Unlurker|Replay|About
Why the heck are we still using Markdown? (bgslabs.org)
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On one hand, yes, all true, it’s definitely a bit of a mess. On the other hand, what’s the alternative and don’t all languages with limitations ultimately get extended by various parties in non-compliant ways? Can anyone point to any alternative that has done it all correctly? Show me one language where someone says “This is all good and correct” and I’ll show you a language with 100 feature requests to extend it way further than its original authors intended and would create a similar mess if acted on. This is all to say, I’m going to coin Roberts’ Rule which says “All markup languages eventually end up as piles of poo with half a Turing-complete language bolted onto the side. Resistance is futile.”
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Why would anyone dislike markdown when it is so simple to use? My only gripe with markdown is that sometimes i forget how to include links.
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Markdown lacks JavaScript and can be considered mostly harmless.
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Because there's only one reasonable implementation of AsciiDoc
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Funniest part of this article is claiming * will produce a b tag then demonstrating it will usually produce a strong tag and not even noticing this.
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The "right element for the right meaning" crowd is always going to fall when they charge against the sheer walls of "but I like using Caution for my bulleted list" crowd. Or the "of course we put tire patches in the wiring element, it's when we use the tire patches". Or a million other examples I've wrassled with over the literal decades. Whatever sophisticated semantic scheme you move into the markup layer, is gonna get messed up. And then your fancy schema is just noise, very expensive noise. Markup layer needs to glue as closely to natural language constructs as possible, and then glue a little more closely than that, and let the bulk of the information derived come from natlang. It's boring, but it works, and it's easier than ever to get quantitative information out of natlang. Keep the domain stuff out of the markup layer. All that said, Asciidoc forever. Write actual books in it. Not really more complex than Markdown[1]. Win win win. [1] Unless you go legit insane with `include` and `ifdef/ifndef/ifeval`
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Hard, hard no on this. Why are we using Markdown? Why do I use it every day? It's easy to write. It's easy to read. Despite the OP's complaints, quality parsers exist. pandoc can turn it into almost any format. We will still be writing markdown in 50 years, because the design bridges a bunch of compromises very nicely.
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I just can't find myself summoning the energy to be mad about markdown. It's good enough for like 99% of the things I use it for. Sometimes I get annoyed at specific extension support or whatever when I realize I shouldn't be using markdown for that task.
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That is a lot of complaining for having no suggested better alternative. And there is your answer to the clickbait title -- we're still using markdown because there's no alternative that is so much better that it is going to dethrone the one that has all the momentum from being the first good-enough take on this that got any traction.
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I don't read HTML all the time, and I don't expect it to be easy to read when outside of a browser. Markdown though, that's my slightly fancy readme. It has just enough structure that I can easily read and understand it on the command line. I can easily grep it without need for an advanced parsing engine. If you need something with font and style weight then go for HTML. But if I see README.html with a project, it's going to put me off wanting to contribute. I do not want to learn that project's style guide for how to add some new parameters to a table or remember that they want to specify italics in one of a dozen different ways.
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The article correctly identifies the upsides of Markdown, then identifies a bunch of issues that I, as a casual user of it, don't care about. Then, in the solution section, doesn't identify a solution. No thank you, I'll stick with Markdown.
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Markdown is essentially plain text with a couple extra features. I think Markdown’s basic appeal is that it’s plain text.
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Markdown is widely used but I agree that it's a mess, there are so many dialects.. A similar but better markup is ASCIIDOC; it's formally defined and comes with a Technology Compatiblity Kit (TCK) that can be used to certify the compliance of an implementation with the spec.
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Easy and "good enough" very often trumps complex and comprehensive. Markdown is great precisely because it can't do a lot of things.
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I actually do agree that HTML is a better one, if it is a bit easier to read the source...I want text, image and links in one place and HTML is indeed the easiest one. BTW TempleOS terminal comes into mind. I really love the hyperlinks.
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Start with Obsidian (with "Live Preview" and "Editing Mode" as defaults) for fantastic WYSIWYG note-taking. Then layer in plugins like Outliner, Templater, Canvas, Relay... and realize Obsidian is almost like an OS for .md files -- which are portable, and easily human- and machine-readable.
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Somewhat related past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41120254 Copying my thoughts from there which haven't changed: >To which I say, are you really going to avoid using a good tool just because it makes you puke? Because looking at it makes your stomach churn? Because it offends every fiber of your being?" Yes. A thousand times yes. Because the biggest advantage of Markdown is that it's easy to read, and its second-biggest advantage is that it's easy to write. How easy it is to parse doesn't matter. How easy it is to extend is largely irrelevant. Markdown may or may not be the best tool for writing a book, but Markdown is the best tool for what it does - quickly writing formatted text in a way that is easy to read even for those who are not well versed in its syntax. I don't want to write a book. If I did I'd use LaTeX before RST. I want something to take notes, make quick documentation and thread comments. ***** My thoughts on strictly-defined XML-ish syntaxes are the same: they're harder for humans to read, write, and modify, which defeats the primary purpose and benefit of Markdown. Very few people have to write a Markdown parser. Many orders of magnitude more have to read and write Markdown. Optimize for them even if it makes writing the parser painful.
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Everyone seems to forget Markdown was invented for humans and incidentally for machines. Almost everyone who complains has some parser or rendering related agenda. No one cares if you can't nest asterisks inside underscores. Most of these edge cases don't read well as Markdown, which defeats the purpose.
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>Everyone seems to forget Markdown was invented for humans and incidentally for machines. We already had plain text for that. Markdown was invented to be converted to HTML. It has no utility over plain text otherwise. The link and image syntax is doing what HTML tags do, but are less readable for humans than just pasting the URL. The relationship to the machine isn't incidental, it's intrinsic.
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All problems are solved once you embrace org-mode. All you need is Emacs! Nothing more!
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Objectively false. Please stop spreading misinformation.
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Because Markdown is awesome, easier to write, and easier to read at the source level.
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> These 2 produce IDENTICAL output. ...and? What a weird article. Of course two different pieces source code can produce identical output. Every single mainstream languages are like that too.
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Mark down is great because it doesn't define a bunch of things. Headline? Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good. The web is full of great content being made hard to access because of poor/inflexible layout choices. Just give me the text and let me choose how to make it readable. The added fact that you can read raw markdown without even parsing it makes it even better. Not having total control over what its going to look like for the reader is a feature not a bug.
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> Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good. God, remember when that was that goal of HTML and the web? What a beautiful couple of years that was.
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Not many keystrokes to get a readable text. Yes, it has issues. But at its core, it is a plaintext with extra stuff, and no temptation to turn it into a webapp. (See my footnotes on HTML vs MD for saving text in https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves/ ). Yes, there is a problem with "many ways to do the same thing". The solution is ease - use a linter or autoformatter. No more bikeshedding. If you plan to use a clean yet expandable syntax, look at Typst. One of its core design principles ( https://github.com/typst/typst?tab=readme-ov-file#design-principles ) is: > Simplicity through Consistency: If you know how to do one thing in Typst, you should be able to transfer that knowledge to other things. If there are multiple ways to do the same thing, one of them should be at a different level of abstraction than the other. E.g. it's okay that = Introduction and #heading[Introduction] do the same thing because the former is just syntax sugar for the latter.
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The article talks about how confusing Markdown can get. I understand, but HTML is *much* more confusing when it comes to creating technical articles. These days we are going to see more and more markdown with the advent of AI. Markdown works really we with AI because it reduces the number of tokens required for the same amount of information vs HTML.
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Yes fully agreed, markdown is going to win by far just because of tokens and AI. The only thing I think right now that should be advanced, is plugins/custom components for markdown, like .mdx, etc token efficient ways of visualizing things in various ways, or custom interactive components, etc.
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Markdown has a lot of weird choices and works best for longer documents. Check out my "Advent of Markdown" where I go through surprising markdown behavior: https://mastodon.social/@timokoesters/115643467322561173
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You can say hell on your own blog.
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Interestingly, you can also choose not to say it on your own blog.
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Ambiguous means unclear meaning, not that there is more than one way to achieve the same thing. Html has that same problem. Think , <strong>, <p style=“font-weight: 900;”>, etc. That’s life. Get used to it.
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is now hilariously called the " b ring attention to" element. I shit you not.
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That's the sort of "we started at the acronym and worked backwards" approach the Pentagon loves to do.
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I don't think Markdown should be (ab)used as a programming language. It should be treated as a plaintext container that has some formatting to organize the contents.
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Agreed, if you need programmable content you can add some Javascript: https://www.markdownlang.com/advanced/javascript.html
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Because I think it’s fair to say it’s becoming a standard format for ai agent specs docs etc. It’s not going away anytime soon.
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These examples are contrived af. Nobody uses markdown like that bro. We like markdown because it's easy to read both rendered and raw.
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Yea I’ve been typing encyclopedias worth of markdown, most to throw away, some to publish, and I’ve never had any the problems shown here.
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When I read articles like this my reaction is always “put up or shut up.” If you have a better idea, make it happen. The author merely described the parameters of a solution and didn’t even attempt to solve it. In essence, we aren’t even left certain that a better solution that satisfies all stakeholders is possible.
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This website, at least in dark mode, doesn't have any visible indication when text is selected. ... Which is additionally frustrating, since the links at the bottom aren't actually links (so you have to select them to copy and paste into your address bar)
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i use it because it does what i want and is easy to use.
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Because, like UNIX/Linux itself, worse is better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better We want to encourage people to produce written output with minimal friction. Barriers to writing--and especially barriers to producing documentation--should be minimized. Markup is overhead. Complex markup is even more overhead. Markdown is the best compromise we know of today that provides just enough structure and typographic capability, while imposing very little cognitive load on the author. Besides, if you need something more complicated these days, you can have your favorite AI agent do it.
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It's also worth remembering that markdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media. A > to indicate a quote was widespread Usenet convention. Asterisks or underscores to indicate emphasis was also a common convention; both are legal because both were common. Double asterisk or double underscores to indicate really, really emphasizing something was also a common convention. So were asterisks to display a bulleted list, blank lines to separate paragraphs, and indenting 4+ spaces to write code. It's a good example of "pave the path" design philosophy, where you do what users are already doing rather than trying to impose some platonic ideal of what the world should be like. And it works quite well at that.
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Stepped right on the rake though because it uses sigils which were common, but requires they be used in uncommon ways (by doubling etc) which it why most chat UIs don't actually use markdown
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markdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media For those of you who weren't there: *bold* _underline_ ~strikethrough~ /italics/ > Quotation - list - list - list I've been using these for almost half a century. They're much easier and more intuitive than Markdown. I see no compelling reason to change.
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I came here to say this.
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For me, Markdown produces a lot of unnecessary cognitive load compared to other markup languages. • I have to decide whether to use asterisks or underscores for bold and italic. • I have to decide whether to use asterisks, hyphen-minuses, or plus signs for unordered lists. • I have to remember all the various rules and edge cases about parsing.
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> compared to other markup languages I think it would be easier for me to appreciate your comment if you named some of these other languages. Markdown is the only standardized one I regularly come across that I type by hand, these days. What are you contrasting to? As for Markdown specifically- the only thing I regularly mix up is the syntax for links. I frequently reverse the [] and (). But that's just because I don't use it enough to have the muscle memory.
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1&2 just pick one, it doesn’t matter. 3 mostly you’re the parser… if you’re after accuracy there are better versions, but it sure is simple to read and write
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I suggest trying Obsidian for WYSIWYG markdown editing. It beats heck out of typing it raw and eliminates that cognitive load.
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The solution is sufficiently perfected with markdown. Just like new revolutionary technologies doesn't replace wheel technology.
Aaron needs to hurry up and reincarnate already.
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Aaron had very little to do with Markdown, other than reviewing the spec once at the end.
Solana Drift Protocol drained of $285M via fake token and governance hijack (anonhaven.com)
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It took a long time until we got real digital money, Bitcoin. But all these new protocols want to do stuff at the expense of trustlesssness.
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The multisig UI/UX is a real and long term difficulty for any governance council. "Please sign this opaque transaction with binary data, it represents our agreement. I promise." For a while maybe ten years ago I worked with MakerDAO on this problem - at the time the idea was a separate auditor for proposed transactions. This general attack pattern is: get a lender with good collateral to call your bad collateral good, then swap collaterals, and it's a known and bad attack vector; the ongoing tension between innovation / speed and caution continues. There's probably a flash-loan multiplier angle here for an even worse attack; I'm imagining chaining a liquidity change in the trusted price oracle for the CVT token in the middle of the swapping. Anyway, upshot - don't loan against North Korean attack tokens. Put it on the list.
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Is public-permissionless just a bad fundamental?
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this is a beautiful attack, the way that multisig signers were compromised with innocuous signatures in advance, without really compromising private keys from the pre-funding to a virgin address, to the bundler, to the exit strategy to decentralized assets to the protocols exposed but functioning perfectly under the stress test - props to Jupiter! - and the optional insurance protocols functioning decently, all while people point fingers at Circle for their bridge working perfectly, it's not even clear what people want them to do specifically! All of these aspects of web3 are working great, and it's easy for a cynic that only sees these headlines to miss that inspirational, great place to build
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It feels like main purpose of those various coins are scams. Either classic pump and dump, or advanced ones based on complex interactions.
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> The funds were used to deploy CarbonVote Token (CVT), a completely fictitious asset Crypto calling out other cryptos, made me giggle
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+ "ZachXBT publicly criticised Circle for not freezing the stolen USDC during the bridge" calling for this, when the whole concept is to avoid government control
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Hyperliquid.
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So this is the end of the Drift project, right? Back at the top of the crypto hype cycle I wouldn't be surprised to see a project survive even a situation like this one, but now that the hype has died down is it still possible to come back from a loss of this magnitude?
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> The attacker used social engineering to induce Drift Security Council multisig signers into pre-signing transactions that appeared routine but carried hidden authorisations. So much for the "Security Council". What an embarrassment to be in a team/org like that and fail your most basic duty which would be "look at what you sign".
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That was inevitable, and all designs like that will eventually yield the same outcome. The people who should be embarrassed are the ones who thought having a group of humans routinely review (possibly complex) transactions for correctness, with no ability to undo/revert the outcome, was a good idea.
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Also, how could one reasonably disprove that the signers were not in on the scam?
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What kind of DeFi protocol has super power private keys to alter the protocol just like that? And no timelock. Seriously? What a joke
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Seems to be very standard now a days as projects seek to do things that can't be done fully on-chain. You'd think they'd take a step back and ask "why is this even a token then?".
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It's a token so they can make $
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All changes should be voted upon no matter if onchain or offchain. After that there should be a timelock, so people that don't agree with the vote to pull their assets if they want to. The only power these private keys should have is to pause the market if there is a major bug or exploit.
iNaturalist (inaturalist.org)
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Does anyone know how they make their map so performant? Showing all those pins is mind blowing to me coming from leaflet maps. Marinetraffic is also a map that blows me away every time i see all the icons and how smooth and fast the loading is when zooming in. Would love to make a similar map at some point for my hobby but leaflet just does not cut it when you want to render 10million plus pins on a global map. Tech blogs or pointers would be great
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I’ve been using Observation.org (or rather its localized version Waarneming.nl) to record my hedgehog sightings. Should I use both platforms, or do these data points end up aggregated downstream anyway?
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This is like pro spider league.
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I love this app, but it's also a significant doxxing risk especially for the large number of non-technical users that it has. A quick look at the map reveals the home addresses and names of many iNaturalist users in my neighborhood, lots of them older folks that probably don't realize that adding all of the neat wildlife that they see in their backyard (or uploading things they see on remote hikes without any 3G coverage once their phone connects to their home wifi network) is also putting their home address on display by adding a cluster of photos right next to their house that are all attached to their account.
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Does this matter if my account is some random username about birds? Like all people learn is "someone does in fact live at that address and they use this app"
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Yeah.. there should be a prompt that gauges how savvy the user is, and if the user doesn't understand the implications of this, the default should be low precision location data with a random offset per item + random offset per user.
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This site was helpful in documenting the spread of lantern flies (invasive critters that damage trees on the U.S. East Coast) - the more folks that report sightings (of anything not just problem critters) the better for all concerned. Conversely, its also beneficial to report sightings of helpful bugs/birds/bats/etc. so can get an early warning when a population starts to thin out.
I've wanted to do something similar, but unfortunately their CV model isn't public and can't be used through their API.
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Are their models considered to be the best or is there some competition? For plant identification, they blow every other free app I have tried out of the water. It also seems to return the genus of a plant rather than misidentify the species which I find impressive.
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IMO it's best-in-class. The next best thing might be google's speciesnet: https://github.com/google/cameratrapai
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Yet they shelter under a 'Science' tax-break. It's duplicitous. They should publish their models and build process. If it's not available for replication, it's not science.
Aaand if you like birds, Listers documentary is a lot of fun https://youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo
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Even if you don't like birds... It's one of my favorite things I've ever watched.
The iNaturalist API is an absolute gem. It doesn't require authentication for read-only operations and it has open CORS headers which means it's amazing for demos and tutorials. My partner and I built this website with it a few years ago: https://www.owlsnearme.com/
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It is a gem. There are all kinds of fun location/organism-specific tools you can put together with the public read-only data, and owlsnearme is a good example of that. I just used it to check my area and learned there are snowy owls nearby, which is new to me! The iNat API certainly has some quirks and shortcomings, but in terms of usability it's uncommonly good compared to most biodiversity platforms. I maintain the python API client[1], which is used for data visualizations, doing useful things with your own observation data (which is how I got into it), Jupyter notebooks, Discord bots, and some research/education workflows. [1] https://github.com/pyinat/pyinaturalist
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My son is now a fan of your site, thanks for sharing !
I’ve been pretty disappointed in the seeks applications ability to identify vegetation or insects. It seemed like it was really good a year or two ago and now I just seem to get so many bad predictions.
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I stopped using seek and just started using gemini…
Seek throws up a „please don‘t disturb nature“ modal at every single start that you need to click away. Usually at that point the bird has gone away, too. The iNaturalist app doesn‘t. It has more features, but Seek‘s former advantage „let me just the a photo and auto-identify“ is now in the iNaturalist main app, as well, so it is my default now.
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>Seek throws up a „please don‘t disturb nature“ modal at every single start that you need to click away. Frustration shared.
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So the modal is doing its job.
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Sure, it's "doing its job" much in the way a podcast advert you've already heard 1000 times is "doing its job".
Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury (github.com/RokoMijic)
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Reading the "endgame" section, and I feel that some serious thought ahould be given to what the replicator colony will do after it has finished dismantling Mercury.
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Please someone, send grey goo to Mercury.
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What about orbital mechanics? Wouldn't that create issues with/for objects in the solar system?
Bootstrapping an electronics supply chain on another planet seems harder than building the dyson swarm itself.
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Just let Claude figure it out
I encourage Dyson sphere enthusiasts to listen to the interesting argument that Dyson spheres they may be deliberately designed as an "sounds neat but is impossible" filter joke, ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM .
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Somehow I new before clicking that it was going to be Angela. Two years ago: AI does not exist but it will ruin everything anyway https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUrOxh_0leE
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Sped through that, couldn't stomach the whole thing. Is there more to it than "argument by sneering dismissal"? (Basically, so far as I can tell, her point seems to be "this was intended as a joke to see if you're stupid, so if you believe it, you are, neener-neener!")
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s (donotresearch.substack.com)
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This idea seems to come and go all over the world. It reminds me of the "Científicos" [1] in Mexico during the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (early 1900s). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cient%C3%ADfico
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Technology did change the world, and technocrats did shape it. This was part of what Burnham called the "managerial revolution". In the 1930s the fascists, communists, and New Dealers all took the reins and governed their societies in new technocratic ways. It has never really changed ever since. The permanent war economy of the United States never ceased, the constant monetary tweaking by the Federal Reserve never ceased, the "nudge units" and public relations firms that manage opinion never ceased. The television was and is a technocratic tool. The birth control pill, and pharmaceuticals generally, were and are technocratic tools. They are technological means by which to manage populations. As Yuval Harari puts it, the answer to "unnecessary people" is "drugs and computer games". The main difference between the original technocracy movement, and what actually played out in history, is that the technicians and engineers operating the machinery of population management were never really in charge. They were merely instruments -- means to an end. Aldous Huxley explained the situation in 1958: "By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manip ulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms -- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -- will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitari anism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slo gans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial -- but democracy and free dom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of sol diers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit." Today the biggest challenges to the Western technocratic oligarchy are 1) loss of narrative control via the internet, 2) external threats from other great (technocratic) powers, and 3) internal decline and incompetence.
> Musk, Altman, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Page, and the like are trying to implement technocracy Several people (maybe all, I do not know for sure) on that list are pretty hard core right wing populists, correct? Isn't that completely at odds with technocracy? Or are you thinking that they are just taking advantage of a populist movement but are themselves technocrats?
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Think it over. No one who leads a populist movement is ever ultimately sincere in his populism. But where, excuse me, where on Earth did you get the idea that any of those guys is a populist?
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant (mintlify.com)
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Is this related to that thing where somehow the entire damn world forgot about the power of boolean (and other precise) searching?
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> "The agent doesn't need a real filesystem; it just needs the illusion of one. Our documentation was already indexed, chunked, and stored in a Chroma database to power our search, so we built ChromaFs: a virtual filesystem that intercepts UNIX commands and translates them into queries against that same database. Session creation dropped from ~46 seconds to ~100 milliseconds, and since ChromaFs reuses infrastructure we already pay for, the marginal per-conversation compute cost is zero." Not to be "that guy" [0], but (especially for users who aren't already in ChromaDB) -- how would this be different for us from using a RAM disk? > "ChromaFs is built on just-bash ... a TypeScript reimplementation of bash that supports grep, cat, ls, find, and cd. just-bash exposes a pluggable IFileSystem interface, so it handles all the parsing, piping, and flag logic while ChromaFs translates every underlying filesystem call into a Chroma query." It sounds like the expected use-case is that agents would interact with the data via standard CLI tools (grep, cat, ls, find, etc), and there is nothing Chroma-specific in the final implementation (? Do I have that right?). The author compares the speeds against the Chroma implementation vs. a physical HDD, but I wonder how the benchmark would compare against a Ramdisk with the same information / queries? I'm very willing to believe that Chroma would still be faster / better for X/Y/Z reason, but I would be interested in seeing it compared, since for many people who already have their data in a hierarchical tree view, I bet there could be some massive speedups by mounting the memory directories in RAM instead of HDD. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
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RAG should have have been represented as a context tool but rather just vector querying ad an variation of search/query - and that's it. We were bit by our own nomenclature. Just a small variation in chosen acronym may have wrought a different outcome. Different ways to find context are welcome, we have a long way to go!
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I don't get it - everybody in this thread is talking about the death of vector DBs and files being all you need. The article clearly states that this is a layer on top of their existing Chroma db.
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I dont understand the additional complexity of mocking bash when they could just provide grep, ls, find, etc tools to the LLM
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If grep and ls do the trick, then sure you don't need RAG/embeddings. But you also don't need an LLM: a full text search in a database will be a lot more performant, faster and use less resources.
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haha, sweet. One of the cooler things I've read lately
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I think generally we are going from vector based search, to agentic tool use, and hierarchy based systems like skills.
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Vector search has moved from a "complete solution" to just one tool among many which you should likely provide to an agent.
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I am not familiar with the tech stack they use, but from an outsider point of view, I was sort of expecting some kind of fuse solution. Could someone explain why they went through a fake shell? There has to be a reason.
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100% agree a FUSE mount would be the way to go given more time and resources. Putting Chroma behind a FUSE adapter was my initial thought when I was implementing this but it was way too slow. I think we would also need to optimize grep even if we had a FUSE mount. This was easier in our case, because we didn’t need a 100% POSIX compatibility for our read only docs use case because the agent used only a subset of bash commands anyway to traverse the docs. This also avoids any extra infra overhead or maintenance of EC2 nodes/sandboxes that the agent would have to use.
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This puts a lot of LLM in front of the information discovery. That would require far more sophisticated prompting and guardrails. I'd be curious to see how people architect an LLM->document approach with tool calling, rather than RAG->reranker->LLM. I'm also curious what the response times are like since it's more variable.
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Hmmm, the post is an attempt to explain that Mintlify migrated from embedding-retrieval->reranker->LLM to an agent loop with access to call POSIX tools as it desires. Perhaps we didn't provide enough detail?
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That matches what I'm curious about. Where an LLM is doing the bulk of information discovery and tool calling directly. Most simpler RAGs have an LLM on the frontend mostly just doing simpler query clean up, subqueries and taxonomy, then again later to rerank and parse the data. So I'd imagine the prompting and guardrails part is much more complicated in an agent loop approach, since it's more powerful and open ended.
> even a minimal setup (1 vCPU, 2 GiB RAM, 5-minute session lifetime) would put us north of $70,000 a year based on Daytona's per-second sandbox pricing ($0.0504/h per vCPU, $0.0162/h per GiB RAM) $70k? how about if we round off one zero? Give us $7000. That number still seems to be very high.
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Hm. I think a dedicated 16-core box with 64 ram can be had for under $1000/year. It being dedicated there are no limits on session lifetime and it'd run 16 those sessions no problem, so the real price should be around ~$70/year for that load.
I think this is a great approach for a startup like Mintlify. I do have skepticism around how practical this would be in some of the “messier” organisations where RAG stands to add the most value. From personal experience, getting RAG to work well in places where the structure of the organisation and the information contained therein is far from hierarchical or partition-able is a very hard task.
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Modern OCR tooling is quite good. If the knowledge you are adding into your search database is able to be OCR'd then I think the approach we took here is able to be generalized.
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The use case is well defined here, let’s not jump the gun. Text search, like with code, is a relatively simple problem compared to intrinsic semantic content in a book for example. I think the moral here is that RAG is not a silver bullet, the claude code team came to the same conclusion.
This is definitely the way. There are good use cases for real sandboxes (if your agent is executing arbitrary code, you better it do so in an air-gapped environment). But the idea of spinning up a whole VM to use unix IO primitives is way overkill. Makes way more sense to let the agent spit our unix-like tool calls and then use whatever your prod stack uses to do IO.
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100% agree. However, if there were no resource tradeoffs, then a FUSE mount would probably be the way to go.
The real thing I think people are rediscovering with file system based search is that there’s a type of semantic search that’s not embedding based retrieval. One that looks more like how a librarian organizes files into shelves based on the domain. We’re rediscovering forms of in search we’ve known about for decades. And it turns out they’re more interpretable to agents. https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/01/08/semantic-search-without-embeddings
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I think it's cool that LLMs can effectively do this kind of categorization on the fly at relatively large scale. When you give the LLM tools beyond just "search", it really is effectively cheating.
Someone simply assumed at some point that RAG must be based on vector search, and everyone followed.
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It was the terminology that did that more than anything. The term 'RAG' just has a lot of consequential baggage. Unfortunately.
It’s something of a historical accident We started with LLMs when everyone in search was building question answering systems. Those architectures look like the vector DB + chunking we associate with RAG. Agents ability to call tools, using any retrieval backend, call that into question. We really shouldn’t start RAG with the assumption we need that. I’ll be speaking about the subject in a few weeks https://maven.com/p/7105dc/rag-is-the-what-agentic-search-is-the-how
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Right. R in RAG stands for retrieval , and for a brief moment initially, it meant just that: any kind of tool call that retrieves information based on query, whether that was web search, or RDBMS query, or grep call, or asking someone to look up an address in a phone book. Nothing in RAG implies vector search and text embeddings (beyond those in the LLM itself), yet somehow people married the acronym to one very particular implementation of the idea.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Understanding young news audiences at a time of rapid change (reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk)
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Useful study. UK-based. The "authenticity" thing of podcasters is only meaningful if the podcaster was there. Sometimes that happens, and those are the good ones. There are good protest videos. Not many war videos. Secondary sources are just pundits, of which we have too many. It's easy to be an influencer who covers entertainment - entertainment wants to be watched. It's hard to be an influencer who covers, say, unemployment. It's possible, but you have to go and talk live to people who just got laid off. That's reporting. It's not the delivery system. It's whether the source goes out and pulls in news. Most don't. “Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news." - City Editor of a Chicago newspaper, 1918. Look at a news story and ask "did this begin with a press release or a speech?". If so, it's publicity. HN had an article from a few days ago about "CEO says" journalism. It's worse on the political front. Democracy requires that a sizable fraction of voters know what's really happening. This is a big problem. Influencers can be controlled. Dubai has cracked down on war reporting by the large number of influencers there.[1] Right now, Iran claims a missile hit on an Oracle data center in Dubai. The UAE denies this. Did anybody in Dubai drive over and take pictures? Call up Oracle and ask? Nah. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/dubai-influencers-war-messaging/686329/
“Most people across generations favour the idea of impartial news, but young people more often (32% compared with 19% of those 55+) think it ‘makes no sense for news outlets to be neutral on certain issues’, such as climate change or racism.” Unfortunately it’s documentarians such as David Attenborough that carefully curate a picture of nature as some playful, curious thing. It would behoove schools that prepare students for post-secondary education to put on actual video recordings of how animals go at it and how the strong kill the weak (and their offspring) in the most savage and cruel of ways with complete disregard. And then ask them if they would rather not know this is how the world really is. Because that’s what taking a side means here, is being wilfully ignorant.
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Taking a stance frames results for the writer, such that they are less likely to write about points of the opposing side or express skepticism towards findings on theirs. I'd rather understand the situation regardless of how much it advantages my preference than gain a false understanding. Most issues are nuanced yet interest in covering things in this manner seems to be more rare over time. You have to hope you can cobble this together by looking at both sides, establish what's true, perhaps if lucky run into an insider / impartial sources (which is why I come back to HN).
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Attenborough narrated documentaries are filled with death and carnage, shot by the most patient cinematographers in the world. What a nonsense take.
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No, it is unfortunately very romanticized and carefully narrated. It gives a very skewed impression of reality. It is closer to a staged scene and less of a documentary, which is why some of those cinematographers wait for so long. Actual nature, and its cruelty, is so banal as to be boring that without the storytelling, you wouldn’t want to see it. I suggest you see some raw video footage, without music, additional sounds, careful DOF camera work and color correction, of one animal killing another. Watch the whole thing if you can sit through it - it takes quite awhile for an animal to die while it’s screaming in pain unable to move.
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I agree that attenborough’s documentaries are carefully composed, presumably to be suitable for a British family audience of the 1970s. You seem to uncharitably ascribe intentional malice to this approach rather than it being a product of its time and cultural values. For what it’s worth, I think his documentaries have done much more good (in raising awareness of the natural world and the need to conserve it) rather than harm. But what I don’t understand is that you quote the OP article re climate change and racism, but then go off on a tangent re Attenborough? Sounds like you have an axe to grind.
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This is tangential, but what you wrote about nature reminded me of a biology professor once saying how at least in nature it seems like other animals generally kill in a quick, efficient way where hopefully the prey won’t suffer too much.
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Humans are by far the most vicious animal species, because the sophistication with which they apply torture is off-the-charts. Felines and orcas may consume their prey alive or play with them, but it's not in their capacity to keep their victims alive indefinitely with the express goal of inflicting maximum suffering.
I feel like the best advice I could give to young news audiences is to stop. Just stop. What little value the news may offer to make you a more informed citizen is completely outweighed by all the negatives. Or if you must watch the news, local only.
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Agreed, watching national or world news is useless. If you want to know what is likely to happen instead of what someone wants you to think will happen, we now have prediction markets. Whenever I see a headline I'm curious about, now instead of reading the article I just go to a prediction market and check the probabilities.
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Prediction markets miss all the experts, whether academic or laypeople wonks, who simply don't care to have a financial stake in the decision. I can't imagine how it'd be representative. In any case, the people weighing in are getting their information from somewhere and it's not thin air. How can you understand an issue without knowing motivations/vested interests from all sides, history leading up, etc?
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There's some drawbacks to the news, certainly, but I can't imagine not being aware or interested in what's happening around the world. Surely it's better to follow AP and Reuters and tune the rest.
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Local US television news is coöpted by conservative media empires that routinely insert propaganda pieces into the stations they control.
How else are young people supposed to cultivate their own cynicism though?
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That, and being prepared - either let macro phenomena like recession, AI, etc wallop you in the face or be able to spot it in the distance and adapt.
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The "news" warns people about impending recessions every single day. You can open up the Stocks app right now and there will be multiple conflicting "articles" on the SP500 having reached its top or bottom. Other than news about mortgage rates dropping and trends in payrates for various careers, I see almost nothing actionable in the news for 99% of people.
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The benefit of media literacy is being able to tell apart issues of import vs false alarms. That career ladders could be changing due to AI; food and oil could spike / be unavailable due to Hormuz so stock up ahead of time; financial risks of BNPL, meme stocks, and crypto; and potential recession due to hiring patterns, AI bubble, private credit - those are not actionable?
If you're running OpenClaw, you probably got hacked in the last week (old.reddit.com)
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If someone could forward the SSH port from my VPS to access my instance, I already had bigger problems.
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Guys, OpenClaw is a toy, that's it!
OpenClaw creator here. This was a privilege-escalation bug, but not "any random Telegram/Discord message can instantly own every OpenClaw instance." The root issue was an incomplete fix. The earlier advisory hardened the gateway RPC path for device approvals by passing the caller's scopes into the core approval check. But the `/pair approve` plugin command path still called the same approval function without `callerScopes`, and the core logic failed open when that parameter was missing. So the strongest confirmed exploit path was: a client that ALREADY HAD GATEWAY ACCESS and enough permission to send commands could use `chat.send` with `/pair approve latest` to approve a pending device request asking for broader scopes, including `operator.admin`. In other words: a scope-ceiling bypass from pairing/write-level access to admin. This was not primarily a Telegram-specific or message-provider-specific bug. The bug lived in the shared plugin command handler, so any already-authorized command sender that could reach `/pair approve` could hit it. For Telegram specifically, the default DM policy blocks unknown outsiders before command execution, so this was not "message the bot once and get admin." But an already-authorized Telegram sender could still reach the vulnerable path. The practical risk for this was very low, especially if OpenClaw is used as single-user personal assistant. We're working hard to harden the codebase with folks from Nvidia, ByteDance, Tencent and OpenAI.
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The level of seriousness of your attitude here is not commensurate to the blatant security problem you are creating in the world.
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Is this you? https://x.com/steipete/status/2005451576971043097 > Confession: I ship code I never read. Here's my 2025 workflow. Might want to start reading it I'd say.
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The root issue is that OpenClaw is 500K+ lines of vibe coded bloat that's impossible to reason about or understand. Too much focus on shipping features, not enough attention to stability and security. As the code base grows exponentially, so does the security vulnerability surface.
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This is a vibe based comment. It’s a generic attack with no meat.
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This is a vibe based comment. It’s a generic attack with no meat.
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Aside from "exponentially" being hyperbolic, which part is unsubstantiated?
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Can you speak a little bit more to the stats in the OP? * 135k+ OpenClaw instances are publicly exposed * 63% of those run zero authentication. Meaning the "low privilege required" in the CVE = literally anyone on the internet can request pairing access and start the exploit chain Is this accurate? This is definitely a very different picture then the one you paint
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What does Telegram/Discord have to do with anything? The OP never mentioned either of these software suites. In fact the only mention of Telegram anywhere in the entire thread is you copy-pasting this exact message.
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There used to be a time where people who shipped CVEs took accountability.
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> There used to be a time where people who shipped CVEs took accountability. I see you haven't heard of Microsoft...
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Have you met these AI companies yet?
Honest question: What do people actually USE OpenClaw for? The most common usage seems to be "it reads your emails!", that's the exact opposite of "exciting"...
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I use it for a side project. I just put it on VPS, and then it edits the code and tests it. The nice thing is that I can use it on the go whenever I have spare moment. It is addictive, but way better addiction than social media IMO. The thing where you give it access to all your personal data and whatever I haven't done and wouldn't do.
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Agent based chron jobs mostly that work with other agents. It’s really nice if you want to tell your computer to do something repeatedly or in confluence with many other agents in a very simple way. Like check my email for messages from Nadia and send me a notification and turn on all the lights in my driveway when she gets there without having to actually get into the nuts and bolts of implementing it. It’s actually really powerful and probably what Siri should be.
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I've only been playing with it recently ... I have mine scraping for SF city meetings that I can attend and public comment to advocate for more housing etc ( https://github.com/sgillen/sf-civic-digest ). It also have mine automatically grabs a spot at my gym when spots are released because I always forget. I'm just playing with it, it's been fun! It's all on a VM in the cloud and I assume it could get pwned at any time but the blast radius would be small.
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>It also have mine automatically grabs a spot at my gym when spots are released because I always forget. seems far more efficient/reliable to get codex/claude code to write and set up a bot that does this.
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Am I understanding right that you're leaving AI slop comments on public city meetings? Proudly doing so?
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No? The comment was admittedly ambiguous but if you go to repo it's far clearer: >I use it to give me a weekly digest of what happened in my neighborhood and if there are any public hearings or trash pickups I might want to attend.
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that does not seem like something you need an 'autonomous' agent for.
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What would you propose as an alternative? Anything not relying on an LLM likely means having to write bespoke scripts. That's not really worth the time, especially when you want summaries and not having to skim things yourself. Going from doing it manually on a regular basis to an autonomous agent turns a frequent 5-15 minute task into a 30 second one.
Assuming you're asking in good faith, IMHO the deeper story around OpenClaw is that it's the core piece of a larger pattern. The way I'm seeing folks responsibly use OpenClaw is to install it as a well-regulated governor driving other agents and other tools. It is effectively the big brain orchestrating a larger system. So for instance, you could have an OpenClaw jail where you-the-human talk to OpenClaw via some channel, and then that directs OpenClaw to put lower-level agents to work. In some sense it's a bit like Dwarf Fortress or the old Dungeon Keeper game. You declare what you want to have happen and then the imps run off and do it. [EDIT: I truly down understand sometimes why people downvote things. If you don't like what I'm saying, at least reply with some kind of argument.]
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You're probably being downvoted because you didn't answer the question. The questioner specifically asked what people are using it for and you answered by describing your technical setup. What we want to know is, what are you actually achieving with this tool?
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First words out of your mouth are to accuse OP of not seriously asking the question. Then you write paragraphs saying nothing much at all. You could have simply answered the question in a simple straightforward manner.
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So I neither downvoted nor upvoted you, but I think people may be downvoting, in addition to the fact that they just don't like the thing, based on the fact that you didn't directly answer the question. Specifically, what are you using it for, not what hypothetically it would be used for.
This question gets asked a lot, and then answered a lot, and then asked again.. why fill the cup if the cup has a hole? EDIT: Y'all can downvote me if you want, but parent poster couldn't find clawhub.ai with 45K skills for OpenClaw. "No one uses OpenClaw for anything." https://clawhub.ai/skills?sort=downloads&nonSuspicious=true
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Obviously I already searched the web (not specifically HN I must admit) and there were always incredibly generic non-answers that ultimately say nothing (and they assume you have 3000$ per month or 2000 Mac Minis on your desk (hyperbole)).
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I think you’ve got your answer, then. If nobody can tell you what it’s really used for, it likely doesn’t have any real use cases.
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Incredibly, one of the responses you got already is exactly one of those replies that says nothing. There's a whole bunch of words that don't actually answer the question.
Gonna be honest. I'd rather fight climate change than have people run LLMs unsecured
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Yeah... The bill is already being paid. I wonder how the life quality of my nephew (and other children) of 5 years old will be..
> Digging up the data from example the 135k instances in the open reeks like bullshit, I would suspect several other claims are exaggerated as well. Do you so stringently examine most CVEs? I’ll bet you don’t. Are you a big fan of this project? I’ll bet you are. Do you have any actual data to counter what they said or do you just sort of generally not vibe with it? If so, now would be a great time to break it out while this is still fresh. If not…
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They are pointing out the data provided does not appear to be real. There is no credible link to this 135k number. They do not need to provide a number, as one does not appear to exist.
It does not need access to your full machine. It can literally run in a vps.
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[delayed]
F-15E jet shot down over Iran (theguardian.com)
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Let's hope Iran doesn't follow the "no quarter, no mercy" policy laid out by US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. For the unfamiliar, it means executing survivors and surrendering combatants. Aka war crimes.
Iran has systems they can pull out of a cave and deploy in a couple hours or less. We will never get all their anti air out.
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With the altitudes they've been flying at, shoulder mounted MANPADs are a viable option.
Why didn't Iran use its capability to take down enemy jets for an entire month?
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Iran doesn't have to shoot down a single jet to win this war. Just move military hardware into caves. Sacrifice civilian infrastructure as the only viable bombing target. Wait it out until American domestic pressure from perceived war crimes ends the war. They can't afford to fight a land war or garrison over the entire country. The fact that Israel has leveled much of the 140 square miles of gaza over the past 3 years and still fails to remove Hamas from power. No chance against 636,372 square miles and 93 million people. Worse odds than Vietnam. There isn't even a defined victory condition.
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Wow, "perceived war crimes", what an interesting way of saying war crimes.
the last time US wanted some country to reset back to Stone Age the same thing happened. turn out those aircrafts are not undefeatable at all.
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The only ones I'm seeing act like there should be no expectation of losing aircraft in a war are social media figures who always want to bloviate about something.
Military aviators train for this, being alone behind enemy lines (look up SERE school if you’re curious, one of the craziest training courses outside of special forces) and there is a special force just for aviator recovery behind enemy lines, US AirForce Pararescue. Hopefully they’ll get the aviators back quickly, the last thing our country needs is American hostages making this ridiculous war harder to stop.
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TBH I went through SERE school (aircrew) and I questioned its value, since the training is in eastern Washington/northern Idaho area mountainous woodland environment and all the evasion they showed us relied on that kind of cover and "bushcraft" And you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran are definitely not eastern Washington lol
The other wars were woke. This is not a woke war. I wish I was joking.
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Care to elaborate on this?
That is assuming Iran holds itself to the Geneva conventions, which ... seems like an extremely risky bet to make.
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Maybe Iran is more civilized than the Barbarians attacking them. We have to wait and see if Iran is fighting a woke war.
"Flawless victory" is becoming sillier every day.
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Irrespective of whether you think that the war is a good idea, having a plane shot down after 20+ days of war isn't exactly embarrassing. If anything, it shows the opposite: The extreme capability of the U.S. military.
Build your own Dial-up ISP with a Raspberry Pi (jeffgeerling.com)
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Nice, but slip and plip is more tun
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What I would love to have is a few compact dialup-to-wifi bridges so I could wifi-ize 30 year old hardware. Would be neat to read email with an old POP client, or chat over the original AIM software (perhaps patched to use a server on the LAN)
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I'd be curious if anyone has actually used a setup like this as a fallback for when their fiber goes down. The latency would be brutal, but a few kbps beats no bps
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It would be funny as a project but there's better low speed backup options like a starlink dish on standby mode (500kbps)
Solar and batteries can power the world (nworbmot.org)
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It's important to note that electricity is 21% of the World's energy demand, according to the IEA[1]. This implies that if we could 10x solar, and figure out how to convert some of that to liquid fuels with decent efficiency, we could become sustainable for all energy. [1] https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix
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While I'm pro renewables and the article is technically correct (it could work), I don't think this is optimal. What's optimal is using a mix of mostly (>90-95%) renewable technologies for generating power supplemented by gas (short term) and nuclear (long term). Additionally, there's a lot of stuff that can be done with cables and batteries that we aren't currently doing to over come daily, seasonal, and weather related variation in power output of wind and solar. Put cables north-south to compensate for seasonal drops in solar output. Put them east-west to have solar power in the evenings/early mornings. Off shore and on shore wind can produce a lot of power and the way high pressure and low pressure systems (aka. weather) work, if the wind is not blowing locally that just means it is blowing elsewhere. Having a lot of solar and wind all over the place and cables to move the power around evens out all the peaks and dips. The rest is just using batteries, pumped hydro, and other storage to add enough buffers. That gets you quite far. Another point here is that people think in rigid "must cover everything 100% of the time", which is valuable but we actually do have a lot of flexibility. You can choose when to charge your car (at night, or at noon), when to run your dishwasher, etc. And does a data center need to be at 100% capacity 100% of the time no matter the cost? Flexible load is a thing. And we can use automation to control it, flexible pricing to incentivize when there are surpluses or shortages, etc. This btw. also neuters the whole "baseload" argument. Baseload power is non flexible power that becomes a problem when we have too much of it. Flexible power is power you can turn off when there's too much of it. The reason energy prices are high in a lot of places is that we have too much of really expensive base load that drives the pricing even if the wind and sun shines for free and gets curtailed. That lack of flexibility is a problem. That's how we could get to 90% over the next few decades. The remaining 10% is harder / more expensive. Gas peaker plants make a lot of sense to fill that gap. Replaced by nuclear long term. Nothing against that but it's just stupidly expensive and slow to realize. There's no need to build new gas plants for that; we have plenty already.
1. Solar panels need a huge capital expenditure up front. 2. Wind power works better for farmers and provide a smaller footprint. Drive on I-80 in Iowa on a clear night and you'll see the wind farms blink their red lights in the distance. Farmers can lease their land for wind turbines, and the generation companies take on the regulatory / capital / politcal risks, etc. 3. Farming is more or less free market based, and often farmers can let their grain sit in a silo until the price is optimal for them to sell. But for a given location, there's only one power company that you can use, and typically the power companies don't like people putting solar panels on the grid. In many states (like in Idaho) there's regulatory capture or weird politics preventing people putting solar panels up on their own land. (Again Idaho) As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies.
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In California, PG&E charges you for putting solar on their grid and they'll pay you a penny for your extra electricity.
In the EU €1800 gets you a 10kWh battery (ex install)
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That's on the high side, I would guess. Depending on what brand you want, you can get 10kWh of LFP for under a grand right now in the US.
66F is ridiculously cold to me, and I live in Canada where it can reach -40(F or C) in the winter. I would find that very uncomfortable and elderly people would be shivering constantly and highly susceptible to respiratory illness. I have a modern cold climate air source heat pump which essentially needs to run 24 hours a day to maintain a stable 20C when the outdoor temperatures reach -15C. Below that, the heat pump shuts off and the furnace kicks in to provide emergency heating. My thermostat is a modern one with full time-of-day and day-of-week scheduling for heating and cooling, but it doesn't matter because the heat pump by itself is not able to swing the temperature up (by even half a degree) on its own, so this causes the furnace to kick in every time the schedule calls for a higher temperature, defeating the entire purpose of time-of-day scheduling. I will also add that where I live (Southern Ontario) the sky is overcast 90% of the time during the winter. Solar panels, even somehow free of snow and ice, are going to produce almost nothing on those dark days. Add in the need to keep the panels free of snow and ice (presumably with heating, since nobody is going to be climbing around on their roof in the winter), and you'd likely reach energy net-negative trying to make use of them.
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Modern heat pumps can heat efficiently at -25 degrees Celsius or even lower. Not sure if they are available in Canada, but in Scandinavia (similar climate) they are pretty common. I also agree that 66F (about 19 degrees Celsius) is not comfortable during day time. It is fine for sleeping temperature. During winter homes in heating dominated climates typically have higher indoor temperatures. One advantage of lower inside temperature is that relative humidity stays slightly higher when it is very cold outside.
There's simply not a lot of sunlight to go around during the winter and the battery capacity isn't large enough. Keep in mind we WFH and homeschool so our house is used 24/7 and I think it's a good approximation for OP's goal.
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> the battery capacity isn't large enough This. You have enough generation to keep a mansion toasty, but you don’t have enough storage to last a long winter night.
Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection (joanwestenberg.com)
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What Andreesen is hinting at, of course in a largely surface level manner, is 无心 or no mind. Popular in martial arts and Buddhist philosophy, I think practically what you should take away is that body and mind are fundamentally intertwined. Introspection is a practice of the mind, specifically cognition centered around portions of the brain like the prefrontal cortex. There’s a lot more to who you are, and areas you can hone / cultivate. The HN crowd is probably overweighted on cognition, and could do with spending more time on other areas: https://www.cheltenhamzen.co.uk/writings/gut-instinct
goes both ways. elitism exists on both ends of the spectrum. the academic side is largely the same thing except it's attained from years of schooling through certain pedagogues that tout the one true way and if you haven't been through that wringer, then your understanding doesn't count. true intellectualism, has humility and the everlasting honest pursuit for truth. neither of these extremes have this quality.
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> the academic side is largely the same thing except it's attained from years of schooling through certain pedagogues that tout the one true way and if you haven't been through that wringer, then your understanding doesn't count Personally, every time I approach an unfamiliar domain I’m shocked by its depth and sophistication, seemingly only made possible by hundreds of thousands of hours given by passionate and intelligent people. Where there are parallels of concepts between domains, there’s often also highly specialized language formed around the exceptions that separate the two (e.g. applications of signal processing in different domains). > true intellectualism, has humility and the everlasting honest pursuit for truth True intellectualism recognizes the value of institutions and the models and frameworks of organized thought that they produce. For every Ramanujan, there are millions of Terrence Howards.
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> True intellectualism recognizes the value of institutions and the models and frameworks of organized thought that they produce there's a lot of asterisks I left out of my initial comment. I think there's a lot to elaborate on. but the shortest version I can state is -- STEM fields suffer from it a lot less where there is a lot of measurable "truth." I think people are jumping on these comments protecting academia (which is fine) but the large point is that academia also suffers from the same effects of which those they look down on
Ah if you look at it from the perspective of doing research or other deep intellectual work by 22, I can see your point. Certainly if that is the peak of human mental capability (not something I can argue for or against but I'll take it as true) you ideally would pursue a focused education up to that point that allows you to dive deep into a challenging problem. IMO this is different from wisdom however, and in fact pursuing the variety of experiences and interactions with others that you need to build wisdom will distract from the focus on your research subject.
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>fact pursuing the variety of experiences and interactions with others that you need to build wisdom will distract from the focus on your research subject. I'm not saying go into the cave and toil. You would still do all the stuff you do socially. Just your academic and professional subject matter would be tailored like it is when you reach undergrad and drop certain subjects in favor of your specialty. You still socialize a ton as a researcher in undergrad and grad school and beyond. Research is very much a collaborative effort too, unlike a lot of jobs or academic learning up to that point. That being said I don't think some magic threshold is reached with that when you reach 32 vs 22. Some people famously lack any social skills all their life. Some people are socialable straight out of the womb. This isn't a linear process.
I think you can forgive it as a rhetorical device when speaking to a really broad audience.
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IMO it's best to use fewer thought-terminating cliches in that case, not more. Unless one is simply engaging in a Reddit-style call-and-response exercise. To me, Musk crossed from "maverick" to "problematic" around 2018, when he tried to insert himself into the Thai cave rescue operation and ended up slinging accusations of pedophilia on Twitter. At this point, he has unlocked more specific adjectival achievements, and those are the ones that should be deployed whenever Musk's behavior is the topic. (Which it isn't here.)
I have a tangential theory to this. Being rich != being famous. There are tons of extremely wealthy people out there that keep a very low profile. Sure they might be well known within their circle but ask the average person and they have no clue who that person is. I would say this is the case for like 90-95% of billionaires. Musk, Andreessen, Zuck and others were all in this camp 10 years ago but they all decided that simply being rich wasn't enough, they wanted to be famous. These folks have all the resources and connections to become famous so they can get on all the podcasts, write op-eds, and are guaranteed to get the best reach on social media and thus the most eyeballs on their content and the most attention paid to them. But when you go from making a few media appearances a year to constantly making media appearances in one way or another is that you need more "content" so to speak. Just like a comedian needs more content if they are going to do a 1hr special versus a 10min set at a comedy club. The problem for all these guys is they have a few genuinely insightful ideas mixed in with a ton of cooky and out of touch ideas. Before they could safely stick to the genuinely insightful ideas but as they've made more and more appearances, they have to reach for some of those other ideas. They don't realize that their cooky ideas sound very different than their few insightful ideas. They think all their ideas are insightful based on the feedback they have been getting for the past decade or so.
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> Being rich != being famous. > decided that simply being rich wasn't enough, they wanted to be famous While these are true, the real detail is that these people were never satisfied with being rich -- they wanted to be powerful . And influence is what makes one powerful. Being rich goes a certain distance: once you have f you money, the only thing worth buying to gain more power is fame. They also truly believe they have all the right ideas, and the validation that comes from being platformed for a financial success (often right-place-right-time type luck, but sometimes combined with genuine skill or insight in a relevant field) hardens them to all criticism.
> Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare You and I have vastly different mental models of the world. Or, at least, very different definitions of “luck”. For example, I would probably say that anyone who is rich through a “family business” has quite a bit of “luck” to thank (by my definition), except for the founder. And even then, the founder is usually “lucky” by connections (e.g. generous government contracts). > and people with great wealth don't have that luxury because they would squander it away and won't be able to grow what they have been given If I had to guess, it probably takes about an IQ of 90 to not lose generational wealth, unless there’s an addiction at play. Maybe even less.
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So your contention is that it's easy to run a family business and manage immense wealth? I'm going to take a wild guess, but I would bet you never ran a business. I've never heard this from anyone that ran a business. Sure they give you the whole "I am very fortunate and lucky in my life" but never "yes, it's trivial to run a business" And my other bet would be you had never had any extended interaction with a 90 IQ individual
The fatalistic view that "platform holders have all the cards" and that "programming as a skill has a future valuation that's heading to zero" is a common psychological barrier in labor struggles. Oppressed or subordinate groups often suffer from a "diffuse, magical belief in the invulnerability and power of the oppressor"[0]. However, theories of political and social power argue the exact opposite: the power of any ruling class or corporation is actually quite fragile because it depends entirely on the cooperation, obedience, and skills of its subordinates. If highly skilled individuals like blue-collar technologists and programmers collectively withdraw our human resources, skills, and knowledge, we can severely disrupt or paralyze the systems that enrich the platform holders. 0. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire
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> If highly skilled individuals like blue-collar technologists and programmers collectively withdraw our human resources Individuals cannot convince the Subway app, Raycast or LastPass to defect from Apple or Google's platforms. Using those platforms is an executive decision, and Senior iOS/Android engineers will not voice this minority concern or risk their job to advocate for it. Similarly, Apple and Google's platform monopolies are not designed by individual engineers, but executives that will happily pay to replace you if you feel morally unjust. The only place where this could work is indie development, since that's the scale where developers have authority to sabotage themselves. And sabotage themselves they would - it would be like Fortnite's removal from the App Store except with ~100,000 times less public outcry. You'd go bankrupt before ever inspiring change on the platform. Nothing about the technology changed, indie developers have long warned users to not give their OEM control over what they can install. But users don't really care, businesses told them the App Store is "safer" before they ever got to see the alternative.
Big-Endian Testing with QEMU (hanshq.net)
Is there any benefit in edge cases to using big-endian these days?
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Well, blogging about how it's important can certainly give insight to others about the age of your credentials, just in case repeatedly shouting "Get off my lawn!" didn't suffice.
It might sound outrageous but I guard against this sort of thing. When I write utility code in C++ I generally include various static asserts about basic platform assumptions.
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There's platform and there's platform. I assume a POSIX platform, so I don't need to check for CHAR_BIT. My code won't work on some DSP with 64-bit chars, and I don't care enough to write that check. Many of the tests I did back in the 1990s seem pointless now. Do you have checks for non-IEEE 754 math?
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So do I. I don't find that outrageous at all. Anyone trying to do the port to something unusual would appreciate the warning. Granted, I still work on a fair number of big endian systems even though my daily drivers (ppc64le, Apple silicon) are little.
This is much-appreciated. I’m hardly a Richard Stallman, but finding little incompatibilities after-the-fact is pretty irritating.
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Take a look at https://www.kermitproject.org/ckupdates.html . These quotes come from the last few years: > [fixes] specific to VMS (a.k.a. OpenVMS), > For conformity with DECSYSTEM-20 Kermit ... > running on a real Sun3, compiled with a non-ANSII compiler (Sun cc 1.22) > this is fatal in HP-UX 10 with the bundled compiler > OpenWatcom 1.9 compiler > OS/2 builds > making sure that all functions are declared in both ANSI format and K&R format (so C-Kermit can built on both new and old computers) Oooooh! A clang complaint: 'Clang also complains about perfectly legal compound IF statements and/or complex IF conditions, and wants to have parens and/or brackets galore added for clarity. These statements were written by programmers who understood the rules of precedence of arithmetic and logical operators, and the code has been working correctly for decades.'
> When programming, it is still important to write code that runs correctly on systems with either byte order What you should do instead is write all your code so it is little-endian only, as the only relevant big-endian architecture is s390x, and if someone wants to run your code on s390x, they can afford a support contract.
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> What you should do instead is write all your code so it is little-endian only, as the only relevant big-endian architecture is s390x, and if someone wants to run your code on s390x, they can afford a support contract. Or you can just be a nice person and make your code endian-agnostic. ;-)
Outsourcing endianness pain to your customers is an easy way to teach them about segfaults and silent data corruption. s390x is niche, endian bugs are not. Network protocols and file formats still need a defined byte order, and the first time your code talks to hardware or reads old data, little-endian assumptions leak all over the place. Ignoring portability buys you a pile of vendor-specific hacks later, because your team will meet those 'irrelevant' platforms in appliances, embedded boxes, or somebody else's DB import path long before a sales rep waves a support contract at you.
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Endianness problems should have been solved by compilers, not by programmers. Most existing CPUs, have instructions to load and store memory data of various sizes into registers, while reversing the byte order. So programs that work with big-endian data typically differ from those working with little-endian data just by replacing the load and store instructions. Therefore you should have types like int16, int32, int64, int16_be, int32_be, int64_be, for little-endian integers and big-endian integers and the compiler should generate the appropriate code. At least in the languages with user-defined data types and overloadable operators and functions, like C++, you can define these yourself, when the language does not provide them, instead of using ugly workarounds like htonl and the like, which can be very inefficient if the compiler is not clever enough to optimize them away.
Assuming an 8-bit byte used to be a "vendor specific hack." Assuming twos complement integers used to be a "vendor specific hack." When all the 36-bit machines died, and all the one's complement machines died, we got over it. That's where big endian is now. All the BE architectures are dying or dead. No big endian system will ever be popular again. It's time for big endian to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
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> It's time for big endian to be consigned to the dustbin of history. And, especially what most people call big-endian, which is a bastardized mixed-endian mess of most significant byte is zero, while least significant bit is likewise zero.
The linked to blog post in the OP explains this better IMHO [0]: If the data stream encodes values with byte order B, then the algorithm to decode the value on computer with byte order C should be about B, not about the relationship between B and C. One cannot just ignore the big/little data interchange problem MacOS[1], Java, TCP/IP, Jpeg etc... The point (for me) is not that your code runs on a s390, it is that you abstract your personal local implementation details from the data interchange formats. And unfortunately almost all of the processors are little, and many of the popular and unavoidable externalization are big... [0] https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/04/byte-order-fallacy.html [1] https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu/blob/main/EXTERNAL_HEADERS/mach-o/fat.h#L36
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To cope with data interchange formats, you need a set of big endian data types, e.g. for each kind of signed or unsigned integer with a size of 16 bits or bigger you must have a big endian variant, e.g. identified with a "_be" suffix. Most CPUs (including x86-64) have variants of the load and store instructions that reverse the byte order (e.g. MOVBE in x86-64). The remaining CPUs have byte reversal instructions for registers, so a reversed byte order load or store can be simulated by a sequence of 2 instructions. So the little-endian types and the big-endian data types must be handled identically by a compiler, except that the load and store instructions use different encodings. The structures used in a data-exchange format must be declared with the correct types and that should take care of everything. Any decent programming language must provide means for the user to define such data types, when they are not provided by the base language. The traditional UNIX conversion functions are the wrong way to handle endianness differences. An optimizing compiler must be able to recognize them as special cases in order to be able to optimize them away from the machine code.
It goes without saying that all binary network protocols should document their byte order, and that if you're implementing a protocol documented as big endian you should use ntohl and friends to ensure correctness. However if designing a new network protocol, choosing big endian is insanity. Use little endian, skip the macros, and just add #ifndef LITTLE_ENDIAN #error Or the like to a header somewhere.
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What does it actually cost you to define a macro which is a no-op on little endian architectures and then use it at the point of serialization/deserialization?
Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs (text.blogosphere.app)
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Amazing that the minimal version works in Dillo, except for the categories menu which uses JS (using a form and submit button inside a noscript tag would work as a fallback).
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i can't describe how happy this project makes me feel. Honestly, i don't even know why. I mean, the idea is great but it's nothing "extra", still it just feels right. Like breath of fresh air.
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I would love a old-school search engine that pulls results purely from a well curated list of websites and blogs.
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This is awesome! I'm happy someone made this exist.
TDF ejects its core developers (meeksfamily.uk)
There's more context in another HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47602859 As an outsider it's pretty opaque to me. I think the Document Foundation (handling LibreOffice) wanted to (re)release an online office suite that seems to compete with Collabora, which sells one. But the biggest contributors to LibreOffice are Collabora employees. I thought maybe they feared Collabora taking over the org, but it looks like there are formal legal disputes between the two, I think (see the post from the LibreOffice side https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-about-collabora-blog-post/ ). And of course when legal issues are involved everyone is being very vague. I just hope it doesn't hurt LibreOffice's development too badly.
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I have a feeling that the Open Document Foundation is going to end up being the loser here. Collabora is the entity that can fund development with a commercial offering. It sounds like they employ the core contributors to the project as well. Regardless of who "wins," I'm just here to say that I like OnlyOffice a lot better and switched away from LibreOffice. I like that it just looks more like a modern program and overall feels less clunky.
I do not know enough about this particular drama to have any opinion on the merits of the sides involved. However, I cannot help but notice the parallels with the infancy of TDF and the separation of LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org. In 2010, Oracle demanded the resignation of every TDF member from the OOo Community Council that was nominally its governance board; this constituted the removal of every community member (ie, non Oracle employee) from the council [1]; I don't know the full details of what happened after the meeting [2], but it seems like the TDF members refused to resign and that they were removed. The justification was quite similar to the justification here [3]: that the TDF members had a conflict of interest by virtue of being TDF members, and that they could continue to be involved if they left TDF. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/10/oracle-wants-libreoffice-members-to-leave-ooo-council.ars [2]: https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council_Log_20101014 [3]: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-about-collabora-blog-post/
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Full circle indeed, nice historical capsule thanks
This is anecdotal at best, but it does play into the tired old technical vs non-technical simplification. The fact that the two entities have now become direct competitors is a better explanation grounded in facts
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Your explanation is also an oversimplification that leaves out a lot of key details. TDF is ran by a board. The board is supposed to contain 10 people, it currently has 7. This board is expected to be elected by members on a regular schedule. The elections are late, because the board has twice delayed the elections. Instead of holding elections to fill out the board, the rump board chose to change the bylaws, through a legally questionable process (properly, they would have to hold a vote of trustees, but chose not to), to allow them to exclude people from voting in the elections. Then they use the new bylaws to exclude many of their political opponents, on very flimsy grounds⁰. You don't need to even consider which side of this conflict is technical or non-technical to see that there is something rotten here. 0: And yes, the grounds are very flimsy indeed. Excluding people in case of active litigation sounds sensible, until you consider that the litigation was started by the TDF board, and is frivolous. Collabra is using the trademarks under valid license.
Fix the title. No one seems to recognize "TDF" (The Document Foundation) despite their daily dramatics, myself included.
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In France, TDF is a company that operates big TV and FM radio antennas, including on the Eiffel Tower and on many mountain-top.
Critics say EU risks ceding control of its tech laws under U.S. pressure (politico.eu)
So rob American businesses blind, but say you didn’t, but if you did, they had it coming anyway because of an unsubstantiated flimsy moral justification that disregards the purchasing choices of the EU citizenry, businesses and governments?
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You are free to not trade with EU citizens then. Nobody forces you to accept their money.
That's cool, but on a practical level, can I generate whatever the APK equivalent for iOS is and just give it to my friends with iPhones?
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Yes. They will have to reload the app every 7 days, but yes.
Isn't that how QMV works?
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The current system is new legislation has to be drafted by the Commission, which is the indirectly elected executive branch. That allows what would otherwise be popular proposals to never even be introduced. Whereas if you have legislation introduced by the directly elected body, popular proposals at least get a public debate and people get to see what they are and who is blocking them, but you still ultimately want the check on power grabs and populist nonsense before it actually gets enacted.
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