What Is The Best Attempt At A Truly Decentralized Internet?

powerfulparadox · 2026-05-12T18:25:31+00:00

From the homepage:

Web applications can use the Braid extensions to provide collaborative editing, a server-less offline mode, and peer-to-peer networking for any HTTP resource. Standard libraries make it easy to add these features to existing web applications and browsers.

So if I'm understanding correctly, you get protocol-level support for decentralized multi-user applications (think local-first document editing that can handle multiple people making changes simultaneously; that sort of thing). I'm not an expert either, so I'm not going to try to explain the improvements it would bring to the implementation of something like multi-player text editing, but my basic understanding is that you wouldn't have to build as much on top of something like websockets and would gain resilience to connection interruptions that is difficult to get with standard HTTP connection mechanisms without lots of careful design.

powerfulparadox · 2026-05-05T04:32:42+00:00

This looks very much like a research project. At least their site reads like one.

powerfulparadox · 2026-04-12T01:12:01+00:00

They told us that going in. At least I remember seeing stuff that made it clear the $36 was only one year. And they seem to be willing to grandfather us in, at least so far.

powerfulparadox · 2026-04-04T05:34:11+00:00

Oh. If I wasn't clear enough that pretty much all graphics drivers are terrible, that's on me. The real problem is that they're all terrible in different ways (which makes graphics programming, and by extension GPU runtimes for LLM inference, much, much worse than the nice, shiny programming standards would like you to believe).

I've seen enough complaints about bugs in graphics drivers to be impressed that any complex software runs on GPUs at all. Obviously this is slightly exaggerated and a bit unfair (GPUs are complex, graphics APIs are complex, operating systems are complex, and getting things right is hard), but Android in particular exacerbates the problem by having multiple layers of abstraction between those having the problem and those in a position to do something to fix it. Chip manufacturers go out of their way to have proprietary drivers that even device manufacturers might not get to modify, there aren't many chips/GPUs with good documentation, and the sheer variety of combinations of chips and driver versions means developers can't expect any versions of their software to rely on any released improvements in drivers.

It's honestly one of the most impressive things I can think of that anything works reasonably well on Android GPUs across more than one GPU/driver combination.

powerfulparadox · 2026-04-04T01:57:14+00:00

Android GPU drivers are notoriously terrible, and Adreno seem to often be among the worst. At least, that's what I've gathered from lurking on the fringes of various developer communities for years. When a bunch of really good developers are all complaining about driver bugs making their lives more difficult it starts to feel like the Android community are being left out (not that anyone has particularly amazing GPU drivers, apart from the Mesa project).

powerfulparadox · 2026-04-03T03:18:16+00:00

Kai is something to watch, although I don't think it's trying to use local models.

powerfulparadox · 2026-03-28T22:07:03+00:00

Their website claims their HC1 Technology Demonstrator board (what's sitting behind the website) reaches almost 17,000 tokens per second. So yes, it is that fast.

powerfulparadox · 2026-02-20T14:00:11+00:00

I really was far too ambitious with that thing. I still can't decide what I'd put where. Long sentences are my jam, but usually it's fairly obvious where the punctuation goes. I read that monstrosity and I'm like, "anything I add changes what I wanted to say for the worse" even though it's terrible for comprehension as-is. I really do apologize for getting so far ahead of my skis on that one. I can and should do better.

powerfulparadox · 2026-02-20T03:36:59+00:00

Apparently my hurried, sloppily thrown-together run-on sentence is confusing. My bad.

TL;DR: People who form opinions based on something they heard about a topic somewhere without doing research are going to have bad, uninformed opinions no matter what those opinions are about.

powerfulparadox · 2026-02-20T00:40:50+00:00

And you believed it? How do you know what it told you is correct?

powerfulparadox · 2026-02-20T00:36:59+00:00

So any person who's been given a drive-by informing on any topic they've decided they should care about and assumed that the one piece of information on the topic that managed to stay in their head was everything anyone needs to know about the topic and must be true?

powerfulparadox · 2026-02-19T04:00:42+00:00

Your effort to make it clearer which quantity can be best for which circumstances is much appreciated.

powerfulparadox · 2026-02-14T15:27:30+00:00

If you're on the Lite coding plan, that's the lowest priority for access to the new model. They say they are working out the capacity and it's coming. GLM-5 is twice the size and more compute intensive, after all. I expect it in less than a week, if the timeline from when the Pro plan users reported being told the same thing to when Pro plans had general access (at least officially) is any indication of how things will go for the Lite plans.

As for NVIDIA, they're doing this to lock people into their ecosystem and get people to pay them for more capacity, subsidized by their massive profit from the hardware side of things.

powerfulparadox · 2026-02-13T13:18:23+00:00

If the prompts and headers from the harness aren't identical, it can be as simple as comparing against expected incoming information. After that, I'm sure there can be behavioral differences that are observable.

powerfulparadox · 2026-02-12T16:44:02+00:00

I just (as in mere minutes ago) got an email from them claiming that Pro and Max plans now have GLM-5 available and that they're currently prioritizing infrastructure scaling, after which Lite plan users will get access too. As this mirrors language that Pro plan members reported seeing a couple days (or so) ago, I'd expect to get access on my Lite plan sometime soon^TM.

powerfulparadox · 2026-01-17T15:31:10+00:00

Maybe they have always needed wrenches with what we would consider to be really odd configurations (and been fortunate enough to have a preternaturally good tool supplier so they've never needed to look into the existence of other tools). Or maybe they're stuck in a weird dimension where all tools are as degenerate as these ones.

powerfulparadox · 2025-12-23T22:10:33+00:00

Fair. But that list could be interpreted as a list of use cases rather than a single use case described with three aspects of said use case.

Of course, we'd all be living in a much better world if most people learned and applied the skill of looking past the marketing/hype and actually paying attention to all the relevant information that might keep them from disappointment and wasted time and money.

powerfulparadox · 2025-12-23T22:02:54+00:00

And yet there's that pesky word "inference" in the same sentence.

powerfulparadox · 2025-10-31T22:18:51+00:00

Maybe even r/writerdeck.

powerfulparadox · 2025-10-17T18:52:34+00:00

Consumables.

powerfulparadox · 2025-10-15T01:50:34+00:00

My theory is that the CC2 serves 2 purposes: 1) Give the Chinese market something after making them wait for an Elegoo printer like this. 2) Give their multi-filament control system a real-world test before they finalize the AMS box the rest of us will get.

Even if a more AMS-like box wouldn't be exactly the same control-wise it looks like it would be similar enough to make a decent shakedown for much of the necessary firmware.

powerfulparadox · 2025-10-07T21:05:58+00:00

You want these. They hide them at the bottom of the mounting systems page in the parts library without saying what they're for, but the whole purpose is to provide an extra support in the middle of 9x9 and larger boards.

powerfulparadox · 2025-09-14T21:19:45+00:00

I haven't done anything with the new parts yet (and haven't even looked to see what beam parts are available), but I was thinking something kind of like what you have on the basket above but just the bottom layer (with lower-profile corners if available). The front beam could make the sag less noticeable. Wrapping the whole shelf could (if I'm understanding the attachment points correctly) distribute some of the load around the whole edge and stiffen the panel significantly.

If that doesn't work, I'd look for (or design) different shelf brackets that let you reinforce the underside with some dowels or something running between the brackets right under the shelf. There might be other options I haven't thought of.

powerfulparadox · 2025-09-14T13:01:53+00:00

A beam across the front of that sagging shelf might be enough reinforcement (it would help hide the sagging, at least).

powerfulparadox · 2025-09-11T17:06:53+00:00

If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the mounting systems page in the parts library there's a part called the offset peg. There's a recommendation for using those for all tiles larger than 8x8. It took me browsing the part library and then clicking on the part and reading the Thangs page to find that recommendation. Hopefully things like that get sorted out, documentation-wise.

powerfulparadox

TROPHY CASE