As much as I understand their decision, I hope they didn't stop. I don't use Facebook myself but now I am worried YouTube now knows that if they try a bit harder uBO would just give up.
Given that YouTube already has a suite of anti-adblocking checks in their UI code [1] (e.g. submit a fake request to the /player endpoint and see if anything removed the ads from it - which also tells you exactly which fields you need to remove from which request, lol), I don't know why they don't have someone looking at the latest filters and reacting to them.
Twitch did that a while back and uBlock Origin was ineffective against their video ads within a few months.
YouTube could also only let you download the main video after you downloaded the ads AND waited however long the minimum ad time is. They don't really need to play games with ad blockers if they want to get serious.
We have the tools to make this orders of magnitude easier. We can do this to all of social media.
Big tech gave us the magic space runes (LLMs) we can use to undo them. They have no idea what they've done. All of their value distilled into powerful exoskeletons we can run from home.
Already, it's become apparent that the world is distancing itself from American Big Tech, and they're using the tools we built to pull away. It's so ironic, but frankly justified since we've impinged upon their sovereignty.
We used to say that Google "hired everyone" to keep the smart people from building alternatives. To take all their free hours, keep them busy, keep them from becoming threats.
Now every single one of our spare hours is a salient of attack. I have never felt so empowered to raise an army against the powers that be. They are all mortal.
Building a facebook is easy, getting people there and hosting it is expensive, and to get that money, you need ads, and to keep getting money for those ads, you have to obfuscate your code so ublock doesn't work anymore, and you're back at the beginning.
Breaking down long term problems into small shorter problems we can solve one after another until the long term problem is solved is the essence of engineering.
No, the "essence" of engineering is having a cohesive vision for a larger plan.
No quality large scale project can exist without it. And any seasoned engineer should understand by now that no SOTA LLM can produce quality engineering at scale.
Nah. You can succeed in every single individual thing but fail at the overall project because the parts don't align into anything that makes sense.
If you need examples, look at game dev. There's plenty of games that have good execution but aren't fun to play or they're a confusing mess because there wasn't good overall direction.
Videogames are a weird comparison because they are basically the ultimate culmination of the combination of both engineering and art. The two can crossover in weird ways but still have distinct aspects that do not really compromise the other.
Just because a videogame isn’t fun doesn’t mean there wasnt a cohesive engineering vision. God of War: Ragnarok is a good example of this. Excellent technical execution and (arguably) great direction but a terribly boring game.
And many games that are terribly engineered are also incredibly fun. Dark Souls is a good example - runs like ass, looks very rough even by the standards of the time when the game released, with terrible enemy AI in a combat focused game - one might even call it a confusing mess (and I laugh at the notion that it doesn’t have good direction)… despite all this it’s a classic and arguably the most influential game since its release.
Elden Ring carries a lot of legacy baggage from years of iteration on the same engine as ~~Dark~~ Demons Souls - and it’s widely considered From Software’s magnum opus and a masterpiece. Yet considering the scope of the game it is a great example of how small wins added up can solve large problems when executed with the skill and judgment gained from experience. So one might still consider it a success in terms of “engineering”.
Would From Software have been able to make the same game using Unreal Engine 5 built from scratch with dime a dozen “Unreal experts” brought in off the street? Not a chance. Want to know why western game development studios are suffering right now? Compare American layoff culture and race to the bottom economics to the retention rates of Japanese game studios like Capcom, Nintendo and other heavy hitters.
For many of the most marvellous things humans have ever built, if you take a peak behind the curtain you’ll still probably find some amount of duct tape and popsicles sticks somewhere keeping it all together.
Fun, however, is a matter of taste and you can’t engineer that.
Long term projects that survived on short term wins are still around. But you're going to want to check how big the graveyard is of "project collapsed under tech debt from short term decisions" to see whether it's a good strategy.
But that means they're good enough for the short them. This is why I find it such an interesting question to wield, but also, it is why my wording was poor in the post.
Short term can, IME, be very short. I've seen people generate, say, a bash script with an LLM. It's generated: short term, the problem is "solved": we've generated a bash script.
… but does it work? Someone comes along, reviews it, "this is garbage, and does not do what it says it purports to do". Perhaps it even gave an output: the script computed … something, but it's just GIGO.
But that "check if this works" friction is the same friction that is what people try to avoid by generating it with an LLM in the first place. If you're too lazy to write the script, you're practically by definition too lazy to verify it.
If this is your working environment, it sounds like quite an unusual place.
I literally can't imagine generating a script with an LLM without testing it at all.
Bash is one of those situations where LLMs can do really well. No human on Earth can remember all of the commands and even fewer humans can remember all of the switches for all of the commands.
This kind of remembering, searching, and assembling is exactly what LLMs are good at - as long as you're not writing a gigantic build system with hundreds of moving parts, in which case you should probably be using something more streamlined anyway.
You can have another agent write the tests and verify the former agent ? This is pretty basic stuff. Makes me question if people are actually trying to use AI
As many have pointed out, I think the cartel is just using the engineering perspective for justification. If avoiding racing to the bottom is the goal, the rule could be that "no one can advertise a lifetime longer than 1000 hrs" as opposed to actually limiting the lifetime.
Pretty sure he’s talking about Cursor and other ai coding startups. There was a lot of drama between the two in the past year and iirc anthropic cut their capacity.
I cannot agree more. Cloudflare has some services that are really cheap (r2) to lure you into their worker "ecosystem", which is just serverless. Once you are vendor locked into their absolute garbage custom JavaScript runtime, you are pretty much forced to use their distributed database Cloudflare KV if you want good performance. Cloudflare KV is so extremely ridiculously absurdly expensive that make predatory pricing of vercel that HN likes to complain about feel like child play.
Oh no... KV is not a distributed database and is really not intended as a database alternative at all. It's more meant for distributing bits of config globally. Cost aside, writes are way too slow for database-ish use and "eventually consistent" isn't what you want for state that is changing often. Durable Objects (SQLite) or Hyperdrive (edge caching in front of a normal postgres/mysql database) are what you want, and will probably be a lot cheaper. Sorry for the confusion.
Oh that's why. I didn't connect the dots until I see your message. I had like 5 vscode open and all of them were spamming GitHub PR extension requiring login alert at me.
Frequency of actions matter, especially for security changes. If we are talking about git, I agree. If we are talking about npm, I bet 95%+ times people install packages in order to use them, not just to admire the code.
Someone else in this thread mentioned that npm can be used to manage pure front end libraries, which is a fair point.
