A few years ago, if you wanted translation, you'd use Google Translate. If you wanted to search the web, you'd use Google search.

But for a few gigabytes, you can now install nllb-200-distilled-600M, and get translations for almost any language locally. You can have your computer crawl the web, create abstracts and categorizations for websites, and build search exactly as you want it.

The main limiter now is hard drive space (and to an extent, local compute) -- but right now it feels like the 70s again where the terminal into a remote server turned into building applications locally.

- Matz is nice -> DHH / Tobias are "not nice" -> Ruby is doomed (because of two not nice people, also perhaps because of AI)

I think if they had focused perhaps on DHH (DHH's writings have been very polarizing), and also dropped the AI bit at the end, they might have had a stronger point, but Tobias ends up being judged guilty by the author almost purely through association:

> [...] Lütke doesn’t say anything nearly as incendiary as DHH, but the actions of the company he controls tell their own story, and his posts on X, the Everything App, document his turn to the right, along with all the crypto and AI stuff you’d expect to go along with it.

The author ends with a hope that a fork of rails will happen, quoting a user on mastodon:

> [...] we're building a community to execute a bigotry-free #Rails fork [...]

Here's my issue: let's imagine the author gets exactly what they want. Rails is forked, the fork becomes more used than rails, the community is saved!

The problem is that this forked code now becomes two things: a product of software (what it was before), and a product of ideology.

When a piece of software now also represents an ideology, people that want to contribute (but are not coders) end up contributing to the ideology instead. E.g. in this case, they'll try to help define what constitutes a bigot, find potential bigots in the community to root them out, things of that nature. When the "easy" bigots are found and removed, the work does not stop -- the definition of what is a bigot changes, and new bigots are found.

To be clear, the above happens regardless of ideology -- it's just human nature (See: Levari et al., Science, 2018). For example, many people on Reddit who claimed it had gotten too left-wing/right wing tried to create their own social media platform, only to realize that targeting an ideology as their main differentiator ended up eventually only attracting the people who are so deep in that ideology that it pushed away anyone casual.

I built Writekin over the past week because I was tired of AI writing that didn't sound like me, even though I had just used AI to clean it up, rather than wholesale write it.

The usual fixes I found online for this were:

- Some sort of SKILL.md, or

- A system prompt full of rules to strip the generic AI tells (e.g. no em-dashes, none of the stock phrases, varying the sentence length, etc).

While those cleaned up the surface a bit, Pangram still came back as ~100% AI written, which was frustrating, as again it was mainly taking my sloppy copy and tweaking it.

So when building Writekin I took a different route: Writekin fine-tunes a local model on your own writing. It reads what you've already written (Apple Mail, iMessage, local documents, chat exports), curates it into a training corpus, and runs a QLoRA fine-tuning on-device via Apple's MLX. A Compose screen then drafts and rewrites in that voice.

Everything runs on your Mac. Ingestion, training, and generation are all local. The only network calls are:

(1) When you download the model weights from Hugging Face and

(2) The Sparkle update check.

Training on your own Mail/Messages only felt okay to ship if the end user could verify that, so the source is public — so you can read exactly what it does!

Quick gut check: It's v0.9 and the output is uneven. Honestly, sometimes it nails your voice, and sometimes it's just completely off. This is more a "this is possible and kind of works" than a finished product.

Would genuinely love feedback!

Source: https://github.com/scouttyg/writekin

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49088436

Points: 6

# Comments: 3

As you said, it's also really hard to get visibility: metrics are poor, and targeting seems more like a whim/suggestion than anything else (their label for context hints basically tells you they only _might_ take your guidance on who they will show your ad to).

Audiences consists of hashed emails or phone numbers -- no targeting demographics, job titles, etc.

Overall it's just not there yet -- I paused my ads today.

On the flipside, if a client enters enough venues that refuse entry to them because of something the client can fix on their end, eventually the client will probably change themselves -- "If you meet one asshole during your day" and all that.

To bring the analogy back to browsers, if a website works fine for a client, they'll have no pressure to change anything on their end -- why upgrade from Windows XP when the site looks fine in IE6? Eventually the client is forced to upgrade -- normally by their operating system. That works, but what if the operating system adds another 2 years to their end of life -- do you just hang on and hope the shim / hacks you added hold?

* From today through June 22, Fable 5 is included on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans at no extra cost.

* On June 23, we’ll remove Fable 5 from those plans. Using it after that will require usage credits. If capacity allows, we’ll extend the included window.

* After this point—when sufficient capacity allows us to do so—we aim to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans. We intend to do this as quickly as we can.

The "offer, then remove" aspect is a bit eyebrow-raising -- it feels like they are trying to get subscribers to switch to usage-based billing, which makes me wonder if we'll ever get it after that June 22nd window.

I believe people do understand the toll caring about something deeply takes -- but caring about all these things at once, many which you personally can't control, feels more like atlas syndrome or compassion fatigue by the author.

I also find the author a bit all-or-nothing in general. Losing friends because they use AI? Why does the dichotomy have to be so black and white? Can people have moral quandaries about AI while still using it, or does the moral stance always have to be absolute?

Even without collecting events, you can calculate what the abuse is worth to you, even if the math ends up being fuzzier.

At the small platform operator level (one guy running a platform, as this article), the cost can be as simple as "this pisses me off and I have weekends." They can burn forty hours bolting on JA4 fingerprinting and a disposable-email blocklist to stop an abuser whose dollar-EV to them was roughly zero. Looks irrational, and that's exactly the deterrent — abuse pricing assumes a rational counterpart, and a guy who'll overspend his own life-hours out of stubbornness is unpriceable.

At any scale larger than a small operator, you also do get real numbers -- you can't perfectly price reputation, but you can price traffic and ad conversions, operational costs, LTV of customers (and conversion funnel metrics) etc, all of which don't stay still while abuse increases.

> [...] That's why it's worth collecting events before acting: what the account is about, which IP network they use, whether they fake devices, whether there's any warmup prior to registration. Because that's what helps estimate whether your mitigation will actually work, and lets you respond in a balanced manner instead of under- or over-reacting.

Isn't this just a way to estimate exactly how much the 'abuse' is worth to the abusers?

For example -- let's say you offer $100 in free AWS credits by signing up to your platform. Expect a malicious user to eventually come to your platform, realize they can resell those $100 in credits for $50, and start using your platform for their own gain. Unless the mechanisms you add in place to reduce fraud / second sign ups / etc is greater than the value that they are receiving ($50), they will continue.

With sites where the platform is free, the math almost always makes sense for these malicious users to eventually abuse. In this case it was leveraging the email reputation of another domain at no cost to their own (along with the added value of anyone getting phished), but on other sites it's public profiles being used for backlinks / spam, etc.

- My doctor friend does not wanting me pinging them asking for free medical advice every time I get health anxiety

- My chef friend does not want me calling them every time I'm struggling with a recipe

- My author friend does not want to read the 20th draft of my book, in which I've changed perhaps 10% of the content from the last draft

In these, the cost is a tax on the relationship -- relying on someone else too much to the point where it could potentially be impacting _their_ life.

Similarly, there are enough communities out there that are not accommodating -- even if I wanted to get a human answer and/or connect with someone, the interactions themselves can be painful. Do we remember what it was like posting on Stack Overflow? Do we believe Stack Overflow was a one-off outlier?

I also believe human imagination and knowledge shouldn't be bound to the relationships you have around you. What if my social group is small, or diversity of knowledge that my social group has is small? Should I not be able to think and explore an idea because my best alternative would be to contact a professor at a university that 99% of the time will not answer me?

I do believe that many people use AI now instead of learning and connecting -- I know my own programmatic knowledge has weakened now that AI has acted as a superhuman autocorrect. But on the other hand, with the help of AI I've also learned about a ton of things that would have otherwise been unavailable to me -- and I believe has improved me on the whole.

So if I download or get sent "Book.pdf", I'll rename it to how I'll remember it -- "Book Title - Author.pdf", etc.

That being said, I don't think there's any right answer here, it's usually just a matter of time and energy. If I had to enrich every single file I download with a great title / detailed metadata / etc that I'd need to find that file later, that's all I'd do all day.

Stripe _says_ they will handle these type of payments, but more often than not, within roughly a year of implementation you'll get an email from them kicking you off their platform, no matter how vigilant you were, or even if the things you were selling were more rated R than rated X. Source: my own insider knowledge along with colleagues in the space.

For context, I built out Playboy's age verification system, and watched as it hurt conversion (nobody wants to upload an ID to an adult website, who would have thought!). Cryptographic signatures from issuing authorities (DMVs, universities, employers, etc) with selective disclosure (e.g. you don't need to upload your full ID, just the fields that matter) is how verification _has_ to work going forward -- AI can fake documents, but not private keys.

I've been working on this 6 months full time, and implemented all the W3C VC, OpenID4VCI/VP, SD-JWT specifications myself.

Would love to get people's thoughts on it!

1) Humans were never held accountable, really

Outside of a few regulated industries, the worst that happens to an engineer who pushes negligent code is that they get fired. But after that happens, what actually changes? The organizational structure of the company that allowed the employee to push bad code still exists.

2) Humans will still be held accountable

If a human (managing a fleet of AI agents, let's say) ends up deploying bad code to production, they won't be able to point to the AI agent and say "it was them that did it!" -- it will still be the human at the end of the line that is held responsible.