manuelmoreale

A significant % of the population in rich countries, probably close to > 100%, benefits from transport infrastructure and sewage treatment and many other vital services. I don't see why 900M of free users on chatgpt is a relevant argument.

Same experience. RSS is by far the most requested resource in the server logs. Sometimes up to 70% of the total traffic is coming from RSS. That said though, I wonder how much of that traffic is biological and how much is bots.

I also wonder how much is dead traffic. Dead as in people who add a ton of stuff in their RSS readers but don’t actually read.

RSS is a bit of a black box when it comes to this but maybe that's a good thing.

Same here. RSS is by far the most requested resource in the server logs. That said though, I wonder how much of that traffic is biological and how much is bots.

Because I also wonder how much is dead traffic. As in people who add a ton of stuff in their rss but don’t actually read.

RSS is a bit of a black box but maybe that’s a good thing.

Closest thing I can think of is this one: https://feedland.org

Or you create a blog for yourself and you make a blogroll.

As for discovering new blogs, couple of options but there are more out there: https://ooh.directory, https://blogroll.org/

> If AI does increase people’s productivity then people should use it.

Productivity is not the only metric worth caring about. If it increases productivity without negative side effects than sure, people should use it. But if it does at the expenses of other metrics then it’s worth debating if we should use it.

Interesting how different perspectives work. It’s less than 400 per square mile in my corner of the country. It’s less than 80 in my area and this feels right for how I want to live.

> you can't meaningfully modify a layout with css alone.

https://csszengarden.com/pages/alldesigns/

That statement wasn't true ages ago, and it's even less true now.

> ‘caring’ (what does that mean exactly?)

caring: (adjective) displaying kindness and concern for others.

If you look at this definition of caring and find a way to turn it into a politics issue that's your problem, not mine.

If you scale a problem up, then yes, you get into politics. If you scale it all the way down, politics disappear. If you see your next-door neighbor struggling with something and you can help, you should. That's not politics. That's called being a decent human being.

> Hand wavy general statements are easy to have

I agree. In fact "everything is politics" is a stupid, hand wavy statement.

> You’ll also find lots of shaming among the group and against ‘outsiders’ trying to enforce idealogy. And if you think that part doesn’t happen, just read your own comment - it’s a mild form of that!

Disagreement != enforcing ideology, at least in my world. And if you don't see it that way, then I guess you're guilty of doing the precise thing you're commenting on.

> Everything is politics.

Everything you want to be politics is politics. Caring for other people shouldn't be politics. Being a decent human being shouldn't be politics. There are plenty of things that aren't politics unless you decide you want to turn them into politics.

Webrings are very much still a thing and Ray has an awesome page on his site all about them https://brisray.com/utils/webrings.htm

If what you're missing is the big list of RSS I have something for you: https://blogroll.org/all.opml

This will automatically download the OPML file for all the blogs that have an RSS address filed on blogroll.org

There's a bit of everything in there but if what you want is a wild ride maybe you can give that a try.

It was awesome back then and it's even more awesome now: https://getkirby.com And there's a V6 in the making that should come out soon.

> You’d have to have a very poorly RLHF’d model (or a very weird system prompt) for it to draw you a Terminator, pastoral scene, or pelican riding a bicycle as its self image :)

How about a pastoral scene with a terminator pelican riding a bike? Jokes aside I get what you're saying, and it obviously makes total sense.

> Is it? They're all generalizing from a pretty similar pool of text, and especially for the idea of a "helpful, harmless, knowledgeable virtual assistant", I think you'd end up in the same latent design space. Encompassing, friendly, radiant.

Oh yeah I totally agree with that. What I was referring to was the fact that even though are different companies trying to build "different" products, the output is very similar which suggests that they're not all that different after all.

> Companies should be free to do whatever they want, as long as they pay for all their negative externalities.

No they shouldn't. Sometimes it's not a matter of paying for the externalities. If you're doing harm at scale the only sane option is to stop doing that, period.

When we figured out that leaded gas was bad we didn't make companies pay for their negative externalities. We banned that shit and that was it.

> The vast majority of people want what's best for their societies, and have different views as to how best achieve that goal, that arise from diverse life experiences.

I'd personally disagree with that assessment. I think the vast majority of people want what's best for them and the cohorts they're in. Which is quite different from wanting what's best for society as a whole.

Asked gemini the same question and it produced a similar-ish image: https://manuelmoreale.dev/hn/gemini_1.svg

When I removed the plot part and simply asked to generate an SVG it basically created a fancy version of the Gemini logo: https://manuelmoreale.dev/hn/gemini_2.svg

This is honestly all quite uninteresting to me. The most interesting part is that the various tools all create a similar illustration though.

He wrote "learn your CSS conventions" which implies that every team and every project will have a different set of conventions. Hidden inside that statement is the fact that he just accepted that Tailwind should be THE CSS convention, something I personally disagree with but to each their own.

Yeah exactly, right? Europe is the dystopian nightmare, sure.

> But why are so many Europeans trying to move to the US?

All I see in my circle is people refusing to even go on vacation in the US, let alone move there.

Where are you suggest we move to escape this dystopian nightmare?

And based on some of the replies in this thread we better act fast before it's too late.

You could say that about literally every single type of addictive behavior present on the face of the planet. You could just stop smoking and/or not buying cigarettes. You could just stop drinking and/or stop buying alcohol. It's a completely pointless observation. There's a reason why these are addictions.

I mean, clearly the companies at the top can't be trusted to do what's in the best interests of the users. So at some point someone has to do something. If this is the correct something that remains to be seen.

> I often zone out as soon as I expect I'm reading slop and that's the reason try to ensure my own writing isn't slop adjacent.

And how is this a problem someone else has to address? Some people zone out when they see a text is too long: are we supposed to only publish short form then? I have 10 years of writing on my site, if someone in 2026 sees my use of em dashes and suddenly starts thinking that my content is AI generated that's their problem, not mine.

Too many people are willingly bending to adapt to what AI companies are doing. I'm personally not gonna do it. Because again, now it's em dashes, tomorrow it could be a set of words, or a way to structure text. I say fuck that.

> Just allowing a service provider to receive a third party attestation that you "allowed" still allows the third party to track what you are doing even if the provider can't. That's still unacceptable from a privacy standpoint, I don't want the government, or agents thereof, knowing all the places I've had to show ID.

Isn't this solvable by allowing you to be the middle man? A service asks you to prove your age, you ask the government for a digital token that proves your age (and the only thing the government knows is that you have asked for a token) and you then deliver that to the service and they only know the government has certified that you are above a certain age.

The service gets a binary answer to their question. The government only knows you have asked for a token. Wouldn't a setup like that solve the issue you're talking about?

> Gemini tells me that for thousands of years, the swastika was used as "a symbol of positivity, luck and cosmic order". Try drawing it on something now and showing it to people. Is this an effective way to fight Nazism?

I'm happy to change my position when some 13 million people are killed by lunatics that used the em dash as the symbol of their ideology. Until then, I'll keep using it everywhere it's appropriate.

Also, if we don't have the guts to resist even when the stakes are this low and the consequences for our resistance are basically non existent, then society is doomed. We might as well roll on our side and die.

> At least, not until the dominant forces in AI decide of their own accord that they don't want their LLMs emitting so many of them.

It's not a power I'm willing to give them. What if tomorrow they tweak something and those tool start to use a specific word more often? Or a different punctuation sign? What do we do then? Do we constantly adapt, playing whack-a-mole? What if AI starts asking a lot more questions in their writing? Do we stop asking them as a result?

You feel free to adapt and bend. I'm personally not going to do it and if someone starts thinking that I'm using AI to write my thoughts and as a result that's on them.

You are not alone and fuck all the people that say that everything is doomed and that there's no way to still have a good internet full of wonderful content made by people.

> I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.

Wrote about this before [0] but my 2c: you shouldn't pause and you should keep using them because fuck these companies and their AI tools. We should not give them the power to dictate how we write.

[0]: https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/on-em-dashes

> but AFAIK a simple forum where kids can talk to each other about familial abuse or whatever would also qualify.

I'm currently scrolling through this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_... and it seems to me these are primarily focused on "social media" but missing from these short summaries is how social media is defined which is obviously an important detail.

Seems to me that an "easy" solution would be to implement some sort of size cap this way you could easily leave old school forums out.

It would no be a perfect solution, but it's probably better than including every site with user generated content.