FrameworkFred

I had a fujitsu lifebook that was 10 years old when I bought it and it lasted another 8 or so after that. I'd maxxed out the ram to 8GB, replaced the missing stylus and bought a new battery. It had a fantastic display that was brighter and had a wider viewing angle than the system76 gazelle I replaced it with. And the swivel hinge connector was soo solid.

I now have a framework 13 that I'd rate slightly higher than that fujitsu (it's lighter and the changeable ports thing is a truly wonderful idea), but it's a bit of a toss-up.

I wonder if the google ai team has to do some RF to scrub the whole "Don't be evil" thing from its all-written-human-knowledge weights before they can get it to attack.

When I mention a preference for brevity in a comment offhand and it snowballs into a rule 8 sessions down the road in a PR review that requests the removal of 90% of a colleague's docstrings.

I can't imagine all the "push back" on the "load bearing" Code of Conduct from their corporate foundation documents.

I've been in the room when an org who tried to convince law enforcement to go after a human for similar things. It's not easy. Probably won't happen. So, you know, felony "lite".

That was a fun read. I was a draftsman as a teenager in the late 80s and I did my best to make my handwriting look like those letters. Then, as a CAD operator, I put that font on everything I produced. It never once occurred to me that it looked like that because it was designed to be legibly engraved.

TIL I can just view markdown in okular directly instead of using a script that converts markdown to html, then converts html to pdf, then opens that pdf in okular.

that is really cool. well done!

actually, that sounds like a pretty good feedback mechanism, especially if you come up with a way to get lat/long and/or an accurate timestamp.

I derailed after this sentence. I searched for more uses of "rats" in the article, then looked in the HN comments to see if it was a bit of jargon that I was unaware of. I read "Lessons from the art of juggling" years ago, but despite the primer, I couldn't get past the unanswerable question of whether I was, in fact, a "rat".

so far, I've used it to kill a bunch of time trying to get it to respond to "Hi @Kirk" in a private Slack channel.

...and to laugh a little every time it calls me "commander" or asks "What's the next mission?" or (and this is the best one) it uses the catchphrase I gave it which is "it's probably fine" (and it uses it entirely appropriately...I think there must have been a lot of sarcasm in qwen 3.5's training data)

and I've treated it like it's already been compromised the whole time.

It would make sense that the holes were a convenient way of thinking and speaking about large quantities of goods such that tribes of people might want to exchange. It would be a very visual way of comparing dissimilar goods, like "1 hole has 50 alpaca skins and I need 200 for the shelter I'm planning to build, so I need 4" and "1 hole has 8 baskets of dried fish which can last 3 families thru the winter, so I need 3 for the nine families on the farm", etc.

And I bet they paid a bit of rent for the privilege. Pretty cool.

This all makes a lot of sense. It is worth pointing out that AI isn't terrible at cleaning up tech debt. I've absolutely used it cleanup code sprawl and to correct design missteps. It gets a lot of well-deserved blame for generating way too much code that's a lot more complicated than it needs to be, but probably not enough credit for making a lot of the cleanup effort around that sort of code a lot more tractable.

I've been using the "Zim desktop wiki" like this for years. I do recommend it as well...super handy to be able to go looking for my thoughts or snippets from 6 months ago. I can also use git to sync between my desktop and laptop because it's all text.

I agree with this soo much.

In a very real way, a codebase is a conversation among developers. There's every chance the next guy will be less familiar with the code than you, who just did a deep dive and arrived at some critical, poorly documented line of code. There's an even better chance that person will be you, 6 months from now.

Use opportunities to communicate.

the chain link tech in Seveneves was wild.

as a nearly perfectly uninformed occasional consumer of space-related articles, I can say it makes a lot of sense (to me) why we'd use something like that to move things around the solar system.

To all the commenters who asked if it's worth it? IMO it's super worth it if you have more than one wifi access point and it gets more and more worth it as your network gets more complicated.

I upgraded to homogenous ubiquiti/unifi when I set up a point to multi-point on my farm because I thought it would make that part easier. Surprisingly, those links aren't really baked in to the rest of it, but the router and wifi antennas that I've installed around those links "just work" with a private, protected, and guest network.

I used to have to update two different routers with the same SSID, username and password to make "hopping" from one to the next "seamless" and, now that I've got 8 wifi antennas in a mesh with a single UI to configure them all, I can't even imagine how I'd do it with the hodge-podge of gear I used to work with.

And I'm probably going to buy a travel router, but I'm wondering, if I use it connect to the hotel wifi, will I be able to use the thing as a wifi hotspot as well or do I have to use an ethernet point because the wifi is "taken"?

same :(

Same. I once registered bithole.com because I wanted a better email address then what I had at yahoo.com...and I realized my mistake as I was typing it on my resume. This feels like a similar mistake.

This reminds me of Auggie's photo album in Smoke..."Sometimes the different ones become the same ones and the same ones disappear."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGV_h36uZ5E

I agree with some of the article. I agree that code is a liability that's distinct from the asset that the code is part of. It's like tires on a car, they're liability-like whereas the car can be thought of as an asset.

But AI can do some architecting. It's just not really the sort of thing where an unskilled person with a highly proficient LLM is going to be producing a distributed system that does anything useful.

It seems to me that the net effect of AI will be to increase the output of developers without increasing the cost per developer. Effectively, this will make software development cheaper. I suppose it's possible that there is some sort of peak demand for software that will require less developers over time to meet, but, generally, when something becomes cheaper, the demand for that thing will tend to increase.

I think the rumors of our demise are overblown.

I have to admit, I'm not up to speed on anything he's been up to lately, but I absolutely read and enjoyed Dilbert way back when. I'm sorry to hear he's not long for the world.

Every time I see someone kitted out in VR gear, I think about his prediction that the Star Trek holodeck will be humanity's last invention and I'm very glad they don't have a button that can beam the next person waiting for their turn into a concrete wall.

I'm actually super-interested to see the next post.

TBH, if you would've asked me yesterday if I'm the sort of person who might get sucked in by a cliffhanger story about a numpy replacement, I'm pretty sure I would've been an emphatic no.

But I have, in fact, just tried random things in numpy until something worked...so, you know...tell me more...

I love this line in the post: "The next time you use something that works so well you barely notice it, remember that somewhere, a designer solved a problem so thoroughly that both the problem and its solution became invisible."

There a things that I immediately replace when they break or get lost: bolt cutters, dremel, leatherman. There's software like IDEs, Zim, Inkscape.

It's very much like losing a limb when any of it is unavailable and it's absolutely true that there are folks out there who did their job so well as to make them indispensable.

Great post.

That's a long read, but it is an awkward thing tbh.

My take on it is that, if you're going to write a decorator, make sure you test it thoroughly and be sure to cover the ways that it will actually be used.

To properly handle a decorator that needed to be called both with and without arguments, I ended up writing a function decorator that returned a wrapped function when there were no parameters provided for the decorator (*args param to the decorator function undefined) and, otherwise, returned an instance of a class that defined __call__ and __init__ methods.

I'm still a bit surprised that I had to do it that way, but that's how it shook out.

I use solaar with a mx master 3s and it's great (thumbscrolling works as it should) except the mouse battery level indicator is uncalibrated...20% at the highest, then it's quickly at 5% where it stays for-e-ver.

I gas-up my car when my tank is below 1/4, so it's a little disconcerting to have a red battery indicator with an exclamation point on it...not enough to actually want to use it with the cable plugged in, but still...

LOL, that would be the sound of freedom from proper precautions :)

How's that work? My employer doesn't offer health insurance, just reimbursement and every plan on the marketplace is an HMO.

I'll admit that I'm not well versed in the different shades of suspend...I had to look up S3 and it definitely eats more battery than I'd like when it's suspended. With that said, I've only ever had two laptops that would actually wake up after a suspend and one of those only did that after it was resurrected after a 5 year hiatus. So my expectations were low enough that I was thrilled that it worked at all. I look forward to the fix in the firmware (which seems to update via standard apt upgrade efforts...also pretty cool). I haven't hit any problems with wifi and bluetooth...both work well for me.

It looks like the author has hit some pretty serious snags along the way and is a lot more understanding than I might be under similar circumstances.

My experience, having just bought a framework 13 with AMD internals a couple of months ago (and letting them build it for me), has been a purely flawless one with ubuntu 24.04. Everything just works and I love being able to swap the ports and the ethernet adapter as needed. The fan rarely makes a sound at all and it's blazing fast compared to the similarly spec'd system 76 darter pro it replaced (though it was a few years old). Battery life is "fine" but not amazing but charging is pretty quick, so it's still a bit of an improvement over the darter.

I disagree that we're greatly off-target.

We can certainly build a grenade-dropper that sometimes picks the wrong target and gets intercepted by hostile actors. We have LLMs that aren't doing some things that we might task a single human brain with.

It's really a matter of product, market, fit.

When our army of bug-smart drones wipes out civilians and heritage sites, does something cruel or otherwise distasteful, and/or requires a deployment of a million drones to get the job done, folks realize they actually wanted something with human-level capabilities...like remote-controlled drones.

When we build an AI chat bot that's often wrong and can't do math all that well, folks complain that they didn't really want any old brain, they want something better.

I'm not sure I buy everything Kurzweil's selling TBH, but I don't think this article is making a great argument.

While I can get behind a lot of points in this post like "what can we do well in 60 days?" and "some problems aren't important," I shudder a little when I see that headline, when I note that the company provides SSO for enterprises, and when I then wonder about their test and QA pipeline.