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And yours and other's agents will probably remain an insignificant and invisible customer base anyway.

My crystal ball is as good as anyone's, but if "agentic shopping" ever becomes mainstream, you can be sure that the vast majority will ask their phone (i.e. Google, i.e. Google Shopping) what the best price is anyways.

By that point, you don't need an AI that boils the oceans and hopefully doesn't confabulate or misinterpret your words, all you need is a better corporate travel portal, which is a legitimate workplace productivity discussion to have, and a solved problem with traditional methods. Ours is effectively close to the workflow you describe: picking dates and time brackets, destination, fine tuning flights and hotel options, sending for validation, less than 10 clicks through information-dense and effective/predictable screens which I wouldn't want to trade for a chatbot and it's usually over the top words salad.

On a different corner of the open source ecosystem, PrusaSlicer, also a wxWidget project, just announced the first of its v3 releases with a full GUI rewrite, and what a blast from the past it was to have a X11, non-scaled, wrong font & dpi. It's really unfortunate that they didn't take the opportunity to switch to Qt

In case you missed it, yesterday there was a hn post about openshot 4 (also a Qt modernization release)

Thanks for taking the time to write this down and cite sources. I'm baffled by the recent-ish increase of such dismissive and lazy comments as the one you responded to.

You mean, just how it is on Windows?

Funny how this post appears in my timeline just above:

Fair Work Commission condemns 'plain wrong' AI legal advice | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49497357

Folks, until LLMs (but more probably, something that succeeds them) know that they don't know, or know that they hallucinate, don't take medical, legal, technical, financial (...) advice without a fair amount of salt.

I saw a laptop earlier in the train that I asked ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini what it was, providing a brand, screen size and ports description. Gemini could never figure it out, Claude and ChatGPT eventually did, after multiple rounds of indirection, giving completely wrong answers (there was a perfect match for the problem statement, they all explored alternatives first). LLMs are (probably) amazing at things I don't care about, and still suck at the mundane stuff you would have the marketing tell you they excel at.

> It is also definitely true that the regulations are largely written by people who do not understand the tech

I kind of switched side on this after the silicon valley made it clear that they are in the king making business, and the kings they want are of the fascistic and not benevolent kind. Also, a big aspect of the "tech culture" (beyond the silicon valley itself) has been about focussing on what could be done rather than whether it should, and this "restraint" must come from "outside the tech bubble".

Matter of fact, the vast majority has moved on to Wayland years ago, both KDE and Gnome have reported their usage stats and neither sees a point in keeping X11 afloat. I too have been using Wayland (KDE) for years, it addressed some decades-long struggles around multi monitor and DPI layouts. I use input methods for CJK that work better and more consistently than before. As far as I'm concerned, this ship has sailed, for the better.

Eventually you'll realize that it's performance artistry all the way up and down. Don't you think that GitHub and its owners are engaged in high stakes lobbying and spending tens/hundreds of millions swinging politics their way (i.e. for their own profits, not yours)? Haven't you paid attention to the US presidential inauguration, who was attending it, and all the dealings before and after that?

If we can go as far as agreeing that this sucks, and that taking no stance only serves to reinforce the establishment of a technocratic authoritarianism, then paying attention to politics and who's at the losing end of what becomes a matter of survival.

My ThinkPad's touchpad has been good enough for 10+ years (and I got a trackpoint!), to the extent I stopped caring altogether. Perhaps a MacBook Pro's is better, but however better it may be, that won't swing me towards Apple. "The best touchpad in the world" is some street creds I'm not interested in.

Just to add to that "Competition" is no longer even a thing when the unchecked capitalistic game is played to the extent we are at, with extreme consolidation and duo/triopoly cartels running most services and playing all the dirty tricks in the bag (regulatory capture, rent extraction, lobbying for deregulation and weakening of labour and environmental norms, ...)

Competition is generally good for the consumer, but Americans need to wake up to the fact that it's not built into the system, it's to be regulated into it, and competing is only good so far as it doesn't turn into a race to the bottom (which again, is a matter of a regulator setting the bar).

I might add (although it's getting off topic) that a centralised service, by definition brokering every single user's comms and metadata is NEVER private. The whole premise of Signal as a secure/private solution always seemed silly, the SGX indirection is theater.

The big deal of a decade ago about SSDs wasn't throughput, but random read/writes. HDDs can be astonishingly fast, but by their very mechanical nature, they suck at jumping from sectors to sectors to gather small files, which is typical of booting an OS.

Last I checked (couple years ago?) it was ill-advised to use anything but Synapse, because:

- you would be at the mercy of very real and frequent federation problems (Matrix being so implementation-dependent and centred around Synapse ; like, the json serialization format is better described as "whatever order and structure python's stdlib is doing"¹)

- there is no non-destructive way back to another server (the open federation would just reject you, and you would have to "start anew"). Interestingly, that last one pushed some servers over the fence and into XMPP, and they could then switch implementations (e.g. from prosody to ejabberd) effortlessly.

¹: https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07#:~:text=matrix%20hom...

> But why wouldn't it be possible to have these two in the same app

I don't believe it's "impossible" to have both in a same app, it's just that the kind of high-density UI and advanced features you depend upon for high-volume chats rarely intersect with family-scale/1-to-one chats, so you either make compromises that directly affect usability/efficiency, or you essentially end-up with 2 chat paradigms at odds in a same client.

> As to whether one protocol can address both use cases: Maybe it doesn't need to either?

It depends what you mean by protocol in this case. Chat rooms (MUCs in the XMPP verbiage) are handled by a specific component, so it's practically happening the way you describe, but at its core, the "message-passing" (stanza-based) nature of the XMPP protocol doesn't change.

> Matrix is a much better conceptual fit for the IRC/Slack-like use case

Debatable, this mostly boils down to the client design choices and priorities, and has little to nothing to do with the protocol. Someone came-up with a metaphor I like to illustrate it: the banquet and the barbecue¹. XMPP has "barbecue"-style clients like Conversations, Kaidan, Dino?, and other that are rather "banquet"-style like Gajim, Fluux, Movim, …

I personally use Conversations on the go and Gajim otherwise. I also happen to have interfaced all my "high-volume/many-participants" IRC chans from back in the days with the biboumi² gateway, so they appear to my XMPP clients as native XMPP groupchats, and the experience was great-enough for me to ultimately drop weechat a decade or so ago and have all my "banquet"-style chans under one XMPP roof.

> between mixed extension support at the client and server side, with XMPP you can never really know if you're getting "plain old Jabber" or something more like Matrix in terms of user experience.

From over a decade of using XMPP daily, this concern is more of philosophical nature than anything. The vast majority of the people you'll reach over XMPP use a decently modern and maintained client that will "just work". Worst case, they will still be getting your messages and the meaning across, because the "message passing" core of XMPP was defined 25-odds years ago and hasn't changed.

The real "risk" for XMPP would be to have a large number of users stuck on an unmaintained client, and users staying behind for years while the ecosystem moves on. We had a bit of that with pidgin 8-or-so years ago. The worse that happens is that you can't use the latest E2EE scheme with them, or that attachments are slower to arrive, this sort of things. That's IMO not bad for a 25 years old protocol that's truly decentralized.

¹: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/05/16/banquets-and-bar...

²: https://codeberg.org/poezio/biboumi/

Probably, and also from the fact that although there's a plethora of matrix clients and servers on paper, none is as feature complete (or feature-complete to the point of usefulness, I might say) as "the one". XMPP has about one decent-to-great client per platform and multiple fully compatible and interoperable server implementations, and every single one of them is by different groups.

What server was that? I got into the XMPP self hosting game in 2014, even then, ejabberd was one of the most "fire and forget" piece of server software I was running. It takes some ports opening and some DNS SRV records to be set and you are good to go with all chat, calls and social features.

You can mediate friends requests by having servers generate an invite link, you can generate QR codes your friend can scan on a side channel, ... There are ways

That's not answering my question, what precisely do LLM enable in ways of educating children that hasn't been thoroughly studied before? What role do you want to give chatbots in the complex framework of child brain development? How do you back it up?

What a weird, unhinged take. Android is mostly written in C, Android apps are AOT/JIT compiled when written in Java, and the NDK lets you write/port from whatever native you have, which is how you get Chrome to run on it to begin with.

Indeed, it won't: I can link a conversation with XYZ-bot that tells me that I'm handsome and my ideas are brilliant and I'm en route to tremendous success. The point is that LLMs are, by design and current models norms, sycophantic and incapable of describing their own knowledge and workings/processes. This is not a matter of "my opinion vs yours", that's what few minutes spent legitimately trying to understand how this works will tell you.

I had the privilege of being educated in several countries and cultures. This might come across as "your education system sucks", and that's essentially what it boils down to, but on the upside I'm truly sorry for you and will oppose a comment to your cynicism. Good exams test your ability to express coherent thoughts about the concepts you learned, and let you generalize upon them by having you use and combine them to solve cases and problems that were not those seen in the teaching material. You can even teach and test history that way, and make it much more insightful and captivating than a laundry list of dates and events (as I suppose was your case?)

Which was pretty much the whole damn premise of needing a teacher to begin with. What a surprise!

> As the nature of assistive tools changes

I mean, does it? The way I see it, the best LLMs have to offer is infinite patience (until they inevitably and unpredictably start to confabulate, which should be a gigantic red flag, anyhow), I don't see how LLMs can be used to explore teaching paradigms that haven't been explored before. We know pretty well from centuries of empirical experimentation how children's brains develop under different stimuli. It's not exactly something the software industry needed to "hack".

Although obvious, I think it's worth stating that this method mostly (only?) makes sense for higher education, where students are conscious, involved and engaged in their curriculum.

Could it be that you vastly overgeneralize? While there's no perfect education system, many are much better than the nightmare you describe.

You can probably keep this kind of unconstructive comments to yourself. Even if this was a place to discuss one's beliefs, nobody was attacking yours to begin with.