local first: could actually be a downloadable index.html file, that runs locally only your browser.

Why is Mistral not mentioned. Is there any reason? I have the impression that they are often ignored by media, bloggers, devs when it comes to comparing or showcasing LLM thingies. Comes with free tier and quality is quite good. (But I am not an AI power user) https://chat.mistral.ai/chat

Becase Mistral is very bad, Qwen, Kimi and GLM are just better.

I have used it, but I just haven't found it good when I have, maybe its gotten better.

I have it as one of the free models in a chrome extension I was working on since I keep a list of tons of free APIs, just there are so many options and I tend to just use the top 5-10 best ones (that I have noticed as being great)

Off topic but I use Mistral in production for various one shot tasks (mostly summarizing), it's incredibly cheap, fast and effective.

Bonus: it's European, kinda tired of giving always money to the American overlords.

We had those woom bikes without pedals and my children could immediately ride a "real" bike bevor they got 3 years old.

Training wheels always seemed to me like a wrong technique from a last century.

Is it possible to have some kind of electron/tauri/,.. based runtime, but without the actual app? The users would need to install this runtime only once. The apps would need to be installed separately. The apps could be just the plain html/js/css/assets maybe packed within a zip, with a dedicated extension. The runtime would take care of the installation. That way the devs could develop with their FE-stack of their choice and ship just the small packages. Does this make sense?

It does sound a lot like what Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are supposed to be. It's very close to how the original Manifest.json worked when given an html/js/css/assets list.

Only a couple of browsers supported that version of Manifest.json. Chrome developers thought it was too much of an 80/20 solution and decided to get deep in the weeds of the 20% instead of delivering the 80% solution while they worked. That's what got us the way too low level and hard to reason with Service Worker APIs for PWAs. It's over-engineered for the 20% of use cases in a way that makes "easy" 80% so much harder than it ever should have been. Chrome developers still randomly promise the web that the "easy high level API" will arrive any day now, but looking at the mess that is Workbox (their team's supposed-to-be high level building block library for Service Worker PWA APIs) it still doesn't look like it will happen any time soon.

It's more the shame because we briefly had a simple JSON manifest format for assets. That JSON format should have been easy to emulate in the Service Worker APIs if those APIs truly were meant to solve the problem, not just solving more interesting problems in a related space that a minority of use cases needed. Google doesn't currently have enough incentive to make PWAs easy to build, and as long as Chrome is the majority browser, Google is the major obstacle.

That's genius! I propose we call this system of apps "the World Wide Web" and call the runtime you install, a "Web browser".

Yeah the problem is web sites are way more restricted than apps in what they can do. Apps need to use native APIs. They need to be more active. x

This doesn’t work. Developers move on to a next version for reasons out of their control. Now a user has a version hell, just like c:\python{all, sorts, of, versions}, and probably a versioned file extension. Bundling tens of megabytes is not a problem for the last ten years. Having everything you need right in your backpack is a good thing for everyone.

It could be feasible if software communities didn’t tend to underimplement features and then solve them by intertwining all sorts of dependencies and their maintenance policies. For example, for as controlled thing as typescript, there are at least four popular ways to “just run” projects, all with different quirks and issues (tsc & node, ts-node, swc-node, tsx). Although it was obvious that people would want to run and watch .ts files based on tsconfig.json, without an explicit compilation step.

I guess that sounds like the normal web/progressive web apps/web archives (especially with the push to more platform APIs in browsers)? Also, Tauri uses the system's WebView2/Webkit runtime, so it essentially works like this already.

This is a pretty standard type of architecture, it's essentially how anything that runs on a virtual machine works. Back when visual basic was popular, it actually surprised me that Microsoft never ended up bundling the VBDLL files with the OS itself allowing developers to ship significantly smaller installation bundles.

Sounds like Adobe Air. It was pretty nice as a development platform. Something similar for Electron is an interesting idea!

I don’t know why they said that. But I guess it’s the difference between a low certainty and a high certainty bet.

In 2024 it’s a safe assumption that a lot of the digital infra we use in 10 years will be based on Rust, so it may make sense to fund that.

On the other hand, something speculative like “semantic web” is less likely to be as important. It could be important, we just don’t know in $current_year.

I think it’s alright to split money between low certainty and high certainty bets, but reasonable people can disagree.

hmm I disagree. I found the article, quite an eye opener for me. I also thought that he cookie banners is what the EU forced the web-site owners to show.. but it clearly isn't. It is just about consent. This consent could be given in a non-annoying way, but clearly the involved companies don't want to.

Are there some realistic Text-To-Speech voice models out there that I can use locally and for free?

I know that ElevenLabs, Microsoft, of course OpenAI have some nice voices. But I would like to use them locally, or maybe in an app?

I often ask myself that too. The talent and infrastructure definitely exist in Europe. (until the people leave for the US) Is it the big VC money, or some magical governmental support (military-industrial complex)? is it the english language that gives the US-companies an advantage? is it the different mindset? I really do not know.

It's very weird and also sad and a bit frustrating to see that the market is in favor of one country that seems to get everything. I'm still crying for Nokia.

Yep, I've been wondering this too. It could be:

- America has a large unified market, it's easier to expand than in the EU.

- Immigration, smart and ambitious people move to America so their companies have access to better pool of talent. Better labor mobility compared to the EU also helps.

- Cultural differences related to entrepreneurship and work.

- Europeans who have historically moved to America have specific genetics and learned behavior, which is passed over generations. Maybe they're less risk-averse, more optimistic or have more energy and desire to do something. Basically, if you select a subpopulation which is willing to move to a different country hoping for a better life, this subpopulation will have distinct traits.

- Legislation, taxes?

Europe should first identify this as a problem and then try hard to understand and solve it.

What is the value of Figma ($24 / month for Designing product mocks..) Why not just get the Adobe Suite with Illustrator, Photoshop,... I am really curious, as I am trying to create a design tool too. What is so great about it? Is there some USP?

Did you implement the payment process on your own, or does it come within a CMS that you are using? what kind of technology are you using to enable subscriptions after payments arrives?