urlwolf

Very interesting to read this. I've never had breakage, but now I'm questioning whether this is the exception, not the rule.

On ubuntu, every new version broke something, sometimes updates make the computer boot to a blank screen... it was a terrible experince for early-days linux users. This was many years ago, but it made me distrust most distros I tried. Except for nixos.

Forgot to mention Nvidia CUDA is now a first-class citizen. Nix becomes a support target for Nvidia. How times have changed, thanks to Google scaring the bejezus of Nvidia by running Gemini on their TPUs. Nvidia may finally get their act together on linux

The only linux distro where I've never experienced disruption whatsoever when a new version comes in. A testament to the validity of the approach they are using (immutability). They also have a simple way to package things, and this produced the largest repository of packages of any linux distro. If something works, it stays working, breakage after updating is unheard of. The unofficial motto is "nixos fixes that."

It's not the case anymore. HN is not reflecting it, but HarmonyOS is very much a 3rd option. Huawei got banned from using Android, and they decided to start a mobile OS from scratch. They are binary compatible with Android, so most apps work straight away. Unless they use play services.

They wrote it from scratch in C++ so they could avoid some of the legacy cruft in Android. And they are getting adoption. It's a major OS in China and in many developing countries (phones with it are cheaper, and it flies on underpowered hardware!)

Before we judge the magnitude of this event (HarmonyOS existing and being successful), let's remember that last time anyone tried to disrupt the duopoly Android-iOS, it was MS, the largest company on earth by market capitalization at the time. And they failed.

Well, it very much looks like Huawei is not failing. We in the west don't see it as much, because propaganda is working well. But last tech conference I attended (GITEX Berlin, if you are wondering), had their app available to download with... 3 logos, not 2. Harmony OS was there. This is a major win for consumers all over the world.

And this being HN, I hope the inevitable comment "but China!" is slightly more informed that the average internet user.

How is this different from taskwarrior? I feel the use cases are overlapping (which is a good thing as taskwarrior rewrite in rust is a mess)

I moved to nix around Nov last year and couldn't be happier, the motto 'nix fixes that' is true. First time I can say linux is trouble free. Upgrades are painless. Dev environments, reproducible. Largest repository of packages in the linux world. Next to zero time wasted configuring things. Foundation LLMs now know enough nix to get you out of trouble most of the time. It's perfect as a linux experience.

> these sub-societies will dwindle until there's nothing left of them, and all that's left is The Culture

This would be a terrible result. Google 'urban monoculture' A pluralistic society is more resilient to catastrophes, and preserving all these small, dwindling cultures is as important if not more as preserving species that are endangered.

> At it's core an LLM is a sort of "situation specific simulation engine." You setup a scenario, and it then plays it out with it's own internal model of the situation, trained on predicting text in a huge variety of situations. This includes accurate real world models of, e.g. physical systems and processes, that are not going to be accessed or used by all prompts, that don't correctly instruct it to do so.

This idea of LLMs doing simulations of the physical world I've never heard before. In fact a transformer model cannot do this. Do you have a source?

Data Science Retreat | Lead software engineer, C or lua | Berlin Germany | REMOTE

---

We are building a collaborative thinking tool with live editing like google docs but outside the browser and with much simpler technology

Why? Security; We want to create knowledge that is not going to end up in the belly of an LLM

Tech stack:

- Wireguard

- zeromq

- WASM for client, handcrafted server code for server. No browser needed on client

- DSL (for gui; probably you won't touch it)

- NixOS

Our approach to security is simplicity; we won't use dependencies unless we really have to; libs of more than 50k LOC are frowned upon. Every line in the codebase, including deps, should be understandable by someone in the team. Servers are nixOS. No docker anywhere.

About you:

- Are self-motivated and can work independently

- Understand how to build highly reliable systems and be responsible for taking code to production

- Understand that code simplicity and readability are more important for long term maintainability

- Strong CS fundamentals (B.S./M.S. equivalent)

We start out on a full-time trial contract basis for up to 3 months and use this period as an extended work interview for both sides to assess fit for long-term employment

With any questions or to apply, email me at org@datascienceretreat.com

Oh, really? Who develops firefox now?

Thanks, I suspect the LLM companies would ignore this, and of course getting into a legal battle is beyond the means of most content producers. so perhaps the license is not the solution, and we need to create a complete world outside http...

This is because GTK is C, not C++. It's much easier to write bindings from C

I had a simillar take until I found keyd:

https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd

Thanks! For me, that simplicity gives me security. The browser is extremely insecure in 2024. And most of the things I want from a browser are just content, not sophisticated SPAs. I'm in me minority in that, I know. So this protocol is excellent for that.

Also, no tracking, no upvotes, no marketing, no status-hogging people, no BS. This is refreshing. People there talk about what they really want to talk about. You are not being sold as a product, or sold at, at all.

> Basically everything in your life gets a bit easier, because people are more scared to piss off someone with a lot of twitter followers

This is terrifying. Status online shouldn't bleed on all those other domains. Using your influence online to get things (or else I will tweet about you and the sky will fall on your head) is petty, and one more bad thing that social media has brought to our lives. Now we have to aim to please those who have amassed followers?

This is a very good question, and I'm sure you will get valuable answers.

My take:

- More efficient than search engines at obscure problems, like configuring an unix tool. Help that you can ask 'explain step by step'

- It expands the range of topics you can read scientific papers in. You just ask it any topic or keyword you don't understand

- Good summaries of text that is valuable, but not worth reading in detail

- Translation

- Code generation/bug fixing. I don't use it this way but other s will tell you whether/how much their coding life improved this way

On 1. yeah this is a serious problem. If webapps start failing to work well under FF all bets are off. I didn't think of it. Testing on another browser increases costs of development. But the alternative (being in the hands of a single company owning the internet) is pretty terrible. It's one company that has a single choke point on how you deliver your product. If for whatever reason your company and the monopolist have incentives that are conflicting... you know what's going to be the result.

OKCupid was the one non-swiping app left, and after being bought by the match.com group it became pretty much the same. There's at least something to read for those who care (and the questions system).

If you are on linux and miss the snappiness of sumatra, try llpp. They use the same renderer. In fact, llpp has more features, like a better overview mode where you can get 3 pages on screen. Search does suck. llpp is written in Ocaml and a fantastic piece of software.

Love this view. I can't get pdf display on FF to invert colors. Is there a way? Then it would replace okular for me (which also does this overview mode)

Is there any way to click on an image to magnify? in many books figures are too small. Ctrl + scroll does magnify the entire doc, but the img is pixelated.

If you are running a consumer MS desktop of win 11 (which forces you to be logged in to their cloud), are you compromised? If so, what's the best way to act from this point on?

I would have agreed till recently. I ran Manjaro without a hitch for a long stretch of time, maybe 7 years. Then one day the hybrid laptop would not recognize the external monitor. I spent quite a bit of time debugging it, and finally concluded I was done with Manjaro. I entered a distro jump journey I hadn't done since... forever. And after about 2 days of fulltime work (more or less) sacrificed to testing distros, I realized nothing would prevent problems like this one from appearing again. I cannot waste days without my main machine being operational.

I bought a desktop, and forgot about that laptop.

But my trust in linux got dented there. I'm happy you have had a good run, I did too. The risk is too high for me to jump into 'debugging linux problems' mode at a random time. I cannot afford the disruption and downtime.

Installing and maintaining linux (when it breaks with a silly update snafu) is too costly for many capable people. Particularly if you have a hybrid card.

Some others (the majority) are not capable of installing or maintaining it.

It goes against GDPR, that's for sure

Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Stephenson, William Gibson. Though Vonnegut would fight the label, his first free novels could be considered sci Fi. I like them better than the later ones

I'll start:

1. Ben Thompson - He is the writer and founder of Stratechery.com

2. Gary Marcus - A cognitive scientist and AI researcher, author of books like "Rebooting AI"

3. Oren Etzioni - CEO of the Allen Institute for AI

4. Andrew Ng - influential figure in ML

5. Steve Sammartino - Futurist with good ideas about education

Can anyone with a copyright law background comment on how bad this is? Is the party over?

I don't know myself :) I'm sure if I try to go with a dumbphone only I'll find fast what I need. I'm off social media, but I have to use whatsapp. Maps are important, and a decent camera too. I use an app to track my sleep (fitbit), to book hours at the gym, to book dance classes... damn, all those are android apps. Even if I wanted to cart around a linux tablet or small laptop, these would be a problem.

I'm not a security expert, but from my understanding your (fantastic) minimal use is still compromised and you are giving plenty of data to both google and govs.

I got most of my impetus to go phone-less from the book 'digital vegan' (highly recommend!)