Unlurker|Replay|About
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
•
I am still plugging away at https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/hex/en-US/today , a daily word game to help language learners. Since hacker news last saw it, it’s been translated into English, German, Spanish and Chinese. If, say, a Chinese speaker wanted to learn more English words, then they could go to https://threeemojis.com/zh-CN/play/hex/en-US/today and play the game with English words with Chinese definitions and interface. This is the first cross language daily word game of its kind (as far as I know), so it’s been a lot of fun watching who plays which languages from where. The next challenge that I’m thinking about is growing the game. The write ups and mentions on blogs add up, the social sharing helps, but I’d really like to break into the short form video realm. If you read interviews from other word game creators, every successful game has some variation of got popular riding the wordle wave, or one random guy made a random TikTok one time that went super viral, and otherwise every other growth method they have tried since then hasn’t worked that well and they are coasting along. So, sans another wordle wave, I am working on growing a TikTok following and then working on converting that following into players, a bit of a two step there, but that’s how the game is played these days. https://www.tiktok.com/@three_emojis_hq for the curious. Still experimenting and finding video styles and formats that travel well there. Pingo AI and other language apps have shown how strong TikTok can be for growth, so I think there’s something there. That’s all for this month!
•
Overly specific LLM research into KV cache eviction. The vast majority of tokens in a sequence will be irrelevant to an attention mechanism outside of a very small window. Right now however we tend to either keep all cache values forever, or dump them all once they hit a certain age. My theory is that you can train model to look at the key vectors and from that information alone work out how long to keep a the token in the cache for. Results so far look promising and it’s easy to add after the fact without retraining the core model itself.
•
Embar: https://github.com/carderne/embar A Python ORM, inspired by Drizzle and the like. Whenever I come to Python I'm frustrated by the ORM options. They generally lack type-safety on inputs and outputs, or useful type hints. SQLAlchemy is an institution but I think it's hard to use if it's not your full-time job. I check the docs for every query. I want something simple for the 80-99% of cases, that lets you drop easily into raw SQL for the remaining %. I'm going to keep hacking at it, would love to from anyone who thinks this is worthwhile (or not). Also: - The interface for update queries is clunky. Should I add codegen? - Should I try to implement a SQL diffing engine (for migrations). Or just vendor sqldef/similar...?
•
As a means to learn about both WebAssembly and Rust, I started writing a WebAssembly binary decoder (i.e. a parser for `.wasm` files) from scratch. Recently it hit v2.0 spec conformance. 3.0 is next on the roadmap. (I'm executing it against the upstream spec test suite.) I don't plan to make it a highly-performant decoder for use in production environments, but rather one that can be used for educational purposes, easy to read and/or debugging issues with modules. That's why I decided not to offer a streaming API, and why I'll be focusing on things like good errors, good code docs etc. https://github.com/agis/wadec P.S. I'm new to the language so any feedback is more than welcome.
•
Building a little extra tool for my reservation system, which simulates guests reserving accommodations before a customer launches. This is nice if you have no idea how users will respond to your availability and options. We have an ML model that's trained on real reservations and use an LLM to decide why a user mightve opted out. We apply personas to this LLM to get a bit of a sense how they would probably be operating the booking flow.
•
http://github.com/samdc73/talimio I’m still exploring new forms of AI-powered learning tools. The latest thing I’ve been working on is an adaptive mode inspired by the LECTOR paper [1]. Where each lesson is a single learning concept with a mastery score tight to it based on your understanding of the said concept, so in principle the system can reintroduce concepts you didn’t fully grasp later on, ideally making separate flashcards unnecessary. It can be self-hosted if any one want's to give it a try! [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03275
•
Working towards a handheld computer with a physical keyboard. Lots of examples out there (Hackberry Pi, Beepy, etc) but wanted to try my hand at it. Along the way I found most of these use salvaged BlackBerry keyboards which are only going to become harder to find, so also on a bit of a side quest to build a thumb-sized keyboard from scratch. Got me into laying out and prototyping my first PCBs and learning about how these things are made - lots of fun so far! Something cool I learned from tearing apart a BB keyboard: the satisfying “click” is just a tiny metal dome that pops and completes the circuit when pressed. Not news to anyone familiar with electronics manufacturing, but it was a cool thing to “discover.”
•
tirreno ~ open security analytics https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno
•
I'm working on building out a microservice ecosystem on OCI. I'm not formally educated so I just sort of stack things up and tear them down. I hardened my server and I am running dockerized services. I'm also running a web server that hosts the very start of my long-term personal site. It's been pretty challenging, illuminating, and down right fun. I've been putting down the controller for a terminal! Seriously, I'm very proud of myself for the little I've accomplished so far. I don't have friends in tech so I don't get to talk about it or bounce ideas off people. Thanks for letting me get that out!
•
Making a realism game mod to Battlefield 6, which recently came out. If you have played military sim (Milsim) games like Project Reality, Squad or Arma you might appreciate it. Its quite cool how the game devs have made a lot of tooling to use; they use Typescript to hook into in-game events and functions. There is a whole community making lots of content too:- https://bfportal.gg/ Currently I am working on an insurgency game mode; where one team has to defend some caches and use guerilla tactics, whilst the other team has a smaller size but the advantage of firepower and vehicles. Hopefully have it released by Christmas time.
•
I got so sick of not being able to find good driving routes that I'm working on https://shuto.app but also because Waze wants but to cut through London for my current contract gigs rather than take the M25 sensibly I'm also working on having the algo handle that for default. Testers would be appreciated if you ping me below though at anosh@ below link. Also if anyone needs a contractor hmu at https://elephtandandrope.com Also working on youtube vids to teach people to code for personal branding and another channel for POV driving vlogs but editing eats time :( Just whatever time can allow really!
•
Building pyreqwest, a high-performance Python HTTP client backed by Rust’s reqwest. It has gotten quite feature rich: async and sync APIs, similar ergonomic interface of reqwest, full type hints, and built-in testing/mocking. It has no unsafe code, and no Python-side dependencies. (Started after getting too annoyed with all the issues httpx has.) https://github.com/MarkusSintonen/pyreqwest
•
open source observability platform - https://github.com/signoz/signoz
•
A bunch of little electronic pin badges that I’m using to fund bigger projects https://hortus.dev/s/badges Currently in the works are a digital sand timer which can be used to track pomodoros (or any sequence of time intervals), and a Jovian orrery which displays the positions of Jupiter’s moons on a strip of addressable LEDs.
•
I keep on grinding on my Kubernetes IDE that allowed me to quit my day job over 3 years ago: https://aptakube.com/ I’ve also been playing with Bun and I have a business idea that would be a good fit, and huge potential but I just don’t have enough time to start something new anymore.
•
Chugging away at building out https://tickerfeed.net - Added creating blog posts - Improved moderation tools - Rewrote an upstream client to move off deprecated API - Lots of improvements around CSS/ui (many thanks to Gemini) - Fixing lots of bugs
•
I'm in crunch mode doing the internationalization and localization of my spreadsheet engine. This is a rabbit hole and a nightmare in Excel, so a big opportunity for us to get this right. This is the PR: https://github.com/ironcalc/IronCalc/pull/616 Feel free to comment and destroy it! You can test it in: https://testing.ironcalc.com
•
Glad to see you're doing this! I was wondering if the currency button could be changed. Defaulting to Euro is fine, but being able to switch that shortcut would be handy.
•
I built https://nofone.io . I ingest health insurance policies and provide insights to insurers on how to improve them and doctors to know what insurers expect to see in documentation and evidence. My hope is to improve the denial situation and standardize medical necessity criteria down the line.
•
https://github.com/arcuru/eidetica Eidetica - a decentralized database built in Rust, intended for local-first apps. It's still unstable but I'm progressing relatively rapidly. In the past ~month I have: - Flown to SF to attend a conference in this niche: https://syncconf.dev/ - Added password based, transparent, end-to-end encryption - Improved my custom CRDTs - Added an index to store configs and metadata - Built support for using sqlite + postgres for Eideticas backend (not pushed yet) Once I finish the backend work I'll hopefully take a bit of a break though. I'm supposed to be retired.
•
Building the self-service/billing system for a CX saas ( https://autopilotreviews.co ) While trying to figure out a good ICP and reach PMF
•
I've been working on a weightlifting logging app for the apple watch. I haven't submitted it yet since I am still beta testing, but I'm mostly feature complete. It's intended to be anti-memetic, and anti-guilt trip. Just put it on your watch, install a program (open format) and you never need the phone itself. Your workout is a holiday from your phone. The data can be exported if you want to use it elsewhere. I originally made it for ROCKNIX but as there was no way to share the app I paid the Apple tax :/ https://github.com/jmahmood/RED-STAR-WEIGHTLIFTING
•
I have been working on my bussiness which is related to moving and packing its mostly inside kigdom of Saudi Arabia. Name of my bussiness is moverstoo my website is https://moverstoo.com/
•
OnlineOrNot ( https://onlineornot.com ) Planning on wrapping up the year with a year in review post (thankfully I've been writing monthly updates as I go, should save some time). Apart from that, clearing up tech debt that helped me ship fast, but was ultimately a bad fit for the business (Next.js and GraphQL).
•
I’m speed-running a bunch of new hobbies to teach myself how to make a physical game (basically its a ping pong paddle that tracks how often you hit a ball — like a “keepy uppy” game with scorekeeping): - Arduino dev and circuitry - 3D printing - PCB design - Woodworking Its all a lot of fun and IMO a lot more approachable than it has been thanks to the assist from LLMs.
•
Still working on the Mint programming language ( https://mint-lang.com/ ) with a 1.0 release in January :). I'm happy with the current feature set, so I'm just polishing and optimizing where I can and giving the documentation a throughout look.
•
What are your thoughts on Marko? https://markojs.com/
•
Simple meal tracker to give some macros but mainly give a health rating on 1-10 scale. http://meal-tracker.fly.dev
•
Feels like I'm working on a million things (between work, side contracts, and creative explorations). Recently a friend asked whether AI is helping or hurting my workflow. And I realized I couldn't give a concrete answer. Lots of speculation, but I realized I didn't have hardly any real data. Inspired by Adam Grant's work on "rethinking", I'm _currently_ writing a tiny CLI to run self-experiments on my own productivity, auto-checking in / observing commits/code changes. Goal at the end is to be able to test myself across different dimensions with "no AI", "moderate AI" (e.g. searching, inline assist), and "full AI" (agents, etc). https://github.com/wellwright-labs/pulse
•
I wanted to add the claude code changelog to my rss reader. It didn’t have a rss feed. Now it does. Had claude code built it: https://claude-code-changelog-rss.stevenmenke.workers.dev/feed.xml Repo should work with any github hosted changelog file. https://github.com/stevenmenke/claude-code-changelog-rss
•
I'm working on an affordable SaaS platform for small and mid-sized fabrication shops across the US and Canada. It automates quoting and production for sheet-metal and CNC jobs and can handle pretty much any CAD format, even full assemblies. On the AI side, we've got a mix of models doing the heavy lifting: a tuned geometric transformer for feature detection, a graph neural net for topology, and a vision model for mesh segmentation. All that ties into our custom CAD logic for geometry parsing, 2D nesting for laser/machining, and 3D nesting for forming and packaging. The whole idea is to level the playing field so smaller local shops can compete with the big instant-quote guys without needing an in-house dev team.
•
This sounds interesting. Are you using any CAD software for this? Can the fabricator create their own design?
•
Building the most effective typing application https://typequicker.com This is something that started as a passion project - I wanted to see just how effective of a typing application I could make to help people improve typing speed quickly. It’s very data driven and personalized. We analyze a lot of key weak points about a user’s typing and generate natural text (using LLMs) that target multiple key weak points at once. Additionally we have a lot of typing modes. - Code typing practice; we support 20+ programming languages - daily typing test - target practice; click on on any stat in the results and we generate natural text that uses a lot of that (bigrams, trigrams, words, fingers, etc).
•
Making rent as an open source developer. Attracting new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my crappy HTML skills. Hi. https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html
•
Really difficult puzzle books that will only be available in dead tree format. Extreme killer sudoku, very hard wordsearches etc. Was hoping to have these ready for Christmas season, but life as always gets in the way!
•
https://www.pleeboo.com/ is a who-brings-what kind of tool for organising poltucks, school events or any kind of gathering where tasks need to be distributed
•
Working on computeprices.com - a cloud GPU rental price tracker
The fastest knowledge base for software teams, Outcrop. A lot of teams enjoy using Linear for product management but still have to use Notion and Confluence for knowledge management. I’ve built Outcrop from the ground up to be fast with much more reliable search and realtime collaboration. Hundreds of teams from startups and major companies have signed up for early access and many have made early commitments to support the development of Outcrop. If your team would be interested, I’d like to hear from you! https://outcrop.app https://imedadel.com/outcrop imed at outcrop.app
•
Firefox Mobile, Android: can't access property "enable", c is null
https://xelly.games/ Vine but for user-submitted microgames Docs: https://xelly-games.github.io/docs/intro
•
Have you checked out rooms.xyz? it's a similar concept.
Very nice aesthetic! You might enjoy affinity propagation also. [0] [0] https://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/applications/plot_stock_market.html
•
Thank you for the feedback and your suggestion! A (partial) correlation network with Cytoscape.js is planned as one of my next experiments. A former colleague nudged me in that direction just a few days ago, and now you as well, so I'll probably have to build that next.
A desktop application to visualize and document how tasks flow through a dynamic heirarchy of AI agents. https://omnispect.dev/
•
Is this API only, or can a person use subscriptions (like claude max)?
Puzzleship - a free daily puzzles website with the archives paywalled. Right now it has Logic Grid Puzzles and Zebra Puzzles. I'm pretty proud of the LGP generator algorithm and some experienced players also liked the way the puzzles are constructed. This is my first subscription site and it's been online for less than a week, so I'm learning a lot and trying to figure out the pricing. https://www.puzzleship.com/
•
Great job!
•
Thank you!
•
Very cool!
•
I'm glad you liked!
Cisco Finally Did It (ft.com)
•
> It only took 25 years, eight months and 13 days, but the stock of Cisco Systems finally hit a new record high.
•
I was wondering about this a few weeks ago, if it would ever happen. Congrats, I guess. Wait, this isn't inflation-adjusted. It needs 2x to realistically be worth more.
•
https://archive.is/bVoD9
Is this just a Click Bait Advertisement for the Financial Times? The link is just "Cisco Finally Did it, now subscribe to find out what they did." and the HN headline is just as useless.
•
Everything journalism is trending towards paywalls.
Their stock price recently passed the split adjusted highs of 2000.
•
Wonder if we'll see a similar headline about NVDA in 2050.
Stop crawling my HTML you dickheads – use the API (shkspr.mobi)
•
I tried to ask Gemini about the blog content and it was unable to access the site. It was blocked and unable to discover the API in the first place.
•
if you use microfeed.org , you can use jsonfeed , eg, https://www.microfeed.org/json/
•
How does the LLM know that the HTML and the API are the same? If an LLM wants to link to a user to a section of a page how does it know how to do that from the API alone? You introduce a whole host of potential problems, assuming those are all solved, you then have a new 'standard' that you need to hope everyone adopts. Sure WP might have a plugin to make it easy, but most people wouldn't even know this plugin exists.
•
HTML is the api
•
>x-ai-instructions header These CEOs got rich by pushing a product built on using other people's content without permission, including a massive dump of pirated textbooks. Probably sci-hib content too. It's laughably naive to think these companies will suddenly develop ethics and start being good netizens and adhere to an opt-in "robots.txt"-alike. Morality is for the poor.
•
Is robots.txt still a thing?
•
It is. A typically ignored thing.
We need a crowd sourced list like adgaurd, but for bots. Id love to block all those ips at the firewall.
•
Block GCP, AWS, Azure, and various datacenter prefixen, and you're pretty much golden. There are scant few legitimate reasons a human being's traffic would originate from those hosts.
•
A large portion of those addresses will be valid residential IP addresses running malware on compromised Windows machines.
It's a nice idea, but so few sites set up equivalent data endpoints well that I'm sure there's vanishingly small returns for putting in the work to consume them this way. Plus, the feeds might not get you the same content. When I used RSS more heavily some of my favorite sites only posted summaries in their feeds, so I had to read the HTML pages anyway. How would an scraper know whether that's the case? The real problem is the the explosion of scrapers that ignore robots.txt has put a lot of burden on all sites, regardless of APIs.
•
43-44% of websites are Wordpress. Many non WP sites still have public APIs. Besides the legality of ignoring the robots.txt, it's also just the kind and courteous thing to do.
•
If a site uses GraphQL then it's worth learning, because usually the queries are poorly secured and you can get interesting information from that endpoint.
When I write the scraper, I literally can't write it to account for the API for every single website! BUT I can write how to parse HTML universally, so it is better to find a way to cache your website's HTML so you're not bombarded, rather than write an API and hope companies will spend time implementing it!
•
If you are writing a scraper it behooves you to understand the website that you are scraping. WordPress websites, like that the author is discussing, provide such an API out of the box. And like all WordPress features, this feature is hardly ever disabled or altered by the website administrators. And identifying a WordPress website is very easy by looking at the HTML. Anybody experienced in writing web scrapers has encountered it many times.
More often than not, I’ve seen web pages that are more easily scraped than one could connect to an official API. It’s so weird. It’s like in many cases companies don’t really care, so of course people are going to scrape your pages instead.
•
Are you aware you are shadowbanned?
Create a static resource inside a script tag whose GET request immediately flags the IP for a blocklist.
•
Not sure I follow. Why wouldn't a browser download it?
The reality is that the HTML+CSS+JS is the canonical form, because it is the form that humans consume, and at least for the time being, we're the most important consumer. The API may be equivalent, but it is still conceptually secondary. If it went stale, readers would still see the site, and it makes sense for a scraper to follow what readers can see (or alternately to consume both, and mine both). The author might be right to be annoyed with the scrapers for many other reasons, but I don't think this is one of them.
•
Not only is abandonment of the API possible, but hosts may restrict it on purpose, requiring paid access to use acessability/usability tools. For example, Reddit encouraged those tools to use the API, then once it gained traction, they began charging exorbitant fees effectively blocking every blocking such tools.
•
That's a good point. Anyone who used the API properly were left with egg on their face and anyone who misused the site and just scraped HTML ended up unharmed
Exactly. This parallels “the most accurate docs are the passing test cases”
•
I like to go a level beyond this and say: "Passing tests are fine and all, but the moment your tests mock or record-replay even the smallest bit of external data, the only accurate docs are your production error logs, or lack thereof."
As I wrote: > Like most WordPress blogs, my site has an API. WordPress, for all its faults, powers a fair number of websites. The schema is identical across all of them.
•
If you decide to move your blog to another platform, are you going to maintain API compatibility?
Yeah APIs exist because computers used to require very explicitly structured data, with LLMs a lot of the ambiguity of HTML disappears as far as a scraper is concerned.
•
> LLMs a lot of the ambiguity of HTML disappears as far as a scraper is concerned The more effective way to think about it is that "the ambiguity" silently gets blended into the data. It might disappear from superficial inspection, but it's not gone. The LLM is essentially just doing educated guesswork without leaving a consistent or thorough audit trail. This is a fairly novel capability and there are times where this can be sufficient, so I don't mean to understate it. But it's a different thing than making ambiguity "disappear" when it comes to systems that actually need true accuracy, specificity, and non-ambiguity. Where it matters , there's no substitute for "very explicit structured data" and never really can be.
"computers used to require" please do not write code. ever. Thinking like this is why people now think that 16GB RAM is to little and 4 cores is the minimum. API -> ~200,000 cycles to get data, RAM O(size of data), precise result HTML -> LLM -> ~300,000,000 cycles to get data, RAM O(size of LLM weights), results partially random and unpredictable
•
Weeping and gnashing of teeth because RAM is expensive, and then you learn that people buy 128 GB for their desktops so they can ask a chatbot how to scrape HTML. Amazing.
•
it's kind of hard to tell what your position is here. should people not ask chatbots how to scrape html? should people not purchase RAM to run chatbots locally?
•
If API doesn’t have the data you want, this point is moot.
•
Not GP, but I disagree. I've written successful, robust web scrapers without LLMs for decades. What do you think the E in perl stands for?
GraphQL: The enterprise honeymoon is over (johnjames.blog)
•
If all your experience comes from Apollo Client and Apollo Server, as the author's does, then your opinion is more about Apollo than it is about GraphQL. You should be using Relay[0] or Isograph[1] on the frontend, and Pothos[2] on the backend (if using Node), to truly experience the benefits of GraphQL. [0]: https://relay.dev/ [1]: https://isograph.dev/ [2]: https://pothos-graphql.dev/
How do GraphQL based systems solve the problem of underlying database thrashing, hot shards, ballooning inner joins, and other standard database issues? What prevents a client from writing some adversarial-level cursed query that causes massive internal state buildup? I’m not a database neckbeard but I’ve always been confused how GraphQL doesn’t require throwing all systems knowledge about databases out the window
•
Most servers implement a heuristic for "query cost/complexity" with a configurable max. At the time the query is parsed, its cost is determined based on the heuristic and if it is over the max, the query is rejected.
That's something you should only really do in development, and then cement for production. Having open queries where an attacker can find interesting resolver interactions in production is asking for trouble
•
Sure, maybe you compile away the query for production but the server still needs to handle all the permutations.
This seems a bit reductive as it skims over the whole query resolution part entirely.
•
This, for me, is a perfect description of the entirety of GraphQL tbh.
Pruning the request and even the response is pretty trivial with zod. I wouldn't onboard GQL for that alone. Not sure about the schema evolution part. Protobufs seem to work great for that.
•
> Pruning the request and even the response is pretty trivial with zod. I agree with that, and when I'm in a "typescript only" ecosystem, I've switched to primarily using tRPC vs. GraphQL. Still, I think people tend to underestimate the value of having such clear contracts and guarantees that GraphQL enforces (not to mention it's whole ecosystem of tools), completely outside of any code you have to write. Yes, you can do your own zod validation, but in a large team as an API evolves and people come and go, having hard, unbreakable lines in the sand (vs. something you have to roll your own, or which is done by convention) is important IMO.
Pruning a response does nothing since everything still goes across the network
•
Pruning the response would help validate your response schema is correct and that is delivering what was promised. But you're right, if you have version skew and the client is expecting something else then it's not much help. You could do it client-side so that if the server adds an optional field the client would immediately prune it off. If it removes a field, it could fill it with a default. At a certain point too much skew will still break something, but that's probably what you want anyway.
Hashcards: A Plain-Text Spaced Repetition System (borretti.me)
I don't mind people comparing such projects against Anki, this is natural since Anki is quite dominant in this space, but I feel like every criticism of Anki on that list was either highly subjective, exaggerated, unfair, or outright wrong and unkind (in a "one does not climb a ladder by throwing others off it" manner). Not saying this is what Fernando intended to do here, but his sharp opinion does come across a bit like it here. Personally, I find the interface is extremely functional; the ability to have deck hierarchies to be a massive feature, not a bug; the WYSIWYG being the default being obvious given the intended audience, but one can still easily edit a textfile and import it or edit in html mode directly if desired; converting something into latex math is as simple as enclosing it in "[$] ... [/$]" and hardly the nightmare it's portrayed as; and finally potentially hacky plugins is a feature, not a bug: occasionally you have a very specific problem and some kind soul creates a solution for you, which may be functional but not the most aesthetically pleasing. That's fine. Anki is a bazaar, not a cathedral, and plugins have ratings and reviews which you can consult if necessary. I have tried many different flashcard solutions, including hacky text-based ones, and I always return to Anki. Despite the fact that most other tools in my stack that I swear by are terminal-based.
•
Using Anki every day for about half an hour (I'm a slow learner lol). Anki sucks, but it's good enough that there's no point looking for other apps.
•
Sucks compared to what? I find anki super. It is amazing what other have built for me to use, for free. It is insane value.
Ok but what about images and formulas?
•
The github page mentions that standard Markdown image linking works just fine: https://github.com/eudoxia0/hashcards https://github.com/eudoxia0/hashcards?tab=readme-ov-file#images
Does anyone outside of people in school or language learners use these type of tools in any interesting ways?
•
Ive used Anki to learn musical intervals
Markdown is the final perfect form for every text (non-binary) content based system. Every product will eventually use markdown as their content store.
•
One of the biggest benefits of LLMs is that products are incentivized to have a way to import and export from markdown.
For the bar exam, I used a combination of an outliner and flashcards. Back then, I was usimg a PalmPilot. The idea was: 1. Turn the subject matter into a knowledge tree. 2. If a branch has more than 5 leaves, you split it up. 3. Flashcards are generated by traversing the tree. The parent node is the question, the child nodes are the answer. The benefit of the tree is that it forces you to think about where in your structure a given piece of new information fits.
•
What was the root question of law?
I wish more people knew about GNU recutils instead of inventing new formats
•
I wish there were more/better tools for working with recutils. I had a phase of trying to use recutils wherever it made sense, a few years ago, but the format has a lot of redundancy (not a bad thing in itself), and editor support to make working with that easier was basically non-existent (perhaps it exists only for Emacs). Using the command-line interface for everything was way too cumbersome. Visidata claimed to support the format, which got me excited, but in my experience it mangled the file if you had anything more than a basic set of records, and the support for display too was overall very rudimentary.
Rust Coreutils 0.5.0 Release: 87.75% compatibility with GNU Coreutils (github.com/uutils)
•
Thanks for fixing imaginary memory safety issues in /bin/cat...
•
This is going to sound like a gripe and I swear it isn't, but is there a plan for a reasonably full suite of minimal userspace tools? I don't expect util-linux itself in Rust, but something like: - coreutils - findutils - libmagic and file - tar and some compression libs - grep, awk, sed - the shell and all of its builtins - something functionally equivalent to openssl or GnuTLS - some ssh client and server - curl - a terminal-based editor - man-db and texinfo - some init system and bootloader - pick a package manager, any package manager, and rewrite it in Rust Barring all of that, maybe just busybox but written in Rust. That should give you roughly what you need for a non-graphical system. coreutils isn't nothing, but it's a pretty small part of the system, with much of it ending up implemented by the shell in most distros.
•
I’m not aware of a unified plan to do this. uutils was started as a fun project, not some plan to build a Rust-only userland.
87.75% compatibility, as measured by a comprehensive, but incomplete test suite. They want 87.75% compatibility to be an accurate measure, but we know that in reality the real number is lower. Also, I have major issues with dumping GPL userspace utilities, for an MIT license suite, that is known to not be feature complete, only, and literally only because it was written in Rust. This does not make sense, and this is not good for users.
•
The gnu project is more than welcome to make its own moves away from C.
•
The GNU project can't go to the men's room without a thumbs up from Stallman, who is so disconnected from how real people do their computing that by his own statement he hasn't written any material amount of code in almost 20 years and can't even figure out how to update his own website, instead relying on volunteers to do so. Stallman comes from the era when C was good enough, because computing was not a hostile environment like it is today. GNU is never going to "rewrite it in rust" as long as he's living, and probably for several years afterwards. In other words, it's a social problem not a technical one.
It’s a cool project but does anyone else find the choice of MIT kinda icky/disrespectful? Like maintainers have put decades of work into the GNU coreutils under the gpl and all that entails, and then some people decide to rewrite it and just say “nah”. I know they claim it’s a clean implementation but cmon, there’s no way they aren’t peeking at the existing coreutils source.
•
It’s uncharitable to assume they’re lying. In which case, it’s perfectly ethical and legal to reimplement an existing program.
Only if you think it’s also icky for OpenJDK to have a clean room port of Java. I’m sure oracle would love to force Android and everyone else using Java to pay licensing fees in perpetuity.
•
OpenJDK isn't a clean room port - it was created from the original source code of Sun's JDK.
AFAIK the GNU authors didn’t have access to the original source code because they were proprietary. I don’t know why this matters but it feels different in a purely “feels” way.
•
The GNU authors almost certainly did have access to the AT&T UNIX source code, and they had to be reminded not to refer to UNIX source code when writing GNU replacements. GNU made intentional efforts to design their programs along completely different lines to avoid similarity to the originals. This is described at https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Reading-Nonfree-Code under "Referring to Proprietary Programs".
•
Gotcha! I don’t, but that’s why I asked, I wasn’t sure if this was about any specific license or what. I’m also curious about this: does that it’s in a different language make any difference here? Like I could also maybe see what you’re saying if these were also in C, but being in Rust, it’s not like they can literally copy the code, regardless. I know you’re talking about feelings and not hard and fast rules, but do you think that plays into any of the feelings at all?
•
Not really. I love Rust. It’s all I want to write these days. My feelings stem from what I perceive as the degradation of the old school hacker ethos into a more corporate friendly environment. Especially during this time when the bigger companies are salivating at the mouth to replace SWEs with AI at the same time encouraging us to pick friendly licenses so they can take advantage of our volunteer work…
•
Yes and no; due to antitrust laws with AT&T, almost everyone had copies of UNIX source code, especially if you were near any universities (why does BSD still honor UC Berkeley on bootup, do you think?). Easy as pie to get; but extremely difficult to legally use without a license. The question about whether Linux and GNU copied from the proprietary originals caused the famous SCO lawsuits. Even though this was proven false, there’s very little chance the originals weren’t used as reference in GNU.
No. The original UNIX utilities were under proprietary licenses for an extremely long time, before eventually they broke free under BSD. The BSD tools are descendants of the originals and are also the versions used by macOS. BSD wasn’t under an open license when GNU got started, so GNU reimplemented the proprietary UNIX utilities with their own enhancements and their own GPL license. As such, complaining about the license is rich, considering GNU basically stole it themselves from the first round. And to this day, HN complaining about macOS’s utilities is also rich considering they are actually more standard and authentically UNIX than GNU.
•
MacOS's utilities are really just FreeBSD's with some patches. https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/text_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/system_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/file_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/adv_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/shell_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/misc_cmds
I mean, why is Ubuntu using it as default when it isnt 1.0?
•
They are testing it in a real world scenario before putting it into a LTS of theirs.
In the short term, yeah 4x slower coreutils is probably worth it for memory safe code. In the long run, I’m glad rust coreutils is slowly working through these compatibility issues so we don’t have to pay for memory safety. Yeah, it'll have new bugs. And right now it’s slightly incompatible. But give it a few more years to cook. I’m sure they’ll get there. As an aside, I find it weird how much negativity rewrites like this get. If someone decided to make a new web browser, C compiler or kernel people would be congratulating them. I really don’t understand the conservatism when it comes to Linux. Is the current implementation perfect? Should it be preserved in amber? The gnu runtime seems like a messy, badly specified hairball of hacky, inconsistent scripts to me. Some guys in a certain room in the 70s and 80s wrote some C programs. And now every bad idea they had lives in perpetuity in my /usr/bin directory? In the decades since, these tools have sprouted hundreds of weird features that almost nobody uses. And now what, people care what language it’s all written in? This code must never be changed?? Who cares.
•
GNU utils is battle tested, well reviewed, and STABLE. That's really what I want in an OS, stability. Rust solves only one case of security issues, but it cannot solve logical errors, which there will be many of in a new software project. I just don't see what's to gain, to suffer through years of instability, waiting for a userspace suite to mature, and reach feature parity, when we have a well understood, and safe tool set know. Maybe in five years, when coreutils is complete, I'd be okay with Ubuntu replacing user land with it. But we're not there, and it's a problem we shouldn't have to tolerate. Also I can't stand we're leaving GPL code behind for MIT.
•
It sounds like your beef is with Ubuntu for shipping some of this code. Not with the project for existing and fixing all the compatibility issues that you seem to care a great deal about. If you want a purely gnu userland with gpl code and strong stability guarantees, Ubuntu is almost certainly the wrong distribution for you. I’m sure plenty of Linux distributions will match your conservative values better. As for the gpl, this isn’t new. there’s been bsd/mit licensed alternatives to coreutils for decades. You know, in FreeBSD and friends. It’s only aiming for 100% Linux compatibility that’s new. And I guess, shipping it in Linux. But let’s be real, the gpl v3 is a pretty toxic license. By trying so hard to preserve user freedom, it becomes a new tyranny for developers. If you build a web based startup today hosted on top of Linux, you might be in breach of the gpl. What a waste of everyone’s time. The point of opensource to me is nobody can tell me what I’m allowed to do with my computer. And that includes RMS.
•
Luckily, the existence of uutils doesn’t change the fact that GNU coreutils exists. In fact, it’s helped improve the stability of the GNU coreutils by clarifying intended behavior and adding test cases. So if you prefer them, you should stick to them. Nobody is taking anything from you.
•
So I guess to properly clarify, I absolutely do not mind that someone wants to build coreutils in Rust. I don't have a problem with Rust Coreutils existing. The problem, and the real issue I have is that this project is being used as the default in major linux distros. Eager adoption of this project, and making it the production target does take away things from me. The interface has changed, stability is affected. Correctness is now measured against this incomplete implementation first, not the known correct, and stable GNU coreutils.
•
> 4x slower coreutils I doubt this is true in practice. The majority of coreutils spend the majority of their time waiting for the results of IO/syscalls. (The exception would probably be, the hashing utilities like md5sum.)
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Developing a food-safe finish for my wooden spoons (alinpanaitiu.com)
•
My biggest grief with wooden utensils replaceing plastic ones and cardboard(-ish) cup lids replacing plastic lids is the texture - I almost shudder everytime these environmentally friendly replacements touch my mouth, to the point that I eat in the most ridiculous way in order to avoid having to touch the wooden fork when I'm trying to get the food off of it. And the reason is exactly the finish. Metal and plastic spoons, forks, lids, etc. are nice and smooth and don't get in your way. Cheaply made wood or cardboards ones are rough and tacky. Of course you could argue that from an environmental standpoint, that's not a bug but a feature: now I'm using even less disposable stuff (first, no plastic because it's been replaced by other stuff; and second also the replacements because I hate using them).
•
This is an interesting article, though I wish they had relaxed some of the requirements. Demanding something that both cures fast and is free of solvents seems unnecessarily specific. For hobby projects finishing on a tight deadline is usually not a high priority so longer cure times are an acceptable tradeoff. For larger scale or business oriented projects the use of a solvent can be fine because proper VOC protective gear is not that expensive. Even for hobby work it’s not hard to get reasonable VOC protective gear or establish a fume extraction hood out of some cardboard and a cheap box fan next to a window in the shop space.
•
I'm personally on team Robinson. For wooden objects actually used with food, the best finish is no finish. https://www.finewoodworking.com/2024/10/10/the-best-food-safe-finish-may-be-none-at-all
Interesting, I'll have to give that a detailed read later. It might be applicable to 3D prints. To head off the people who will jump up-and-down calling me paranoid for not considering untreated printed works food safe, and accusing me of accusing them of poisoning family & friends (in some circles the discussion can get more cantankerous than the vi/emacs thing!): you keep using printed things for food without treatment if you like, and I won't judge, but I prefer to remain paranoid because if printed items were food safe it would be a selling point and I don't see any manufacturers using food based examples in their advertising.
•
> To head off the people who will jump up-and-down calling me paranoid for not considering untreated printed works food safe, I’ve been involved with consumer 3D printing for over a decade and I don’t recall ever seeing a conversation where anyone suggested 3D printer parts were default food safe. It’s one of the more common FAQs you see on 3D printing forums.
> Some carvers use urushi lacquer which is the sap from a tree common to Japan. Urushi is the name of the Japanese tree, Toxicodendron verniciflua (the genus formerly was named Rhus ), and of the lacquer of which its sap is the main constituent. The lacquer is also called urushiol (note, not urush oi l), which is also the resinous substance found in other members of the Toxicodendron genus: T. radicans and T. rydbergii , or poison ivy; T. diversilobum and T. pubescens , poison oak; and T. vernix , poison sumac. The resinous oil is what causes allergic reactions. Which finally gets to my point: What are the allergic affects of the tree, its raw sap, the liquid lacquer, and maybe for hypersenstive/reactive urushiol allergies, the finished lacquer? I don't meant to be alarmist - people have been eating off urushi lacquer for centuries. I'm thinking more about working with it. EDIT: For those interested in the scientific aspects of the resin, plants, and allergic reaction: Aaron C. Gladman MD. Toxicodendron Dermatitis: Poison Ivy, Oak, and Sumac. Wilderness & Environmental Medicine vol 17 #2 (June 2006) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1580/pr31-05.1
•
> What are the allergic affects of the tree, its raw sap, the liquid lacquer, and maybe for hypersenstive/reactive urushiol allergies, the finished lacquer? Essentially the same as for any other urushiol. I'm highly sensitive and had to ask my partner not to get into kintsugi with the traditional lacquers because even the tiniest spot of urushiol and I will be considering a trip to the burn unit. I've gotten a very mild reaction from ~century old lacquerware but I wouldn't expect that to be common, once it's fully cured. And just because it's mild doesn't mean it's any less itchy, trust me.
•
As a child, my grandmother once accidentally used a poison oak stem to roast a hotdog over a campfire. She hadn't cooked it hot enough to denature the oil, and she reacted to it internally, which required a hospital visit. Granted, consuming it is the worst-case scenario, but exposure to those oils can be life threatening.
> Which finally gets to my point: What are the allergic affects of the tree, its raw sap, the liquid lacquer, and maybe for hypersenstive/reactive urushiol allergies, the finished lacquer? The Wood Database can be a useful practical site for this sort of thing. I found [0], a page for a different wood which is said to contain the same allergen: > The sap contains urushiol (the same allergen found in Poison Ivy), and can still be irritating to some sensitized individuals even after the wood has been dried, and sap can also seep through some wood finishes to the surface of the wood. Same as poison ivy? Count me out if true: I react badly. [0] https://www.wood-database.com/rengas/
•
The Wood Database? Thank you for once again reminding me how incredible the Information Highway once was, and could be. I lament our detour onto the Commercial Highway.
Dude already found the perfect thing, but wanted an excuse to play with random metallic driers and resins instead. Fine, but don't pretend it was necessary. But it’s really hard to mix properly and apply on small wooden objects like spoons and cups. I almost always use too much accelerator, Just use a precision scale. Pharmacists give me side-eye when I mention cutting my medicine. No, I do small-scale epoxy mixing!
•
I have only used Rubio once and didn't bother with accelerant at all. For my use case it worked out fine. Although it's the only time I've done any sort of wood finishing so take it with a grain of salt.
I think all wood finishes are "food safe" once they're cured.
•
That is a terrible assumption to make. Regular lacquer for example does poorly under temperatures commonly encountered when preparing food and it’s basically a mix of solvents.
If you use the appropriate wood, you can wet and sand many times to get a smooth finish. You can burnish it (rub with hard metal) to close the surface well. But it will still stain and absorb smells, just to a lessor extent. You'll notice if you use the same spoon for coffee and tea, or the same spoon for curry and miso soup.
•
Why would you use a wooden spoon for those? I use wooden utensils for frying and stirring in metal pots and pans. Everything else is just the usual stainless steel type suitable for utensils.
When the wood fibers get wet they swell and become soft. When soft, the surface will be very sensitive to damage. Fibers on the surface will raise and then not return to their original position, causing surface roughness. Repeated cycles of wet/dry will cause cracks.
•
From experience, even the cheapest wood spoons won't bulge, as long as you don't leave them immerged in water for a long time.
iOS 26.2 fixes 20 security vulnerabilities, 2 actively exploited (macrumors.com)
•
Somehow my phone auto-updated to iOS 26. My advice is don't do it. Litreally everything is worse. Apple use to put function first, then form followed, then polished till it was a natural experience.
If your phone is laggy after liquid glass, Enabling "Reduce Motion" from Accessibility/Motion makes my 2020 iphone se much better. You can also disable transparency for even more frames, but it makes some UIs look particularly bad (because everything is transparent in frutiger aero/liquid glass)
•
But may break Safari, in which case you’ll have to close safari, toggle the setting and open it again. The navbars float in the middle of webpages otherwise.
It's unfortunate that Apple has taught me (and I assume others as well) over the last 15 years that the best practice is to never install a major OS update. It seems clear to me that they use OS updates as a way to eventually slow your device down so the lag becomes so annoying that you want to purchase a new device. (Edit: And the really obnoxious part is that they force you to receive upgrade prompts every single day and you can't disable it.)
•
Apple users not updating major OSes goes back to the 90s with System 7. It's a seemingly weird habit that some formed even as exposure to vulnerabilities increased.
Your theory is real but its not the main purpose, it’s a happy accident for Apple. Otherwise there’d be a class action.
•
I don't think so. There is always a cutoff for the last major version they recommend for any hardware. Why is the cutoff always after it lags the device severely and not -before- that happens?
Because it's factually incorrect. Ars Technica, a clickbait aggregator whom should have been banned from this site long ago, is hardly a reliable source.
•
https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/about-software-updates-depc4c80847a/web > Note: Because of dependency on architecture and system changes to any current version of Apple operating systems (for example, macOS 26, iOS 26, and so on), not all known security issues are addressed in previous versions (for example, macOS 15, iOS 18, and so on).
Private Equity Finds a New Source of Profit: Volunteer Fire Departments (nytimes.com)
Yes a bunch of poor people in a rural area trying to raise money from a bunch of other poor people doesn’t seem to be working out too well… But in Johns Creek where I use to live where the median household income is $170k. Firefighters aren’t volunteering https://www.indeed.com/cmp/City-of-Johns-Creek/salaries/Firefighter/Johns-Creek-GA?period=YEARLY I am arguing that in the US as a nation, no firefighter should have to “volunteer” that’s where the state and federal government should step in. I’m more okay with taking my tax dollars as a person who makes a good living to help rural areas and I would vote for a politician to help them before they would.
•
In Switzerland volunteer firefighting is common.
•
So is universal healthcare, free college education and a safety net. Are firefighters in Switzerland doing bake sells to pay for maintenance on their equipment like the people in the cities in the article or does the government do it?
Well, the overwhelming percentage of open source contributors to Linux are from corporations. I bet you will see the same for most popular open source projects
•
That didn't answer my assertion.
•
Well would the fact I have never written a single line of code since 1992 that wasn’t directly in service of my getting a degree for the next four years or getting paid for the last 30, tell you how I feel about free labor? I was a hobbyist assembly language programmer for six year prior to going to college and did some BASIC.
If you look at a precinct-level map of election results you’ll see speckles of blue everywhere, as well as areas that were narrowly split. Those speckles represent real communities with people living in them. You can’t just write them off. There’s also small towns or clusters of homes in the middle of nowhere where most of the residents disagree from the communities surrounding them. They don’t necessarily have enough votes to make a dent, but they also exist. Assuming people’s politics or worth based on where they live leads to unpleasant outcomes.
•
Whose writing them off? I have repeatedly said that I have no issues with taxpayer funded assistance on the federal and tax level. But you can’t help people who are more interested in “owning the libs” and “fighting wokism”.
•
I was more responding to the notion that rural = Republican and therefore bad/hopeless. I think it’s a mischaracterization that needs to die before we can make real progress towards reform in this country.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Science Communications on YouTube (blogs.memphis.edu)
List is incomplete without some other high quality channels already mentioned in other threads, but also Anton Petrov[1]'s channel, Sixty Symbols[2], Science Clic[3] and Artem Kirsanov[4]. Animalogic[5] certainly worth mentioning. And absolutely stunning Journey to Microcosmos[6]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/@whatdamath [2] https://www.youtube.com/@sixtysymbols [3] https://www.youtube.com/@ScienceClicEN [4] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR2uRTQ53V_egXKFflMMaaw [5] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwg6_F2hDHYrqbNSGjmar4w [6] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBbnbBWJtwsf0jLGUwX5Q3g
•
ScienceClic has extremely good animations. And it's run by some guy in his early 20s. He knows the physics, he can create these amazing animations and he comes up with genuinely novel metaphors and perspectives.
Who has time for videos? I know lots watch them, but wow - reading is so much more efficient. I can skip ahead - and skim - or revisit; I can annotate; I can save, transcribe (copy/paste), I read so much faster than even accelerated video can play .... and all so much more easily. By sticking to reading, am I missing out on content? Edit: Not a criticism of watching video, I'm wondering if I'm missing substantial things. If I didn't read, for example, I'd miss a lot that doesn't exist in video or audio. Same thing with podcasts.
•
They are good summaries. They’ve essentially replaced low- to mid- depth magaize articles, and some of the high depending on the topic
He was bought out by private equity.[0] That’s why the channel is different now. [0] https://www.electrify.video/post/electrify-completes-majority-investment-in-veritasium
•
This explains why i have been finding his recent videos somewhat disjointed/disorganized and titles click-baity. The quality of the content has most certainly gone down.
I highly recommend turning off watch history on YouTube. it stops recommending you videos entirely; just watch what you subscribe to
•
I have a dedicated Chrome profile/account for watching videos that I don't want infecting my primary account's recommendations. Right click, "Open link as".
She's very hit or miss in her quality IMO. Also, she's explicitly disclaimed the title of "science communicator", so she might not want to be on this list anyway. :) I kind of wish they hadn't included Veritasium either. He seems to have gone downhill.
•
Her content is mostly meta, vs science comm/teaching. I am really torn on her: Great communicator, funny, accomplished. Seems confident/smug?/conservative for a scientist. Something about her word choice and style feels more politician than learner/researcher. Not sure how to phrase this.
•
That's an interesting perspective. I definitely don't get a "politician" tone from her. Her tone seems very casual to me. Conservative in the broad sense, maybe (definitely not politically).
Apple Maps claims it's 29,905 miles away (mathstodon.xyz)
Maps has gone backwards on CarPlay, too. Hysteresis is completely broken - I stop at a traffic light and the map will jump back and forth between two resolutions, often once a second, which is extremely distracting. I also love that Find My says my partner was "last seen" at home "8,912 days ago". Apple just doesn't give as much of a shit any more.
•
Sidenote, I love spotting random binary numbers out on the wild
> On a vaguely related note, driving 3000 kilometers through Europe in an electric car was surprisingly nice. Having done a number of multiple-thousand km trips in Europe in an EV (not a Tesla, nobody buys those anymore) — it's amusing how non-EV muggles think this is somehow an ordeal. It's just fine! There are drawbacks: you do have to use your brain and plan ahead more than you do when burning dinosaurs. But I found that the 20-30 minute stops every 2h really improve how I feel after a day or two of driving. Agreed about prices: there is gouging going on with some crazy margins. When charging at home, an EV is 2-4x less expensive per km than a gasoline-powered car, but when fast-charging on a road trip the cost of energy is nearly the same.
•
> But I found that the 20-30 minute stops every 2h really improve how I feel after a day or two of driving. I honestly started considering this a feature. I am a huge believer in "productive friction" - where some things are intentionally made annoying or hard so that humans avoid them - and this is a really good example.
I had a Volvo XC90 that “jumped” off the interstate and onto a parallel mountain road east of Knoxville. It did its best to track along those roads and somehow made its way into North Carolina. But even when I was back in Chicago, it was still stuck in NC trying to find a way off those mountain roads. Dozens of on/off cycles did nothing. I disconnected the battery overnight and that didn’t work. At the next service appointment, the dealer had to do a full firmware reset to wipe the memory and get it working again. It amazed me that Volvo programmed an SUV to disbelieve that it could ever actually leave a road.
•
> It amazed me that Volvo programmed an SUV to disbelieve that it could ever actually leave a road. Only for footpaths in residential areas. I wonder what class of vehicles is least likely to go off roading?
AI and the ironies of automation – Part 2 (ufried.com)
I really like this author's summary of the 1983 Bainbridge paper about industrial automation. I have often wondered how to apply those insights to AI agents, but I was never able to summarize it as well as OP. Bainbridge by itself is a tough paper to read because it's so dense. It's just four pages long and worth following along: https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf For example, see this statement in the paper: "the present generation of automated systems, which are monitored by former manual operators, are riding on their skills, which later generations of operators cannot be expected to have." This summarizes the first irony of automation, which is now familiar to everyone on HN: using AI agents effectively requires an expert programmer, but to build the skills to be an expert programmer, you have to program yourself. It's full of insights like that. Highly recommended!
•
>the present generation of automated systems, which are monitored by former manual operators, are riding on their skills, which later generations of operators cannot be expected to have. But we are in the later generation now. All the 1983 operators are now retired, and today's factory operators have never had the experience of 'doing it by hand'. And yet they're still doing great. Factory automation has been wildly successful and is responsible for why manufactured goods are so plentiful and inexpensive today.
•
The author's conclusion feels even more relevant today: AI automation doesn’t really remove human difficulty—it just moves it around, often making it harder to notice and more risky. And even after a human steps in, there’s usually a lot of follow-up and adjustment work left to do. Thanks for surfacing these uncomfortable but relevant insights
•
Sanchez's Law of Abstraction comes to mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601623
How can you be sure you remember if you aren’t actually doing it?
•
This is an important question I think. Gradually losing a skill to atrophy is not something you notice consciously.
Calculators don't do math, they do calculating. Which is to say, they don't think for you. There's not much value in being able to quickly compute some expression in a world with calculators. But there's a huge value in knowing how to know which numbers to feed into the calculation.
•
I derive tremendous value from being able to calculate taxes, tips, and so forth in my head, or right on the receipt, without having to reach for my phone and launch Droid48. (I know some of y'all are also Droid48 bros.) It's even more profound a convenience than knowing how to drive Emacs with just the keyboard and not having to reach for the goddamn mouse.
Kimi K2 1T model runs on 2 512GB M3 Ultras (twitter.com)
•
Does this also run with Exo Labs' token pre-fill acceleration using DGX Spark? I.e. take 2 Sparks and 2 MacStudios and get a comparable inference speed to what 2x M5 Ultras will be able to do?
Because of privacy reasons? Yeah I’m not going to spend a small fortune for that to be able to use these types of models.
•
There are plenty of examples and reasons to do so besides privacy- because one can, because it’s cool, for research, for fine tuning, etc. I never mentioned privacy. Your use case is not everyone’s.
Kimi K2 is a very impressive model! It's particularly un-obsequious, which makes it useful for actually checking your reasoning on things. Some especially older ChatGPT models will tell you that everything you say is fantastic and great. Kimi -on the other hand- doesn't mind taking a detour to question your intelligence and likely your entire ancestry if you ask it to be brutal.
•
I made the mistake of turning off nsfw mode while in a buddy's Tesla and then Grok misheard something else I said as "I like lesbians", and it just went off on me. It was pretty hilarious. That model is definitely not obsequious either.
Kimi K2 is a really weird model, just in general. It's not nearly as smart as Opus 4.5 or 5.2-Pro or whatever, but it has a very distinct writing style and also a much more direct "interpersonal" style. As a writer of very-short-form stuff like emails, it's probably the best model available right now. As a chatbot, it's the only one that seems to really relish calling you out on mistakes or nonsense, and it doesn't hesitate to be blunt with you. I get the feeling that it was trained very differently from the other models, which makes it situationally useful even if it's not very good for data analysis or working through complex questions. For instance, as it's both a good prose stylist and very direct/blunt, it's an extremely good editor. I like it enough that I actually pay for a Kimi subscription.
•
It's a lot stronger for geospatial intelligence tasks than any other model in my experience. Shame it's so slow in terms of tps
> I get the feeling that it was trained very differently from the other models It's actually based on a deepseek architecture just bigger size experts if I recall correctly.
•
It was notably trained with Muon optimizer for what it's worth, but I don't know how much can be attributed to that alone
The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps? (codemanship.wordpress.com)
•
A lot of discussions around vibe AI coding flaws: awful architecture, performance problems, security holes, lack of maintainability, bugs, and low code quality. All correct, but none of those is matter if: - you create small utility that covers only features needed only for you. As many researches show that any individual uses only less than 20% of software functionality, your tool covers only 10-20% that matters for you - it only runs locally, on user computer or phone, and never has more than one customer. Performance, security, compliances do not matter - the code lies next to application, and small enough to fix any bug instantly, in a single AI agent run - as a single user, you don't care about design, UX, or marketing. Do the job is only matter It means, majority of vibe coded applications run under radar, used only by a few individuals. I can see it myself: I have a bunch of vibe code utilities that never intended for a broad auditory . And, many of my friend and customers, mention the same: "I vibe coded utility that does ... for me". This means a big consequences for software development: the area for commercial development shrinks, nothing that can be replaced by the small local utility has a market value.
Are you arguing that the difficulty of producing a fully functioning poc is no different today than 2-3 years ago?! Personally, I’ve been writing software for 10 years professionally. It is much easier, especially for someone with little coding experience, to create a quite complex and fully featured web app. It makes sense that ai models are leveraging frameworks like next js/react/supabase, they are trained/tuned on a very clear stack that is more compatible with how models function. Of course those tools have high value regardless of ai. But ai has rapidly lowered the barrier to entry, and allows be to go much much farther, much faster.
•
No, I'm arguing that it's gotten steadily easier and easier to build high-level projects all the time over the last 20 years. React is obviously a huge part of that. There's a zillion React tutorials out there, so the value of making React accessible to beginners -- once again, that value was not created by AI , but rather by bloggers and youtubers and conversational evangelists. I also just don't think "going fast" in that sense is such a big a deal. You're talking about frantic speed. I think about speed in terms of growth. The goal is to build sturdy foundations so that you keep growing on an exponential track. Being in a frantic hurry to finish building your foundations is not a good omen for the quality of what will be built on them.
•
3 years ago you throw hundreds of dollars to the Upwork and have an app in result. Nowadays it's much cheaper/faster with LLM, but the difficulty is pretty much the same.
davydm nails it. The gap isn't in generating code - it's in everything else that makes software actually work. I've been building accounting tools for years. AI can generate a function to parse a bank statement CSV pretty well. But can it handle the Barclays CSV that has a random blank row on line 47? Or the HSBC format that changed last month? Or the edge case where someone exports from their mobile app vs desktop? That's not even touching the hard stuff - OAuth token refresh failures at 3am, database migrations when you change your mind about a schema, figuring out why Xero's API returns different JSON on Tuesdays. The real paradox: AI makes starting easier but finishing harder. You get to 80% fast, then spend longer on the last 20% than you would have building from scratch - because now you're debugging code you don't fully understand.
•
all of these problems are better articulated at the level you just explained them. the code for these issues is convoluted and is only of use when an entity (human or not) can actually manipulate the symbolic text that achieves that task. a random oauth stub is of 0 use to the most skilled programmers without documentation as to what contracts and invariants are. bits in a file is just a means
 Top