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lodovic
Joined 730 karma
Software engineer for an energy giant

  1. I tried to sign up for Gemini this weekend but gave up after an hour. I got stuck comparing their offerings, looking for product pages, proper signup, etc. Their product offering and naming is just a mess. Cloud console. AI studio, I was completely lost at some point.
  2. I love these thought experiments. Looking at the code size, it would have been possible for someone to come up with this back in the days, similar to the idea of a million monkeys on a typewriter eventually producing Shakespeare.
  3. I always start in the Claude CLI. Once I hit the token limit, I can do two things: either use Copilot Claude to finish the job, or pick up something completely different, and let the other task wait until the token limit resets. Most importantly, I'm never blocked waiting for the cap.
  4. I actually get more mileage out of Claude using a Github Copilot subscription. The regular Claude Pro will give me an hour or up to 90 minutes max, before it reaches the cap. The Github version has a monthly limit for the Claude requests (100 "premium requests") which I find much easier to manage. I was about to switch to the max plan but this setup (both Claude pro and Github Copilot, costing 30 a month together) was just enough for my needs. With a bonus that I can try some of the other model offerings as well.
  5. So you buy a new TV, unpack and install it, and then when the whole family is gathered around, you suddenly get this confirmation on the TV if you agree with their T&C. Are you supposed to reject them and return the TV at this point? T&C should be part of the purchase agreement, instead of being forced upon the user while using the product after purchase. Any one-sided change of T&C after purchase should be invalid and punishable.
  6. Not everyone feels like that. Yesterday the app of my tv provider on my Samsung TV home screen suddenly shows a Prime icon in its place, prompting to install the app if you use muscle memory to control the TV. I am unable to remove this annoying ad. I really really hate ads and will go to great lengths to avoid seeing any in my private home. So I see this as an invasion of my privacy. Not buying Samsung anymore.
  7. I've been thinking about this as well - make a small device that in real time detects ads and turns off audio an video while it's playing. I'd rather see a blank screen than an ad. That way, the whole ad pyramid scheme stays intact while the conversion rates plummet.
  8. I'm thinking of installing the extension in a sandbox and then use a local agent to have endless fake conversations with it
  9. The use case is people that are urged to view something that is blocked (torrent / adult / gambling). They want it now, and they don't want to get involved with some shady company that slaps on a 2 year contract and keeps extending indefinitely. These people instead find "free vpn" in the web store and decide to give it a try.

    VPNs are just one example. How many chrome extensions do you have that you don't use all the time, like adblockers, cookie consent form handlers or dark mode?

  10. I think the hate for Microsoft is more based on its popularity rather than Apple being "better". Both have dubious business practices. Ads in the start menu? Apple constantly pushes iCloud and related subscriptions. Market abuse? Apple is well known to remake and then block competing apps from competitors. Stability? Everyone knows the spinning beachball of death but acts like it never happens. User unfriendly? Apple constanly modifies its hardware to hurt independent repair outlets.

    I don't have that rosy 50's Chevy picture, it's more like a luxury coupe with a tighly locked hood. Sleek, desirable, you pay through the nose for every upgrade, and don't attempt to fix it yourself.

  11. Your argument is ignoring musical geniuses such as Vivaldi, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, none of them came from Vienna or Germany.
  12. Can't you just give the information you are hinting at? Other people than OP read this. You basically tell me to go read thousands of messages on a mailing list just solve your rhetorical question. (answer: Intel, Redhat, Meta, Google, Suse, Arm and Oracle. There are much more efficient ways to find this.) Yes, they are the main kernel contributors and have been for many years. I'm still not sure I understand the comment.
  13. It looks really nice, but agreeing on the naming - it's not really an actual OS, more like a dashboard toolkit, or a set of widgets.
  14. That's just not going to happen. Senior devs will get 5-10 times as productive, wielding an army of agents comparable to junior devs. Other people will increasingly get lost in the architecture, fundamental bugs, rewrites, agent loops, and ambiguities of software design. I have never been able to take up as much work as I currently do.
  15. If you zoom out to 25 % the text is clearly visible and screenshottable.
  16. Usually they write only prompts and then accept whatever is generated, ignoring all typing and linting issues
  17. I find that hard to believe. As long as we have open weight models, people will have an alternative to these subscriptions. For $200 a month it is cheaper to buy a GPU with lots of memory or rent a private H200. No ads and no spying. At this point the subscriptions are mainly about the agent functionality and not so much the knowledge in the models themselves.
  18. I would expect a thermostat to last 15+ years across multiple home owners - it should be an improvement over a mechanical one, after all. If that's not adding to Google's bottom line, they shouldn't have "disrupted" that market in the first place.
  19. An Ableton live set file is just a gzipped xml, so I can imagine some git hook that would unzip it before committing it to git. That way you can merge different branches, but it will surely come with its own limitations.
  20. Fair enough, but it seems to be more prevalent with EVs because electric power is a given in such a car, where a diesel or gasoline car usually has fallbacks for most electric systems except the lights and the dashboard, and the alternator can keep the engine running if the battery suddenly dies.
  21. But you can replace the ECU in a gasoline powered car, or the entire engine if you want. You may have to recode some of the parts such as the headlights and the airbags. Often you can use parts from other brands. But replacing anything in an EV is a nightmare: all the parts, motor management, battery management, charging controller are tightly integrated, signed, coded to the car etc.
  22. To be fair, I started programming in the nineties, I genuinely enjoy the process, but I really enjoy agentic coding as well. It's just thinking on a higher level, and you don't need to do all the chores anymore. I still do proper software engineering with tests, layers, separation of concerns, etcetera, but I don't have to type so much anymore. And the speed is on average double compared to writing it by hand.
  23. You are pulling numbers out of thin air. First you claim 100m 18-30 year olds (the number is closer to 55m) and now you inflate gen Z numbers too (my count is less than 70M, and there is just no way that 100% of them are tiktok users). Here are some real sources https://media.market.us/gen-z-statistics/ https://www.neilsberg.com/insights/united-states-population-...
  24. I used a llm to sum your percentages and counted only 785,644,479 people. That's just over half the 1.4B claim. However, it also linked to articles that showed that as of 2025, there are approximately 1.38 to 1.56 billion active iPhone users worldwide. So the percentages may be misleading but the number is correct.
  25. This is like storing copies of all physical mail because one letter could contain a Xerox of a newspaper.
  26. Smaller teams, not smaller salaries
  27. To start with, Google is now a mandatory expense for many companies. Because 90% of users have Google as their default search engine, either through Chrome or Safari. And Google pays a lot of money for that. You can say goodbye to Google, but that also means goodbye to 90% of users.

    Second, the lack of proper competition in the ad market cannot be healthy for the cost of advertising. It's impossible to become a competitor to Google without sinking billions in costs. There is no pressure on the price so traditional publishers pay way too much for the ads. That ad may never be served, because Google renders a summary of your content next to the search results; and if a user would visit the site regardless, there is AMP - Google sells you ads and then deploys middleware to prevent you from serving them.

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