News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

1980phipsi

Re:Jailbreaking the Switch 2 on Thursday October 22, 2026 @09:35AM (#50195123)
What about putting Steam on your Switch 2?
Walter has been working on adding ARM64 support to DMD. I think he recently got Hello World running.
Re:Prompting Claude Opus 5.5 on Monday September 28, 2026 @06:58AM (#49876114)
The people who are adopting LLMs later are also slower to adopt new technology in general. The samples of people who adopt early and adopt late have different characteristics.
Re:The darker side of being a doctor on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @08:23AM (#49815040)
"Are you sure you can find that many more doctors? That they'll be any good? Speaking from Romania: ..."

The prior post was specifically talking about the US. (I assure you, arrogant dismissive doctors are also a thing in the US)

In the US, there are a number of things that artificially increase the barriers to becoming a doctor.

1) You typically need a four year college degree to apply to medical school

2) Medical schools are accredited by the AMA, which is controlled by doctors. The AMA makes it very difficult to start a new MD-granting medical school.

3) Medical school in the US is very competitive to get in. They are likely turning away a lot of people who could complete the degree.

4) Since 1997, the federal government has a fixed number of Medicare (Medicare is a federal health insurance program for people over 65) supported residency positions. That number was basically flat for 25 years. We lost about 20% per capita of doctors being trained with support from this program. The caveat to this is that the total number of residents per capita has increased over time, particularly the past 15 years or so. My understanding is that they are less likely to be fully funded, so they spend more money getting trained, and then have higher students loans (on average graduating with debt above 200k going back to the late 2000s) that they need to pay off, so they charge more.

And you can add to this that it can be very difficult to be a doctor in another country and come to the US to practice here.

How much time do the doctors spend to diagnose versus o1?
And at the same time the car companies want to move away from Apple CarPlay, which for any of its fault is a substantially better UI than we can expect the legacy carmakers to produce.
The deterioration in the Windows and Office experience is astounding.
Re:Fundamental Theorem of Calculus on Thursday April 23, 2026 @08:14AM (#47874834)
I took calculus in high school and college, and I don't think any of my instructors explained the intuition as well. So sleep-deprived or not, it's a great one!
Re:Dip 1053 – A Tale of Tuples on Friday April 17, 2026 @02:16PM (#47808909)
A write-up on the D language blog on the recently accepted DIP that enhances tuple unpacking.
Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did on Thursday March 12, 2026 @11:10AM (#47351794)
You can deposit checks via the app pretty easily.
Re:Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @10:40AM (#47249092)
I attach a copy of the file and then provide a network location for where it is located. Makes it easy for people to just open up a simple copy to look at it and they know where to go to access the original.
Re:I Pitched a Roller Coaster to Disneyland at Age 10 in 1978 on Tuesday February 24, 2026 @11:59AM (#47139456)
It's packaging an existing product differently than a fully new product. Would still require either new machines or adapting existing machines for it.
My thinking is that the company creating the game would train the AI in advance (like a generative adversarial network), not that any kind of training would happen on the users' computer. They could periodically send updates or improvements (maybe by having it play in multiplayer or something).
I would love to see someone use modern machine learning techniques to make a kick ass Civ AI.
Re:Child prodigies rarely become elite performers on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @11:57PM (#46895832)
This sounds like Berkson’s paradox.
Re:Amazon to Shut Down All Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh Stores on Tuesday January 27, 2026 @11:59AM (#46782724)
The lack of people in them was the thing about going to one that always felt weird to me.
I was able to install the D language compiler DMD by providing a .deb file.

https://chatgpt.com/share/69781bb5-cf90-800c-8549-c845259c33...

At the end of the day, the goal is to make a product that people find useful. How that ends up happening is almost completely irrelevant to the people actually using the product.
Re:A letter to those who fired tech writers because of AI on Thursday January 15, 2026 @10:41AM (#46634102)
How is this for an ordering:

Good human written docs > AI written docs > no docs > bad human written docs

Re:What a year of solar and batteries saved us in 2025 on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @12:39PM (#46604566)
Any idea why swapping didn't pan out for Tesla? My understanding is they are doing that in China.
> Anyone familiar with basic economics is pulling their hair out reading this, because there's one extremely obvious way to lower the price of building new housing: Reducing or eliminating tariffs on construction equipment and materials and ensuring a robust supply of low-cost labor.

And just in general reducing the restrictions on building in places with high rent to income ratios.

Re:State of the Fin 2026-01-06 – Jellyfin on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @12:52PM (#46515822)
Yeah, I don't mind paying for something, but they broke a bunch of stuff last year and it's still not fixed. That's what annoys me about plex.
> Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games but charging per hour. Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA.

MMORPGs have had monthly subscription fees for a long time.

For a lot of games if they charged by the hour would probably see less revenue...people buy tons of games and then barely ever play them.

Re:GOG Patrons- Join gamers keeping classics alive on Monday January 05, 2026 @12:03PM (#46501415)
I think it's reasonable to argue something like, "some IP protection is good, but too much is bad, and we probably have too much right now." It would be impossible to calibrate the laws so that the amount of IP protection is socially optimal, but we can look at the areas where the protection is too much and start there.
Re:Imagine 130M Washing Machines on Monday January 05, 2026 @10:47AM (#46500172)
>> A few billionaires might have additional vacation homes, but they are not going to consume a million homes, much less 10 million.

> Sumner is somehow unfamiliar with the concept of a landlord or vacant property investment.

I'm sure he is not unfamiliar with either...

Not sure what landlords have to do with anything since washing machines are often included as part of a rental (or the apartment doesn't have a washing machine, but what does that have to do with landlords?).

And vacant property investment is a small fraction of total property ownership in the US. It's more common that people have a vacation home and rent it out part of the year.

>> progressive consumption taxes

> When someone proposes one, let me know.

They have been proposed...many times. In fact, the US's system has elements of a progressive consumption tax already since people can put retirement savings in IRAs/401ks. What would make it a more complete progressive consumption tax would be to either raise the limits on contributions to these retirement accounts (and remove income limits), and also introduce accounts like these that are meant as more universal savings vehicles. This is preferred (in my view at least) to just cutting dividend and capital gains rates to 0% since that would benefit existing rich people.

Re:Weighting an average to minimize variance on Thursday November 27, 2025 @12:16PM (#46071246)
Let w be the vector of weights and S be the comformable matrix of covariances. The portfolio variance is given by w’Sw. So just minimize that with whatever constraints you want. If you just asssume weights sum to one, it is a classic quadratic optimization with linear equality constraints. Well known solutions.
> It is also important to note that, until recently, the GenAI industry’s focus has largely been on training workloads. In training workloads, CUDA is very important, but when it comes to inference, even reasoning inference, CUDA is not that important, so the chances of expanding the TPU footprint in inference are much higher than those in training (although TPUs do really well in training as well – Gemini 3 the prime example).

Does anyone have a sense of why CUDA is more important for training than inference?

Aka vertical integration.
Re:Weighting an average to minimize variance on Saturday November 15, 2025 @01:08PM (#45939319)
It’s much clearer when you write these problems in terms of matrix math. The minimum variance portfolio is very important in finance.

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