That can be true, but I think even in such areas there can often be something interesting if you have an openness to a certain kind of modern "anti-beauty". I mean stuff like liminal spaces, places that are interesting because they're so uninteresting, etc. Each random shopping mall can be banal and anodyne in its own unique way, each gas station at each dusty crossroads has its own individual whiling away the hours behind the counter.

> Kind of sounds like the community is full of people willing to cause me harm for ideological reasons.

You just described everyone using AI to churn out slop and overload websites.

This just means next time they'll make sure to keep it really secret.

"Single file" is a bit misleading when it requires Github to do anything.

It's kinda implicitly obvious that a messenger needs some kind of backend. Though admittedly using Github as a backend is such an unusual choice that I would consider it equally important to mention.

And its why we cannot have nice things. This is likely a TOS violation of github.

That’s fair, although GitHub is just the default transport because it requires zero setup.

The protocol itself isn’t tied to GitHub and works with any Git remote.

If GitHub ever decided this wasn’t an acceptable use case, swapping the remote would be trivial.

Looking at the source I don't think that's true -- it's using GitHub specific APIs to read/write files. It's not standard git so any remote wouldn't work, and the mechanics are more akin to a key-value store than git really.

Not to say you couldn't add a generic git protocol to this, just that that's not being done here.

> The protocol itself isn’t tied to GitHub and works with any Git remote.

> If GitHub ever decided this wasn’t an acceptable use case, swapping the remote would be trivial.

Nope.

From the README:

"GitHub is the only working write provider right now. GitLab, GitVerse, Gitea, Forgejo, and other git hosts are protocol targets for future adapters. Today they are not finished write adapters."

I think it's pretty clear from the readme that this is a humorous proof of concept more so than anything someone should seriously use.

True, but imagine this use case:

A messenger file with hardcoded settings and a hardcoded PGP key, stored on a USB stick.

You send a message.

Then you physically destroy the USB stick.

The client, the key, and the configuration are gone.

At some point the joke starts looking suspiciously like a dead-drop communication protocol.

How do you like that, FBI?

From the translated readme:

Macaroni Messenger is not a joke. It simply refuses to complicate solutions unnecessarily.

That's why some technical decisions might look like a joke.

Sometimes it really is a joke. But most of the time, it's just the simplest working option.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48487542

This was slightly more thoughtful than I feared it would be. However, what I still do not see in any posts from any of these AI pushers is any genuine consideration of the possibility that the best thing might be for them to do less of what they are currently doing. Not to do it differently. Not to mitigate it. Not to do something else in addition. But to actually reduce their current activities.

It is certainly true that providers charge more in the US. However, it's hard to disentangle this from the insurance issue because of the way that providers and insurers are intertwined in a gordian knot of insanity.

The article mentions one example of this, which is that part of "provider costs" is actually paying for the provider to wrangle with the insurer. But even apart from such direct costs, the care is distorted in various ways in order to comply with the insurer's whims. One you hear about a lot is doctors ordering tests that likely aren't really necessary, simply to avoid having the insurer deny something later because they didn't go through all the required motions.

Another reason that "profit margin" is grossly inadequate as a measure of cost or inefficiency is that it doesn't count the actual "work" done by the companies, even though a lot of it simply doesn't need to be done. There are thousands of people with jobs in insurance companies that simply do not need to exist because most of what the industry does simply doesn't need to be done. The leeching is not just a matter of shareholder returns or executive salaries. All the salaries of everyone working for insurance companies are a form of waste. (Okay, probably not all, since even with a saner system some bookkeeping would need to be done, so if you look at the net difference it's not a total waste. But it's more than just shareholders and executives.)

Most corporate jobs are performative, period.

This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder how many people using these AI tools are thinking about the long game.

First it's "the model will say it can't do that". Now it's "the model will just misdirect you without telling you it's doing so". For now that's only for stuff that it thinks is developing a competing model (even if you trust it to accurately determine that), but who knows? It could be anything. Maybe it'll start silently nudging you away from certain sources of information. Maybe it'll give you inaccurate troubleshooting advice to induce you to pay for some kind of support contract from a corporate partner. Maybe it'll just subtly give out bad business advice to keep everyone else from succeeding in any way. It could be doing all that right now, for all we know. These models are a complete black box and there is no limit to the misinformation, disinformation, and malicious behavior that they could be engaging in already, let alone in the future.

> This slows down deploying the system globally.

Good. Pretty much everything should roll out way slower.

So win-win. EU consumers get a fully-baked, slower-rolled-out product. American consumers and developers get to see it earlier, warts and opportunities and all.

> these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years.

Then you should have done it right the first time.