If this was really the truth, the brand names wouldn't matter. But instead the brand ends up as the sole desirable target in the corporate sales.

I think the more likely answer is that being an expert judge on a product's quality is just very hard.

More so when you have to buy it before you can use it.

So people tend to trust brands they've had good experiences with, or heard others having good experiences with.

The greed here is in leveraging that trust to sell a shitty updated version of the product.

But my experience with startups is that the odds are great they're ALL going to be abandonware in a couple years.

Ex - 50% of every company started is out of business in 5 years.

But they should be rotating those regardless. You don't get to say "Maybe the attacker didn't get this credential". You just rotate.

The most generous interpretation is that they have not yet have completed that rotation, and they didn't want to risk putting those credentials into the wild during that process.

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But all of that aside, I feel like the undercurrent of this comment is that the "safety" rules that providers are pushing are genuinely harmful.

Another point where "if you don't own the model, you can't properly operate the tool" becomes true. Open isn't about profits, it's about capabilities.

Hard to take this as that big a deal when Google literally launched a product along similar social themes named "Google Buzz" which lasted all of like 16 months in 2010, well before agents and llms.

Either the project will find a fit, or it won't - and code quality doesn't have all that much to do with it existing in 2 years (some - but not as much as engineers want to believe).

Because... I have use-cases where this is true, and use-cases where this falls flat on its face.

I don't actually think it's obvious (at all, really) without defining what "superior" means.

In the same way that I don't think it's obvious that a plane is superior to a car, or a boat, or a bike.

They each do things the others don't, and excel in different spaces.

And the non-xwayland numbers are all within a single ms of each other.

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Not to undermine the measurements of the author (agree with you, it's a cool effort), but my read is that this was basically proof that it doesn't matter.

I'd argue that most folks get plenty of value from the content itself, entirely separate from the intent, context, or even existence of the author.

I don't care about the motivations of the director to enjoy an action movie. I don't care about the life history of the author to enjoy a good fiction.

I think there is (and should be) space for content where people care, but I'd suggest it's the fringes (ex - majority of music is production grade pop, not meaningful songs, majority of books sales are erotic fiction, etc).

In the same way that I don't need the lumber in my house "hand sawed" for it to achieve my goal of creating a habitable space.

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But more broadly, I do think there's space to at least question the use and role of AI.

Because while content can (and should) be addressed directly, there's a valid meta-conversation about the intent of producing content, and the results producing that content might have.

What goal does producing this content achieve?

What is the role of this content in society?

Is this content, on this scale, an appropriate thing to be making?

These are MUCH harder questions - often because we've shifted from concrete (content) to abstract (value judgements).

To go back to my housing analogy: We're no longer evaluating the benefits of hand-sawed vs power sawed timber. We're discussing whether our housing is built in the right spots, if we're building enough of it, and are we allocating it in the right ways.

AI is a machine that generates content that is supposed to be statistically identical to the content that it was trained on, and it's trained on the content posted here.

The content here will look like AI generated content, and the AI generated content will look like the content here. By fucking definition.

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Instead we get a bunch of pseudo-intellectual, hokey about how "my AI radar is perfect!" and "I can always spot it because of [insert bullshit about detecting style that's semantically the same as the pre-existing stuff]".

It's just... exhausting.

Yes - there is a lot of AI content on here. Just like there were a bunch of (and still are) under whelming marketing articles on here. Just like there's STILL a bunch of interesting and engaging articles (some of them even written by AI!).

Just vote based on the content and move on with your lives.

People out here wasting time and energy on trying to burn witches. If you want a "sure-fire" AI free experience... Go talk to a real person, in person. Otherwise...

I just don't think this is true.

Frankly - it's hard to argue this at all (even today) given that JS is the dominate language on the planet, and it lacks types... as does python, which had a reputation for decades as THE language to use to teach new folks to code. Or take PHP which dominated server development for a LOOONG time: also lacks types. Ruby on Rails has a wonderful reputation as the "get shit done" framework: no types.

Types are good for modern software companies, where code size has ballooned up very high (common to work on a codebase with hundreds of thousands of lines) or teams are large (50+ developers) and terrible if you just want to hammer out something that works as a solo dev.

Do I like types today? Sure - the tooling is solid, and I work on large codebases with large teams.

Did I like types as a solo dev at 3 person startup? no.

Personally - I also think people really underestimate just how much the tooling around types has improved over the last 20 years.

If I'm having to try to look up the difference between iBrowserInterface6 and iBrowserInterface5 and iBrowserInterface4... (and yes - shit like this really did exist: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/shdeprec...)

And I have no tooling for autocomplete, and the docs are shoddy, and google is just coming on the scene...

People understandable want to throw their computer out the window.

Types are great. Some forms of them were not.

Lets say this catches on (in some form or another, whether in this precise implementation or not).

So assume we have a world where resources can be gated by a payment wall that agents can interact with.

I'm also assuming that world continues to have agents that are majority hosted and run by 3rd parties (ex - google/anthropic/openai/xai/etc).

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At what point can I sue these companies for obviously failing to act in my interests?

Because that's the clear next step here.

Basically - where is the fiduciary duty that I would require for a real working relationship?

Because otherwise these agents can and will prefer to access payment gated resources that have financial relationships with their operators or developers.

Because "load samples, arrange them, and instruct it to do a thing" are basically the required steps.

Arguably, if you don't care much about the result, you can skip loading samples.

> You still have to... write the music.

When? When you load up other folk's samples? When you press a play button? When you arrange other folk's samples?

It's a recording device that plays samples. It doesn't give a flying flip about who wrote them.

You might choose to write samples, lots of people using them don't.

If I happen to like it, I hit thumbs up/like. Otherwise I ignore it.

I sometimes go through and browse musicians, mainly to see if they have other songs I might like, but generally speaking... it's not high on my list of priorities. Then again, I don't give a shit about the "pop" aspect of music at all. It's mainly background noise I put on while doing something else.

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As an aside:

> I also think it’s an entirely false equivalence to say using electronic instruments are like AI music tools. Very different things – an electric guitar doesn’t play music by itself. It’s still a tool at the end of the day.

I think this is where it gets weird, and I think you're pretty solidly incorrect here. Samplers and grooveboxes absolutely play music by themselves. I think there's also a weird world where things like "Girl Talk" are somewhat spiritual successors to AI music...

Ex - I definitely love girl talk, and I'm not in any way implying that those albums don't take skill and taste, but he's literally just playing samples of other artists. If that's real music (and I'd argue strongly that it IS real music) then I think I struggle to rule out AI generated songs that are edited by someone (and if you've used this tooling, it still requires lots of editing).

Anthropic won't even let you run "claude -p [prompt]" any more... They bill it at api rates.

So if you're trying to automate the ai (and seriously, that's the point) the subsidized plans are crippled.

But it just can't touch swiping for speed. Frankly, the keyboard I miss most is the T9 predictive text from my old school pre smart phone era.

Nothing has come close to the same expressiveness and speed while being usable completely blind, only by feel.

I do feel like mobile keyboards have stagnated in a bad spot, though.

Ex - People change hair color, lose a boat load of weight, wear eye-color changing contacts, drastically change hair styles (facial and normal) etc...

No one bats an eye at an ID that "only sorta vaguely resembles you" outside of a very limited subset of places (the only one I can actually think of is Customs while traveling).

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So my take is that as long as the gender appears similar and the ethnicity seems "close enough"... the store is still going to sell you alcohol, the bar is going to let you in, and the movie theater is going to sell you tickets.

Personally - this is less acceptable to me than just having the site collect my image/id.

I'd support just putting the id in a dedicated device (ex - gov issues smart key) or just accepting that sometimes people will share id info (just like... physical ids).

It doesn't even close all the doors to transferring ids - since I can still just hand someone a phone (just like... physical ids).