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QuadrupleA

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As Platforms Decay, Let's Put Users First (2023)

eff.org
6 points·by QuadrupleA·hace 3 meses·0 comments

Tech promised everything. Did it deliver?

youtube.com
2 points·by QuadrupleA·hace 10 meses·0 comments

comments

QuadrupleA
·hace 16 días·discuss
Point not mentioned: it just doesn't work that well! It lies, it reverts to the mean on every topic, it wastes the reader's time. It's toxically positive, sycophantic. It's such a good mimic that it's insidiously hard to distinguish its bullshit or fake work from real work.
QuadrupleA
·hace 19 días·discuss
Always amazed how spoiled we are with modern hardware! The 8087 was $500 in today's dollars, and delivered around 50 kFLOPS of performance (0.00005 GFLOPS).

A cheap mobile phone CPU+GPU costs the manufacturer maybe $20, and typically does 50 GFLOPS on the CPU and 500+ on the GPU. So 10 million times the performance for 1/25th the cost.

Humbling too how "worthless" all the incredible ingenuity of the 8087 circuits and die designs now is, although I'm sure many of those innovations live on in modern chips.
QuadrupleA
·hace 27 días·discuss
This hype cycle is unique in that the tech writes its own hype.
QuadrupleA
·hace 2 meses·discuss
[dead]
QuadrupleA
·hace 2 meses·discuss
The effort required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude more than to create it.
QuadrupleA
·hace 2 meses·discuss
Because AI creates unmaintainable messes in any language, and ergonomic ones help humans clean up.
QuadrupleA
·hace 2 meses·discuss
Not sure how excited I feel about visiting your website and having it auto-download a 8GB model with GPT-3.5 level hallucinations, and then probably crash because I only have 6GB of VRAM. My dad won't be able to use it, or anyone else without a bleeding edge device. On a powerful enough "neural engine" device the battery will be drained quickly, while the heatsink burns a hole in my lap.
QuadrupleA
·hace 2 meses·discuss
This is just emotional rhetoric. Pretty much any app in the last 20 years has depended on a server somewhere, or a cloud provider. Like an AI provider, they can go down, they can turn off if you don't pay your bill, etc.

And local inference requires fairly beefy hardware, that is FAR from ubiquitous across today's userbases. Local models are also still far dumber than what frontier labs can serve.

Weird that this is getting such a tidal wave of upvotes.
QuadrupleA
·hace 3 meses·discuss
Exactly double the cost of GPT 5.4 - $5 per MTok input, $0.50 cached, $30 output.

All the AI players definitely seem to be trying to claw more money out of their users at the moment.
QuadrupleA
·hace 3 meses·discuss
Definitely seems like AI money got tight the last month or two - that the free beer is running out and enshittification has begun.
QuadrupleA
·hace 3 meses·discuss
One thing I don't see often mentioned - OpenAI API's auto token caching approach results in MASSIVE cost savings on agent stuff. Anthropic's deliberate caching is a pain in comparison. Wish they'd just keep the KV cache hot for 60 seconds or so, so we don't have to pay the input costs over and over again, for every growing conversation turn.
QuadrupleA
·hace 3 meses·discuss
Love SQLite and most of these features.

On the STRICT mode, I've asked this elsewhere and never gotten an answer: does anyone have a loose-typing example application where SQLite's non-strict, different-type-allowed-for-each-row has been a big benefit? I love the simplicity of SQLite's small number of column types, but the any-type-allowed-anywhere design always seemed a little strange.
QuadrupleA
·hace 3 meses·discuss
One thing I haven't seen mentioned much, in AI coding and other AI-assisted work, is the sheer needless verbosity of models, the walls of text they spew out for us to read through. This alone adds to the workload & fatigue.

There's a thing in writing, "pity the reader" - respect your audience's time, get to the point. In The Elements of Style, "omit needless words."

You can prompt models to be succinct, but the latest ones - GPT 5-series especially - ignore your requests and spew paragraphs upon paragraphs of noise. Maybe it's the incentives of charging per token?

If you want, I can expand on this topic and generate a lengthy comparison chart.
QuadrupleA
·hace 4 meses·discuss
Fun fact: Copilot gives you no way to ignore sensitive files with API keys, passwords, DB credentials, etc.: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/11254#discussi...

So by default you send all this to Microsoft by opening your IDE.
QuadrupleA
·hace 4 meses·discuss
> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things

I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out?
QuadrupleA
·hace 4 meses·discuss
As a 20+ year Windows user now happily running desktop Linux for about a year - too little, too late. This company has completely lost my trust over the past 5+ years, with all the ads, upsells, silent telemetry, bugs, background process mess, forced updates, poor performance, etc.

It's not only steered me off of Windows, but Azure, Office, and anything else with the Microsoft name on it. I'll do my best to steer family and business customers off likewise.

Trust is earned over years, and whoever the execs are that pushed all these shitty short-term squeezes on their customers, the company now gets to pay the reputational price.
QuadrupleA
·hace 4 meses·discuss
Average dev might be more intelligent, but likely neither will produce something of UV's quality. Either AI coding claims are way overblown and OpenAI can't easily remake UV, or OpenAI is buying the ecosystem & mindshare rather the code, probably to lock-in, enshittify, and try to squeeze a profit out of a so far money-losing business (AI not Astral, though true for both I guess).
QuadrupleA
·hace 4 meses·discuss
Not sure I follow - is the car the coding agent, and the developer the driver?

Agree with OP here, if AI coding tools are as intelligent and amazing as AI influencers and CEOs are saying, just prompt them to "Remake UV but faster & better".
QuadrupleA
·hace 4 meses·discuss
Side note, everyone's talking about having AI agents "conform to the spec" these days. Am I in my own bubble, or - who the hell these days gets The Spec as a well-formed document? Let alone a good document, something that can be formally verified, thouroughly test-cased, can christen the software "complete" when all its boxes are ticked, etc.?

This seems like 1980's corporate waterfall thinking, doesn't jibe with the messy reality I've seen with customers, unclear ideas, changing market and technical environments, the need for iteration and experimentation, mid-course correction, etc.
QuadrupleA
·hace 4 meses·discuss
No slowdown that I've seen - my style of freelancing is pretty long-term though, clients I've known and worked with for many years.