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Trump signs executive order for single national AI regulation framework (cnbc.com)
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A win for states rights!
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I wish this article would include what the details of the framework are. It’s unhelpful in its current form.
Denial of service and source code exposure in React Server Components (react.dev)
Wouldn't make more sense keeping React smaller and left those features to frameworks? I liked it more when it was marketed as the View in MVC. Surely can still be used like that today but it still feels bloated
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But the react-components are a separate library, they are not installed by default
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? afaik react server components made it to core
git checkout v15.0.0 There we go.
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Can I have v15 with the rendering optimizations of further versions?
This isn't a Javascript problem, this is a React problem. You could theoretically rewrite React and RSC in any language and the outcome would be the same. Say Python ran in the browser natively, and you reimplented React on browser and server in Python. Same problem, not Javascript.
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> This isn't a Javascript problem, this is a React problem. It happened with Next.js as well https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/11106 > Say Python ran in the browser natively, and you reimplented React on browser and server in Python. Same problem, not Javascript. Yes. And since Python does not natively run in the browser, that mistake never happens. With JavaScript, the desire to have "backend and frontend in a single codebase" requires active resistance.
I wonder what does these vulnerabilities mean for Facebook. As per my knowledge, Facebook's the biggest web app written in React.
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This is about React Server Components, a subset/feature of React that can optionally be installed and used. Apps that use React without server components are not affected.
So contrary to all other changes, this one was not done for Facebook to use. What was the reason behind RSC then?
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Market capture?
React Server Components always felt uncomfortable to me because they make it hard to look at a piece of JavaScript code and derive which parts of it are going to run on the client and which parts will run on the server. It turns out this introduces another problem too: in order to get that to work you need to implement some kind of DEEP serialization RPC mechanism - which is kind of opaque to the developer and, as we've recently seen, is a risky spot in terms of potential security vulnerabilities.
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I had this issue with a React app I inherited, there was a .env with credentials, and I couldn't figure out whether it was being read from the frontend or the backend. So I ran a static analysis (grep) on the apk generated and points light at face dramatically the credentials were inside the frontend!
It's really concerning that the biggest, most eye-grabbing part of this posting is the note with the following: "It’s common for critical CVEs to uncover follow‑up vulnerabilities." Trying to justify the CVE before fully explaining the scope of the CVE, who is affected, or how to mitigate it -- yikes.
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Very standard in security, announcements always always always try to downplay their severity.
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fwiw, the goal here wasn't to downplay the severity, but to explain the context to an audience who might not be familiar with CVEs and what's considered normal. I moved the note down so the more important information like severity, impacted versions, and upgrade instructions are first.
You need to update again.
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This could be the Next.js motto.
I remember when the point of an SPA was to not have all these elaborate conversations with the server. Just "here's the whole app, now only ask me for raw data."
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It's funny (in a "wtf" sort of way) how in C# right now, the new hotness Microsoft is pushing is Blazor Server, which is basically old-school .aspx Web Forms but with websockets instead of full page reloads. Every action, every button click, basically every input is sent to the server, and the changed dom is sent back to the client. And we're all just supposed to act like this isn't absolutely insane.
> Then they rediscovered PHP, Rails, Java EE/Spring, ASP.NET, and reboted SPAs into fullstack frameworks. I can understand the dislike for Next but this is such a poor comparison. If any of those frameworks at any point did half the things React + Next-like frameworks accomplished and the apps/experiences we got since then, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
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> If any of those frameworks at any point did half the things React + Next-like frameworks accomplished and the apps/experiences we got since then, we wouldn't be having this discussion. This is interesting because every Next/React project I see has a slower velocity than the median Rails/Django product 15 years ago. They’re just as busy, but pushing so much complexity around means any productivity savings is cancelled out by maintenance and how much harder state management and security are. Theoretically performance is the justification for this but the multi-second page load times are unconvincing. From my perspective, it really supports the criticism about culture in our field: none of this is magic, we can measure things like page-weight, response times, or time to complete common tasks (either for developers or our users), but so much of it is driven by what’s in vogue now rather than data.
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How does Next accomplish more than a PHP/Ruby/whatever backend with a React frontend? If anything the latter is much easier to maintain and to develop for.
Correct, their main purpose is ecosystem lock-in. Because why return json when you can return html. Why even build a SPA when the old school model of server-side includes and PHP worked just fine? TS with koa and htmx if you must but server-side react components are kind of a waste of time. Give me one example where server side react components are the answer over a fetch and json or just fetching an html page?
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The only example that has any traction in my view are web-shops, which claim that time-to-render and time-to-interactivity are critical for customer retention. Surely there are not so many people building e-commerce sites that server components should have ever become so popular.
UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16 (alecmuffett.com)
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Serious question: What's the gold standard in blocking certain content for an age group, without tracking ones identity? My initial thought would it would be just making it super easy for their guardians to distribute and control device content. But let the control end at that echelon of power; Not even the local councils or schools should be given the power to regulate social media for kids to this extent IMO, let alone the govt
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Remember how the morons, at the early stage, were saying "come on, don't be excessive, it's not China here", and now we are reaching a similar or worse civil rights point in most western countries...
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I guess we will see a jump in the number of foreign eSIMs sold to UK minors.
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UKistan doing UKinstan things
Why does it seem like all this age-restriction and the consequential VPN bans are happening across the west all at once?
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Guaranteed this is the next move they'll try in Australia too.
I know what you're thinking: these restrictions are easy to work around. But don't worry, we can just layer more restrictions on top. Eventually the children will be safe! The government just needs to... - require proof of age (ID) to install apps from unofficial sources on your phone or PC. Probably best to block this at both the OS and also popular VPN downloading sites like github.com and debian.org. - require proof of age (ID) to unblock DNS provider IP addresses like 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 at your ISP. - make sure children aren't using any other "privacy" tools that might be a slippery slope to installing a VPN. This makes it so much easier for the parents too! The internet will be so safe that they won't even need to talk to their children about internet safety.
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You joke, but as I understand it, all internet in the UK has Government mandated 'adult content' filtering by default and you have to go through a process to prove you're over 18 to have it removed... So they are much more than halfway there already...
What is it about these UK politics posts that draws a particular type of commenter? What the heck media are these folks consuming to have such a warped view of this country?
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Seems to be a device for American free speech advocates to feel like they’re contributing something while being distracted from Trump chilling free speech by shaking down CBS & ABC, defunding Harvard, bogus investigations into James Comey, Tish James & others, Texas school book bannings, AAUP vs Rubio, etc, etc.
> any relevant device supplied for use in the UK must have installed tamper-proof system software It's happening. Computer freedom, everything the word "hacker" ever stood for, will be officially destroyed if this passes. We're about to be robbed of control over our computers by force of law . It's just the UK now but eventually it will be every country. This is a very dark day. I've been prophesizing its arrival for a while now. I was secretly hoping I was wrong about everything, that we'd turn this around, that we'd enshrine a right to control our computers into law. The opposite is happening instead. It's so sad...
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The absurd thing is that the amendment only covers smartphones and tablets - which means those who the bill aims to target can easily break the law by using a laptop, desktop, camera, smart TV etc. In short, the Pandora's Box of automated surveillance and security risk on any smartphone or tablet is opened, while a gigantic loophole for serious offenders is left open.
An illegitimate underground scene running on life support, using old unlocked computers which are a finite resource they will eventually run out of. Utterly depressing... We used to be free... If this passes, the only strategic move available is to somehow develop the ability to make our own computer processors in our garages. Billion dollar fabs are single points of failure and they will be exploited, subverted, regulated and controlled. The only possible solution is to democratize and decentralize semiconductor manufacturing to the point anyone can do it. We must be able to make free computer hardware at home just like we can make free computer software at home. Anything short of this and it's over.
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> If this passes, the only strategic move available is to somehow develop the ability to make our own computer processors in our garages. How feasible is this really? I'd feel a lot better if it were possible to produce chips free from backdoors even if the resulting CPUs weren't even as fast as an old Pentium III, but my guess is that any effort to do this at scale will be quickly shutdown by the government
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No idea how feasible this is. When it comes to electronics in general I'm pretty much beginner level. Here's an example that was posted here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46178789 Lithographically fabricated integrated circuit in a garage. Whatever this is, we need a lot more of it to stand a chance at resisting governments. > any effort to do this at scale will be quickly shutdown by the government The whole idea is to make this so easy and ubiquitous that they can't shut it down completely. They can shut down some but not all. I believe this is the only way a law like this can be resisted. Promote civil disobedience by making it easy.
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In practice, import them from China like we used to with region unlockable DVD players. > democratize and decentralize semiconductor manufacturing to the point anyone can do it. Physics makes this completely unrealistic.
On a related note, they built their digital ID so that third parties could verify attributes (it's NOT just a single-service login across government + a linking ID across government services, which is how it was sold by the BBC). They're pretty close to completely de-anonymising the internet for UK citizens. Say they introduce an Australian-style social media ban for under 16s, then requires all social media to link their accounts to digital IDs for this verification. Naturally the only remaining loophole is if a UK citizen manages to avoid being flagged as British ever by using a VPN, so I expect they will focus on that going forwards. Keep in mind the UK already arrests and imprisons vast numbers of people for speech offences, there's no slippery-slope argument here because the UK is already at the bottom of the slope as an ultra-authoratitarian anti-speech nation.
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This thread and the positions espoused by a clear group of users such as the one im responding to is really weird. Sure the UK ain't perfect and this proposal by a group of lords (Not the government ...) is naive at best. But the way this is all framed and discussed here as some kind of wild government overreach with totalitarian intentions and the repeated extreme positions by a small group of users on this thread just shouts influence campaign. Such campaigns intentionally mix and distort facts, such as the statistics and anecdata which are quoted repeatedly in this thread, which are in substance much more nuanced if users actually bothered to read the linked articles.
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Certainly, calling the UK "ultra-authoritarian" is incorrect. But the point about attempts of completely deanonymizing Internet access is still important. The inability of the government to know everything about its citizens is an important check that prevents it from slipping towards illiberal, even if prosperous, system, like that in mainland China, or Singapore.
> On a related note, they built their digital ID so that third parties could verify attributes Isn’t that the entire point of government ID of any variety? The only reason anyone ever asks to see ID is so they can use it verify attributes of your identity, such as name and age. Otherwise what’s the point of an Identity Document , if it’s not to document something? Digital ID has always been sold as something approximating your passport/Driver License (there is no official government ID in the UK), but digital, on your phone, and actually a government identity document. Rather than a government document that has a specific purpose (such as crossing the border or driving a car), which people pretend is government ID. Something that can cause a serious problem for people because passports and driver’s licenses aren’t free to obtain, replace or keep valid. Plus the government departments that issue them refuse to take any responsibility or liability for the accuracy or validity of the documents for any use case outside their very specific role in narrow government functions, like crossing the border, or figuring out if you’re allowed to drive a car. The UK already has citizen SSO that stretches across all digital government services, and has had that for a decade plus now. Although it’s not really attached your identity, it’s just a unified auth system so government departments don’t end up creating their own broken auth systems instead.
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A digital ID can be better than a passport / driver license, because it can verify only specific attributes of the bearer to a third party. E.g. only the fact that you're older than 21 in a liquor store or a car rental, but not other details readily visible in a passport.
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> Isn’t that the entire point of government ID of any variety? Ideally this could be done without deanonymizing accounts to service providers unless the user wants to for a 'verified' account linked to their identity publically but I don't think any digital ID system has been built that way. Imagine it acting like OAuth but instead of passing back an identity token it's just verification of age, platforms would store that which would show they had performed the age verification and could be used for other age gates if there are any.
12,000 arrests per year, jury trials limit the conviction rate to 10%. So they are currently trying to get rid of juries, which they will do (at least for speech offenses). Labour have an overwhelming majority, and a leader that has styled himself as a more extreme Nigel Farage. The UK is actually a scary place right now, if you are paying attention..
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> 12,000 arrests per year Arrested is not the same thing as being charged. The latter is what would lead to a trial. > So they are currently trying to get rid of juries, which they will do Huh > a leader that has styled himself as a more extreme Nigel Farage I’m sorry, what? > The UK is actually a scary place right now It is?
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>Huh https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn5lxg2l0lqo >I’m sorry, what? Take the online protection act for an example, Nigel Farage though it went too far, Keir Starmer wanted to include a ban on VPNs... >it is? If you have been paying attention, yes.
> The UK is actually a scary place right now, if you are paying attention.. It has been the most authoritarian country in the West for decades already, this is nothing new. British people are the most apathetic people in the world, so it's really easy to abuse them.
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>the most authoritarian country in the West Australia and the US are more authoritarian in specific areas e.g. censorship and taxation respectively.. but overall, yes, the UK is worse. >British people are the most apathetic I'm not sure that's fair, our culture looks apathetic from abroad, but like other countries we care deeply about what our media tell us to care about.
> Keep in mind the UK already arrests and imprisons vast numbers of people for speech offences I think you’ve been spending too much time on Twitter
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Or spending too much time in jail from speaking freely.
It's illegal to insult anyone in Germany, and has been for a long time. Libel, slander, and insults are all criminal (not civil) offences. I know what you're thinking: "That sounds crazy" - Yeah, it kinda is. In practice this is rarely enforced, as the offended party must file a formal complaint and most people have better things to do.
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> "That sounds crazy" - Yeah, it kinda is. In practice this is rarely enforced Generally, selective enforcement is itself a huge problem. That might not actually be an issue in this instance though if the only thing preventing enforcement is the lack of a formal complaint and assuming that the complaint process is easily accessible to everyone (not requiring money to file, and without other barriers that might prevent certain people from filing but not others). It's still a terrible idea to make it illegal to insult others, but "rarely enforced" may not be the red flag it usually is.
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Well, time is money, right? If someone files a complaint and goes through with whatever proceedings ensue you can bet that it's not a single mom working a full-time job. For police officers, on the other hand, enforcing this law on behalf of themselves is part of their job. So in practice this law is grossly unfair. It does lead to a greater level of decorum in public debate than in most other countries, which is nice, but it's not a fair law by any means.
German prosecutors actually did a bizarre and out-of-touch (for an American audience) interview with 60 Minutes recently where they proudly declare they're going to bring order to the Internet and how things like calling politicians "dicks"[1] is rightfully VERBOTEN. > But it was a 2021 case involving a local politician named Andy Grote that captured the country's attention. Grote complained about a tweet, that called him a "pimmel," a German word for the male anatomy. That triggered a police raid and accusations of excessive censorship by the government. As prosecutors explained to us, in Germany, it's OK to debate politics online. But it can be a crime to call anyone a "pimmel," even a politician. Naturally, it's necessary to arrest people for being mean and/or expressing VERBOTEN political beliefs on the Internet so that...uh...everyone will feel free to express their opinions. > Josephine Ballon: This is not only a fear. It's already taking place, already half of the internet users in Germany are afraid to express their political opinion, and they rarely participate in public debates online anymore. Half of the internet users. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/policing-speech-online-germany-60-minutes-transcript/
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Germany does not protect free speech the way the US does. You're free to voice any opinion, but the exact wordings in which you are allowed to do it are restricted. You are allowed to say "I hate Merz" but not "Merz is a piece of garbage". I'm not saying this is good, but it's not recent and it does not prevent free communication of ideas.
I thought Daily Mail was close to tabloid status (or a bit above). Aren’t they banned from being a citation on Wikipedia?
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It's a chipwrapper.
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They are a trash paper so skepticism is warranted but care should be taken not to dismiss facts just because of who reports them. Thankfully, we don't have to depend on the word of the Daily Mail for evidence that the UK doesn't value the ideal of free speech and are far too comfortable punishing and silencing online speech. It's a problem, and it makes their efforts to tie people's online activity to an individual worrying.
It can be hard to wrap your head around it from the US, but many of these are people that are in fact being arrested for writing posts on social media, e.g., https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-67294873 (arrested for post wearing a Manchester Arena bomber costume) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-60930670 (arrested for posting "the only good British soldier is a dead British soldier" from Scotland) that would be categorically protected speech in the US.
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> that would be categorically protected speech in the US. So they'd just send ICE to pick you up and get you denaturalized.
You do realise what terrorist speech entails though, right?
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https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/07/uk-palestine-action-ban-disturbing-misuse-uk-counter-terrorism-legislation
Exposing the military for being an inept paper tiger is a truly heinous crime.
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Destroying military equipment neccesary for national defense is a good way to get in legal trouble in pretty much any country. They should consider themselves lucky they did it in an enlightened country like Britian. Many places in the world that would be a death sentence.
I'm relatively confident this was the entire end goal of the Online Safety Act. Get the (relatively) easy law passed, then "oh no platforms are only requiring this for UK-based IPs and there are too many VPNs/proxies, I guess we need to de-anonymize everyone".
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What a brilliant plan! Nobody could have seen this coming! God I'm sick of the constant attacks against online freedom. God forbid anyone should ever have a private conversation.
>It's so organic and grass roots It is though. This is one of the few surveillance issues actually driven by grassroots organisations like ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Shout ) in particular when it comes to adult content who have been at this globally for well over a decade. There's no shadowy cabal trying to age-restrict porn or social media, this is more like a modern day Carrie Nation. Puritanism always comes from the bottom up
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Collective Shout are a tiny fringe group, they have had a massively outsized impact because of some extremely effective and clever lobbying but few people here in Australia where they are based know about them (they're definitely not a household name by any stretch of the imagination).
> democracy house of lords
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they're subordinate to the commons it's really not a problem, they're essentially a reviewing chamber it works quite well
It's crazy that there is a house of unelected lords in an allegedly modern country.
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They have very limited power these days. They advise the House of Commons, as more or less a hereditary think tank. They can delay the passage of bills, though this has been limited to a maximum delay of one year since 1949 (less for some types of bills) and there are some checks on this ability. They have a few other things they can do that are (IMO) too boring to warrant much thought unless you're a member of parliament. The idea of a House of Lords does strike me as a bit odd, but it's not really the big deal it used to be.
Brit here. The HoL's role is to review and scrutinise legislation as part of the parliamentary process of turning bills into acts (laws). Most legislation originates in the (directly elected) House of Commons. But all parliamentary bills pass through the Lords, and they can propose ammendments, but those ammendments have to be approved by the Commons. Those that aren't are sent back to the Lords for reconsideration. In the event of deadlock, the Commons has primacy and can overrule the Lords.
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Good Lord, Jeeves! Do you mean to tell me that a gaggle of elected coves can simply override the peers in the Upper House? It seems a distinct inversion of the natural order, what? Rather like the oyster overruling the walrus! It makes one feel the foundations of the Empire are trembling a bit, like a jelly in a high wind.
Are there any limitations on what can be proposed in one of the houses? For example in Australia our upper house (senate) can't adjust or propose bills to do with money.
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no
Interesting to see these kinds of comments more in this thread compared to the one from yesterday. The one from yesterday was discussing how australia is banning social media for anyone under 16. Most comments were supportive because they hate social media. A few comments were discussing how it is just a way to propagate more KYC.
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As an Australian it's so irritating how enthusiastic people are to give up their privacy and freedom of speech, and also force everyone to hand over personal information to private companies, on the flimsiest of pretexts from the most incompetent of governments. After the number of data breaches we've seen, they want to do this, and in the least privacy-preserving way possible. Why not set up a government api where a site can get a yes/no answer about age using tokens, so the site itself gets no information but if the age is ok? Nope, we'll just pick a few sites and force everyone to give them their data, what could go wrong? And if you actually look at the suicide statistics, there's no epidemic of suicides going on... https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/population-groups/young-people/suicide-self-harm-young-people It's just lazy parents who can't be bothered parenting looking for a quick fix. I want to hand my phone to little tommy and turn my brain off. What's even more galling is that the quick fix with so many obvious negatives won't even fix anything. As a kid I had unlimited time to get around any blocks. It's so dumb. 4chan is perfectly fine, but reddit must be stopped! Just to be clear I don't think either should be blocked. Make the entire internet 18+ only and put the parents who let kids on the net in jail, I don't care.
"ssh-D" would be a good name for a terrorist née protest group opposing this.
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It'll be amusing right up until the UK decides SSH is a threat to children.
Is there actually a massive problem that they are trying to solve with this?
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If it's anything like Australia, then yes - here the conservative major party hates the interent because it has taken so much away from their massive donor and supporters' businesses (mostly legacy media - Murdoch's News Ltd, Nine Entertainment, etc.), and the more "progressive" major party (left of the Overton window but objectively fairly centre-right) hates it because actual progressives there shoot down all their hypocrisy and they can't control the narrative at all. They both want to go back to the days of billionare-controlled media setting and driving the narrative, because they know how to influence that (or in Labor's case, think they know but they always fail to, despite sucking up to the media). So they dispose the Internet and social media.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void (suggger.substack.com)
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Given the site where this is posted and the screenshot, is the author an engineer turned fiction writer? Kudos if true. Posting these must take a lot of courage.
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As someone who thinks about the co-evolution of language and culture quite often, I love this sort of think-piece. Gives me a bunch of my own threads to pull
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English does this kind of thing all the time, as others have pointed out, but often to understate things somewhat. "Not bad!" actually means pretty good, but the speaker does not want to sound as if gushing. (Maybe it wasn't "fantastic", but still more than acceptable.) Even the opening example—like if Alice said something truthful but offensive or bombastic, and Bob objects, Carol can say "Well, she's not wrong..." Back when Americans economically feared the Japanese rather than the Chinese, there was a myth that the Japanese were so conformist that the same word meant both "to differ" and "to be wrong"— chigau (違う). Well, Japanese society is pretty conformist, ngl, but the reality is a bit more subtle. In Japanese it's incredibly rude to tell someone they're wrong so instead they say chigaimasu , "it's different".
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In English it's rude to say there's something wrong with somebody's child, so people will say "Jane sure is different." Though it's generally still considered saying too much.
There are some direct ways to express agreement in Chinese, like 對 or 好. At the same time, the negative statements described are not unique to Chinese at all. It's not that deep, really.
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The author states outright that this is not unique to Chinese, it's just much more prevalent than in American English. 不错 is literally "not bad", but it's more positive than the American English equivalent, being basically semantically equal to 很好 (lit. "very good", although in practice just plain old good/OK). You can even say seemingly absurd things like 很不错 "very not bad" (= excellent); or you can tamp it down with 还不错 "also not bad". Funnily enough, in British English, "not bad" is high praise; but you still wouldn't say "very not bad".
This makes me think of a tool from semiotics called the Greimas square where you can have opposing concepts e.g. A and B (ugly & beautiful, for & against, legal & illegal). At the surface level they can appear as binaries, but the negation of A is not equivalent to B and vice versa (e.g. illegal is not equivalent to not-legal) and encourages the consideration of more complex meta-concepts which at surface level seem like contradictions but are not (both beautiful and ugly, neither for or against). -- Others have pointed out that English speakers do have the capacity, and do use these sort of double negatives that allow for this ambiguity and nuance, but if you are an English-only speaker, I do believe that there are concepts that are thick with meaning and the meaning cannot accurately be communicated through a translation - they come with a lot of contextual baggage where the meaning can not be communicated in words alone. -- As a New Zealander who's lived in the U.S. for the last 15 years, I've realized in conversations with some native Americans where despite sincere (I think) efforts on both sides, I've not been able to communicate what I mean. I don't think it's anything to do with intelligence, but like author hints how language shapes how we think and therefore our realities. -- I've never found poetry to be interesting, but recently I've come to appreciate how I think poets attempt to bypass this flaw of language, and how good poets sometimes seem to succeed!
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Western culture is predicated on a sort of positivist metaphysics, and our language reflects that. Whereas in the east, the langauges and cultures have both long ago (as in, thousands of years ago) assimilated the precepts of non-dualism, which brings with it a greater degree of subtlety, through its embedded understanding of equanimity, dependent arising, and so on. It's a different ontological root, and therefore a different schema altogether. Knowing what I know of you guys in NZ, a lot of that sort of thinking has made its way into popular understanding by way of encounters with the Maori people, and some of it has to do with more modern notions of pluralism, and some of it has to do with British politeness. All that to say, it is not your fault nor the Americans fault that there's a gap in understanding. It's the byproduct of where those two schemas do not connect.
native Americans or Native Americans? the latter would be more like the Moriori and fit the context better, but somehow native English speakers who arent interlegible are also interesting.
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While I don’t want to take away anything from OP’s personal experience, I find it vastly more likely that this is a subjective problem and has nothing to do whatsoever with a lack of mutual understanding between New Zealanders and Americans. Of course the two dialects are mutually understandable. That doesn’t mean that communicating some concepts overloaded with personal experience can’t be difficult but this is true within dialects as well. Linguistic relativity remains fairly controversial, linguistic determinism is widely panned, and while there is empirical evidence for weak linguistic relativity, it is for rather weak instances, meaning it can usually be overcome with effort. And that’s for wildly unrelated language families, not two modern dialects with one intensely influenced by the other through mass media and other cultural phenomena.
I would say Australian English relies on this negation even more than British English, to the point of being confusing without more cultural context.
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Yeah nah... nah yeah, you're right.
"How are you?" "Not too bad" always makes me smile. Such a British answer.
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I say and hear it all the time in the US...
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"Can't complain"
I think it's especially American English that doesn't use litotes as much as British English or the other Western European languages. This piece seems to be very much about American English, when I read something like: > In English, this feels bizarre. If something is good, you say: Nice Great Perfect Brilliant
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Really? I read the same sentence (as an American) and immediately thought that they must be referring to British English. Certainly nobody says brilliant as an affirmation here. And "no problem" and "not bad" are both common colloquial statements in American English.
Yes, that sentence is simply untrue for, at the very least, BrE. For example: https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/home-news/chart-shows-what-british-people-say-what-they-really-mean-and-what-others-understand-a6730046.html (2015)
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This is all very familiar with this North Eastern American English speaker except the "quite good" one. The rest seem normal to me in my American English. Perhaps it's too many Dr Who and or Monty python as a youth. Though in New England the language can be very sarcastic and indirect.
One thing I remember from languagelog is that almost all English speakers have a form of "yeah no" and they all think they invented it. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=30758 Might be Scottish.
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Not only did Australians invent it, we also invented Pavlova, Sam Neill, etc.
My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020) (jeffhuang.com)
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If you append to the bottom of a 50-thousand line file, won't scrolling to the bottom be tedious? Or is he prepending new days to the top of the file?
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Better than choosing between 2000 productivity apps, And even better than coding the 2001st one.
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90% of the time I try to come up with systems more elaborate than a spreadsheet, I realize I’ll spend longer designing and maintaining it than I will actually using it. You really only see those efficiencies across larger organizations and even then it isn’t a given these sorts of systems will be well-maintained, and the benefits they provide are usually not so much efficiency as standardizing the way that users record data. This standardization is in turn mostly useful because it allows larger groups of people to coordinate across time and space (e.g. calendar events, and records of those calendar events for employees who joined years after they occurred). At an individual level you’re basically always better off using text files as the equivalent of a machine-readable blank piece of paper to scrawl notes on with minimal (if any) thought being given to other features.
Personally, I just use obsidian notes. Its simple enough, uses markdown, syncs to my phone. I like to break projects/problems out into checklists. Helps keep me motivated. I don't use the 'linking' feature between notes. The whole 'second brain' thing seems like something you do to make a neat screenshot of your note graph. I just use regular old folders like a file directory. My notes have gotten a little messy though.
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The nice thing about linking is that you can embrace the chaos a bit and not need to have everything organized into folders. Transclusions (embeds) are very useful also. I agree that the note graph visualizer is just a gimmick though.
I've been noticing lately, at least for myself, that useful technology stopped happening like 10-20 years ago. If all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked (without a monthly subscription.) There is also this article today: https://jon.recoil.org/blog/2025/12/an-svg-is-all-you-need.html about how great good ol' svg is. And then every recurring article about using RSS instead of all the other siloed products. textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better". Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?
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> all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked The improvements made during the late 2000s and 2010s mostly had to do with making the functionality of these technologies accessible to non-technical users. I was younger and probably more mentally agile back then, but I remember the first iTouch I ever bought being very intuitive to use; you could usually intimate what you wanted to do without even looking it up. I got so accustomed to this intuitiveness (Windows Vista being an unhappy interruption in those series of memories) that by the time Windows 8 rolled around I was completely taken aback by how bad it was. I mentioned in another comment that these productivity apps only really see a positive net expected value at the enterprise level, where they aren’t primarily used for efficiency but as coordination mechanisms and institutional memory. Individual users can only really hope to take advantage of them if they are intuitive to use. From what I’ve observed, most of these UX failures are not the result of a lack of technical aptitude, nor an issue of cost, but of failures in institutional coordination (principal-agent problems and things like that) or the market simply being cornered; both follow the general trend of consolidation in the tech industry. The companies that are making most of our software are huge and they lack the competition to incentivize them to improve.
I'd say Obsidian (just over five years old, since its first release), which is ironic because it's basically just a UI on top of text files.
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Logseq for me. Its just so powerful, the infinite nesting and draggable indents and zooming
With notepad.exe: At the first line of the a .txt file put .LOG This will then put a timestamp at the end of the file every time you open it. Also, if you press the F5 key it inserts a timestamp. Been using this for years and it's pretty much all I ever needed.
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Thank you throwaway613745!
An SVG is all you need (jon.recoil.org)
I recently found out that it is surprisingly hard to convert an SVG file that consists of series of line segments into a list of those line segments in Python. I tried with ChatGPT and Claude but both were not able to find a solution that respects the entire specification, especially transforms. Initially, my expectation was that there must be a library for this kind of thing, but alas.
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I seem to remember that the DOM nodes themselves expose some pretty useful functions. I think it was in the context of detecting edge crossings for a graph router, but you were able to interact with the computed/rendered coordinates in this context. Sorry that's not more useful and explicit, it was a while back and never went anywhere.
I agree with the author when they write: """ In my idealistic vision of how scientific publishing should work, each paper would be accompanied by a fully interactive environment where the reader could explore the data, rerun the experiments, tweak the parameters, and see how the results changed. """ I do like seeing larger labs/companies releasing research full of SVGs. In recent memory, I quite liked this from NVIDIA: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/dbr/blog/illustrated-evo2/
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Interactive and SVGs don't really mix, although intuitively it would seem that they do. Rendering remotely complex SVGs tale multiple seconds, while any kind of interactivity demands ~30+ frames per seconds. Without interactivity, postscript is vector graphics too.
I really like SVG, I did a lot of things with it and some interesting ones. The only blame I have is that it is sometime slow. Like for QR Code, precise maps or +100 pixels wide squares. More than 100 "DOM" elements and it will take multiple seconds to show. The animations also are slow too, compared to canvas, plain CSS or Lottie but nothing very cursed, it's mostly fine.
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I embedded a chess engine in SVG image of a chess board ( https://github.com/jnykopp/svg-embedded-chess ) so that the engine moved the pieces automatically and played against itself, just by viewing the SVG. This was done for a friend of mine who made an art installation that projected like some 50x20 (can’t remember exactly) of these images in a grid on a wall, for perpetual chess madness. The number of chess SVGs a laptop’s browser was able to run simultaneously did feel suprisingly low, but luckily it was enough for that particular piece of art.
Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1 (libroot.org)
I've read people say that some of the documents were fake to sensationalize the story. With Putin and China, honestly I prefer feeling like the US has the best cyber weapons available, and I am not even american. "Privacy" is different in the digital age. Computers make it easier for criminals to do what they do, so it's fair if the government tries to peek into it.
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Whats china invading again?
This was the main thread about Snowden on the day his identity was revealed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850590
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https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=5850590
If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State", which came out in 1998, I don't know how you can come away from that movie thinking anything other than someone in that script writing pipeline had some insider knowledge of what was happening. So many of the things they talk about in the film were confirmed by the Snowden releases that it's kinda scary. Today, it's almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it." I wish that weren't the case, but I'd like to see more representation embrace privacy as the basic right it should be again.
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> almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it." no it is not. This is parroting the helplessness you probably dislike. There are many factors at work in a complex demographic of modern America. It is worse than useless to repeat this incomplete and frankly lazy statement.
We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government. What this actually provides, first and foremost, is the capability to perform targeted surveillance more rapidly, and to do so temporally by reaching into datasets already recorded. Obviously this provides a much-needed capability for legitimate investigations, where the target of interest and their identifying markers may not yet be known.
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I was sitting in the auditorium, early 2010s at DEF CON ~X[¿I?]X~, when General Alexander gave the headlining speech of that conference (then-Director of NSA). Within the speech he defined the world "intercept," within the intelligence community, as meaning a human operator has (in some manner) catalogued some piece of information . The implication was that all data in stored forever , and machine learning tasks were making associations without meeting their definition of "having been intercepted" — even with the elementary ML of fifteen years ago, this was a striking admission. ---- This was among the first things I thought about after my initial weeks using GPT-3.5 (~January 2023): that most of these conversations wouldn't be considered "intercepted" despite this immense capability of humanless categorization. Now, almost three years later, I_just_hope_our_names_touch_on_this_watchlist.jpg
Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free (riviantrackr.com)
The replies to this comment are very telling. Everyone is highlighting various desires and issues with cars: - Cars are dangerous to people not in cars - Cars require your undivided attention (and even that isn't fool-proof) - Cars are inaccessible: age, eyesight, control operation, etc. - There's a lot of traffic (iow there's a lot of cars) What people are expressing a desire for is more robust public transit and transportation facilities that protect everyone: peds, drivers, cyclists, etc. The best way to solve all of these problems, totally ignoring self-driving for a moment, is to reduce the total number of vehicle miles traveled. Reduce the number of car trips. Reduce the length of car trips. If there are less cars, there is less danger from cars. If there are less cars, there is less traffic. The only way to have less cars is to provide alternatives: street cars, bike trails, pedestrian facilities, sub-regional buses and trains, inter-regional trains (or buses). Literally all of these problems get significantly better when there are less drivers on the road. Trains can provide the inter-regional travel that allows you to work, read, hangout, sleep, etc. without the constant danger of having to watch the road the entire time. Self-driving cars will certainly be useful, but I think people are really missing the point that the root of the problem is cars specifically. They can (and will!) still be available for people that truly want or need them, but harm reduction is the name of the game. Even changing a portion of your trip from car to something else can make a huge difference! It doesn't have to be door-to-door, it could be that you drive to a park-n-ride. Or you stop driving to the local downtown in the spring, summer, and fall. Most of the people in this comment section want better public transit. It can be made to work even if the goal is to go skiing or mountain biking once you arrive. Cars need to stop being the default and become the exception. It's cheaper, more efficient, safer, and healthier.
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> What people are expressing a desire for is more robust public transit and transportation facilities that protect everyone: peds, drivers, cyclists, etc. I'm going to take a guess here that you're in a bubble. Most people don't give more than a passing thought to protecting anybody else on the road but themselves and their own loved ones. You could say enlightened self interest means this should extend to random strangers, but I bet that as a practical matter it does not. I'd even go farther and suggest that the largest plurality of people who support public transit want it so that it will take other people off the road, not them.
One day, all personal transport will be AI, and lunatics like me who enjoy performance driving will have special vehicles we drive at a track. Self driving cars are great. That you can’t afford one is just a matter of time.
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Could happen. But we still allow horse-drawn carriages on some roads. I think I'll be long dead (and I wouldn't be surprised if everyone in this discussion will be long dead as well) before we kick human drivers off the road. If we really gave a shit about driving-related fatalities, there is a lot of fruit hanging way lower than replacing the average sober driver.
Driving can be annoying. I like it in some cases, but it's no fun when there's a ton of traffic, lots of stop lights, etc. I'd love to be able to push a button and let it handle the grunt work in those cases. Sometimes I want to do something else. Maybe adjust my music, or send a text. If the car can keep me going while I do that, it would be nice. I live with two people who can't drive. Often I have to take them to things. Tonight I'm going to spend about 90 minutes going, waiting, and coming back, so one of them can do something. It would be great if I could just put them in the car and say, have fun, see you later, and stay home while the car takes them there and back.
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Anecdotally, whenever I have to tote someone around who cannot drive, it is nearly universally true that they also cannot get in and out of the car without help, too. So that has to be arranged, a self-driving car won't be able to solve it.
> A train can't take me to the beach Yes it can!! Why can't a train take you to the beach? https://www.amtrak.com/top-beach-destinations-by-train > It can't take me camping away from civilization. How many vehicle miles do you travel every year? How many of those are to go camping? > It can't haul lumber from a hardware store so I can build a treehouse. Have you tried? Like really tried? https://philsturgeon.com/carry-shit-olympics/ > but let's not pretend there is a perfect Venn diagram of overlap between what their use cases are. I never said anything of the sort and I'm not pretending that at all. You're creating a strawman. The comment I was responding to said this: > I'd love to get in my car and go to sleep for a couple of hours or read a book whilst it drives me somewhere. Imagine if it could even pull over and charge up without any kind of intervention too. You could get in your car, and get a full nights sleep whilst it drive you somewhere 500 miles away. That's a train. Most instances of "somewhere" can be accessed by train. Or by a train to do the long miles and then other modes of transit once you're closer. My overall stance is that there's a lot more overlap between why folks want a super expensive self-driving car and more robust public transit and better support for multi-modal transit. I've not pretended anything like you've claimed.
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> Or by a train to do the long miles and then other modes of transit once you're closer Of your many points in various posts, this is maybe the only point I'm really on board with. Amtrak already supports this, even. My car can drive me to the train and then the train can do the long haul, and at the other end my car will drive me off the train and to the destination. Still need waaaay more rail routes than we have now, though, so this is a dream for a century from now, not something in my lifetime.
Trains can take you to the beach and away from civilization. Build a station where you want to go. At one point trains were the most practical way to get to national parks. How often are you building treehouses that you need to pay hundreds of dollars extra a month to justify the cost, versus a one-time delivery fee?
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If you build train station away from civilization pretty quickly it will be filled with civilization. Trains are ok for mass transit. Rest of world is for cars.
I think it helps you drive. It takes away the tedium of driving and reduces your workload. Big wins are: 1) stop-and-go traffic 2) long boring highway trips infrequent but just as important - emergency braking That said I absolutely hate that this seems to give tesla the "courage" to remove physical driver controls (like turn signal stalks, drive select stalks, full controls for wipers, lights and defrost)
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As an aside, IIRC they put the turn signal stalk back in a recent update. It saves them a few bucks per car to use buttons instead, but there are people who will not buy a Tesla without a turn-signal stalk -- and the loss on that is probably 500x what is saved by not putting in a stalk.
> if you have experienced the latest FSD, Waymo's and now Rivian's bet is just so obviously the exact wrong bet I have. It’s wild for anyone to say this. Waymo works. FSD mostly works, and I seriously considered getting a Tesla after borrowing one last week. But it needs to be supervised—this is apparent both in its attention requirement and the one time last week it tried to bolt into a red-lit intersection. The state of the art is Waymo. The jury is still out on whether cameras only can replicate its success. If it can’t, that safety margin could mean game over for FSD on the insurance or regulatory levels. In that case, Rivian could be No. 2 to Waymo (which will be No. 1 if cameras only doesn’t pan out, given they have infinite money from Google). That’s a good bet. And if cameras only works, you’ll still have the ultra premium segment Tesla seems to have abandoned and which may be wary of licensing from Waymo.
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Waymo operates on guardrails, with a lot more human-in-the-loop (remotely) help than most people seem aware of. Tesla's already have similar capabilities, in a much wider range of roads, in vehicles that cost 80% less to manufacture. They're both achieving impressive results. But if you read beyond headlines, Tesla is setup for such more more success than Waymo in the next 1-2 years.
Worthless comment. Of course it's not an issue for city driving. It's an issue for long trips and rural driving. No one said EVs don't serve many use cases. I have one myself.
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Worthless human. More range is not needed and mark my words, mainstream EVs will not bother going beyond ~300 miles. Even the 400mi in a model s is a lot. More charging stations maybe, though we have plenty here in CA so roadtrips in a Tesla have never been a problem.
Let's be real. A staggering amount of drivers are incapable to switch on Automatic Cruise Control or trigger automatic parking. They know how to start the car, how to switch lights and wipers on/off and that's about it. Paying subscription for something what they are never going to use is going to be a hard sell.
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And to be even more real, a staggering amount of drivers won't be able to afford an autonomous driving subscription even if they wanted to. Or a car new enough or in good enough condition to have functional self driving.
Unrealistic for 99% of the world, billions live where they earn such sum for more than a week. Not all of those have cars, but many do. This is just some little SV + maybe NY bubble thinking. Also EU would show a big fat finger to such predatory pricing.
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You assume it will be priced same elsewhere. It's definitely going to be priced by region (Tesla's FSD already is).
> Autonomy subscriptions are how things are going to go In America, maybe. Chinese manufacturers are already treating self driving as table stakes. If I have a choice between a subscription car and one that just works, I’m buying the latter. > continuous development and operations/support ICE vehicles require continuous servicing and manufacturer support.
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> In America, maybe. Chinese manufacturers Let's revisit this conversation after China's cutthroat automotive competition is resolved. That era passed a long time ago in the US.
History suggests it won't be that clean. 1. High-severity accidents might drop, but the industry bleeds money on high-frequency, low-speed incidents (parking lots, neighborhood scrapes). Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments. 2. Insurance is a capital management game. We’ll likely see a tech company try this, fail to cover a catastrophic liability due to lack of reserves, and trigger a massive backlash. It reminds me of early internet optimism: we thought connectivity would make truth impossible to hide. Instead, we got the opposite. Tech rarely solves complex markets linearly.
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> High-severity accidents might drop, but the industry bleeds money on high-frequency, low-speed incidents (parking lots, neighborhood scrapes). Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments. This seems like it can be solved with a deductible.
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I doubt autonomous car makers will offer this themselves. They'll either partner with existing insurers or try to build a separate insurance provider of their own which does this. My guess, if this actually plays out, is that existing insurers will create a special autonomy product that will modify rates to reflect differences in risk from standard driving, and autonomy subscriptions will offer those in a bundle.
I would pay so much for my own SUV to self-drive as well as Waymo. Keyword: my own SUV. Not a rental. With the possibility for me to take over and drive it myself if service fails or if I want to do so. The significant unlock is that I get to haul gear, packages, family. I don't need to keep it clean. The muddy dogs, the hiking trip, the week-long road trip. If my car could drive me, I'd do way more road trips and skip flying. It's almost as romantic as a California Zephyr or Coast Starlight trip. And I can camp out of it. No cramped airlines. No catching colds by being packed in a sardine can with a stressed out immune system. No sharing space with people on public transit. I can work and watch movies and listen to music and hang out with my wife, my friends. People won't stare at me, and I can eat in peace or just be myself in my own space. I might even work in a nomadic lifestyle if I don't have to drive all the time. Our country is so big and there's so much to see. One day you might even be able to attach a trailer. Bikes, jet skis, ATVs. People might simply live on the road, traveling all the time. Big cars seem preferable. Lots of space for internal creature comforts. Laying back, lounging. Watching, reading, eating. Changing clothes, camping, even cooking. Some people might even buy autonomous RVs. I'm sure that'll be a big thing in its own right. It's bidirectional too! People can come to you as you go to them. Meet in the middle. Same thing with packages, food, etc. This would be the biggest thing in travel, transport, logistics, perhaps ever. It's a huge unlock. It feels downright revolutionary. Like a total change in how we might live our lives. This might turn big suburbs from food/culture deserts into the default places people want to live as they have more space for cheaper - because the commute falls apart. This honestly sounds better than a house , but if you can also own an affordable large home in the suburbs as your home base - that's incredible. You don't need a tiny expensive place in the city. You could fall asleep in your car and wake up for breakfast in the city. Spend some time at home, then make a trek to the mountains. All without wasting any time. No more driving, no more traffic. Commuting becomes leisure. It becomes you time. This is also kind of a super power that big countries (in terms of area) with lots of roads and highways will enjoy the most. It doesn't do much in a dense city, but once you add mountains and forests and streams and deserts and oceans - that's magic. Maybe our vast interstate highway infrastructure will suddenly grow ten times in value. Roads might become more important than ever. We might even start building more. If the insurance and autonomy come bundled as a subscription after you purchase or lease your vehicle, that's super easy for people to activate and spend money on. This is such a romantic dream, and I'm so hyped for this. I would pay an ungodly sum to unlock this. It can't come soon enough. Would subscribe in a heartbeat.
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You must be a lot more comfortable as a passenger than I am, because that honestly sounds like my personal hell. I don't mind driving, but I hate being in any vehicle for extended periods. Have you considered a chauffeur?
Public transit is a dream turned nightmare consistently for seventy-five years. Autonomy will be less efficient -- but not that much less efficient given closer car spacing, speed, and remote parking -- but it will be spectacularly more convenient and comfortable. I'm all for it. You'll survive the tire pollution.
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> You'll survive the tire pollution. I tend to expect better from HN commenters. I don't have an interest in having a discussion with such a callous and dismissive comment. I hope your day gets better. Tire pollution is worse than tailpipe emissions and the full effects aren't known. You're dismissive of other people's and the environment's health and you're wrong. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyres-produce-more-particle-pollution-than-exhausts-tests-show
That's one opinion. My opinion is public transport is phenomenal. It's relatively reliable (very in some places), generally clean and safe, low cost, encourages urban/high efficiency development, protects greenspace, and employees people.
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What are you talking about? In most cities public transport sucks, hardly goes anywhere, gets more expensive year after year, makes housing prices go up, and is slow and inflexible enough that people still end up needing cars to go around
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I'm not sure where you live, but that doesn't match my experience at all. And I think most people agree given the overwhelming majority of people who choose to drive, notwithstanding traffic and parking. The declining public transit ridership in most metropolitan areas over time is well documented.[1] It's because in most places -- but evidently not where you live -- public transit sucks relative to private transportation and ride-hailing services. As discussed above, EV autonomy will only increase the difference. [1] https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/fta-transit-ridership-per-capita-report/737603/#:~:text=The%20FTA,as%20high-capacity
Yeah, let's not train people properly, better give techbros more money
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What evidence is there that we can train people to be better drivers? We've got a century of effort and it seems the bulk of road death prevention has come from improved, and more expensive, design.
Because it’s not convenient enough, and too expensive. Fix those two and personal car ownership will plummet in many places. Many people don’t want to own a car, pay for insurance, gas, tires, oil changes, parking, washing etc. Car ownership sucks horribly for most people, it’s just currently the best option. That will change.
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Almost all these points apply ride hailing with or without driver-less. How do Waymo prices compare to Uber where Waymo exists?
The consumers who mock Tesla (and other auto manufacturers) that deliver continuous updates are rapidly dying off or moving into assisted living facilities. They're not going to be buying many new cars in coming years. Pursuing that market segment seems like literally a "dead" end.
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That's my impression too. You'd need to be 80 years old to be excited by a toyota.
>afforadbility This 1000%. Electric cars are supposed to be simple. Give me something in a shape of a Civic, with the engine replaced with a motor and a battery good for 150 miles, and sell it for $10-12k new. Don't even need an entertainment cluster, give me a place to put a tablet or a phone and just have a bluetooth speaker. Instead, we are getting these boutique, expensive vehicles packed full of tech, but in the end, they still fundamentally suck as cars compared to gas alternatives, especially hybrid. I got a Prius Prime for my wife last year, the car is way better than any EV on the market in terms of usability. Driving to work and back can all be done in EV mode easily, and then when you wanna go somewhere, you can keep the car above 80 mph easily and get there faster without worrying about where to charge.
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> Don't even need an entertainment cluster, give me a place to put a tablet or a phone and just have a bluetooth speaker. Illegal - backup camera is required. Speakers probably too for alerts. Also you are super naive if you think that's where actual cost is.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Prove It All Night: With no fame or fortune, what keeps a band onstage? (1999) (chicagoreader.com)
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One day I'll retire, and the day after that I will still write code even though I'm no longer being paid to do it. And I'll still play my guitar every day even though I have no interest in being famous. I'll do both of those things for as long as I am able because they bring me joy.
I knew someone who played guitar in the band at their daughter's wedding, and at least part of it was getting out of having to socialize after dinner— and in particular to participate in a father-daughter dance.
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> and in particular to participate in a father-daughter dance. part of being a parent is puttying your kid first. if you don't like to dance but your daughter really wants/needs this as part of the ritual, then you put on your big boy pants and do it. if your daughter really is okay with it fine, but you're an asshat for not. you may not like ballet, but you show up to the recitals. you might not like sportsball, but you show up to the events. you might cringe at the beginner band's abilities on stage, but you show up. it's not for you. it's for the kid.
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princess comes first.
Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools (larr.net)
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GNU's version of Yacc is called Bison. Pine Is Not Elm (even though that was never an official acronym). UNIX was UNICS which was a pun on MULTICS. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. nano is a copy of pico which was the "PIne COmposer". Postfix is a completely opaque portmanteau of post (as in mail) and "bug fix". C++ is "C incremented", and C is the successor of B, which is the successor of BCPL. Developers haven't "lost the plot", we never had it in the first place. Inversely, Clang, LLDB, jq, fzf, loc are modern projects perfectly in line with the author's notion of a good name. "mise-en-place" is the perfect metaphor for what mise does.
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I believe one of the things that prompted stallman to give that talk was the inclusion of the lsp client "eglot" in emacs. Eglot i think is short for emacs polyglot. The most idiomatic name, lsp-mode, was taken by another package. Stallman wanted to find another name but no one seemed to care as much as he did. I think one name he suggested in its place at one point was "code-parse" or something like that.
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Yep. Just did a reimage update to Fedora 43, got errors about 'ptyxis' in some shell scripts. Wat (wipes desk and keyboard)? Oh, it's the graphical terminal program (alternative to 'gnome-terminal'). Well, um, ok. However, I will concede, after more digging as to why (as it rankled), that there was a "have to choose a unique name" issue there (even leaving aside trademark issues). I'm resigned (so I suppose signed up) to deal with residual issues that crop up going forward. I love to mock '*ly.com' names for almost certainly doomed enterprises, but I get that at least it wasn't already taken.
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There is a place I agree with this: human anatomy. I find eileiter/oviduct superior to Fallopian tube.
> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field. The cognitive load is unavoidable and in some ways worse in industries with highly technical names. At one point in my career I was an engine calibrator at a large automotive OEM. Our lexicon included physics industry terms (BMEP, BTDC, VVT, etc), a large software package where every variable, table, and function was an acronym (we had about 75k tunable parameters, each with an acronym), and all the internal company jargon and acronyms you'd expect in a large corporation. But every name was as technical and functional as the author would desire. During my first month I was exhausted . I would doze off in afternoon meetings or pass out in my car as soon as I pulled in the driveway. I finally mentioned this to a more senior coworker and his insight was that my brain was working overtime because it was busy learning another language. He was entirely right! The constant mental load was a very real and tangible load. He relayed an anecdote when he went to S. America on his honeymoon and despite him and his wife having taken ~4 years of HS/college Spanish the mental work they had to do to function basically nixed half the daily activities they had planned due to exhaustion. That was what I was experiencing. The idea that more technical and specific names reduces mental load does not track with my experience. The complexity is intrinsic not incidental and I don't think it has much to do with the specific names chosen.
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In mobile telephony, one of the first things new hires are told is “don’t even try to work out what all the acronyms stand for; it won’t help”. You just have eat all the alphabet soup. Worse is that they nest themselves. You can have acronyms where every letter stands for another acronym. Writing a thousand words without using a single noun is easy. And of course all the short ones are overloaded. Is an AP an Application Processor or an Access Point? Depends on which subfield the person you’re talking to is from. But they’re a necessary evil, since MSISDN is still less cumbersome than Mobile Station International Subscriber Directory Number.
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I thought this was a wonderful example of "some things are just intrinsically challenging to represent in your brain": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZwWG1nK2fY Apparently they've found structural differences in the brains of people undergoing London's famously difficult taxi qualification. I think I saw a video that said people studying for "the knowledge" as it's known report massive fatigue.
> grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials), sed (stream editor), cat (concatenate), diff (difference). Even when abbreviated, these names were either functional descriptions or systematic derivations. If you asked someone unfamiliar with unix tools what they thought each of these commands did, diff is the only one which they would have even the slightest chance of guessing. It's ridiculous to complain about "libsodium" and then hold up "awk" as a good name.
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awk is short for awkward, like awkword, for awkwardly manipulating words (text).
However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you won't ever forget it. libsodium is forgettable.
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Don't forget that you need to know English for that to work. I'm pretty sure most Unix users don't speak English (most computer users definitely don't). I interact with people who know few words besides "hello" and "goodbye", and for them "sed" is a nonsense term, just a set of letters randomly thrown together. Same as e.g. Excel, a random token that means nothing. sed is just an example, of course, the author's point doesn't hold much weight for many (most?) users globally.
Relevant XKCD Https://xkcd.com/1168/
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Someone once tried this on me during Friday drinks and I successfully conquered the challenge with "tar --help". The challenger tried in vain to claim that this was not valid, but everyone present agreed that an exit code of zero meant that it was a valid solution.
I think perhaps the articles argument gets less strong then? It's claimed grep is "well named" because even though it's not obvious when you first read it, that it being a contraction for "global reg ex print" and hence memorable. I'm not sure the same argument can't be made for libsodium which assuming the reader is familiar with NaCl (the same as the assumption that the previous reader is familiar with regex) then it's an equally memorable name for your crypto library. There's always a consideration about the context the name is intended and likely to be used in. The article mentions engineering naming and "ibeam", but engineering has it's own technical names an jargon as well. Most people wont know what "4130 tube" means, but people who build bicycle frames or roll cages will - and they're likely to use the less specific term "chromoly" if the don't need to distinguish between 4130 and 4145. In my head "libsodium" is similar - if you don't know what it (and NaCl) mean, you 100% should keep out of that part of the codebase.
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One additional complication with grep (and other CLI tools) is that the name itself is part of the day to day UX. It needs to be short, easy to say, and easy to type. With a library the API that is contained within serves the analogous role.
I believe strongly in this counterargument: https://medium.com/better-programming/software-component-names-should-be-whimsical-and-cryptic-ca260b013de0 Small summary: external identifiers are hard to change, so projects will evolve such that they are not accurately descriptive after time. (Less discussed there, but: In a complex or decentralized ecosystem, it's also the case that you come across many "X Manager"/"X Service"/"X State Manager"/"X Workflow Service" simultaneously, and then have to rely on a lot of thick context to know what the distinctions are)
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I suppose it depends on your goals, but that scope restraint can be a good thing. Do one thing, do it well, and while you're at it call yourself by the thing you do so you remember that's what you ought to be doing. A bit wordy for unix but you get the idea.
> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field. This article would certainly disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Defense_and_partner_code_names > the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait. Is that even a meaningful distinction? Does anyone think, "Gee, I'd really like to cross the Golden Gate strait?" or do they think "I want to get to Napa?". > The Hoover Dam is a dam, named after the president who commissioned it, not “Project Thunderfall” or “AquaHold.” It was actually called the "Boulder Canyon Project" while being built, referred to as "Hoover Dam" even though finished during the Roosevelt administration, officially called "Boulder Dam", and only later officially renamed to "Hoover Dam". The fact that Herbert Hoover initiated the project tells you nothing meaningful about it. Would "Reitzlib" be a better name than "Requests"? > If you wrote 100 CLIs, you will never counter with a cobra. But out in the real world, you could encounter a Shelby Cobra sports car, Bell AH-1 Cobra chopper, USS Cobra (SP-626) patrol boat, Colt Cobra handgun, etc. > No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable. When you open your medicine cabinet, do you look for a jar labeled "acetylsalicylic acid", "2-propylvaleric acid", or "N-acetyl-para-aminophenol"? Probably not. It's a bad sign when all of the examples in an article don't even agree with the author's point.
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Biology is another discipline where the author is wrong. See e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein
Wait till you work in a corporate environment, where Project Fuzzy Mustard triggered a violation of the ElastoFish metric in the Yellow Hills subsystem, leading to a Code Mild Lavender with a side of Pink Sprinkles.
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I need scissors! 61!
It's still to his point: > Even when engineers get creative, there’s logic: a butterfly valve actually looks like butterfly wings. You can tell how the name relates to what it actually defines, and how it can be memorable. Editor MACroS still has a logic. It isn't just random.
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That's as good as random.
Nobody says "gh:someguy/openai/llm-streaming-client" in conversation. You say "the streaming client" or "llm-stream" the same way you'd say "Pegasus." But when someone new joins or you're reading code, "llm-stream" is self-documenting. "Pegasus" requires looking it up every single time until you memorize an arbitrary mapping.
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> You say "the streaming client" "Which one?! There are seven popular projects with this exact name on GitHub that have >100K stars; which particular one do you use?"
https://www.postgresql.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL
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I know. My point is that almost everyone refers to it as Postgres, because they do not actually value the descriptiveness of "PostgreSQL".
GPT-5.2 (openai.com)
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There’s really no point in looking at benchmarks anymore as real world usage of these models varies between task and prompting strategies. Use your internal benchmarks to evaluate and ignore everything else. It is curious to me how they don’t provide a side x side comparison of other models benchmarks for this release
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Did Calmmy Sammy that his is the version that will finally cure cancer? The AI shakeout in the AI industry is going to be brutal. Can't see how Private Equity is going to get the little guy to be left holding the giant bag of excrement, but they will figure that out. AI, smart enough to replace you, but not quite smart enough the replace the CEO or Hedge Fund Bros.
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I'm continuously surprised that some people get good results out of GPT models. They sort of fail on my personal benchmarks for me. Maybe GPT needs a different approach to prompting? (as compared to eg Claude, Gemini, or Kimi)
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Did anyone notice how Cursor wasn’t an early tester? I wonder why…
Looks like they've begun censoring posts at r/Codex and not allowing complaint threads so here is my honest take: - It is faster which is appreciated but not as fast as Opus 4.5 - I see no changes, very little noticeable improvements over 5.1 - I do not see any value in exchange for +40% in token costs All in all I can't help but feel that OpenAI is facing an existential crisis. Gemini 3 even when its used from AI Studio offers close to ChatGPT Pro performance for free. Anthropic's Claude Code $100/month is tough to beat. I am using Codex with the $40 credits but there's been a silent increase in token costs and usage limitations.
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Did you notice much improvement going from Gemini 2.5 to 3? I didn't I just think they're all struggling to provide real world improvements
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Maybe they are just more consistent, which is a bit hard to notice immediately.
But 400k was never usable in ChatGPT Plus/Pro subscriptions. It was nerfed down to 60-100k. If you submitted too long of a prompt they deleted the tokens on the end of your prompt before calling the model. Or if the chat got too long (still below 100k however) they deleted your first messages. This was 3 months ago. Can someone with an active sub check whether we can submit a full 400k prompt (or at least 200k) and there is no prompt truncatation in the backend? I don't mean attaching a file which uses RAG.
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Context windows for web Fast (GPT‑5.2 Instant) Free: 16K Plus / Business: 32K Pro / Enterprise: 128K Thinking (GPT‑5.2 Thinking) All paid tiers: 196K https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11909943-gpt-52-in-chatgpt
It is annoying though, when you start a new chat for each topic you tend to have to re-write context a lot. I use Gemini 3, which I understand doesn’t have as good of a memory system as OpenAI. Even on single-file programming stuff, after a few rounds of iteration I tend to get to its context limit (the thinking model). Either because the answers degrade or it just throws the “oops something went wrong” error. Ok, time to restart from scratch and paste in the latest iteration. I don’t understand how agentic IDEs handle this either. Or maybe it’s easier - it just resends the entire codebase every time. But where to cut the chat history? It feels to me like every time you re-prompt a convo, it should first tell itself to summarize the existing context as bullets as its internal prompt rather than re-sending the entire context.
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Agentic IDEs/extensions usually continue the conversation until the context gets close to 80% full, then do the compacting. With both Codex and Claude Code you can actually observe that happening. That said I find that in practice, Codex performance degrades significantly long before it comes to the point of automated compaction - and AFAIK there's no way to trigger it manually. Claude, on the other hand, has a command for to force compacting, but at the same time I rarely use it because it's so good at managing it by itself. As far as multiple conversations, you can tell the model to update AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md or whatever is in their context by default) with things it needs to remember.
This is also the default in Gemini pretty sure, at least I remember turning it off. Make's no sense to me why this is the default.
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Mostly because they built the feature and so that implicitly means they think it's cool. I recommend turning it off because it makes the models way more sycophantic and can drive them (or you) insane.
I have been using chatGPT a ton over the last months and paying the subscription. Used it for coding, news, stock analysis, daily problems, and a whatever I could think of. I decided to give Gemini a go when version three came out to great reviews. Gemini handles every single one of my uses cases much better and consistently gives better answers. This is especially true for situations were searching the web for current information is important, makes sense that google would be better. Also OCR is phenomenal chatgpt can't read my bad hand writing but Gemini can easily. Only downsides are in the polish department, there are more app bugs and I usually have to leave the happen or the session terminates. There are bugs with uploading photos. The biggest complaint is that all links get inserted into google search and then I have to manipulate them when they should go directly to the chosen website, this has to be some kind of internal org KPI nonsense. Overall, my conclusion is that ChatGPT has lost and won't catch up because of the search integration strength.
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Gemini voice recognition is trash compared to chatgpt and that is a deal breaker for me. I wonder how many ppl do OCR versus use voice. And how has chatgpt lost when ure not comparing the chatgpt that just came out to the Gemini that just came out? Gemini is just annoying to use. and Google just benchmaxxed I didn't see any significant difference (paying for both) and the same benchmaxxing probably happening for chatgpt now as well, so in terms of core capabilities I feel stuff has plateaued. more bout overall experience now where Gemini suxx. I really don't get how "search integration" is a "strength"?? can you give any examples of places where you searched for current info and chatgpt was worse? even so I really don't get how it's a moat enough to say chatgpt has lost. would've understood if you said something like tpu versus GPU moat.
That's hilarious and right on brand for Google that they spend millions developing cutting-edge technology and fumble the ball making a chat app.
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Every Google app is a chat app, except maybe search.
sure. It may be more than that...possibly due to variable operating params on the servers and current load. On whole, if I compare my AI assistant to a human worker, I get more variance than I would from a human office worker.
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They're not really capable of producing varying answers based on load. But they are capable of producing different answers because they feel like behaving differently if the current date is a holiday, and things like that. They're basically just little guys.
I've had the same experience with search, especially with it hallucinating results instead of actually finding them. It's really frustrating that you can't force a more in-depth search from the model run by the company most famous for a search engine.
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Try the same question in deep research mode.
ChatGPT web UI was also like this for the longest time, until a few months ago: all sorts of random UI bugs leading either to data loss or misleading UI state. Interrupting still is very flaky there too. And on the mobile app, if you move away from the app while it's taking time to think, its state would somehow desync from the actual backend thinking state, and get stuck randomly; sometimes restarting the app fixes it, sometimes that chat is that unusable from that point on. And the UI lack of polish shows up freshly every time a new feature lands too - the "branch in new chat" feature is really finicky still, getting stuck in an unusable state if you twitch your eyebrows at wrong moment.
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i basically can't use the ChatGPT app on the subway for these reasons. the moment the websocket connection drops, i have to edit my last message and resubmit it unchanged. it's like the client, not the server, is responsible for writing to my conversation history or something
Google’s standard problem is that they don’t even use their own products. Their Pixel and Android team rocks iPhones on the daily, for example.
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You cant buy an iPhone without a director approval. And it's like 3 gen behind as well. So no, they don't use iPhones.
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Google tells its employees what products they're allowed to buy for personal use?
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you have to get premission from director for your presonal phone? wtf
That’s because they will be bullied out of the dating market if they have a “green bubble”.
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There isn't much of a dating market in Silicon Valley because there aren't any women. (Well, there are some locals, but in my experience they all live with controlling immigrant parents and are sort of eternal teenagers.)
Compared to the other benchmarks which are much more gameable, I trust PelicanBikeEval way more.
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But, to do what exactly?
A new pretrain would definitely get more than a .1 version bump & would get a whole lot more hype I'd think. They're expensive to do!
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Maybe the rumors about failed training runs weren't wrong...
to be fair that image has the resolution of a flip phone from 2003
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It's trivial for a human that knows what a pc looks like. Maybe mistaking displayport for hdmi.
The no tools part is impressive, with tools every model gets 100%
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If I recall, the AIME answers are always 4 digits numbers. And most of the problems are of the type where if you have a candidate number it's reasonable to validate its correctness. So easy to brute force all 4 digit ints with code. tl;dr; humans would do much better too if they could use programming tools :)
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