>it can read my text messages, including two-factor authentication codes. it can log into my bank. it has my calendar, my notion, my contacts. it can browse the web and take actions on my behalf. in theory, clawdbot could drain my bank account. this makes a lot of people uncomfortable (me included, even now).
I think it's interesting that if this was a normal program this level of access would be seen as utterly insane. A desktop software could use your cookies to access your gmail account and automatically do things (if you didn't want to use the e-mail protocols that already exist for this kind of stuff), but I assume the average developer simply wouldn't want to be responsible for such thing. Now, just because the software is "AI," nothing matters anymore?
I was very impressed by Anthropic's swarm of agents building a C compiler earlier this year with 1000 PRs per hour. Easy to nitpick that it wasn't perfect, but it sure was impressive.
You mean trying and failing to build a C compiler. This isn't a very hard task to begin with (assuming you know compilers, and the models do), but it was made unrealistically easy by giving the agents thousands of tests written by humans over years (on top of a spec and a reference implementation, both of which the models were trained on), and the agents still failed to converge. I was actually surprised that they failed as this was the purest possible example of "just do the coding" (something that isn't achievable in real or more complex cases) and when I read the description I thought they made it too easy, and in a way that isn't representative of real software. My thought at that failure was that if agents can't even build a C compiler with so much preparation effort put into the test, then we have some ways to go. Indeed, once you work a lot with agents for a while you see that coding isn't really their strong suit (although they are impressive at debugging).
What percentage of people will think that’s life changing?
Because then we’re not talking about “can everyone up their demos to life changing, please?”, we’re talking about “can everyone use demos Oarch thinks are life changing, please?” - and “can build a MVP C compiler draft that barely works for $XXK” isn’t really that compelling to me, and we’re both software engineers, and my whole day job has been an agentic coder for…2.5 years?…now. My incentive structure and demographics are lined up perfectly to agree with you, but I don’t :/
Maybe a personalised diet and exercise plan based on a huge range of information: preferences, biometrics, habit forming, disposable income, your local area etc
This is an excellent point and reminds me that, in some ways, the agentic coding stuff and ability for RL to hill climb on that and improve models quickly, has distracted from prompt engineering / putting more effort into getting data to them as a user.
This is same cop out people use to talk about "Linux."
"No, Linux isn't bad, your distro/DE is bad, if you used XYZ then you wouldn't have this problem." And then you waste your time switching to XYZ and you just find new problems in XYZ that you didn't have in your original distro.
I'm genuinely tired of this in the Linux community. You can't use the "Wayland" label only for the good stuff like "Wayland is good for security!" and "Wayland is the future" and then every time someone complains about Wayland, it is "no, that's not true Wayland, because Wayland isn't real."
But that's what we signed up for in the Linux wirld. Linux systems are smorgasbord of different components by design, and that means being specific. I'm using KDE Plasma 6, that's a different experience than someone using Cosmic or Sway.
Furthermore, Wayland is, first and foremost, a protocol, not a standalone software like the Linux kernel. Wayland is no more than an API format transmitted over the Wire protocol. So properly criticizing Wayland is about criticizing the abstraction this API creates and the constraints introduced by it.
The interesting thing about this strategy is that there are many people on this very website who have no idea what YCombinator is and just call this website "Hacker News."
Most people (me included) are not really in the target audience for YC. I have no interest in starting a company, and even if I did I wouldn't want to do so in North America.
You also see some posts on here about some YC founded company or other with open positions, which is a wider audience (so that helps the equation I guess).
My guess is that these two target audiences together is enough for them. It is not like HN is a heavy site, nor does it change much over the years. So with smart coding (i.e. a compiled language) and hosting my guess is that moderation time is the bulk of the actual operating costs.
People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.
Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing.
If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.
I would actually flip your statement around. Today, many people feel entitled to be paid for sharing things on the Internet. In that sense, they are the newcomers. The original ethos was about sharing information simply because it mattered to someone else, and a few of us still believe that value has not gone away.
The signal (fan sites) to noise (sites focusing on revenue) ratio is way off today. The issues are that ad revenue generating sites are too plentiful, in some cases they are generated by code and they are more highly placed in search engine results. SEO and procedurally created content is where we lost the way (I think the lure of getting rich as a social media influencer or streamer further moved us away).
I was looking for discussion around a brand new album last night (not King Crimson related...), like from an internet forum, reddit, even a review, but the first few pages of search results were all storefronts selling/streaming it, PR (not even reviews) or AI generated pages about the artist. The stuff I was looking for existed, but I only found it after adding "reddit" to the search terms. I was hoping to find a new forum similar to this one focused on that kind of music. Reddit is not ad free, but at least it has a raison d'etre beyond advertising...
So, it's harder to find fan sites, and I'm sure fan site maintainers are less motivated to keep up for this reason (a more popular site is probably more fun to maintain). At least compare this to FOSS projects. I think findability is easier for those, and the popular ones are reasonably well maintained.
Geocities ran ads, but the user's page was still in the spirit of OPs comment. I'd say that lasted until the late 00's. Around 2009. I partially blame the rise of Facebook for the proliferation of "social," though, people tend to get bored with _anything_ if it stagnates too long. Regardless, the internet was inherently social before that; they only changed the landscape. Not for the better in my eyes (though hindsight's 20/20).
There are distinctions to be made between rotating/static display ads, spam and everything (i.e., user surveillance) that encompasses digital advertising today. Personally, ads don't bother me. Spam is annoying in terms of UX. But really, user surveillance is what we need to worry about in terms of UX, our privacy, security, etc.
I think there's a worse-step beyond passive surveillance, where ad-networks function as a channel for viruses that seek to change your computer, along with scams and phishing.
Ad-blocking--refusing to run their code--is a simply common sense when the networks are not liable for ensuring that the code they send is not malicious.
Geocities was full of a lot of things. There were pages that were just ad farms, often with no meaningful content except a bunch of key words hidden in the background. But there were also plenty of clean and useful sites by people who wanted to share their passion with others.
The later all but ceases to exist. Even if you are sharing your passion, you are doing it on a social media platform that is using your content to drive your audience into seeing their ads. You are ad bait.
That's very different from the web of the turn of the century.
It was 96/97. I remember thinking "The drones are moving in on this."
Canter and Siegel had nuked Usenet in 1994, and banners were invented in 1994 by Hotwired. But it took a while for the tech to eat the web, because the web was a niche interest for the first few years.
During that time you could - and a lot of people did - put together a simple site with a text editor and free hosting supplied by your ISP.
The majority of internet users wouldn't have experienced that supposed world.
The median age in the US in 39, which means at least half of all Americans would have been in elementary school or not around during that supposed era of the internet, and the mass adoption of the internet only really began in earnest in the early 2000s.
> "that supposed world ... that supposed era of the internet"
"Supposed: Presumed to be true or real without conclusive evidence". You think there isn't conclusive evidence that the internet existed before 1995? o_O
>If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.
Unfortunately, music lyrics are protected by copyrights so your site of King Crimson lyrics would not be authorized unless you paid for a license. The music publisher may not expend the effort to have a lawyer send you a "Cease & Desist" letter to make you take it down because your personal website is small fish but they wouldn't ignore a popular website that tried to show all lyrics for free with no ads.
The legitimate ongoing licensing costs from Gracenote/Lyricfind for their catalogs of millions of song lyrics will cost significantly more than the hosting bill. The cost is beyond the resources of typical hobbyists who like to share information for free.
EDIT: I have no idea what the downvotes are about. If you think my information about lyrics licensing is incorrect, explain why. Several decades ago, volunteers were sharing guitar tabs for free on the internet and that also got shut down by the music publishers because of copyright violations. Previous comment about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24598821
> The music publisher may not expend the effort to have a lawyer send you a "Cease & Desist" letter to make you take it down because your personal website is small fish but they wouldn't ignore a popular website that tried to show all lyrics for free with no ads.
Exactly. Now what if there wasn't one popular website with all the lyrics, but a million different small fanpages?
There's a tension that the fan engagement is what really makes entertainers rich. The industry has every right to crack down, but if they do say they are really cutting their own legs off.
I think if there's any negative phrasing in your first three words, those reading from the Philosophers Chair (bathroom) are primed to take what immediately follows as Bad Vibes and downvote accordingly. They're not in this for accuracy.
Well my problem isn't with the writing in its original form, it's with the downvoting in response to it. I am fine with someone bringing bad news if it's helpful info.
> If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.
Anyone can still do this today (I don’t know the legalities of publishing copyrighted lyrics though). Of course, the proportion of people who wanted to do that was much higher in previous decades.
But we also spend much more time and bandwidth today than decades ago, so maybe it just wasn’t feasible to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.
But in search results, you only find the sites that game the system to maximize their profits, while millions of other well-meaning sites get little to no traffic, and eventually people lose interest in maintaining an online presence. They move toward big silos like Instagram, platforms that just use their content to attract more ads.
Ads do break the internet, or let's say, fundamentally change the model of how it works to the detriment of most people
But no-one would ever find it - which might be fine - and that seems like a waste.
>> to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.
This is a big change in perspective & expectation. The original web was not volunteers doing work for others, but humans voluntarily doing work to share with others.
Nobody could find it back in 1994 either! That was part of the fun. You stumbled on a webring or somebody's curated oracle and found a bunch of interesting weird tiny websites.
I was trying to use a grain/chaff analogy to respond to your post, but I think there were just less crops in the old days. For the sites (crops) that were there, you had a lot more healthy ones. As spam and low-quality sites proliferated, the signal->noise ratio of sites got completely out-of-balance.
Yes, and yet we would do well to distinguish hobbies from necessities, like quality journalism. Not saying there's an easy fix, but there better be one.
In a proper world, searching for "band song lyrics" would take you ... to the band's website, where they'd have perhaps some ads for band-related things and the lyrics, right there.
Copyright and SEO and other stupidity prevents the obvious solution from being the enacted one.
You used to get the lyrics when you bought the music. Came in a nice booklet with the tape or CD, and then you would read along while listening to the music.
Should be the same with streaming. If I can listen to the song, I should be able tho see the lyrics.
There's an asymmetry here. We aren't talking about ads like billboard ads or TV commercials. We're talking about creepy behavioral tracking, harvesting and selling.
I go to YouTube and see a lot of things that make me question the narrative that this is an advanced system that elicits user preferences, makes markets clear, allows competitors to enter the market, etc.
The first ad I see if is for Chrome. Well I'm already using Chrome because sometimes Youtube punishes me for using Firefox. So the message is "lights are on and nobody is home", I mean, they can see the user agent and probably have deeper analysis that would indicate I'm not faking it.
Next I get a sequence of three obvious scam ads. Trying to provoke the fear of dementia in elderly people unless you use this "one weird trick" or a crypto scam or something that's obviously a scam but no way I am going to sit through 45 minutes of droning to know what the punch line is.
Then there are the saturation ads for things like car insurance that are always over-advertised because nobody wants to buy them (people wouldn't buy insurance at all if they didn't get it from their employer, or had to get it to drive a car or get a mortgage, etc.) These have internalized the form of the scam ads because they're surrounded by them.
Finally after maybe 20 ads I see something I might want and think "do I send them an email that says I'm afraid they're a scam because they're advertising in a place soaked with scams, they've incorporated so many superficial characteristics of scams and that they should reconsider their advertising spend?"
I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers.
> I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers.
by hook or crook, people have things to sell and those platforms are the place to put up shop... (my opinion) most new products/services are garbage (hello temu and friends) so its not a surprise most ads are therefore garbage/frauds as well...
I'll admit that objects you buy from Temu are often 2-3x larger or (more likely) smaller than than you expect them to be, but often they are OK. Having worked a bit in recommendation engineering I have a lot of respect for what they do.
I've built a number of nice puzzle kits with Chinese themes I bought from Temu but don't actually use any of my kemonomimi supplies I bought from Temu and instead rely on American fashion brands, Etsy or commissions.
> People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them
You're wrong. We pay for everything all the time.
We pay for home internet (not cheap!). We pay for various subscriptions and streaming services. We pay for online tools. We pay for a TON of stuff.
And we still get hit by tons of obnoxious, invasive ads regardless of how much we pay. And people call us pirates if we want to install and adblocker. Advertisers like to violate us; it's their business model.
Stop parroting their lines, and stop defending bullshit.
There is a huge difference between providing a service with adverts to pay for it, and what almost all lyric sites are. They don't just put up ads and the related opportunities for adtech to stalk us in order to pay for the server and bandwidth: they spend time and money (SEO, sometimes more active advertising themselves) seeking out more and more visits to extract more revenue from that stalking and advertising relationship. And the have few standards on the sort of 3rd parties they deal with: last time I found myself on such a site and some things got through my blocking, the ads shown wouldn't have looked out of place on a porn site.
Selling ad impressions and stalking opportunities is the point of those sites, offering lyrics is just a way to do that.
That's how the internet worked back when we were all excited about it. Giving things away for free is easy on the web; irritating people badly enough that you can squeeze money out of them is what takes effort.
No, its because greedy people try to make money off people. Ads are the reason the internet sucks. There could be a wikipedia like site for lyrics that would cost pennies to maintain and people who like music and contributing would add to it. But scummy sites making money will pay to be at the top of search results as an ad, so they can get people to click on their site that is full of ads, all while sucking up bandwidth and processing power. Why are their dozens of almost identicle recipes for every dish? Because each one is trying to extract money with ads. Why do they all have some long-winded story about how they grew up eating this recipe every 9/11 anniversary? So they have more space to shove ads.
Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out. Do you know how much money they could make turning every wiki reader into a product for ads?
> Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out
Technically, they already did a long time ago. Jimmy Wales spun up a for-profit arm using the wikipedia tech stack, and it's now everyone's least favourite ad-ridden pop culture wiki[1]...
Honestly, "native UI" gets so much worse with every passing year that I don't even want native UI. I want old windows UI.
I saw a screenshot of GTK 1 and the first thing I thought is that I'd rather make something using GTK 1 than GTK 3. Unfortunately I asked an AI chatbot about it and they advised against it because of "security" :(
That's the false assumption that unmaintained is insecure. Any old DOS game in Dosbox would be insecure by that logic.
So if I run Dune2 in dosbox, is that a security issue? Of course not, but if you were to load a bitmap from the network and feed it to GTK1 for displaying, there could well be an overlooked issue lurking around. But you need to look at the greater picture, not just "old==insecure"
What? You don't even need to understand how Mastodon works in depth to realize that sending a post to 500 different servers owned by completely different people in completely different jurisdictions is going to make it harder to delete later.
Sure -- but it also makes it harder to verify. That's my issue with Bluesky, perhaps I'm thinking like a lawyer. ATProto's most touted feature is also its biggest danger. A post on 2 servers thats hashed/verified (and perhaps admissible in court) might be more dangerous than many more rando Mastodon servers.
Not being able to trust the integrity of the data on the Mastodon network to the point it's not admissible in court is not a good thing for Mastodon. If this is really true, I'd say it's a completely failure of the most fundamental concepts of information technology.
AGAIN, we are way past SIMPLE SOLUTIONS like this. We have enough data and information to be able to see the potential for harm that we can mitigate through smart policy without falling back on this simple argument.
I think it's interesting that if this was a normal program this level of access would be seen as utterly insane. A desktop software could use your cookies to access your gmail account and automatically do things (if you didn't want to use the e-mail protocols that already exist for this kind of stuff), but I assume the average developer simply wouldn't want to be responsible for such thing. Now, just because the software is "AI," nothing matters anymore?