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"One color a day, told as it ought to be told: with its provenance, its chemistry, and the people who paid for it in poison." is so Claude it hurts. :'D

Yes. Why the heck do LLM's produce prose like this? It's de facto standard in the narration for all these slop videos drowning YouTube.

No human writes like this, so what is the training material that has taught LLM's that this is the way to write?


Also http://detectportal.firefox.com. And http://neverssl.com was set up for this purpose while being a bit easier to remember :)

I remember a while back neverssl.com would happily serve HTTPS requests! Another good alternative is http://httpforever.com/

I would add "...especially considering this administration thinks AI regulation is a scam invented by Big China to slow down American innovators?"

It came back, died, and now it's back as some kind of weird AI-focused news aggregator.

this sentence hurts to read

But they have such great AI generated insights on their AI stories:

"Many users praise Zhipu for open-sourcing GLM-5.2 under MIT with a 1M context window as a major step for accessible AI, while others respond with insults and anti-Chinese hostility."


I mean, it reads almost like an abstract of papers I've recently seen, with a similar info-cramming approach (somewhat like an editorial-SEO keyword bloat).

Reminds me of the Perplexity news thing.

It died and came back again last month

I actually found some of it useful. I saw some page where it helpfully pulled tweets from well known people relating to some story. So it’s not just some slop, or that’s how it looked to me.

That's disappointing to hear, I remember the reboot news and thought they had a pretty solid team behind it. I guess gaining traction proved too difficult.

which is hilarious because i was excited when i heard Digg was coming back. Many platforms are having a difficult time with bots, mass thread manipulation, etc. I'd be interested in a platform which attempted to fix that problem. I thought that was "so obvious" that i figured it was going to exactly be Digg's play. .. nope, just another AI play, as if we are missing those these days.

No idea if zero AI/bots is even possible, but at least an attempt would have me interested. A platform like Reddit/Digg of old, offering human connection, features aimed at less toxicity, etc.

Instead they give us this AI crap :s


Nah, this is just slop.

Took me 10 seconds to find this better link: https://mc.merill.net/message/MC1381110


> 502 Bad Gateway

People must really love PostScript!


The printer's jammed, give them some time.

Meanwhile, more about PostScript:

John Warnock's "linguistic motherboard" and Owen Densmore's "class.ps" smalltalk-like object oriented PostScript programming system, which NeWS and The NeWS toolkit used.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29295116

Owen Densmore's work with Bill Atkinson and John Warnock on the Mac printing system, and his "linguistic motherboard" email and "Swiss Army NeWS: A Programmable Network Facility" white paper:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33827923

More history of PostScript, JAM, InterPress, and John Warnock's vision of PostScript as a "Linguistic Motherboard":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37201231


My boss, many years ago, talked about the time he programmed a printer to act as a web server using Postscript. I never asked what happened to other print requests while it was running.


There is an apocryphal story about some poor sys-admin who after spending several days trying to diagnose mysteries hangs in the new office laser printer. traced it to one user who was sending long print jobs that printed nothing. This enterprising engineer had to be told to knock it off after explaining how the new laser printer had the most powerful computer in the office and as such had rewritten some of his simulation code in postscript to run on the printer.


They were routed to the integrated time machine in PS, and sent to the year 2026 when they would be rendered in mobile phones, then the bitmaps would be sent back in time to your boss's printer.


They were silently sent to the client browsers... ;-)


Thanks for posting this!

I've started looking into the history of Postscript because I was looking into the idea of "sending a program not a data structure".

Some thoughts so far: https://krishna.github.io/posts/send-a-program-not-a-datastr...


Check out Don Lancaster’s tinaja archive, if it’s still around. He was quite enamored with NeXT style universal postscript and wrote at length about it.


Don Lancaster passed away in 2023 at 83.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lancaster

Don Lancaster has died (gilaherald.com)

https://gilaherald.com/obituary-for-don-lancaster/

HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36545595

Woody Baker was one of his biggest fans on comp.lang.postscript!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36546584

DonHopkins on July 1, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Don Lancaster has died

I have always been a huge fan of Don Lancaster's wizardly writing about PostScript, who not only regularly published in Computer Shopper, but also generously ran a free PostScript help line at his own personal phone number. But Woody Baker was by far his biggest most enthusiastic fan of all (and highly eccentric in personality and coding style), and he would regularly extol and evangelize Don Lancaster's virtues and ideas on comp.lang.postscript. Once around March 4 1990, I gave Woody Baker some feedback on his comp.lang.postscript faq, including the suggesting that he might consider leaving Don Lancaster's personal phone number out of it, but he replied:

>Again, I want to thank you for your contributions. You and D. Cortesi have been most helpful. The two of you gave me very in depth feedback. I have moved almost all the editorializing to the end. I have moved the style stuff to the end. As for DON LANCASTER, I left his phone number in. Don publishes it regularly in the computer shopper, as a free PostScript help line. He is self-employed, and a widely published Author, for TAB books among other things. He says he averages 80 helpline calls a day. He also sells programs and books that he is self publishing. I can assure you, he won't mind at all.

Woody loved to talk in depth about how amazing and inspirational Don Lancaster was, and defend his well deserved honor and reputation whenever anybody criticized his work.

http://computer-programming-forum.com/36-postscript/ff79f7dd... [broken link, not on archive org]

>True. Don lives in an APPLE II world. You are wrong, however in certain statements. He has (unfortunatly) mentioned what FLXPROC does. It happens to be critical to certain things, that several consultants are working on here and there. He knows enough not to blab some things, and jerk work out from under individuals (at least some of the time). Don has dug pretty deeply into certain areas of PS, and I have dug deeply into other areas of PS. Don is first and formost a writer. He's self employed, and extremely intellegent. I am first and formost a software engineer, and secondly a writer. I tend to write, however for clients. I'm confident that I know what FLXPROC does, and what it is good for. And I'm sure Don does also. I more or less told him about FLXPROC and he more or less told me what it does. After first quarter 1990, some things will be essentially worthless as consulting info, and will rapidly become public knowlege. I don't applogize for keeping the lid on some things. I'm a bit of a mercenary in a way. I like consulting.

>Cheers

>Woody

Their great respect was mutual:

https://archive.org/stream/Ask_the_Guru_v1

https://archive.org/stream/Ask_the_Guru_v1/Ask_the_Guru_v1_d...

>Don Lancaster's ASK THE GURU Selected reprints

>Copyright c. 1987 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics, Box 809, Thatcher, AZ 85552. (520) 428-4073

>Electronically self-published using the Apple //e computer and the LaserWriter Plus. All graphics were done in their entirety by ProDOS Applewriter 2.1.

[...]

>I don't think I was ever more amazed when Woody Baker of The Copier Store mailed me back one of my very own laser printed business cards — redone in real ink in an almost "embossed" gold! Turns out Woody had found an older Omnicrom machine scunging around unsold in the back of his warehouse and fired it up. Lo and behold, the instant conversion of any toner image to real ink in stunning colors!

Example 10 of Don Lancaster's Postscript Show & Tell beautifully illustrates how an Omnicrom printer works:

https://www.tinaja.com/glib/psnt.pdf

>Example ten -- What appears hear as a mild-mannered Postscript technical illustration is really the secret of full color laser printing.

>Omnicrom sheets are real ink applied to a carrier. You place the sheet in contact with your toner image and then run it back through the fusion rollers a second time. The ink gets fused over the toner.


PostScript was the first language I ever used professionally! :P

At the time, I worked for a printing house in Kyiv that specialized in accidental printing (screen printing, flexo-, tampo- etc. i.e. mostly printing on weird curved surfaces, not paper). The triad (full-color) screen printing was all the rage (early-mid 90s). Part of the process of generating the films that were later used to irradiate the polymer layer covering the screen mold was bound to a bootleg Scitex machines IDF used for printing maps. While we had the machines, we didn't have a proper driver that could take a color image, separate it into channels and instruct the machines to produce the films. So, I'd produce PS files from, eg. Photoshop (also bootleg...) and then edit the PS files by hand to match the requirements from the Scitex machines.

I wasn't a programmer by training, and doing all this stuff absolutely felt like magic. Something I will never experience with computers again :'(


I really liked developing in PostScript within NeWS... had quite a lispy interactive feeling to it.

It was perfectly usable on a early '90s Sun Workstation so I'd love to know what performance would be like on the vastly faster machines we have now.


Wait, I thought OpenAI had to pay Microsoft until AGI was achieved or something? Am I misremembering? Is that a different thing?


Per WSJ, previously, they both had revenue sharing agreements. MSFT will no longer send any revenue to OpenAI. OpenAI will still send revenue to MSFT until 2030 (with new caps)


My understand was that was in relation to IP licensing. Microsoft got access to anything OpenAI built unless they declared they had developed AGI. This new article apparently unlinks revenue sharing from technology progress, but it's unclear to me if it changes the situation regarding IP if OpenAI (claim to) have achieved AGI.


I wouldn't be surprised if they had already, internally. An OpenAI employee tweeted today that Codex has achieved "escape velocity" and is now improving rapidly. Make of that what you will.


The point is also that you don't have to sign up for AWS, and GCP, and Azure, and Alibaba, and Nebius…

And, more importantly, that you can use the existing OpenAI SDK for your language but swap models (even across providers) by changing one line of code.

You're paying for convenience, yes, but model routers solve a real problem.


Is this the extension that Arc installs when you open DevTools? Not great...


I ain't reading all that, but do you really think it wise to recreate TheFacebook in 2026?


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