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Office.eu launches as Europe's sovereign office platform (office.eu)
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You can have hosted Nextcloud on Hetzner, with Headscale, email server, Vaultwarden, and Wordpress on European infrastructure (Hetzner) individually installed just for you from Federated Computer today for $19/month unlimited user accounts. I use it every day. Human support, too...!
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Good luck to them, but without an equivalent to Microsoft Access it's not really a replacement for Microsoft Office for many power users. (Yes, I'm aware that Access has some weaknesses as a database but for quick-and-dirty custom applications it's still the easiest platform out there.)
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This has been a longtime coming, it is not unique but it is still significant The enormous momentum of the installed base and occupied headspace of Microsoft systems made them lazy and complacent decades ago. They have been peddling insecure unreliable software for a generation now, and believed their was no viable threat. It took too long, but finally. Trump and his mad bad actions are good for the Europeans like a heart attack is good for your health
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Has it been hugged this easily? Doesn't load for me.
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Microsoft draws over 3 billion dollars out of Norway yearly. We are many that want this number much, much closer to zero. At it's small steps like this that makes it possible.
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Your sovereign wealth fund probably makes 3 billion dollars out of Microsoft yearly.
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> Office EU is a complete cloud-based office suite Issue is.. if you are a traditional MS Office "poweruser", the last thing you want to do is spend your days in a web browser. These apps should also be available as native apps, similar to MS Word, Excel, Pages, Keynote, etc.
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This is probably not the target audience. Most people just need to write occasional letters and sign some files.
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From the FAQ on the homepage: What is Office EU? Office EU is a European productivity suite for files, email, calendars, documents and calls, built on Nextcloud Hub. It brings Files, Talk, Groupware and Office together in one platform. Looking through the Office EU screenshots, they do look like Nextcloud Groupware/Files/Office with the logo changed.
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> Yes. Office EU provides a desktop sync client for Windows, macOS and Linux so files stay up to date across devices. Regardless of the Nextcloud issue. It's probably just a web wrapper then.
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The EU tech ecosystem is sadder every day
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I laud the attempt and I think it's important there are more projects that try to compete with their American counterparts. I do want to gently note that if your entire pitch is "we are a bold, independent European alternative that liberates you from the hegemony of the established American players," maybe don't name your product the exact same thing as the product you're replacing? "Office." They named it "Office."
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For me, the charitable interpretation is that office is very close to a default term for the category of the software. Open Office, Libre Office, WPS Office, Only Office, Polaris Office. One thing that may contribute to Europe's and the world's independence from Office is the notion that it's a term distinctly associated with a Microsoft product. I don't entirely disagree though because they could have attached some distinguishing prefix or suffix. Maybe that's what the .eu is.
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To be fair, Microsoft Office doesn't exist anymore as a separate brand: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-office "Office is now Microsoft 365, the premier productivity suite with innovative productivity apps, intelligent cloud services, and world-class security. Office.com, the Office mobile app, and the Office app for Windows are combined in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app—with a new icon, new look, and even more features." You can count on Microsoft to mess up their marketing message in the craziest ways. Why stick with the best-known productivity software brand on the planet when you can call it "365 Copilot"?
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I doubt this will stop the lawsuit. Also Microsoft still absolutely sells Office 365 tiers separately from Microsoft 365 tiers. Their marketing is terrible and confusing but Offie definitely still exits as a brand, and you can bet your bottom dollar the lawyers are going to be having a great day on Monday.
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I mean, at least the gloves come off, who’s going to come after them for using the name? Microsoft? EU will just invalidate their patents. Done. Bye.
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It also possibly sets a false expectation of perfect compatibility… you can imagine bureaucrats trying to figure out if a file needs to be opened in Office or Office (new)
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Considering that for the average office worker I know switching from outlook to outlook (new) is a major hurdle within the same ecosystem, I can only imagine what they were thinking coming up with a name.
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That is not even broaching the sacred domain-specific excel macros which will 100% break when you try and run in this program.
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Cheap purchased PR slop with fake articles and no product. e.g.: - https://hostingdiscussion.com/news/european-cloud-workspace-office-eu-emerges-as-sovereign-alternative-to-big-tech-suites/ - https://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/empresas/amp/plataforma-office-eu-lancada-como-alternativa-europeia-ao-microsoft-office And it seems to be repackaged Collabora (~LibreOffice): https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/05/office_eu_suite/
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LibreOffice came from OpenOffice which was StarOffice which was developed in Germany.
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They list a bunch of companies under the heading "All these companies work with the same technology" on their landing page. I think it's quite scummy, and very non-impressive when you see it.
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I need to learn this skill of producing nothing and pretending I have. It seems to be very rewarding, financially speaking.
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In general getting EU grants is very lucrative. It takes some relationships and writing skill but in the end you never have to deliver any results (beyond maybe a report that no one ever reads)
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Should have gotten an MBA instead of a BS.
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Really, just lack shame and sell something you do not have and bet that you can get it before anyone really presses too hard. It's an incredible thing to see.
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You need to know the right people in Brussels/Washington to milk the system and scam the taxpayer in your favor.
Grandparents are glued to their phones, families are worried [video] (bbc.com)
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[delayed]
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This feels similar to how you'll see rows and rows of elderly people mindlessly pushing the slot machine buttons in casinos. It makes me wonder if impulse control starts breaking down for that crowd. Of course, I also wonder if non-digital natives also just have less of a thick skin for this sort of thing.
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Wait till you see the grandparents glued to the TV.
The recontextualisation of "parental" is very amusing.
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As nicely illustrated in this Young Sheldon episode fragment: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Nd90rFPYVnc
I was reading up on some RCTs on social media and mental health recently and one of the surprising findings is that social media is actually worse for older people.
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Can you share some things you were reading?
My aunt is 80 and thank goodness she has an iPhone. She’s bedridden and spends all day on it. She has no children but I lived with her for a while when I moved out of my parent’s, and we text often.
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The concern is what you're doing when you're getting older but still able. The decline is accelerated by muscle weakness which is accelerated by sitting around all day looking at screens.
My parents generation are the most screen addicted people I know. Absolute slaves to Facebook’s algorithm. It’s really disheartening to see.
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My Dad’s got early stage dementia and Facebook is an absolute nightmare. The apps infested with AI slop and the algorithm seems to fill his feed with stuff designed to get him worked up (currently badly behaved cyclists even though he no longer drives).
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Mine got Israeli propaganda and kept texting me so often about Hamas and Muslims that I had to block him.
Taking grandmas unpaid care work for granted - no longer possible. Outrage!
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More: If you want to spend time with your grandkid please do not just sit besides him, phone in hand. If you do not want to then that's fine
Seniors are the most vulnerable people on the internet, the most likely to be fooled by disinformation, the most likely to vote, and are one of the biggest threats to civil society. Boomers are destroying what previous generations have built.
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Here in Germany they also ignored the demographics, so our social insurance systems (retirement but also health) are heading towards a catastrophe, because there is no capital backing them. They are fundamentally relying on the next generation being bigger or at least equal. This has turned them essentially into Ponzi schemes. The taxpayer has to jump in, making the state less and less able to do anything at all. Of course they now collectively avoid responsibility and slowly milk the young - their own children - dry. It is truly the most egoistic generation ever.
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And also the most likely to fall victims to scams. An elderly family friend lost millions to a pig butchering scam.
Try Unhook (desktop) and Untrap (iOS). At this point, my YouTube experience is just the channels I subscribe to, and the video player. It reduced my usage to almost zero. I'm not exactly curing cancer, but my media consumption is more moderate and mindful now.
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Same thing can be achieved (mostly) by disabling youtube watch and search history. It causes the home page to be blank, and all recommendations under any video are usually from your subscriptions, related your subscriptions, or directly related to the video.
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This is the simplest and most effective solution, Cheers
Sure, but I've seen since the 70s old folks just staring at TV all day, so it's not just a mobile phenomenon either.
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Very true, phone addiction is that taken to a new level but the same underlaying issues remain.
It’s all fine, but in that case also do not worry about this hypothetical old person spending time the way they like to.
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Certainly, how they spend their time is their choice, concepts of free will and all that.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
C++26: The Oxford Variadic Comma (sandordargo.com)
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C++ seems to be constantly getting complicated. If the major version were to change, there wouldn't be any need for backward compatibility with the existing code, and it would have been okay to delete that syntax while creating an automatic formatter.
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Are you suggesting we move to C++++?
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It's already there. It's called C#
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Of course since the old syntax is merely deprecated and not removed, going forward you now have to know the old, bad form and the new, good form in order to read code. Backwards compatibility is a strength but also a one-way complexity ratchet. At least they managed to kill `auto_ptr`.
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C++ got too complicated after C++23 I went back to C.
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learned something new. thanks for the article.
This seems pretty good to me just on the level of trying to read C as someone using C++. Parameter packs and variadic templates are easily the most confusing syntax in C++ and cleaning it up is... very welcome
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Hats off for using "..." in your comment immediately after a valid identifier word and with no comma in between, given the topic of the article.
I used to slay with this in code golfing competitions from TopCoder, where you had to implement a function to solve a particular problem, thanks to C pointer maths and the gcc generally putting function arguments in order in the stack. Turns out, these two are equivalent in practice (but UB in the C++ standard): double solve(double a, double b, double c, double d) { return a + b + c + d; } double solve(double a ...) { return a + 1[&a] + 2[&a] + 3[&a]; }
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K&R syntax is -1 char, if you are in C: double solve(double a,double b,double c,double d){return a+b+c+d;} double solve(double a...){return a+1[&a]+2[&a]+3[&a];} double solve(a,b,c,d)double a,c,b,d;{return a+b+c+d;}
Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
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I also work at big tech. Claude code is very good and I have not written code by hand in months. These are very messy codebases as well. I have to very much be in the loop and constantly guiding it with clarifying questions but it has made running multiple projects in parallel much easier and has handled many tedious tasks.
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Daily Claude user via Cursor. What works: -Just pasting the error and askig what's going on here. -"How do I X in Y considering Z?" -Single-use scripts. -Tab (most of the time), although that doesn't seem to be Claude. What doesn't: -Asking it to actually code. It's not going to do the whole thing and even if, it will take shortcuts, occasionally removing legitimate parts of the application. -Tests. Obvious cases it can handle, but once you reach a certain threshold of coverage, it starts producing nonsense. Overall, it's amazing at pattern matching, but doesn't actually understand what it's doing. I had a coworker like this - same vibe.
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For those of you for who it is working: show your code, please.
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Why so every armchair reviewer can yell, "Slop!"?
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It churns through boring stuff but it's like I imagine the intellectual equivalent of breaking in a wild horse at times, so capable, so fast but easy to find yourself in a pile on the floor. I'm learning all the time and it's fun, exasperating, tremendously empowering and very definitely a new world.
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Exceptionally well. I’ve been using it for my side project for the last 7 months and have learned how to use it really well on a rather large codebase now. My side project has about 100k LOC and most of it is AI generated, though I do heavily review and edit.
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What you said about "we're all cooked" and "AI is useless" is literally me and everyone I know switching between the two on an hourly basis... I find it the most exciting time for me as a builder, I can just get more things done. Professionally, I'm dreading for our future, but I'm sure it will be better than I fear, worse than I hope. From a toolset, I use the usual, Cursor (Super expensive if you go with Opus 4.6 max, but their computer use is game changing, although soon will become a commodity), Claude code (pro max plan) - is my new favorite. Trying out codex, and even copilot as it's practically free if you have enterprise GitHub. I'm going to probably move to Claude Code, I'm paying way too much for Cursor, and I don't really need tab completion anymore... once Claude Code will have a decent computer use environment, I'll probably cancel my Cursor account. Or... I'll just use my own with OpenClaw, but I'm not going to give it any work / personal access, only access to stuff that is publicly available (e.g. run sanity as a regular user). Playing with skills, subagents, agent teams, etc... it's all just markdowns and json files all the way down... About our professional future: I'm not going to start learning to be a plumber / electrician / A/C repair etc, and I am not going to recommend my children to do so either, but I am not sure I will push them to learn Computer Science, unless they really want to do Computer Science . What excites me the most right now is my experiments with OpenClaw / NanoClaw, I'm just having a blast. tl;dr most exciting yet terrifying times of my life.
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I use Cursor and have been pretty happy with the Plan -> Revise -> Build -> Correct flow. I don't write everything with it, but the planning step does help me clarify my thoughts at times. One of the things that has helped the most is all the documentation I wrote inside the repository before I started using AI. It was intended for consumption by other engineers, but I think Cursor has consumed it more than any human. I've even managed to make improvements not by having AI update it , but asking AI "What unanswered questions do you have based on reading the documentation?" It has helped me fill in gaps and add clarity. Another thing I've gotten a ton of value with is having it author diagrams. I've had it create diagrams with both the mermaid syntax and AWSDAC (Diagram-as-Code). I've always found crafting diagrams a painstaking process. I have it make a first pass by analyzing my code + configuration, then make corrections and adjustments by explaining the changes I want. In my own PRs, I have been in the habit of posting my Cursor Plan document and Transcript so that others can learn from it. I've also encouraged other team members to do the same. I feel bad for any teams that are being mandated to use a certain amount of AI. It seems to me that the only way to make it work is by having teams experiment with it and figure out how to best use it given their product and the team's capacity. AI is like a pair of Wile-E-Coyote rocket skates. It'll get you somewhere fast, but unless you've cleared the road of debris and pointed in exactly the right direction, you're going to careen off a cliff or into a wall.
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On two greenfield web apps using straightforward stuff (Preact, Go, PostgreSQL) Claude Code has been very helpful. Especially with Claude Code and Opus >= 4.5, adding an incremental feature mostly just works. One of these is sort of a weird IDE, and Opus even does OK with obscureish things like CodeMirror grammars. I literally just write a little paragraph describing what I want, have it write the code and tests, give it a quick review, and 80% of the time it’s like, great, no notes. To be clear, this is not vibecoding. I have a strong sense of the architecture I want, and explicitly keep Claude on the desired path much like I would a junior programmer. I also insist on sensible unit and E2E test coverage with every incremental commit. I will say that after several months of this the signalling between UI components is getting a bit spaghettilike, but that would’ve happened anyway, and I bet Claude will be good at restructuring it when I get around to that. I also work in a giant Rails monolith with 15 years of accumulated cruft. In that area, I don’t write a whole lot, but CC Opus 4.6 is fantastic for reading the code. Like, ask “what are all the ways you can authenticate an API endpoint?” and it churns away for 5 minutes and writes a nice summary of all four that it found, what uses them, where they’re implemented, etc.
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FAANG colleague writes this week -- "I am currently being eaten alive by AI stuff for my non-( foss-project ) work. I spend most of my day slogging through AI generated comments and code trying to figure out what is good, not good, or needs my help to become good. Or I'm trying to figure out how to prompt the tools to do what I want them to do" This fellow is one of the few mature software engineers I have ever met who is rigorously and consistently productive in a very challenging mature code base year in and year out. or WAS .. yes this is from coughgooglecough in California
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I am getting disproportionately good results with the models by following a process: spec -> plan -> critique -> improve plan -> implement plan.
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If I may "yes, and" this: spec → plan → critique → improve plan → implement plan → code review
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I'm repeating this 3rd time, but, a non-technical client of mine has whipped up an impressive SaaS prototype with tons of features. They still need help with the cleanup, it's all slop, but I was doing many small coding requests for that client. Those gigs will simply disappear. I just got started using Claude very recently. I have not been in the loop how much better it got. Now it's obvious that no one will write code by hand. I genuinely fear for my ability to make a living as soon as 2 years from now, if not sooner. I figure the only way is to enter the red queen race and ship some good products. This is the positive I see. If I put 30h/week into something, I have productivity of 3 people. If it's a weekend project at 10h/week, I have now what used to be that full week of productivity. The economics of developing products solo have vastly changed for the better.
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It has made my job an awful slog, and my personal projects move faster. At work, the devs up the chain now do everything with AI – not just coding – then task me with cleaning it up. It is painful and time consuming, the code base is a mess. In one case I had to merge a feature from one team into the main code base, but the feature was AI coded so it did not obey the API design of the main project. It also included a ton of stuff you don’t need in the first pass - a ton of error checking and hand-rolled parsing, etc, that I had to spend over a week unrolling so that I could trim it down and redesign it to work in the main codebase. It was a slog, and it also made me look bad because it took me forever compared to the team who originally churned it out almost instantly. AI tools are not good at this kind of design deconflicting task, so while it’s easy to get the initial concept out the gate almost instantly, you can’t just magically fit it into the bigger codebase without facing the technical debt you’ve generated. In my personal projects, I get to experience a bit of the fun I think others are having. You can very quickly build out new features, explore new ideas, etc. You have to be thoughtful about the design because the codebase can get messy and hard to build on. Often I design the APIs and then have Claude critique them and implement them. I think the future is bleak for people in my spot professionally – not junior, but also not leading the team. I think the middle will be hollowed out and replaced with principals who set direction, coordinate, and execute. A privileged few will be hired and developed to become leaders eventually (or strike gold with their own projects), but everyone in between is in trouble.
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> At work, the devs up the chain now do everything with AI – not just coding – then task me with cleaning it up. This has to be the most thankless job for the near future. It's hard and you get about as much credit as the worker who cleans up the job site after the contractors are done, even though you're actually fixing structural defects. And god forbid you introduce a regression bug cleaning up some horrible redundant spaghetti code.
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Near future being the key term here imo. The entire task I mentioned was not an engineering problem, but a communication issue. The two project owners could have just talked to each other about the design, then coded it correctly in the first pass, obviating the need for the code janitor. Once orgs adapt to this new workflow, they’ll replace the code janitors with much cheaper Claude credits.
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Lol you may be on to something there.. 'a code janitor'.
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I develop prototypes using Claude Code. The dead boring stuff. "Implement JWT token verification and role checking in Spring Boot. Secure some endpoints with Oauth2, some with API key, some public." C# and Java are so old, whatever solutions you find are 5 years out of date. Having an agent implement and verify the foundation is the perfect fit. There's no design, just ever-chaning framework magic. I'd do the same "Google and debug" cycle, but 10 times slower.
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I work for a university. We've got a dedicated ChatGPT instance but haven't been approved to use a harness yet. Some devs did a pilot project and approval/licenses are supposedly coming soon.
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I work at a FAANG. Professionally, I have had almost no luck with it, outside of summarizing design docs or literally just finding something in the code that a simple search might not find. I am yet to successfully prompt it and get a working commit. Non-professionally, it's amazing how well it does on a small greenfield task.
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Wow, that's such a drastic different experience than mine. May I ask what toolset are you using? Are you limited to using your home grown "AcmeCode" or have full access to Claude Code / Cursor with the latest and greatest models, 1M context size, full repo access? I see it generating between 50% to 90% accuracy in both small and large tasks, as in the PRs it generates range between being 50% usable code that a human can tweak, to 90% solution (with the occasional 100% wow, it actually did it, no comments, let's merge) I also found it to be a skillset, some engineers seem to find it easier to articulate what they want and some have it easier to think while writing code.
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Could you say more on how the tasks where it works vs. doesn't work differ? Just the fact that it's both small and greenfield in the one case and presumably neither in the other?
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Can you elaborate on the shortcomings you find in professional setting that aren't coming up on personal projects? With it handling greenfield tasks are you perhaps referring to the usual sort of boilerplate code/file structure setup that is step 0 with using a lot of libraries?
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I almost don't write any code by hand anymore and was able to take up a second part-time job thanks to genai.
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Like a lot of things, it’s neither and somewhere in the middle. It’s net useful even if just for code reviews that make you think about something you may have missed. I personally also use it to assist in feature development, but it’s not allowed to write or change anything unless I approve it (and I like to look at the diff for everything)
I've only recently begun using copilot auto-complete in Visual Studio using Claude (doing C# development/maintenance of three SaaS products). I've been a coder since 1999. The suggestions are correct about 40% of the time, so I'm actually surprised when they're right, rather than becoming reliant on them. It saves me maybe 10 minutes a day.
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The only part AI auto complete I found I really like is when I have a function call that takes like a dozen arguments, and the auto complete can just shove it all together for me. Such a nice little improvement.
I just moved to a new team in my company that prides itself on being "AI-First". The work is a relatively new project that was stood up by a small team of two developers (both of whom seem pretty smart) in the last 4 months. Both acknowledged that some parts of their tech stack, they just don't at all understand (next.js frontend). The backend is a gigantic monorepo of services glued together. The manager & a senior dev on my first day told me to "Don't try to write code yourself, you should be using AI". I got encouraged to use spec-driven development and frameworks like superpowers, gsd, etc. I'm definitely moving faster using AI in this way, but I legitimately have no idea what the fuck I am doing. I'm making PRs I don't know shit about, I don't understand how it works because there is an emphasis on speed, so instead of ramping up in a languages / technologies I've never used, I'm just shipping a ton of code I didn't write and have no real way to vet like someone who has been working with it regularly and actually has mastered it. This time last year, I was still using AI, but using it as a pair programming utility, where I got help learn to things I don't know, probe topics / concepts I need exposure to, and reason through problems that arose. I can't control the direction of how these tools are going to evolve & be used, but I would love if someone could explain to me how I can continue to grow if this actually is the future of development. Because while I am faster, the hope seems to be AI / Agents / LLMs will only ever get better and I will never need to have an original thought or use crtical thinking. I have just about 4 years of professional experience. I had about 10 - 12 months of the start of my career where I used google to learn things before LLMs became sole singular focus. I wake up every day with existential dread of what the future looks like.
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This app sounds destined for total disaster.
UMD Scientists Create 'Smart Underwear' to Measure Human Flatulence (cbmg.umd.edu)
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Hand ‘em the IgNoble prize already
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if they are electrified, they can be hacked to be an ignition source
These measurements will not be complete if they do not measure the other two states of matter, liquid and solid. I don't know about you, but they've been known to appear.
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As long as you're not achieving Plasma you're probably fine.
My first question was: who funded this? Seems like a candidate for a Proxmire Golden Fleece Award. This research was supported by the University of Maryland, the Maryland Innovation Initiative Phase I and the UM Ventures Medical Device Development Fund.
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Or just maybe, it was developed to further a legitimately needed area of medical research with direct human clinical relevance like quantifying differences in the microbiome for colorectal cancer, etc. The concept of the Golden Fleece awards (and whatever Rand Paul’s version is called) linking a reaction of “sounds stupid to me” by a random layperson with “taxpayers are getting ripped off” is inherently faulty and weaponizing populism to sabotage publicly funded scientific research.
What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023) (blog.zuthof.nl)
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All those nice numbers are just beaten by the unit cost. And the ecosystem is a mess.
It stands out, because it didn't sell. Which is weird because there were some pretty big pros about using them. The latency for updating 1 byte was crazy good. Some databases or journals for something like zfs really benefited from this.
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In "databases and journals" you rarely update just one byte, you do a transaction that updates data, several indexes and metadata. All of that needs to be atomic. Power failure can happen in between any of "1 byte updates with crazy latencies." However small latency is, power failure is still faster. Usually, there is a write ahead or some other log that alleviates the problem, this log is usually written in streaming fashion. What is good, though, is that "blast radius" [1] of failure is smaller than usual - failed one byte write rarely corrupts more that one byte or cache line. SQLite has to deal with 512 (and even more) bytes long possible corruptions on most disks, with Optane it is not necessarily so. So, less data to copy, scan, etc. [1] https://sqlite.org/psow.html
Optane didn't sell because they focused on their weird persistent DIMM sticks, which are a nightmare for enterprise where for many ordinary purposes you want ephemeral data that disappears as soon as you cut power. Thet should have focused on making ordinary storage and solving the interconnect bandwidth and latency problems differently, such as with more up-to-date PCIe standards.
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PCIe was a bottleneck in consumer boxes, but that wasn't the whole problem. Optane's low latency and write endurance looked great on paper, yet once you put it behind SSD controllers and file systems built around NAND assumptions, a lot of the upside got shaved off before users ever saw it. "Just make it a faster SSD" was never a business. The DIMMs were weird, sure, but the bigger issue was that Optane made the most sense when software treated storage and memory as one tier, and almost nobody was going to rewrite kernels, DBs, and apps for a product that cost more than flash and solved pain most buyers barely felt.
Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager (isaacfreund.com)
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Insightful article. I don't recall ever viewing an easy-to-follow lesson, tutorial or book for that matter that clearly explained the various components of a Linux Desktop environment. Always had to follow complicated and obscure guides to do this and that, when solving issues, but seldom did any explain their functions clearly.
> I can make it do basically anything I want X11 can't do high refresh rates every time that I've tried to do so.
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It runs just fine at 165 hz for me. Given that xrandr and CRTs have been around for a while, and both have supported high refresh rates for a long while, something seems fishy here. Something is probably at fault, but it's not X11.
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Huh ? It did in 2000.
The fact that Wayland can't just substitute out pluggable WMs without changing a bunch of other unrelated infrastructure is IMO one of the biggest user-facing losses relative to X11. Anybody who is working to improve that is doing god's work as they say.
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Not only a loss but a key disabler. Having used to having the same customized window manager for decades it's impossible to change to Wayland until there's a fully equivalent interface for managing windows so that everything works as I want from mouse clicks to keyboard shortcuts. Maybe it could be an existing window manager adding support for River, or Wayback layer that reimplements an X11 desktop root on top of a minimal Wayland compositor, but none of the current Wayland compositors even scratch the surface of this.
Have you guys in this thread even read the post? > The new 0.4.0 release of river, a non-monolithic Wayland compositor, [...] splits the window manager into a separate program. There are already many window managers compatible with river. This is exactly the pluggable WMs in Wayland you are looking for.
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The Wayland standard does not prescribe it (unlike X), and the reference implementations were monolithic for a very long time. Wayland in general had a rather cavalier approach to doing away with things that X users take for granted, like, well, making screenshots. Eventually, under pressure, those in charge agreed that these features are actually very important for real users, so implementations appeared. It's an understandable way to discover the minimal usable subset of features, but the process of it is a bit frustrating for the early adopters.
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Yes, and I am praising them for tackling the idea. I don't know how you managed to misread me like that. I also read the article before commenting.
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Sorry, I didn't address that at you but rather the other replies in this thread.
This comment was written by AI
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Yours? Because I know that mine wasn't.
You can do that already with libraries such as wlroots or Smithay
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Especially with LLMs, the cost here is down significantly. People also drastically over-idealize what making an X window manager entailed: sure X had it's compositor, but you had to build so so much yourself. I'm glad River is trying to create a bigger base here; this is way cool. And it sort of proves the value of Wayland: someone can just go do that. Someone can just make a generic compositor/display-server now, with their own new architecture and plugin system, and it'll just work with existing apps. We were so locked in to such a narrow limited system, with it's own parallel abstraction layer to what the kernel now offers (that didn't exist when X was created). It's amazing that we have a chance for innovation and improvement now. The kernel as a stable base of the pyramid, wlroots/sway as a next layer up, and now River as a higher layer still for folks to experiment and create with. This could not be going better, and there's so much more freedom and possibility; this is such a great engine for iteration and improvement.
The Xorg codebase still includes some of those old drivers and is structured to allow them to exist.
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Just to be clear the hardware abstraction layer used by wayland and any current Xserver is exactly the same.
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Yes exactly. DRM exists, but there's still what I called the X "kernel", all of it's heavyweight abstractions. To the previous a-hole, frak you: not an AI. That's rude as frak. Also, you manage to be incredibly wrong. Even an AI wouldn't overlook such an obvious error; maybe it'd be better to have it replace you. So rude dude! Behave!
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I am sorry if I mistaken you for a bot but the model you are describing have not been implenented by any graphic driver in decades.
The Webpage Has Instructions. The Agent Has Your Credentials (openguard.sh)
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I am building https://agentblocks.ai for just this; you set fine-grained rules on what your agents are allowed to access and when they have to ask you out-of-channel (eg via WhatsApp or Slack) for permissions, with no direct agent access. It works today, well, supports more tools than are on the website, and if you have any need for this at all, I’d love to give you an account: pete@agentblocks.ai Works great with OpenClaw, Claude Cowork, or anything, really
So this is like a claw type thing? I’ve never used these “agents”. Not sure what I would do with them. Probably not for coding right?
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You can do basically anything with a claw agent. For example, I asked one to build me a Dyson sphere. It is still working on it, but so far so good.
Yeah, it's more of a personal assistant. It can do coding, but it's most useful as a PA.
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So. Yesterday I had a need to, from my android phone, have ChatGPT et Al mobile app do something I THOUGHT was very simple. Read a publicly available Google spreadsheet (I gave it the /htmlview which in incognito I could see ALL the rows (maybe close to 1000 rows). None could do it. Not ChatGPT, not MS Copilot, not Claude app, not Gemini, not even GitHub copilot in a web tab. Some said I can’t even see that. Some could see it but couldn’t do anything with it. Some could see it but only the first 100 lines. All I wanted to do was have it ingest the entire thing and then spit me back out in a csv or txt any rows that mentioned 4K. Seemed simple but these things couldn’t even get past that first hurdle. Weirdly, I remembered I had the Grok app too and gave it a shot, and, it could do it. I guess it is more intelligent in it’s abilities to scrape/parse/whatever all kinds of different types of sites. I’d guess this is the type of thing that might actually excel in your agent or these claw clones, because they literally can just do whatever bash/tool type actions on whatever VM or sandboxed environment they live on?
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Yeah, I think this was an issue of Google blocking bot user agents more than the LLMs not being smart enough. A bot that can run curl (like mine) should read it no problem.
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Ah ok that actually makes sense as the reason. And I think I’ve seen that with even coding agents when they are trying to look up stuff on the web or URLs you give them, now that I think about it..
Glassworm Is Back: A New Wave of Invisible Unicode Attacks Hits Repositories (aikido.dev)
So we need a new standard problem due to the complexity of the last standard? Isn't unicode supposed to be a superset of ASCII, which already has control characters like new space, CR, and new lines? xD
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The only ones people use any more are newline and space. A tab key is fine in your editor, but it's been more or less abandoned as a character. I haven't used a form feed character since the 1970s.
>Remove them from Unicode. Do you honestly think this is a workable solution?
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Yes, absolutely. See my other replies.
Unicode is "designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized" Unicode needs tab, space, form feed, and carriage return. Unicode needs U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK and U+200F RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK to switch between left-to-right and right-to-left languages. Unicode needs U+115F HANGUL CHOSEONG FILLER and U+1160 HANGUL JUNGSEONG FILLER to typeset Korean. Unicode needs U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER to encode that two characters should not be connected by a ligature. Unicode needs U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE to indicate a word break opportunity without actually inserting a visible space. Unicode needs MONGOLIAN FREE VARIATION SELECTORs to encode the traditional Mongolian alphabet.
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> Unicode needs tab, space, form feed, and carriage return. Those are legacied in with ASCII. And only space and newline are needed. Before I check in code to git, I run a program that removes the tabs and linefeeds. > Unicode needs U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK and U+200F RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK to switch between left-to-right and right-to-left languages. !!tfel ot thgir ,am ,kooL > Unicode needs U+115F HANGUL CHOSEONG FILLER and U+1160 HANGUL JUNGSEONG FILLER to typeset Korean. I don't believe it. > Unicode needs U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER to encode that two characters should not be connected by a ligature. Not needed. > Unicode needs U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE to indicate a word break opportunity without actually inserting a visible space. How on earth did people read printed matter without that? > Unicode needs MONGOLIAN FREE VARIATION SELECTORs to encode the traditional Mongolian alphabet. Somehow people didn't need invisible characters when printing books.
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Unicode is for human beings, not machines.
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That's a very narrow view of the world. One example: In the past I have handled bilingual english-arabic files with switches within the same line and Arabic is written from left to right. There are also languages that are written from to to bottom. Unicode is not exclusively for coding, to the contrary, pretty sure it's only a small fraction of how Unicode is used. > Somehow people didn't need invisible characters when printing books. They didn't need computers either so "was seemingly not needed in the past" is not a good argument.
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Look Ma xt! N ! e tee S T larip (No Unicode needed.)
Another dum dum Unicode idea is having multiple code points with identical glyphs. Rule of thumb: two Unicode sequences that look identical when printed should consist of the same code points.
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As far as I know, glyphs are determined by the font and rendering engine. They're not in the Unicode standard.
So you think that the letters in the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets which are printed identically to the Latin A should not exist? And, for example, Greek words containing this letter should be encoded with a mix of Latin and Greek characters?
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> So you think that the letters in the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets which are printed identically to the Latin A should not exist? Yes. Unicode should not be about semantic meaning, it should be about the visual. Like text in a book. > And, for example, Greek words containing this letter should be encoded with a mix of Latin and Greek characters? Yup. Consider a printed book. How can you tell if a letter is a Greek letter or a Latin letter? Those Unicode homonyms are a solution looking for a problem.
I don't think that would help much. There are also characters which are similar but not the same and I don't think humans can spot the differences unless they are actively looking for them which most of the time people are not. If only one of two glyphs which are similar appear in the text nobody would likely notice, expectation bias will fuck you over.
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I wonder how anybody got by with printed books.
Invisible characters are there for visible characters to be printed correctly...
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I'll grant that a space and a newline are necessary. The rest, nope.
Regardless of the thorny question of whether it's Github's responsibility , it sure would be a good thing for them to do ASAP.
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Here's the big reason GitHub should do it: It makes the product better I know people love to talk money and costs and "value", but HN is a space for developers, not the business people. Our primary concern, as developers, is to make the product better . The business people need us to make the product better, keep the company growing, and beat out the competition. We need them to keep us from fixating on things that are useful but low priority and ensuring we keep having money. The contention between us is good, it keeps balance. It even ensures things keep getting better even if an effective monopoly forms as they still need us, the developers, to make the company continue growing (look at monopolies people aren't angry at and how they're different). And they need us more than we need them. So I'd argue it's the responsibility of the developers, hired by GitHub, to create this feature because it makes the product better. Because that's the thing you've been hired for: to make the product better. Your concern isn't about the money, your concern is about the product. That's what you're hired for.
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[delayed]
And why do we not anymore make use of it, but instead implemented separate JSON loading functionality in JavaScript? Can you think of any reasons beyond performance?
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Why did you opt in for such a comment while a straight forward response without belittling tone would have achieved the same?
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I actually gave it some thought. I had written the actual reason first, but I realized that the person I was responding to must know this, yet keeps arguing in that eval is just fine. I would say they are arguing that in bad faith, so I wanted to enter a dialogue where they are either forced to agree, or more likely, not respond at all.
How is it an accessibility issue? HTML allows things like little gif files. I've done this myself when I wrote text that contained Egyptian hieroglyphs. It works just fine!
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I mean if you don't have sight.
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Then use words. Or tooltips (HTML supports that). I use tooltips on my web pages to support accessibility for screen readers. Unicode should not be attempting to badly reinvent HTML.
Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis (theculturenewspaper.com)
Everyone is complaining about movie theater prices. But, I'll also complain about streaming prices. I want to watch The Secret Agent and it's $9.99 to rent on Apple TV. It doesn't seem to make sense in comparison to month all-you-can-watch subscription prices.
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Presumably, the business goal is to steer you toward (recurring) subscription rather than (one-off) pay-to-watch activities.
Good riddance. It won’t be missed. Very little of Hollywood benefited humanity - it was mostly a tool of the rich and governments to propagandize. It was just an another opiate for masses. It was built on ruthless exploitation of labour and consumers.
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Hollywood produced some of the most influential pieces of art of the last century and it permeated global culture in a way only comparable to Renaissance-era Florence. Even if your simplistic take stained by marxist propaganda is true, you shouldn't just casually dismiss the labor of hundreds of thousands of artists and technicians over a century simply because you've become jaded by Marvel slop.
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Agreed. To say "good riddance" to Hollywood scares me. Like we are giving up and accepting generated slop and influencers from now on. There's a lot of bad movies, but just as you said, very few mediums have thusly pierced through across cultures and societies quite like Hollywood.
My fiance mentioned we haven't gone to see a movie in theaters in years and it would be fun to go. I checked what was playing and: 2 tickets, 2 sodas, 1 popcorn. $86 dollars. Don't know if I'll ever go to a conventional movie theater again.
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> 2 tickets, 2 sodas, 1 popcorn. > $86 dollars. > Don't know if I'll ever go to a conventional movie theater again. We almost never go to regular theaters anymore. IMAX feels worth it for something like F1 or Top Gun where it’s all about the visual spectacle, otherwise meh. We go to Alamo Drafthouse a lot tho. A little pricey but the experience of watching a movie in comfy seats over a fairly decent restaurant dinner is fantastic for certain kinds of movies. Peaky Blinders was the most recent. Tommy Shelby paired with a good cocktail or two, fantastic. Also I don’t know how Alamo achieves this, but people there are really good about noise and other bullshit. I think it’s because they do in fact kick people out for being annoying.
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For a long time now I've felt that there's only situation where it makes sense. That's movies where it is something about it would make it much more enjoyable on IMAX or similar with a professional sound system. So something in the visual spectacle category. For any normal movie I'd rather just watch it from my couch. But for the once in a while, over the top, blockbuster I'll still go to a theater.
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Avatar is a good example. I enjoyed each one in the theater but I tried watching Avatar: The Way of Water at home and despite having an entire media room devoted to good sound, proper lighting well calibrated projector and such it was not all that great. The movie fell a little flat without the theater experience to go with it. I saw the limited run in advance to the 3rd one coming out in theaters again and it was good in that setting, as a reference point for my experience
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You can see live theater (albeit without concessions) for less than that. I'm not sure who is going to the theater or why, but I hope they are enjoying themselves!
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The last movie we attended people were incredibly disruptive throughout the film, to the point that it was difficult to focus on the film. Some people enjoy screaming, laughing, and talking as part of the experience, but it's apparently been normalized beyond my tolerance threshold. Add in the cost and overall movie quality decrease of Hollywood productions, and it's difficult to justify. Presently, we watch foreign movies at home 95% of the time and maybe a Hollywood production when they manage to find their roots and create something worth watching.
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The last time I chose to watch a movie in a theater instead of the comfort of my home, I went for the raucous audience aspect of the experience.
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It is surprising that such a large number of people continue to fall victim to fraud at the cinema. High-quality televisions and sound systems are now available at a reasonable price. It has been 12 years since I last attended a movie screening. All content will be available on-demand within a month of the theatrical release. Popcorn maker at home and drinks.
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Unless you have a private theater room its not quite the same thing as watching first run movie in a darkend crowded theater - and even that misses the social aspect for an anticipated picture The communal experience is special On top of that most people don't have the attention span to sit through a film without opening their phones - film is supposed to be about capturing your attention not just entertainment Otherwise watch it on your laptop for all I care
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That's not what fraud is.
Then I guess you aren't familiar with the 20 minutes of trailers, 1 minute of Cocacola ad and 2 minutes of other completely irrelevant content before the movie actually begins.
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And worse, it's not even consistent, they show different amounts of trailers based on the movie/showing! If you show up 20 minutes late, you might miss the start for some movies and yet still have another 15 minutes of trailers for others.
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I hate this. Like the ticket is not expensive already, they also feel like feeding you ads. And then wonder why people don't go to the cinema and wonder if they can increase the amount of ads to compensate...
Do Europeans know you can watch soccer without drinking beer? It's cheaper and healthier. Absolutely bizarre obsession you lot have with it.
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It’s a communal thing. It’s more than just the sport it’s also about being out with other fans, showing support and usually friendly ribbing of the opposing teams fans from time to time. That is how it was explained to me when I said something similar
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beer is way cooler than popcorn
Maybe I'm insane or it's my age, but I can't watch new movies/shows without just seeing propaganda agendas at every turn. Really kills it for me.
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To be fair, there's plenty of that in older films and TV series as well, particularly "golden age" material from the 1940s -- 1970s, which played strongly off WWII, Cold War, and pro-business themes, with occasional ventures into counterculture works for the latter. The original Top Gun (1986) was describe at the time as the US Navy's most successful recruiting campaign ever, noted in this 2004 account citing 1990 correspondence with then Secretary of Defence Dick Cheney: < https://archive.org/details/operationhollywo00robb/page/180 >. Similarly endless war, cowboy, biblical, and rom-com films of that period.
Should art not of a point of view?
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> Should art not of a point of view? It can, sure. However, I will not pay to be lectured to on topics I have no interest getting lectured on. I'll keep my money, they can keep the sermon. Let's see who has more to gain from listening to the other. If they want my money, what I want to hear/see matters a whole lot more than what they want to preach to me. They simply forgot the golden rule: he who has the gold -- makes the rules. Let them rediscover it.
I think I have to agree with HN User Blell here. I mean, the NFL, at root, is in the business of entertainment also, and it makes more than Hollywood as well all in. But why would Hollywood care?
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NFL and related sport are, at least putatively, unscripted. Which might be raised in relation to gaming as well, but I'd argue that gaming elements share much more in common with cinema, particularly in the contexts of world design, character development, backstory, and of course, CGI.
Silicon Valley is a not a catch-all term for tech?
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Metonym & Toponym < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy > < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponymy >. "Silicon Valley": As more high-tech companies were established across San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley, and then north towards the Bay Area's two other major cities, San Francisco and Oakland, the term "Silicon Valley" came to have two definitions: a narrower geographic one, referring to Santa Clara County and southeastern San Mateo County, and a metonymical definition referring to high-tech businesses in the entire Bay Area.[citation needed] The name also became a global synonym for leading high-tech research and enterprises, and thus inspired similarly named locations, as well as research parks and technology centers with comparable structures all around the world. < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley >
games are global - NFL is solely american.
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OK, but how many markets are Games Awards actively televised in? I believe they have been watched more on YouTube, when I hear watched more than NFL in context of TV discussion I don't think YouTube is the distribution channel, however I followed the wikipedia link and it says "streams" which OK, not how I thought it was being ranked. If we are ranking on streams however, does this take into account streams of parts of each media? For example streams of Bad Bunny's halftime show, streams of important plays, versus streams of individual awards being presented? I don't actually care either way, much, since I don't like American football, don't generally like team sports, and don't spend time gaming, but somehow I think the comparison between the two in online streams throws the metrics off.
I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion
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Doesn't AI just replace the coding that other people have done many times? That is, we don't have to do repetitive work because of AI. Yes, I don't know how to write a React app even though I can vibe code it quickly, but that's repetitive nonetheless. It's just that it is another person who has repeated the code before. That said, there are a ton of code to write by hand if we push the envelop. The 10 algorithms that I no one has build for production. This concurrency library that no one has built in my favorite language. That simulation that Claude Code just get right no matter how much prompts/context engineering/harness engineering I do. The list can go on and on.
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> I have always enjoyed the journey Don't take it personally, but those are the worst kind of engineers in any real world business context. I watched those type of people ruining projects, companies by overengineering them to death. On the bright side, such traits can make a positive impact in academic or research context.
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Yet your passion to spread negativity is thriving. Here you thought negativity is a destination, but turns out it’s a whole new journey for you! Passion reignited indeed.
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Those who say they enjoy "building" with AI instead of coding are just outsourcing the coding part (while training the AI for outsourced company). It's nothing to enjoy, but yeah, you get the product, which is probably what people enjoy. Getting the product. It's like buying a IKEA furniture and you think you made it by merely assembling it. If you don't know IKEA effect, it's having a greater value for something than it actually is, because you were partly 'involved' in creating/assmebling it.
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With coding (by hand), there are two aspects of it. One is the pleasure of figuring out how to do things, and one is the pleasure of making something that didn't exist before. Building with AI gives you the second pleasure, but not the first. Or maybe it still gives you the first, too. Maybe you get that from figuring out how to get the AI to produce the code you want, just like you got it from trying to get the compiler to produce the code you want. Or maybe it depends on your personality and/or your view of your craft. Anyway, the point is, people take pleasure in their work in different ways. Those who enjoy building with AI are probably not all lying. Some do enjoy it. And that is not a defect in them. It's fine for them to enjoy it. It's fine for you not to enjoy it.
I've been coding since I was about 15 and still love it. These days I mostly build tailored applications for small and medium companies, often alone and sometimes with small ad-hoc teams. I also do the sales myself, in person. For me, not using LLMs would mean giving up a lot of productivity. But the way I use them is very structured. Work on an application starts with requirements appraisal: identifying actors, defining use cases, and understanding the business constraints. Then I design the objects and flows. When possible, I formalize the system with fairly strict axioms and constraints. Only after that do LLMs come in, mostly to help with the mechanical parts of implementation. In my experience it's still humans all the way down. The thinking, modeling, and responsibility for the system are human. The LLM just helps move the implementation faster. I also suspect the segment I work in will be among the last affected by LLM-driven job displacement. My clients are small to medium companies that need tailored internal systems. They're not going to suddenly start vibe-coding their own software. What they actually need is someone to understand the business, define the model, and take responsibility for the system. LLMs help with the implementation, but that part was never the hard part of the job.
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I’m doing the same as you and even though I was producing coding a lot of the actual products I estimated the coding part just to be about 20% of the work. The rest is figuring out what and how to build stuff and what stakeholders really need, and solving production issues in live event driven systems. Agentic coding is just faster at the 20% part, and I can always sit down and code the really hard stuff if I want to or feel I need to if the LLM gets stuck. If it produces something not understandable I either learn from it until I understand it og makes it do a pattern I know instead. So all in all, not so worried.
I hope the companies you worked for had someone else taking care of security, as what you've described is a ransomware writer's wet dream.
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You have a gateway / platform for that. You aren’t exposing those services to the internet.
> I could use AI and have a working solution an hour later. That sounds really cool. You should share what you used. > The goal was not to become a Bluetooth archaeologist. The goal was to solve the problem. I'm sympathetic to this view. It seems very pragmatic. After all, the reason we write software is not to move characters around a repo, but to solve problems, right? But here's my concern. Like a lot of people, I starting programming to solve little problems my friends and I had. Stuff like manipulating game map files and scripting ftp servers. That lead me to a career that's meant building big systems that people depend on. If everything bite-sized and self-contained is automated with llms, are people still going to make the jump to be able to build and maintain larger things? To use your example of the BLE battery monitor, the AI built some automation on top of bluez, a 20+ year-old project representing thousands of hours of labor. If AI can replace 100% of programming, no-big-deal it can maintain bluez going forward, but what if it can't? In that case we've failed to nurture the cognitive skills we need to maintain the world we've built.
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It has also led me to a career in software development. I find myself chatting through architectural problems with ChatGPT as I drive (using voice mode). I've continued to learn that way. I don't bother learning little things that I know won't do much for me, but I still do deep research and prototyping (which I can do 5x faster now) using AI as a supplement. I still provide AI significant guidance on the architecture/language/etc of what I want built, and that has come from my 20+ years in software. This is is the project I was talking about. I prefer using codex day-to-day. https://github.com/klinquist/HomeAssistant-Vehicle-Battery-Monitor This is another fun project I recently built using AI: https://github.com/klinquist/machinemon
The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product (kanfa.macbudkowski.com)
I realize this sounds one sided. Ive also founded companies and worked across the range of startup to faang. Everything has changed... For the better if you ask me.
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You are invested in some kind of AI start up, right?
I have friends (well, friends of friends) who still play the NFT lottery. People love gambling lol
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I thought everyone realized by now that a digital image made available via block chain or any other mechanism, can be duplicated indefinitely. The only thing you get is a copyright on some generated image or set of bits. And what are the chances any random digital image is going to be appreciated as art? You can't hang it in a living room or sit it on a coffee table. It's beanie babies, but without even a hill of beans. Are people just expecting there's going to be enough digital fools to make a market?
This is exactly my experience at Lovable. For some parts of the organization, LLMs are incredibly powerful and a productivity multiplier. For the team I am in, Infra, it's many times distraction and a negative multiplier. I can't say how many times the LLM-proposed solution to a jittery behavior is adding retries. At this point we have to be even more careful with controlling the implementation of things in the hot path. I have to say though, giving Amp/Claude Code the Grafana MCP + read-only kubectl has saved me days worth of debugging. So there's definitely trade-offs!
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My colleague recently shipped a "bug fix" that addresses a race condition by adding a 200ms delay somewhere, almost completely coded by LLM. LLM even suggests that "if this is not good enough, increase it to 300ms". That says something about how much some people care about this.
There’s a big gap between reality and the influencer posts about LLMs. I agree with you that LLMs do provide some significant acceleration, but the influencers have tried to exaggerate this into unbelievable numbers. Even non-influencers are trying to exaggerate their LLM skills as a way to get hired or raise their status on LinkedIn. I rarely read the LinkedIn social feed but when I check mine it’s now filled with claims from people about going from idea to shipped product in N days (with a note at the bottom that they’re looking for a new job or available to consult with your company). Many of these posts come from people who were all in on crypto companies a few years ago. The world really is changing but there’s a wave of influencers and trend followers trying to stake out their claims as leaders on this new frontier. They should be ignored if you want any realistic information. I also think these exaggerated posts are causing a lot of people to miss out on the real progress that is happening. They see these obviously false exaggerations and think the opposite must be true, that LLMs don’t provide any benefit at all. This is creating a counter-wave of LLM deniers who think it’s just a fad that will be going away shortly. They’re diminishing in numbers but every LLM thread on HN attracts a few people who want to believe it’s all just temporary and we’re going back to the old ways in a couple years.
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>Many of these posts come from people who were all in on crypto companies a few years ago. This is ditto my observation. There seems to be a certain "type" of people like this. And it's not just people looking for work, it even includes well-to-do people. My guess is either they have super low critical thinking, a very cynical view of the world where lies and exaggerations are the only way to make it, or something more pathological (narcissism etc).
Wouldn't Java always lose in terms of latency against a similarly optimized native code in, let's say, C(++)?
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There are actually cases when Java (the HotSpot JVM) runs faster than the same logic written in C/C++ because the JVM is doing dynamic analysis and selective JIT compilation to machine code.
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You can achieve optimized C/C++ speeds, you just can't program the same way you always have. Step 1, switch your data layout from Array of Structures to Structure of Arrays. Step 2, after initial startup switch to (near) zero object creation. It's a very different way to program Java. You have to optimize your memory usage patterns to fit in CPU cache as much as possible which is something typical Java develops don't consider. I have a background in assembly and C. I'd say it's slightly harder since there is a little bit of abstraction but most of the time the JIT will produce code as good as C compilers. It's also an niche that often considers any application running on a general purpose CPU to be slow. If you want industry leading speed you start building custom FPGAs.
I personally know of an HFT firm that used Java approximately a decade ago. My guess would be they're still using it today given Java performance has only improved since then.
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it doesn't mean Java is optimal or close to optimal choice. Amount of extra effort they do to achieve goals could be significant.
As long as you tune the JVM right it can be faster. But its a big if with the tune, and you need to write performant code
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Java has significant overhead, that most/every object is allocated on heap, synchronized and has extra overhead of memory and performance to be GC controlled. Its very hard/not possible to tune this part.
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You program differently for this niche in any language. The hot path (number crunching) thread doesn't share objects with gateway (IO) threads. Passing data between them is off heap, you avoid object creation after warm up. There is no synchronization, even volatile is something you avoid.
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> Passing data between them is off heap how exactly you are passing data? You can pass some primitives without allocating them on heap. You can use some tiny subset of Java+standard library to write high performance code, but why would you do this instead of using Rust or C++?
Depends. Many reasons, but one is that Java has a much richer set of 3rd party libraries to do things versus rolling your own. And often (not always) third party libraries that have been extensively optimized, real world proven, etc. Then things like the jit, by default, doing run time profiling and adaptation.
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Java has huge ecosystem in enterprise dev, but very unlikely it has ecosystem edge in high performance/real time compute.
> there's a reason nobody outside tech trust so blindly on LLMs. Man, I wish this was true. I know a bunch of non tech people who just trusts random shit that chatgpt made up. I had an architect tell me "ask chatgpt" when I asked her the difference between two industrial standard measures :) We had politicians share LLM crap, researchers doing papers with hallucinated citations.. It's not just tech people.
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And the worst part is, these people don't even use the flagship thinking models, they use the default fast ones.
And what exactly is preventing you from building bespoke software for "infrastructure monitoring and operational tooling tailed to your specific needs"? I could certainly imagine building myself some sort of dashboard. It would seem like a prime use case. You want to hear about a problem solved? Recently I extended a tool that snaps high resolution images to a Pixel art grid, adding a GUI. I added features to remove the background, to slice individual assets out of it automatically, and to tile them in 9-slice mode. Could I have realistically implemented the same bespoke tool before AI? No.
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> And what exactly is preventing you from building bespoke software for "infrastructure monitoring and operational tooling tailed to your specific needs"? Let's say I emit roughly 1TB of telemetry data per day--logs, metrics, etc. That's roughly what you might expect from medium sized tech company or a specific department (say, security) at a large company. There is going to be a significant infrastructure investment to replicate datadog's function in my organization, even if I only use a small subset of their product. It's not just "building a dashboard" it's building all the infrastructure to collect, normalize, store, and retrieve the data to even be able to draw that dashboard. The dashboard is the trivial part. The hard part is building, operating, and maintaining all the infrastructure. Claude doesn't do a very good job helping with this, and in some sense it actually hinders. EDIT: I'm not saying you shouldn't take ownership of your telemetry data. I think that's a strategically (and potentially from a user's perspective) better end result. But it is a mistake to trivialize the effort of that undertaking. Claude is not going to vibeslop it for you.
Related anecdote: My 12yo son didn't like the speed cubing online timer he was using because it kept crashing the browser and interrupted him with ads. Instead of googling a better alternative we sat down with claude code and put together the version of the website that behaved and looked exactly as he wanted. He got it working all by himself in under an hour with less than 10 prompts, I only helped a bit putting it online with github pages so he can use it from anywhere.
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Out of curiosity, did you also implement scramble support? Or just the timing stuff?
The statement wasn't: "no one ever vibe codes an alternative to product X" It was: "With sufficiently advanced vibe coding the need for certain type of product just vanishes." If a product has 100 thousand users and 1% of them vibe codes an alternative for themselves, the product / business doesn't vanish. They still have 99 thousand of users. That was the rebuttal, even if not presented as persuasively and intelligently as I just did. So no, it's not the case of "both things being true". It's a case of: he was wrong.
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At some point there will be market consequences for that kind of behavior. So where market dynamics are not dominated by bullshit (politics, friendships forged on Little St James, state intervention, cartel behavior, etc.) if my company provides the same service as another, but I replaced all of the low quality software as a service products my competitor uses with low quality vibe coded products, my overhead cost will be lower and that will give me an advantage.
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