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Except we're living in a world where it wouldn't be that surprising, especially after reading this post. Good idea of a joke but bad execution.

They're free because they're either gathering more data or trying to capture the market.

We don't have to accept it no, but also you shouldn't be dumbfounded when it happens. Always assume everyone is doing it.

Also I can't get weather information on Google with Firefox

Agreed, my desktop will always just be my wallpaper and nothing else. I don't want any icons there.

It might be your unconscious deciding that it's not worth doing? Posting things online is rather useless and often brings more negatives than positives.

For me, I'm not overweight at all (quite the opposite, actually), but I'm totally addicted to sugar. To the point that food other than carbs/sugar is really uninteresting to me. Doesn't help that I don't like meat. What else can I eat? I can't survive on just vegetables


There are a whole bunch of sources of vegetable protein, and carbs/sugar for that matter. It’s actually quite easy to survive on just vegetables.

If you don’t eat meat then your sugar and carbs probably are processed from a vegetable in the first place.


Well you can't be healthy on just sugar either.

Be an adult and eat your fruits and veggies.

A pretty easy solution would be to mix vanilla whey protein into a fruit smoothie to boost your protein.

Another would be to just abstain from sugar for a few weeks before slowly reintroducing foods. [0]

[0] https://philmaffetone.com/method/nutrition/


whole wheat pasta is much better than a cake.

eating chips (fat/oil, salts, carbs) is also better than sugary stuff, it's just very easy to overeat by snacking (and then usually people still go and have full meals)


Every time I have to use React, I'm astounded at how convoluted web app development still is in 2024. Am I out of touch or is it really that bad?


Everyone in JS-land seems to have an opinion about how tooling should work, and because the platform (well, Node at least) provides no opinions of its own, everyone goes ahead and implements it. So you end up with a thousand-and-one competing bundlers, linters, formatters, test runners, etc, with all the associated churn and cost in learning it all and getting a new project up and running.

Compare that to something like Go which includes all of that stuff out of the box—by and large everyone has just said "yep that seems to work" and stuck with the defaults.

I think the second problem is the browser still fundamentally wants to be a displayer of documents. Yes there has been continued additions of new APIs over the years that have made the SPA pattern much easier to work with, the fact of the matter is you can still save yourself about an order of magnitude of complexity if you can get away with your app being an "old school" multi-page affair.


This feels like less of a problem in recent years, with Vite having won the bundler space in the same way that VHS/Blu-ray won home video.

There might be future evolution of course, but it feels like Vite is the default for new/retrofitted projects these days.


Yet I wouldn't call gui ecosystem in go a success like js'es is.


Is that a fair critique given that GUI applications aren't really Go's target market?


It just demonstrates that there is a lot more natural complexity in writing UI than CRUD endpoints or small services.

Sure, the browser environment (DOM etc) introduce plenty of problems, but it's going to be more complex than slapping together CRUD endpoints regardless.


It doesn't. The original comparison to Go here was in terms of opinionated defaults with respect to tooling. Go became a popular language for distributed systems, backend web, CLI tools, etc, in part because of the batteries-included tooling. Starting or getting acquainted with a project in Go is pretty straightforward because of this. The opposite is true of JS projects, in part because of the lack of standardized tooling. To point at Go's lack of usage for GUI applications in the context of is a non sequitur.

To phrase the comparison a different way: Would the JS ecosystem be better if there was one set of tools everyone agreed on, similar to Go? (The answer is yes.)


Well, if it doesn't handle a notoriously hard area basically at all, then frankly it's a pretty bad data point to bring up.


Again, the comparison made was about tooling around Go/JS. What Go, the language, is or isn't typically used for is utterly irrelevant to that comparison.


Complexity handled by tooling is absolutely relevant.


Such as... :)

Well, Go bundles its own runtime with the executable. JS has to work on probably millions of different combinations of versioned runtimes.


Have you been using plain React, or have you been using a layer on top? I have found that React itself (complemented with React Router and a state management library such as redux, mobx, or similar), but many of the layers built on top of React to make it "simpler" including Next.js and Create React App add a lot of complexity.

It used to be that the build system for React added quite a of complexity (when it was webpack), but with modern alternatives like esbuild and vite that's no longer the case either.


As a (mostly) Typescript / Svelte dev, React is like a shitstorm of bad abstractions, and looking at it makes me irrationally upset. I refuse to flush any brain cycles down that drain.


You're right, I have to deal with that world instead of .NET and Java, because of many enterprises products now only offering React based SDKs.


UI development is hard in general, you just hear more devs complaining about web because it is the first UI platform they try.

Android, iOS, QT, JWT, SWT it is all hell. If anything most modern web environments are way better than most others that came before it.

If a platform is "simpler" than the web it also usually means it is much less powerful.


If you don't want the fancy stuff, just use react-redux and build an SPA.

It gets complicated past that, but that's because trying to mix streamed server generated HTML and client rendered HTML (and often one and then the other in the same piece of UX) is hard to do.


woosh


Super impressive, but I can't help thinking what a waste to use all of this for... Grok?


To summon a word from many years ago, never underestimate what people will spend on e-penis

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=e-penis


Grok 3 will be released by the end of the year. What if it beats OpenAI? There is some value in that.


Why? Grok is nothing but another LLM and LLMs have proven to be quite the productivity booster. You can see it this way: previously we only knew how to use supercomputers to crunch numbers to simulate stuff like fluid dynamics, which is useful, but only in a limited domain. Now we can use supercomputers to "simulate" the workflows of 95% of the office drones worldwide (us included). I think that's a MASSIVE paradigm changing leap forward.


We can't though. This is what the marketing department keeps shouting from the rooftops, this is what the futurists keep prophesying, but in practice these things seem to be giant liability machines with no common sense, self doubt, or ability to say "I don't know, let me ask someone else."

They're neat, they have uses, but they're not replacements for anything. Even Whisper cannot replace a human transcriptionist as it will just make up and insert random lines that are not present in the source audio.


Google speech to text, siri, zoom subtitles, youtube subtitles etc insert almost only things I didn't say into the transcriptions. Whisper understands exactly what I say, even if I mumble, use abbreviations etc, and, at speed too. Maybe it does something wrong sometimes; the old way is infinitely worse. It's almost a joke between me and my colleagues to switch on speech to text when doing team calls (even 1 on 1); it gets 99% completely wrong; we talk about programming Typescript; it transcribes about robots and sex and rocks in the purple water; it's funny to read. If you would turn off the audio, you, as a third party, would think we are drunk or on acid, while with sound you would follow every fine.

I assume native english speakers do better (?) but we speak english (with accents) and whisper has no issues at all.


Again, it's seriously impressive tech, and it has its uses. But the failure modes are wildly different and severe, made even more severe by how impressive it is in the usual case. Medical transcriptions find themselves containing cancer diagnoses that were never uttered in reality, for instance.

A failing traditional TTS can be spotted by glancing through a transcript. A failing Whisper can only be identified by thorough comparison, with the failures being far more impactful and important to spot.


From what I read on their website, it's mostly used to "improve twitter". That doesn't sound very productive to me. I love using LLMs and they do improve my productivity, but they also use a ton of power that is currently mostly subsidized by investors. If I had to pay for the real power use of the prompts I made to learn VIM this month, I don't think I would could have called it a productivity boost.

I hope we get to see low power, local LLMs with good performances rather than continuing building huge energy sinks like this one in times where we should be trying to lower our footprint.

> Now we can use supercomputers to "simulate" the workflows of 95% of the office drones worldwide *(us included)*. I think that's a MASSIVE paradigm changing leap forward.

This is not what it is doing. And if it was, why would I, as an "office drone" celebrate this...?


> From what I read on their website, it's mostly used to "improve twitter".

I hope they use it for more than that.

Because the way Twitter is going at the moment they are likely to be massively fined and/or banned by the EU. They have been continually warned to sort out the misinformation and by every definition it has gotten far worse since Musk took over.

Was always surprised this purchase wasn't made by Tesla given they have actual use cases for it.


> And if it was, why would I, as an "office drone" celebrate this...?

Because nobody in management tends to notice or care when white-collar workers get stripped of most or even all their job responsibilities.

There's a whole genre of Reddit post that goes something like "I only do a few real hours of work per week" or "I was hired but never told to do anything" or "my team was laid off but they forgot to fire me for five years, so I just came in and goofed off all day."

(I think this is because many types of white-collar worker are secretly valued more for their knowledge and edge-case intelligence — i.e. their ability to solve emergency problems in a pinch, or randomly save the company a million dollars one day — than they are for consistent, productive output. For many such workers, "regular job duties" are just thing management uses to keep them busy so that they don't get bored and quit!)

For a healthy company, "AI taking your job" actually means "AI taking all the stressful and boring parts of your job", leaving you to do just the fun parts. It's like the people who do data entry who secretly automate 99% of their work, leaving them to just "manage" a script — but someone else is stepping up to create the "script" for you to "manage."


I think it’s mostly that grok is not used in a serious way. You don’t see research or open source projects that support it like, say, anything from OpenAI, Anthropic, Facebook…


Grok exists because of Elon’s vendetta against OpenAI (and Sam Altman) and how “woke” and “censored” ChatGPT is. So he spent boatloads of capital to create a rival that all the RWNJs on Twitter will pay for Twitter Premium to do things like “haha I asked Grok why did the gas chambers at Auschwitz have wooden doors” or to generate fake images of Donald Trump caressing Kamala Harris’ pregnant tummy “for the lulz”

It’s a very expensive, tragic, joke.


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