So what, they won't be using any of the existing Google Gemini models of infra then? Because all of Google - from Gemini to the data center infra etc - has (and still is) worked on by non-US persons even - gasp - outside the US. They'll do a complete clean-room ground up bootstrap of all the research and infrastructure from zero?
You of course don't have to reinvent science, but it is in fact standard practice to do infrastructure from the literal ground up with US citizens for even unclassified government data.
Can you provide a different source on that? The govcloud page you've linked says operated by US citizens, not built by US citizens. I'd be pretty surprised if they did the latter. Standard practice as I understand it is to simply run the standard software in a separate environment. A recent Propublica report [0] pointed out that Microsoft was hiring citizens to escort the actual engineers that aren't citizens, for example.
Victims are not the ones running red lights, cutting across pedestrian sidewalks/pavements at 20+ mph, going down one-way-streets the wrong way, screaming at pedestrians to get out the way so they don't have to slow down when pedestrians are crossing on a green man etc etc etc.
At least in London the cyclists are absolutely lawless. Yes a lot are injured and some sadly die, but many many many totally ignore the rules (assuming they've even bothered to find out what the rules actually are).
It's only got worse with ebike hire (Lime at al) as people will hop on after drinking, or have never even got a driving license etc so have no actual idea on the rules that car drivers have to prove etc before they're let behind the wheel at all. And when they're done with their lime bike they literally just dump them wherever they're done with it, blocking sidewalks/pavements for everyone.
This antisocial cycling social-ill is very much at a "scourge" stage in London and is getting a lot of press.
Same behavior in Tucson and Denver. I hate cyclists. They're threatening, break the law, and self entitled. Drivers and walkers seem to get along fine for the most part. The one courtesy cyclists extend to the rest of us is that they self-identify by wearing spandex branded with logos from companies that don't sponsor them - some weird role-play poser fetish I guess.
But be honest - you don't really care about evidence.
Please don't do this on HN. It's against the guidelines to post “internet tropes”, and the purpose of HN is for curious conversation, whereas a link to this kind of URL is low-effort snark.
Also, your comment upthread breaks several guidelines; particularly the lines “some weird role-play poser fetish I guess” and “But be honest - you don't really care about evidence”.
Please make an effort to observe the guidelines if you want to participate here.
The actual trope in this conversation is "citation needed". That's a phrase which pretty much everyone here, yourself included, knows is the superficially civil (politely hostile) way of saying "you're full of shit".
Telling someone they're sealioning is just using a recently coined word. You also know that person wasn't sincerely asking for evidence - they were sealioning, and very hostile about it.
As for mocking cyclist fashion, that's just a case of falling on the wrong side of the fence. It's completely acceptable here, encouraged even, to mock certain groups and not others. In any given conversation, snark is allowed so long as it points in the agreed direction. And it's self-reinforcing, because anyone who goes against the grain is weeded out - as in your moderation here.
Anyways, I'm not sure what you could do differently. The alternative chat forums do seem consistently worse, so maybe this is as good as it gets.
> As for mocking cyclist fashion, that's just a case of falling on the wrong side of the fence. It's completely acceptable here, encouraged even, to mock certain groups and not others. In any given conversation, snark is allowed so long as it points in the agreed direction. And it's self-reinforcing, because anyone who goes against the grain is weeded out - as in your moderation here.
People who have conviction about issues with moderation include links to demonstrate what they mean. When people make vague insinuations like this without links, it's an indication that they just want to spray a little poison into the atmosphere, and evade accountability for their own conduct or examination of their claims.
If you have evidence of what you mean, please share links or quotes in the comments or email us (hn@ycombinator.com).
Either way, the guidelines apply to everyone equally, and it is never “acceptable here, encouraged even, to mock certain groups”.
> People who have conviction about issues with moderation include links to demonstrate what they mean.
Yes, I see you're using extra words to say "citation required". It's borderline clever, and fits the obvious intention of telling me I'm full of shit, except you're making a strong statement that also needs bolstering. How would you know if the alienated people just quietly go away or silence their opinions to fit in?
Regardless, it's acceptable here to mock climate deniers, capitalists (landlords, CEOs, Billionaires), SUV or truck drivers, religious fundamentalists, various flavors of conservatives, fans of "AI slop" (music or art), etc... You've got better search tools than I do to find the links.
I don't particularly want to defend any of those groups. I just wish we could add cyclists to the approved set, because they're frequently self-righteous hypocrites. I can see I'm unlikely to succeed in this endeavor.
> it's an indication that they just want to spray a little poison into the atmosphere
That seems a more than a bit uncharitable. Do you have any evidence to back it up? :-)
> evade accountability for their own conduct or examination of their claims.
I contradicted a jerk in defense/support of someone who said something I agree with. When the jerk doubled down and became truly belligerent, I bowed out of the conversation and let them have the last word before it turned into an actual flame war.
You came in 12 hours later with an "I don't care who started it" approach, looking for a reason to chastise both of us, and the worst crimes you could come up for me was some weird thing about troping and making fun of cyclist fashion.
Is that accountable enough? Am I supposed to feign penitence like the belligerent kid did?
> Regardless, it's acceptable here to mock climate deniers, capitalists (CEOs, Billionaires), SUV or truck drivers, religious fundamentalists, various flavors of conservatives, fans of "AI slop" (music or art)
No, it’s not acceptable to mock any of these categories. Never has been in the years I’ve been doing this job. Yes, people do it, in breach of the guidelines, and the community flags them and the moderators warn them then penalize or ban them. This has been consistent for years. What’s also consistent is that people who are strongly partisan towards one position are convinced we are biased towards the opposite of that position.
This isn't an example of that. You claimed something in your initial comment. You did not back it up.
I'm asking you to back up your initial claim. If you had addressed it you'd have a point, and that would be a correct example of sealioning.
But you haven't, so don't accuse me of sealioning.
This isn't me arguing in bad faith. This is me asking you to back up the claim you made in your first comment. That's arguing in good faith, if you only you are willing to provide the other side of the argument.
The “sealion” link and the abusive parts of their earlier comment are unacceptable and I've replied to their comment to make that known. However, these lines in your comment are also clear breaches:
> Back up your fucking claim.
> Really? Do you actually want to argue your point or is negative attention your fetish?
> ^this kind of argument is not fucking productive.
> So CITE YOUR SOURCES.
Please don't fulminate or post flamebait on HN, or use capitalization for emphasis. The entire purpose of HN is to engage in curious conversation about topics we find interesting, and to avoid furious battle like this.
Apologies, and noted. I wasn't my usual self, which is honestly what prompted me to give in to replying to them. I usually try to do better, and will do in future.
Same happened for me when I clicked on the link, I had to delete the cookies for wesnoth.org and then load the site again. I think their Anubis setup might be broken a bit
I was just talking to some friends in medicine the other day. They are getting more and more AI stuff and they love it.
Just basic stuff like smart dictation that listens to the conversation the practitioner is having and auto creates the medical notes, letters, prescriptions etc saving them time and effort to type that all up themselves etc. They were saying that obviously they have to check everything but it was (and I quote) "scarily perfectly accurate". Freeing up a bunch of their time to actually be with the patient and not have to spend time typing etc.
It's way beyond dictation. Medics I know (fresh postgraduates who used LLMs to help write their R code for statistical analysis for their research) are starting to treat it as one of their peers for domain reasoning, e.g. for discussing whether the conditions for a heart transplant are met. They're indeed in the "wow, this thing is human-like" stage, just not in the "let's delegate to the super brain, and then rubber-stamp the result at the end if it looks good" one we seem to be in... perhaps yet.
This is the crazy part with LLMs. It knows much more than you as a single user will ever realize, as it only shows the part that matches with what you put in.
I was building a tool to do exploratory data analysis. The data is manufacturing stuff (data from 10s of factories, having low level sensor data, human enrichments, all the way up to pre-agregated OEE performance KPIs). I didn't even have to give it any documentation on how the factories work - it just knew from the data what it was dealing with and it is very accurate to the extent I can evaluate. People who actually know the domain are raving about it.
With respect I feel like the author is missing a whole bunch here about the point of a website.
It's not just content/info/data, it's a performance (in the creative sense).
Brands spend a lot of time honing their appearance - not just fonts and colours but the whole composition and visual pacing - their entire "say something without saying anything at all" aspect etc. Just walk through any place with physical shops and really look at how the stores have worked on their appearance and how they present themselves to customers. They're not just selling a product, they're selling a lifestyle/feeling/etc/etc. They're not just going to give that creative control away to some LLM.
Another way to think of it is instead of people watching a movie or play when they go to the cinema or theater, they're just given the script to read. Same information but the entire artistry of both the performers and the directors is totally absent, leaving it up to each reader to imagine the delivery of lines or the scene's setting etc.
I think on HN and in tech in general people seem to forget that "the first bite is with the eye", and that is why "normal people" never liked or used RSS. The desire to leave our mark and to create (and view!) visually appealing things seems to be pretty innate in humans - we've been doing it since cave paintings. I struggle to think of a world where we just hand that over to AIs and humans have zero creative control.
To add to this, the OP's vision benefits the user -- reducing a business's value to its actual raw value as a service rather than a brand. For me, it sounds great.
But the business's incentives are in the exact opposite direction. That opposite direction is the whole point of branding. They want their service to have a vibe, a personality, something you irrationally value beyond its raw value as a service.
> something you irrationally value beyond its raw value as a service
Sometimes that feeling is the value. Sure my plants don’t care if they live in a cheap plastic pot off Amazon or a nice pot from the overpriced gardening store selling at a 200% markup, but I care. Sitting in my balcony surrounded by cheap disposable clutter feels different than enjoying the outdoors amidst quality vibes.
Some things are commodities, some are not. The point is only that it's in the interest of commodity businesses to convince you they are not selling commodities. That sleight of hand doesn't prevent genuine quality and artistry from mattering in many cases, including, in your case, pots.
Presentation of data and a story is a very important part of the service. That's why we have a mix of pictures, tables, paragraphs, etc. It's why UX is so important in general.
This is a very good point, however I'm on the other side of it (or at least across the boundary, perhaps not polar opposite).
Performance may be worth a lot today but I feel it will be less and less. I mean "we" don't like the "performance" of Windows (copilot everywhere, a setup process taking ages with dozens of offers you don't want), we don't like MacOS' performance (weird corners ;), inconsistent icons, icons disappearing behinds notches, no tiling)
I like Hackernews because it's so minimal, I just changed the bar to be gray instead of orange, otherwise it's perfect for my needs. Imagine some performer making this a beautifully crafted site, I'd go for any of the alternatives we see coming by every now and then.
Movies are perhaps different, although for me they are often about the lessons, did they change my view on things? That can often be condensed a lot more (for me that usually means drop a lot of the emotional finery, ie, I like TNG and Voyager more than Discovery because there is less crying and close-ups of crying people's eyes, ok, Discovery also has a lot less moral discussions).
Maybe I'm not normal, but to me my own UIs sound good, more efficient, more (useful-) information dense, so I need to spend less time navigating. It's why I use Nix and Gnome and (to a lesser degree) FireFox. It clicks more for me, but I can think of ways to improve them (yes I will soon try Niri). It's why people like chatting with their agents that are hooked into everything (Home Assistant to email to joblisting sites). Where's your beautiful UI in that workflow? Just give me a good API. Personal assistant/agents may be toys for nerds at the moment, but they're going to be big imho.
One argument against mine is perhaps that I also get used to tools and setups at some point, even though I don't consider them optimal at first, they become optimal. Perhaps because there is a deeper vision behind them.
All in all, perhaps we're both right. But people here seem to be very much on the company side (not surprising), but I don't care about your company, I care about information. That's why I have ad blockers, throw articles and long lists into LLMs and increase the contrast on your "beautiful" gray on gray text.
Buried in your prose is certainly a point shared with your average website visitor: they want the information, they don't want to be wowed with complex animations. But they also don't want no styling. There is a middle ground between looking like lynx and having some flair.
> Maybe I'm not normal
You definitely are not normal, if we define normal as "the vast majority of people". If web developers took your feedback seriously it would be detrimental to the experience of almost everybody. But I think that you knew that.
<devils-advocate-mode>Meh, more and more people will get information relevant to the decisions they have/want to make via their agents, not via your work-of-art-website. Deal with it.</devils-advocate-mode>
> I think on HN and in tech in general people seem to forget that "the first bite is with the eye", and that is why "normal people" never liked or used RSS
I think HN reflexively shoots down any idea or prediction with a bias to the incumbent.
Generally, a technological advancement will render some previous ways of working useless or outdated. People value convenience way more than a curated experience but I'm not disagreeing that brand differentiation would still exist.
A company that offers a meaningfully better experience in the long term will outcompete a company that focuses too much on aesthetics.
If they get generative UI right, where the UI provider can also give their own flavour and have some differentiation but also allow enough personalisation to afford the user better experience, it will happen.
Some bets don't work (like RSS) but some bets have worked - like the Amazon e-commerce model. A person in 1985 could have shut Amazon's idea down the same way you have.
Convenience is often curated experience. That is apart what was already there when humans emerged (which is of course still the biggest part), everything human experience was curated by previous humans. But of course even curated crafts get thrown and replace with other different experiences.
You're right, but are also ignoring that branding, appearance, etc., is simply not important to some people. They prefer function over form, which is where I think the author is coming from. They're wrong in thinking that most people share this opinion, and the idea of LLMs creating UIs seems awful to me, but as you can see from the comments here, this is appealing to some. It's niche, but this website is not exactly mainstream.
I partly share this opinion because most branding and UIs, products that are primarily marketed as a "lifestyle", etc., are obnoxious. Yes, appearance is a factor of anything we interact with, but when using technology my primary thought is if it solves a practical problem. Not if it's broadcasting an image, or even if it's enjoyable to use. The latter is important, but often companies prioritize it over functionality, which is backwards to me.
So starting with a mostly functional product, and giving me the choice of how to style it, is appealing to me. This is why I still use RSS, custom style sheets, the CLI and simple GUI wrappers, etc.
There is an audience for this type of product, but it's of the magnitude of a rounding error, so naturally most companies don't, and likely shouldn't, focus on this segment.
I totally agree that there is an often loud minority calling for this sort of thing: "I am an expert. I don't need styling or white space. I want every last square centimeter of space filled with 8pt font. I demand information density!" (aside: these are also the same people who say that JS-based UIs are slow and server-side HTML is faster, despite the fact that backend latency is 99.999% of the problem but that is another discussion...)
And yet, in my lived-experience at an unnamed Big Co when we did lots of UXR work in the on-call, monitoring, and incident management software/tooling, when it came to people being the primary on-caller handling a page for an incident when the company is losing millions for every minute of downtime that the 8pt font information dense UI they said they wanted actually led to increased stress, more mistakes, longer time-to-mitigation etc. Turns out that a carefully and deliberately designed UX and information architecture and - gasp - white space (that was all carefully and minutely tuned to specific CUJs over many rounds of research and prototyping) is really important.
Even if you have all the information available, just throwing stuff at the screen doesn't always help IME. Less is often more.
Nice analogy with movies, but essentially it’s a category error. Movies are media, not interfaces. You consume movies, but _use_ websites. A movie is immutable. A website is dynamic. As a matter of fact, even movies follow a very common structure, from narrative, to format specs and credits. Directors and actors fit their performance to these constraints. Movies are arguably way more standard than websites.
I think OP has envisioned a situation half way between what we now have and what will soon be the actual reality and that his idea will just be quickly skipped over.
I don't think website design will go away, but I do expect that people will soon be ordering products and booking holidays through AI chats instead of doing it themselves, which will require the kind of manifests he's talking about, but will skip the UI layer completely.
No mention of password managers yet? One of the major benefits is the password manager can do a quick, simple, completely deterministic check on the domain before providing the password. That would have stopped this dead in its tracks without relying on the human just happening to notice.
I personally use bitwarden on my chrome profile across Windows Mac Linux and android and think it's great. Highly recommended.
Of course I tell this to family and friends and no one does it so I dunno...
Its not just JavaScript, it's cookies, it's "auto loading" resources (e.g. 1x1 pixels with per-request unique URLs), it's third-party http requests to other domains (which might art cookies too).
I think the XKCD comic about encryption-vs-wrench has never been more apt for Gemini the protocol...
Why would you only include blogs in your small web index? That must be a minute fraction of what is out there?
I can't think of a single blog that I read these days (small or not), yet there are loads of small "old school" sites out there that are still going strong.
> Why would you only include blogs in your small web index?
I am not associated with this project, so this would be a question for the project maintainer. As far as I understand, the project relies on RSS/Atom feeds to fetch new posts and display them in the search results. I believe, this is an easier problem to solve than using a full blown web crawler.
However, as far as I know, Kagi does have its own full blown crawler, so I am not entirely sure why they could not use it to present the Small Web search results. Perhaps they rely on date metadata in RSS feeds to determine whether a post was published within the last seven days? But having worked on an open source web crawler myself, many years ago, I know that this is something a web crawler can determine too if it is crawling frequently enough.
So yes, I think you have got a good point and only the project maintainer can provide a definitive answer.
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