Unlurker|Replay|About
Why Do They Want to Get Rid of Software Engineers? (jrswab.com)
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I've been noticing lately that the discussion around LLMs and using them for programming has begun to expose people for how little they understand programming or what software developers do in general. I think I generally agree with the author as a result. A year ago I might think this was more naive, but today... I think software development has more of a moat than I thought, for more reasons than I originally perceived. There are a lot of senior developers who discuss how they use LLMs and why, for example, and it exposes that even with a decade or so of experience, people can have extremely thin and weak understandings of what they're doing, and why. That isn't to cast shade at all, and I've been (and will be) the experienced yet clueless person at times. I could be right now. A reductive description is that it's turning a lot of people in expert beginners, and the coworker they collaborate most has no way of compensating for it. LLMs are useful and powerful tools, but they can't make up for these kinds of deficiencies yet. It doesn't seem like they will very soon, either. I can't imagine the messes people are creating with LLMs when they have no experience at all, though. They might feel empowered (and to a degree they certainly are) but when it comes to complex, large, mission-critical, and/or distributed systems... These tools are nowhere near where they need to be. I've also found that important software can now become more ambitious. We seem to model the risk developers face based on the software of today, but what I'm seeing is that I'm able to build and maintain more ambitious projects than ever. I'll be pushing the limits of what's possible for myself for a while yet, and I suspect it will continue to produce value for the people I work with. I could have these tools do the work I used to do (or help me do it faster) and leave it at that, but the reality is that I don't just stop there. I keep going, I continue refining, I discover more ways to make it more valuable, I iterate faster and maintain a tighter feedback loop with the people who use the things I create. So, why would I be eliminated from that process? Do people really believe that my position in that loop will be eliminated by AI? This seems to disregard a myriad of qualities that allow software developers to be effective and valuable team members. If that happens, frankly, I believe far more roles than software would be eliminated at that point. The implications would go far beyond software.
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Part of this is jealousy (yes, I said it) It's not jealousy though. It's seeing an operational bottleneck as inefficiency. If you know what you want and you have to go through someone else to get it, that's frustrating, so you look for ways around it. AI is a way around software engineers. The key to remaining usefully employed is not to be the bottleneck. If it's faster for someone to get to a solution with a software engineer than without a software engineer then you will remain employed. This is largely irrespective of cost - generally speaking spending money on a salaries to go faster is always better so long as you're actually going faster.
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It's natural to reduce the cost of doing business.
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They want to get rid of software engineers because we are expensive, we have an annoying habit of saying no, we are not particularly good looking on average and are not obviously tied to directly revenue in a way that sales is (sales folks tend to be good looking too as a bonus.) It's basic market dynamics + some high school social calculus.
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I’m honestly at a loss for words at this question. We’re software engineers. Like half of the work we do is try and automate jobs. Are we really confused about why “they” might want to automate our jobs?
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It would be much better to replace CEOs & other C-suite execs but no one is working on that kind of AI.
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Why does this entire article read like chatgpt? Kind of ironic considering the content. Big llm smells: 'Not "AI helps you autocomplete a function." Not "AI explains a stack trace." I mean the full-on narrative:' 'Sure, it's a weird language. It looks archaic. Sometimes it's hostile. Sometimes it's beautiful. But still—if you know what you're doing—you can sit down with a keyboard and turn words into: a product a workflow an automated business process a system that makes money while you sleep a tool that saves a team thousands of hours That's real power. It's leverage.' 'Not because we're lazy. Not because we're gatekeeping. Because building real systems is hard, and the number of people who can reliably do it is limited.' Sometimes I think we get too caught up on what chatgpt will do to the economy, software, and businesses, and forget the most insidious aspect of this type of technology - we will no longer know how to write and all human text communication will confirm to a specific pattern.
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I don't know if it's LLM-generated or not, but I'm guessing you're right. It sure as hell matches the horrible choppy LinkedIn blogspam pattern, though, and that was enough to bounce me right there.
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Why do "they" (bloggers) want to get rid of their own writing? What are the good reasons to write a blog, minus those that involve you actually writing it?
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I guess just status farming, or some sort of delusion about writing being a hindrance to conveying your ideas, much like with writing code.
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not one word written by the author, i'd rather read the prompt
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Who's "we"? I won't stop knowing how to write. If other people do, that's their problem.
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The next generation on humans growing up with TikTok autogenerated AI videos written by ChatGPT, generated by Sora and uploaded to the web using OpenClaw or whatever automation tool you wrote using Claude Code. There are literally people running bots creating such shortform videos as we speak. And there are millions of kids (and adults) scrolling those same videos as you reading this. Let that sink in.
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I meant rather the market for human writing will vanish when 80% or more of the population views LLM text as good communication.
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Software engineers are laborers. If you're a capital owner, a laborer is something that weights down your returns. It's not rocket science.
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Counterpoint -- capital owners see SWEs as their asset, and owners do not like to see their assets go away (with intellectual property in their heads). So they nurture and give a lot of freedom to their SWEs. I've seen both ways, and don't share the "capital owners BAD" sentiment. The first thing to join a company is to see whether they assign Eng department to Costs or to Assets mentally.
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I agree but I'd also note that a capital owner actually has a couple motivations to get rid of high paid labors. 1) Cost 2) Flexibility. If you can hire random laborers to do most of your tasks, you can quickly scale up whereas if you depend on highly skilled and trained workers, starting a new operation elsewhere is hard. Similar, you can shift activity around, are less impeded by the opinions of workers, etc. Significantly, this may allow you to "franchise" your operations in various ways.
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Yes this has been the motivation for decades. There has always been a language, methodology, or system being hyped that promised to eliminate the need for trained programmers. Why? Because they are expensive. Digital computers were cheaper than the legions of human "calculators" that they replaced, but once those savings were realized, the next step was to attack the smaller number but still expensive per head staff of programmers you needed to get the most value out of a computer.
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> Software engineers are laborers. If you're a capital owner, a laborer is something that weights down your returns. > It's not rocket science. It's far above the heads of many supposedly "smart" software engineers, who looked at their high salaries and 401ks, forgot they were disposable laborers, and confused themselves for capitalist tycoons. Drop the libertarianism and form a labor union before it's too late. You're not smart if you're parroting your boss's talking points like an idiot.
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> forgot they were disposable laborers, and confused themselves for capitalists. I agree with this, but it isn't just limited to software engineers. Most of the supposed "middle class" in the US fits this description. We currently have the highest level of wealth inequality in history which is still growing at runaway rates and plenty of laborers who view themselves as "temporarily embarrassed billionaires" willing to prop up the system, seemingly unaware that those at the top will gladly wipe them off their boot when given the chance.
> Part of this is jealousy (yes, I said it) This feels like cope here. They want to get rid of SWE because they are highly paid (in the US especially) and they want them for cheap (e.g. Bangalore, London) AI just makes it a no brainer. Also I don't think there is anything wrong with everyone being a software engineer, more accessibility to the SWE field for all is great. Current SWE's will just need to now adapt quicker to remain relevant, and those that can't will just then leave the field. Perhaps those that don't adapt were probably not good engineers anyway.
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That's like saying that the chefs who didn't want to adapt when their restaurant became a McDonald's were probably not the good chefs anyway.
Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS (sitespy.app)
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I like https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io for this. Open source and free to run locally or use their Saas service.
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Quick feedback: 1. RSS is just fine for updates. Given the importance of your visa use-case, were you thinking of push notifications? 2. Your competition does element-level tracking. Maybe they choose XPath?
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Interesting... added to bookmarks. Could come in handy in the future
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This is interesting, gonna try it on our next project! thumb up
Show HN: Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included (klausai.com)
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I don't get it. The point of OpenClaw is it's supposed to be an assistant, helping you with whatever random tasks you happen to have, in natural language. But for that to work, it has to have access to your personal data, your calendar, your emails, your credit card, etc., no? Are there other tasks that people commonly want to run that don't require this that I'm not aware of? If so I'd love to hear about them. The ClawBert thing makes a lot more sense to me, but implementing this with just a Claude Code instance again seems like a really easy way to get pwned. Without a human in the loop and heavy sandboxing, a agent can just get prompt injected by some user-controlled log or database entry and leak your entire database and whatever else it has access to.
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this is reallly fucking interesting mind if I write an article about this on ijustvibecodedthis.com ?
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"The week after our launch we spent 20+ hours fixing broken machines by hand." oh fuck yea, sounds great. Hard pass on this (and OpenClaw) thanks.
The DNS record for apistronghold.com doesn't resolve for me. (NXDOMAIN)
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Guess I don't have the naked domain set up yet. Ill fix that up. You should be able to go to www.apistronghold.com
Is this not just Claude Code? Genuinely hoping someone could spell it out for me
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Claude Code is awesome, I use it all day, every day. OpenClaw is similar but not the same. I think if all you do is write code, CC is probably best for you. OpenClaw is interesting because it does a lot of things ok, but it was the first to do so. It will chat with you in Telegram/messages which is small but surprisingly interesting. It handles scheduled tasks. The open source community is huge, clawhub is very useful for out of the box skills. It's self building and self modifying.
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We're all asking the same thing. It's basically Claude Code, AFAICT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327474
This sounds awesome and exactly like the easy and safe on-ramp to OpenClaw that I've been looking for! I want to believe. Two questions as a potential user who knows the gist of OpenClaw but has been afraid to try it: 1. I don't understand how the two consumption credits play into the total cost of ownership. E.g. how long will $20 of Orthogonal credits last me? I have no idea what it will actually cost to use Klaus/OpenClaw for a month. 2. Batteries included sounds great, but what are those batteries? I've never heard of Apollo or Hunter.io so I don't know the value of them being included. In general, a lot of your copy sounds like it's written for people already deep into OpenClaw. Since you're not targeting those folks, I would steer more towards e.g. articulating use cases that work ootb and a TCO estimate for less technical folks. Good luck, and I'm eager to try it!
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> safe on-ramp to OpenClaw IMO I don't think the "OpenClaw has root access to your machine" angle is the thing you should worry that much about. You can put your OpenClaw on a VM, behind a firewall and three VPNs but if it's got your Google, AWS, GitHub, etc. credentials you've still got a lot to worry about. And honestly, I think malicious actors are much more interested in those credentials than wiping out your machine. I'm honestly kind of surprised everyone neglects to think about that aspect and is instead more concerned with "what if it can delete my files."
The cost of ownership for an OpenClaw, and how many credits you'll use, is really hard to estimate since it depends so wildly on what you do. I can give you an openclaw instruction that will burn over $20k worth of credits in a matter of hours. You could also not talk to your claw at all for the entire month, setup no crons / reoccurring activities / webhooks / etc, and get a bill of under $1 for token usage. My usage of OpenClaw ends up costing on the order of $200/mo in tokens with the claude code max plan (which you're technically not allowed to use with OpenClaw anymore), or over $2000 if I were using API credits I think (which Klause is I believe, based on their FAQ mentioning OpenRouter). So yeah, what I consider fairly light and normal usage of OpenClaw can quite easily hit $2000/mo, but it's also very possible to hit only $5/mo. Most of my tokens are eaten up by having it write small pieces of code, and doing a good amount of web browser orchestration. I've had 2 sentence prompts that result in it spinning up subagents to browse and summarize thousands of webpages, which really eats a lot of tokens. I've also given my OpenClaw access to its own AWS account, and it's capable of spinning up lambdas, ec2 instances, writing to s3, etc, and so it also right now has an AWS bill of around $100/mo (which I only expect to go up). I haven't given it access to my credit card directly yet, so it hasn't managed to buy gift cards for any of the friendly nigerian princes that email it to chat, but I assume that's only a matter of time.
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Would having a locally-hosted model offset any of these costs?
Where Some See Strings, She Sees a Space-Time Made of Fractals (quantamagazine.org)
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this is reallly fucking interesting mind if I write an article about this on ijustvibecodedthis.com ?
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I only see varchars sometimes where others see Strings.
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Asymptotic Safety also predicted the higgs mass (126 GeV vs the measured value of 125 GeV). https://arxiv.org/abs/0912.0208 The trick is, at that time most of the possible mass range was excluded experimentally, so it is a bit less impressive. I'm not sure how much tuning went into it (possibly none)
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Obviously forces of nature go from strong to weak with scale, and there is probably one that is even weaker than gravity holding galaxies together. Surprised this perplexes people.
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Just hand waving a suppose force isn't going to satisfy anybody in this domain, you've got to back it up with some math at least before anybody cares.
Searching for the Agentic IDE (twitter.com)
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The VSCode forks all do too much, Nimbalyst is built from scratch to be a proper agent manager. https://nimbalyst.com/
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Antigravity is getting there
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Intent from augmentcode is trying to be this https://www.augmentcode.com/product/intent
I don't understand how random thoughts on X are front-page news on Hacker News. If some tech CEO makes a major announcement on X, it's newsworthy and belongs here. Anything else that's actual news is also fair game ... but all other X posts do not belong here!
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criteria for hitting HN frontpage is generally whether it is interesting to people. That thought is likely the same thought a bunch of us are having at the moment.
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It easily reaches the front-page for people with a following. I don't think many votes are necessary to get to the front page. And when there's some critical insight or leak. Aside from that I've seen few posts on X that didn't follow the pattern, and were short lived at the top.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web (hacks.mozilla.org)
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I'd really like to be able to run _any_ language in the browser. WASM is a great first step.
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Agree with the points. But when reading this, it seems much more complicated than using JavaScript on the web when developing real-world applications. However I think that will not be an issue because of AI.
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Agree with the points. But when reading this, it seems much more complicated than using JavaScript on the web when developing realworld applications. However I think that will not be an issue because of AI.
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WASM with DOM support will be great. Unfortunately it will also be great for obfuscation and malware.
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You can already compile malware to obfuscated asm.js. If anything, WASM blobs are easier to reverse engineer than obfuscated JS - good luck writing a ghidra plugin for JS source.
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The web is fascinating: we started with a seemingly insane proposition that we could let anyone run complex programs on your machine without causing profound security issues. And it turned out that this was insane: we endured 20 years of serious browser security bugs caused chiefly by JavaScript. I'm not saying it wasn't worth it, but it was also crazy. And now that we're getting close to have the right design principles and mitigations in place and 0-days in JS engines are getting expensive and rare... we're set on ripping it all out and replacing it with a new and even riskier execution paradigm. I'm not mad, it's kind of beautiful.
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I only got mad when people wanted to add browser features that clearly break sandboxing like WebUSB. How does wasm break this?
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What makes WASM execution riskier than JS?
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Novelty - JS has had more time and effort spent in hardening it, across the browsers, WASM isn't as thoroughly battle-tested, so there will be novel attacks and exploits.
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We could finally write programs for the browser in any language that compiles to WebAssembly. And even mix and match multiple languages. It would be amazing.
The 45% reduction in DOM operation time from removing JS glue is the number that should change how people think about this. WASM has been stuck in a chicken-and-egg loop for years: no DOM access meant the only viable use cases were compute-heavy workloads like codecs and crypto, which kept the ecosystem too small to justify better tooling, which kept adoption low. Direct web API binding through the component model breaks that loop because it finally makes WASM viable for ordinary web development, not just the hot-path optimization niche. The complexity concerns in this thread are valid but I think they are transitional. The WIT layer looks heavyweight now because the toolchains are immature, but the end state where you import a browser API like any other library in your language is genuinely simpler than the current JS FFI dance.
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> no DOM access meant the only viable use cases were compute-heavy workloads like codecs and crypto, no, it didn't mean that, because the overhead is not a deal breaker: 1) you don't have to do the glue code (libs can do it for you) 2) there's overhead due to glue, but the overhead is so small that WASM web frameworks easily can compete with fast JS frameworks in DOM heavy scenarios. Source: Analysis of the creator of Leptos (a web framework based on WASM): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KtotxNAwME
This is the right direction. Another important bit I think it’s the GC integration. Many languages such Go, C# don’t do well on wasm due the GC. They have to ship a GC as well due the lack of various GC features(I.e interior pointers)
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Probably needs to be fixed by bundling runtimes for things like Go, or bringing back cross-website caching in some secure way if that's possible
There's something real in the impedance mismatch argument that I think the replies here are too quick to dismiss. The browser's programming model is fundamentally about a graph of objects with identity, managed by a GC, mutated through a rich API surface. Linear memory is genuinely a poor match for that, and the history of FFI across mismatched memory models (JNI, ctypes, etc.) tells us this kind of boundary is where bugs and performance problems tend to concentrate. You're right to point at that. Where I think the argument goes wrong is in treating "most websites don't use WASM" as evidence that WASM is a bad fit for the web. Most websites also don't use WebGL, WebAudio, or SharedArrayBuffer. The web isn't one thing. There's a huge population of sites that are essentially documents with some interactivity, and JS is obviously correct for those. Then there's a smaller but economically significant set of applications (Figma, Google Earth, Photoshop, game engines) where WASM is already the only viable path because JS can't get close on compute performance. The component model proposal isn't trying to replace JS for the document-web. It's trying to lower the cost of the glue layer for that second category of application, where today you end up maintaining a parallel JS shim that does nothing but shuttle data across the boundary. Whether the component model is the right design for that is a fair question. But "JS is the right abstraction" and "WASM is the wrong abstraction" aren't really in tension, because they're serving different parts of the same platform. The analogy I'd reach for is GPU compute. Nobody argues that shaders should replace CPU code for most application logic, but that doesn't make the GPU a "dud" or a second-class citizen. It means the platform has two execution models optimized for different workloads, and the interesting engineering problem is making the boundary between them less painful.
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> The browser's programming model is fundamentally about a graph of objects with identity, managed by a GC, mutated through a rich API surface. Even more to the point, for the past couple of decades the browser's programming model has just been "write JavaScript". Of course it's going to fit JavaScript better than something else right now! That's an emergent property though, not something inherent about the web in the abstract. There's an argument to be made that we shouldn't bother trying to change this, but it's not the same as arguing that the web can't possibly evolve to support other things as well. In other words, the current model for web programming we have is a local optimum, but statements like the the one at the root of this comment chain talk like it's a global one, and I don't think that's self-evident. Without addressing whether they're opposed to the concept or the amount of work it would take, it's hard to have a meaningful discussion.
> WebAssembly has a sandbox and was designed for untrusted code. So does JavaScript. > It's almost impossible to statically reason about JS code, and so browsers need a ton of error prone dynamic security infrastructure to protect themselves from guest JS code. They have that infrastructure because JS has access to the browser's API. If you tried to redesign all of the web APIs in a way that exposes them to WebAssembly, you'd have an even harder time than exposing those APIs to JS, because: - You'd still have all of the security troubles. The security troubles come from having to expose API that can be called adversarially and can pass you adversarial data. - You'd also have the impedence mismatch that the browser is reasoning in terms of objects in a DOM, and WebAssembly is a bunch of integers. > There are dynamic languages, like JS/Python that can compile to wasm. If you compile them to linear memory wasm instead of just running directly in JS then you lose the ability to do coordinated garbage collection with the DOM. If you compile them to GC wasm instead of running directly in JS then you're just adding unnecessary overheads for no upside. > Also I don't see how dynamic typing is required to have API evolution and compt. Because for example if a browser changes the type of something that happens to be unused, or removes something that happens to be unused, it only breaks actual users at time of use, not potential users at time of load. > Plenty of platforms have static typed languages and evolve their API's in backwards compatible ways. We're talking about the browser, which is a particular platform. Not all platforms are the same. The largest comparable platform is OSes based on C ABI, which rely on a "kind" of dynamic typing (stringly typed, basically - function names in a global namespace plus argument passing ABIs that allow you to mismatch function signature and get away with it. > The first major language for WebAssembly was C++, which is object oriented. But the object orientation is lost once you compile to wasm. Wasm's object model when you compile C++ to it is an array of bytes. > To be fair, there are a lot of challenges to making WebAssembly first class on the Web. I just don't think these issues get to the heart of the problem. Then what's your excuse for why wasm, despite years of investment, is a dud on the web?
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> Because for example if a browser changes the type of something that happens to be unused, or removes something that happens to be unused, it only breaks actual users at time of use, not potential users at time of load. I don't understand this objection. If you compile code that doesn't call a function, and then put that artifact on a server and send it to a browser, how is it broken when that function is removed?
The fact that you made some webassembly things isn't an answer to the question of why webassembly is not used by the overwhelming majority of websites.
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That's a fairly arbitrary metric. The overwhelming majority of code running outside of the browser on my laptop isn't in Python, but it's hard to argue that's evidence of it being "doomed to being a second-class citizen on my desktop indefinitely".
It's still not a great idea IMHO ;) (there was also some more recent discussion in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47295837 ) E.g. it feels like a lot of over-engineering just to get 2x faster string marshalling, and this is only important for exactly one use case: for creating a 1:1 mapping of the DOM API to WASM. Most other web APIs are by far not as 'granular' and string heavy as the DOM. E.g. if I mainly work with web APIs like WebGL2, WebGPU or WebAudio I seriously doubt that the component model approach will cause a 2x speedup, the time spent in the JS shim is already negligible compared to the time spent inside the API implementations, and I don't see how the component model can help with the actually serious problems (like WebGPU mapping GPU buffers into separate ArrayBuffer objects which need to be copied in and out of the WASM heap). It would be nice to see some benchmarks for WebGL2 and WebGPU with tens-of-thousands of draw calls, I seriously doubt there will be any significant speedup.
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With Google now pushing developer certification, Android and iOS practically being mandatory for certain basic functions like accessing your bank or certain government services, Webassembly would make web apps first class citizens that aren't subject to mobile operating system lockdown. Being able to complete on efficiency with native apps is an incredible example of purposeful vision driving a significant standard, exactly the kind of thing I want for the future of the web and an example of why we need more stewards like Mozilla.
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If it "only" speeds up DOM access, that's massive in itself. DOM is obviously a crucial element when running inside a browser.
Temporal: A nine-year journey to fix time in JavaScript (bloomberg.github.io)
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As a side note, huge fan of Promise.allSettled. When that dropped it cleaned up so much of the code I was writing at the time.
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this is reallly fucking interesting mind if I write an article about this on ijustvibecodedthis.com ?
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They travelled through time (forward, at 1X) by nine years to do this for us. I appreciate it.
My playbook for JavaScript dates is.. store in UTC.. exchange only in UTC.. convert to locale date time only in the presentation logic. This has worked well for me enough that Im skeptical of needing anything else
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I have a scheduling system that allows users to specify recurring events. "Every Monday at 2pm." Which needs to be understood in the native timezone of that user and needs to be capable of being displayed in that timezone for all viewers or optionally in the native timezone of the viewing user. Temporal is a blessing.
If you give me your background I'll explain in longer terms but in short it's about making the intent clear and anyone who understands s modicum of PL theory understands why what's a constant is so and what's a function is so.
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I'm a programmer. I'm a human. Perhaps we should also allow for some "human theory" inside our understanding.
That's not what I mean. Even though it is serializable, it's still not the same when you serialize/deserialize it. For example `JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(Temporal.PlainYearMonth.from({year:2026,month:1}))).subtract({ years: 1})` won't work, because it misses the prototype and is no longer an instance of Temporal.PlainYearMonth. This is problematic if you use tRPC for example.
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> For example `JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(Temporal.PlainYearMonth.from({year:2026,month:1}))).subtract({ years: 1})` won't work, because it misses the prototype and is no longer an instance of Temporal.PlainYearMonth. I don't know if I'm missing something, but that's exactly how I'd expect it to compose. Does the following do what you wanted your snippet to do? Temporal.PlainYearMonth.from(JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(Temporal.PlainYearMonth.from({year:2026,month:1})))) JSON.stringify and JSON.parse should not be viewed as strict inverses of each other. `JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(x)) = x` is only true for a for a small category of values. That category is even smaller if parsing is happening in a different place than stringification because JSON doesn't specify runtime characteristics. This can lead to things like JSON parsing incorrect in JS because they're too large for JS to represent as a number.
> have to agree on what "now" means, even when governments change DST rules with very little notice. I didn't spot how Temporal fixes this. What happens when "now" changes? Does the library get updated and pushed out rapidly via browsers?
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Right, browsers own it instead of websites needing to rebuild Moment.js bundles. Additionally, most browsers pass the ownership further to the user's OS as the IANA timezone database is a useful system-level service and best updated at the cadence of OS "required" updates.
Aside: Bloomberg JS blog? ok.
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Yep. You can learn more about why we created this new blog here: https://bloomberg.github.io/js-blog/post/intro/ I hope you like it ;-) And if it seems like a surprise, you can blame me for not publicising this kind of content earlier given how long we've been working in this area. Thankfully Jon Kuperman and Thomas Chetwin (plus others) found the time and energy to put this platform together.
> Safari (Partial Support in Technology Preview) Safari confirmed as IE Spiritual successor in 2020+.
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Slower to implement new features, but still implementing them, just makes it the new Firefox. IE's larger problem was how popular it had been before it stopped implementing new features. It was like if Google got bored with Chrome and decided to stop all funding on it. People would be stuck on Chrome for years after that investment stopped because of all the Chrome-specific things built around it (Electron, Puppeteer, Selenium, etc and so forth). Right now the world needs a lot more Safari and Firefox users complaining about Chrome-only sites and tools than it does people complaining about Safari "holding the web back". Safari's problems are temporary. Chrome is the new Emperor and IE wasn't bad because it stopped, it was bad because it stopped after being the Emperor for some time. People remember how bad the time was after the Empire crumbled, but it's how IE took so many other things down with it that it is easier to remember the interregnum after IE crumbled than to remember the heyday when "IE-only websites are good enough for business" sounded like a good idea and not a cautionary tale.
The most underappreciated design decision in Temporal is making everything immutable. Half the Date bugs I have debugged over the years come from someone calling setMonth() or setHours() on a Date object that was shared across call sites. The other half come from the implicit local timezone conversion in the Date constructor. Temporal fixes both by forcing you to be explicit about timezones through ZonedDateTime vs PlainDate, and by returning new objects instead of mutating. Nine years is a long time, but given how many TC39 proposals ship half-baked and then need follow-up proposals to fix the gaps, I would rather they got this one right.
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It is not just in time keeping that mutable shared state is an issue, I have seen problems arising from it elsewhere as well in Python especially, but also in C and C++. Probably because Python is pass by reference implicitly, while C and C++ makes pointers/references more explicit, thus reducing the risk of such errors in the code. There a few schools of thought about what should be done about it. One is to make (almost) everything immutable and hope it gets optimised away/is fast enough anyway. This is the approach taken by functional languages (and functional style programming in general). Another approach is what Rust does: make state mutable xor shared. So you can either have mutable state that you own exclusively, or you can have read only state that is shared. Both approaches are valid and helpful in my experience. As someone working with low level performance critical code, I personally prefer the Rust approach here.
They seem to have taken it from Joda time that revolutionized time in java 10+ years ago. Sadly no mention of Joda.
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Also no mention of Stephen Colebourne, author of Joda and the JSR-310 spec (the basis of java.time), the one person you should always stop and listen to when he says you are doing something wrong with time. Alas, this post is not the only time the TC39 people ignored him.
The worst are methods that both mutate and return values. I know this gets into a complex land of computer science that I don’t understand well, but I wish I could define in TypeScript “any object passed into this function is now typed _never_. You’ve destroyed it and can’t use it after this.” Because I sometimes want to mutate something in a function and return it for convenience and performance reasons, but I want you to have to reason about the returned type and never again touch the original type, even if they are the same object.
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> any object passed into this function is now typed _never_. You’ve destroyed it and can’t use it after this. That is basically what affine types are. Once the value is "consumed" it can't be used again. In rust, this is expressed as passing an "owned" value to a function. Once you pass ownership, you can't use that value anymore. And having used it in rust, I wish more languages had something like that.
> The worst are methods that both mutate and return values Been bitten a few times by Array.sort(). Luckily there’s Array.toSorted() now.
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Also a Bloomberg proposal :) https://github.com/tc39/proposal-change-array-by-copy
I don't think they're saying it shouldn't be possible to mutate arguments, just that the ! convention should be enforced. The Ruby runtime could, for instance, automatically freeze all arguments to a function that doesn't end with a !. That way all code that correctly follows the mutation naming convention will continue to work, and any development who doesn't know about it will quickly learn when they try to mutate an argument and get an error. Ideally a helpful error telling them to add the !.
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That's really interesting. Although my worry is the freezing having bad effects down the line after the function returns. a = [1, 2] def check_this(arr) raise "doesn't start with 1" unless a.first == 1 end check_this(a) a << 3 # Raises "FrozenError (can't modify frozen Array)" because check_this froze `a` Now, if you could temporarily freeze, and then unfreeze only the ones you froze, that could be really cool.
Elevated errors on login with Claude Code (status.claude.com)
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Hey folks, I'm Palcu from the reliability engineering team at Anthropic. I just posted a small retro on the status page: > Between 14:17 and 17:11 UTC, our primary application database experienced severely degraded I/O performance following a routine maintenance operation, causing slow or failed requests on Claude.ai and preventing new or refreshed sign-ins for Claude Code and the Console. API traffic via Claude Developer Platform was unaffected. https://status.claude.com/incidents/jm3b4jjy2jrt Sorry again, thanks for bearing with us as we're dealing with the influx of new users and scaling up all of our systems.
Can I take a moment to complain about Anthropic's insistence on using a magic email link for login in the year 2026? It's so unnecessary. Please, anthropic team. Just allow us to user username/password/2FA.
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The magic link is nice IMO. One less secret to manage.
Passkeys are the 2026 answer. No (added) username, no password, no two factor SMS, no phishing.
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I'm not a fan. But what Anthropic SHOULD have done is use plain ol' SSO. Google, GitHub, Microsoft, etc. logins with the option to do this magic link stuff. The third party auth providers would use passkeys at the user's discretion.
On iOS and macOS 2FAs are auto-populated for you, and of course also your saved login and password. You don't need to leave the page and open other applications. This is by far the most common sign-in UX. So is there some security benefit in the email link sign-in?
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The only way an account accessed by a magic link can be compromised is by an already compromised associated email. No password in clipboard, which is how some of us still do it, etc. The magic link makes everyone secure regardless of how they store their secrets. And there's also no password stash if the server were to be hacked, which means no sending out "please update your password" emails and the like.
oauth `redirect_url` points to localhost, so the login redirect hangs
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oof
It's quite amusing to see so-called "developers" waiting for their 10x engineer called "Claude" to hand hold them like interns who can't read or write any code when it goes and takes a break for 2 hours. Codex was taking a nap for 8 hours [0] recently with many of the interns here complaining that it is "down". [0] https://status.openai.com/incidents/01KK9JA8JKQKDW1W24T09NHBYH
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> It's quite amusing to see so-called "developers" waiting for their 10x engineer called "Claude" to hand hold them like interns who can't read or write any code when it goes and takes a break for 2 hours. Think about it, they're being forced to read and update code, on the spot, that someone else wrote! It takes time to get up to speed.
Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar (wsj.com)
nowadays, if you have correct spelling and grammar people accuse you of being an llm.
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I have used em dashes and semicolons for decades. The LLM appropriation of my writing style has been almost as devastating as their impending vaporization of my career path.
I end all of my sentences with periods and I was told that I have a negative attitude at work because of it. Seriously, my manager's advice was to stop ending my sentences with periods.
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There was a "right to be boring" lawsuit in France by an older employee who used vous instead of tu with his colleagues and subordinates, and was fired for it. He just wasn't comfortable in the informal register. If I recall correctly, he won.
The flip side is that my exclusion of others is often other's exclusion of me. When someone says "aks" instead of "ask", they know what they're doing. They look around and think "I am like those who say aks, so I will say aks too. Those who say ask are outsiders". So I response: Ok, you're an outside to me then. Approaching like "they can't speak properly and we're evil for excluding them" is patronising and racist.
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people aren’t saying “aks” to make a public statement against you for whatever reason. they’re saying it because that’s how they learned to speak and the dialect of speakers who they were surrounded with. yeah, people code switch, but i have come across many many people who just say things differently from the majority pronunciation. they’re not misunderstood and they can communicate just fine (see nucular vs nuclear). that’s just how language works, right
> misstake I see what you did there. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
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A smelling pistake
I don't really see that as the same thing as what the article was pointing out. Those are shibboleths that only an insider would know. You have to get the pronunciation of Cholmondeley or Couch "right" to pass for an insider. The random misspellings, missing spaces, sloppy grammar, etc in the examples in the article seem different to me. Misspelling "en route" as "enriewu" doesn't show, "look, I know the secret country club spelling for en route". It simply shows that you don't have to care about your mistakes. You write something that approximates what you mean, and you're too important to spend time revising. The mistake could be "enrout" or "n route" or on any other word. But you're not going to be a try-hard who edits and frets over their messages, you're blessing someone with 10 seconds of your attention and they're lucky to receive your correspondence, typos and all.
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It's absolutely a power move, but it's also what happens when people are surrounded by sycophants who never correct them and will take time to decipher what they mean. And over years, sloppy typing (forgivable) evolves into sloppy thinking.
No, "gh" is usually silent in English spelling.
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Laugh, trough, tough, rough. Maybe it should be "Vawfan"
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Ghoul.
There's also the British penchant for deliberately mispronouncing French words. I have heard "renaissance" pronounced "reh-NAY-sance", "fillet" pronounced "fill-it", "valet" as "val-it" and so on. I think it's a national point of pride to pronounce the words of their neighbor incorrectly.
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Those are the standard British pronunciations, if you meant 'I have heard' as though it might be a niche or occasional occurrence. ('fill-ay' et al. are AmE pronunciations.) It's not always that way though, consider 'niche': it's AmE that decided it's 'nitch'!
>America is at least as guilty of mispronouncing non-english words it's just natural drift. See also: Cairo, IL or Versailles, KY...
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Notre Dame, IN
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence Ignorance of why something exists is not a good enough reason to destroy it.
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Never heard of this before, but it’s great. Pretty succinct explanation of why effective reform is hard the likes of DOGE is counterproductive.
I think a more likely reason, that for some reason, a lot of people don't want to talk about, is that these "Global Elite" aren't really that smart, creative, or articulate. That they've gotten to where they are despite, not because of their communication skills. They're not being "typical unconventional / quirky entrepreneurs." They're simply C students who knew the right people.
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It's more just selection for sociopathy and backstabbing. Don't even get me started on technical ability; the engineering standards at even the highest echelons are at times apppalling.
This could be read as a condemnation of the text input interfaces we've designed; the users are busy and have little choice. Typing on a phone still is awful: * Very time-consuming, especially for edits/corrections * Lacks functionality (where is undo? the right/left arrow keys?) and other functionality is very poor (mouse/pointer control) * Frustrating! * Consumes attention: I can type on a full keyboard while looking elsewhere - including talking to someone else, though of course all actions suffer. On full keyboards I can type while reading something, to transcribe it, or I can just watch the output. Or just imagine using keyboard-based commands (e.g., Vim) on a smartphone. I've tried alternative screen keyboards and they are a bit better, but it still sucks a lot.
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Bingo. I have oft opined that the switch to an audiovisual culture was (bandwidth and compute gains notwithstanding) simply due to the piss poor ergonomics of the touch screen. IRC was a literate culture, owing to its roots in the physical medium of the typewriter. It imposed technical barriers to entry selecting for a minimum of intelligence. After kneecapping the literate media by destroying this input mechanism with touch screens, the audiovisual media flooded in to fill the vacuum - and brought with it the illiterate masses who now all see themselves as amateur videographers, unencumbered from the previous burdens of needing to "read the fucking manual."
Their schedules are full of leisure , and they can't be arsed to extend even the oz of courteous effort that proper punctuation and grammar require. And their class all recognize it. Possibly it's a class marker. Here, I have to carefully articulate my point because I am desperately trying to convince you not to carry water for the Epstein a class.
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What's your point? That everyone with a lot of wealth lives exactly the same, and is comparable to Epstein? I'm not sure I understand.
> Before smartphones/autocorrect/dictation it was worse. Not sure I agree. I remember e-mails being capitalized and punctuated. It's not so much typos and laziness as much as incomplete thoughts and distraction. Communication as a whole has devolved from an e-mail with a complete thought and some details to a text or chat message without capitalization, punctuation or context. The lack of capitalization and punctuation are just a tell to me that the sender didn't put thought into it. I can't tell you how many times I get a chat message asking a question. I in return ask questions about context, and explain why I'm asking. Then the original sender gets annoyed and provides context. Then I ask more questions. Then the original sender gets quiet. Then I get an invite to a meeting to discuss with a wider audience.
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Then the original sender gets quiet. Then I get an invite to a meeting to discuss with a wider audience. One of the most infuriating aspects of working in corporate with people where English is not the primary language.
Wiz joins Google (wiz.io)
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This isn't a new observation [0] but this means Google will now have two Wizes, since Wiz is also the name of their internal web framework [1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43399077 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41092039
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Didn’t this happen a long time ago?
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Wasn't this acquisition just a bit money laundering operation from Israel?
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No reactions beside: monopolies are bad for innovation and why we cannot have nice things. You might hear some people say "but these big companies innovate". They were mostly done innovating two decades ago, now they just snuff out innovation and acquisition is one of their main tools.
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well if you are waiting for the monopolies to be broken don't wait they will not be broken monopolies are here to stay, capitalistism for the rich and socialism also for the rich they best thing you can do is be rich yourself
> will result in less competition The system working as intended. “Competition is for losers” - Peter Thiel
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Thiel is an idiot
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>> “Competition is for losers” - Peter Thiel > Thiel is an idiot Sounds more like he's selfish, perhaps to an unusual degree. Monopoly is great for the monopolist. For everyone else? Not so much.
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But very rich...
Is it possible the foreignness makes ‘W’ appealing as it signals cool modern tech alignment or something? Like how ‘X’ attracts marketing and typographic knuckle-draggers in English, or how all our AI companies have butthole logos for reasons that only make sense if you understand the underlying companies and culture.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_of_Israel#W There's 5 of them, two of which happen to have been acquired by Google. Fair to say it's likely a coincidence. Interestingly, they all use "vav vav" as the start of their Hebrew names. "Vav" is the hebrew letter for V, so it's kind of like using VV to represent W. Maybe you're right, and it's a stylistic thing! My knowledge of Hebrew ends in Hebrew school, and that mostly focused on blessing and prayers over startup naming.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
The MacBook Neo (daringfireball.net)
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Soo has there been work to run hackintosh on an iPhone??
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> The Neo doesn’t have a hardware indicator light for the camera. The indication for “camera in use” is only in the menu bar. There’s a privacy/security implication for this omission. According to Apple, the hardware indicator light for camera-in-use on MacBooks, iPhones, and iPads cannot be circumvented by software. If the camera is on, that light comes on, and no software can disable it. Because the Neo’s only camera-in-use indicator is in the menu bar, that seems obviously possible to circumvent via software. iPhone and iPad does not have a hardware indicator light
> You cannot buy an x86 PC laptop in the $600–700 price range that competes with the MacBook Neo on any metric — performance, display quality, audio quality, or build quality. And certainly not software quality. I would argue the opposite: while Apple hardware is generally excellent, it is the software that leaves to be desired. Apple has also been consistently pushing the industry in a dangerous direction (walled gardens with app stores, excessive power over developers and users). MacOS is also very behind Linux these days in terms of app compatibility (especially games). I won't be buying a Neo before a compatible Linux distro is confirmed. If the stock OS can't be replaced for one reason or another, it's dead on arrival as far as I am concerned.
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Same here, MacBooks are decent hardware but nowhere near so superior as to justify all the downsides and increasingly dark patterns Apple has been pushing left and right.
Calling this a "content consumption" device seems wrong to me. Sure, it's not a professional laptop. You're going to have a bad time trying to run more than one Adobe creative suite app at once, or running the iOS emulator, but the chip in it is very powerful, and you can do real work on this laptop. I was even thinking of snagging one to use as a kind of thin client for dev accessing my big linux box via tailscale. It might be worthwhile to ensure that a web app you're developing will work on a less powerful machine without killing the browser, for example.
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It’s not even a less powerful device. It has the same performance as the M1, which is still a beast.
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I have a macbook pro m1 with 8gb ram and it has been surprisingly good for all kinds of work. And I've had it since about 2020.
> It might be worthwhile to ensure that a web app you're developing will work on a less powerful machine If that’s your goal this machine is still too powerful. Web apps generally care about single thread performance. The machine has a single thread performance that exceeds any and all Intel/AMD processors, according to Geekbench (A18 Pro: 3445; Ryzen 9 9950X: 3385). My own test for ensuring my web app performs well involves a machine less than half as fast, and my web app runs with all assertions turned on.
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> The machine has a single thread performance that exceeds any and all Intel/AMD processors Not true at all: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
> The Neo charges faster if you plug it into a more powerful power adapter, in either USB-C port. The fact that the "usb 2" port works for (fast) charging is a big win. That means you can charge and use the fast usb port at the same time.
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USB-C PD (power delivery) has been a standard for over a decade now. I first used it on a Nexus 4 or 5, and later on a Chromebook Pixel in 2016. It would be surprising for apple to not use that standard, particularly when both ports are probably run from the same controller.
> That means you can charge and use the fast usb port at the same time. For some use cases, you can do that with a single USB port, too. For example, a single USB cable connected to a monitor can both send video and charge the laptop.
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Sure, but it's certainly convenient to have two ports
But you’re stuck with MacOS. I can’t stand it and every update makes it worse. Been running popos abs everything I can and it’s petty nice. Installed it on a new LG Gram and everything works including fingerprint reader. Is my favorite laptop and my old Mac sits gathering dust,
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I generally run chrome/firefox and vscode full screen, and then alt-tab between those and my email (outlook at current company) and messaging (slack). Plus terminal window/s. That workflow is mostly reproducible across win/mac/linux. What features are you using that MacOS is getting in the way?
For now. These will be pretty cool Linux machines if Asahi starts supporting them at some point.
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It's going to take 3 years+ and it will be a 8GB RAM linux machine.
It's amazing how often people who post on here about hating macOS have only just got a Mac for the first time and simply can't be bothered to learn, or hate that the keyboard shortcuts are different, or desperately want their OS level adverts back or something. It's lazy.
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Conversely, it's amusing how often do Apple people assume everyone else is Holding It Wtong (tm).
Portrait or landscape - if your use is dominated by looking at the screen and/or situations where it can't set it down (to use the KB), then the iPad is better. Assuming the software you need supports iPad, etc.
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Am I the only person who manually rotates a laptop screen to portrait, then holds it like a book to use thus?
When did $600 become budget?
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Recently after another round of 30-40% inflation.
Just imagine what Apple would do to the market if they also offered a full Linux support, but not Windows... They'd probably own some 70% of Linux market outright and also double its overall size overnight.
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Apple wants to make money with services, however, and buying more devices in their ecosystem. Full Linux support would counteract the lock-in.
They already cannibalized a lot of Linux users, developers mainly when they released MacOS X around year 2000. Suddenly you could have a Unix, with pretty much the same CLI as Linux but without all the supported hardware/driver issues. Laptop sleep in particular was pretty finicky. If MacOS didn't pick a Unix/BSD base, I'm pretty sure all the tech companies running Mac would be on Linux.
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They seem to be trying hard to annoy developers lately though. <cough> xattr...
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> They already cannibalized a lot of Linux users, developers mainly when they released MacOS X around year 2000. FoxTrot comic from 2002: * https://archive.is/https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2002/02/25
IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs. Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful, keyboard doesn’t suck, and display isn’t a 300nits POS unusable even in a bright room. You want the same performance as a MacBook Air without one of these fatal flaws? You’ll hand to spend $1500+ anyway so you save nothing. Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes.
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In my opinion PC industry is also cooked because of fans. I simply cannot use any recent PC laptop, because the moment you do something it engages fans in the most obnoxious way. Every time someone turns on their PC laptop next to me, my ears feel assaulted. My Mac does engage fans from time to time, but I never notice the noise.
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Exactly. PC manufacturers have so many SKUs and are changing so many things from one model to another that their brand doesn't mean anything anymore. Buying a Dell, HP, Lenovo or Asus branded laptop doesn't say anything meaningful about what you're actually going to get. Unlike Apple (or Framework) where the brand still means something.
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It gets worse when you look at Intel/AMD's CPU naming schemes. Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, Intel Core Ultra 9 285H. Clown show all around.
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The last competitor remaining is Lenovo with the ThinkPads and pre-installed Linux [1]. But even Lenovo cripples them: * You need to be very careful. Select alwaysCTO build with the best available display. But even then, Lenovo *removed* the HiDPI display from the X13. The only actual competitor to the MacBook Air is the ThinkPad X13. * Lenovo added useless camera humps protruding out of the panel. There is a thick bezel and enough space for a much better camera. And for opening the laptop used to be a dent in the (round!) palmrest, nothing protruding. * AMD, Intel and Lenovo fail to ship a fanless X13 and T14. I would happily keep same performance for two years, just getting rid of it. * Lenovo is drowning us in Yogas, Z13 or whatever Legion. They still have huge advantages (keyboard, maintenance manual, replacement parts, Linux compatibility, much more ports in case of the X14 and T14). Apples keyboards are nowadays “acceptable” but not even comparable to a good ThinkPad keyboard. [1] By the love of god. Don’t order them with Windows! You are putting 80 to 130 euro right into Microsoft’s stock owners. And they will use it to harm Linux. And of course, making Windows even worse. They use it to harm you . Select Linux. Donate the rest (Fasst, GNOME, KDE…) or use it for the better display.
Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes. But inevitably, some chucklehead comes along "wut? I can get <proceeds to type spec sheet> for half that! Have fun paying the apple tax, lol." Someone posted that on Ars yesterday, with a random Amazon link from Naikan, your name for quality computing. Or rather, "Naikan, your name for a quality trackpad, screen, and high-quality ABS case! Be sure to check out the $12,000 of 'bonus' software add-ons, no extra charge!". It's amazing someone can post that without the slightest hint of self-awareness.
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> It's amazing someone can post that without the slightest hint of self-awareness. It's amazing that people attribute it to lacking self-awareness. You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience. There are damn good Chromebooks in the $200-300 territory that I can genuinely recommend to people. If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo? macOS itself has been declining in quality since at least Mojave; people don't rave about it anymore. The Macbook Neo will 100% continue the trend of people showing up at Best Buy and comparing the Lenovo machine to the Mac that costs 3x as much. This will not sway the average Joe any more than the Macbook Air did. It's not even seriously competing with the iPad price bracket that might tempt students.
I had a Microsoft surface book 2. The provided charger could not provide enough power to the device when it was under heavy load and there was no higher charger option either. That shit should be illegal. And if the battery for the base/GPU died? You can't use the computer w the gpu even with a charger attached. The device itself could have been a dream and something i could have seen Apple doing : a touchscreen monitor that was also a computer and could be detached from the keyboard/gpu.
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For a couple of days I had a Surface Book 1 before returning it. The keyboard was really good but otherwise just a terrible device and experience. The touch screen was completely useless. Super laggy and sometimes the pen would still believe it was touching the screen even at like 1cm away. Windows 10 had almost no features for touch based interaction. It was just regular Windows with the same microscopic buttons for mouse. Plus a ton of display ghosting, GPU glitches, etc.
> IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - I see your point, but as a counterexample, look at the TV industry, at PC monitors, at washing machines, etc. There manufacturers have, for decades, created SKUs left and right, sometimes only so that a large dealer can offer to match lowest prices because no other dealer has access to the same SKU. > it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs. I don’t know how they do things nowadays, but it used to be the case that the same SKU didn’t even guarantee you the same hardware. Two machines of the same order could even be slightly different, requiring different drivers.
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Washing machines and the others don't have a company like Apple that is so differentiated that customers love their products so much they get to own something like 80% of the profits of the biggest personal computing market.
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Creating SKUs to avoid price matching is still just having one product coming out of the factory. It's just extra space in a database somewhere, so it costs nothing. The PC makers do have to create new physical products for each of those SKUs though. So it's apples and oranges here
> I don’t know how they do things nowadays, but it used to be the case that the same SKU didn’t even guarantee you the same hardware. Two machines of the same order could even be slightly different, requiring different drivers. Apple is guilty of this too. For example, two iPhone's purchased at the same time can have displays from different manufactures, with noticeable quality differences between them.
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And unless you looked it up, you'd never noticed the difference (save comparing the two side-by-side). Whereas the cheap laptop requires one to know the difference so you can get the right driver, or other jackery because your WiFi card was a mid-year change. It reminds of me of mid-year production changes on cars, where VINs XXX-YYY need part number ZZZ, but VINs AAA-BBB need part number CCC.
This is my advice anyone asks me about a laptop. The specs don't matter (at least if you're asking me, it means you don't know computers and will mostly just use a web browser, and therefore nearly any specs on the market will be fine) and the things that do matter are just never on a spec sheet -- keyboard, trackpad, speaker, screen quality. Some stuff won't be discovered until years later: for instance I had an Acer laptop in 2007 which was designed with insufficient cooling, and cooked its thermal paste in about a year or two. Once it was cooked, you couldn't play games or do anything intensive without rebooting the machine. I hadn't thought to research that issue since I figured cooling was a solved problem. But, I'm sure Acer saved a few dollars per unit. (and of course, the screen, trackpad, speaker (yes, singular!) and keyboard were all awful as well.)
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I bought my last Acer around 2010 (Aspire 4820TG I think, good machine). Their notebooks were always on the cheaper side, where its price just sat right with the offered value. Cooling issues were always present and weren't a big problem as long as the machine was maintainable. Unfortunately maintainability in notebooks (and electronics in general) all changed around 2015-ish and from there on it was used ThinkPads only for me.
Yeah, for a while my favorite laptop was the Surface Book 2. Decent specs, does what I want it to. Then Microsoft started going through "Marketing Driven Development" for Windows and its just been downhill for my experience with that laptop. It's not just the marketing trash, the OS has gotten noticeably slow despite me keeping it pretty vanilla. It's downright insulting. As for my desktops, I just smoosh over Windows and install Linux over now, I don't care about anything on Windows enough to keep it. I can play all my games on Linux just fine. I can do all my dev stuff on Linux too.
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I put Linux on an old Surface tablet. Works better than Windows on the same device. The only thing that isn't working under Linux is the camera. Built in extra privacy as a bonus!
> I get it, other than price, the Neo and Air are a bit confusing product wise. Have they looked at how Asus, Lenovo, and Dell are doing their products though? It's absolutely wild the disparity between PC and Apple for laptops. Yep. I'm a long-time ThinkPad user, but I have no idea how Lenovo's ThinkPad T series differs from the ThinkPad E series or ThinkPad L series or ThinkPad X series, and their website certainly isn't going to tell me. I keep on buying T series because I'm honestly afraid of trying anything else. To say nothing of Lenovo's non-ThinkPad laptop brands, including Ideapad, Legion, Yoga, ThinkBook (!), and LOQ. I really don't know what laptop to recommend to a friend. One friend showed me specs for an Asus they found at Best Buy, and it looked okay, so I said "It's probably fine." Turns out it was shoddily made and overpriced: they had to sent it back not once but twice because the wifi and then the camera didn't work out of the box, then a few months later the hinge broke. I am not a Mac fan, but it's easy to recommend them because you at least know they are universally well-built machines.
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> I have no idea how Lenovo's ThinkPad T series differs from ... My personal rundown and how they get assigned: E - Educational / Lower office personnel spec L - Office personnel you hate spec, but don't offer the E because they might complain. T - Give this to all the technicians because they can't take care of anything and it will survive typically. P - Give this to the engineers who believe having an RTX gpu will actually help them so that they are happy, and to the CAD operators who actually need it. X - Smaller/Ultrabooks before the term got started, now somewhat a blurry line because T series have gotten lighter/thinner. But the X1 Carbon sure is a great way to spend a ton of money for a light laptop when a T-series would suffice. Personally I stick to older used X series (currently x250) because I just enjoy a small laptop and they are dirt cheap now.
> It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful This, so much this! I run Asahi on M1 Air but wanted to upgrade to something with fuller Linux support. After trying Thinkpad T14s, trackpad quality has rosen to my attention, something I never thought about before. Turns out glass, haptic trackpads are still only available in probably about a dozen laptops on the market and it's not easy to actually know which ones are these!
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I exclusively use the trackpoint on thinkpads, to the point that I disable the trackpads in the BIOS or disconnect them from the motherboard entirely.
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You can buy a Magic Trackpad and pair it with your Thinkpad no problem. It's much more comfortable to use it side-by-side with your keyboard, most of the time I'm reaching for the Trackpoint if my hands are on home row.
Inarguably one of the great things done by apple is the rather easily overseeable models. And no mattter the processing power in the models you get a rather great experience from the haptics, audio and visual in all of them. And I would be very much in the Apple Camp for personal laptops, if Gaming was in any way shape or reasonable. Thats the only downside of apple. They tried to fix this before but that really did not work out.
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At the same time with effort they can run a surprising amount of games. Heroic Launcher makes it a bit easier to wrangle the game dev toolkit (riding off the back of work from the whisky dev before they quit dev work from all the complaining users). I had Cyberpunk 2077 running on a M1 Macbook Air almost two years before the MacPort came at a very playable 30fps (900p Medium settings). Although I did have to use thermal pads to heatsink it to my metal laptop stand and added a slow spinning fan for good measure. It's not perfect, but I've also spent a lot of time only buying games with no road blocks to running on Mac/Linux.
Oh i have a steam deck and am in the process of migrating to linux latest when Win 12 hits. Just some problems with some software like Fusion 360. I do like Linux alot.
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https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps fusion360 is supported.
If they're your friend, why didn't you just tell them to get a Mac?
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15 years ago this comment would have been a troll. Nowadays it’s solid advice. The current Mac line-up is a step ahead of the competition. App compatibility is hardly an issue anymore with the exception of some very niche software.
> MacBook Neo Review: No Other Budget Laptop Can Compete > PC Magazine came to the same conclusion: > Similar to the Verge: Apple pays well. Budget laptop at 600 Euros ? And can't compete having a tablet processor, 8 MB RAM, 256 MB SSD. 2 USB ports (one i presume used for charging) ? Yeah. It really can't compete with better options.
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It definitely would have competitive issues with 8MB RAM and a 256MB SSD. Knocking it for having a tablet processor means you haven't actually been paying attention to Apple's in-house processor development.
As I said in another thread $650 HP OmniBook 5 on Ryzen is faster, more RAM, feels great to use, and I don't have to deal with MacOS!
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lol $150 more for a crappy low res display etc. So bad.
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To save anyone else trying to figure out what computer lostmsu is talking about, at least going by the current prices on HP's website (not MSRP): HP OmniBook 5 Laptop Next Gen AI 16-fb0037nr If I were shopping for a cheap laptop I would have given up and bought a Macbook Neo before I found that one.
Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight (16bpp.net)
> After all of the above work and that talk in mind, I decided to ask an LLM. Impressive that an LLM managed to produce the answer from a 7 year old stack overflow answer all on its own! [1] This would have been the first search result for “fast asin” before this article was published. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/26030435
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I did see that, but isn't the vast majority of that page talking about acos() instead?
And similarly, entire generations of programmers were never taught Horner's scheme. You can see it in the article, where they write stuff like A * x * x * x * x * x * x + B * x * x * x * x + C * x * x + D (10 muls, 3 muladds) instead of the faster tmp = x * x; ((A * tmp + B) * tmp + C) * tmp + D (1 mul, 3 muladds)
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Not just for speed, Horner can also be essential for numerical stability.
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The reason for writing out all of the x multiplications like that is that I was hoping the compiler detect such a pattern perform an optimization for me. Mat Godbolt's "Advent of Compiler Optimizations" series mentions some of these cases where the compiler can do more auto-optimizations for the developer.
The problem with Horner’s scheme is that it creates a long chain of data dependencies, instead of making full use of all execution units. Usually you’d want more of a binary tree than a chain.
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Not in this case because the dependencies are the same: Naive: https://godbolt.org/z/Gzf1KM9Tc Horner's: https://godbolt.org/z/jhvGqcxj1
Thinking about speed like this used to be necessary in C and C++ but these days you should feel free to write the most legible thing (Horner's form) and let the compiler find the optimal code for it (probably similar to Horner's form but broken up to have a shallower dependency chain). But if you're writing in an interpreted language that doesn't have a good JIT, or for a platform with a custom compiler, it might be worth hand-tweaking expressions with an eye towards performance and precision.
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Probably for ints unconditionally. For floats in Sesse__'s example without `-ffast-math`, I count 10 muls, 2 muladds, 1 add. With `-ffast-math`, 1 mul, 3 muladds. < https://godbolt.org/z/dPrbfjzEx >
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The compiler is often not allowed to rearrange such operations due to a change in intermediate results. So one would have to activate something like fastmath for this code, but that’s probably not desired for all code, so one has to introduce a small library, and so on. Debug builds may be using different compilation flags, and suddenly performance can become terrible while debugging. Performance can also tank because a new compiler version optimizes differently, etc. So in general I don’t think this advice is true.
You should never assume the compiler is allowed to reorder floating-point computations like it does with integers. Integer math is exact, within its domain. Floating-point math is not. The IEEE-754 standard knows this, and the compiler knows this.
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Ah, fair point, it has been a while since I've needed fast inexact math. Though... they are allowed to cache common subexpressions, and my point about dependency chains is quite relevant on modern hardware. So x*x, x*x*x, etc may each be computed once. And since arithmetic operators are left-to-right associative, the rather ugly code, as written, is fast and not as wasteful as it appears.
Compilers cannot do this optimization for floating point [1] unless you're compiling with -ffast-math. In general, don't rely on compilers to optimize floating point sub-expressions. [1]: https://godbolt.org/z/8bEjE9Wxx
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Right, I totally forgot about floating point non associativity.
Didn't know this technique had a name, but I would think a modern compiler could make this optimization on its own, no?
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No, it's not equivalent for floating point, so a compiler won't do it unless you do -fassociative-math (or a superset, such as -ffast-math), in which case all correctness bets are off.
The 4% improvement doesn't seem like it's worth the effort. On a general note, instructions like division and square root are roughly equal to trig functions in cycle count on modern CPUs. So, replacing one with the other will not confer much benefit, as evidenced from the results. They're all typically implemented using LUTs, and it's hard to beat the performance of an optimized LUT, which is basically a multiplexer connected to some dedicated memory cells in hardware.
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You'd be surprised how it actually is worth the effort, even just a 1% improvement. If you have the time, this is a great talk to listen to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPR8h4-qZdk For a little toy ray tracer, it is pretty measly. But for a larger corporation (with a professional project) a 4% speed improvement can mean MASSIVE cost savings. Some of these tiny improvements can also have a cascading effect. Imagining finding a +4%, a +2% somewhere else, +3% in neighboring code, and a bunch of +1%s here and there. Eventually you'll have built up something that is 15-20% faster. Down the road you'll come across those optimizations which can yield the big results too (e.g. the +25%).
I'd expect it to come down to data-oriented design: SoA (structure of arrays) rather than AoS (array of structures). I skimmed the author's source code, and this is where I'd start: https://github.com/define-private-public/PSRayTracing/blob/8dea5113f6b00e1ef6bb5c0c117562e971280271/render_library/Objects/HittableList.cpp#L39 Instead of an `_objects`, I might try for a `_spheres`, `_boxes`, etc. (Or just `_lists` still using the virtual dispatch but for each list, rather than each object.) The `asin` seems to be used just for spheres. Within my `Spheres::closest_hit` (note plural), I'd work to SIMDify it. (I'd try to SIMDify the others too of course but apparently not with `asin`.) I think it's doable: https://github.com/define-private-public/PSRayTracing/blob/8dea5113f6b00e1ef6bb5c0c117562e971280271/render_library/Objects/Sphere.cpp#L34 I don't know much about ray tracers either (having only written a super-naive one back in college) but this is the general technique used to speed up games, I believe. Besides enabling SIMD, it's more cache-efficient and minimizes dispatch overhead. edit: there's also stuff that you can hoist in this impl. Restructuring as SoA isn't strictly necessary to do that, but it might make it more obvious and natural. As an example, this `ray_dir.length_squared()` is the same for the whole list. You'd notice that when iterating over the spheres. https://github.com/define-private-public/PSRayTracing/blob/8dea5113f6b00e1ef6bb5c0c117562e971280271/render_library/Objects/Sphere.cpp#L43
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When I was working on this project, I was trying to restrict myself to the architecture of the original Ray Tracing in One Weekend book series. I am aware that things are not as SIMD friendly and that becomes a major bottle neck. While I am confident that an architectural change could yield a massive performance boost, it's something I don't want to spend my time on. I think it's also more fun sometimes to take existing systems and to try to optimize them given whatever constraints exist. I've had to do that a lot in my day job already.
We love to leave faster functions languishing in library code. The basis for Q3A’s fast inverse square root had been sitting in fdlibm since 1986, on the net since 1993: https://www.netlib.org/fdlibm/e_sqrt.c
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Funny enough that fdlimb implementation of asin() did come up in my research. I believe it might have been more performant in the past. But taking a quick scan of `e_asin.c`, I see it doing something similar to the Cg asin() implementation (but with more terms and more multiplications, which my guess is that it's slower). I think I see it also taking more branches (which could also lead to more of a slowdown).
The huge gap between Intel (1.5x) and M4 (1.02x) speedups is the most interesting result here. Apple almost certainly uses similar polynomial approximations inside their libm already, tuned for the M-series pipeline. glibc on x86 tends to be more conservative with precision, leaving more room on the table. The Cg version is from Abramowitz and Stegun formula 4.4.45, which has been a staple in shader math for decades. Funny how knowledge gets siloed, game devs and GPU folks have known about this class of approximation forever but it rarely crosses into general systems programming.
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I did scan some (major) open source games and graphics related project and found a few of them using `std::asin()`. I plan on submitting some patches.
When Intel specced the rsqrt[ps]s and rcp[ps]s instructions ~30 years ago, they didn't fully specify their behavior. They just said their relative error is "smaller than 1.5 * 2⁻¹²," which someone thought was very clever because it gave them leeway to use tables or piecewise linear approximations or digit-by-digit computation or whatever was best suited to future processors. Since these are not IEEE 754 correctly-rounded operations, and there was (by definition) no software that currently used them, this was "fine". And mostly it has been OK, except for some cases like games or simulations that want to get bitwise identical results across HW, which (if they're lucky) just don't use these operations or (if they're unlikely) use them and have to handle mismatches somehow. Compilers never generate these operations implicitly unless you're compiling with some sort of fast-math flag, so you mostly only get to them by explicitly using an intrinsic, and in theory you know what you're signing up for if you do that. However, this did make them unusable for some scenarios where you would otherwise like to use them, so a bunch of graphics and scientific computing and math library developers said "please fully specify these operations next time" and now NEON/SVE and AVX512 have fully-specified reciprocal estimates,¹ which solves the problem unless you have to interoperate between x86 and ARM. ¹ e.g. Intel "specifies" theirs here: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/code-sample/reference-implementations-for-ia-approximation-instructions-vrcp14-vrsqrt14-vrcp28-vrsqrt28-vexp2.html ARM's is a little more readable: https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0596/2021-03/Shared-Pseudocode/Shared-Functions?lang=en#impl-shared.RecipSqrtEstimate.2
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Thanks!
Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job (washingtonpost.com)
> I'll be down voted into oblivion, but no one will actually present a coherent a counter argument Is there a term for this Jehovah’s Witness complex where being ignored is taken as a sign of one’s faith?
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Flagged / down voted into oblivion, check. No counter argument presented, check.
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"Jehovah's Witness complex". You just coined the term for it.
I knew it. I was saying from the instant they started we'd have a scandal like this. Bunch of tech bros walking into the government with personal MBPs and administrative authority to demand data from anyone and everyone was a privacy crisis happening in real time. Yet here on HN, what have we been arguing about? Big tech. Google and Meta have been allowed to become boogeymen in this community out of all proportion to the actual threat they posed[1]. While the actual boogeyman stealing our data to exploit in the market? It was us. [1] I mean, lets be honest, while everyone has abstract complaints the truth is that they've actually been remarkably benign stewards of our data over the past 20 years. Much, much, MUCH more responsible than the glibertarian dude in the cubicle next to you, as it turns out.
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Posts predicting this were apparently flagged as "political". For example, Bruce Schneier's warning [0]. For a site called Hacker News, DOGE unfortunately attracted a different priority of notoriety than, say, the numerous merger and acquisition and VC maneuvers reaching the front page. If hacker punks nominally subvert the established order by flaunting laws and authorities, then DOGE was very much hacking. Tina Peters is an unsophisticated hacker punk, She doesn't live up to the social engineering chops of Kevin Mitnick, but her plan did involve a Geek Squad uniform . Legendary but too "political". Attracts too much noise, not enough signal. That's why you didn't see an elevation of the developed thoughts you're talking about. Since the beginning of DOGE, it has not been especially bold to predict: - DOGE will cost more than it saves. The seminal errors, mistaking $ millions for $ billions, world-write permissions on their Drupal site, etc. convinced us that we can't expect deliberate professionalism. - The very first whistleblower, out of NTSB, convinced us that exfiltration was the goal. This is within the top 5 whistleblower stories here. The critical detail was their instruction that access logs be scrubbed. - And the general public smelled it, too. No one doubts that threats against Tesla dealerships were civil libertarian radicals, not recently-fired USAID bean counters. - When Peter Theil's FBI handler, Johnathan Buma, went whistleblower a few months into DOGE, it wasn't about Theil. He saw a Russian active measure influencing Musk's inner circle. One of Kash Patel's first acts as FBI director was to order Buma arrested. So, the commentary worrying about "big tech" was commentary within Y Combinator's sphere. [0] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035977
The public is...unintelligent, and generally incapable of differentiating between an accusation and a conviction.
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Something DOGE relied on when publicizing all those 300 year old people claiming benefits. Who turned out not to exist. Or when they put loshed that website full of their savings. Which turned out not to exist.
The Feds love to wait. I doubt the next president will be as lenient with pardoning. Maybe there’s a market I can bet on pardoning.
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I would have LOVED to have a Polymarket bet when Biden said he will NOT Pardon his son.
> If you enable reckless behavior, you are even hyping it I believe you are responsible for this behavior too. Are the people mad at ICE complaining that immigration was perhaps a little too lax under Biden’s admin, and possibly creating a situation where so many people felt inclined to vote for the Mass Deporations Guy? Is there retroactive anger for Biden Admin? Note that I’m talking about a conservative voter’s right or wrong stance on the popular-at-the-time migrant caravans and not the actions of a specific person in a mid level position. Not that I’ve seen, ymmv.
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From my point of view, people are angry at ICE not mainly because deportations exist, but because of the methods being used, and those methods are clearly encouraged from above. Who else would be responsible, if not the policymakers themselves? You can argue about whether immigration was a real problem or mostly fearmongering. In that case, any realistically achievable level of deportations under the previous administration would probably have been dismissed as insufficient anyway so the outcome would the same. But if policymakers deliberately loosen rules, they can be blamed for the consequences. It is no different from weakening medicine purity standards and then acting surprised when people die. In that case, responsibility clearly falls on the people who made the policy too. It may sound blunt, but assigning blame is a normal part of politics. Politicians are there to make decisions, and they should be praised or blamed for the results.
Anyone know where I can buy/borrow an ebook version of "Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate"? Can't find it anywhere.
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Openlibrary has a scanned copy in French and English it seems: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1161327W/R%C3%A9flexions_sur_la_question_juive?edition=key%3A/books/OL6032226M
So you're saying that if you worked there you would also steal the social security data? What am I supposed to be taking away from this besides the fact that you would make poor choices and lack ethics? Didn't seem like it was a problem for people who worked in gov't prior to DOGE existing, so I'm not really getting any other takeaway here.
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Steal ? Oh no no no no no, not once, not ever. But look around the network, see what file shares are world readable, maybe see if there's any FTPs or Telnet servers with no username/password (or at least, no password stronger than "guest"). That's just being curious. And if I see any interesting files, and I make a copy to look at later, that's not a crime, is it? I'd like to think my younger self, if he'd been hired at the SSA or somewhere similar, would see the difference between "the personal data of hundreds of millions of people" and the networks I actually had access to at the time. I know I wouldn't be trying to sell the data or trying to otherwise leverage it for financial gain, but I don't really have such a high opinion of my younger self's judgement that I would completely rule out making a copy for objectively dumb reasons.
Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, growing (2025) (doi.org)
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this is reallly fucking interesting mind if I write an article about this on ijustvibecodedthis.com ?
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More broadly, an incredible amount of our society's systems are built around actors being uncoordinated. Redesigning institutions to resist networks of coordinated action between seemingly unlinked individuals will, in my opinion, be one of the great social challenges of this era.
That’s the beautiful thing about science: You do not have to (and should not) trust any individual. And even if you don’t trust “the consensus” of “the scientific community”, you can empirically verify yourself.
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Can ordinary civilians feasibly measure, for example, global trends in mean temperature without relying on the data of others?
Fucking hilarious to me when people claim academics are motivated by the "money", eg, when claimed by climate deniers.
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Undoubtably climate science is the exception and immune from fraudulent data generation and sometimes complete forgery
It kinda skips over how large mainstream journals, with their restrictive and often arbitrary standards, have contributed to this. Most will refuse to publish replications, negative studies, or anything they deem unimportant, even if the study was conducted correctly.
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Mainstream journals are complicit, but are not the biggest problem. The biggest problem by far is modern society: Tenure, getting paid a livable wage as a researcher, not getting stack-ranked and eliminated from your organization all overindex on positive research results that are marketable. This "loss function" encourages scientific fraud of sorts.
Do you want issues of Nature and cell to be replication studies? As a reader even from within the field, im not interested in browsing through negative studies. It'll be great if I can look them up when needed but im not looking forward to email ToC alerts filled with them. Also who's funding you for replication work? Do you know the pressure you have in tenure track to have a consistent thesis on what you work on? Literally every single know that designs academia is tuned to not incentivize what you complain about. Its not just journals being picky. Also the people committing fraud aren't ones who will say "gosh I will replicate things now!" Replicating work is far more difficult than a lot of original work.
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> Replicating work is far more difficult than a lot of original work. I don’t regularly read scientific studies but I’ve read a few of them. How is it possible that a serious study is harder to replicate than it is to do originally. Are papers no longer including their process? Are we at the point where they are just saying “trust me bro” for how they achieved their results? > Do you want issues of Nature and cell to be replication studies? Not issues of Nature but I’ve long thought that universities or the government should fund a department of “I don’t believe you” entirely focused on reproducing scientific results and seeing if they are real
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I know you got a ton of responses already but not caring about replicability just invalidates science as a method. If we care only about first to publish we end up in the current situation where we don't even know that we know is actually even remotely correct. All because journals prefer novelty over confirmation. It's like a castle of cards, looks cool but not stable or long-term at all.
So much of this started with the rise of the peer-review journal cartel, beginning with Pergamon Press in 1951 (coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father). "Peer review" didn't exist before then, science papers and discussion was published openly, and scientists focused on quality not quantity.
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Some "fun" reading on the subject of Mr. Maxwell: https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/red-lines tl;dr He is the bridge that uncomfortably links Biden's former Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to Jeffrey Epstein and Mossad. Hence, * gestures at the last couple of weeks and years *. Dude was just, like, Fraud Central, apparently.
>scientists focused on quality not quantity. I know a PhD professor doing post doc or something, and he accepted a scientific study just because it was published in Nature. He didn't look at methodology or data. From that point forward, I have never really respected Academia. They seem like bottom floor scientists who never truly understood the scientific method. It helped that a year later Ivys had their cheating scandals, fake data, and academia wide replication crisis.
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When I read something in a textbook I blindly believe it, depending on the broader context and the textbook in question. Is that a bad thing? People are constantly filtering everything based on heuristics. The important thing is to know how deep to look in any given situation. Hopefully the person you're referring to is proficient at that. Keep in mind that research scientists need to keep abreast of far more developments than any human could possibly study in detail. Also that 50% of people are below average at their job.
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There is a vast difference between a student reading from a textbook and a researcher / scientist reading studies and/or papers. As a student you are to be directed* in your reading by an expert in the field of study that you are learning from. In many higher level courses a professor will assign multiple textbooks and assign reading from only particular chapters of those textbooks specifically because they have vetted those chapters for accuracy and alignment with their curriculum. As a researcher and scientist a very large portion of your job is *verifying and then integrating* the research of others into your domain knowledge. The whole purpose of replicating studies is to look critically at the methodology of another scientist and try as hard as you can to prove them wrong. If you fail to prove them wrong and can produce the same results as them, they have done Good Science. A textbook is the product of scientists and researchers Doing Science and publishing their results, other scientists and researchers *verifying via replication*, and then one of those scientists or researchers who is an expert in the field doing their best to compile their knowledge on the domain into a factually accurate and (relatively) easy to understand summary of the collective research performed in a specific domain. The fact is that people make mistakes, and the job of a professor (who is an expert in a given field) is to identify what errors have made it through the various checks mentioned above and into circulation, often times making subjective judgement calls about what is 'factual enough' for the level of the class they are teaching, and leverage that to build a curriculum that is sound and helps elevate other individuals to the level of knowledge required to contribute to the ongoing scientific journey. * In short, it's not a bad thing if you're learning a subject by yourself for your own purposes and are not contributing to scientific advancement or working as an educator in higher-education.* * You can self-study, but to become an expert while doing so requires extremely keen discernment to be able to root out the common misconceptions that proliferate in any given field. In a blue-collar field this would be akin to picking up 'bad technique' by watching YouTube videos published by another self-taught tradesman; it's not always obvious when it happens.
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This is a good point. It is not humanly possible to verify every claim you read from every source. Ideally, you should independently verify claims that appear to be particularly consequential or particularly questionable on the surface. But at some point you have to rely on heuristics like chain of trust (it was peer reviewed, it was published in a reputable textbook), or you will never make forward progress on anything.
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> When I read something in a textbook I blindly believe it, depending on the broader context and the textbook in question. Is that a bad thing? It is if what you read is factually incorrect, yes. For example, I have read in a textbook that the tongue has very specific regions for taste. This is patently false. > Keep in mind that research scientists need to keep abreast of far more developments than any human could possibly study in detail. Also that 50% of people are below average at their job. So, we should probably just discount half of what we read from research scientists as "bad at their job" and not pay much attention to it? Which half? Why are you defending corruption?
> coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father A crazy world we live in where Robert Maxwell's daughter is more notorious than he is.
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Never knew of the guy but what a terrible sounding person from his Wikipedia at least. Shit apple doesn’t fall far from the shit tree I guess.
Fun fact, he almost got the worldwide console rights to Tetris back in the 80s, and tried going to Soviet officials to get those rights. To the point he's the antagonist of a recent "Tetris" movie that came out.
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This is a fun fact, thank you.
Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025) (thewave.engineer)
there is a solution for that, its called flip-flops. But it would be hilarious if LEGO would add a pair in one of their sets :)
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https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/brick-clog-5010203 Pricing is on-par for LEGO.
I recall but can't find that there was a red technic car built with studs before the panels/studless took over - that thing didn't look terribly realistic but it DID look like lego.
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Probably this one: https://brickset.com/sets/8865-1/Test-Car The difference in the instructions between classic and modern sets is interesting too, instructions for both the main and alternate build in just 38 pages. Compared to the modern instructions, which often add just a couple of parts per page.
Oddly enough I found the Duplo line much more fun to play with as our kid went through the blocks years. You could build something substantial with fewer block clicks, there were fewer different types of blocks, they were less fiddly and prone to vanishing into rugs/carpets, etc. Also the proper Legos tended to be sets which makes it very stressful to mix them into a misc bag.
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Duplo is also compatible with regular Lego. We used Duplo for the big structure and Lego on top for details. Great way to build huge stuff quickly. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/LEGO-kompatiblo.jpg
Lego was always expensive, you can compare prices adjusted for inflation. For example, the 1979 Galaxy Explorer < https://brickset.com/sets/497-1 > was around $32, that's $144 today. The reimagined set from 2023 < https://brickset.com/sets/10497-1 > was sold at $99, $106 today. Not only it is cheaper, but much larger and with many more pieces.
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Yes! We were never bougie enough to get Lego, I played with Sears bricks growing up.
Sorting Lego is such a pain in the ass. I have like a huge stash from when I was a kid. Back then we just had it all in a few tubs and dug to find a part. But somehow now I feel I must sort them… but the “right way” is ill defined and kind of sucks the joy out of playing (especially disassembling) And there is no “right way” that I’ve even found. Sort by color and now the little pieces fall to the bottom and are hard to dig for. The best I can see is part type and size… maybe… even then it sucks out the fun. I want to build cool shit with my daughter not spend every moment of Lego time sorting. There is no joy in sorting… Maybe I just revert back to the “big tub” approach. I dunno. Thanks for listening to my TED talk I guess.
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Why sort by color if human eyes (unless colorblind) are great at recognizing different colors? Back when I was a kid, I used the big tub approach (with the Spyrius base octant as my shovel).
My memory of twenty years ago says the dark-grey pins were 1 stud wide on one side, and half-wide on the other, and low-friction like the light-grey ones.
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I think they were light grey as well. They were commonly used to make cranks out of the 4185 belt wheel or attach objects to the wheel.
Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure (theregister.com)
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https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/01/16/internet-voting-is-insecure-and-should-not-be-used-in-public-elections/
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Don’t forget about https://verifiedvoting.org/ and its decades-long advocacy for scanned paper ballots.
Stories like this probably scare some people off from electronic voting but I don't think this is that big of a deal. When we finish voting operations in my area we load the ballots up on someone's personal vehicle and they take them down, securely, to where they need to go. That vehicle could get blown up and those ballots could be gone, though I think we could still get a record of the results. That being said for the United States, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship, and making "voting day" a paid national holiday. Not so much for technical or efficiency reasons but for social reasons. I'd argue it should be mandatory but I don't think we should force people to do anything we don't have to force them to do, and I'm not sure we want disinterested people voting anyway. Exercising democracy, requiring people to put in a minimal amount of thought and effort goes a long way. It should be a celebratory day with cookies and apple pie and free beer for all. Not some cold, AI-riddled, stay in your house and never meet your neighbors, clicking a few buttons to accept the Terms of Democracy process. I know there's a lot of discussion points around "efficiency" or "cost" or "accessibility" or how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries run elections) and there are certainly things to discuss there, but by and large I think the continued digitalization and alienation of Americans is a much worse problem that can be addressed with more in-person activities and participation in society. We're losing too many touchpoints with reality.
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i don’t think that requiring in-person “ID”-proofed voting and removing mail-in ballots (which is the best part of voting in CA) does anything to bring people back to reality… Even if it were a holiday, people may not be able to travel or take time off from obligations. There’s no obligation to drive 2 hours to vote, to fly back if you work in another country, or to go get a new birth certificate because Real ID doesn’t prove citizenship even though you provide citizenship documents to it when you get one… I’ve heard of a lot of takes here about what we should do for voting to make it “more secure” but all of this is actually a solution for a problem we just don’t have.
> but also have places where getting to a government office to get such an ID is difficult or expensive Where in the US do you find it's difficult for people to get an ID? Where is it not? What percentage of the population has an ID in a place where it's difficult to get one vs somewhere it is easier? What constitutes an ID being expensive? Nearly every country in the world requires proof of citizenship to vote. How is the rest of the world dealing with this problem? Do you think that their democratic processes might be compromised because of it?
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Until 1986[1] most Americans didn't get a Social Security Number until their first job. In The Matrix (1999) there's a scene where Agent Smith explicitly remarks that Neo has an SSN as proof he's a law-abiding citizen in a white-collar job. [1] when it was made a requirement to claim tax deductions for dependent children. Even today, if you don't want the tax break, you can opt out at the cost of ruining your child's life!
> What percentage of the population has an ID in a place where it's difficult to get one vs somewhere it is easier? Not the OP, but except for passports (and passport cards)... there isn't really any federal-level ID in the US (and passport booklets/cards are expensive , just a bit over $100 IIRC). The nearest equivalent in the state level are driver's licenses, which are also on the expensive side considering the ancillary costs (because it's a driver's license , not just an identification card). This is also the reason why US-centric companies like PayPal, for this exact reason, accepts a driver's license as proof of identification (obviously where not otherwise prohibited by local laws). Some (New York for example) do have an ID (called a non-DL ID, that's how embedded driver's license is in the US), but most states do not have a per se ID. > What constitutes an ID being expensive? Developing countries, rather ironically, issue their IDs for free? Okay, indirectly paid by taxes, but there's no upfront cost. The above-mentioned identity documents have a clear cost attached to them. > How is the rest of the world dealing with this problem? Do you think that their democratic processes might be compromised because of it? Cannot talk about other countries (because there is an ID system and it's not a controversial affair to them), but instead I'll answer with a reflection of the US system. Unfortunately, American ID politics are hard , mainly due to concerns of surveillance, but I think (only my opinion) because some of them want those historically disenfranchised (even if a fully native-born US citizen) de facto disenfranchised. This means that there is no uniform and freely-issued identification system in the US (or even a requirement to do that at the state level). Unfortunately, this... is a tough nut to crack, politically-speaking.
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> most states do not have a per se ID I haven't researched this thoroughly, but what state will not issue an ID that is equivalent in every way to a driver's license except that it isn't a license to drive? I just checked Mississippi, Wyoming, South Dakota, and West Virginia, all of which do, so clearly being rural, poor, or both isn't enough to stop states from doing it. (The detailed politics are, as you say, a mess.)
Some districts have limited DMV hours in advance of voting days. Coincidental how these might be Democratic leaning areas in Republican states.
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I don't even know why this is downvoted. Standard technique in Texas. Harris County does not have 40 DPS offices for its 5 million people. The current backlog to get a DPS drivers license appointment in Harris County is 45 days. The next available appointment in Kerrville is tomorrow. That is inequitable. But anyway, none of that is the real core issue with the idea of voter ID. The real issue is that there are many living Americans who were born in jurisdictions that steadfastly refused to issue birth certificates to Black people.
Trump expects half of the US to get a passport in the next 6 months. These kind of fundamental changes require years of preparation. Either Trump is an incompetent moron or he has ulterior motives.
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He's trying to prevent poor people from voting. Requiring poor people to pay a hefty fee, which they probably don't have, to get a passport seems a fairly competent way to go about making sure poor people don't vote to me. If I don't want poor people voting, then attaching a fee to voting doesn't mean I'm incompetent. It means I'm smart enough to know poor people don't have money. By the way, I think all of this is horrible. Everyone should be equal before the law and should have their vote count without having to pay for that right. I'm just pointing out that this is a really good way to eliminate the vote of the poor.
Some states only require a piece of mail and checking a box saying you are legally allowed to vote to register. Then when you checkin to vote the workers are not permitted to ask for ID to prove you are the person you claim to be. At no point during that process is there presentation of proof of citizenship.
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In that process there's no proof, but every state manages voter roles which your provisional information will then go through a further process.
Any ballots that are cast under same-day registration are cast as provisional and will go through the full verification process if the election is close enough where those ballots are necessary. Source: actually ran a fucking election precinct. Non-citizens aren’t casting ballots illegally.
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I'm not talking about same day registration. If you are on the rolls and proof of citizenship is not required to register, then how do you as a poll worker know the person on the rolls is a citizen?
Most state-issued Real IDs don't count as proof of citizenship under the SAVE Act. https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/will-save-act-allow-real-id-to-be-acceptable-4a8f8e
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Under the SAVE act, you kind of have to have a passport or don't vote in some states. Which is why I'm pretty sure it's not gonna pass. Both republicans and democrats depend heavily on mass votes from, let's just say, a lot of people who are, generally speaking, not the sort to have passports.
I don't care how much maths and encryption you use, you can't get out of the fact that things can be anonymous (no one can know how you voted) or verifiable (people can prove that you only voted once) but not both. - Switzerland usually gets around this by knowing where everyone lives and mailing them a piece of paper 'something you have' - South Africa gets around this by putting ink on your fingernail I've read quite a bit about the e-voting systems in Switzerland and USA and I just don't see how they thread the needle. At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database. Until we all have government-issued public keys or something, there isn't a technical solution to this? (Genuinely curious if I'm wrong here)
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The USA threads the needle by simply not having verifiable voting. And it turns out it works pretty well. Despite countless hours and lawsuits dedicated to finding people who voted more than once, only a handful of cases have actually turned up. It's not that there are no checks. You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. To vote more than once you'd have to pretend to be somebody else, in person, which means that if you're caught you will go to jail. We could certainly do better, but thus far all efforts to defeat this non-problem are clearly targeted at making it harder for people to vote rather than any kind of election integrity.
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> You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. So you go to other stations, duh. It's called "carousel voting" [0], if done on a large, organized scale. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting
Sure you can, you just need an anonymous voting mechanism that's sufficiently naive. You use the verifiable process to restrict access to that anonymous mechanism. In Canada, at both federal and provincial levels, you walk up to a desk and identify yourself, are crossed off a list, and handed a paper ballot. You go behind a screen, mark an X on the ballot, fold it up, take it back out to another desk, and put it in the box. It's extraordinarily simple. > At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database. Well, that kind of fraud is a different issue from someone reading the database and figuring out who someone voted for (you just... don't record identities in the database).
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There will never be a technical or operational process that excludes cheating. The only deterrence that seems to work on humans and even then only most of the time is severe capitol punishment and that will only be as effective as people believe it happens thus requiring live streaming of the removal of cheaters heads without censorship. The current legal process of each country would have to be by-passed or people would just sit in a cage for 30 years. Even in such cases there will be people that sacrifice themselves if they think that bribe money can go to their family but that is at least a start.
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Also cheating with paper ballots is much harder to scale and remain undetected than cheating by altering records in a database.
What about this? Consider a toy system: everyone gets issued a UUID, everyone can see how every UUID voted, but only you know which one is your vote. This is of course flawed because a person can be coerced to share their ID. In which case you could have a system in which the vote itself is encrypted and the encryption key is private. Any random encryption key works and will yield a valid vote (actual vote = public vote + private key), so under coercion you can always generate a key that will give the output that you want, but only you know the real one.
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Besides the fact that 99% of the general population won't be able to understand this, a $5€ wrench says that you show me proof of the correct private key (either by you showing me the letter you received, me being present when you set it up, or however it is set up)
You can have e-voting systems that protect ballot secrecy and are verifiable. You can use homomorphic encryption or mixnets to prove that: 1) all valid votes were counted 2) no invalid votes were added 3) the totals for each candidate is correct And you can do that without providing proof of who any particular voter voted for. A few such systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting https://www.belenios.org/ Authentication to these systems is another issue - there are problems with mailing people credentials (what if they discard them in the trash?). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ontario-municipal-elections-online-voting-study-1.7644536 Estonia (a major adopter of online voting) solves this with the national identity card, which essentially is government issued public/private keys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card Lots of cyber risks with the use of online voting though, especially in jurisdictions without standards/certification. I outline many in my thesis which explores the risks to online elections in Ontario, Canada (one of the largest and longest-running users of online voting in the world) https://uwo.scholaris.ca/items/705a25de-f5df-4f2d-a2c1-a07e96a23c1b
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> You can have e-voting systems that protect ballot secrecy and are verifiable. In these systems the voter cannot verify that their vote was secret as they cannot understand, and much less verify the voting machine. > And you can do that without providing proof of who any particular voter voted for. Which is good for preventing the sale of votes, but keeps things obscure in a magical and correct box. How can I tell the machine didn't alter my vote if it cannot tell me, and just me, who I voted for? The global sanity checks are worthless if the machine changed my vote as I entered it.
It is not even about understanding. It is about how easy it is to distrust it. Contrary to what nerds think, the goal of elections isn't to get bulletproof results by mathematical standards. The goal is to create agreeable consent among those who voted. A good election system is one where even sworn enemies can begrudgingly agree on the result. A paper ballot system has the advantage that it can be monitored by any group that has members which have mastered the skill of object permanence and don't lie. That is not everybody, but it is much better than any hypothetical digital system
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> the goal of elections isn't to get bulletproof results by mathematical standards. The goal is to create agreeable consent among those who voted. A good election system is one where even sworn enemies can begrudgingly agree on the result. First you must explain to them why the former is not an example of the latter.
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GP already said. > eVoting cannot be understood and audited by normal citizens, not even by nerdy ones. I suggest you explain the verifiability of evoting systems to your grandma or your friend with an art degree. Then ask them to explain the same to their peer while you just listen. Then repeat the exercise with paper voting. You will see the difference.
I don't understand the reason for electronic voting. The UK manages to tally up paper votes overnight, even from far-flung Scottish islands. Electronic voting is literally solving a problem that nobody has.
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The UK is the world's 22nd most populated and 78th largest country.
BitNet: 100B Param 1-Bit model for local CPUs (github.com/microsoft)
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this is reallly fucking interesting mind if I write an article about this on ijustvibecodedthis.com ?
How do you do ternary matmul with popcnt on 1.58 bit packed data?
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Assuming 2 bit per values (first bit is sign and second bit is value). actv = A[_:1] & B[_:1] sign = A[_:0] ^ B[_:0] dot = pop_count(actv & !sign) - pop_count(actv & sign) It can probably be made more efficient by taking a column-first format. Since we are in CPU land, we mostly deal with dot products that match the cache size, I don't assume we have a tiled matmul instruction which is unlikely to support this weird 1-bit format.
> Framework is ready. Now we need someone to actually train the model. If Microslop aren't gonna train the model themselves to prove their own thesis, why would others? They've had 2 years (I think?) to prove BitNet in at least some way, are you really saying they haven't tried so far? Personally that makes it slightly worrisome to just take what they say at face value, why wouldn't they train and publish a model themselves if this actually led to worthwhile results?
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Rest assured, all the big players (openai, google, deepseek etc) have run countless experiments with 4,3,2,1.58,1 bits, and various sparse factors and shapes. This barrel has been scraped to the bottom
What OpenAI did was train increasingly large transformer model instances. which was sensible because transformers allowed for a scaling up of training compared to earlier models. The resulting instances (GPT) showed good understanding of natural language syntax and generation of mostly sensible text (which was unprecedented at the time) so they made ChatGPT by adding new stages of supervised fine tuning and RLHF to their pretrained text-prediction models.
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There were plenty of models the size of gpt3 in industry. The core insight necessary for chatgpt was not scaling (that was already widely accepted): the insight was that instead of finetuning for each individual task, you can finetune once for the meta-task of instruction following, which brings a problem specification directly into the data stream.
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