231–240 of 251 posts
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Same! I’ve been using Continue in VSCode and found most of the bigger Qwen models plus gpt-oss-120b to be great in agentic mode!
Do you use openrouter models with continue?
Was the page done with AI? The scrolling is kinda laggy. Firefox/m3 pro.
yeah i tried fixing it - the websites were more of an afterthought or annoying thing i had to do and definitely did it way too fast
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So I've done that sort of refactoring a lot, albeit on real code in much bigger systems, not a script. Lots of coders won't do this, they'll just keep adding to the crap, crazy big module. I always end up with a vastly smaller code base. Like 2000 lines turns into 800 lines or something like that. Did that happen too or did the AI just do a glorified 'extract method', that any decent IDE can already do without AI? I…
It ended up being less, yeah, but not by that much, maybe 15%. Thing is, there was no "extract methods" possible. It was an old user script creation tool that had been modified over the last 10 years. If it were that easy, I would have just done it myself. What this shows me is that it truly understands all the things this script was supposed to do and was able to organize it better, while not breaking any functional…
Fascination in combination of interesting tools with very interesting tools in a very very unconventional workflow.
I like it.
I'm certain that I will not use the same workflow but it gave me ideas for my own.
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I can't agree with a 'companies won't be evil because they will lose business if people don't like their evilness!' argument. Certainly, going through life not trusting any company isn't a fun way to live. Going through life not trusting in general, isn't a fun way to live. Would you like to see my inbox? We as tech people made this reality through believing in an invisible hand of morality that would be stronger tha…
My argument here is not that companies will lose customers if they are unethical. My argument is that they will lose paying customers if they act against those customer's interests in a way that directly violates a promise they made when convincing their customers to sign up to pay them money. "Don't train on my data" isn't some obscure concern. If you talk to large companies about AI it comes up in almost every conv…
You are making the - correct! - point that _other companies_ who have paid contracts with an AI provider would impose significant costs on that provider if those contracts were found to be breached. Either the company would leave and stop paying their huge subscription, and/or the reputational fallout would be a cost.
But companies aren't people, and are treated differently from people. Companies have lawyers. Companies have the deep pockets to fight legal cases. Companies have publicity reach. If a company is mistreated, it has the resources and capabilities to fight back. A person does not. If J. Random Hacker somehow discovers that their data is being used for training (if they even could), what are they gonna do about it - stop paying $20/month, and post on HN? That's negligible.
So - yes, you're right that there are cold-hearted profit-motivated self-interested incentives for an AI provider to not breach contract to train on _a company's_ data. But there is no such incentive protecting people.
EDIT: /u/johnnyanmac said it better than me:
>> If they promise those paying customers (in legally binding agreements, no less) that they won't train on their data... and are then found to have trained on their data anyway, they wont just lose that customer - they'll lose thousands of others too.
> I sure wish they did. In reality, they get a class action, pay off some $100m to lawyers after making $100b, and the lawyers maybe give me $100 if I'm being VERY generous, while the company extracted $10,000+ of value out of me. And the captured market just keeps on keeping on.
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My argument here is not that companies will lose customers if they are unethical. My argument is that they will lose paying customers if they act against those customer's interests in a way that directly violates a promise they made when convincing their customers to sign up to pay them money. "Don't train on my data" isn't some obscure concern. If you talk to large companies about AI it comes up in almost every conv…
I think you're making good points, that aren't exactly counter-examples to the concerns being raised. You are making the - correct! - point that _other companies_ who have paid contracts with an AI provider would impose significant costs on that provider if those contracts were found to be breached. Either the company would leave and stop paying their huge subscription, and/or the reputational fallout would be a cost…
I have trouble imagining why a company like Anthropic would go through the additional complexity of cheating their individual customers while not doing that to their corporate customers. That feels like a whole lot of extra work compared to just behaving properly.
Especially given that companies consist of individuals, so the last thing you want to do is breach the privacy of a personal account belonging to the person who makes purchasing decisions at a large company!
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I think you're making good points, that aren't exactly counter-examples to the concerns being raised. You are making the - correct! - point that _other companies_ who have paid contracts with an AI provider would impose significant costs on that provider if those contracts were found to be breached. Either the company would leave and stop paying their huge subscription, and/or the reputational fallout would be a cost…
Yes, my argument is mainly with respect to paying customers who are companies, not individuals. I have trouble imagining why a company like Anthropic would go through the additional complexity of cheating their individual customers while not doing that to their corporate customers. That feels like a whole lot of extra work compared to just behaving properly. Especially given that companies consist of individuals, so…
(as a sidenote, I'm very grateful for your insightful and balanced writing on AI in general. It played a considerable part in convincing me to give AI tooling another go after I'd initially written it off as more trouble than it was worth)
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> So yes, it is free. This sounds pedantic, but I think it's important to spell this out: this sort of stuff is only free if you consider what you're producing/exchanging for it to have 0 value. If you consider what you're producing as valuable, you're giving it away to companies with an incentive to extract as much value from your thing as possible, with little regard towards your preferences. If an idiot is convinc…
I understand the point people are trying to make with this argument, but we are so far into a nearly universal scam economy where corporations see small (relative to their costs of business) fines as just part of normal expenses that I also think anyone who really believes the AI companies aren't using their data to train models, even if it is against their terms, is wildly naive.
I do know the way of the world, I just disagree with it and would like it to be different, so I make a point of taking opportunities to try and do that. It's possible to understand the world whilst also not accepting it, and encouraging it to be better.
You can call me naive, I will call you defeatist:)