that once the LLM application quits or otherwise drops out of the alternate screen, that conversation is lost forever.

With the usual terminal mode, that history can outlive the Claude application, and considering many people keep their terminals running for days or sometimes even weeks at a time, that means having the convo in your scrollback buffer for a while.

I've actually heard a plausible theory about the TUI being janky, that being that they avoid use of the alternate screen feature of ANSI (and onwards) terminals.

The theory states that Anthropic avoids using the alternate screen (which gives consuming applications access to a clear buffer with no shell prompt that they can do what they want with and drop at their leisure) because the alternate screen has no scrollback buffer.

So for example, terminal-based editors -- neovim, emacs, nano -- all use the alternate screen because not fighting for ownership of the screen with the shell is a clear benefit over having scrollback.

The calculus is different when you have an LLM that you have a conversational history with, and while you can't bolt scrollback onto the alternate screen (easily), you can kinda bolt an alternate screen-like behaviour onto a regular terminal screen.

I don't personally use LLMs if I can avoid it, so I don't know how janky this thing is, really, but having had to recently deal with ANSI terminal alternate screen bullshit, I think this explanation's plausible.

    > FastMCP is the standard framework for building MCP applications

Standardized by whom?

In an era where technology exists that can lend the appearance of legitimacy to just about anyone, that kind of statement needs to be qualified.

"The sandbox isn't so bad, if the criticism you have is that it totally fails at doing the one thing a sandbox is supposed to do."

I haven't in a very long time, over a decade at this point.

A few friends and I have a small handful of self-hosted services that we all run on a VPN between our places with stuff like a recipe sharing app, etc., but the number of people with access to that is single digits.

In terms of "hosting anything," I still have my own homelab, and my self-hosting will be limited to this sort of stuff for the foreseeable. A cluster of limited-scope apps that helps me and a handful of friends keep in touch after moving out of our hometown, beyond just chatting in Signal groups.

I won't be putting up my own public website (or portfolio, or whatever; be it hosted on my own infra or not).

My two cents: I'd love to have a site. I've been involved with web technologies since the early/mid 2000s, when I built my first site in elementary school.

I've picked up hobbies since then that lend themselves well to sharing online, but right now, with the amount of LLM-related scraping happening, I have no intention at all of hosting anything I've made by hand, be it code, photos, recipes, etc.

These bots make their own ground rules -- "just put up this special robots.txt thing" -- and then ignore them, requiring tools like Anubis to be created, maintained, and kept constantly up to date, and for what? So the plagiarism machine can plagiarise more? Copyright courts have apparently just checked out on this, so I'm not at all confident they'll do anything about this.

To be clear: my ego isn't so huge that I want my name plastered everywhere, on everything I've ever touched. I believe strongly in the principle of not getting your shit scraped online and then churned out into something that these LLM companies can (eventually? presumably?) profit off of (or at least turn into investment, in the short-term). These companies have done terrible things to the state of public discourse and I do what I can to avoid feeding the beast.

It's not the conjugations that scare most people, it's the declensions (ok, well, at least anglophones).

To be clear: this is civil action by a family, not the position of the Government of Canada.

What's a rare pepe and how does it support the project?

    > Based on the fact user scripts are globally disabled now I'm guessing this was a vector.

Disabled at which level?

Browsers still allow for user scripts via tools like TamperMonkey and GreaseMonkey, and that's not enforceable (and arguably, not even trivially visible) to sites, including Wikipedia.

As I say that out loud, I figure there's a separate ecosystem of Wikipedia-specific user scripts, but arguably the same problem exists.

Same here, but it'll be a cold day in hell before you see me using the dreaded double-period-bang..!

This is ignoring ML which has existed for decades.

Neural networks, computer vision, sentiment analysis, all of these and more have provided an unspeakable amount of value over the years.

This isn't the argument against traditional payment systems you seem to think it is.

There's a reason most people in well-banked countries use plastic over cash these days, convenience and consumer protection are it; and even with cash, the barrier to entry for fraud is higher since at some point that cash will come into contact with the banking world, and will have to be accounted for. If your cash flow is suspicious enough, it'll be audited.

These are often undesirable features for SMEs that need to be accountable for a variety of reasons, including KYC regulations; besides, while blockchains provide protocol-level security, they fail in two ways that do matter to consumers:

- They provide no meaningful consumer protections (since this necessarily requires an authority, which blockchains may not have)

- They don't protect at all against meatspace vulnerabilities like scams and other deception-based attacks, which are by far the more common issue in banking. This is exacerbated by the lack of consumer protections.

(To be clear: don't read my comment as being in support of PayPal. They have abused user trust for a while, and I haven't had an account there in over a year -- fuck 'em.)

This is coming from California, a distinctly capitalist state, and refers to a list published by the US Federal Department of Justice, which reports to a distinctly capitalist (or... at a minimum, a distinctly non-communist) administration.

It also doesn't get in the way of the US's (already extraordinarily loose) firearms sale and acquisition doctrine which regularly costs innocent lives with the pretext of resisting a tyrannical government (which, it appears, people aren't actually that interested in doing now that one's in power).