I understand a couple of things about VW: they are huge, partly state owned and have had historically strong commitments to workers. Today, they are facing strong competition from Chinese car makers selling boring cars at affordable prices.
Generally one could say the time of the car as a fetishized product is coming to an end. Car design will converge like phones and laptops. Some people will buy Apple, some will buy Framework. But VW is HP or Dell. They are only bought because they are useful and/or part of a large contract. Nobody rents a VW Passat for their rap video.
Now, someone with a better understanding than me please tell me: why in the world is VW not going all in on electric? They are even lobbying for an extension of the right to sell petrol cars. Are they so badly trapped that they have to stall change in the market in desperate hopes they can eventually catch up again?
I worked in the german auto industry ten years ago, left the industry just after dieselgate.
I asked my boss why they don't go full speed on electric, or even hybrid. He said I would do diesel until my pension. That really didn't age well.
My take on germans is that they take a great deal of time to create a plan, and then they implement it and never change it anymore. VW probably has their plan set out, and cannot change course until they hit the wall.
>stall change in desperate hopes they can eventually catch up
Worse! They hoped they wouldn't need to, because "EVs are a fad."
VW was toast the moment they took Herbert Diess out back to be shot. They had a visionary leader, but the org chart was just too calcified. Classic Innovator's Dilemma situation.
Kagi is really good. And I never thought I would say this but their AI assistent actually works. It is well integrated with their search product to deliver actually usefully results.
That said I’ve had a hard time getting other people on board. Apparently many people are just numb to the enshittification of the web?
I think Kagi is a cool idea but I just don't have a strong usecase for it. I don't find myself googling things as much as I used to, and if anything, when I am googling things they just aren't that important. I end up going directly to certain websites instead.
- Really high SNR when searching about topics I am not a subject matter expert on.
- Really good at finding prior art on a topic while not necessarily limited to papers conferences and patents (e.g. finding obscure blog posts on a hobby project that actually is relevant prior work).
Arguably this can be achieved with frontier models but my experience is that Kagi is vastly more exhaustive and well I don't need to ask for references because they are indexed in the search itself.
> I end up going directly to certain websites instead.
Many of my Kagi searches never actually show me a Kagi interface before I get to the page that I want. Many of my search queries are putting something like "jj @gh !" in my browsers URL bar, which will navigate directly to https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj, or "nats @dh !" to navigate to https://hub.docker.com/_/nats/, etc. The ! will navigate directly to the first result, and the @gh will add site:github.com to your query.
Last night at a social outing I had to explain to a project manager who is supposedly an AI expert that the side project I run as a community resource can't be entirely free because it costs me non-trivial amounts of money due to its success. She was unaware that things like bandwidth, or email, or compute could cost anything. She even asked me what compute is. She even started with "I mean, I know you pay for the domain, but... What else?".
Even people working close to us seem to have no conception of the economics of the web. Kagi is, practically speaking, an activist's service. Most people only respond to direct incentives. It's how we got to where we are now. I would expect this uphill battle almost naturally at this point.
How many of those people don’t use an ad blocker? I know a lot of people who put up with that web experience, and it boggles the mind. I digress. It’s not as if showing ads has somehow funded a better search experience, if anything ads go up and quality goes down is what I see. I pay for YT Premium. I would also pay for ad-free, more controllable, Google Search.
Maybe it’s a situation where the frog slowly got boiled, or maybe we have rose tinted nostalgia glasses and search is actually better now than it used to be? Even with ad blockers, they’re determined to ram shopping/promoted results into unrelated queries and I’m fed up using verbatim mode. You used to at least get Wiki results fairly high up, no longer it seems. And every software-related search returns GeekForGeeks slop instead of the actual docs. And they wonder why traffic is going to agents?
Every single time I accidentally use Google I am shocked at how terrible it is. People just haven’t seen the alternatives. I finally setup a family subscription to get my wife and kids on Kagi and they don’t want to go back to Google now.
I don't think I agree with that but I think ads and slop you get from the "free" alternatives are more damaging in subtle ways that people don't appreciate. I also pay to remove ads from just about everything I use and am shocked at just how much better that makes my life.
I've found the assistant, particularly the android app, to be buggy as all hell. Perhaps it's fine in the browser but as a heavy phone user I couldn't make it work anymore.
Have you seen how people use Fruity Loops nowadays? We’re already halfway there if you compare that to using an AKAI S9000 or MPC2000. And then go back to actually playing an instrument. It’s a gradient and we’re already pretty far along on it :)
I think so too. And it is how codebases are managed implicitly anyhow. You don’t let anyone PR against core functionality, you keep that API under lock and key.
But UI on top of a good API should be unable to cause problems; the API must prevent invalid state etc. So letting LLM’s write UI code for CRUD-apps (which is most of them…) seems fine to me.
I agree. I’m a customer out of principle (EU) but they make it hard to find out where to get a subscription and what that gets you. But their 18 eur per month offering is actually good with 255 eur worth of tokens included. Take care though: you need to create a specific kind of API key to avoid being charged for per token use besides your subscription.
This is on par with European stereotypes about French engineering so I’ll just go along with it :)
I’m a casual user out of principle and it’s fine. Nothing extraordinary but capable of assisting coding sessions. It won’t one shot a cancer medicine but it handles my Rust projects well. Mind you I don’t like the style of LLM use where people just brute force their way to a working state from a very high level prompt. I mostly ask it to implement tickets/issues I write beforehand.
Great to see support for the M-chips catching up. The chips are obviously very powerful and efficient and I find the latest MacOS releases to kind of drag them down.
With the build quality these machines have I can see Linux support extending their usable lifetimes well past 10 years. By which time we’re back to a mainframe-terminal model anyway since all compute is AI and it is all done in the cloud. (?)
It can still be true though, because entry is nothing without sales and a continued search for product market fit. I don’t know about 1% but if you say ‘for every 100 apps launched in 2015-2020 only 1 turned into a sustainable business’ I’d say that’s in the ballpark.
If code becomes cheaper that may change the business fundamentals but it also means capturing customers becomes way harder.
Openrouter stats seem to indicate that there is a lot of demand for ‘good enough at a good price.’ After all, not everyone is decompiling PS5 games. In fact, most people are just speedrunning notetaking apps in JavaScript frameworks.
But, Openrouter stats can only measure the usage they see. I'm not sure it is really all that representative of total LLM usage across the market.
I think that's the difference here -- OpenAI and Anthropic are competing more with each other (and Google Gemini) than they are with open weight models. While people on HN are familiar with Kimi and GLM models, I'm not sure how many casual users of LLMs know about them. I think the competitive risk open weight models pose to OpenAI and Anthropic is much further in the future.
There is a lot of usage that's only known by Anthropic or OpenAI that's not visible to the rest of the world.
And the share of the tasks where cheap open model is enough only grows in time.
Frontier models just fight over smaller and smaller piece of the pie and I suspect them pushing for security work is way to open potentially infinite token sink as attackers pay for tokens so defenders need to spend even more tokens to defens
> most people are just speedrunning notetaking apps in JavaScript frameworks.
I feel seen. But seriously, my app, with my preferences, written by a semi-trustworthy entity that isn’t trying to shove ads down my throat. That’s really great.
Yep, this. I've seen it coined as "the age of personal software" and I totally agree.
I've built easily a dozen personal apps in the last few months that I have no plans on releasing or sharing, run locally, and solve very specific productivity (or one-off) issues for me.
I would never have spent the time building these apps in the pre-LLM days because the effort wouldn't have been worth the gains.
But now? Sure Claude, build me a MacOS app in Swift that does this exact thing I need. Less than an hour later, it's done.
i mean, i made myself a dvd player for my steam machine. i don't see how that makes anthropic money at real token costs.
when lyft line was heavily subsidized in SF by VC money, i used it almost daily to commute to work because it cost $2.50 each way. Now that it's $20, I don't use it.
Generally one could say the time of the car as a fetishized product is coming to an end. Car design will converge like phones and laptops. Some people will buy Apple, some will buy Framework. But VW is HP or Dell. They are only bought because they are useful and/or part of a large contract. Nobody rents a VW Passat for their rap video.
Now, someone with a better understanding than me please tell me: why in the world is VW not going all in on electric? They are even lobbying for an extension of the right to sell petrol cars. Are they so badly trapped that they have to stall change in the market in desperate hopes they can eventually catch up again?
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