We tell stories of Therac 25 but 90% of software out there doesn’t kill people. Annoys people and wastes time yes, but reliability doesn’t matter as much.

E-mail, internet and networking, operations on floating point numbers are only kind of somewhat reliable. No one is saying they will not use email because it might not be delivered.

Reliability matters in lots of areas that aren't war. Ignoring obvious ones like medicine/healthcare and driving, I want my banking app to be reliable. If they charge me $100 instead of $1 because their LLM didn't realize their currency was stored in floating point dollars and not cents, then I may not die but I'd be pretty upset!

As we give more and more autonomy to agents, that % may change. Just yesterday I was looking at hexapods and the first thing it tells you ( with a disclaimer its for competitions only ) that it has a lot of space for weapon install. I had to briefly look at the website to make sure I did not accidentally click on some satirical link.

When web apps took off there was nothing that would save Delphi. Web stack was awful back then and I also enjoyed Delphi an building interfaces with it.

But web stack unfortunately had many more upsides than desktop apps and nowadays tooling for web sucks less.

The risks that you download and start spreading malware or worse CSAM. You really don’t want that sitting on your disk.

Admittedly the risks is lower if the list is coming from Annas Archive, but this is still putting a lot of trust in an external list.

Much better off doing this manually, finding the list of what you want to seed and vetting that list yourself.

People seem to be very concerned, but putting aside the legal risks (which I accept - don't use this if you're in one of the ~10 countries it could get you in troubles for), I don't really get it. The idea is to support Anna's Archive. If you do not trust the project, why support it? Levin is meant for people that want to support Anna's Archive, and my assumption was that this implies some kind of trust in their torrents.

Edit: just adding that "finding the list of what you want to seed and vetting that list yourself" is extremely not practical and not won't really help anyone. Torrents work because we're all seeding the same torrents. If I'd seed a torrent of my 5 favorite books and you seed a torrent of your 5 books, our torrents will forever have 1 seeder each. And good luck manually vetting all the files in one AA torrent. I am planning to let people manually add/remove torrents from Levin, but I highly suspect it will be used by very, very few.

I'm seeding the Epstein files right now.

Any iOS or Android app could in fact, download arbitrary content without you noticing, but corporations conditioned people to only raise alarms on torrents and other community efforts.

As I said in other comments - yes, this requires some kind of trust in the AA project. Personally, I tend to have more trust in this kind of projects than in big corporations, of which people are happily running their binaries without blinking. However, I'm not trying to convince people to trust AA - this project is simply meant for those who want support them.

Honestly, in these HN discussions, I am disappointed that people seem very casual about mass piracy of copyrighted works.

As far as being casual about mass piracy, I think the preservation outweighs the damage, and on top of that copyright is too restrictive in the first place. If we could massively boost the internet archive and have dozens of similar institutions, and didn't paywall science articles, and brought copyright down to a reasonable duration, then after that I would be much easier to convince that instances of piracy are bad.

You could say that cameras want to be free. A camera left unattended is likely to walk away.

Some rules are about adjusting incentives and disincentives to maximize value for everyone.

There is a lot of room to argue where that balance is. But the "its easy to copy stuff" argument isn't even grappling the kinds of context that result in more creations.

Most copyrighted material doesn't hurt you in any way if you can't have a copy. So someone creating something and not sharing with you should not be something to complain about.

Nor should it be a problem if they are willing to share with you, if you do something for them.

You are also completely unfettered to create anything for yourself that you feel you are missing.

People don't owe other people their work.

Because you are on the site where people who have no understanding of the domain or the problem still feel it necessary to share their opinion on things they don't understand.

Sure, but what if the scenario was slightly modified, with explicit 100% guarantees regarding rhe package you would receive in the maile:

1. It could only contain either an SSD/hard drive or a usb drive. The storage device has not been tampered with. It was only ever used as a regular storage device out of the box.

2. There is no malware or any malicious executables on the storage device. The only types of data that it could contain would be text/html, structured data/document files (json, csv, office suite files, pdf, etc.), and media files (audio, video, images, etc.). None of those files will exploit any vulnerabilities in the software that opens them (neither through the parser nor anything else)

This makes it nearly a perfect 1:1 analogy to the torrenting scenario, both involving the exact same set of imo the most important dangers.

Which, for me personally, is the fear of ending up with illegal content (CSAM, stolen credit card dumps, etc.) on a storage device in my possession through no fault of my own.

Even if it could be a winnable battle in the end, it would be pretty much over reputationally way before it gets to the legal resolution. Just being accused of having any illegal content of that nature is not something I would want to ever deal with at all.

You gotta realize how it would sound and how you would appear to most uninvolved average people in real life, when your legal defense isn’t even something like statement #1 below, and is way closer to the statement #2:

> “I am not guilty, the accusarions are false, those files were never present on any of my storage devices.”

> “I am not guilty, despite those files being actually present on a storage device in my possession. That’s all due to how torrents inherently work, so, let’s start from the basics…” [and now we gotta explain simplified basics of torrent technology and how it works to the DA, the judge, as well as anyone else observing the trial, and pray they will try to actually understand]

I would love for the authors of in-print books to be paid - even when it's usually not a lot. Buy books - they are cheap, or borrow them from libraries - they buy books. If you need books for not-reading, and at scale, you should still be paying - especially if you can afford to pad Nvidia's fat margins.

Even if you're self-interested, I would urge you to pick your crimes carefully, and to remember to commit one crime at a time. If distributing copyright material is your chosen hill - more power to you! Just don't sleep walk into it thinking it's harmless.

Everything with the power to protect the innocent, also has exactly the same power to protect the guilty. The two facets are inseperable.

Observing only the negative side, or only the positive side, is a null argument. The fact that a tool can be used for bad is exactly cancelled out by the fact that it can be used for good. Neither is a valid basis for any kind of policy.

Except that on balance, it's better for everyone that we have tools and capabilities and knowledge than not.

It's better that we have knowledge of say, poisons, than not, even though some people apply the knowledge to do harm.

This manifests in at least a couple different dimensions. The simplest one: there are more good or neutral people using knowledge and tools for good things than not. A less direct way: It's better for you to have options to help yourself and others deal with problems and meet needs than not.

Even if someone can use a tool against you, you are still better off having a lot of useful tools at your disposal in general than not, including to counter the one going against you, which zeros that out, and then also to deal with everything else, which becomes a net positive.

The alternative is to be an animal. Either a wild animal totally at the whims of nature, or worse a voluntarily domesticated animal that knows that tools exist, but has abdicated all responsibility for their own welfare to some farmer claiming to take care of them. And you still have the exact same bad guy problem, only now without any ability to deal with it.

Acting like the bad side of a useful thing is the only side, or even the most important side, is simple bad math.

Aside from any other unflattering quality that results in fear of any obvious easily identified harm being one's highest priority that outweighs all other considerations.

Con: Possible 25+ year jail sentence, multi-trillion dollar fines, might be distributing actually harmful material.

This is one area where I'm letting the limited liability corporations take the risk.

I use block option there quite a lot. That cleans up my experience rather well.

Daniel Stenberg Jason Fried David Heinemeier Hansson Nick Chapsas Laurie Kirk Brian Krebs

I found WPF rather nice to work with. Same with knockout.js and Angular I don’t see much downsides.

Everyone can write bad code of course in each of them but I think it was working quite well.

This contrasted with MVVM frameworks like early AngularJS, Knockout, and WPF, which relied on two-way data binding. That automatic syncing felt convenient for small apps, but at scale it often led to hidden coupling and hard-to-trace update chains.

Over time, many developers came to view pervasive two-way binding as a design mistake in complex systems. React's unidirectional model gained traction because it favored clarity and control over "magic."

But that’s just generic „blablabla”. MVVM is not a mistake and is still plenty useful.

People confidently write strong opinions on the internet.

Like I don’t remember syntax or linting or typos being a problem since I was in high school doing Turbo Pascal or Visual Basic.

My experience is I hanged out with one band in a garage where they were practicing and I attended couple live music shows in pubs.

Main upside of those live music shows is that they are not "perfect" like playing a record and each one of the gigs will be off here or there, tempo somewhere will be off or a tune will be off - or you are just having enough beers you don't care pick your way :)

If you’re in a band and care about sound quality, bring your own mix guy!

That's a very different metric. How good the sound is vs. what the sound is.