This article (and holiday spare time) made me update and check zed again. I really liked it when I tried it a few months ago, but it failed miserably when doing work on remote code. It would hang, and I couldn't find any diagnostics to debug it's fairly complex remote agent to find out what went wrong.
But now it works fine! Remote work is noticeably snappier than via mounting the remote server as a drive, and remote git seems to work nicely. A very nice Christmas present - thanks, Zed!
Your "About" links seem not to work. In my case I was interested in where data is hosted, and the only information I see (from your HN post) is that you are from Paris. Does this mean EU hosting (which is good)?
Yes, sorry — I’ve focused more on the actual logic of the dashboard rather than the landing page, which still lacks polish.
Regarding the data, all your files are stored on Backblaze B2 servers (EU-central), with their data centers located in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
I hope I’ve answered your question correctly.
This will kill open source. Anything of value will be derived and re-derived and re-re-derived by bad players until no-one knows which package or library to trust.
The fatal flaw of the open internet is that bad players can exploit with impunity. It happened with email, it happened with websites, it happened with search, and now it's happening with code. Greedy people spoil good things.
Copyright was the base protection layer. Not in the "I own it" sense, but in the "you can't take it and run with it" sense.
With the current weakening of it, it opens the door to abuses that we don't have the proper tools to deal with now. Perhaps new ones will emerge, but we'll have to see.
Until now, people have had the leverage/cost asymmetry in their favor where they could easily differentiate and make rational choices.
AI has tipped that nuanced balance in a way that is both destructive, and unsustainable. Just like any other fraud or ponzi.
Cost/loss constraint function now favors the unskilled, blind, destructive individual running an LLM who spits on all those that act with good faith. Quite twisted.
Or use the API to program in anything you want. We use Google Sheets for our accounting system, loading data via bank APIs and a cron-driven python script. We used to use Xero, but it couldn't handle the different tax regimes we operate in.
That looks like a great usecase. Would you be able to write about the architecture. A lot of us would love to be able to do things like this in Sheets, I'm personally trying to integrate a forecast estimate into Sheets
I own my company so have no fear of losing my job - indeed I'd love to offload all the development I do, so I have no resentment against AI.
But I also really care about the quality of our code, and so far my experiments with AI have been disappointing. The empirical results described in this article ring true to me.
AI definitely has some utility, just as the last "game changer" - blockchain - does. But both technologies have been massively oversold, and there will be many, many tears before bedtime.
As an example, I'm pretty sure I just took up some of the slack here in NZ. I've been looking at installing solar for a while, and a particularly good quote for a Chinese system (Sigen) recently made me go ahead. I strongly suspect the unusually good price and fast delivery were due to cancelled US demand.
OT: Solar is awesome! 18 panels are generating 2/3 of our load, despite it being late winter. And a 16kWh battery means the grid power we import is all off-peak. In summer we're going to be exporting enough that we may even cover our winter grid import. Plus it gives us the best UPS system we've ever had, including zero-second cut-over (c.f. Tesla's half-second glitch).
Cory Doctorow has a compelling theory that the megatech companies have to appear to be startups, or else their share price reverts to normal multiples. Hence the continuous string of increasingly over-hyped "game-changing technologies" they all (not just Meta) keep rolling out.
VR, blockchain and LLMs have their value, but it's a tiny fraction of the insane amounts of money being pumped into these bubbles. There will be tears before bedtime.
Indeed, for big valley tech companies it's crucial to have a new business developing in the wings which has plausible potential to be the "next big thing." They're desperate to keep their stock price from being evaluated solely on trailing twelve month revenue, so having a shiny, ephemeral hype-magnet to attract inflated growth expectations is essential.
So far, it appears the psychology of investors allows the new thing to fail to deliver big revenue and be tacitly dropped - as long as there's a new new thing to replace it as the aspirational vehicle. Like any good mark in a con game, tech investors want to believe.
> as long as there's a new new thing to replace it as the aspirational vehicle. Like any good mark in a con game, tech investors want to believe.
Yea, but it seems like the new new thing needs to get progressively bigger with each cycle, which is why I think the shell game is almost over.
They really can't overpromise much more than they did with the AI hype-cycle.
It feels like a startup valuation in that having a down round is...not favored by investors; I feel like having a step-down in promises would also be problematic.
> They really can't overpromise much more than they did with the AI hype-cycle.
While I agree that "replace all human labor" is already pretty high up there on the overreaching u/dis-topian promise list, there are still a few things left.
Perhaps the next dream to sell will be digitizing the minds of Valued Shareholders so that they can grasp immortality inside the computer.
Yup which is why I think that the bubble is going to burst but what's surprising to me is that a lot of normal folks might be hurted by this too in the sense that s&p 500 has really concentrated its holding into companies believing into AI and the hype train seems to be coming to an end and the bubble coming near its burst.
Or every investor just expects the other investors will fall for this, but the result is the same: number go up so buy more. It could be no one really falls for it at all.
The economy could be doing really bad but the stock market can be doing good, they aren't direct correlation imo anymore.
It can take a long time for the stock market to actually be corrected but I know one thing and that is, bottom it would be corrected some day and maybe they would call it the bursting of a bubble
> Cory Doctorow has a compelling theory that the megatech companies have to appear to be startups, or else their share price reverts to normal multiples.
(I'm not smart enough to break out Amazon's and Apple's ad biz P/E separately.)
My quick spot check says Meta's P/E is more than "legacy" ad agencies and (much) less than Google's.
Just observations. I have no insights.
My opinion, based solely on vibes, is the online ad biz (Meta and Google) is more fraudulent than not. If true, than both are grossly overvalued, in that castles in the sky sort of way.
This may well be true, but my point is more that Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg seem almost uniquely unable to turn the startups into great new businesses, when compared with the other big tech companies.
Amazon added cloud and prime, Microsoft added cloud, xbox, 365, Google added Chrome, Android, cloud, Youtube, consumer subscriptions, workspace, etc. Netflix added streaming and their own content, Apple added mobile, wearables, subscriptions.
Meta though, they've got an abandoned phone platform from years ago, a half-baked Metaverse that is being defunded, a small hardware business for the Quest, a pro VR headset that got defunded, a crypto business that got deprioritised, and an LLM that's expensive relative to open competitors and underperforms relative to closed competitors... which the tide appears to be turning on as the AI bubble reaches popping point.
> Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg seem almost uniquely unable to turn the startups into great new businesses, when compared with the other big tech companies.
Really? Instagram, WhatsApp... the two most used apps & services in the world?
> Google added Chrome, Android, cloud, Youtube,
It's arguable how GCP is profitable, but chrome/android/yt are money-losing businesses if you exclude ad revenues.
Seems to require an app. Which instantly gives ChangeFly my PII. Nope.
Anonymized identity requires some entity to certify that a given token proves what it says it does. That is an awesome power, and given the abuse of that power by private companies who have gained it in the past, I'm not going to give it to ChangeFly, whoever they are.
Which begs the question of who we DO trust enough to do provide this service. Perhaps our banks?
Hey foxylad, I hear your frustration. Did you know everything you do on your phone and computer is through an app?
My name is Lukas Dickie and I'm the founder of Changefly. You can verify this by looking up our business registration with Washington State or contacting Troy Foster at Perkins Coie (https://perkinscoie.com/professionals/troy-foster). I have a long track record of working with governments and companies around the world.
For identity verification, Stripe is our current data processor and undergoes annual audits. Your identity is first verified by Stripe, secondly reprocessed for privacy on Changefly, then immediately deleted.
I encourage you to check out the links below to learn how the Changefly ID works and how Changefly is truly changing the game for privacy and security:
Yes - title should be "Passkeys are just passwords your granddad and the websites he visits can't stuff up". Passkeys will do for authentication what TLS did for transport.
But now it works fine! Remote work is noticeably snappier than via mounting the remote server as a drive, and remote git seems to work nicely. A very nice Christmas present - thanks, Zed!
Good job Zed!