I can't find the article first using the term, but it's like a hidden sponsored article - start by describing a general problem that people might have or something in the technology space, end by advocating for a solution that your company (or the company who paid you to write the post) sells.
Unfortunate to see an otherwise-good article padded by AI-isms ("But here’s the twist: that search I described earlier was never sent to botd. All the history was in SQLite, so I pointed another agent at it and got the analysis anyway. The tool died; the data didn’t.", amongst other examples).
Maisem Ali writes about how they have not stopped engineering despite handing production of code over to AI. I think that's an interesting perspective for a few reasons, but most of all, I'm not sure I agree.
First, we see a prime example of how that can blow up. "botd died this month. It crumbled under its own weight." It's hard to imagine how an agent harness (or is it an overlay on top of other harnesses?) could crumble under its own weight from sheer technical complexity. What makes a tool like this "crumble"? If properly architected, it seems that any outside change could be adaptable. Failing tests could be fixed.
This AI coding evolution has given us the ability to spin up prototypes we don't understand the inner workings of, but I believe for anything of value (and, I would argue, botd appeared to have value to Maisem) we should at the very least understand and influence the architecture and engineering of what we're building. If Maisem had done that for botd, it would not and _could not_ have "crumbled under its own weight". Whatever outside influence required change within botd would have been manageable.
Second, the off-loading of the production of this article indicates to me a lack of respect (with no offence to Maisem, because this is what much of the industry is doing today) for the value in thinking through the writing process. There's a lot that I've learned personally about software I worked on that only came to me through trying to write explainers. Taking a step back from the software we build and looking at it from a birds-eye view, to share how it is constructed or how to use it, helps develop our understanding.
Maisem's article is already very good, and I hope that is demonstrative of their own writing! I would read more! But I want to read words written by a person for other people. AI can help edit, it can help us build ideas, but in code and in our written word, AI should not be _the author_.
Having built a tool in this space, I enjoy seeing all the Calibre alternatives that have been coming out in the last few years! It's fascinating to see the specific wants that people have.
Bookshelf, for example -- what possesses someone to make an ebook library that _only works on object storage_? Is this a weekend project, answering the question of "what would this look like"? Or was it something the author wanted for a long time?
Author here. It mostly came from a personal need rather than trying to answer "what would this look like on object storage?"
I wanted something with as little infrastructure as possible, ideally no database or additional services to maintain, while still having my library available anywhere. Object storage fit that pretty well, especially with things like R2 where the free tier is already more than enough for a personal ebook library.
That said, I don’t want Bookshelf to be tied to one particular setup forever. The plan is to keep the core idea of minimal infrastructure, while adding more storage/deployment options over time.
> Having built a tool in this space, I enjoy seeing all the Calibre alternatives that have been coming out in the last few years!
If there would be just anything actually good. But for some reason they all have just very basic organisation-levels, and barely any support for handling custom data from calibre.
For some reason, streaming ebooks seems to be also not existing. One can either download the whole book, or use some lousy in-browser-reader. So strange how the ebook-world has no decent software for selfhosting.
Kavita has a custom epub library that actually streams the epub pages. The reason why it's non-existent is due to epub being a zip, with a manifest of pages and images. Each page is an html document, so it may have images requested from that manifest.
Most applications just use epub.js which needs the whole book loaded at once.
Edit: Also Kavita does support some calibre tags for metadata and def is much more customizable with a powerful filtering system which you can then bind to your dashboard/side nav.
www.kavitareader.com for those that might be interested (or check the wiki to get a bit more about it).
> what is it that you want from your library management tool?
Custom fields for metadata and accessibility from different devices. Usually there is only hardcoded metadata, tags or categories and one or more systems for collections. And moving data between different software is also quite limited of course.
At the moment I manage everything with calibre on desktop, and use calibre-sync(?) on mobile which has full support for calibres metadata, including the custom fields. But it has no builtin reader and a very unoptimized interface. So the whole handling is very cumbersome, I have to first filter for what I seek, then download it, then change to the reader-app, and maybe organize the file there too, and afterwards I have to delete the local file and manage stuff on desktop like read-state, rating, etc.
Agree so much! It's so interesting all the different use cases and interpretations of those use cases people have.
Like this self-hosted project aims for "simple deployment"/less infra, but I can't imagine how you end up at "use Cloudflare proprietary offerings" and reconcile that with "self hosted".
But if you host the node app yourself and point it at your own seaweedfs/minio/garage that's still more infra than node process+SQLite file.
It's not _theft_ because nothing is _stolen_. The tokens are being used in a way that breaches the contract agreed to by whomever set up the account with OpenAI, Anthropic, Kilo, Antigravity etc. but it's not theft.
Are we reading the same article? That's mentioned once, as a potential alternative, nested in a bulleted list of alternatives. This is not an article about credit card fraud.
This is about people circumventing the model company's attempts to protect their intellectual "property" (which, if you insist on that incoherent usage of the word "property", they themselves stole from the rest of us).
It's equivalent to buying a DVD in the US which is region-locked to Asia. Grey market, not black market. If you use a stolen credit card to buy that DVD, well tat's a totally separate matter.
It's mostly refunding and card fraud because "bad money drives out good" in any marketplace. It's equivalent to getting a refund on an Amazon package you received, which is why a frontier model is being sold at around 2% of the face value.
Right, theft requires that there be somebody who no longer has access. This is about too many people having access. Piracy might be a more fitting term.
Fun idea and a great easter egg, but as a game, the tutorial needs some work. I was so lost for so long and I'm still not sure I understand half of the game!
Thank you for your feedback! I appologize for the inconvenience. But honestly that's not my fault; the spreadsheet app doesn't well support for tutorial :(
You’re expecting the wrong thing. The demo demonstrates the insane inference rate of dedicated hardware. Iirc it’s llama 3 or something. Not a very good model by today’s standards. But it runs at 16k tokens per second, an order of magnitude above the competition.
Imagine what’s possible if you had GLM-5.2 turned into a hardware chip like this.
It's a custom 3 bit quant of Llama 3.1 8B and other shortcuts. The quant is not good. Their newer arch switches to standard 4 bit quants, should be far better!
The company I work for, Digits, has been regularly updating our AI-vs-human bookkeeper benchmark. Look at page 8 -- many models are nearly as accurate as a human bookkeeper
Thanks, that's useful! We did use ChatGPT 5.5 for some time and it did perform pretty well too (of course more expensive than GLM 5.2).
We tried Claude 4.7 and 4.8, but we found both models to be "lazy" and very expensive. Claude would always rather prefer the route of saying that the evidence was not found or something is incomplete, rather than put more effort into finding/repairing the particular issue.
They do not like to talk about it too much in public these days, but Rocket Lab had somewhat shady beginnings. Once they moved past the semi-amateur phase, their first real project was weapons development on a DARPA contract. They were working on a paste-like semi-solid fuel for throttleable engines for munitions, and other similar things.
That pushed their main NZ investor away, and they somehow hooked up with the US intelligence community, which facilitated a rather unique series of inter-government arrangements for launching US reconnaissance satellites from NZ. That was probably always the appeal -- to launch over China with very little warning. A cheap, rapidly launchable vehicle was always a dream of the US agencies -- in 2003 this was FALCON program (Force Application and Launch from CONUS) run by DARPA and the Air Force, and today it is the Space Force's "Victus".
So, although the bulk of work was done in NZ, Rocket Lab functioned rather intimately with the US spooks from the very early on, including getting some funding from In-Q-Tel. Then in 2013, for the bulk of investment they just had to become a Delaware Corporation, for all the usual reasons. Very soon they moved engine manufacturing to a facility in California. More recently, with the large rocket (Neutron), their main manufacturing operations are in LA and the launch facility in Wallops. All in all, they are an international outfit.
It was always an American company. In order to launch rockets from countries in the US sphere of influence (even from NZ), companies must obtain an FAA license.
Rocket technology itself is so intensely regulated by US export control laws that it’s practically impossible to develop an orbital launch vehicle without being a US- or Europe-registered company.
It is a real shame. It also looks like a lot of engineering work is shifting away from NZ — Auckland seems to be focusing more on operations and space systems, and the launch stuff is moving to the US with Neutron.
That is false. They were a purely NZ operation launching sub-orbital rockets before they got into DARPA contracts. What you meant to say is "Before they ever launched Electron", and I'm pretty sure that is false too, they weren't "primarily" American, the majority of the workforce was in NZ until years after that.
I'm 99% sure that they went to the US venture to raise money to build Electron and that's when they made the US company that primary and the NZ company the subsidiary.
Yes you are correct. That's one meaning of primary. I just think it's misleading by the more colloquial meaning to say "primarily a US company" when AFAIK basically all the engineering happened in the NZ subsidiary of what was initially more-or-less a USA shell company. Engine manufacture was the first thing they moved to the USA that I know of, after one or two launches IIRC.
Aside, Peter Beck has said (probably at a talk I was at in 2014) that they initially designed and built Electron in NZ so that they would be importing restricted technology into the USA, to minimise ITAR problems, which only covers exports.
Plenty of ”American” financial entities are registered to a holding company abroad. Does that make the company not American because a holding company abroad exists?
They still have significant NZ design, manufacturing, and launch operations.
For regulatory and capital raising reasons the parent company has been US based for quite a few years now. They've also been on a multi-year acquisitions spree and picked up quite a large US workforce through that.
What would have happened, in that first story, if he had left the ship and swam to a passing boat? Or swam to shore? He was apparently able to leave as later in his imprisonment, the boat drift closer to shore and he swam from there. Why not just leave?
Abandoned crew members often remain on the ship in the hope of eventually getting paid their overdue wages after the legal issues are sorted out. If they leave the vessel then that weakens their negotiating position.
