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In the early 1800's Alexis de Tocqueville attributed a lot of American success to its small organizations/associations:

"There is nothing, according to me, that deserves more to attract our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of America....

In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one."

[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/805328.html


Francis Fukuyama mentions this in one his books -- The Origins of Political Order or Political Order and Political Decay, I can't remember which -- and argues that this is an important part of how American democracy was workable (and British democracy too, by the way).

Other thinkers with related ideas are mentioned by other commenters:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45364562

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45365419

As far as I can remember, Fukuyama's idea was that small organizations gave people a way come together as members of a certain community of practice or interest -- a trade, religion, a hobby -- and to gain first hand experience with self-governance. The organizations also provided a way give the shared concerns of their members a public voice. It's not feasible for a political candidate to visit every tradesman of every stripe in his shop, but when the horseshoers have a regular meeting at their hall, a candidate can often arrange to visit the hall for an hour or two. The same is true for ladies' charitable societies, religious groups, libraries, map collectors and many other groups that represent certain interests or powers in the society. These organizations were often (though not always) chapters in larger organizations, which provided a way to really focus people's voice at higher levels of government.

I believe the absence of these social organizations is more or less the cause of the imbalance in US democracy today. It simply is not workable for the individual to face off, toe-to-toe and unmediated, with the state.


Great connection to draw. Ben Franklin too spent much time creating and cultivating the strength of small grassroots organizations.


Yes, his autobiography is full of incidents relating to them. Starting a library, a fire department, two companies of militia...


It would be remiss to overlook the role of the church in 19th century American society. There was something of a religious revival. And the nature of a single congregation is that it never grew past the limits of a small, personable organization. While there was a flourishing of denominations, there was nothing akin to outright sectarian conflict or violence. So there was this small, personable network of congregations in intimate contact with each other that spread throughout the entire country, with small nodes every few miles or so at least.


Tocqueville is the first person I thought of reading this!


Yeah, I remember he commented on every town having its own local newspaper too, which has obviously been replaced by commercialized mass media today.



If you want to experiment with a version of the world model the article references, you can play with an implementation I put together here:

https://insightmaker.com/insight/2pCL5ePy8wWgr4SN8BQ4DD/The-...


No mobile support?


Interesting, I would love to hear how well those worked.

Grammit uses the Prompt API for the local LLM, which currently uses a version of the Gemma 3n model on Chrome.

Grammit uses prompting instead of fine-tuning or custom training. Simplified, it has a system prompt along the lines of: "Rewrite this text, correcting any grammar or spelling mistakes," combined with a prefilled conversation containing a number of examples showing an input sentence and the corrected output.


I don't know if Vivaldi supports the new Prompt API [0] that Grammit uses to run the local LLM.

As far as I know, the only browsers supporting it currently are Chrome [1] and Edge [2].

[0] https://github.com/webmachinelearning/prompt-api

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/ai/prompt-api

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/web-platfor...


There is a proposal to add support for this:

https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/...


There is a Prompt API in development that's available in both Chrome and Edge to give access to a local LLM. Chrome extensions have access to it and I believe websites can request access as part of an origin trial.

The model is fully managed by the browser. It's currently the Gemini Nano model on Chrome, and they are testing a version of the Gemma 3n model in beta channels. Edge uses phi-4-mini.

More information is available here: https://github.com/webmachinelearning/prompt-api


Yes, Chrome uses the Gemini Nano model for the Prompt API while Edge uses the Phi-4-mini model.


We're building a Chrome extension grammar checker that runs locally using Chrome's built-in LLM.

You can try it out here:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/grammit-the-ai-gram...

LLMs can also correct other sorts of mistakes, such as correcting "The first US President was _Ben Franklin_" to "George Washington".


>LLMs can also correct other sorts of mistakes, such as correcting "The first US President was _Ben Franklin_" to "George Washington".

And they can also cause new factual mistakes that a grammar checker never would!


Preach.


Epic is not a customer of Apple.

Many of Apple's customers are also customers of Epic.

Apple is trying to prevent those shared customers from accessing Epic.


I think very few developers wish to be customers of Apple. But Apple gatekeeps the platform developers need to publish on.

It is this relations that is the core of DMA, and which DMA seeks to change.


They do not need, they want and they don't want to pay Apple.


This is ridiculous. If you develop a game that needs to be available on all major platforms, Apple devices are a part of them.

Are you also one of the people, who would argue, that you can build you own road network, if you don't like the terms on the current road network?

Luckily it is not you who are going to work on these regulations, but people who actually care about free markets (how ironic that the EU is the progressive one on the question of freedom).


There is such a thing as a private road. This is not about access. This is about money, and to think the EU - the geniuses who gave us all GDPR pop ups - don't have a intrinsic interest in devaluing Apples ecosystem is delusional.


The GDPR didn't "give you" pop ups, it just made it mandatory for companies to seek our consent before they abuse our personal data. Many companies chose to be as obnoxious as possible about it to annoy you into agreeing. You need to rethink who you're directing your anger at.

As a matter of practical advice, there are optional filter lists for uBlock Origin that block the vast majority of consent popups. I barely see any these days.


And there's Consent-o-Matic for the rest.


> he geniuses who gave us all GDPR pop ups

It was not part of GDPR, GDPR also says that giving and removing consent should be equally easy and not remove functionality (like disabling the whole website with a transparent black background) hence the vast majority of the cookie banners are illegal.

Blame companies for illegal behaviour, the EU's rules are supposed to give you the information about how/where your private information is being shared. That's genius, and you should be grateful that now you know how much your personal information leaks.


> There is such a thing as a private road.

Yep, but not interstate roads. You can also buy a pocket calculator, which in your analogy is the private road.

You go with you conspiracy theories.

The explicit goal of the DMA is to open up the market. I can only recommend you to read a bit more about it: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/index_en


You can call Apple a customer or supplier of Epic, but it's just semantics they do have a business relationship.

The deeper point is companies get rid of litigious business partners whenever possible. It's one reason why you end up regulating utilities, nobody wants the electric company to have excessive control over the local economy. Where exactly digital platforms sit on this spectrum is probably a question for legislators not the courts.


I've created a few DSL's and I've regretted not closely emulating an existing language that users already know.

When creating a new DSL you should find the language that is most familiar to your users. That could be Python, Javascript, or SQL. There is a good chance though that it is spreadsheet formulas.

Whatever that language, align capabilities you add to your DSL with the syntax and function naming of that language only diverging where needed to add the custom capabilities which motivated the DSL.

The closer you align with what your users already know, the more easily they will be able to adopt it. An added benefit of this that emerged in the past year is GPT's will be able to write your DSL with less prompting.


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