News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

2sk21

I was listening to a Verge podcast in which Nilay Patel remarked that of the AI companies started pushing for universal healthcare, AI would become a lot more popular. But no signs of this.
Re:How to Build Wealth as a Career Person on Sunday October 11, 2026 @03:41PM (#50047025)
I took the most boring approach: twenty five years of steady index fund investing allowed me to retire early.
Re:What should we tell our students? on Friday October 09, 2026 @04:47AM (#50017809)
Since AI abundance is taken for granted, why not just just offer every single person in the world full health insurance?
I also love the concept of Maths in Anathem. One of my all time favorite books!
I'm a retired AI researcher and I still enjoy programming. However, I don't use any however assistance as I still want the thrill of learning new things. Unfortunately, it appears that the only way for most developers to enjoy similar activities is to be retired with enough money
Re:GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @02:30PM (#49996896)
How would a user know whether a generated visualization to illustrate some process is accurate or not?
Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @05:29AM (#49990306)
Unless humans have gone through the proofs line by line and verified them, this all remains unproven.
Re:Dots: Always-on agents on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @10:27AM (#49909491)
The Cyrano de Bergerac story needs to get updated for the agent era :-)
Re:Dots: Always-on agents on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @10:15AM (#49909324)
The harness should be your own for sure but the model is the problem. Even if the model is open weight, I have no idea whether it is acting in my interest.
Re:Dots: Always-on agents on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @10:12AM (#49909276)
yeah - the dissonance is strong here
Re:I didn't sign the Fields medallists' letter on Friday September 18, 2026 @10:01AM (#49754551)
Yes - but then we may well wind up with a hoard of hungry AI labs that are just waiting for interesting problems to show up so that they can devour it before any human mathematician gets a chance to solve it.
Re:A Beginning for Mathematics on Monday September 14, 2026 @07:08PM (#49705510)
> Now comes AI and it looks like the only bottleneck is people's motivation.

Who pays the salary of the mathematicians and the cost of accessing the AI?

Re:AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems on Saturday September 05, 2026 @09:57AM (#49576554)
Who is going to teach programmers to wield AI competently?
Re:AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems on Saturday September 05, 2026 @09:29AM (#49576327)
Much the same here - I have gone back to basics and am studying a lot more than I ever did.
Re:The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @09:44AM (#49536133)
You aren't worried that these binaries may have unfixed vulnerabilities?
Re:The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @09:10AM (#49535662)
You aren't worried about the provenance of the installed apps?
Sounds like cargo cult approach to engineering management (to use Feynman's metaphor). It's interesting to see that even Meta is subject to this. When I worked at IBM (round about 2014), management decided to adopt the Spotify organizational system with squads, tribes and guilds - but nothing really changed. We still wrote code much the same way and delivered at the same rate. Except with more organizational overhead.
Exactly! I posted much the same comment in another thread and there were lots of huffy complaints that amounted to "you're prompting it wrong"
Thats fine but then Fable 5 should have requested this information instead of blundering along. So why didn't it? An expert human asked to do the same task would have surely asked for the additional data.
Re:Who's Afraid of Chinese Models? on Tuesday July 21, 2026 @05:15AM (#48989894)
Yeah - we also don't know if the models from OpenAI and anthropic are back-doored either.
This seems more like a marketing move though following the old dictum that all publicity is good publicity.
Re:Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @04:35PM (#48375904)
You can turn off the "smart" features in the settings page for gmail. I did this and find it to be much more usable!
Re:Mirage Reasoning: The Illusion of Visual Understanding on Tuesday March 31, 2026 @06:53PM (#47594544)
This is just insane! Why hasn't this bubbled up to the top?
Re:How AI Impacts Skill Formation on Friday January 30, 2026 @05:11AM (#46822608)
You can, most certainly, drive a car without understanding how it works. A pilot of an aircraft on the other hand needs a fairly detailed understanding of the subsystems in order to effectively fly it.

I think being a programmer is closer to being an aircraft pilot than a car driver.

Re:Prism on Thursday January 29, 2026 @06:18PM (#46818280)
Indeed - there is a lot of fake "productivity" going on with these swarms of agents
I was reminded of this classic short story by Isaac Asimov, The feeling of Power: https://archive.org/details/1958-02_IF/page/4/mode/2up
I feel grateful that I retired a few years ago and no longer have to make a living being a developer.
Re:Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI" on Thursday January 22, 2026 @08:23AM (#46718924)
This reminds me of the early 1980s, when home PCs were still very new, the main use cases that vendors used to promote were managing household accounts and recipes. These use cases were extremely unimpressive for most ordinary people. It took a long time for PCs to become ubiquitous in homes - until gaming and the web became common.
Re:Karpathy on Programming on Monday December 29, 2025 @04:20PM (#46425845)
IDEs used to be extremely expensive back in the 1990s. IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio and IBM's Visual age for Java were quite expensive subscription as I recall. subsequently, open source IDEs like Eclipse and VisualStudio seem to have become the norm.
The next generation of SEO - this article is both hilarious and disturbing

Older »