> If it's affecting only a tiny number of users

Tiny number of users with such an enormous user base (10-16% desktop share) still means there's thousands of users affected.

Maybe a subscription based payment model would also work for in general?

Similar to a gym membership where only a small part of the paying users actually show up.

I'm referring to these kind of articles as "Look Ma, I made the AI fail!"

Still I would agree we need some of these articles when other parts of the internet is "AI can do everything, sign up for my coding agent for $200/month"

My thoughts went into a different direction: "Maybe I should buy a small tablet so that I can read code properly without carrying a full laptop?"

(Sure, there might be small laptops of similar dimensions ... But as the name "laptop" suggests these are made for a different UX... and they require more effort to turn on/off)

The whole way media treats numbers is more than tiring:

"X increased by Y"

Sure... but:

- What's the relative increase? - Is this increase out of the ordinary? Annually? Globally?

But I don't think this is some sort of conspiracy. Rather: Most journalists are not very smart.

> I wonder what the overlap is of people who find out about one of these URLs, but also does not know how to use a VPN? It seems to me like it would be near zero.

The whole kinox thing was "common knowledge" among students a few years ago. And this was way before VPN providers became patrons of the arts.

My pet idea (which I'm also reluctant to fully get behind):

Participation in social media (including comments sections in newspapers, etc) only with verified identities but behind some sort of escrow (so that you're anonymous to the public and also the platform... until you break the law by threatening SA or similar).

Why?

Bots, trolls, etc are a huge problem and if only actual people could post, this would a bit harder for bad actors.

There are plenty of "easy money working from home" scams where the victim/patsy is a regular person duped into criminal activities like mail forwarding packages bought with stolen credit cards. I wonder if the same ecosystem would crop up around such an identity scheme.

One reason I could think of: Fewer dependencies that need integration

By introducing a dependency on a third-party service with no SLA? This seems to make the dependency situation worse.

Ah haha. I love this conversation of trying to find a product market fit in public.

What if the input to the JavaScript (mermaid in this case) is not trusted to run on the end client machines but by running untrusted input on a sandbox (this service, or self hosted idk) is somehow acceptable and the output a blob of an image is acceptable to display on the actual client machines.

Takes the planets to align just right and need us to squint just enough but I think we can find something if we look hard enough.

But then mermaid can simply output PNG so you could run it as a worker... Thinking...

To further this: You can even feel the org structure in games.

- Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth clearly had two completely decoupled teams working on the main game and the open world design respectively

- Cyberpunk 2077 is filled with small shoeboxes of interactable content

My experience with coding agents points into the other direction: It's mentally very taxing!

Usually, you have a lot of time to think on the side while coding on what to do next, strategize, etc. But if you work in small increments with an LLM agent, this time is reduced and you have to be ready for the next thing once one increment is done.

So I don't see this as an equalizer. Rather, those who can constantly push forward are getting much more than those who don't.