theshrike79

As someone who's still on IRC daily and has built multiple IRC bots and clients over the years:

- most of the jank of IRC is client-side and can be fixed on the clients, IRCv3 protocol changes are nice, but not essential for a good experience.

- bots can make channels more engaging, just posting the titles of URLs pasted on the channels so even people without fancy rich clients can see what's behind a YouTube link or Reddit share url without clicking it open makes the experience more "discord/slack-like"

- IRC bots and clients are super fun and easy first projects for any language, you get to do permanently open sockets to multiple destinations (multi-server of course), asynchronous stuff and text handling.

I went with IRCCloud for the longest time myself until early this year, due to the November Revolution of AI models getting super good, I figured out I can build my own IRCCloud just the way I like it with the price of a single Claude Pro subscription.

And so I did. I think I had an MVP running in a week (evenings on my free time) and over the summer I cancelled my IRCCloud subscription and I'm fully using my own system.

Now I have a TUI, Web UI, native Swift client (with iOS, but haven't tested it yet) and a Tauri client for Linux - all sharing a common backend that I run on a VPS 24/7.

Batteries are 90-95% recyclable.

Gas is 0% recyclable.

AFAIK the core of the issue was that they didn't want their tech to be disassembled and analyzed.

This was a cool way to destroy a bunch of material while still being useful. It's a cool ad and they can sell the smelted stuff as whatever trinkets.

It takes like 30 seconds for each robot to be completely dismantled.

Could you do it faster? =)

How so?

- Looks cool

- They managed to efficiently dismantle a bunch of robots

- Our robot overlords know what's waiting for them if they get uppity =)

Also they're selling the molten metal.

The OG Ioniq (not the 5) was also sold as two kinds of hybrid (self-charging and charging) as well as full EV.

On the other hand applications on TempleOS are expected/assumed to be perfect and have no bugs. It makes things a lot simpler =)

Codex used to rule in the usage limit front, but GPT-6-Astra eats up quota like crazy.

Cost is stable, what users see is "the same".

Engineers are happier because they can spend more time on that extra round of polish that was just filed into low-priority "fix when time" Linear tickets.

QA is happier because the stupid bulk operations are handled with AI and they can focus on the hard to find stuff that tickles the QA mind in a special way =)

Same stuff, but with better (in-house) tooling and (most) people are happier. The Code Artesans aren't, but it's mostly their problem and they'll find companies that only do fully manual programming for specific niches.

Most likely about three billion - all vibe coded and most of them with super pretty domain names and launch pages :D

The only complicated bit is the PDF indexing. I would personally suggest using a proper cloud model in a massive datacenter to do it if the source is even a bit fuzzy. (lots of tables, fancy layouts etc). A "normal" PDF can just be converted to markdown in seconds.

After that the local stuff can be managed by any local model that has a tool to use bash or read files.

I have a Discord bot that can ingest a RPG PDF and stores it in a sqlite vector database for search, took me maybe an evening to build it with Claude.

> the next LLM takes these comments as canonical

This is the best and worst thing about LLM coding agents. They trust comments way too implicitly. And then the errors just keep compounding.

Or a temporary hack that becomes "load-bearing" because the agent doesn't figure out that it's supposed to be a temporary testing shim - instead it keeps building on it until it basically duplicates what it's mocking.

Notion is the least bad multiplayer wiki available at the moment.

It's basically a fancy context aware ctrl-f to the book.

I use this regularly with RPG manuals. I _know_ the stuff, but don't remember every detail by heart. And just ctrl-f:ing through a Mörk/Pirate Borg -style PDF isn't really productive (they're "artistically" laid out). But I can just ask an AI bot that has the pdf indexed like "how does the medical kit work?" and it'll give me a summary along with the relevant rolls within seconds.

Greenfield, in my mind, implies "we are not taking any historical factors into account and just pick the best one for the task."

"We are a Java house" is not a Greenfield thing. It's picking what you already use internally.

Everything: https://core.telegram.org/bots

Bots are, on a platform level, presented as bots. It's not a courtesy rule of "please name bot accounts as _bot" or something.

You can do actual payments with the API, it's possible to earn money with a bot.

Custom inline keyboards you can use to operate bots instead of parsing commands like ye olde IRC bots. Like a home automation bot could reply with a list of rooms when you ask for a room temperature, then you just tap the button for that room.

Closed source, walled garden yadda yadda, but it just works.

Discord bots are a bit less robust, but can still do a ton of things "natively" Matrix bots can't.

And a massive Anker USB-C battery pack isn't _that_ heavy if you want to spend multiple hours with the thing on.

Was it DNS? Any guesses? :)

The Vision Pro comes closest, but it's expensive as all hell - and Apple only.

My basic point is that the EU DMA is a good idea, but it's still stupid - and I live here.

I do get the point of it, stuff needs to be interchangeable. BUT. Security and privacy need to be taken into account.

Apple has a track record of picking user privacy even if it makes their services objectively worse. Now EU makes them open up the APIs. Cool, I'm all for it.

Now who makes sure that Joe-Bobs Trusty AI is as secure as Apple Private Compute and won't just store my chat transcripts verbatim on an open S3 folder? EU law doesn't say.

The PR flack will 100% hit Apple though, the fact that the user whose data was leaked used JBTAI is buried in the second to last paragraph under the fold between two ads. Apple will be in the headline with all caps.

Same goes for Google, they don't want their AI to be interchangeable with something, because the lack of analytics will hurt their ad revenue. And maybe some lip service to privacy too.

(And my infinite pet peeve, why is Apple App Store bad and needs to be opened up, but Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo app stores are cool and 3rd party options aren't enforced by law?)

Our helpdesk doesn't use Sharepoint though :) And we're a Google Apps company, so we don't even have a M365 subscription.

But you're right, the best competitive advantage of Teams is that it's "free"[0]. But that's about it, it's objectively bad in all other ways - anyone claiming otherwise has Stockholm syndrome and is in denial =)

Just the fact that, as a consultant, it's literally impossible to connect to multiple teams workspaces with the same client. The OFFICIAL Microsoft advice is to use Private Browsing in separate browsers...

Meanwhile on Slack I can just hit cmd-number and swap between clients. AND we can have shared channels over instances, like $vendor having a support channel on our Slack with their actual people with their own accounts.

[0] If you have M365 anyway.

What's interesting to me is that the SVG versions don't have the "AI Image generation hates negative space" issue as badly as generated images do. They kinda stay on point and don't fill every single empty bit with some pattern.

I just went with Prosody and it took maybe 20 minutes with claude+opentofu+docker to get it added to my stack.

It _works_, but the limitations of Jabber without 42 different optional extensions became apparent pretty quickly.

Yep, the baseline for "messaging" has changed. Without first party emoji support, preferably custom emojis too, images, reaction gifs etc the majority of non old-nerd people won't even consider the system.

And it can't just be an optional feature in some clients, it needs to be something that just works everywhere.

If Slack is dying, what's replacing it?

Telegram has by far the best bot support of any platform, with Discord a close second followed by Slack.

This is what the FOSS services kinda tend to glaze over, SO MUCH of my personal and professional life is managed by chatting with services that are represented as bots in a chat.

Yep :(

I wanted to self-host a chat service where I can control my bots and AIs, but with no native tagging functionality makes it really janky to work with.

Discord and Telegram Just Work, but I'd much rather have the whole thing in my control.

Buzz[0] seems nice, but for one person an 5 bots having a full-ass postgres+redis+s3 setup seems completely bonkers.

[0] https://github.com/block/buzz

You do know that Google is fighting the same DMA rules as Apple?

They need to similarly make Gemini hot-swappable to anything on Android and don't want to.

Apple was just first because they're a bigger and more visible target.

There’s no official way to “tag” people on Jabber. Clients do it but the protocol doesn’t.

This is (to me) a big issue when using bots, for example. I need a non-ambiguous trigger for them.

Block the TV via its MAC address then?

If it does MAC spoofing, then just take it out back and shoot it. That's properly malicious.

Still better than Teams though.