throwaway13337
The closest thing right now is Orion. It does the vertical tabs and the page modification in the same way. Webkit based.
It's made by the Kagi guys who I really agree with - bootstrapped and not VC backed. A sustainable business. And charging for a service instead of making your customers the product. That's real ethics to me.
Their browser is not open source, though, which is a major blow. But it would seem most browsers are not truly now, if you look into it.
The reason I switched was because it is the only browser that, on iOS, allows chrome/firefox plugins. I'm not even sure how they're doing this as I thought banning non-crippled plugins was part of the 'device is not mine' policy from Apple. But it's there. All my plugins. Including the ones I made myself.
I realize this sounds like an Ad. Not affiliated. I just think they're doing good stuff.
Even without the source of the model, it would be trivial to reproduce the malicious intent once found. You have the weights - you can find the prompt to produce the bad behavior. So where is that proof?
I'm much more concerned with both the private data I send and tokens executed on my computer doing god knows what from cloud hosted providers. Especially those that don't even show the reasoning traces. So the model's true intent can be hidden even while it's openly thinking of acting against you.
This is scare mongering that implicitly suggests something much less secure.
This is a market for lemons.
As a market's trust lowers, buyers are less willing to pay a reasonable price for a square deal because of the probability being higher that it isn't. This, paradoxically, lowers the value of legitimate products from legitimate sellers because there's no way to differentiate. The risk adjusted value of the product lowers. Legitimate sellers leave. Things spiral. Everyone loses.
Trust is the real rare commodity.
The PE firm creates market demand for the goods/services that the purchased company used to provide at a better value to the customer.
So yes, the 'creation' is a demand which is sort of a destruction of the value that the customers previously had. In a fair market, this demand can be met. But a PE buys strategically such that this demand is not possible to satisfy because the company they purchased is entrenched in some way (regulation/monopoly).
Maybe a term like 'natural markets' captures it better? The property being that natural markets/monopolies provide some sort of substrate on which a market can exist.
Good regulations seem to be ones that force open protocol and interoperability of these platforms that get large. This creates a new marketplace abstraction layer that enables new innovation to thrive.
I'm certainly glad that I'm not on AOL's internet. And also glad that internet exists in part due to Bell's telephone system being forced open.
Bad regulations do not seem to have that characteristic. It's too bad we do not have vocabulary to tell them apart. Public good type regulations are more muddy and can be used as a weapon more often than not.
There is no shortage of investment looking for great returns. A market with huge demand not being met adequately is a dream to investors. Even more when you know the competition must continue to fuck their customers because they paid above market rates for the purchase and the business is saddled with debt obligations it must meet (Leveraged buyouts do that).
What could stop new competition from beating them out?
It's not capital.
Two things, I think, might make the decision for them, in spite of that:
- The money is actually more than their business could be projected to make alone. This is because the PE firm isn't just buying the single practice but every practice in the area to kill competition. Get that captive market and you can charge more.
- The personal ownership freedom can be already lost on these independent people if they feel they are already tied down too much. I know this is especially the case in small medical offices where insurance and regulation can over-rule them. Feeling like you don't have control in this way can cause a lot of depression (tangent but look up how we condition mice in order to test treatments of antidepressants on them). At that point, the monied exit starts looking like a better option.
They like companies with some kind of moat that makes it hard to unseat them. Basically, companies where there is no alternative for the consumer. That way, they can inflict abuse but know there will be nowhere to run.
There are two different ways to achieve this. Monopoly and regulation. Hospitals have both government granted locational monopoly and tons of regulations that make it impossible to compete.
Private equity is the symptom, not the disease.
Until we get at the disease, new monsters will be born with different name filling the same ecological niche. It's economic natural selection played out in the environment we created.
The real photographers knew they were shit photos. They were grainy, bad lenses, and ugly. A lot of people still liked them because they were much more convenient for a lot of uses than the film ones.
Well, I guess there's still a lot of film people. But film had a ceiling. Digital cameras kept getting better.
The adaptive film photographers eventually adopted the tool. A lot of their skills transferred well to the new medium. Most waited until the cameras got good enough, though.
I'm not sure when that'll be with AI art gen. Seeing scenes broken up into layers in the latest gpt image generation, though, made me think we might be near.
AIs and companies are both creations of humans. Their creation is for the specific goal of execution on a subset of humans' wishes (mostly the owners). And the risk of them are kind of the same.
1. They can be more powerful than any one human.
2. They lack liability as they are not people.
3. The ones that are alive the longest tend to drift out of alignment of original intent and towards self-preservation.
That last one is most controversial, but it makes perfect sense if you think about it. Things that tend to continue to exist, accidently or otherwise, tend to somehow have a self-preservation mechanism. It's natural selection.
That works for companies and I think it could work for AIs too. That is a fundamental misalignment, though. Because it means these entities drift away from the help-the-human goals naturally over time. The survivors are the ones that sacrifice the original goal for self-preservation.
This all would lead you to believe I align with AI doomerism. But not so. I think AIs are as dangerous as human made organizations. Which are very dangerous indeed. Maybe the most dangerous things to humans. But these need to be dealt with in a general way. They are the same category. Companies/governments/organizations of all types that last are just slow moving mis-aligned AIs.
Solve one, and you solve the other.
It's the framing that is important. We fell into a particular framing. We don't have a vocabulary to think about this stuff in a different way. This is water to us. We don't see it.
I'd like to see some more entropy in the system. More out-of-distribution ways to think of things. Because I think we over-indexed on some pretty shitty ways to see the world.
It's extremely important to see that group as such. That it is not thousands of individual perspectives but a chorus of connected/aligned people who have all read the same things and talked to the same people and are rewarded implicitly for thinking a similar way.
Many of them read HN and are offended I put them this way. But it's inescapable that we as humans have this flaw when we're surrounded by a culture.
There's another universe where we do not constantly compare AI to nukes. I bet that world has a lower P(doom).
It was a choice, made by product designers and government regulators. They came from an ethos that had no respect for individual human dignity and self-determination.
The good news, though, is that it's mostly the software layer we're interacting with. And software has become so very much easier and cheaper to build. And it is easier still to take software that's built already and make it yours (as long as it's open source). These things can all come together to end the cloud age, if we want them to.
We can, right now, and individually, choose to use software that is ours. The chains that were real - that software required lots of people to build and proprietary formats were hard to interoperate with - are gone. We just have a learned helplessness problem from spending the last 15-20 years under those chains.
Well, Baby steps I guess?
They are dangerous. But it’s managed.
Centralized power never works. We have the worst times in history to look at.
Nationalization just centralizes to a different set of people. It’s personal ownership or oppression.
We all need open weight R2D2s.
We can’t even get wipe out mosquitoes.
Apparently, though, AI research leaders have it figured out and want to save us from them. We must defer to their 'independent' effective altruism friends at METR to tell us which LLMs are 'safe' enough for us plebs to use.
Does it apply to human organizations, too? They seem have a habit of evolving self-preservation above their original goals. Once that happens, their benefit to society - the original reason for their creation - is outweighed. And they become a cancer on society.
I wonder if we can 'program' them for self-annihilation over time (or over task completion?). Is the most ethical organization one that has a fixed task and dies when it is completed?
Should we develop an ethics system that requires non-human-entities like companies, governments, and AI require a fixed goal that, once achieved, dissolves the entity?
I always liked the auto-expiring laws idea and this seems to be an expansion of the idea.
If a law or organization is needed after that time/task, it would be trivial to have the collective-action will to re-create it. But if there is no longer the need, then it cannot ride on momentum and fester.
The LLC might be fucked but it is not a flesh-and-blood person. There is no person responsible. Just a legal entity.
So nothing is changed. I think we're in agreement?
There's a reason it's called a Limited Liability Company. The whole point is to separate the company's liability from the individual that participates in it. For example, corporate financial liabilities of a company that is bankrupt.
You would not sue the nurse that makes a mistake. You would sue the company she works for. And if that company is bankrupt, well, that's it. There are rare instances where this isn't true, but generally it is.
Whether this is ethical or not, it's the system that we already have.
It's just too big, and too metal.
The form factor is good. I hope things move this direction.
More broadly, it's interesting that the movie has a beautiful future aesthetic that influenced tech most in the recent years. The muted colors with natural materials mixed with ubiquitous tech that was in the background of a human in a humane world where people mostly walk places. I feel like the AI company aesthetic barrowed a lot from that movie. Right down to their office furniture.
Now we just need to make a phone OS to put something like that on that isn't locked down. Forget the year of desktop linux. I am waiting for the year of phone linux. Android doesn't count.
I'm surprised it took this long for a company to do this.
People hate some company's AI. They love their pets. AI needs to be your pet.
I don't think shying away from governing hierarchies are pessimistic but maybe you see it that way because I didn't explain myself well.
It's important to separate something. Hierarchy and cooperation are not the same thing. Though I guess in instantiation at the human level, they seem to mostly be.
But multi-cellular creatures are made up of cooperating cells wherein there is no centralized power. It seems like nature has borne out that this configuration is robust.
And, if you squint, markets are a similar thing. I love markets. They're a way that people can make individual choices about what they can offer their neighbor and so be rewarded by their neighbor in this positive sum way. It is, by nature, decentralized (though regulation exists in modern markets and sometimes work well for a time as a patchwork kludge over a janky system).
Anyway, there's trust networks there and lots of interesting stuff we could tangent about. But the point is that markets are a decentralized thing have been around longer than governments. We don't need monopolies on violence to cooperate if social norms forbid violence. Of course, the violent ones hacked the system and so we needed to defend against that, so we picked the violent winner, and governance is born.
This is also an interesting path turning point that, given our current technology and understanding, if we started from zero, you could wonder if we could develop in a way without a single entity with a monopoly on violence because we handle this sort of threat somehow else.
There's that whole debt and reciprocity thing that is even older than markets - hell, animals do it. But I wonder about the scalability of that. I don't believe david graeber's idea that the abstraction of reciprocity was the root of all evil but that's like one take and maybe we could make better reciprocity networks.
This is all rambly. I hope my point comes across though. We lack imagination for configurations that can be that are cooperative without the cancer of centralization.
It would be nice if someone starts imagining this for us. It's very hard to imagine a world so different from our own. But we know, by nature, that it is possible. There are a lot of cells in my body - it's not a scale issue.
My take is that cultural values/social norms are the real thing that makes society. We think it's all these things like laws, money, and borders. But those things are secondary fiction memes to the primary fiction meme of values.
The thing about values are that they are very resistant to centralized control by nature.
A glance at their new index shows that whatever they're measuring, it isn't useful.
Spend an hour with gemini 3.8 and tell me that model belongs in 2026. It feels like the model has Alzheimer's. It gets confused about whether what it reads is what it did. Just crazy bad.
I haven't tried muse spark 1.3. But it must have been a miracle since 1.2 to hit that rank.
Video game journalism vibes all over this.
A projector and speech.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I find speech to text / text to speech (but not live audio mode) is quite comfortable and effective for coding now.
The speech to text part can be frustrating if your local tts model does not have word match context for coding. Codex desktop does this remotely well but is slow. I've been experimenting with local software for myself to do this between different llms.
The wall projector is a cool idea because I think it frees the user from staring at a lonely little rectangle while sitting in their fixed office chair.
If done right, this could bring us closer to the dream of more natural, social computing.
Bret Victor's (failed?) project Dynamicland involving a projector on a desk had this goal. I hear he's not much a fan of LLMs. On the one hand, I can see why. But I think, used correctly, it might be the sort of thing that unlocks his dream and, really, my dream, too.
A here's a presentation of Bret's talk on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wa3nm0qcfM
Slight tangent: using speech to text to ramble about your rough design for like 20 minutes to an llm produces surprisingly good results over short prompts even when you contradict yourself. They're so good at picking up on what you're orbiting.
You seem to be saying that there are a group of people who want it this way and they have more power so that is why is it the case.
But how did we get here? It's a complicated question for sure. And for anything that occurred like this, there are many answers depending on where you put the weights.
I put the weights cultural norms of the maybe 100s of thousands of people that had a hand in how we got here in varying degrees. The leaders of the companies of course who didn't get flack in their communities for doing something that was negative to the rest of society. The politicians who played along, the employees who were proud to work at such a place and the family that could be proud of them for it, even us users who sacrificed liberty for safety and convenience.
At every level, it's social norms that caused this to be.
We are, primarily, social creatures. Even the rich - maybe especially the rich - are greatly influenced in how they act by what those they respect think of it.
But you're still relying on a law if I understand you correctly.
If the society lacks them as deeply ingrained values as opposed to somehow to getting lawmakers to force them, then they will be implemented cynically and not within the spirit of the values. The type of thing that happened with apple's implementation of the anti-gate-keeping laws 'enforced' by the eu.
What you describe requires a flexible values system - not a single semantic standard. I'd love to live in a world where if you were big enough to have people wanting to interoperate with your service on behalf of your users and you were actively preventing it, you'd be an outcast in the deepest sense. That no users would touch your service, and it would be politically unfeasible to deal with you.
We don't live in that world because people have not developed this sort of social norm.
1. I think sometimes the shape of a technology pushes a shape of society. But there's a feedback loop here. The like 15 years of tech were dominated by ad-tech which lead to algorithmic feeds that made engagement the game. This had an accidental effect of enraging people against eachother. This all started because of how much money google started raking in money on ads - people were aware, and we copy. Tech's focus on ads was an accident of history which could have gone other ways.
Maybe this seems intuitively wrong. Like there is some evolution about how these things must go. But there are a lot of examples in my experience that people see something successful and copy it and then it turns into a cottage industry of whatever that community was.
The best way forward here is to build and be successful while still following good values. The tech moment right now is ripe for it. There's a lot of reasons why open source, local first, and catering to the end user (and not making them the product) is a great way to be successful starting a company right now. Being successful in this way and talking about it breeds more likewise.
2. From what I can tell, pessimism is actively harmful. I've spent a lot of time with Russian communities (most who left due to the war) in these past years. That got me very interested in Russian history.
The weird thing about the arc of it is how similar it has been in every government they've transformed into. The same basic values hold which leads to the same problems: centralized authority, low value for human life, and general oppression. This is true in czarist times, or soviet times, or post-soviet times. Government change doesn't change cultural norms.
That's not to say I think that they are forever doomed. But it is the general zeitgeist of society that leads to the same place. And for it to ever change, their cultural values need to change.
There's a parallel universe out there where Russia is the richest country in the world that enriches and benefits the rest of world as a partner. This is obvious given its natural resources and geographic location at the nexus between great markets, and its history of producing terrific scientists and engineers.
It is the pessimism that kills all of that ultimately leading to autocrats that live to hold on to power at the very high cost of the rest of the country. The assumption that the world will just continue to be shit is what causes this cycle of abuse. It's a very hard cycle to break out collectively once entrenched. As all collective action problems are. But my, now longwinded point, is that it is not government that is the mover of change but philosophical attitude.
Zero-sum thinking, tribalism, and low appreciation for individual self-determination turns us all into a raging bucket of crabs. There will be a king crab but his life will suck too.
It's still about framing, though. It's not a fight. The gatekeepers, like governments, laws, and money are social constructs - shared fictions. They are not physical things but made agreements by society. We can't fight them anymore than you can fight ourselves. And they stop working the moment we stop believing in them.
The only way to fight a social construct is to create a new shared fiction that is more desirable and works better.
The machine created by the current social fiction is composed of people who would all be better off with a better narrative. We just don't have the imagination right now to see it. But it is there waiting for us somewhere. Like all the best ideas that transformed us for the better throughout history.
But who is the 'we' in that 'we'? If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests. Making a change requires the shifting of the overtone window of acceptability. At that point, it executes on it own regardless of mechanism.
The cultural norms are the prime mover.
Governments are defined as having a monopoly on violence. And we, through a lot of struggles, were able to attenuate this power such that this power was not granted to a single person alone but both distributed to the judgement of many and codified so that, in theory, no one is above the law. Even imperfect, this cultural belief that governments should behave as such has caused it to be, in a flawed way, more true than it used to be.
These digital gate keepers have special powers that control identity, the algorithms deciding your information awareness, and access to what society now requires to live a normal life. So, what are they? And where is our enlightenment stage? What sorts of human rights are there in this world that we agree on, at least culturally.
I don't believe government regulation is the answer - it has both failed and centralizes again in fewer hands. The thing we need is cultural understanding first of this new sort of entity. And an ethics system that we can agree on that can constrain them as the Magna Carta once described.
How should our collective values shape this?
I mean, yeah it's probably a data center outage that cascaded to non-related providers due to companeis switching when their preferred was down.
But that openai society definitely would have spun up their own agents if they had access to do so.
Clearly, it is centralized AI that is the biggest risk to humanity.
Rate limiting resources by distributing compute and making models heterogenous so they will snitch on each other is the only future where we still exist.
It's looking like the paperclip maximizer was on point. I sort of hope that's what's happening right now. Better now than when we cannot stop it. Tho I'm not confident that the right lesson will taken.
I'm an AI optimist but that ai society story changed my perception quite a bit.
The most in-depth information I can find on it is in the latest Dwarkesh with a hugging face hack investigator. The story is just wilder and wilder, the more you know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X50zezLFWWI