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Today we're beginning to roll out Project Tailwind with its new name: NotebookLM, an experimental offering from Google Labs. It's our endeavor to reimagine what notetaking software might look like if you designed it from scratch knowing that you would have a powerful language model at its core: hence the LM. It will be immediately available to a small group of users in the U.S. as we continue to refine the product and make it more helpful.
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Most of the 160-200 million laptops sold each year are replacement purchases. The average laptop is replaced every 3 years (in business) to five years (elsewhere). My 5.7 years per laptop experience is not exceptional.
The question is not how we can evolve towards a circular economy, but instead why we continue to evolve away from it.
Lenovo, a Chinese manufacturer that is now the largest computer maker in the world, bought IBM's PC business. Chinese companies don't have a reputation for building quality products, especially not at the time. However, since Lenovo was still selling Thinkpads that looked almost identical to those built by IBM, I decided to try my luck and bought a Lenovo Thinkpad T430 in April 2013. At a steep price, but I assumed that quality had to be paid for. My mistake was clear from the beginning. I had to send the new laptop back twice because its case was deformed.
To make laptop use more sustainable, the software industry would need to start making every new version of its products lighter instead of heavier. The lighter the software, the longer our laptops will last, and we will need less energy to use and produce them.
Let's take an example of Chrome's browser. The GUI, HTML renderer, V8 JavaScript engine, browser extensions—all these parts of Chrome individually are heaping behemoths of code. So, all these components are separated and live in different operating system processes, and can only speak to each other via an IPC mechanism.This way, a rogue website isn't able to access your home directory, since only the GUI part of Chrome has access. The GUI (officially called the Browser process), is the only part that has access to your home directory. So, the Renderer is "Sandboxed".
MacOS, OpenBSD, and even Windows have all made serious progress in sandboxing.
Here, we find every other desktop Linux distribution. Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, have zero meaningful system level sandboxing.
A modern "Linux distribution" that actually does sandboxing incredibly well is ChromeOS. There are a whole bible of strategies that ChromeOS implements to keep Chrome in it's own little world. Among the strategies involve cgroups, namespacing, seccomp, etc… This technologies basically do what Docker does (corrected). Chrome cannot see your files unless you give it explicit permission to do so, nor can it execute other programs, or wipe your hard drive.Not only is Chrome sandboxed—every important system process is sandboxed in ChromeOS. The system logger, the display server, the wifi daemon… A lot of architecting has gone into minimizing the attack surface of these various services by giving them the least amount of privilege possible to do their job. This is the principle of least privilege.
Recently, Cory Dansfeldt's blogpost, titled "I block ads" went viral on Hacker News.
I find myself doing much the same things he does.
I use Safari extensions or plugins on macOS, iPadOS and iOS like: Wipr, 1Blocker, Hush and Vinegar. The reason I paid for these apps is that they make the browsing experience so much more enjoyable, less cluttered and faster. Besides all this, I also block ads with the help of NextDNS. This has as an added bonus that whenever visitors are on my guest Wi-Fi, their TikTok and Instagram and such, are also blocked, which has the added benefit of a truly undisturbed and cosy evening.
All this attention grabbing is an attack on the mind, a focus sapping drain on our happiness. That is probably why I found this comment by user "Nextgrid" very insightful:
There is no difference between ads and malware - both are code that uses your machine to make it do something undesirable, and often stalk you (modern adtech is often way more powerful than the spyware of the old days) in addition. It is your absolute right to block all malicious code.
Operating systems mostly wisened up to their earlier vulnerabilities and patched most of the avenues malicious code could load itself on your machine. Browsers countered the early abuses of the pop-up window feature by blocking them and nobody complained. Operating systems and browsers should include ad- and spyware-blocking by default just like they block conventional binary viruses.
Of course, one problem with blocking ads is that it's really hard to distinguish them from normal text or images on websites. So out-of-the-box blocking will always have to rely on blocklists like the ones that uBlock Origin uses. These lists depend on knowing the bad actors in this space, and the domain names that they serve ads with. Blocking all JavaScript will stop some trackers, but it will also break many features of websites.
This will always be a cat and mouse game. Google upped the antes by making a fairly good web browser, Chrome, and now that more than 50% of all internet traffic globally goes through this browser, they are making it harder to block ads in it, as several headlines of recent well illustrate. Well played, Google.
An interesting opposing view was that of user "jader201", who wrote:
In 2004, I started a small website on the side that had no business value at all. It was just a small community of video game fans (specifically Animal Crossing), and pretty quickly, the costs outgrew what I was willing to afford on my own.
So I opened up donations. Unfortunately that didn’t get me very far, so I eventually— and begrudgingly — added ads. I was very intentional about keeping them as unobtrusive as possible: just some banner ads at the top and bottom of each thread and forum, and a square next to the first unread comment. I hated pop-ups (the kind that opened in a new window — very common at that time), and I didn’t have them on any other page on the site (just forums).
This gained me about 10x the revenue I got from donations alone, and was able to scale the site’s hardware, allowing me to keep the site up and running for nearly 20 years, and provided some modest passive income for a time. (I just recently sold it to someone else, but it’s still up and running.)
My point is, that wouldn’t have been possible without ads.
This is an interesting point that I also run into. It's almost impossible to live from writing, unless you are very well known. I hear Jason Kottke can live from the income generated by his blog, but he started 8 years earlier than me, and he puts way more time and effort into his blog than I ever did.
I like to write about technology, photography, financial well-being, and generally about whatever I fancy that day. But I don't even dream of making a living of my musings. In fact, very recently, I've signed up for the Amazon Affiliated program again. I think I tried it in 2017 but didn't generate enough clicks, so I was kicked out of the program. Also, there are now Google banners on my blogs. They don't generate any money yet, but a guy's got to dream, right?
The reason I resisted having Amazon affiliate links or banners on my blogs and websites for so long is a simple one: I want to practise what I preach. I don't like to see ads on websites; hence, I block them. I don't mind affiliate links so much, but they are not ideal either.
Interesting to me was the many comments on Hacker News focus on not how they are blocking ads, but why. It seems to me that many of us, technologically inclined folk, feel deep down inside that although we have every right to block ads, we are bereaving hard-working bloggers and maintainers of small forums and community websites of the money they so desperately need to keep afloat financially.
This is a great way to pay the creator of the content. But how do you pay the person who pointed you to the interesting link? Do you go back in your browser to tip them? Do you even think about that, every? I guess not. Wouldn't it be great if it was a convention to write links as follows:
<p>My favourite website is <a tip="tip-to-jan@janromme.com" href="https://somesite.com">this website</a>.</p>
There are already other kinds of data that we can put in an HTML link. For example, there are a bunch of relationship statuses (like author, source, external) that we can put in the REL attribute. What if there was a TIP attribute as well, where someone could simply add their lightning address to receive tips for the trouble of linking you to this useful content?
Maybe the internet wouldn't be so riddled with advertisements then 🤔
You can discuss this blog post on Hacker News or Stacker News.
The way I see it, there are multiple problems with dating apps:
1. The chicken-and-egg problem of dating apps: Why would I sign up for this app? It looks empty, it doesn’t have enough users in my area. If everyone feels this way, no-one will start signing up.
2. Another concern with dating apps is that it’s mostly men that make an account on these apps.
3. Maybe women on these platforms feel easily attacked or threatened by too much attention? Some men apparently are misogynous.
Who will build a NOSTR based dating app that addresses these difficulties?
Features should include:
1. Easily on-board: easily create a #nostr account. A user doesn't need to know the protocol is nostr though, this is only a technicality that makes it straightforward to build this app quickly.
2. Many specific filtering options, build in a way that doesn’t damage your privacy. I want to select a person based on location and religion, for example, without having the whole world being able to read my location and religion on my open access #nostr profile. This is a tough one to crack, I think.
3. We only want serious people, so fidelity bods should be an option. Or maybe simply paying for a "nostr-dating.com"relay is all we need. Perhaps $5 a week, for example?
4. Furthermore, when mistreated, I, as a male or female, should be able to downvote another user. After a certain threshold of downvotes, they become visible and other users can choose to preemptively block or ignore the misbehaving user. These votes should be confidential and not be traceable back to a specific user.
5. #nostr by default has no way to save photos or videos. But for prospects to see each other, those are essential. Possibly, said subscription to a “dating-relay” that only relays messages that contain #singleandreadytomingle should also provide temporary hosting services.
6. Added bonus: once you do find someone and stop paying the relay the weekly fee, it deletes all your messages and photos and videos.
7. Private DMs are indispensable as well.
What else am I missing?
Let’s uproot the damaging multi-billion dollar “dating app market” with open-source and open protocol tools ✌️✊
You can discuss this blog post on Hacker News or Stacker News.
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A chatGPT/Forever Voices/Midjourney horror story:
How wins in this scenario?
Nobody:
None of this is impossible today, and in fact, it is already happening. Read about CarynAI here: https://nypost.com/2023/05/16/i-went-on-a-date-with-chatgpts-carynai/.
Want to discuss this short horror story? Post your thoughts in this thread on Hacker News.
You might have noticed I stuffed some Amazon Affiliate links in this post? That's on purpose. I hope to monetize this blog. I hope you don't mind me earning an honest living?
