Sloppy's comments

I have owned two high end OLED TVs both got horrible burn-in within a year. I'll never get another. This will only be worse on a computer screen with permanent areas like menu bars and docks to ruin the OLEDs. I've heard all the "we have fixed this..." and most of these are demonstrably marketers spouting, well dare I say, lies.

You need Google Translate to read it. <--- read with a high degree of irony.

On my deathbed; "I wish I'd spent more time ranting about crappy software made by monopoly companies that just don't give a ... ack ... gasp xxxxxxxx"

Far to little effort and attention has been devoted to creating beautiful text online. The web set text back centuries. In some ways it was never this bad except for the monospaced typewriters. This is welcome indeed.

Now maybe AI will buy their products?

"Apps" suck. Use a web ui and tell Apple and Google to shove it. If anti-trust and/or our consumer protestors in various US legislatures won't fix the app stores by breaking them up, the app devs can just drop making apps. I've done many apps and would estimate that 90% have no real need for the API toolkits that Apple and Google give you, they can just as easily be done as "web apps" -- if, that is, everyone dropped the apps and used web apis so cooperation of apps would be based on them, not the toolkits. Exceptions do apply but they are in the minority IMHO.

Wait a minute, is this a metaphor for our relationship with high tech? I want to breakup with my Pixel 6 because its camera lacks megapixels...

Today I drifted in AI generated dread feeling that half of what I read (including this article) was AI generated -- maybe more since it included AI generated music. Was it due to my recent return from some number of days in the Oregon outback off the grid with no interweb pipes? I knew it was too short a time. I feel a great panicky need to run from an impending Matrix moment.

Haha, followed the link in Firefox but it was blocked because of my ad-blocker.

Who has the time to track all the stuff Google collects about you? At least spread out the tracking by NOT using every Google app. They've become the single largest surveillance organization in history, dwarfing even China's government.

Besides Firefox and Duckduckgo work so well I don't notice the difference.

Next, dropping Gmail...

The consensus seems to be: - Cmd-v should paste to match formatting everywhere. No one wants that formatting or if they do they are in a tiny minority that can be served with some new shortcut. - there are several more or less cheesy ways to fix this in more or less places

So Apple, retire it with the silly touch bar, push really hard click, and the lightning connector. Maybe these devs would be happer making touch text editing more than awful.

The article is a load of confused rubbish. I couldn't find anything remotely insightful or even coherent in it.

Very nice ideas, please please please someone pick this up!

Doing anything on a mobile device is far more painful than people assume. A generation of people are now unfamiliar with using a PC and although it has its problems, the use cases are far easier.

Are these really solved cases?

- multiple tabs in a browser. Why not put tabs/shortcuts on the desktop (errr mobile top?)

- apps in general, why do they exist at all? Most are just slightly better web pages--ok I know it's just to give Apple&Google gatekeeper status and create a way to get paid for the app. but at a cost to users that is more and more annoying. Why have a mobile aware NYTimes.com AND an app? Ditch the apps where not really needed and do a decent one-page web app instead. No need to update, no special gatekeeper for install. If the first issue was solved, it would make mobile devices easier. I have no sympathy for the Mush burdened x-twitter but if they have a gripe with Apple do a decent web page and no gatekeeper is involved.

- &^&%$#$$% passwords. Partly because of apps in general, all your passwords are hidden from your password manager, which is of dubious value on a mobile to begin with. Typing in that auto-generated password created by a password manager is HELL on a mobile device, text being hell as this article points out.

Thanks.

Why are paywalled posts left or even allowed on HN? I'm sure there are other sources of this exact content. I have nothing against paywalling unique content, just don't expect me to buy a subscription just to blab about it here.

same as for non-logged in users, namely popular for various categories

If you are not logged in to YouTube you get generic crappy recommendations, why not this for someone without history turned on?

I use the YouTube recommender extensively and understand the issues about getting increasing crap in recs. I really have no interest in fake science crap or conspiracy theory crap! So I aggressively "do not like" videos or channels that turn up with this junk. I'm not sure I could use YouTube without the recommender and would not use it if I got constant crap. The "do not like" tells the recommender not to send that particular type of crap and though more crap will inevitably drift in, the result is a pretty useful feature.

Wow, Red Bull does give you wings!

Hype is ever-present, beware. OK.

ML was overhyped but has proven useful, OK.

But the new Generative AIs are fundamentally different. They are trained without any notion of a ground truth. They therefore have no concept of reality. They only know what is real-ish. They are psychotic. Temper the hype with the caveat--"but what it produces is often untruthful or unreal" and the hype is instantly clear.

This essay fails to account for why GAI is so different. This problem can only be solved with new methods for training that have as yet not been invented. Older style ML is based on using some ground truth and comes with a metric that measures how close it is to this truth. Not so of any of the new GAI, so continue to beware until researcher figure out how to measure truth--and good luck with that.

As a data scientist who has created AI applications and built many models over the last 10 years, I can say beware of ChatGPT. AI derived knowledge should be used only by those who understand its limits.

One of the simplest AIs is a recommender. We put guardrails on using its predictions inside ecommerce apps by limiting what it learns from (purchases for instance) and limiting what it is used to predict (purchases). When Facebook uses a recommender it learns from time-on-site (a value to FB but not necessarily to the user and a complex behavior that can be comprised of may non-beneficial sub-behaviors) and use it to recommend things that lead to more time-on-site. This application is dangerously devoid of guardrails as so much recent evidence has shown.

Now we have a text generating AI that has been trained from a great swath of human knowledge. That means the teachings of Gandhi as well Hitler, etc. What do you expect it to "know" as truth? Generative AI that is used to generate thoughts from this training corpus MUST have contradictory and downright evil ideas since it has no way to judge between ideas it learns from.

Generative AI in this form can be nothing but psychopathic until guardrails can be devised to limit its psychopathic responses OR the corpus it learns from can be labeled in a way to flag what is "bad", if we can even agree on what that means.

Psychopaths can be useful if they are knowledgeable but beware, you are talking to a psychopath in ChatGPT.

You really have to ask?

Don't force subscriptions! If everything I ran - occasionally - required a subscription, no matter how small, I would drop 99% of it. I have already done this for MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite. I don't need updates and certainly not their online "collaborative" features, which are pretty lame IMO.

Not sure how this works for them. A customer doesn't need services or updates but they disable their SW so, what, the user will come back to them. No, they just force us to find pay once alternatives or stop using the functionality. Because of this baffling practice I no longer consider their formats the standard.

Every new/subsequent round of funding will dilute your shares or options. If you have good management and investors, they will add "anti-dilution" shares when new funding is taken so early hires are re-incentivized. Stay on their minds via performance and make sure they know you know about "anti-dilution". If they think you are essential they will make sure you stay.

Remember that ALL early investors are diluted when new money comes in. For example the first Angel investor may opt to add more money to new investment rounds to buy anti-dilution shares. Think of your continued contributions as adding more value in return for anti-dilution shares.

That said, getting rich from options is a fool's bet. Take a good salary then save and invest it. You'll be better off and the risk is much lower. You are far too close to the situation right now to judge the likelihood of success for your startup and have no idea how many factors hidden to you will make or break that bet. FTX, Theranos, ...

The reason VCs can play this game is that they have certain advantages and they place 100 bets to one success. You can place only one in that same timeframe. Even they would not play that game.