News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

DenisM

Re:Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages on Sunday November 01, 2026 @05:04PM (#50330404)
I previously used a portable propane generator for a 30amp inlet to transfer switch. In my test runs it didn’t go that high.

Today I could plug in a car that gives off 20amp into the same inlet, it would limit how much load it can carry, but I could stay below 2.4 kw if needed. Why wouldn’t that work?

Re:Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages on Sunday November 01, 2026 @05:00PM (#50330373)
Makes sense. My mind went into a less safe direction, I’m glad I asked before following it.
I can supply anecdotal evidence - of all the people I stay in touch with only one person occasionally opens IDE to write code. This transcends from interactive client apps through novel database engines.

AI is undergoing cosmic inflation, we get further apart faster.

Re:Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages on Sunday November 01, 2026 @03:12PM (#50329274)
Be sure to alert the fire department ahead of time.
Re:Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages on Sunday November 01, 2026 @03:05PM (#50329209)
Is that the transfer switch just for the furnace or the whole house? I was staring at my furnace yesterday, trying to figure out what to do if power stops and temperature drops below freezing. Doing the whole house transfer switch is too much, esp given o don’t have a 30amp power source, but it never occurred to me to do just the furnace.
Re:Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages on Sunday November 01, 2026 @03:01PM (#50329167)
It solves my problem just fine - power critical loads for a few days by spending $100 upfront fir the cable and 5 minutes to manually switch the load. It’s a difference between moving to a hotel for indefinite time and staying put.

Sure you can set a loftier goal and spend tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours solving it. Most people won’t though.

Re:Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:26PM (#50328230)
It’s unfortunate and inconvenient. However A transfer switch requires <3 minutes to engage. If a car was able to supply 30-50 amp via compatible plug it would work reasonably well even absent unified v2h standard.

Most recent teslas support 20amp at 120v output via official $100 cable adapter. Some other cars support about 20amps too, eg RivianR2. While it falls short of desirable amperage the car manufactures can bridge the gap if they wanted to. Even now I can run the bare minimum of workloads - a full size fridge, a small AC or Microwave, LED lights, and phone chargers.

Garbage collected? Couldn’t tell from the docs.
Re:Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages on Sunday November 01, 2026 @10:59AM (#50326837)
> The only way I can see to do this today is with Tesla Powershare + Cybertruck, which says "If the system includes a UL 1741-listed solar system

Since this was posted Tesla rolled out PowerShare to recent ModelY and some other cars. Not sure about solar recharge though. Where I live storms come in winter and I have natgas so most of the power will go to fridges and electronics, which will hopefully last long enough.

> This is shaping up to be a winner-take-all industry

How so? So far we have a few models of nearly the same capabilities and a slew of models 6-12 months behind.

Re:OpenAI raises less than half of $30B target on Saturday October 31, 2026 @01:22PM (#50318071)
lack of appetite, when broadly visible, removes future speculators from the new investment pool, and starts bleeding old speculators. This will create a downward pressure. As the dynamic plays out the second rung of speculators will bleed out too.

Thats how bubbles burst - as each tranche of speculators bails the next tranche gets spooked through the pricing signals.

Reading tea leaves, the market believes that whomever is first to AGI will reap all the benefits, leaving nothing to the runners-up. In this view, even a tiny edge in model quality is decisive.
Re:The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @04:29PM (#50265328)
> until reaching AGI, whatever that word means

Maybe that’s exactly it - AGI is ability to plan well?

Re:The State of Context Engineering on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @11:00AM (#50260400)
Yes, and also a diversity of models. I had argon model catch issues that opus missed.
Re:The State of Context Engineering on Sunday October 25, 2026 @09:02PM (#50237697)
I like the overall idea of deliberate forgetting. And I found checkpointing into artifacts (code, design, intent) to start with fresh context to work well for that purpose.

Interestingly, the artifacts include not just code but alao retroactive design and retroactive “execution plan”. I feed them to another agent to validate the approach and resume work with fresh context and update mission statement.

Unexpectedly, design doc and an execution plan are now outcomes of coding process, not inputs to it. I’m not sure how to think about this.

We have proof they have no moral qualms or other guardrails, and they have incentive. We also have a decent idea how much it costs to connect to ambient WiFi or cell/5gnetworks. It’s a matter of time, which may or may not be already in the past.
Delegate to ChatGPT.

Like, lower the volume (“turn to tge side”) and say, hey Richard, can you compute 123^45 for me? Or “can you check flights”?

Re:OpenAI: Securing our frontier model training environment on Friday October 23, 2026 @10:51PM (#50217979)
Operating air gapped networks is probably a new area of expertise for most people. It’s not hard to unplug cables, but people need access, updates need to be installed, results need to be extracted.

Also threat actors being on the inside breaking out is a bit new.

Thank you for sharing. Would love to hear more!
AI is the dark energy of engineering - it pushes us further apart, faster. Some of us get pushed towards slop, others towards formal spec validation, and as time goes it will be harder and harder to see each other.

A while back a knowledgeable man was a philosopher, and they could all easily talk to each other and understand. As time went we split up - we have philosophy doctors in various fields who have very little to talk about.

This happened again when the term “engineer” fractured (even before software engineering). Software engineering itself fractured, too.

And it’s happening again now.

Re:AI compute is the new oil–and needs a new market on Thursday October 22, 2026 @11:44PM (#50204274)
This caught my eye:

> Architect Financial Technologies, founded in 2023, offers futures in compute linked to the value of chips in America. The firm has also recently launched a platform where model-makers bid to provide “inference”—the useful output produced by an AI model in response to a prompt—rather than the underlying compute capacity.

I think the idea of selling inference is solid, but I’m not convinced Wall Street is going to be doing that. Superscalers are better positioned.

Inference will likely be priced by evals, specific for each workload.

Re:Using LLM for confidence scoring is a bad idea on Thursday October 22, 2026 @12:14PM (#50197397)
Can you provide an example f how you did that? Very promising!
Re:Why do we have so many meetings? on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:55PM (#50169269)
How you asked them why?

It could be more productive than being angry. Or not, but worth a try.

Re:The End of Rationing on Monday October 19, 2026 @10:31PM (#50160672)
I imagine this new awareness could create a lot of new jobs, given how much software out there should be in the same state.

I’m not sure if the job title tho. Software restoration?

Current open weight models are 6 months behind on cyber offensive capabilities. We can use that as a proxy on other hazardous capabilities. Thats how much time we have until the genie is out of the bottle.

The bill may create an incentive for Chinese labs to nerf their open weight models before release. If that works we get another 6 months until unnerfed models leak to public.

Thats what the bill gives us - a few months months to come up with the next bandaid.

The bill mandates private model review, akin to financial audit, and sets a threshold on predicted failure blast radius to trigger government review , which may result into court blocking model release.

What we have now is that for government to act the model has to cause enough damage to cause Congress to pass a new law to try to stop the model after it’s been already released.

Re:Pele – Mermaid diagrams as themeable SVG on Saturday October 17, 2026 @07:57PM (#50136382)
The layout quality is very impressive!

Have you given much thought to diffing diagrams? The source can be version controlled and a source diff can be seen, but a visual diff would be amazing and easily sway me from writing prose to writing diagrams.

Re:Pattern Matching Beats Narrative Reasoning on Saturday October 17, 2026 @07:01PM (#50135967)
It’s really hard to discuss non-narrative reasoning because as soon as you start it becomes narrative. I’m rather flummoxed as to what to do about it. Some headway can be made with spatial reasoning, but not much beyond that. And even then.
Re:OpenAI discloses four more rogue incidents on Saturday October 17, 2026 @03:18PM (#50134160)
You’re right that punishing unintentional or well-intentional hackers will actually empower ill-intentional hackers.

However 99% of businesses will not be able to effectively handle security reports in reasonable time. They did not need that level of competence or funding until now, and therefore they did not acquire it. Most companies that use locks don’t employ locksmiths.

Looking another way - the entire economy got suddenly hit with entire pile of technical/ security debt it has accumulated over 50 years, and only has one year to deal with it. No amount of diagnostic will fix this, this is economically infeasible.

One thing that is feasible is a government bailout for technical debt. All the engineers that were freed up from AI-induced restructuring should be employed to pay down technical debt across the entire economy. Simply updating all software to use latest libraries is a great start. Using AI to diagnose, repair, re-deploy all old software. Using AI to rewrite all old software that cannot be recompiled.

Re:OpenAI discloses four more rogue incidents on Saturday October 17, 2026 @03:05PM (#50134026)
If it does not exist today it will tomorrow.

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