Neat. Depending on your use case it might make sense.
Still I wonder what they use for backup? For many use cases downtime is acceptable, but data loss is generally not. Did I miss it in the post?
OP here. There I currently have some things syncd to a cloud S3. The long term plan would be to replicate the setup at another location to take advantage of garage region/nodes, but need to wait for the money for that.
Coincidentally I implemented a TinyBasic in C recently. Based on DrDobbs journals first issue. I ported HAMURABI over to it (I only have int math and some other parts were different). It is a great weekend project. Recommend.
Entire BASIC interpreters were shipped in the very size-constrained ROMs of almost all home computers of the 80s. There was no luxury of parser generators. It's absolutely simple enough that you can write the lexer and parser yourself.
Which, for historical context, is why while Dartmouth BASIC compiled to native before execution, all the 8 bit home computer systems with ROM BASIC were contrained to be plain interpreters.
Although those with machines powerful enough to run CP/M, and having disk drives, could enjoy the access to compilers.
I built it as a plain single C file. You can find DrDobbs journal Vol 1 from 1976 with implementation ideas in the internet archive. It is a very retro approach. Just a fun side project. I am sure there are better ways to do it.
I would say being 6, standing in your bedroom and thinking "I'm going to remember this moment for the rest of my life" would fall under "particular interesting event".
No you don't. There are plenty of games you can buy and go into the wilderness and play just fine offline. Just because game developers WANT you to be online so they can get data doesn't mean you NEED to be online.
That's what confuses me about this whole topic. If you want a local app, make one. Nothing "requires" online if the features don't drive it.
We drove everything online for logistics and financial reasons. Not because the tech requires online connections for everything. it isn't changing because people don't see always-online as a big enough deterrent to change their habits.
There are currently tens of thousands of games that are unplayable due to requiring pinging to a network/patch server which long ago was deprecated.
Forsaking patch requirements, just as many games are no longer playable due to incompatibility/abandoned OS, codebase, gamebreaking bugs.
In both of these scenarios, my "lifetime license" is no longer usable through no action of my own, and breaks the lifetime license agreement.
I shouldn't need to be into IT to understand how to keep a game I bought 5 years ago playable.
The solution to this "problem" for user, as offered by the corporate investment firms in control, is to offer rolling subscriptions that "keep your license alive", for some reason. Rather than properly charge for a service at time of purchase.
TLDR: Why move the goal posts further in favor of tech/IT/Videogame Investment firms?
I think this thread is an example of a fascinating class of miscommunication I've observed on HN, but I want to say it out loud to see if I'm understanding it.
Two people meet in an HN thread, and they both dislike the status quo in a particular way (e.g. that copyright is awful, DRMed games suck, whatever). They both want to fight back against the thing that they dislike, but they do it in different ways.
One person finds alternatives to the mainstream and then advertises them and tell people: Look, here's the other way you can do it so you can avoid this terrible mess! That messaging can sometimes come across as downplaying the severity of the problem.
The second person instead wants to raise awareness of how awful the mess is, and so has to emphasize that this is a real problem.
The end result is two people that I think agree, but who appear to disagree because one wants to emphasize the severity of the problem and the other wants to emphasize potential solutions that the individual can take to address it.
Concretely, I think that's what happened here. I think everybody in this thread is pissed that single-player games would have activation and online DRM. Some people like to get around that by buying on marketplaces like GOG or playing open source games, and others want to change the policy that makes this trend possible, which means insisting that it really is a problem.
Sorry for all the meta commentary. If I got it wrong, I'd be interested to understand better!
Indeed. Most often due to divergence in definitions, scope, prior knowledge, assumptions, time frame, budget, share of burden, objective and/or incentives.
You need a launcher and internet connection in the same way as you "need" to read a 15Mb wall of text to use your iPhone. They need to bully you into it.
I think video games are actually a counter-example: people are still willing to pay for single-player video games and the business model of those doesn't actually rely on Steam working the way it does.
> many of your users will not be professional engineers. They may be salespeople, product managers, students, hobbyists, and so on.
This is not just true for authentication.
If you work in a business setting, your APIs will be used by the most random set of users. They be able to google for how to call your api in python, but not be able to do things like converting UTC to their local time zone.
Staff helps! I had this thought today taking the train here in Japan, why I feel safe compared to other countries. Every station is staffed with a real person. Most trains have at least two people in them. One driver and a second staff announcing and checking doors. The staff is clearly visible and in uniform.
I know Japans base safety level is higher than the rest of the world. But I think putting trained staff in uniform on display would improve the situation everywhere.
I don't live in Japan, but I don't remember being in a train where there wouldn't be at least two people from the staff in uniforms. Could you explain what you have in mind? Are there trains without drivers or without people checking tickets?
Uhm, my recent washing machine purchase involved actively looking for not needing an app. They did try hard though, for example by offering 3 more years of warranty when you install the app.
Either the cost or repair/replacement during those extra 3 years is really low or your data is really valuable. Adds flavor to the challenge in designing it to last just long enough to leave warranty.
Data is probably not the only advantage they get from the app. For example, you are more likely to purchase other appliances from the same vendor so that you can have them all in the same app.
> Yet, I can’t escape the fact that it’s better reading than what I write
I worry we will have a lot less good writers or artists in the future. Everyone starts bad, without the skill. The hurdle is, why should I put in effort to learn, if AI is already somewhat good.
Someone mentioned here before, we learn to judge skill before we can learn the skill itself. The drive to jump the gap is what creates the genius.
I don't think that AI being somewhat good is the main stopper, it's that we know for certain that it will improve at a giant pace, the very same prompt that triggers a mediocre book today will trigger a good book tomorrow (as an aside, I firmly believe that the word "trigger" is way more apt than "create" when talking about AI output), there is billions of dollars invested to make sure of that, and is not like we haven't seen unbelievable leaps already for art generation.
There is 2 things that are gonna help a lot, one is better classification, in that regard advances will help purge itself, just like our digestive system filters what we don't need models will do the same, e.g. scientific and factual models will have zero jokes in it's corpus, and you will know that the response you received came from such a humourless model, the second thing is just plain feedback, teachers will use AI and give it thumbs up or thumbs down and the machine will use such opinion over the opinion of most students, it will also favour the input by students with the most promise, those who win math championships and all that jazz.
They gonna focus on high value targets, that mean giving it for free to colleges and others in exchange for their cooperation, giving it for free to Hollywood plus custom solutions for their needs, in exchange again, for their cooperation, the entire internet was just a great bootstrap plan not their lifelong strategy.
> the very same prompt that triggers a mediocre book today will trigger a good book tomorrow
"Good" in which sense? That people read it and/or pay for it? But people already did, before LLMs: they read and paid for the most terrible, cliched, trite stuff. I mean, there are whole genres that are basically trash, before anyone even dreamed of AI (I'm pretty sure 90% of mainstream Hollywood script writers can be replaced by an LLM; they already feel like they were written by one anyway. This is not praise of LLMs, it's criticism of Hollywood!).
Surely, then, a "good" book is not merely something people will read or pay for. So why would AI become "good" at it, in which sense?
Reading/writing is a human activity. If you cut humans from a big part of the loop, how can the result ever be good?
This isn't the same context as writing code or building apps.
Years ago I read Luis Bunuel’s biography. When he visited Hollywood (in the 50s or maybe 60s) he made a small device out of paper which allowed him to predict the plot of the typical Hollywood movie.
It was made out of a few wheels, the outer one larger than the inner ones, all attached with a pin in the middle. He had written types and characters and events on the edges of the outer wheels.
He would ask you how the movie starts, what were the main characters, adjust the outer wheels containing these items and get the rest of the plot with very high accuracy.
Hollywood is a home of amazing masterful artists but the suits mostly bet on what has proven to work.
Haha, I didn't know that anecdote! It totally tracks with reality.
I didn't mean to say the people who work in Hollywood don't know their craft, plenty of skilled people who I'm sure would produce wonderful work (and sometimes do!) if given the chance.
I meant Hollywood as this machinery of algorithmic clones, as described perfectly by your anecdote about Buñuel.
"Why should I put in effort to learn when the world already has thousands of writers better than me?"
This problem isn't new. People don't create art based on supply and demand. I don't think there's a future where people stop making things just because computers can do it too. It may be impossible to make a living off of art, but we will keep making it. Ask artists today and many will tell you it never felt like a choice to begin with.
I typed my original comment in a despondent mood while eating. Born out of frustration with not having much time between my dayjob and family to practice/write, which gives the LLM's ability to effortlessly write prose a bitter taste.
Reflecting on it more, though, I'm not as bothered. I don't _really_ care if an LLM is "better" than me, now or in the future, because I do enjoy the process of reflecting my ideas and experiences onto page, or, word processor.
And, beyond that, the homogeneity and uniformity of the LLM output is kind of exhausting. I'm sure this is something that can be "improved" at various stages of the pipeline, but some imperfection and variety is nice too.
The lock screen clock went from "can read in a split second" to "wait what number is this?".
Luckily there was a setting for that one.