But the only time I need to use them is… what is it, ctrl-alt-F3 to switch to a console if my window manager has fallen apart. This is a very rare event, so I can’t find any strong feeling here.

What do people use these keys for? The volume/brightness keys seem much more useful. Maybe I’ll map the corresponding F-keys to brightness as well, so I can just never care about Fn.

* to the extent to which MA can do that… I mean it’s one state, so we should judge it’s accomplishments by that standard. One possibility could be that the rest of them get their act together, or at least, every state that engineers are willing to live in does.

Like they might have hired really good AI infra folks, gotten really good uptimes on their nodes, gotten folks who really know how to configure Infiniband (or whatever). But then, didn’t find the folks who knew what to run on that infrastructure. Or maybe Grok just had too much political drama around it.

Apparently for some of the simplicity-produces-speed arguments, users have found complex/featurefull. tools that are still quick. I’m not sure how to evaluate this (I like simplicity just because it is easier to fit simple tools in my head) but we should note the counter argument (and applaud the follow-up).

If you were raised on programs where most of the features were accessible at a button-click, without going through a bunch of hamburgers, modern GUIs won’t feel familiar, CLI will.

Social media is the development that they can also use that personalized feed to show media, and actually, your real friends don’t generate enough content to keep you hooked 24/7. So the site is quickly overwhelmed with professional content creators and other entities that are looking for engagement. The site might pander to them intentionally, or it might just fail to prevent them, but in any case they take over. This turns it from a sharing network to a passive consumption broadcasting one.

Hackernews was never a social networking site really, and so it never had the infrastructure to develop into a social media site. It is more like an evolution of a phpBB board, or something like 4chan (but, thankfully, with just enough moderation to keep out all the unpleasantness).

The important distinction is that the feed isn’t personalized, content is ranked based on what the community finds interesting. This seems to surface better stuff. It could just be the moderation and the type of content (tech stuff has always been easier to find on the internet than, say, politics). But there’s probably something to the fact that content has to be “better” in the sense that it can’t just appeal to a specific quirk (weakness?) of an individual viewer.

They could be trained to generate code that would phone home. But these are just tools, anybody doing the right thing and checking and understanding every line of code that they use an LLM to generate has nothing to worry about.

“You can run,” I guess maybe in the context of “You can run but you can’t hide” is not really touched upon too much. I mean it doesn’t have a particular connection to this story, any more than any other story about a fugitive.

Google really was competent in the 2005-2020 era (probably further on the left, that’s just as far as I remember).

I don’t think Microsoft has seriously disappointed anybody paying attention since 2012 or so.