Recent submissions

Comment · 25 minutes ago
Look up price versus intelligence for your favorite open model on artificial analysis and compare it with Luna, Sol, Opus, and Sonnet. Mind you, all of those are API prices, and you're still better off paying API prices than using an unsubsidized open model. Subscriptions from any of the major labs are an even better deal.
Comment · 28 minutes ago
The major issue is going to be you ran your stuff dry with agents and now you are cut off from the chats. If instead, like 1% had been reserved, then you'd automatically be able to use the website and it would cut off people who set up skills to hack around it, which I suspect is why they're doing this.
Comment · 32 minutes ago
All types of architecture have advantages and disadvantages. Clean code might not be very cache-friendly, but it does a pretty good job of making sure you don't have to hunt in too many places to update things and It also makes it pretty simple to split things up so that you can write unit test for most everything.

This is not the right choice for everything, just as using Python is not the right choice for everything. The question to ask is: what are we trying to do in the first place? Then take it from there.

You did that by making sure the speed-up was business relevant. I'm mostly putting this out to force people to think about whether that also applies to their specific thing.

Comment · 58 minutes ago
It was built by nerds but optimized on the data of everyone, so it ended up appealing mostly to the average person.

Maybe that's also the solution to a question I've had for years. The ads I see on diverse social platforms are terrible, but if they are matched with algorithms that try to fit me in as an average person, then it makes sense that, as a huge nerd, they miss the mark.

Comment · 1 hour ago
I'm sure there are places that would sue you for that, and it's not worth the bother. Bug bounties really compete mostly with people like me who would say, "Haha, I found an issue with Meta; they're gigantic idiots." And then make an X post or anything about it.
Comment · 7 days ago
I don't necessarily feel bad about it, but I do feel sad about it.

I would not want all my bread to have come from wheat being milled on an old watermill, but I love visiting those as museums, and I think it would be bad if they were torn down.

I probably feel about the same for JetBrains. Plus, I have fond memories of using them.

Comment · 7 days ago
For a while I agreed with you, but then I realized I want my agent to have access to the same find references, index, and rename tools, and the rest of the refactor tools that JetBrains have always provided me. And I wanted to be able to use those, even if it means I'll have to pay for Jetbrains.

Just like it was inefficient for me to manually rename variables and classes, it's token inefficient for my agent to do that.

Comment · 8 days ago
In theory you’re right it’s an often repeated talking point but I just don’t understand why am I worth advertising to but not worth creating products for? The products I see advertised are either stupid or so overpriced that it means buying them is stupid.

I am entirely willing to spend money and I have decent savings. I just expect the products put on offer to be worth buying.

Comment · 10 days ago
I happen to believe AI will be the biggest change in my career in tech. I therefore think it's pretty natural that there is lots of news about it.

But I would welcome other tech news on the site. A quick count says that less than half the submission are AI related and that is split between four types of ai news (how to handle security, a new model, a non-model release from a major lab and politics). Would you complain about there being too many news about programming languages if the frontpage had C++, Ruby, Lisp and a great guide to ARM assembly?

Comment · 10 days ago
How much is Cambridge Analytica going to have to pay? I'm all for ramming Meta, but I feel like they should be forced to pay the same amount.
Comment · 14 days ago
I don't believe dropping to 100‑man teams will be enough.

A big problem is that we now have such big budgets that they need approval higher up, and worse, you end up looking like a fool when your project fails. That is still the case with 100-man teams.

This is not necessarily a terrible situation to be in if it were a startup situation where you could count on having 90% failures and the winner making the whole bucket worth it and people knew and accepted that.

But outside Sand Hill Road nobody gets that, so the strategy is to play it safe, safe, and safe, and then you end up with boring games.

It also doesn't help that it used to be that gamers would reliably update every couple of years, so graphics cards and processes would get faster, and you could make a generic shoot‑'em‑up game that was significantly better than the previous shoot‑'em‑up just because you now had more to work with.

Computers have actually increased in price, so much so that no one buys to update their computers. And at the same time, you need permission from an extremely high level to make games, so you can only make games that are very safe.

Meanwhile, the golden age of indie games is out there. It's never been easier to make your creative game and it's never been easier to find an audience for it.

As a result, there are more games than ever on Steam, and those fun games can last a lot longer because they don't have the marketing budget, so there's no big, immediate launch-month splat window. People will find them on social media, watch their favourite streamers play them etc.

Until we get to a point where games are created by studios who accept that 90% of them will fail, we are going to have interesting games from non‑studios.

That leaves a hole in the options for game development, though. Where are we with games that can be developed by 50 people but not by four? Those games do not have a home right no; They are too risky and uninteresting for the big guys, and they are out of scope for the independent.

The entire game-development business is being torn apart and remodeled by AI development right now. It is very likely that the big companies may never be able to make a game with 500 people.

Many games that were previously too large and required too many people to be feasible for indie developers are now very feasible for them. It's also quite possible that exclusives, such as for PlayStation, will very quickly disappear due to widespread piracy aided by AI powered decompiling. The future is extremely hard to predict at present, even more so than for non-gaming segments of the industry.

Comment · 19 days ago
In Wal mode you can have multiple readers. Writers block, but because there is no network traffic, the writers finish very quickly, so in practice you don't usually wait that long.
Comment · 19 days ago
Audiobooks replaced reading for a lot of people once those audiobooks became available on their smartphones, for others it was podcasts. For many, they walk only to and from their car.

I've saved no end of hours of transport thanks to Zoom and Teams meetings, and hybrid is now a thing (just not for me).

Bricks and mortar stores around here have been empty for years in some cases, and I'm the last person in the office who carries cash.

Comment · 20 days ago
That is a good point. However, from time to time we do spend very large sums on certain buildings and what we get for it isn't proportionally more beautiful; in fact it often looks worse.

Hopefully with AI we will make things like stonework and indoor plasterwork, hell, even indoor statues, that much cheaper, and we can start creating beautiful places to live.

Comment · 20 days ago
What does it mean for art to have a soul?

I would argue that modern art has none. Further, I would argue that art is what speaks to people.

That means that an AI generated image which makes people laugh has more soul than whatever the top selling modern artists was in 1995. By my estimation, that makes a lolcat a better piece of art than most modern art.

That is something that I actually think is true. Of course there are great artists who can show us much, much more than what is inside a lolcat. Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.

Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get. Trying to defend art by claiming magical things like it doesn't have any soul is just cope. And frankly, the more I see of that, the less I care about artists and their real problems.

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