Too many people are fixating on AI and missing the point. Oh the dev was salty because people can use AI, oh he's just angry that an LLM can do his work now and his skills are becoming "useless"...It's not about AI, it's about the community?

The guy is clearly burned out, fighting an uphill battle, and feeling like it's no longer worth it. He could have reported the bug and taken the money, but he didn't. To judge him for feeling upset that someone else did that, and not give him credit for not taking the money in order to contribute more to the community, is... well it's a choice, I guess.

The LLM wave hasn't really produced this upswell of terrific apps or ideas the "common man" would've made if he only knew how to code. It's just slop, usually made at the level of the lowest common denominator, literal bespoke software nothing can coalesce around. The exceptions are few and far between, and they usually started before AI and adapted to using it as an existing community.

If thisnsort of behaviour is going to become the norm for the future, there will be no future, and I'd want to get out too? There will always be the one guy that's just hungry enough to not care about others and they'll take the money. No community can form around that, it'll never even get a chance to start up under such conditions.

I’m seeing that the old mantra is alive and kicking: "If the product is cheap/free, you are the product! Pay for the product!" Turns out that now both is true—they’ll charge you a steep price comparative to other brands, and they’ll _still_ spy on you. Why are some still defending corporations?

It’s incredible how these brands are, one by one, destroying any affinity and good will left for them (LG, Sony, Microsoft, etc.). Nowadays whenever I hear a company has a custom OS I think custom what? Custom tracking and ad pipeline? This just makes me turn elsewhere entirely, not want to "upgrade" to an even more expensive product that _might_ not track me. Might isn’t good enough.

I’ll take a cheap TCL panel with all the latest bells and whistles, and be done with it. Sure, the software will be janky, but it will be cheap and just as good at showing moving pictures, if not better. If I suspect something nefarious, I’ll get an old Android box and install a rooted system on there that I control, and use that instead of the inbuilt Android TV. But I _won’t_ be paying extra for the trouble.

It would have to be a fight to the death against trlion dollar companies, It can’t just be “don’t buy it”. What you are suggesting means companies like google meta etc. Get wiped out. There is no way they would go naturally.

In my neck of the woods Google actually disabled some of that routing infra, breaking RCS, I guess wanting to force the carriers to build out parts of it? Needless to say the carriers wouldn’t have any of it, so as it stands RCS is fully broken, has been for some time, and will continue to be.

This just shows the fragility of the tech and why I wouldn’t want to rely on it for anything crucial.

RCS has been an absolutely unmitigated disaster, and it's just a black box when it breaks. There's no reason why messaging in 2026 should need to have cell carriers involved whatsoever - everyone's phone is connected to the internet, every phone should have an IP based messaging app by default.

Forget about global trends, forget "unprecedented events", this isn’t rocket science, I’ve seen the climate shift myself, in my lifetime, and I’m not even that old. It’s difficult to imagine how people elsewhere aren’t seeing the same, like we aren’t inhabiting the same reality somehow?

In Continental Europe we used to have winters with regular snow even in large cities. I know, I really liked playing in the snow as a kid. It was cold. For the past dozen or so years, there is less and less snowfall, with milder and milder winters. Snow in the cities amounts to maybe a week or three of weak drizzle. Forget about what my grandpa remembered about how the Danube used to freeze over so you could walk across the river. What we do seem to get more of is wild, torrential rainfall in sudden bursts amid long dry spells. Bad for infrastructure, even worse for agriculture.

The climate is changing here, and it’s getting hotter, not colder or more balanced. Wildfires are increasing in frequency, and God knows what’s going on with the country’s underground aquifers, we never seem to care about those, because we’ve always just had plenty, so why worry. Of course all this is easily dismissed as anecdata. But when I read about the research labelling Europe the fastest warming continent, I don’t have trouble believing it. Sure, someone living in the northernmost reaches of Europe might not see anything, yet, this doesn’t mean the research is wrong.

Worse yet, the infrastructure for dealing with this simply isn’t there in most countries, and I’m not talking about stuff that will "reverse global warming" or whatever, I’m talking steps that will keep cities livable in the short to medium time-span. Most societies are unwilling to mentally deal with or consider what might happen two, three decades down the line. They aren’t willing to contend with a future where their children will have to endure water rationing, curfews, economic and other hardship, mass migration or any number of scenarios that will affect their wellbeing.

We have to greenify the streets, reduce the number of heat-producing vehicles, upgrade the pipelines, irrigation, water collection, and other systems across European cities... I have a sneaking suspicion it will take some massive, un-ignorable crisis, like a record number of elderly people dying from heat exposure to actually start investing in any of this. And by then it might be too late.

I've been using XCancel to retrieve posts of an account via RSS, only posting vintage photos from my hometown. It was a small convenience, but I guess that's over. I'll never get what keeps people tethered to it.

Meanwhile I’m running Waydroid with Android 13 – _an entire operating system, with apps, running services, etc_ – on my laptop, in roughly that same memory footprint.

Where did it all go wrong? To think I really liked Windows 10 when it first came out, and thought it was a solid direction forward into modernising Windows.

Brave sort of created that themselves, it’s called Brave Origin and allows you to have a browser without all the cruft compiled in. Believe it or not, it’s meant to be a paid product, but it’s (intentionally) free on Linux.

Now, on Linux there’s also a setting in regular Brave which allows you to uncover per-feature switches to disable offending elements and retain some, which is the way I use it, to avoid having to reinstall Brave. I’m guessing this isn’t available on Windows without getting a licence?

Regardless, Zen is still the better main browser, particularly on Linux... but Brave is a fine second choice IMHO.

Just before coming to read this article and thread, I read how Hyatt got rid of something like 30% of their call centre staff, and how the industry is gearing for replacing human work with AI.

There is sadly ample fiscal headroom in mundane drone-like work that was being outsourced (still cheaply, I might add) that AI can replace and even do a marginally better job of. I suspect AI prices can even increase and it will still be profitable for enterprises.

Companies like this will certainly keep expanding their AI use, and once they commit to that, there's little stopping them from moving to open models or local inference if need be.

My concern is less over the bubble and more over the social cost of AI. Call centres and the like provide a tremendous number of jobs. As AI moves into enterprises more and more, where are all these people supposed to work? Become baristas? They certainly won't be "learning to code"... What sorts of social and other unrests will this cause?

These forces I think will muddy the waters and make predictions difficult. Say what you want about the AI bubble, but if it pops, it will be different than previous ones. The bubble doesn't even need to burst because of the insane economic model, if enough people are economically devastated by it, it will cause ripple effects of its own.

The thing is that companies that are investing in AI crap to replace mundane drone-like workers is that the AI will get better but more importantly we will get more used to the way behaves towards us. Right now we some janky-as-fuck implementations but we're currently being trained on how to react to AI just as much it is trained on us responding to it.

Ever since the first wave of attacks it was clear this wasn’t a passing thing, and would return unless the AUR fundamentally changed. They introduced... email verification, then hoped for the best. In a sense it’s good that this has happened as I think it will help the team understand it can’t go on like this.

I’d hate to see an AUR that’s a walled garden, and I’m not sure what an Arch without the AUR would look like. But something in between will need to be invented.

The Homeric epic as we have come to understand it is actually a kind of collective oral poetry, memorised, rendered and promulgated through a series of techniques, most notably formulae. One such formula is a "common epithet" associated with characters, somewhat famously, "cow-eyed" Hera, for Zeus’ wife. Another is, for example, a catalogue, an eldless barrage of names, locations, places, etc. common across many epic oral traditions.

The singer/performer (in Homer’s time there were special bards specifically of Homer’s texts called rhapsodes) would use these formulae to help them construct the flow and meter of the overall poem while rendering. So they basically knew the formulae by heart, knew the general plot outline, and had enough cultural and other vocabulary to be able to reconstruct a long text in a single sitting from memory.

This means that most of the time, every performance was unique, and small details were continually added and altered by every rhapsode / performer. Hence, while the outline remained fairly known, the details have naturally shifted over the years. Hence the mountains of inconsistencies with for instance armour, customs, etc. Even though the story is set in the Bronze age, most dress and probably some of the cultural aspects in general is a mix of stuff contemporary to the time of writing and stuff the Greeks may have thought seemed old to them.

It was, by and large, more important to remember the overall details about what the key characters do than it was to remember what they wore for centuries on. For the purposes of plot, armour is armour after all. (Incidentally, this is why the description of Achiles’ shield in the Illiad is such an interesting example.)

Given all of this, today it’s generally accepted that "Homer" was not a singular poet of tremendous gifts who bequeathed the world two immense poems, but rather a name for a collective author. This hypothesis was borne out by Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord in their research in Yugoslavian oral poetry in the early XX century, where they found living examples of singers able to, in several sittings, render some 12k+ verses from memory.

This is by no means unique, and similarities have since been found across cultures, though, perhaps, not to that extent. Blues is, for example, full of constant epithets and other formulae that make constructing and reconstructing songs or indeed improvising them in a call-and-response manner much easier. As long as you have the cultural cachet and knowledge of the building blocks, that is.

Right, that was my understanding, but it seems inconsistent with what I quoted from the review.