So I started thinking. What don't I like about reddit...

- I don't like the flat subreddit structure - I think it makes duplication (which is wasteful) more common, and (unintuitively) makes things harder to find.

- I don't like the tracking, the algorithms, the ad-networks (more tracking), the constant coercion that "Reddit is better in the app" (it's not, it's just more tracked). This is actually my major complaint, I'm made to feel more like the product on reddit than just about anywhere on the net.

- I don't like the 'moderators are gods within their domain', it's easy to piss off a mod and get a ban, and no-one cares. I think there ought to be some right of appeal which goes beyond "message the same mods to appeal", it just doesn't sit right

- I don't like the expressiveness (or rather, the lack thereof) of reddit - I like the fact that it's all text, but there's a lot you can do with text that reddit ... just ... doesn't.

I added up what I don't like, and what I do like, and I thought "they blew it". They took something that was awesome and they enshittified it on the holy quest for money. And then I thought "well, what if there was something like reddit, that didn't do that ?"

I looked. I didn't find it. I decided it'd be a fun project to make it.

So, in a month or two (I'm still knocking out bugs that I'd be embarrassed to launch with) I'm going to launch https://blewit.net/ - blewit because (a) I think they did, and (b) because it's a double pun "blue it" as well as "blew it".

I've tried to fix all the things above, and then some.

- I've made upvotes/downvotes (which are and have always been "I agree with you" or the opposite) and "this is a cool post" into separate axes, with the latter being the important signal. (https://blewit.net/post/83555697458937856),

- I've made moderation always public with a reason, and a right of appeal to someone-who-isn't-the-moderator-who-you-annoyed. (https://blewit.net/post/83987003737112576)

- I've extended the ```code``` fence to allow different types of code, and enabled group-specific supported plugins to the WASM client that mean you can render (and play) music, see (and interact with) chemical structure models in 3D, or animations, or 3D models or graphs, or maps (https://blewit.net/sandbox). I intend to keep on adding these as the platform grows. Since they're plugins, you don't pay an enormous download cost, apart from when you use them.

- I made it have no tracking, no adverts, no hidden algorithms, no dark patterns at all. You get to manipulate your own feed, up/downvotes matter, and no-one is tracking you or selling your data. In fact I only ask for a username and password, not even an email address - we have no data (lol). We set a single, transitory, session-id cookie to stop you from having to log in too often. That's it.

Whether it works, well we'll see. It has to bootstrap first, which is always the hard part. I'm planning on targeting communities and getting things working well, group by group, rather than a pedestrian, mediocre universal experience. Example: the circuit-creation/simulation plugin for science.electronics.* will pretty much do anything ngSPICE will do... Online, in a forum :)

Look for a launch, in 6-8 weeks or so...

Somehow I though the nVidia cards were way out in a league of their own on that, and 84GB is a lot less than 256 (or, soon, 512).

Just working on a few more things, there’s a network configuration to run through (webserver failover, database failure and recovery, etc) and the legal sign off (the OSA has teeth, failure to comply carries criminal, not civil penalties, so I want all the docs/policies cleared by the lawyer).

If you take away the traditional ways such a service makes money out of you (advertising, selling your access patterns and data), but still want to run a service, there are still operating costs and startup investment needed to make it work.

So funds have to come from somewhere to pay hosting fees, bandwidth, caching services, legal fees, etc. etc. Getting people to pay for access is one such way. "If you dont' have to pay for the service, you are the product" has the corollary "If you don't want to be the product, you have to pay for the service".

I'm about 4 weeks to 6 weeks away from launching 'https://blewit.net/' along similar principles - no ads, no tracking, no algorithms, no dark patterns. We're going for a Patreon-style funding model, hoping that sufficient people will be incentivised to support an open and transparent foum that doesn't track you.

It's based on reddit, but since I think reddit blew it (the name is a double-pun: blue and blew it), there are some differences - it is primarily text-based but allows other fences (the ```...``` construct) than just code. You can notate music, or see chemical structure, or write maths - real maths, or plot graphs, or ... there's quite a few things you can pull in.

The inspiration, the ideas, the workflow, the vision, the end product - all mine. The grunt work that takes all the time - hand it off to the LLM, and make sure it bloody works at the end.

With that approach, I built a compiler for my own language - it runs on {Mac, Linux, Windows} and any of those can produce code for {Mac, Linux, Windows, WASM, iOS, Android, Zynq, m68k, 6502} - the last 3 being more useful to me than most people I expect. I have a signed binary running on my phone, which was developed on a Linux box and never saw anything from an Apple Xcode installation...

That compiler was how I (and Claude) wrote a WASM client to a server back end, all of which use the exact same classes and data formats, making integration trivial.

I'm working on a cross-platform UI framework now, with a Cocoa-like UI description, that you drag lines between your code and the various UI platforms you want to support {Desktop, tablet, phone}, with mobile variants offering portrait and landscape. Write your actual program logic once, and visually connect UI into it, on a target-by-target basis. Support any platform with one codebase.

I wouldn't have considered taking on a program of this complexity without the LLM. It'd just have been a pipe-dream. They're tools. Wonderful tools, but still tools.

Seems like gritty, dystopia-like films are something of a luxury, only to be afforded when daily life itself isn't too close to the harsh realities being put on film.

The main difference is now that it's pretty stupid to go online with a new service without running everything through a lawyer, given the OSA has teeth - criminal penalties to people with say in the company.

If I were to print out my OSA docs, they'd come to 168 pages. That's just my take on the regs, my remedies, my policies, and a study of any weaknesses in the coverage of the harms defined by the OSA.

Then, because kids under 18 can access the site, there's the children-specific definitions of the same - except these cover more child-focussed areas like harassment, brigading, encitement to suicide etc. That's another 123 pages.

For a single-operator site like I intend to be, that's a damn lot of paperwork, before I've ever even launched the site. Understandably so, the solicitor is keen to charge quite a bit of money to make sure that volume of content is above-board and legal.

So things got expensive before they ever even get going.

And it's kind of annoying to see the kids say it doesn't matter anyway [sigh] - as if I thought it ever would.

Besides, I imagine they move it, then they say they’ll move it.

It's still frustrating as hell to come down in the morning, having given it a list of tasks to do overnight, with tests to pass before they're "done" and find that it worked for about 20 minutes after I went to bed, and decided that it would stop at "3am" (it wasn't) and "not do significant work this at this late hour". Like WTF ? You're an LLM. You don't sleep.

Bloody training data full of humans demanding sleep. I tells ya...

- Education is not "elite", it's open to all.

- Informed is not "educated".

Forcing political speech to be truthful (or at least have a reasonable expectation of being truthful) with serious consequences (jail time) for knowingly lying would go a long way to counter the misinformation that caused Brexit.

Perhaps that they're wonderfully trusting people who believe whatever politicians that Gary down the pub thinks are the best ?

The “prime directive” of the site is “do not track”. Historically that’s been irrelevant to the internet at large, but I think there is a growing feeling of disquiet over just how spied-on, measured, packaged, and sold we all are. If that undercurrent grows, the world might be a different place in a year or two.

Cheers