[HN Gopher] Give people something to link to
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Give people something to link to
Author : simonw
Score : 122 points
Date : 2024-07-13 16:14 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (simonwillison.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (simonwillison.net)
| verdverm wrote:
| Another great post by Simon.
|
| I literally built this concept into my new project last night,
| because I wanted to add evidence to the story about the Google
| Gemini App moderating yt-dlp, by showing that the Gemini API does
| not. Also to enable a funnel to the project and the other
| business-y reasons Simon outlines.
|
| https://topicalsource.dev/chat/84a0d6dd-f66f-4f12-af17-5e99c...
|
| The other thing I did was use localStorage to keep a list of
| public chats you've visited, so that when you come back you can
| see the other chats you have read. Also easier lookup than trying
| to find wherever you may have gotten the original link from.
| (like scrolling back in text history)
| verdverm wrote:
| (btw, don't go to the example YouTube link, Gemini pulled a
| common troll meme)
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > _Hyperlinks are the best thing about the web_
|
| Indeed. Well, hyperlinks and URLs.
|
| URLs are the cornerstone of the web. A precise, universal
| (hopefully), long-lasting (hopefully) way of referencing articles
| and other resources. It's always frustrating to see people fail
| to appreciate their brilliance, e.g. _search this on YouTube_
| rather than just pasting a link into a message. Giving a write-up
| a permanent home on the web can certainly help give it
| visibility, and help the author avoid writing up the same ideas
| again.
|
| Related classic essay: _Cool URIs don 't change_. [0][1]
|
| [0] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23865484
| cxr wrote:
| Two under-utilized properties of URLs are also that:
|
| - there's a near-infinite supply of them
|
| - they support forward declaration
|
| Together the practical upshot is that if you're having a
| conversation with someone or responding during the Q&A of a
| talk or whatever and you want to be able to say, "Yeah, we
| thought about that, and we have some information about it on
| our site--just visit acmeinitiative.example.com/skub," except
| that you haven't already written the /skub article yet, that
| doesn't preclude you from being able to say in the moment (i.e.
| live) that /skub is effective immediately now the designated
| handle for such an article, and is how any interested party
| should retrieve it once the article does appear--whenever that
| is. (The same goes for third-party articles or other resources
| you want to reference--just mint a URL on-the-fly and then
| whenever you get a chance set up a redirect to whatever it is
| you wanted to link to.)
|
| There are so many recordings (podcasts episodes, etc.) that
| I've listened to involving smart, technical people who
| definitely control their own domains but don't think to take
| advantage of this. Usually they sort of mumble some description
| that you _might_ be able to use to find whatever they 're
| talking about, or they manage to only get half the words in the
| title wrong when they're trying to recall it for the host, and
| then you and every other interested listener has to
| individually squander time and attention if you want to track
| it down. It results in a huge waste of collective energy.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I hate the " _search on <whatever>_" statements.
|
| 1. It triggers my "AOL Keyword" yuck response immediately.
|
| 2. It completely ignores the concept of search bubbles. The
| results you and I get when searching the same term can be
| wildly different.
|
| 3. URLs and hyperlinks are _right there_. Instead of trying to
| make me do extra work you can just link me directly to a thing.
| That way I can see your exact reference instead of wading
| through a bunch of reaction videos to the video you wanted me
| to see.
| veqq wrote:
| The walled gardens increasingly block URLs
|
| - FB blocks many sites for sharing copywrited content (even
| random blogs) - reddit blocks all dot ru, may archival sites,
| telegram links etc. etc. - twitter blocked some blogging
| platforms - also many smaller sites block discord (which is
| justified)
|
| Hopefully this will motivate people to leave them.
| fragmede wrote:
| It's easy enough to tell someone to click on
| https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ, but how do you transfer that URL
| verbally, over a phone call or some other voice-only medium
| like podcasts with out resorting to an equally hard to memorize
| url shortener?
| randometc wrote:
| Along these lines, Square's incident response meme lives on as
| https://outage.party/
| ibash wrote:
| Dead links are the worst. Can someone make a browser extension
| that uses gpt to hallucinate websites for dead links?
| jdougan wrote:
| There are extensions that talk to the Wayback Machine
| euroderf wrote:
| Would it be so difficult to ping all links in a page being
| loaded, and clearly mark the dead ones ?
|
| Sure it would eat some bandwidth, but so do prefetch schemes
| and other stuff intended to speed up page renders.
| 6510 wrote:
| You could probably do some fun compression scheme where you
| provide just enough information for a fixed llm version to
| generate a page that satisfies its authors goals.
|
| Your idea seems fun if people can one by one describe what the
| page use to look like and/or crawl the web for clues. We can
| have our _under reconstruction_ banners back.
| GaggiX wrote:
| I don't think there is a browser extension but there is a site
| called websim AI that creates fake pages in real-time using
| LLMs and it honestly works surprisingly well.
| sva_ wrote:
| https://websim.ai/
| xyst wrote:
| We used to call this "imagination". I guess in the digital age
| this is something that is lost :3
| breck wrote:
| You might find this interesting:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40948221
| quectophoton wrote:
| And there are probably a few whole generations already that
| don't even know that link rot affects all links, not only links
| to "internal" URLs (like, say, a Discord image).
|
| So there's artists that just link to some social media website,
| not considering that accounts can be suspended, usernames can
| change, etc.
|
| Similarly there's also developers that "link to"[1]
| dependencies without considering that repositories might
| disappear (together with the source code for that dependency's
| version if nobody backed it up), a package's version might be
| removed from registries, online documentation for a dependency
| could disappear (ugh), etc.
|
| [1]: Just adding name+version to whatever manifest file and
| forgetting about it forever. _Maybe_ adding a cache (not even a
| proper mirror, much less any self-sufficient way to build the
| dependency in case of disaster).
| remoquete wrote:
| You'd think that OpenAI, by now, had technical writers on
| payroll. Well, according to LinkedIn, they don't. It's not that
| surprising, then, that their documentation is in such a sorry
| state. Why they haven't hired specialized roles for documentation
| is beyond me; they either think they're irrelevant, or they
| ruthlessly prioritize growth over docs. Whatever the reason,
| they're hurting themselves.
| gryfft wrote:
| Hiring technical writers would be admitting to human supremacy
| in the technical writing space. Better optics to use GPT-
| generated docs regardless of impact to engineers and users.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Like Google and customer support?
| simonw wrote:
| OpenAI's documentation is improving a bit now, but they're
| currently being left in the dust by Anthropic. The Anthropic
| prompting guide is genuinely the best I've seen anywhere:
| https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-...
| quectophoton wrote:
| This is something rsync.net (the service) does well. For example,
| I haven't seen any other service with a "CEO page"[1]. Maybe it's
| something common and I just haven't noticed in any other service
| because it was not as discoverable.
|
| I don't know if it's really useful since I don't think I've ever
| needed to forward anything to any CEO, but I'm not even a
| customer and this page is the first thing that came to mind when
| reading the article.
|
| [1]: https://www.rsync.net/products/ceopage.html
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