b7r6 (u/b7r6) - Readit News

b7r6 commented on 1910: The year the modern world lost its mind derekthompson.org/p/1910-... · Posted by u/purgator

bigstrat2003 · 7 months ago

Children in general have a very hard time grasping the idea that their parents' lives resembled their own at all. For another example, look how every generation of teenagers, without fail, thinks they are the first people in the world to invent having sex for fun. I myself didn't understand how my parents used to easily catch me in most of my attempts to get away with trouble, until I realized (as an adult) that they caught me so easily because they tried the same sorts of things as kids themselves. It's just human nature, I guess.

b7r6 · 7 months ago

My late grandmother had a pithy turn of phrase when I would act like she "just didn't get it".

"Kiddo, every generation thinks they invented sex and fast music."

b7r6 commented on XML is the future bitecode.dev/p/hype-cycle... · Posted by u/tannhaeuser

b7r6 · 3 years ago

God damn I miss Naggum.

"In many ways, the current American presidency and XML have much in common. Both have clear lineages back to very intelligent people. Both demonstrate what happens when you give retards the tools of the intelligent."

The list is just too long now: OOP, COM, CORBA, UML, Scrum, Microservices, JSON RPC, ReactJS, writing shit in JavaScript when you don't have to, LangChain, all of it. It's just fucking stupid and wrong and frankly the software business isn't for everyone.

It doesn't make you a bad person that you're not serious about this shit.

https://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html

b7r6 commented on Google denies training Bard on ChatGPT chats from ShareGPT twitter.com/steventey/sta... · Posted by u/chatmasta

paxys · 3 years ago

1. Google denies doing it, so at the very least the title should have an "allegedly".

2. Even if they did – so what? The output from ChatGPT is not copyrightable by OpenAI. In fact it is OpenAI that is training its models on copyrighted data, pictures, code from all over the internet.

b7r6 · 3 years ago

Whether or not training one giant LLM with socially enormous stakes on the output of another commercially-controlled LLM is an interesting question.

My stronger opinion is that the people who can do this stuff via having a crawled corpus of the Internet need to keep in mind that it's all our "user-generated content" that they've freely appropriated to build their models, and so whatever the technical copyright rules are (or become): you don't ethically own something that's closely imitating stuff we all wrote over the years.

b7r6 commented on Gmail is killing independent email igregious.com/2023/03/gma... · Posted by u/foxylad

b7r6 · 3 years ago

For me at least, existing completely without GMail / Google SSO is unrealistic, and the million email corpus that is attached to it would be painful to part with as well.

But I've been trying to slowly de-tangle myself, and for it's faults ProtonMail has been working out pretty OK for me as a compromise between usability and true digital freedom.

b7r6 commented on When Google paid websites to promote Firefox leonidasv.com/til-google-... · Posted by u/leonidasv

b7r6 · 3 years ago

The "Best Google" busts up Microsoft monopolies via going big on open software and open standards.

The "Worst Google" copies the business model they just un-fucked.

I'd say in 2023, we really need the "Best Google".

b7r6 commented on Tailscale Funnel now available in beta tailscale.com/blog/tailsc... · Posted by u/dcre

qwertox · 3 years ago

I constantly read good things about Tailscale, as well as to a lesser degree Cloudflare, that I think I'm missing out.

But I've experienced so many times that companies change things and this can mess up the workflow or infrastructure really bad, adding days of work to implement an alternative.

With your hype, how much do you trust that you can rely on Tailscale? Should I feel safe when giving them control?

b7r6 · 3 years ago

Any company can take a turn for the worse, and any time you've got SaaS deep in your stack there's risk there.

I can only say that I worry about TailScale growing up to be evil the least of basically every SaaS company I've ever used. They seem extremely serious about making the interaction a "win/win" and keeping it that way as they grow.

b7r6 commented on Tailscale Funnel now available in beta tailscale.com/blog/tailsc... · Posted by u/dcre

stdgy · 3 years ago

I'm afraid I don't have a lot to add to this conversation but I have to say I just love Tailscale. I don't often run across software that feels so right and when I do it's a great surprise. Every time I see a new feature they're releasing I'm always impressed at how adept they are at targeting modern pain points.

I grew up and got into software by messing around with self-hosting web servers and game communities as a kid. As time has gone on I felt like we had lost some of the magic of easily sharing your machines and your creations with other people. We have a ton of services where you can now deploy and share your creations, but we've moved further and further away from direct sharing. There were plenty of good reasons why this has happened, with security being the most obvious factor, but it still makes me a little sad. I want my things to be able to talk to each other no matter where I am. I want to be able to invite my friends in and have access to my stuff.

Tailscale makes all of that quick, easy and awesome. I think it's really neat, makes me feel like a little nerdy kid again.

b7r6 · 3 years ago

> I'm afraid I don't have a lot to add to this conversation but I have to say I just love Tailscale.

Strongly seconded. In my last company we used TailScale in some medium-advanced configurations, and from the dead-simple basic stuff up though some of the trickier stuff it's just a joy to use.. It's making much better networking practices highly-accessible and I'd bet ends up making the Internet a more secure, better organized system as a whole.

They run an amazingly transparent engineering process, for example their issue page (https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues) is a model of transparent, responsive, involved open development. They embrace cool, modern, quirky stuff like NixOS (https://tailscale.com/blog/nixos-minecraft/). It's just generally really high-quality software developed with a very cool "hacker" philosophy.

TailScale is IMHO the coolest place to work right now, and something that almost any software company should look at if they do any networking.

If there's anything not to love, I can't see it. :)

b7r6 commented on Is Y Combinator worth the money? · Posted by u/acecreamu

b7r6 · 3 years ago

There is nothing wrong with being the category-defining early-stage investment company, and doing it as a for-profit business that's optimized for good financial outcomes.

I think what some of the insiders (like the OP) and semi-adjacent outsiders (like me) might be feeling a little queasy about is that YC began with a pretty clearly stated goal (in addition to making money) around disrupting the unproductive importance of high-status networks and signaling like elite university educations and to a lot of us (even people who didn't apply like me) that was really inspiring. And to at least some degree, YC is now a high-status network that signals well.

There's nothing uniquely bad about it, it's kind of the default throughout human history, and they are completely transparent about being a for-profit company, but it's also ok to be a little sad that it's not quite as idealistic as it used to be.

b7r6 commented on Universal Speech Model sites.research.google/usm... · Posted by u/rzk

generalizations · 3 years ago

Google has almost no business sense, or marketing acumen. They've only ever done one thing well, from a business perspective - create a world class search algo, put it behind a minimalistic web page, and pay for it with ads. And they didn't even come up with that business model: they just did what the competition did, but made the idealistic-nerd version of it.

Everything since then has been a combination of algorithm and compsci research (which they are world-class in; credit where credit's due), vague ideas about things people might like, and copies (or buyouts) of their competition. They remind me of my engineering friends who tried to come up with business plans in college...good at building things, but clueless about figuring out what people actually need, what they should therefore actually build, and how to make it user-friendly. You know, all the stuff that you need if you want to run a business. (As I've said before on hn, their initial competition against youtube is a great example of this)

It's a surprise that a technology came along which upended them so abruptly, but it's been clear for a long time that they were only alive because their search engine couldn't be beat, and they didn't have a clue how to replicate that success.

b7r6 · 3 years ago

There seems to be a lot of truth in that, but I think it's also maybe a little harsh as well.

Google hasn't needed to generate another monster revenue stream outside of ad sales, so it's possible that they never really tried all that hard (they've certainly killed it on the things that protect it, notably Android and Chrome). An utterly dominant position in how people access information that lasts for decades is probably "a hell of a drug".

For example, GCP is technically a really, really good cloud offering, maybe even the best for a lot of use cases (if you haven't looked at it lately, Cloud BigTable looks friggin amazing, I wish I'd had that database for the last ten years). They've obviously failed to parley that technical achievement into dominant market share, but maybe with the pressure on around search they get serious about whatever combination of pricing and marketing and customer support that gets them some serious market share.

YouTube has been quietly building their TikTok competitor into something I'm actually starting to waste some time on, they people who work on that are clearly really good at their jobs even if they started a little slow.

And on the LLM space, honestly I'm rooting for them: MSFT/OpenAI/ChatGPT need at least some competition and they are probably the best positioned to do so. Facebook/Meta is also doing this stuff in a more "open" way and that's keeping the pressure on around some competition too.

In general this LLM stuff is going to be a great thing long-term, but letting one company dominate both mindshare and marketshare is going to make that a much rougher road for society than if it's avoided.

b7r6 commented on Universal Speech Model sites.research.google/usm... · Posted by u/rzk

paxys · 3 years ago

Google – here's some crazy research that could hypothetically be turned into a useful product one day.

OpenAI – write that down, write that down!

b7r6 · 3 years ago

A very funny phrasing of some legitimately confusing news.

I keep thinking that there's no way that Brain/DeepMind are just getting stomped, lapped, generation-gapped by e.g. `ChatGPT`: they must have had an internal demo of this sort of thing like 2 years ago, right? At some point the Empire strikes back?

But the rollout and product integration has been so well done, so coordinated and cohesive that it's now just obvious that it was way too soon to count MSFT out of the game. It's all through search and Office 365 and GitHub/CoPilot/etc. and the whole stack in such a legitimately compelling way that you can almost forget that the DNA is Win32.

It's a bad thing to let Microsoft get a stranglehold on developer and user mindshare network effects: the 90s were rough. But with how cool it all is it's very tempting...