> I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented, but they really soured people on their value proposition.
I think that they took the opportunity and milked it as much as they could. They are making a lot of money, have a ton of subscriber and are very successful.
They don't care if you are happy about the service as long as enough people pay for it. And it seems to be working.
> I genuinely don't understand what docker brings to the table. I mean, I get the value prop. But it's really not that hard to set up http on vanilla Ubuntu (or God forbid, OpenBSD) and not really have issues.
For me, as an ex-ops, the value proposition is to be able to package a complex stack made of one or more db, several services and tools (ours and external), + describe the interface of these services with the system in a standard way (env vars + mounts points).
It massively simplify the onboarding experience, make updating the stack trivial, and also allow devs, ci and prod to run the same version of all the libraries and services.
That said, I'm not a nix guy, but to me, intuitively NixOS wins for this use case. It seems like you could either
A. Use declarative OS installs across deployments
B. Put your app into a container which sometimes deploys it's own kernel and then sometimes doesn't and this gets pushed to a third party cloud registry, or you can set up your own registry, and then this container runs on a random ubuntu container or cloud hosting site where you basically don't administer or do any ops you just kind of use it as an empty vessel which exists to run your Docker container.
I get that in practice, these are basically the same, and I think that's a testament to the massive infrastructure work Docker, Inc has done. But it just doesn't make any sense to me
you can actually declare containers directly in Nix. they use the same config/services/packages machinery as you'd use to declare a system config. and then you can embed them in the parent machine's config, so they all come online and talk to each other with the right endpoints and volumes and such.
or you can use the `build(Layered)Image` to declaratively build an oci image with whatever inside it. I think you can mix and match the approaches.
but yes I'm personally a big fan of Nix's solution to the "works on my machine" problem. all the reproducibility without the clunkiness of having to shell into a special dev container, particularly great for packaging custom tools or weird compilers or other finnicky things that you want to use, not serve.
The end result will be the same but I can give 3 docker commands to a new hire and they will be able to set up the stack on their MacBook or Linux or Windows system in 10 minutes.
Nix is, as far as I know, not there and we would probably need weeks of training to get the same result.
Most of the time the value of a solution is not in its technical perfection but in how many people already know it, documentation, and more important all the dumb tooling that's around it!
Citation needed. In my circles, Senior engineer are not using them a lot, or in very specific use cases. My company is blocking LLMs use apart from a few pilots (which I am part of, and while claude code is cool, its effectiveness on a 10-year old distributed codebase is pretty low).
You can't make sweeping statements like this, software engineering is a large field.
And I use claude code for my personal projects, I think it's really cool. But the code quality is still not there.
Stack overflow published recently a survey in which something like 80% of developers were using AI and the rest “wants to soon”. By now I have trouble believing a competent developer is still convinced they shouldn’t use it at all , though a few ludites perhaps might hold on for a bit longer.
Depends, in France for instance all the cards are dual "VISA/Mastercard" and "CB ". They will use CB in france and use the partner network in foreign countries.
And chatgpt is going to pull the data from an random UK website when you are in the US and vice-versa, and will augment it with knowledge from its model that come from a reddit thread from 2010 written by an italian plumber.
I saw that on the DIY Uk subreddit where people were confused because ChatGPT was answering question using american standards. It's really hard to answer questions based on regional tribal knowledge.
Apparently a good source are the tradesmens shop? THey might know their customers? Word-of-mouth?
Well no, not really. I’m replying in the context of the parent comment, that was painting a scenario where the GPT would reply with information relevant to different countries.
It doesn’t need to be advanced prompting, it’s enough to provide enough information and ask to “provide advice relevant to the current and applicable codes and regulations”
It’s the first question a forum dweller would reply to a poorly articulated post.
And how would the LLM know that a comment in english in a random forum is applicable to a specific country but not another?
UK, US, Australia all have different rules and regulations, but their websites don't exactly advertise their location. It is implied that you visit them based on your country. The UK has a weird mix of metric and imperial, so you can't even use the units to figure it out!! It's not always easy to figure it out, even for a human.
I think you're exaggerating. There are several ways an LLM can discern the applicability of certain data to a context (document metadata such as TLD, cross check with applicable authoritative codes and regulations, be wary of random forum posts.)
I'm pretty sure an LLM can provide pretty refined answers given some reasonable context. i.e. I want to rewire a socked in my apartment, which is in London, UK. What do I need to do?
> - Have a real time video conversation with an AI which can see what you see, translate between languages, read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world.
Maybe it's me having an extremely low imagination, but that stuff existed for a while in the shape of google lens and the various vision flavor of LLMs, and I must have used them.... 3 times in years, and not once did I think "Gosh I wish I could just ask a question aloud while walking in the street about this building and wait for the answer". It's either important enough that I want to see the wikipedia page straight from google maps and read the whole lot or not.
> an AI which can read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world.
I can already do that pretty well with my eyeballs, and I don't need to worry about hallucinations, privacy, bad phone signal or my bad english accent. I get that is certainly an amazing tools for people with vision impairments, but that is not the market Meta/OpenAI are aiming for and forcefully trying to shove it into.
So yes, mayyybe if I am in a foreign country I could see a use but I usually want to get _away_ from technology on vacation. So I really don't see the point, but it seems that they believe I am the target audience?
> I can already do that pretty well with my eyeballs, and I don't need to worry about hallucinations
I see. Perhaps your eyeballs missed the part where I said I'm blind?
The entire purpose of my comment was to push back against this idea that AI is stuck in 2022. It's weird and nonsensical and seems disingenuous, especially when I say "here are things I can do now that I couldn't do before" and the general response is "but I don't need to do those things!"
I think they did miss that, but to be fair you probably should have opened with that. It’s great that AI is enabling new use cases for blind/partially-sighted people! It’s encouraging to hear your perspective. At the same time, I’m sure you can imagine that the “killer app” for a blind person might seem less useful to a fully-sighted person. Imo there are still useful aspects, and you raise good examples, but the “second pair of eyes” aspect in particular is low-value for me.
I don't think they missed it. They addressed it in:
>>> I get that is certainly an amazing tools for people with vision impairments, but that is not the market Meta/OpenAI are aiming for and forcefully trying to shove it into.
That is an amazing use of the technology, and for sure something that should result in a pretty successful company - but not enough to bet the entire VC ecosystem on.
I think anyone saying AI has no use is being willfully ignorant, but like every hype cycle before it since mobile (the last big paradigm shift), IMO it's going to result in a few useful applications and not the paradigm shift promised.
Yes, you are right, I missed it at first. I read it as another message from AI evangelists that overpromise every aspects of AI.
After I finished writing the message I realized that you were blind but I was too enraged to do the right thing and scrape the message. When I came back to my senses the anti-procastination had kicked in and I couldn't edit it.
I am sorry losing my temper, and I am very happy that this tech is able to be useful to you, and I think that it is a fantastic use case.
Now I need to get off the internet, it just brings the worst in me.
Let's be calm. It is true that the technology has improved and certainly has new and improving uses. But we started out talking about business.
I think a charitable reading of this thread is simply: AI as a large technology leap is still developing a business case that can pay for all the hype. Not to mention it's operating cost.
been the impact of OpenAI and meta glasses / headsets on the blind community at large?
Based on your statements it seems that the real value of AI is increasing the participation rate of visually impaired people in the global workforce.
If Elon or Sam can convince governments and insurance companies to pay for AI-powered glasses as a healthcare necessity maybe there’s a pathway forward for AI and VC class after all.
…maybe that’s the real game plan for Marc Andreesen, Kanye, Elon and the others.
They’re not really Nazi’s just early adopters choosing the “innovative freedom” promised by Emperor Palpatine and the Sith over the slow march of the Senators of the Republic.
You describe new ways of feeding information into the model and new ways model presents outputs. Nothing radically changed in how model transforms inputs into outputs.
> Self-hosting hundreds of GBs of data isn't feasible
Why wouldn't it be feasible? Storage is cheap, backups are cheap. It's not for everyone, obviously, but for 20 EUR/month you can get a VM with a couple hundred GB of storage and 1TB of backups on a storagebox in hetzner.
Or have a raspberry pi with a 1TB SSD in your home, or both!
I use a laptop, desktop PC, phone, and 2 tablets at home. Another PC and laptop and tablet when I visit my parents.
Not all of them are mine, and it is _very_ annoying to have to login to a website on them. You have to go through the unlock flow on your own device (long and complicated password) to access the password, and then copy the site-specific password (usually long and complicated) to the new device.
It is a giant pain. I can understand why people wouldn't want to go through it.
As far as I can tell, there are SaaS ones, broken ones, no longer maintained ones, and the ones that don't work on multiple platforms. There's not one password manager I've heard of that didn't exhibit one or more of the above "features".
"Perfect is the enemy of good", but the effort around making informed choice makes not using password managers seem better.
I use proton pass (SAAS). I just figure I should be paying for core internet services like email, storage, passwords, calendars, etc. so that ideally my interests are aligned with my provider. I use the services on windows, android and linux regularly. So I can confirm that proton pass, email and vpn all work on those three operating systems. I cannot imagine they wouldn't work on MacOS.
Yes, you pay, but I see that as acceptable and expected for the service offered.
Where did you get that from? You are talking about millions of people scattered over hundreds of political entities over hundreds of years.
There might have been some commonalities, but certainly not anything like this rule.
The feudal laws of mostly Western Europe. Eastern serfdom has been much worse and much closer to slavery, however the serfs still had their house and share from the crops. The eastern European feudal lords, dukes, kings or emperors never had access to this much share of the wealth like ordinary billionaires today do.
I think that they took the opportunity and milked it as much as they could. They are making a lot of money, have a ton of subscriber and are very successful.
They don't care if you are happy about the service as long as enough people pay for it. And it seems to be working.