This applies to almost everyone working on SaaS; not in all cases, but the absolute majority work on SaaS means creating artificial scarcity in order to extract value from people. It is a fundamentally evil, antisocial, anti human thing to do. If you believe that is okay to restrict access to infinite resources to preserve the status quo you deserve the same place in hell as the people pushing gambling.
Don't create artificial scarcity. Don't play zero sum games.
> almost everyone working on SaaS; not in all cases, but the absolute majority work on SaaS means creating artificial scarcity in order to extract value from people.
Maybe this is just my lack of understanding in how most SaaS companies operate... But to me making software that people find valuable and charging them for that is not inherently immoral. Surely that is the majority of cases?
People like thot_experiment don't believe in intellectual property, period.
They believe that everything that is created should be public domain when the cost of replicating it is zero (books, media, software, music, most art). Those people also generally believe that borders and countries shouldn't exist.
Whilst I respect their worldview, I have found that it's not worth arguing with this group because they typically refuse to explain how such world would work, handwaving away any problems you'll bring up.
> This applies to almost everyone working on SaaS;
The original idea behind SaaS is to align the incentives of the customers and the software company.
Historically software companies made money on selling upgrades. This meant bug fixes were not a priority, and security fixes were something companies got shamed into doing.
SaaS fixes that incentive problem. With reliable ongoing revenue a company can keep software patched and updated and doesn't have to cram a bunch of new shiny marketable features in just to make a huge sale every 3 or 4 years, while engineers try and add whatever bug fixes they can after the shiny new features have been polished off.
It also means software companies don't have boom or bust cycles with hiring. Funding stays consistent, and so does staffing. It makes the financials much easier to manage. Companies used to hire a bunch of temp employees in the run up to a release.
Ongoing release cycles also led to better software engineering practices. More automated tests, reproducible builds, better version control systems, and a lot more things that we take for granted now days.
There are obvious downsides to SaaS as well, but the original idea was good.
This is pseudo-intellectual drivel. Creating value and then charging for it is not creating “artificial scarcity”, any more than doing nothing is creating “artificial scarcity” by absence of value. There was no “infinite resource” that just happened to exist before the work was put in to create it. And creating value is - almost by definition - completely orthogonal to zero sum games.
What are you talking about, most SaaS could be software that just runs on a computer, it's SaaS because you need a way to retain control to charge for it. Most of the effort going into developing software this way goes into the part that holds onto the value because distributed systems are hard. A lot of software is drastically easier to create if you don't turn it into SaaS. In any case I don't think SaaS companies don't create value, but I think the cost for that value is too high.
I've basically stopped using agentic AI completely as I've found the easy wins it gets me almost always come with tons of debt I have to pay down later. I specifically find the loss of situational awareness that comes with agentic development to cost far more than the utility I get from the code it writes.
As a result of this I've switched almost entirely to using qwen-coder3 locally in FIM autocomplete mode, and that's been pretty fantastic. Since I'm still doing most of the programming myself I keep the codebase loaded up in my brain the way I'm used to but so much of the tedium of programming is accelerated by the mind-reading autocomplete with 300ms latency (to useful completion, not first token).
Agents are neat but fundamentally it's a hack on top of the best autocomplete you could imagine, I find using it to do the thing it actually does gives me by far the best UX.
I was pretty big on ollama, it seemed like a great default solution. I had alpha that it was a trash organization but I didn't listen because I just liked having a reliable inference backend that didn't require me to install torch. I switched to llama.cpp for everything maybe 6 months ago because of how fucking frustrating every one of my interactions with ollama (the organization) were. I wanna publicly apologize to everyone who's concerns I brushed off. Ollama is a vampire on the culture and their demise cannot come soon enough.
FWIW llama.cpp does almost everything ollama does better than ollama with the exception of model management, but like, be real, you can just ask it to write an API of your preferred shape and qwen will handle it without issue.
Oh I was completely wrong about the model management stuff btw, llama-server has fully fledged model management baked in now, you just have to make an *.ini with your model configs (most models can do this themselves, I pointed qwen3.6 at the relevant part of the docs and it wrote me an ini with all of my model configs in about 2 minutes) and you can swap between models via api or a dropdown menu in the UI.
It's probably been well over a decade since the last time I read a book, maybe two. Maybe it's an ADHD thing? but my retention and immersion is just so so so much deeper when I listen to audiobooks, even at 1.6x-2x (depending on the narrator) I feel like I'm transported in a way that reading physically just doesn't give me.
LMAO ok, I mean that's bad but if we're referencing history to contextualize a situation let's start with the USA and UK deciding that "sovereign country" isn't a real thing if they vote to nationalize their oil industry. We're heading toward decade 8 of FAFO here with zero lessons learned.
I wish my bike hadn't gotten stolen, I had audioreactive LEDs on there and I'd take a video for y'all. Maybe it's time to resurrect the project.
I don't think FFTs are particularly good for music visualization if you're trying to be expressive because there isn't a particularly meaningful mapping from an FFT to the subjective experience of music and it adds significant latency. I ended up using a few stacked bandpass filters as well as mixing the raw PCM into the light strip for texture. Compressor with a slow attack and even slower release for auto-leveling (the release has to be like 20 seconds to make sure you don't up the gain a bunch during a breakdown in the music). I ran all the realtime stuff on one core of an ESP32 and a bluetooth stack and all the UI stuff on the other. I was getting about 200FPS on a strip of about 120 SK9822s w/ a custom HDR driver giving me about 11.5 bits of color per channel.
I really miss my bike, watch your shit on caltrain.
It's eternally crazy to me that people tolerate advertising, it's just something I've never been able to wrap my head around. It's like someone telling me they don't mind peeing their pants or support israel or something, it's just like, I understand the words you are saying but I cannot put myself into a position where they make sense. You have a finite amount of time on earth, why would you waste any of it watching ads?
That's what they're doing: spending their time. They choose to do it by watching some kind of Internet content.
They can do it by watching ads or spending money. A lot of people hate spending money. Some don't have the money to spare; some just don't want the hassle of connecting a money source.
It helps that we got trained by television, where for many decades there was no paid alternative. We accepted advertising as the only way to watch General Hospital or Star Trek or whatever.
We'd probably all be better off if we decided to watch fewer moving pictures and did something that didn't require ad support. But if people are going to just watch their entertainment, they're going to pay for it one way or the other.
When they see an ad, they see something completely different than you do. They don't see evil corporations trying to exploit human psychology, they just see funny videos and interesting new things to buy.
For some non-zero percent of ads, I can understand this point of view. But most ads aren't funny, nor are they about new or interesting things. Maybe me and my friends are compleatly out of touch, but when I ask, they struggle to think of ads that have made any positive impression that aren't 10 years old by this point.
I've heard of people who consider all the generic ads out there to be compelling and will buy just the worst garbage out there because their brain is wired that way. To them, I'd consider those ads as psychological and economic abuse.
I do want to know what new movies are coming out. I do want to know what new restaurants open. Advertising is information, most of it isn't useful but some of it is, and a halfway intelligent adult can separate the fact from the opinion.
I don't want ad tech and surveillance capitalism, I don't tolerate services with unskippable ads. Regular TV commercials are skippable with a DVR, which is critical. It's tech companies that turned advertising from sometimes helpful/usually annoying into unacceptable.
There's a game of one-upsmanship here to express the least possible tolerance for advertising in general, which I don't get. It's not a cancer on society, it's a necessary thing that's gotten dumb and out of hand.
the most popular sport in America takes about 3hrs per game and has about 12 minutes of actual action per game - that should tell you all you need to know how well Americans are trained and love watching ads
I feel strongly about advertising. Long before streaming, my parents used to leave the ads on in between programs, and it always made me mad. I think my ADD comes into play, the idea of voluntarily watching them feels really strange.
I also wonder how the world would change if we made targeted advertising illegal. One can dream...
Gemma 4 E4B is an incredible model for doing all the home assistant stuff I normally just used Qwen3.5 35BA4B + Whisper while leaving me with wayy more empty vram for other bullshit. It works as a drop in replacement for all of my "turn the lights off" or "when's the next train" type queries and does a good job of tool use. This is the really the first time vramlets get a model that's reliably day to day useful locally.
I'm curious/worried about the audio capability, I'm still using Whisper as the audio support hasn't landed in llama.cpp, and I'm not excited enough to temporarily rewire my stuff to use vLLM or whatever their reference impl is. The vision capabilities of Gemma are notably (thus far, could be impl specific issues?) much much worse than Qwen (even the big moe and dense gemma are much worse), hopefully the audio is at least on par with medium whisper.
Don't create artificial scarcity. Don't play zero sum games.
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