evv (u/evv) - Readit News

evv commented on GLM-5: Targeting complex systems engineering and long-horizon agentic tasks z.ai/blog/glm-5... · Posted by u/CuriouslyC

ionelaipatioaei · 4 days ago

I think the only advantage that closed models have are the tools around them (claude code and codex). At this point if forced I could totally live with open models only if needed.

evv · 4 days ago

The tooling is totally replicated in open source. OpenCode and Letta are two notable examples, but there are surely more. I'm hacking on one in the evenings.

OpenCode in particular has huge community support around it- possibly more than Claude Code.

evv commented on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month theverge.com/tech/875309/... · Posted by u/x01

embedding-shape · 5 days ago

> If the admin dies and nobody else has the keys to the kingdom, the server can go down at any point

This is how infrastructure works, and supposed to work, besides the point that servers "die by themselves" which of course isn't true in reality. You decrease the bus factor if this is a problem for you.

> Discord servers don't just go away unless somebody actively makes them to

If all the sysadmins at Discord died and nobody else has the keys, exactly the same problem happens. Discord though surely have multiple backups of the keys and so on, something you too can do when you have your own infrastructure, so overall that argument feels almost dishonest, since you don't compare the two accurately.

> Anything open source will be worse at phishing and fraud / abuse prevention by definition

What? Completely orthogonal concerns, and if your main "fraud-prevention approaches" depend on security by obscurity, I'm not sure you should even attempt to be involved in those efforts, because that's not what the rest of the industry is going by a long mile.

> People want bots (for things like high-fidelity Youtube music streaming on voice channels), and those are mostly Discord-only.

Actually, the further I get in your comment, the more it seems like you don't actually understand what Zulip offers nor what the parent comment is about. Music streaming on voice channels? Completely outside the scope of Zulip...

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I think you have to understand the comment you're replying to a bit better, before attempting to lift Discord above Zulip. They're specifically talking about Zulip as an alternative "for managing the firehose of busy communities", not as a general replacement for every single Discord "server" out there. Yet you've responded to the comment as that's what they've been doing.

evv · 5 days ago

> This is how infrastructure works, and supposed to work

No, infrastructure doesn't have to work this way. This is a very old-school mentality.

Sign the content with a key that you control. Back up the content locally. And boom- your server is easily replaced. It only helps copy data around and performs certain conveniences.

I've been working on this full-time for a few years. If we succeed, we solve link rot (broken links) on the web.

evv commented on RIP Low-Code 2014-2025 zackliscio.com/posts/rip-... · Posted by u/zackliscio

evv · 19 days ago

Dumb question: whats the difference between "low-code" and "libraries+frameworks"?

Usually the point of a library or framework is to reduce the amount of code you need to write. Giving you more functionality at the cost of some flexibility.

Even in the world of LLMs, this has value. When it adopts a framework or library, the agent can produce the same functionality with fewer output tokens.

But maybe the author means, "We can no longer lock in customers on proprietary platforms". In which case, too bad!

evv commented on The Meaning Machine: A Dream for Universal Language eric.vicenti.net/posts/dr... · Posted by u/evv

evv · 23 days ago

Hey HN, hope you enjoy this idea!

LLMs are a game-changer, but they’re only half the story: probabilistic and fuzzy. The missing half is a universal formal language: something precise enough to translate cleanly between human languages and let anyone communicate with computers, without learning programming!

My dream is to remove barriers everywhere: culture, science, medicine, law, diplomacy. You don’t erase ambiguity, you encode it! Dialects, jargon, puns, inside jokes, social context.. we can build everything in.

Maybe this isn't possible, but now that we have language models to help... it might be!

evv commented on Fossil versus Git fossil-scm.org/home/doc/t... · Posted by u/vednig

evv · a month ago

Your alternative is... what exactly? A unique and baroque file format for each application (see: Git)? Folders of JSON or markdown files which are slow, easily corrupted, and lack indexing? Depend on some memory-heavy external DB service like Postgres?

In most cases, embedding SQLite is the best solution. And that is exactly what it was designed for.

evv commented on Show HN: I Made Loom for Mobile demoscope.app... · Posted by u/admtal

admtal · 2 months ago

Unfortunately not

iOS guardrails make that pretty much impossible

I had to accepts some tradeoffs to get this specific collection of features, Face Cam, touches, etc…

I’ve heard Android might allow more, and I’ll be looking into an Android port soon.

evv · 2 months ago

Looks like it is possible if you do a normal iOS screen recording, then use your app to add the Face Cam and touches on top.

evv commented on The man who keeps predicting the web's death tedium.co/2025/10/25/web-... · Posted by u/thm

theamk · 3 months ago

This feels very 2000's. eDonkey, Perfect Dark, Opera Unite....

Turns out, other than piracy, there are no legitimate uses. The existing technologies are good enough.

P2P is cool if you have a desktop, but you cannot host from laptop or phone that spends most of the time sleeping (unless you want your battery to die real fast). The solution is hosting providers - which are already decentralized (and federated, if you squint hard enough)

Web of trust never took off - turns out people don't trust their friends' friends' much, some sort of centralized authority works much better.

_Cryptographic_ identities have huge problem of it's own - there are many people who don't have any persistent data on their PC - for example, they have only one laptop/phone, they don't back it up, and it breaks regularly. If your system requires one to keep a secret key for decades, it automatically excludes a very large fraction of computer users.

Publicly accessible versioning and immutable content sound cool for readers, but have very few upsides (and many downsides) for writers. And it's writers who select publishing technology.

People has been proposing those things forever. No one needed them back then, and no one needs them today. Just look at which decentralized social networks are actually winning (like Mastodon) - it's pretty much opposite to what's described in your comment.

evv · 3 months ago

Thanks for spawning many interesting topics. A dose of cynicism is great, in moderation!

> P2P is cool if you have a desktop, but you cannot host from laptop or phone that spends most of the time sleeping (unless you want your battery to die real fast). The solution is hosting providers - which are already decentralized (and federated, if you squint hard enough)

Yes, most people will rely on servers because phones are terrible p2p nodes. When identity is properly owned by the end users, the servers have nearly zero lock-in, unlike traditional hosting providers. A community's server can go down for some reason and the community can easily transition to other server(s), keeping their conversations and knowledge intact. Sadly this is not the case with Mastodon or even Bluesky.

> _Cryptographic_ identities have huge problem of it's own - there are many people who don't have any persistent data on their PC

This is probably the single biggest problem we are facing, because it impacts UX. There are several tools available to mitigate this issue, but I don't believe there is a perfect solution. Keys can be linked across devices with cross-signing, there are mechanisms that can enable key rotation: DNS, social media connections, and social/manual rotation in the worst case. The plan is to leverage existing tools that are used to keep secrets safe for regular people: system keychains, password managers, passkeys, smartphone "wallets".

> Turns out, other than piracy, there are no legitimate uses. The existing technologies are good enough.

People become very comfortable in their virtual prisons, and most people won't change unless they have a reason to. Maybe they have legitimate work or content that is stigmatized and censored by other platforms. Maybe they live under an autocratic regime. But I think most people want better control over their content moderation and feed algorithm.

> People has been proposing those things forever. No one needed them back then, and no one needs them today.

I'm not laughing at your exaggerated use of "no one". Decentralized and censorship-resistant technology is society's fail-safe. Maybe your social media oligarch isn't abusing their power too much today. Maybe your government actually supports free speech today. What about tomorrow, the next decade, and the next century?

evv commented on The man who keeps predicting the web's death tedium.co/2025/10/25/web-... · Posted by u/thm

amarant · 3 months ago

P2P and federation tech is really cool stuff! I feel like ipfs is what most non-tech people thought the cloud was, perhaps even what it should've been.

I'll admit I'm a bit out of the loop though. Say I wanted to publish a blog on this.. Let's call it web 4, for lack of a better term..

How would I do it? How would people find it? Last I checked there wasn't really a good solution for that(or at least I didn't find one) but it's been nearly a decade, so things might've changed!

evv · 3 months ago

The solution is to build on the traditional web. How does anybody find anything new on the web? Basically: hyperlinks!

People will create links from social media. With some basic SEO, your content can be indexed by your favorite search engines. Increasingly these "web4" sites will link to themselves, leveraging the built-in social features that are portable across sites/servers/peers.