smeej

I think a lot of people don't want or care about major traction. They want to make little things that make their own little corners of the world better.

There are small towns all over the world which could realistically have their own little "hometown app" now, that really does track all the interesting things going on there. People don't need "The (Unofficial) Smallville Happenings" Facebook pages anymore. These don't all have some programmer who cares enough about building such a thing to make it happen, but they probably do have a teenager or even a retiree who would have a lot of fun making something that really works well for the people of that town and how they want to use it. The barrier to entry just became low enough to get over.

And that's just one example. There are SO MANY problems that used to require mega investment to solve at scale to get any traction at all. Now communities can build them for themselves. And they'll never be the kind of data target that a megacorp is, because you'd have to target each little app individually, hoping there was something useful in there.

The democratization of software development is going to have lots of things that go nowhere, and lots of little hobby projects, and a few things people will actually hear about and care about. But a lot of people's lives will become incrementally better and I'm excited to see that.

I'm looking forward to the making of more software. I think there are probably people who have had really useful software ideas for a long time that they'd never be able to raise money for, but now for $20 a month, they can get up and running, serving their local and/or niche communities, without having to hire a team of engineers.

Eventually we're going to reach a point where they don't have to understand the code themselves. The democratization of software creation is going to be fascinating.

I think there might be a small handful of humans whose visage is so distinctive they can definitely know (or more importantly, prove) an AI image is of them and not a doppelganger. I can't imagine winning this case.

Do you have your image source available somewhere? I'm not going to build this same thing, but I'd love to add some prints of birds to my shelves and, not knowing much about birds, it would help to have a set of pictures I could look through and go, "Ooh! This one!" and learn about them. It'd be a good jumping on point!

I would say the answer is "obviously not," to the degree that it's hard totake your question in good faith.

The China-made goods have been sold. Ownership transfers at sale. It would be ludicrous for some Chinese agency to say, "Well, we made it, so even though you bought it from us, it's actually still ours. Surprise!"

Sure it does. It shapes your impression based on your perception of Anthropic.

"Made in China" on items for sale in China is a positive indicator. "Made in China" on items for sale in the U.S. is a negative one.

The line between "attribution" and "marketing" seems to depend on your impression of the entity involved.

I would very deliberately avoid a mystery novel or a prayer book if it said "Co-authored by Claude" because I don't want to see a world in which those things are generated by entities other than humans.

I don't have that same objection when it comes to computer code.

But the important point is that your impression of either one depends on your prior position on Claude. What do you assume when you see that attribution?

I don't really understand what makes this different from companies stamping "Made in China" on products that were made in China.

The line between "advertisement" and "attribution" seems to depend upon your impression of the entity taking the attribution.

It wouldn't be easy, but I'm imagining it would probably require identifying the other side of some historical transactions, and being able to prove that. Like if you had ever sent to/from any other address you held the key to, you could sign a transaction from that other address.

There's still some small part of me hoping that the later waves are whitehats and the reason they're keeping everything in segmented addresses is because they hope to find a way to return the funds.

I had CDs from all my high school friends' dumb little bands. All gone.

I don't care that nobody else on YouTube would ever have wanted to hear them. I don't even really care that the band members themselves would probably be embarrassed that I still had a copy. The point of buying the disk (and uploading it in the first place) was so that I word continue to have access to it.

I lost my entire local indie music collection. I'm glad your interests were apparently more mainstream, but I can't listen to my high school classmates' songs ever again.

I trusted it in 2008 because none of these things had been around long enough to have a track record of enshittification.

Yeah, but if the songs in your Google Music library weren't on YouTube Music, you just lost them forever. End of story.

It was the betrayal that turned me off Google.

The thing that pissed me off was that I had uploaded so many indie local bands' CDs, none of which were ever on YouTube, so I lost more than half of my music library when they forced that change and there was nothing I could do about it, having long since gotten rid of the disks because I believed them that they would never delete my stuff.

(Degoogled not long after that, actually. Fool me twice...)

I had a cohort of friends from grad school that used Buzz like crazy. We tried Google+, but it just wasn't as useful. This would have been 2008-2010.

We also really wanted to use Google Wave, but couldn't get enough invitations to go around. It was like nobody at Google figured out that the only reason invitations worked for Gmail was because Gmail was interoperable with email. Wave didn't interoperate with anything. Either your friends were on it and you could use it, or they weren't and you couldn't. 3-4 invitations after a couple months just wasn't enough of a social effect to make it useful like it had been for Gmail.

Little did we know back then how many people were yearning to have stalkers. "This person wants to be notified every time I put something online" sounded incredibly creepy in the mid-aughts!

Not having a front light is a dealbreaker for me.

My favorite device is still my Boox Poke 2 Color. I just wish it were slightly bigger. I don't care about writing on it (I have a BT keyboard that should work fine and don't write much by hand anyway if I can avoid it). Just want to read/highlight/annotate in KOReader, but need syncthing for my workflow.

Which reader do you have? I've been looking everywhere I can think of for a good 8-inch device, but I need it to run Android. Heck, I even tried looking into tablets with traditional screens and am having trouble turning up anything serviceable.

I have a 6" screen and it's too small. I got a 10.3" one and it was too large. But I'm starting to suspect those of us who primarily want to read are the only ones who want 8 inches, and we're a rare bread.

This reminds me of the plot some Libertarians had back in 2020 to win the U.S. presidential election by taking New Mexico or some other state. I can't remember how it was supposed to work mathematically, because NM doesn't have enough votes by itself to prevent either other candidate from getting a majority, but I remember having seen articles about it. (I tried searching to provide a link and can only find references to Texas, and I'm absolutely certain the articles I read were not about Texas.)

I think the reason I might like to have the dot be darker is also because even at closer zooms, it suggests "There's a high density of activity here," which could make it more obvious that a town or neighborhood is active in my app in a way that wouldn't be as obvious if there were just one regular dot on an area that might not have a lot of good places to meet, but does have lots of groups meeting at the one really great meeting place.

If I'm browsing the map trying to decide if it's worth joining the platform at all, I'm a lot more likely to stay and click around if I can tell my area has lots of options, not just one.

I can't sent it right now, but I can follow up with you too. My opinions here might very well be specific to my own project.

Does it end up a darker or at least fully opaque dot to show it's not the same as the individual dots elsewhere? Like from your example in the article, I might make that dot maroon (or some other color entirely) instead of red so people understand "there are multiple things here."

This has been my first adventure dealing with maps with user-generated points and I'm discovering how much goes on behind the scenes that I never noticed!

I think for my purposes, people would rather see a list of the groups meeting at that place than click individual identical markers arranged around the point to see what's there.

I can see why this would be helpful in other use cases though!

I still don't understand how the dots help when multiple dots need to be at the exact same coordinates at the lowest zoom level. How do you open a list of them?

I'm working on a project (using Protimaps and MapLibre, even, so this is very timely for me) where users create groups at physical locations. If 12 groups choose the local public library's schedulable meeting room as their meeting space, how would anyone click to see the list of groups that use that one room? Wouldn't I just end up with what looks like one very dark dot?

I would use the shit out of this. I'm a heavy user of Logseq (OG, the md file-based version). Would LOVE to save my favorite web resources this way.

Have you ever listened to a congressional hearing? Or spoken to an "average reader"?

Most absolutely glaze over at the idea of calculating the "log base" of anything. If they ever got that far in math class, they certainly have not used the concept since then and cannot remember what it means or how it works. They might remember exponents, but the compounding of them is absolutely lost on the overwhelming majority of people.

Honestly, having spent a huge chunk of my career in customer support, 80%+ of the tickets could be solved with a script and not need an AI. Just about every company has a catalog of macros for answering support tickets and once you have a good set, 80% of people just need you to send them a link to the support article where you actually already answered their question in great detail, if they'd bothered to look for it.

The solution in the article is, "Pay for a max plan and then buy the extra tokens you need by API." How is that noteworthy? Isn't that exactly what Anthropic and OpenAI recommend?

I feel like I must be missing something.

Just testing out practice mode, I found what I really wanted was to be able to stay at a certain level until I felt I was getting good at sequences of that length, not immediately get pushed to the next level every time even when it took me 8 tries to get the 4-note sequence right. Give me a chance to feel like I'm improving! Don't just keep giving me harder things when I keep struggling with the existing ones.

I've been a longtime user of Logseq, and thankfully both it and its plugins are open source. I've just been having a lot of fun tweaking plugins I use a lot to have the additional features I've always wished they had. It's so easy to clone the repo and just say, "Claude, make this do X as well."

This seems like such a classic example of mixing up correlation and causation.

Who's more likely to choose a job that can be done from home? People who already have reasons they'd rather not go out and spend their entire day around other people. How do you control for all those reasons?