raydiak

That's a pretty blatant public admission that corporations fundamentally regard intelligent entities as profit sources.

On behalf of the actual majority who lost elections to gerrymandered districts, electorates, and blatant disinformation campaigns...yes this. Me too like an AOLer

Review the guidelines; this type of slander is well afoul of them. Go ahead and get the last word in if that's important to you, as I won't be wasting any more of my time on this thread or your destructive attitude. Comparing different opinions is acceptable but mean-spirited emotionally driven personal jabs are not.

I vaguely recall having a few similar complaints about Perl's PDL back in the day. Makes me wonder why we can't also support something closer to syntactically loop-esque constructs to express the same things without the need for special slicing/indexing notations with their own implicit semantics.

Calling a spade a spade is not condescending. You still haven't addressed the consequences of NOT doing something about Google's monopoly. You continue to ignore the fact that multiple comments from the person you were originally responding to blatantly falsified your misrepresentations. You don't care about my continued patient attempts to bring this discussion back to reason instead of personal attacks. You need some debate classes or something.

Anyway, I've done what I set out to, which is leave something for readers to think about. Changing your mind is not on my priority list, some people just can't be reasoned with. Facts are what they are, regardless of your acceptance or lack thereof. Say whatever further mean-spirited personal attacks make you feel like you "won" here, since that's apparently important to you. Go ahead and get the last word in. I'll leave you to it.

Review the guidelines. That level of snark and vitriol is wholly unacceptable on this site. That is why I comment here instead of, say, X. Disagreeing is not condescension. I keep stating facts, and you keep circling back to emotional aspersions. This is supposed to be a place for civilized discourse. If you are incapable of disagreeing in a mature and respectful manner, it is you who should engage yourself elsewhere.

You still haven't addressed the consequences of NOT doing something.

Perhaps you've never heard the expression about "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." It's an aphorism, absolutely not literal. [1] Additionally, even if it were intended literally, which it clearly was not, saying it should have been done 20 years ago is not the same as fantasizing. It also obviously concludes that it should be done now, which is not fantasy.

I didn't say you were dismissive. If you have valid points, you should be able to make them without rewording everything into something else that you can tear down. That's called a straw man argument. "... the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction" [2]

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/a/603725 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

That's a fair point. If we saw a downward trend in google search usage in the last year or two, it might support your theory.

Whether AI and search are similar enough to call them competitors, at least right now, is highly debatable. I don't know about other people, but I for one have definitely not started asking chatbots questions instead of looking for informed, human-authored content.

EDIT: Note that I mean downward trend in total, not the percentages shown by statcounter. Statcounter does have a separate chatbot page though, if you're interested in that. Still doesn't answer your totally valid question of how many people are chatting instead of searching, though. Maybe Google or ChatGPT could tell us :)

The lawsuit focuses specifically on search and search advertising. So the answer to your question is Google Search.

Note that a legal monopoly is not the same as the extreme simplification of "zero other options". "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises." [1]

"In United States v. Google LLC, the federal government alleges that Google has unfairly hindered competition in the search market through anti-competitive deals with Apple as well as mobile carriers. The government alleges that, as a result of these practices, Google has accumulated control of around 88% of the domestic search engine market.

In doing so, the government alleges, Google has additionally monopolized the search advertising market at the expense of competing services. Per the government's estimation, Google has been able to accumulate control of over 70% of the search advertising market. As a result of lack of competition, Google has been able to over-charge advertisers versus what they would pay in a competitive environment." [2]

Statcounter seems to align quite closely with the government's assertion. [3] Extra creepily, it appears to be even a hair worse globally, where Bing is less used (not that I like Bing or MS either). [4] But there is no international framework I'm aware of to handle global-scale monopolies, so that's outside the scope of the suit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... [3] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/un... [4] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share looks pretty clear to me. If this suit turns into another nothingburger, that moat probably extends from here to the AI apocalypse.

You're not entirely wrong, though I was also playing it up a little. Meant to be read more like a standup comedy bit, some part honest opinion and some part exaggeration. Someone told me a long time ago that laughing at my own jokes isn't funny, and ever since, nobody including me is ever quite sure how serious I am or not. :)

I'm not so opposed to vibe coding as recreation. Though if you're ever interested, those are all pretty easy and fun things to work with directly in my opinion, at least at hobby scale. Well, maybe not bare webgl, but that's why three.js is in the list.

AI sure does it a lot faster than I can though. I totally get your point that it lowers the bar to entry, and that the speed and near-instant mutability is more conducive to creativity. I'm more opposed to the semantically inscrutable term "vibe coding", but it seems pretty well entrenched already.

It is clearly directed at this specific project, given that it is attached to this specific HN item. And grow some manners.

This is a straw man, nobody asserted that the consequences should not be considered. Clearly, whichever way we proceed there will be considerable consequences; I doubt there is any dispute about that. Your argument seems to fail to acknowledge the dystopian consequences of NOT doing something.

Also, let's dispense with inappropriate jabs such as referring to other perspectives as "fantasy".

That makes total sense. I can see why many would be more Clippy tolerant if they hadn't had to explain its interruptions to other people and/or turn it off and move on with their day several dozen times or more.

Thanks! Sounds like a reasonable prediction. To me, crazy animated stuff in the wrong context is a component of bad UX. Though I learned web design by interning under a literal Nazi, so my design opinions may be a bit...extreme.

Perhaps I could make room in my heart some day for animated cats on personal sites. Clippy is still pushing it. More because of a bunch of bad memories of trying to support people who were infuriated by it, or on a few occasions having to go to the trouble of opening Word just to disable it on several machines in a day, than its actual physical aesthetics. In my memory it looks more like an image search for "evil Clippy" (didn't think to try that until now, some pretty funny stuff).

Completely agree that corporate dark patterns are a much greater concern. That's why, except for Clippy, I like this project. It puts the tool directly in people's hands with no need for tech skills or cloud gatekeepers and spying.

Tangentially, I just realized that this nicely self-contained Clippy might be able to copy itself. It doesn't have to be able to write an LLM, just copy (or worse yet upload) one file and execute it. Like Agent Smith. But Clippy.

To me, the value of these types of projects is specifically that they are self-contained and local-only. That's the only kind of interaction with it I'm comfortable with right now. I mostly jumped ship on commercial software a long time ago, so I'm hoping there will still be some AI-free linux distros for a good long time. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. At the point that the type of AI integration you're imagining becomes ubiquitous and mandatory, I may or may not stop working with computers entirely, depending on the state of the tech and the state of society by then.

I'm glad! :) I do actually feel some less exaggerated version of what I wrote, but the excess in the verbiage was largely comedic. If you look it up pretty much anywhere, you'll find that there's a very large camp of us Clippy haters who never recovered. I was doing some amount of IT support at the time, and one of the main problems was all the popping up and asking questions confused people in various ways, and if you hid it the obvious way it'd just pop up again. Back when computers were still a new and novel thing for many people, having constant offers of "help" popping up when you're just trying to type a letter introduced counterproductive amounts of cognitive load for some frustrated users I got to deal with.

I'm in the exact same boat as you describe, except it was some other precompiled local-only project instead of this one that I tried a few months ago. That's why I said I like projects like these, because it's a fully private hassle free way to try out LLMs. Haven't really figured out any good purposes for it in my life, but I like to see these tools being made available to people without the time/motivation/savvy to jump through a bunch of hoops.

The Clippy character specifically is the part I find off-putting, but perhaps that's just an excess of relevant experience. How many times I had to explain to confused people that it's not saying anything you have to care about, or disable it for them when they're cursing at their screen because the "hide" option doesn't actually disable it you have to go into the settings for that or it keeps popping up. Which made it just another config burden when I'd be installing office on many computers in a day.

Now, a strong argument could be made that those experiences have made me unreasonable and bigoted against animated paperclips, because this is not the original Clippy. I can live with that.

Which part of my original comment made that a question worth asking? Thought I had already expressed that fairly clearly.

I'm all for these prepackaged local-only AI projects. Much more my speed than corporate cloud services. Real shame this one went down the path of choosing an embodiment that makes me want to shoot holes in my screen. It's even worse than those pixel art cats that chase my cursor on certain blogs. I miss plenty of things about the 90s, but I seriously doubt I'll live long enough to forget how much Clippy is not one of those things. Clippy would be more suitable for a horror game than an assistant. Going out of their way in the README to profusely thank Microsoft for summoning that hellspawn is just icing on the cake.

I hate to put down anyone's open source hobby project, and the guy looks so friendly and happy in his picture. But my honest reaction is fear of what further nightmares people are going to start animating with AI. I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day. Might as well add Rover from Microsoft Bob, some blink/marquee tags, a MIDI file playing in the background, and a minigame about diagnosing DMA conflicts in mixed plug and play and non-PnP systems. Some parts of the 90s should stay in the 90s.

You sure wouldn't want them spying on you, stealing your data, chewing up your resources for shady profit schemes, or making your machine unbootable. Better to leave that to the experts at Microsoft and FAANG since all those features come preinstalled nowadays.

Snark aside, given the context, this really seems like a baseless attack on independent open source developers, who represent a significant potion of this site's subject matter and target audience. Genuine question: why do you feel that this warning is appropriate here but not the dozens of other solo github projects that make it to the HN front page every week?

Besides the words "Japan" and "solar", the headline has nothing at all to do with the content of the article or technical reality, and sounds more like the beginning of an anime story arc. Like someone prompted an AI with "every headline should have a power level over 9000".

While I agree with some of the points here, the aloof tone-deaf consumerist mentality reveals either ignorance of, or more likely indifference to, the transformative juncture we've reached and/or the possible perils. If all you feel about the current situation is "bored," that's a you problem. The world is not here for your amusement. Boredom is a lack of imagination. Go do something else. Your problem is not boredom, it is your own apathetic attitude and need to be regularly spoon-fed entertainment.

Maybe I don't get the level of burnout I'm seeing because I don't spend much time streaming or doomscrolling, but that's an example of my point. If you spend more time creating than consuming, then boredom isn't a problem regardless of what the rest of the world is up to. Occasional fear and horror at the news maybe, but certainly not boredom.

I think you meant "indignant". Besides that, I pretty much agree. Got pretty defensive about the only questioning comment on the post when I looked too. Harsh reaction to a fair point, and then contrary when somebody pointed out it was harsh. All the other comments got ordinary civility and thank yous.

Checking one process for network traffic says absolutely nothing about the actual proliferation of that data, whether from a repair tech having physical access to read the log, or the data being written elsewhere besides the log, or another process receiving it either directly or via the log and uploading it. If you want to prove everyone wrong, at least actually prove it instead of pretending to and then accusing anyone of FUD who points out the holes in your logic and methodology. I don't even give a darn that it's Apple, not like there'd be any less dubiousness if it were Microsoft or Google. This reads like someone who has an emotional axe to grind, not actual research.

Far less than double. Putting one rotor directly in the turbulent wash of another is nowhere near as efficient as two well-separated rotors, for a number of reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra-rotating_propellers gives an estimate of "between 6% and 16% more efficient than normal propellers".

So everyone's fine installing opaque binary blob drivers which run in kernel space on their desktops and laptops and not even having root access to their own cloud-controlled phones, but some undocumented low-level ESP32 commands which require the device to already be compromised are a news-worthy threat vector.

Really wonder if something got lost in translation, here. In the past we would have just thought that was cool and looked for a way to turn it into a SDR.

Silly physicists spent generations trying to confine plasma with magnets and lasers when all along we could have just used plastic wrap.

Exactly. Put another way, tensorflow is not an AI. You can build an AI in tensorflow. You can also resize images in tensorflow (using the traditional algorithms, not AI). I am not an expert, but as I understand, it is common for vision models to require a fixed resolution input, and it is common for that resolution to be quite low due to resource constraints.

The demo shows deterministic physics with no input, which gives me various suspicions. But I agree, it is clearly updating most or all of the screen for every frame

I don't pretend to know anything about HP calc hacking (did a little TI BASIC for fun, that's not even remotely similar). But doesn't this come up in all kinds of daily situations, graphical or otherwise? You only recalculate and update the parts that may have changed. I assume this is similar to why Zelda on my original black and gray GameBoy as a 90s kid was arranged into scenes with few moving elements, so it didn't have to recalculate rendering for the entire screen during action.