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the webpage fills vibecoded in the worst way tbh; i don't think that's attractive to the current gen of emacs users

maybe it targets net new users?


It's ironic that a community that uses a program originally developed at the MIT AI Lab, extensible in the traditional programming language of AI, would hate AI.

Richard Stallman prefers to call AI "Pretend Intelligence".

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PRETEN...

Richard Stallman proposes the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) for what the industry calls “AI”: systems that pretend to be intelligent and are marketed as worthy of trust. He uses it to push back on hype that asks people to trust these systems with their lives and control.

From his January 2026 talk at Georgia Tech:

https://youtu.be/YDxPJs1EPS4?t=641

"So I've come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. And if we start saying this more often, we might help overcome this marketing hype campaign that wants people to trust those systems, and trust their lives and all their activities to the control of those systems and the big companies that develop and control them." — Richard Stallman, Georgia Tech, 2026-01-23. Source: YouTube (full talk) — "Dr. Richard Stallman @ Georgia Tech - 01-23-2026," Alex Jenkins, CC BY-ND 4.0; transcript in video description.


RMS aside, there are a fair number of AI enjoyers among the emacs community.

I'm interested in a multi threaded emacs.

This landing page made sure I lost interest in this attempt.

JFC, who wants animations in their editor?

Also, I set prefers reduced motion on my browser. Pages that are filled with useless animations in spite of my preference tells me the dev is either incompetent as they cannot handle basic accessibility or an asshole because they just don't care.


What's the relationship between MotherDuck (https://motherduck.com) and DuckLabs?


Hey, MotherDucker here! We've been working closely with the DuckLabs team since day one, and the collaboration will continue! You can read more here: https://motherduck.com/blog/duckdb-amazon/


Wait, you guys actually call yourselves MotherDuckers :rofl:. I was thinking before that would be a hilarious name, kind of like how Google has “Googlers.”


My understanding is that MotherDuck provides hosting for DuckDB.

And DuckLabs is the engineering behind DuckDB.

If I'm correct, this seems like a signal that AWS is coming after the segment of customers wanting to host DuckDB (MotherDucks customers).

Correct me if I'm wrong though, please.


You're right - MotherDuck just got Jeffed.


TL;DR AWS will either acquire MD next/soon, or (more likely) keep them around for the optics that they are totally not going to starve the community of anything other than DuckDB as a hosted AWS service.

From the MD "about page":

The idea for MotherDuck came after Jordan Tigani, MotherDuck co-founder and chief duck-herder, saw DuckDB in action and thought, “Wow, this is amazing! someone should really build a serverless version.”

...

Hannes and Mark, who founded DuckLabs to focus on the core technology and build the world’s best analytics database, were looking for partners who would build a commercial cloud offering.


super interesting, i really wanted to try waymo but just never had the opportunity; maybe in Munich then

also, uber (in partnership with pony.ai and verne, a Croatian startup) launched robotaxis in Zagreb a week ago https://www.reuters.com/technology/uber-launches-autonomous-...

so waymo/Munich is in fact the second in the EU; also they are playing it safe

> In the coming weeks, you’ll start to see Waymo vehicles on the streets of Munich where we’ll begin driving manually across the city. We are taking a rigorous, phased approach that starts with high-definition mapping of local street networks and testing with trained autonomous specialists behind the wheel. This validation period will ensure the Waymo Driver adapts seamlessly to Munich’s distinct driving conditions before we aim to open commercial ride-hailing to the public towards the end of 2027.


Have you ever visited the EU? Let me help you with the positives: common market, freedom of movement, rule of law, clean and beautiful cities and towns.

Also, war is costly—so is preparedness. Sometimes you don’t have a choice, e.g. you have a strong polity neighboring you that insists your are by gods grace their zone of influence.

I’m sad about nuclear to, but that’s on a culture in specific countries; not on Brussels.

Also, there’s heaps of mistakes in the regulations they churn, but that’s another story.


This article is about using LLMs to overfit for a specific benchmark (or make a custom software for niche use cases) though. Not about LLMs benchmaxxxing


Isn’t that the same? It’s a sort of recursive version of overfitting specific benchmarks


at some point the kitchen knife analogy stops being useful


I don’t disagree with your point on Dario’s conflict of interest. I def think the models are expensive.

But why call them overpriced? Compared to what? Even if we take the margin reports at face value, we don’t know their training costs, etc.

Curious if this was more of an emotional take or if there’s actual evidence behind it.


Yeah I don’t think they are over-priced, last I checked all those companies are still losing money hand over fist.

I guess the question is more he doesn’t want people catching up by doing cheaper training (through distillation or otherwise), and he definitely doesn’t want companies to spend their money training these models and then _giving them away_, which fundamentally undercuts their commercial model and any way to claw back their investment


> But why call them overpriced? Compared to what?

Compared to some available Chinese model I guess. For most common tasks the additional intelligence is marginal and the cost is around an order of magnitude higher.


Compared to how much they want to pay. This is always what 'overpriced' means, as far as I know. The seller's costs/profits/margins aren't a concern for the buyer.


Thank you for sharing that perspective; I'm from Eastern Europe and have had many Indian colleagues over the years (both in the EU and working remotely). I always wondered, given the super deep talent pool and many founders originally from India, why we don't see that many Indian companies on the global stage.

I guess Eastern Europe is a bit similar (in the fact that it had a brain drain; although maybe less so since my country joined the EU), but also have a unique challenges, i.e., the EU market is fragmented and the companies need to break into a market by market.


Indian companies just don’t have the contacts and background to access capital in the way that “yeh we went to school together” that opens more doors. It often seems like VC is designed to keep the idiot sons of the aristocracy occupied rather than being about building anything great.


I don't know about their other software, but i'm a (paying) user of komoot. Komoot development has stagnated until bending spoons took over ~1y ago, see the recent https://www.komoot.com/product-updates

maybe it's case by case basis; i'm not an evernote user since the botched rewrite probably 10y ago at this point


what’s your point? i boycott russian companies, not american

if you don’t see the difference that’s on you

ok i admitted it, now call me a hypocrite


The relevant difference between Russia and America seems to be - that Russia is killing less people? Or is there another thing that makes the difference for you?


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