Roughly the same is true for sexual interactions. Was posted on HN a while ago. And I think it makes perfect sense, if you look at Japan they have all that development and are like 10+ years ahead.
I disagree with the comparison between LLM behavior and traditional software getting worse. When regular software declines in quality, it’s usually noticeable through UI changes, release notes, or other signals. Companies often don’t bother hiding it, since their users are typically locked into their ecosystem.
LLMs, on the other hand, operate under different incentives. It’s in a company’s best interest to initially release the strongest model, top the benchmarks, and then quietly degrade performance over time. Unlike traditional software, LLMs have low switching costs, users can easily jump to a better alternative. That makes it more tempting for companies to conceal model downgrades to prevent user churn.
> When regular software declines in quality, it’s usually noticeable through UI changes, release notes, or other signals.
Counterexample: 99% of average Joes have no idea how incredibly enshittified Google Maps has become, to just name one app. These companies intentionally boil the frog very slowly, and most people are incredibly bad at noticing gradual changes (see global warming).
Sure, they could know by comparing, but you could also know whether models are changing behind the scenes by having sets of evals.
This is where switching costs matter. Take Google Maps, many people can’t switch to another app. In some areas, it’s the only app with accurate data, so Google can degrade the experience without losing users.
We can tell it’s getting worse because of UI changes, slower load times, and more ads. The signs are visible.
With LLMs, it’s different. There are no clear cues when quality drops. If responses seem off, users often blame their own prompts. That makes it easier for companies to quietly lower performance.
That said, many of us on HN use LLMs mainly for coding, so we can tell when things get worse.
Both cases involve the “boiling frog” effect, but with LLMs, users can easily jump to another pot. With traditional software, switching is much harder.
Do you mind explaining how you see this working as a nefarious plot? I don't see an upside in this case so I'm going with the old "never ascribe to malice" etc
Especially in non common law countries like Germany or France. Not sure about drivers and other vendors but 3rd party ink or even patches to counters, hw modifications to "repair" (better to remove the planned obsolescence) are legal.
That's a bit harsh given all the problems SMTP and IMAP have. They are very dated and have some exotic "features". There is not a single mail client that gets everything right!
In other words, “they don’t sit atop the currently-fashionable implementation techniques that are the only thing webshits happen to know.”
Well, no shit, they were designed before HTML and HTTP, not just JavaScript, and there’s zero need to actually shove them into that mold because they already exist and are fine as they are in terms of protocol-level features. If you can’t deal with that maybe you shouldn’t be trying to do development at that level.
Meanwhile, all that energy spent reinventing the protocol layer to be maximally aesthetic to people for whom all the world is JavaScript running in a browser could have been used to actually improve the applications running over the protocol.
JMAP really solves many problems and allows you to do many things that are just not possible with IMAP. Also, IMAP has many ways to (badly) perform the same task, not all supported by all servers or all clients. MIME parsing is not easy to do and there is not always quality libraries available for your language... JMAP solves all of this.
Syncthing can do this and much more. Its the absolute best option to sync anything anywhere. It is very flexible, uses local connections, can only sync on wlan/certain wlans. The only thing that could be better is UX - for novel users its not so easy to understand. But people hanging out on HN should choose it as its just great!
I agree it's very good, and I use it for a lot of other folders eg notes, but I don't see how to use it as a backup tool for photos, without either using the option linked above or copying/hardlinking elsewhere on the NAS end. Unless there's a setting I'm missing that stops it from deleting on the NAS end?
EDIT: Don't get me wrong, it's my favourite file syncing tool, especially as one of the few open source syncing solutions. But I worry it always gets recommended as a backup tool and people don't realise it'll also sync deletions, so they'd suffer data loss.
It is also hard to contain the DLL/SO, every system has different mechanisms to ensure it can not access 'everything'. Wasm, as build for the browser, has it in its DNA.
