Em dashes without surrounding spaces is such a ugly relic that triggers me to no end and is objectively wrong. The dash object is part of the sentence — not the two words it's separating.
big doubt on that and maybe that's a good thing? Let's be honest, right now most of the web is dominated by low effort spam. Taking money away from view farming would dramatically increase the web quality of the web. Suddently that guy who's really into "key gardening" doing research and publishing detailed results on his website actually has viewers — isn't this good? Especially since website hosting is close to being free these days.
> big doubt on that and maybe that's a good thing? Let's be honest, right now most of the web is dominated by low effort spam.
I think that is funny considering it is likely going to have the exact opposite effect.
Low effort blog spam is cheap to make. And it is often part of content marketing strategies where brand visibility is all that matters, so not much harm if the viability is directly on your site or in an AI chatbit interface.
Quality content on the other hand is hard to make. And there are two groups of people who make such content:
1. individuals or small groups that like to share for the sake of sharing. They likely won’t care about the AI crawlers stealing their content, although I think there is a big overlap between people who still run blogs and those who dislike AI.
2. small organizations that are dedicated to one specific topic and are often largely ad financed. These organizations would likely stop to exist in such an AI search dominated world.
> Especially since website hosting is close to being free these days.
It is under specific circumstances. The problem is that those AI crawlers don’t check by once in a while like Google does but instead they hit the site very frequently. For a static site this won’t be much of an issue except for maybe bandwidth. For more complex sites like - say - the GitLab instances for OSS projects, reality paints a different picture
Still unconvinced. You really don't need anything beyond a static site to effectively share information.
Another point you're missing is that there's a 3rd group of people sharing content: experts who are there to establish their expertise. Small companies and individuals generate the highest quality content these days. I work on a blog for our SAAS company and it has been a great success in terms of organic growth (even people coming from LLMs) and to simply establish authority and signal expertise in the field. I can imagine a future where this is majority of expert content on the web and it seems quite sustainable imo.
You can't expect the benefits of public web without bearing the costs. Just put your stuff under a auth wall (can even be free) and no one will crawl it.
Vanilla JS and the default browser capabilities are quite incredible these days. Server-side templating (jinja2, twig etc.) + vanilla js and some library sprinkle (htmx, graphs) will cover 99% of all web use cases and continue working 10 years later faster than most new stuff.
I recently adapted 3 open source dashboards made in react, alpine and vue to just vanilla JS for my use case and saw at least 100x speed increase. Data rows that took 2~ seconds to render were visually instant. Granted, the original dashbboard code lacked some optimizations but the vanilla code I replaced it with didn't really do any magic to begin with — just got rid of the incredible overhead these frameworks introduce by default.
it's easy to see how people might say v3 is an adtech conspiracy. Ads are always served to the user now, expect a noticeable revenue increase by almost every adtech company.
I've been using L-Theanine for a over a year now and then and it definitely has effects!
I use it mostly for sleep 100-150mg in combination of 5HTP which I found it to be an incredible sleep cocktail. I generally don't have trouble sleeping but this cocktail gives me great dreams and increase the quality of my sleep where 6-7 hours is very much enough for me compared to the usual 8-9. Unsurprisingly, l-theanine is popular in lucid dreaming communities and while I have no particular interest lucid dreaming my dreams are definitely more vivid and most importantly instantly forgettable (like normal dreams are) which is the most desirable outcome imo.
250+mg does have my mind racing a bit and this dose will prevent me from falling asleep effectively (at body weight of 75kg), anything above 200mg seems too much imo for my body weight. So I think the effect is very much observable just through dose variability.
For day use I've tried l-theanine with caffeine in the morning and I'd say the effect is similar to mild adhd medication (I've been told it compares to like ~2mg of Ritallin or pinch of Kratom powder). Tho for me it always comes with side effects similar to a cup of too much coffee would have. I found that just like adhd medicine, it works best with a protein shake.
This is my unscientific anecdote, tho OP's post makes me want to record my own experiences.
Not to put too fine a point on it but if there are blind trials showing no effect and non-blind trials showing an effect, my conclusion would be the effect is a placebo.
I've tried different L-Theanine supplements, and there's definitely a difference in quality across companies... which could help explain the variance in experiences.
Unfortunately, there isn't much regulation for supplements in general. Some companies do 3rd party purity testing, though it's not always the case.
That's a reasonable take but still depends on the trials. E.G. if the blind trial was 20 college age Americans males, and the non-blind trial was 1000 people from various ages and countries, I'd probably lean towards trusting the non-blind trials (unless I happened to be a college age American male).
Or if all the available trials are n<=20, I'll probably lean towards trusting the anecdotes, at least enough to try the supplement for myself.
When it comes to cheap-to-produce supplements, very limited trial data is the norm, unfortunately. There's no money for running large trials.
> t this cocktail gives me great dreams and increase the quality of my sleep where 6-7 hours is very much enough for me compared to the usual 8-9.
You take it for sleep but you sleep less? I think you mean you take it for "fun sleep".
Theanine is excitatory, that is wht it acts like ritalin for you, which is also excitatory. Period. Which is why at higher doses your mind races. Theanine brings me into psychois becasue I am sensitive to glutamate and I have Bipolar Disorder. Drinking tea give me paranoia and the "fun sleep" you have I have every night.
It’s almost as if this post is attempting to gaslight the world into thinking that L-Theanine doesn’t work. It’s the exact equivalent of saying “Look at the data, LSD does not make you hallucinate, it’s just conjecture. Look at my data and numbers.”
This entire post makes me think there is either an ulterior motive for writing it to try and discredit the obvious impact L-Theanine has on people, or, the write up is simply an irresponsible take on trying to show that one used data to prove something as false which is unequivocally true, at least for some.
Nonetheless, L-Theanine profoundly impacts some people and others it has no effect on. This post should have language that makes it clear that the results are from one single person who has one single experience which is extremely divergent relative to others who have experienced the life changing effects of L-Theanine.
Without such qualifying language this post seems grossly irresponsible and misleads the reader into thinking there is no effect that L-Theanine has.
That’s fair, however the overall gist of the post seems to imply that the numbers data and numbers produced somehow groundbreakingly prove that everyone who has proclaimed it works is wrong and the data and numbers in the post prove that.
Happy to be told I’m wrong, but that’s how I read it.
Very little if anything is ever proven to be absolutely true in all circumstances. The author did a decent job of controlling variables and blinding so their evidence for a lack of effect is substantially more robust than any number of personal anecdotes claiming an effect.
We’ve known for centuries now that people are absolutely terrible at knowing if medical interventions work beyond placebo unless you use rigorous protocols to remove bias and account for reversion to the mean. Yet it seems the message just doesn’t get through to vast swathes of otherwise intelligent people.
What makes you think it is trying to gaslight anyone? The post makes it clear that it just not working on the author is a possibility, but also fairly points out that there are other studies with more participants that weren't really promising either. It then suggests that those who do really believe it works on them also replicate a blinded self-experiment, which seems pretty fair to me - because then surely they'd be able to show results, if they're one of the (apparently many many) people whom it works for.
I also think/thought L-Theanine works for me, and since it's not harmful I'll keep taking it, but at this point I accept that it's likely just placebo effect until shown otherwise.
> The post makes it clear that it just not working on the author is a possibility,
This is my hypothesis. I'm very confident it worked for me, but I'm guessing that there's a certain combination of symptoms and traits that it's effective. If it was a placebo for me, it would be literally a miracle: likely the cheapest thing I've tried and had the biggest effect without requiring me to make a habit out of taking it.
Placebo is such a curious thing. If you can prove to yourself that your effects are placebo-effects, then those effects should disappear, because you no longer believe in them.
So if it's working for you, you probabaly should NOT start a study to find out if it works or not. It might stop working (for you). What good would that do?
I am hoping my level of self-delusion would be strong enough. When I was a kid and wanted to play sick to get out of school, I'd always quickly develop an actual low-grade fever and begin feeling legitimately sick. Even after I noticed the pattern, it still happened.
I'm hoping I can use this power of deception against myself with L-Theanine if I were to run this kind of study (but, maybe fortunately, have no motivation to do so at this point).
It may have something to do with what we say to ourselves inside our heads. If we say something to ourselves it is kind of believing. We believe what we think, we believe what we say. We can of course change our thoughts later. Like when you started feeling sick but when there was no more need for the symptoms, you could say "I'm no longer sick at all" :-)
Why use kilobytes of text and a handful of clock cycles when I can use terabytes of weights and thousands of teraflop-days of GPU farms to achieve the same result?
> It's kinda ludicrous to think we'll lose the ability for something so simple.
Sorry, but I already have to google each time I want to figure out how to open various file formats.
"Google, what ffmpeg flags do I use to convert this .flv file to .mp4", "what are the flags to losetup or kpartx to mount 'disk.img' as a loopback device?", "how do I extract an '.ab' backup from 'adb backup'?"
Nah that's good. JS is way too powerful and 99% of pages don't need bloat like webrtc, navigator api or thousands of other points that are almost never used for good but for evil.
Html should be powerful enough on its own to provide basic web page functionality to majority of use cases and only then the user should give explicit permission for the server to rum unrestricted code.
> I appreciate the constant existential wobble Firefox faces
The wobble seems to somewhat artificial. I'm having trouble believing Firefox could ever not be able to afford to continue browser development — there are way too many interests at stake. Google alone would have no choice but to bail Firefox out because Chrome can't be the only browser without being regulated to hell and back.
Google providing most of their funding is a fact, and that this provides a large amount of leverage over what Firefox can do is obvious. So how is the balancing act artificial?
For it to be self-imposed there needs to be an comparable amount of money ready to spring forth if Google ever pulled out that Mozilla is somehow keeping a lid on.
We are able to develop not just an open source kernel, multiple different distributions and a large suite of software. I would think that we could also develop a browser that doesn't need to spy on us.
