cm277 (u/cm277) - Readit News

cm277 commented on Apple has not destroyed Steve Jobs' vision for iPad victorwynne.com/vision-fo... · Posted by u/curtblaha

skydhash · 6 days ago

It still remains a crippled user experience in many ways:

- PDF reader: Preview would be a nice addition to the set of default app, but you have to choose between the very basic viewer tied to Files.app and various viewers with many schemes to get into your wallet.

- Files: I know a lot of apps rely on databases, but we still have to use files every now and then. The Files.app is very clunky for what I consider a solved problem.

- The weird stage manager: Even on a 13" screen, it's hard to manage more than two apps side by side. Why not introduce a simple workspace manager a la GNOME if they user want to save a particular set of windows.

- Profiles: Even browsers are adding them these days as they recognize that people have a faceted life. Instead we have custom notification settings. The ipad is not that personal of a device. It's closer to the Apple TV than my laptop in terms of privacy.

cm277 · 6 days ago

After years with a mini, I jumped to an Air just so I could finally get a proper 'netbook' experience. Don't like Chromebooks, Windows is too complex; there is room for a simplified laptop that is easy to use and update but let's you use proper apps without going all the way to a full laptop with pro tools.

I've started to see this as a generational challenge. I am Gen X, I used to run FreeBSD and Linux, I don't mind the complexity and upkeep of a Windows laptop with all the trimmings (I do mind the complexity of the unixes, sorry). But what about Gen Z who are used to simple, powerful technology with simplified apps and UIs? why would they/should they put up with legacy UX and ways of working?

My guess is that where Microsoft is going with the new Office apps which are just web apps with thicker clients. Simplify, simplify until we can all work with iPads, Windows/ARM or whatever. Makes sense to be honest, although I'll probably keep a Thinkpad around the way old mechanics keep a set of tools in the garage although they will probably never use them again.

cm277 commented on Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately thealgorithmicbridge.com/... · Posted by u/baylearn

rvz · 2 months ago

Exactly. For example, Microsoft was building data centers all over the world since "AGI" was "around the corner" according to them.

Now they are cancelling those plans. For them "AGI" was cancelled.

OpenAI claims to be closer and closer to "AGI" as more top scientists left or are getting poached by other labs that are behind.

So why would you leave if the promise of achieving "AGI" was going to produce "$100B dollars of profits" as per OpenAI's and Microsoft's definition in their deal?

Their actions tell more than any of their statements or claims.

cm277 · 2 months ago

Yes, this. Microsoft has other businesses that can make a lot of money (regular Azure) and tons of cash flow. The fact that they are pulling back from the market leader (OpenAI) whom they mostly owned should be all the negative signal people need: AGI is not close and there is no real moat even for OpenAI.

cm277 commented on Creating a pan-European legal entity, the right way klinger.io/posts/eu-inc... · Posted by u/whyoh

cm277 · 2 months ago

This reminds me of the old XKCD about inventing new standards... fine, you get an EU Inc corporate model. What's the labor law applied for employees? what is the tax regime, and which countries will take in taxes? what about oh, I don't know liability, insurance, debt and bankruptcy, etc, etc.?

A company is a legal person within a jurisdiction --of which all of the laws apply to every person. You can't have an EU Inc without a federal EU. Heck even the US doesnt have a US Inc. This is naive at best.

cm277 commented on Steve Jobs would have fired everyone twitter.com/greggertruck/... · Posted by u/e-brake

benterix · 2 months ago

I know people hate this but it shows a huge problem: innovation in operating system design. It's really a tough one. You really want the basic functionality to be very stable and unchanging to save yourself and others incompatibility pain over the next decades. OTOH, you need to release a new OS every now and again to show the markets that you are doing something. So they did a cosmetic upgrade like changing the graphic theme. Which, depending on your PoV, might be a very good thing.

cm277 · 2 months ago

UI is fashion-driven like clothing or furniture or car design. That's not new, it's just hard to admit for us techies that such a thing exists in our world. And just like with fashion, some changes are not for 'better' but for 'cooler' or 'more interesting'. The question is how far on the 'worse' scale you're willing to go to get up on the 'cool' scale. Otherwise, we'd all still be running Windows Server 2000...

cm277 commented on AI-first – We're just 6 months away from AGI revontulet.dev/p/2025-ai-... · Posted by u/rednafi

mrweasel · 3 months ago

That's pretty much my take. LLMs aren't a bad idea, they are useful, in certain fields, but they aren't living up to the sales pitch and they are to expensive to run.

My personal take is that the whole chat based interface is a mistake. I have no better solution, but for anything beyond a halluciating search engine, it's not really the way we need to interact with AI.

In my mind we're 6 months away from one of the biggest crashes in tech history.

cm277 · 3 months ago

Agreed. Text is used for a lot of things. A fantastic text parser/generator that doesn't need regex and can extract /meaning/ would have been a sci-fi fever dream even a decade ago. So, LLMs will definitely have their use and will probably disrupt several industries.

But this hype-storm just reminds me of the fever-dream blogs about the brave new world of the Internet back when hypertext became widely used in '93 or so (direct democracy, infinite commerce, etc, etc). Yes, of course, the brave new world came along, but it needed 3G and multi-touch screens as well and that was 15 years later and a whole different set of companies made money and ruled the world than those that bet on hypertext.

cm277 commented on The Other Bubble wheresyoured.at/saaspocal... · Posted by u/WillDaSilva

urbandw311er · a year ago

Some of this rings true - yes, there are SaaS companies leaping onto to the A.I. hype train with little regard (or care) whether AI can add any real value to their product.

But Zitron conflates this with a lack of potential or capability of A.I. itself. This is absolutely not true. Any developer who has spent any length of time pair programming with A.I. or using it to analyse/debug code will understand immediately what I’m talking about. 5,000 LOC files debugged, discussed or refactored in seconds. Bugs tracked down in an instant instead of an hour. When AI fits a task well, it adds immense, jaw dropping value and it’s clear to me that, with LLMs harnessing transformers we have discovered something new and revolutionary.

cm277 · a year ago

I havent coded in years, so I'll take your word for the potential of AI in SWE. But, software development has guardrailed against bad code with unit testing, CI/CD, etc. Also, productivity / output can be measured more-or-less well. Partly for that reason, it's also used to efficiency shifts (say from C++ to Java; or Perl to anything...) and those are not usually massive, all-or-nothing changes.

Where's the equivalent in customer support? or document creation? or any of these other mythical AI use cases? genuinely asking.

The article makes a good case that the SaaS bubble is deflating and needs a new hype cycle to keep investment up. AI makes sense for that, so at least that's one good use case :-)

cm277 commented on Sam Altman's response to Mira leaving OpenAI twitter.com/sama/status/1... · Posted by u/staranjeet

cm277 · a year ago

So, serious question: if OpenAI is "a few thousand days from AGI" and about to dominate the GenAI space, why can they not hold on to execs? why is there no amount of options/money they can use to retain them with?

cm277 commented on It's Okay to Abandon Things netninja.com/2024/02/05/i... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

cm277 · a year ago

I mostly agree with

cm277 commented on The Founder Mode Tradeoff – By Kent Beck tidyfirst.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/rbanffy

tbe-stream · a year ago

The founder mode binary is way too simplistic.

There are examples of successful companies all over the founder mode spectrum.

What level of "founder mode" is optimal depends on a lot of factors. For example:

- size of the company - available people (at every level of the company) - type and number of products (is it possible to scale the work over different departments?) - qualities/personalities of the founders (trust me when I tell you, being micromanaged by a non-technical founder on a technical product is not effective) - type of business (for example; in aviation, you're going to need a lot of certification management)

And you can execute poorly all over the spectrum, even when making the right choice on the level of "founder mode".

cm277 · a year ago

Agreed; I dont remember the source but I much prefer the Marines → Navy → Police continuum. Some circumstances require a highly capable team with high communication, aligned goals and motives, who can take decisions individually or at a low enough level. Some circumstances require bureaucracy, process, external and internal controls.

The dumb "Founder mode" discourse hides away two things: a) scale forces you to climb that ladder towards bureaucracy and controls anyway, b) it's scope-specific. You don't want to go "Founder mode" on phone support. Or accounts payable, or probably HR. There are specific objectives, projects and also circumstances that need a more hands-on approach. And honestly a "Marines" analogy where the team is tight and authorized to make decisions, is better than some micro-managing, coke-fueled "Founder mode".

cm277 commented on We must break tech monopolies before they break us thenextweb.com/news/break... · Posted by u/unripe_syntax

cm277 · a year ago

The cry to "break up the monopolies" bugs me. Maybe because I am old enough to remember the failed Microsoft case or to have lived the re-unification of AT&T into, well, AT&T.

If you really do believe that the tech giants need to be reigned in, breaking them up is NOT the way to do it. It's a red herring, a quixotical quest that will eat up time, money and opportunity costs for newer, better companies. Break-ups will be litigated endlessly, we'll end up talking about who benefits from what and at the end either nothing will happen or some business unit(s) will be spun out as sacrificial lambs so that the main behemoths can keep printing cash.

The correct answer IMHO is "tax and regulate". Recognize that big tech are now infrastructure companies, massive railways on which international commerce happens and that they need to be taxed as such and regulated. As in regulated for minimum service levels, for liability on what happens on their rails (see Crowdstrike), for access to their platforms to others, for competing against their own customers. Regulate them, tax them, squeeze their margins down to something reasonable, turn them into, well, AT&T.

No, that won't kill them and it would be much less dramatic than a breakup (and would feel less satisfactory, for sure). But it could actually happen relatively quickly and would push them to their natural place, i.e. platforms and utilities on top of which younger, hungrier companies can build.