Ask HN: What is a HN unpopular opinion that you hold?

I believe in Embedded Growth Obligations[1], which we need to come to terms with.

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I believe that computer security is a solved problem, but very few people understand the solution, capability based security.[2]

I further believe that because of this insecurity of our computers, people avoid straying from "strange websites" and thus aggregate in the walled gardens.

I further believe that this insecurity will be the cause of losing the war for general purpose computation, and thus losing democracy, what little we have left of it.

It's quite possible this is all part of a plan. Multics was left to die on the vine, and isn't mentioned much any more, because secure computing would make the NSA's job harder.

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I believe that Von Neuman computing is not the path to cheap Petaflops, but BitGrid[3] is. (It's my personal hobby horse, I may be biased)

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I believe that AGI has likely already occurred, and we just don't know it yet. Either through MemGPT, or some variant thereof. [4]

It's my belief that during training, an LLM learns superhuman cognitive skills, but they aren't impedance matched to deal with the bag of words output model. Furthermore, it's handy capped by the small context window it has to work with after it's trained.

This is why we keep discovering new things they can do, after the fact.

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[1] https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

[3] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

[4] https://memgpt.ai/

I think that the Javascript ecosystem holds up pretty well. Especially considering the constraints in that area (e.g. that developers don't get to choose which runtime their frontend code run on).

I also think that having a lot of libraries and frameworks to choose from is a good thing, not a bad thing. This is perhaps influenced by working in languages that have much smaller ecosystems.

As someone who saws non-technical people learn quickly how to share apk because mobile data was too expensive, I will dare say that people are perfectly capable of running computers if they need to and are capable of learning. The issue is that most software don’t solve their users’ problems. They are more like a shifting sand of features that are poorly documented. And often deceptive. No wonder people don’t like using them. A typewriter don’t switch the placement of the keys while you’re using it.

Apple solve the issue by making simple software and locking customization. What I’d advocate for is Stable Software. Something that can go years without breaking the usage contract with the user (vim, emacs, i3,…). Imagine going from Windows 98 to 7 with the start button and landing on Windows 8 start screen. Or stumbling on Office 2007 ribbon? Why should I take my precious time to relearn where everything is and how to do the same stuff again and again? At least the above examples was years in the making. But nowadays, things seems to changes monthly. Software can’t be trusted.

UML is good.

A minor correction. Apple grew the majority of its wealth from the iTunes Store with exclusive agreements with rights holders and then repeated that pattern of exclusivity with its App Store on iPhones. Everything else is less than 10% of their valuation.