jjani

Casinos, scams (both of these Web3 as well as traditional), game hack developers, ransomware and database hackers. Adtech, which thousands of HNers work in (anyone at Google). Temu, Shein, gacha/lootbox games, dopamine drug dealers (Meta, Bytedance). NSO group, spyware. Policeware, Clearview, surveillance tech. You could name defense as well, but I find that more ambiguous.

I wouldn't be surprised if it at least 25% of HN has worked for such companies for at least 2 years of their career.

Huh? If the goal is compliance, you wouldn't use something that's worse for compliance - which is why the Legal and Security wouldn't like it. If it helped with compliance, they'd love it! So the reason can't be compliance.

SamA is in a hurry because he's set to lose the race. We're at peak valuation and he needs to convert something now.

If the entrenched giants (Google, Microsoft and Apple) catch up - and Google 100% has, if not surpassed - they have a thousand levers to pull and OpenAI is done for. Microsoft has realized this, hence why they're breaking up with them - Google and Anthropic have shown they don't need OpenAI. Galaxy phones will get a Gemini button, Chrome will get it built into the browser. MS can either develop their own thing , use opensource models, or just ask every frontier model provider (and there's already 3-4 as we speak) how cheaply they're willing to deliver. Then chuck it right in the OS and Office first-class. Which half the white collar world spends their entire day staring at. Apple devices too will get an AI button (or gesture, given it's Apple) and just like MS they'll do it inhouse or have the providers bid against each other.

The only way OpenAI David was ever going to beat the Goliaths GMA in the long run was if it were near-impossible to catch up to them, á la TSMC/ASML. But they did catch up.

IE once captured all of the value in browserland, with even much higher mindshare and market dominance than OpenAI has ever had. Comparing with Apple (= physical products) is Apples to oranges (heh).

Their relationship with MS breaking down is a bad omen. I'm already seeing non-tech users who use "Copilot" because their spouse uses it at work. Barely knowing it's rebadged GPT. You think they'll switch when MS replaces the backend with e.g. Anthropic? No chance.

MS, Google and Apple and Meta have gigantic levers to pull and get the whole world to abandon OpenAI. They've barely been pulling them, but it's a matter of time. People didn't use Siri and Bixby because they were crap. Once everyone's Android has a Gemini button that's just as good as GPT (which it already is (it's better) for anything besides image generation), people are going to start pressing them. And good luck to OpenAI fighting that.

Who uses PWA for work-related apps though? There too, the standard is MDN which uses a curated version of the app stores.

> I’ll now cover the opposite case: my peers who see generative models as superior to their own output. I see this most often in professional communication, typically to produce fluff or fix the tone of their original prompts. Every single time, the model obscures the original meaning and adds layers of superfluous nonsense to even the simplest of ideas.

I'm going to call out what I see as the elephant in the room.

This is brand new technology and 99% of people are still pretty clueless at properly using it. This is completely normal and expected. It's like the early days of the personal computer. Or Geocities and <blink> tags and under construction images.

Even in those days, incredible things were already possible by those who knew how to achieve them. The end result didn't have to be blinking text and auto-playing music. But for 99% it was.

Similarly, with current LLMs, it's already more than possible to use them in effective ways, without obscuring meaning or adding superfluous nonsense. In ways whose results have none of the author's criticisms apply. People just don't know how to do it yet. Many never will, just like many never learnt how to actually use a PC past Word and Excel. But many others will learn.

Besides the many factors (e.g. reserve currency) others have already mentioned, here's another one:

Digital services not being taxed/tariffed when exported whereas physical goods are, is purely a historical artifact. The US has managed to get the whole world addicted to their doomscrolling dopamine algorithms, raking in trillions of dollars. If these were physical goods, this would've been entirely different.

The heroine dealer of the world. So far they've been allowed this position, which is incredibly privileged. And now that the EU sometimes takes a (paltry) step towards slightly taxing the drugs, the dealer screams and kicks, "it's unfair! They're targeting just me!".

I had no idea! Cool to learn.

It definitely makes complete sense in that scenario, but remains a very niche usecase where people have no other option.

>People outside tech just get installation instructions

People outside of tech don't need instructions to install non-PWA, store apps. So all this does to me is reinforce that no one is installing PWAs outside of niche scenarios where 1. people basically have to use the app due to a connection to a physical institution 2. they are explicitly told how to do it 3. the app is not available on the stores for legal reasons.

> They don't want to be subject to app store approval policies, shitty TOS, nor pay Google or Apple a 30% cut. Installing the app is easy, visit the web site, clck the install banner, add to home screen and you're good to go. On the developer side you get to deploy as iften as needed.

And the metrics are saying that people click it?

> I used to do it like that as well, but clients want a mobile app and management decided to give them a PWA

I'm quite surprised to hear this is a common thing. Besides myself, I don't know a single person who has ever installed a PWA. For people in tech, despite knowing they exist. For people outside tech, they don't know they exist in the first place.

Does management actually have any PWAs installed themselves?

Apart from the crazy dog, the style has similarities to "Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels" by Jean Fouquet[1], from a somewhat similar era (1452). If you search for "Early Netherlandish paintings" you'll find more, so it's not outrageous for the time. I'm sure people who know their art history (not me) can point towards even much closer ones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melun_Diptych#/media/File:Fouq...

> Presumably (some faction inside) Google wants to warn users about scam apps

Or (the ads faction that effectively runs the company) wants to warn users about apps that don't spend much on AdWords and Play Store ads.

Why not use AnswerOverflow to make the chats indexed and searchable? It's definitely a lot better than nothing, multiple times it has already helped me find answers to questions I had.

Not OP, but most of my experience is in backend yet I find current LLMs better at backend code than at frontend code :)

> For frontend, we don't need people anymore

Does this include UI design? We're finding tools like v0 decent, but nowhere near production design quality. Same for just using Claude or Gemini directly.

They've been doing this in Korea for a decade already, funny to read it now framed as a new development. I guess the news hadn't spread to the English-speaking world.

In fact, over here every brand does it. Even US brands like HP and Dell.

Piles of VC cash were never necessary, FWIW. Tracking, potentially. They may indeed have massively undervalued ads, or even other monetization options - Line makes millions off of emojis and such, and if they'd have been as big as Whatsapp, possibly billions. Meta too is not even tapping 5% of Whatsapp's monetization potential, FWIW. I wonder if it's intentional to prevent anti-trust concerns.

But I don't think monetization matters too much. Ms tried making the botched Skype play, and as a company there's no way they didn't understand the value of hundreds of millions of eyeballs, daily usage market share. They understood that with IE, despite it being a zero-revenue product in and of itself.

> when the mobile ecosystem didn’t support their legacy persistent-connection-style protocols

You may know more about this then I do - what's the main difference? I used them back in the day and as end-user they felt the exact same as modern messaging apps. I send a message, it gets saved on some server, the receiver gets it from there. When I used it, it definitely didn't require both parties to be online to send/receive.

Or is it about the notifications?

Heh, this reminds me of a vaguely related lesson I learned recently. Sold Nvidia mid-2023. "Surely everyone understands by now just how much money they're going to be making the coming 2 years, and this is already completely priced in, it's so blatantly obvious!". Heh.

I never understood why they became less popular when mobile phones took over. Even in the 00s so many people were already in group chats through MSN, ICQ and so on.

All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper mobile app. Instead they wasted billions on Skype to replace their golden opportunity.

Most of this was written by an LLM, with the writer doing post-editing. Susprised not to see any other comments on this yet!

That doesn't mean it's a bad piece, I think it's a good writeup.

More like 5/95 with Microsoft - and that's being generous, I wouldn't be surprised if it was 1/99. It's basicaly just hip tech companies and a couple of Fortune 500s that use Google Docs. And even their finance departments often use Excel. HN keeps underestimating how the whole physical world runs on Excel.

> Honestly, they don't care. I skim the testosterone subreddits occasionally and many people brag and joke about how small their testicles are.

Wouldn't surprise me at all if most of that was coping behavior.

Everyone games the benchmarks, but a lot is pointing towards both Meta and OpenAI going to even further lengths than the others.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is widely considered superior to 3.7 Sonnet now by heavy users, but they don't have an SWE-bench score. Shows that looking at one such benchmark isn't very telling. Main advantage over Sonnet being that it's better at using a large amount of context, which is enormously helpful during coding tasks.

Sonnet is still an incredibly impressive model as it held the crown for 6 months, which may as well be a decade with the current pace of LLM improvement.

> Lemon Squeezy - it was very popular until being acquired by stripe. Full of serious bugs, bad support. Lovely design, slightly better fees than Gumroad, but many hidden. Would still use over Gumroad just cause the Gumroad checkout design is so bad it loses sales imo.

Curious to read the acquisition made it less popular. Is it due to the concern of Stripe buying it solely as an "extinguish" strategy? Or is it unrelated to the acquisition and just because of the bugs and poor support?

Your link seems to say the opposite.

> Paid Services

>... When you activate a Cloud Billing account, all use of Gemini API and Google AI Studio is a "Paid Service" with respect to how Google Uses Your Data, even when using Services that are offered free of charge, such as Google AI Studio and unpaid quota of Gemini API.

>... How Google Uses Your Data When you use Paid Services, including, for example, the paid quota of the Gemini API, Google doesn't use your prompts (including associated system instructions, cached content, and files such as images, videos, or documents) or responses to improve our products, and will process your prompts and responses in accordance with the Data Processing Addendum for Products Where Google is a Data Processor. For Paid Services, Google logs prompts and responses for a limited period of time, solely for the purpose of detecting violations of the Prohibited Use Policy and any required legal or regulatory disclosures. This data may be stored transiently or cached in any country in which Google or its agents maintain facilities.

Activated a Cloud Billing account -> All use of Google AI Studio is a "Paid Service", even free use -> Google then doesn't use prompts or responses to improve the products

Good interview, I don't remember seeing a president of the EU commission ever talking this much sense. The part on digital services is something I've brought up multiple times in the tariffs discussions as predictably, I haven't seen any US outlet point it out, even those extremely critical about the tariffs. Even on HN.

Of course, that she's saying the right things says nothing about whether she will actually enact them. The longer term response to the tariffs will reveal everything. If the EU simply lets the US get away with adding 10% and getting nothing in return - or even worse, if the EU gives up the DMA, GDPR or other things for appeasement purposes - then her words will be meaningless. If the 10% stays, a 10% DST is the minimum to respond with.

That sounds incredibly disappointing given how high their benchmarks are, indicating they might be overtuned for those, similar to Llama4.

What did Sonnet build it on, that you ended up using it?

One of the drawbacks of all frontier models (with Sonnet being the most extreme) for web dev is their strong preference for React in any kind of situation, even for Wordpress-blog equivalents where it makes no sense.

In my mind, I was thinking of giving a set of fictional findings, not realizing that would technically make it.. fiction!

I think it's fine to have fictional notes. It's still a very different task than e.g. writing a fantasy novel, which these benchmarks roughly are about. Instead, the task would be to turn a given set of facts on a real-world topic into a high-quality, serious article.

> Then even writing what some might consider Pulitzer prize winning is a subjective task.

This applies to these benchmarks for "short fantasy story" tasks all the same.