I’m literally fed up with half-minded techbros throwing around such overhyped writings. They’re absolutely detached from reality and talk about something that doesn't pass any fact checks.
After reading this writing, I was really curious "are we really got a breakthrough" so I subscribed to a Claude to personally check the state of the matter. As my personal test, I'm using a task that must be relatively simple for an experienced programmer: write an SSH agent that manages keys. The protocol is very simple, and the agents exist for decades now. I already tested that a year ago with Claude, and I was curious how it would do this time.
I installed up the Claude Code CLI tool, created CLAUDE.md with instructions that sounded like "this project is to build a fully functional SSH agent application that listens on a UNIX socket and implements the SSH agent protocol according to RFC specification <link> and all functionality must be covered with tests, create a plan, track progress, etc. The ultimate goal is to have a fully functional application with all SSH agent features." There were more details, of course, but you got it.
Opus 4.6 model worked autonomously for 30 minutes or so. During the process, it had been producing non-compilable code, which it had to fix. Then it stopped at a half-baked project that wasn't working as an SSH agent even closely and had zero tests pretending the job was done.
The truly intelligent technology should finish the project. Why did it stop? How is it intelligent if it makes mistakes that it needs to fix? Why can’t it finish the project while it understands a goal? How much must I push it to finish a project? How someone can claim that "this" is going to replace us?
I can't buy someone's claims that “we are one step before replacing everyone’s jobs" when the facts are saying that nothing has changed for the last year and LLMs are literally not capable of finishing things or concentrating on small important details. They always miss something important. What are we talking about here? Snake oil. This is not intelligence; the technology is a world's blurred snapshot compressed into a couple of gigabytes blob and acts as a dumb parrot.
Why this site has such abnormally slow scrolling in Safari, but is smooth in Chrome? There's nothing special about this site. It's like going back in time when the internet was optimized only for a single browser. It's kind of like "I'm a Chrome dev and I don't care about other browsers"?
It’s no longer funny to see how developers again and again are trying to fix problems of real world by creating digital hideouts because this is the only thing developers do the best - programming. Whenever we see a problem with banks, governments, corporations, we immediately try to fix the problem with “own digital alternative”. But hiding from the real problem in a new network doesn’t fix remaining initial problem for the rest of the world. Complex socio-economic problems shall be fixed with socio-economical instruments. No new network could solve problems of monopolies and profit-greedy corporations.
It's a technical solution to a technical problem, that problem being the client-server architecture which inherently centralizes control and disempowers users.
The Internet started out peer-to-peer, but client-server became dominant during the 90s when the Internet became mainstream - because at the time it was the only option for building services that scaled.
Freenet provides an alternative to the client-server architecture that doesn't require compromising on user experience or scalability.
> Complex socio-economic problems shall be fixed with socio-economical instruments.
Missing the forest for the trees.
The socio-economic problems are caused by the limitations & drawbacks of modern tech: It's too easy to centralize control over a platform, whilst keeping things decentralized requires an upfront desire to do so, along with the nightmare that is backwards compatibility.
> No new network could solve problems of monopolies and profit-greedy corporations.
It is a solvable problem. Monopolies & rent-seeking behaviors happen because the tech involved has chokepoints that favor centralized entities.
We know the business processes that should happen for running service X, based on our daily interactions with them and the idealized form of how they should work. Breaking the processes down into components & putting them onto a decentralized compute platform would significantly relax their control over common chokepoints. Dispute processes would be made as public as current government processes, ideally Estonian-like.
Society and governance are gradually getting transformed and integrated into a global communication network run by software and hardware. The Earth is becoming a giant computer within which we live.
It's too early to declare that complex socio-economic problems cannot be solved by a new network/infrastructure/etc. Software is one of the "socio-economical instruments" and we shouldn't dismiss its potential for social transformation beyond the control of banks, governments, corporations.
I was searching something for a web page preservation and also considered Safari web-archives, but decided this is a “no go” for me because of private format which is basically a vendor lock. Thus I ended up with a Chrome extension named SingleFile which does a pretty decent job by saving the whole page (or its part) as a single self sufficient html file viewable by any browser. Also html files are easily indexed by Spotlight or other search engines. The extension has no command line though but personally I don’t need that.
The author considered the proprietary nature of the webarchive format, and determined that it was readable without Apple software, and that it wouldn't be too difficult to create a tool to view or transform webarchive files if Safari were to disappear: https://alexwlchan.net/til/2024/whats-inside-safari-webarchi...
Of course, without a working implementation, there could be hidden obstacles.
I tend to use those VE, virtual environment to make distinguish between containers, VMs and lightweight full OS based containers, since the days of using OpenVZ - may be i'll like that naming too.
Ironically by killing Google you highly likely will put Mozilla into a surviving. I doubt they will figure out how to deliver any new “big” features without being able paying their talented devs without a such funding.
It doesn't "fund" it - it buys its position as the default search engine in Firefox, which makes up the bulk of Mozilla's income. In this theoretical world where Google actually goes away, presumably some other company would want to pay for that position.
> It’s also fast and efficient to type on the keyboard. Plus it feels very natural.
If you are solely an English writer then yes. Using md with some languages will quickly turn you into its hater. Certain formatting symbols aren’t easily accessible in some layouts, like backticks for code or ^ for superscript. Some symbols require extra keystrokes like ~ in german. Some layouts will require finger yoga exercises. Basically, any other text markups based on English (including LaTeX) are unfriendly to other languages. Thus an abnormal popularity of md across the apps makes them much less friendly for non-English users. Mobile typing pushes this pain to another level.
Yeah. My native language has some very awkward placements of certain symbols as well actually. But I chose to sacrifice the letters æ, ø, å years ago by switching to using US-based layouts on my computers. Sometimes I use Dvorak layouts (even have a custom one I made for my mechanical keyboard that I sometimes use). Most of the time I write on a computer in recent years has been using the keyboard on my MacBook Pro computers with just US QWERTY. I very rarely type anything in my native tongue on the computers. Mainly just on the phone. And I am 97% sure that the times I need æ ø å on my macOS laptops I can long-press or option click some of the related characters like a and o.
For a while, when I originally switched away from my native language QWERTY variant, I would sometimes need æ ø å on the computer and I would Google aelig oslash and aring respectively and find the symbols for those letters that way :p
