jimkoen

> In my opinion this project is the best effort so far to have a full Office365 open-source alternative.

Then the effort sucks.

From my perspective as a German, this almost looks like a scam. It's a bunch of OSS software rebundled as a package by a company which would like to make money off of support for the software. Which inherently sounds great, except that their only original contribution to the software package is a mid tier project management app.

The vibe I've been getting so far, is that they're trying to resell OSS software and accompanied support, except the underlying software already has great community and commercial support (Nextcloud and Collabora for example) and to make up for that, they're getting the german government to slap a "Made in Germany" label onto the package.

This is why the GDPR is so nice. A company needs a strategy in place to make sure your data is actually deleted and that strategy needs to be verified to work. Purging backups of records to be deleted upon reimport is fine, but you better make sure that process works, else the person who's data you accidentally didn't delete has a case against you in court.

> Oh yeah the horror of not being able to go behind your boss's back in a company email.

The horror of finding out that my employer lies to me and invades my basic human right to privacy, because they know they can only get what they want from me by manipulating me.

> The tragedy of being ignored when bringing up office equipment in a discussion about saving costs in a tech platform.

The tragedy of pointing out, that apparently only some deverse clean water, while others don't, and having it fall on deaf ears.

> The inhumanity of having workers hired to make food and do dishes on a Friday.

The inhumanity of devaluing people based on their misfortune in life, that didn't enable them to jump into a well paying tech job.

> The absolute gall to be asked a question about the identity you are proud and obnoxiously open about.

The absolute gall of my employer to berate me about my pride, my _identity_ they find so obnoxious, only to take advantage of it once it serves their purpose.

The water purifier thing was CARTOONISHLY evil, like you took it from the fucking Fallout Universe!!!!

> What's the innovation here? > Having a distribution to pick from?

As I understand it, it's exactly this. Specifically, representing neurons in a neural network via a probability distribution of logic gates and then collapsing the distribution into the optimal logic gate for a given neuron via hyper-parameter tuning in the form of gradient descent. The author has a few more details in their thesis:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00616

Specifically it's the training approach that's patented. I'm glad to see that people are trying to improve on his method, so the patent will likely become irrelevant in the future as better methods emerge.

The author also published an approach on applying their idea onto convolutional kernels in CNN's:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04732

In the paper they promise to update their difflogic library with the resulting code, but apparently they seem to have conveniently forgotten to do this.

I also think their patent is too broad, but I guess it speaks for the entire ML community that we haven't seen more patents in this area. I could also imagine that, given that the approach promises some very impressive performance improvements, they're somewhat afraid that this will be used for embedded military applications.

To ruin it for everyone: They're also patented :) https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023143707A1/en?inventor...

To ruin this for everyone: The underlying optimization that enables these to run as computationally efficient as they do, is patented:

https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023143707A1/en?inventor...

This is ridiculous, it's subjective, and it's really punitive in a political way. The NSDAP has made huge gains in Germany, the people voted for that, how dare the intelligence service say oh, this is far right. It's the same as if they had said, it was far left. The government has no business in deciding which party can field candidates. That's the voters to choose.

> It's coding model no longer just generating code but managing an entire code base by themselves.

What model is the author talking about? I would pay for that. Is Claude really THIS good, that it could manage the codebase of say, PostgreSQL?

I've been ID'ed as a teenager when I was trying to buy Skyrim, which at the time was rated for audiences older than me. Gamestop and electronic retailers also generally didn't have teenage employees.

Maybe it's just because they're anticipating fallout from an escalation over Taiwan? Large US tech companies would be crippled because they'd suddenly loose access to top chips and manufacturing capacity over night.

That's actually a moderately decent pitch for an episode.

How are they attempting to gain power in the constitutional court?

> Can't wait to see what this boneheaded President's tarrif on TSMC does to this situation.

Can you please provide a source? Genuinely curious as this would be fatal to the US economy. Imagine working 2 years to get out from Covid chip shortages only to hammer progress down with tariffs.

I'd be delighted to see PG behind a paywall so I would never have to consume his content again, but I have the feeling the man is too affluent to ever need the side hustle.

> will negatively impact their sales BECAUSE TRANSACTIONS WILL MORE AND MORE COME IN VIA BOTS.

If you assume that every good or service can be infinitely commoditized, then yes, perhaps this will hurt businesses that use this kind of technology.

Realistically though this just isn't the case and there are a lot of products, commodities and services that are unique in their own right and dont't have that kind of competition. So your Visa and Mastercard example is completely moot.

For example, you wouldn't really tell this agent to get you "the best rated shooter game on steam" because that's just not how purchasing decisions in gaming are made.

And on that point, from reading their announcement this sounds more like what critics of AI have been talking about, are you seriously going to automate something that gives you _pleasure_? Like selecting a game that you want to play? Wtf? Because in the scenario youre describing, thats exactly whats happening.

It's en-enshittification. And once OpenAI gains the lead in AI development and starts rent seeking, it's going to be

enenenshittification.

I still don't get your point. When buying a product with a lot of competition, how is Operator different than a price comparison or review site?

I can see it driving purchasing decisions, but I can't see it killing off the actual shop sites? Because the shop is getting a _comission_ on the sale.

I'm getting an ever growing vibe off HN that for a website where a ton of people work on tech, or even in e-commerce serving content to people, they seem to have an awful understanding of consumer behavior.

> captcha-enabled manual-labor-required

Maybe check what Turnstile is/does before commenting? Cloudflare only needs you to solve captchas periodically and then they use your browser fingerprint to classify you as a human accessing a site.

Towards the rest of your comment:

I don't understand how this is a bad thing?

As far as I know, TripAdvisor gets a commission on all sales, so do most e-commerce providers as that's how e-commerce works?

I don't understand your argument.

Isn't this exactly what Cloudflare Turnstile was build to prevent?

I can't imagine companies will continue to just give up data to OpenAI. And I mean, most large companies with valuable data have begun selling it to OpenAI. Nobody is giving away anything for free at this point.

And besides, from what I've heard about it on here and elsewhere, Google has already made AdSense an unsustainable income source for websites, with all their requirements for suitable ad placement.

I've tried looking up the source code, but this seems to be the CEO of a security company blogging about their closed source side project.

What an amusing coincidence, I didn't know Lamport wrote LaTeX, rather I knew of him only in connection with Lamport clocks.

> The more logic happens near the db, the more surface for errors and edge cases can be reduced and reliability issues avoided. The reduction in distances may also result in improved abstractions and in making the computations efficient in a fundamental thermodynamic way.

Fundamentally this sounds great, but isn't this rather painful with Postgres?

In my DB lectures in Uni I've been informally told to avoid managing logic from within Postgres, as the development and debugging experience for stored procedures is rather poor. I would add to this the painfully slow development cycles for third party language implementations such as plv8. In addition, platform support is next to none, because language extensions cannot load external code due to the trusted nature of the execution environment.

If ChatGPT takes over SWE's jobs, will Google just administer IQ tests to determine applicant suitability?

Thank you! What you are saying resonates with me and I really want to believe it. Though I wish I could find such a good argument to ward off the incoming people that cite publications that proves this wrong.

> The other kinds of automation are more questionable. Developing E2E CI/CD automation for an internal tool that is redeployed once every quarter might be a more difficult sell to management. For these cases, even if the rate of manual process invocation is somewhat high (i.e. frustrating for some employees), the customer can't see it. They won't pay one additional cent for this.

I've generally had the experience that it's the exact opposite. Best practices dictate that all processes should be automated to the limit.

> wanted to "automate everything".

With all due respect, this is preached by pretty much every book you read on cloud administration. I'd argue that if the process is decent enough, it'll work with major cloud providers, because their API's are rich enough to enable this already.

The thing with most automation tools though is, a) they're abysmal for most of the workflows preached (thinking of ansible and im shuddering) and b) to reach the degree of automation described in most literature, you need the API's of $MAJOR_CLOUD_PROVIDER.

Serious question, when would you want to use synchronization primitives in the frontend? I've seen the discussion revolve around service worker / web worker usage, but I think sharing ressources between a worker and the main thread has been discussed in the past and has ultimately been abandoned for security reasons.

> Everyone will be in it if they have access to the LLM wizard.

You're arguing that everyone might be good at sports if they had a personal trainer. How is this not a good thing? If you take these models only by the base value they provide, you might be able to eliminate private tutoring from the equation and make performance of students more comparable.

I am far from happy that these models originate from shady for-profit corporations with dubious incentives, but a state actor could just as well train a model for support in education.

> Your response is to rely on opaque knowledge agents produced by the largest and shadiest corporations that humanity has ever known.

This is ironic. My teachers organized a big week about the importance of the personal carbon footprint when I was still in high school (~2015). The personal carbon footprint is criticized for shifting blame for climate change to personal consumer behavior, rather than corporations and was subject of a big advertising campaign from BP [0].

I think you overestimate the average teacher in terms of their ability to think critically and overall skill in their respective subjects.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint#Shifting_resp...

My takeaway from this is maybe somewhat different from what the authors intended:

> The last one? Our friend, cassandra-messages. [...] To start with, it’s a big cluster. With trillions of messages and nearly 200 nodes, any migration was going to be an involved effort.

To me, that's a surprisingly small amount of nodes for message storage, given the size of discord. I had honestly expected a much more intricate architecture, engineered towards quick scalability, involving a lot more moving parts. I'm sure the complexity is higher than stated in the article, but it makes me wonder, given that I've been partially responsible for more than 200 physical nodes that did less, how much of modern cloud architecture is over engineered.

Most merchants in the EU are not interested in partaking in a dispute arbitration process. You will find such disclaimers in the TOS of many european webshops, as the EU has laws in place that would permit arbitration.

If there is a dispute, it will typically end up in court.