News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

FridgeSeal

Re:Type Server Protocol on Monday October 26, 2026 @08:10PM (#50253032)
The issue is that it just becomes a “bad at everything” tarpit.

- performance is awful.

- gradual typing is sort of ok, but relies too much on runtime behaviour.

- async support is a bit all over the place.

- uv has made the packaging experience sort of liveable, but collectively it’s still very limited: feature support, conditional dependencies, rudimentary tree shaking, cargo-style workspaces, etc.

In an era where your options of tech stack are freer than ever, unless you explicitly need PyTorch, I’m not really sure why you’d choose Python over literally everything else.

Re:JetBrains Thinkrail on Sunday October 25, 2026 @04:34PM (#50235796)
The problem is that it’s market or care and respect. If you can’t even be bothered to while a simple readme communication your intentions, what else can’t you be bothered doing properly?

It’s a marker that the project is likely to be low-effort slop, which may or may not just be abandoned at the deep of a hat.

I think the commenter above is making the point that this should be defence-in-depth.

Yes, of course use good encryption and auth{n,z}, but _also_ layer on restrictions at the network layer to stop general traffic from even getting there.

Re:CERN and Mistral join forces to accelerate AI for science on Monday October 19, 2026 @06:00PM (#50158669)
One of us! One of us!

Join us, in the pit of despair!

Re:Unikernels were hard. key word: were on Sunday October 11, 2026 @07:08AM (#50041910)
If your app, is the only one running, and the whole kernel is a library, you can simply have said library instrumented with as much observability as you need, directly and you now no longer need to worry about which processes are using cpu and IO because…it’s all you.
Re:Unikernels were hard. key word: were on Sunday October 11, 2026 @07:05AM (#50041887)
Let me know when your local OS does multi-machine scheduling across heterogeneous hardware and application constraints, networking, observability, service accounts and a finer grained permissions system, in a way that’s far less confusing and piecemeal.

Also, this argument only works if you just broaden the definition of “OS” to “anything that runs that isn’t your apps”.

That was a fun read, but not the one I was thinking of. Eventually found it, it’s “The Lucky Dinosaur”:

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/lucky-dinosaur

That wasn’t it alas, but I did manage to find it, it’s “The Lucky Dinosaur”:

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/lucky-dinosaur

Re:REA Reverse – Engineer Anything on Saturday October 10, 2026 @06:11AM (#50031360)
“Congratulations, your small hobby subreddit has been chosen as a default subreddit! Prepare to reap the rewards of 1000x the amount of:

- traffic.

- low efforts posts.

- users who won’t read or respect the rules and culture.

There’s an SCP story like that.

World only survives, in realities where this particular creature in containment is alive. I’ll see if I can dig it up.

Re:Cloudflare Ohttp Gateway on Saturday October 03, 2026 @08:44PM (#49949391)
“Well you see, it’s better because of the fact the _we_ do it!” - Cloudflare, probably.
Re:AI needs $6T in annual revenue to justify data centre boom on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @08:05PM (#49902585)
Oopsy, MBA-holder detected!!

Simply holding an overrated degree doesn’t instantly guarantee that their opinions and skills are “worthwhile” or “good”.

Re:AI needs $6T in annual revenue to justify data centre boom on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @07:10PM (#49902087)
I’ve watched my work go absolutely ballistic for AI-ing all the things.

Lots of code gets written, that much is certain. A lot of slopped out PowerPoint presentations which are just worse to read than human-written ones. We have _not_ magically accelerated delivery times and the product which is 99% vibe-coded perpetually has “oh that’s weird” bugs. An obscene amount of effort is being poured into internal tooling, 90% of which is reinventing existing tooling. Important to note that the internal tooling isn’t actually usable or helpful in building the product, but we are pouring eye watering amounts of cash into it.

This is very misleading. Person B didn’t “shoot” person A, they instead figured out that intersecting A’s spatial position with a metallic mass at higher than normal velocities would solve the challenge and of getting “A” to stop being in the way on the footpath.

I too, can play linguistic games! It doesn’t matter that someone didn’t secure their third upstairs window, or you borrowed a key from their neighbour, you effectively, still, broke into their house.

Pointing junkies at new data centres might be the socio-economic uplift of the decade!

(Only sort of joking)

The age of a Warhammer 40k Tech Priest is upon us! Praise to the Machine God.

Just, without the aliens, space travel, or mech-suits.

Got half the other downsides though!

Re:Fuck it, make it anyway on Saturday September 12, 2026 @09:21AM (#49672071)
You’re not alone, I’ve been keen for something like this for a while.

It’s fine to keep apprised of, but I really do miss the actually-genuinely-interesting topics and projects which used to pop up here, pre ai days.

Re:Fuck it, make it anyway on Saturday September 12, 2026 @09:17AM (#49672054)
Yeah those games exist, and most gamers don’t want them. We’ve not been able to convince the industry to stop bothering to make them, so they still do dumb stuff like, making Concorde, then realising nobody wants it.

Indie and non-triple-A studios keep having wind, because they’re the ones producing interesting and fun games which people _actually want to play_.

Re:A misalignment of AI in mathematics on Friday September 11, 2026 @08:57PM (#49667501)
I _want_ to agree, but I fear this is too close to the old “do what you love for work and you’ll never work a day”.

It didn’t lead to a lot of people having a wildly successful career, it lead to a lot of people getting burnt out, exploited, underpaid and generally disillusioned.

There will be a lucky few, who have the benefit of being given the space to work alongside. The vast majority of people will (unless we change things) simply be made to take whatever the machine outputs and call it a day.

Re:On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @07:55PM (#49618858)
If ~~someone gives you a hint about an approach~~ you steal someone’s notes about a promising approach, and then you hire 10,000 people to brute force the problem basically everyone would consider that “shitty behaviour”, “theft”, and “poor form”.
Re:On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @07:47PM (#49618777)
Building on them without fundamentally understanding is akin to putting on robes, calling yourself a Tech-Priest, worshipping a machine god and doing your best Warhammer 40k impression.
Re:On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @07:43PM (#49618750)
What do you mean “we won’t need mathematics as it is today”?

To further human understanding is itself a goal that single-handedly justifies our efforts.

Jumping straight to the “answer” and therefore missing both the understanding of the actual problem, and any useful discoveries along the way is a waste at best, and actively harmful at worst.

Re:An Alien Mind on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:05AM (#49594095)
I have extraordinarily bad news for you about the state of the environment right now.
Re:Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes on Sunday September 06, 2026 @10:40PM (#49593241)
It’s Python, you’ve already sacrificed performance, what a little bit more?
Re:44% on ARC-AGI-1 in 67 cents on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @10:39PM (#49531093)
Technically correct, but not in a functionally useful way.

The “L” in LLM’s generally refers to human-language specifically. You’d expect to feed it…human text. Nitpicking that the human text also constitutes a mathematical language is like, correct, but so general as to be unhelpful.

Re:Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care on Monday August 31, 2026 @06:31AM (#49508017)
I couldn’t tell you what colour my functions or structure syntax is, but I can tell you when I look at code, that the presence of the colour instantly lets me straight to whatever part of the text I care about at that moment.
Re:Creepy Crawlies on Sunday August 30, 2026 @10:54PM (#49505084)
It doesn’t have to be fully sound, it’s there to provide _some_ degree of interim protection.

Evidently, it makes _enough_ of a difference for the people running it. Criticising it is just letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

The alternative to Anubis isn’t “something better that isn’t being picked”, it’s “completely unprotected”, and the people criticising it for being imperfect could helpfully move the conversation forward by actively suggesting a concrete alternative.

I’d say “wow, how have they gotten away with such blatant corruption?” But the US really seems to be full-sending into “mask off corruption meltdown”.
Re:Disruption with Some GitHub Services on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @05:39PM (#49456298)
Ibis’ are fantastic creatures, and don’t deserve the scorn you’ve heaped upon them!

Their bin-chicken status is testament to their adaptability, but it’s essentially our fault they’re that way.

Re:How I Find Problems to Solve as a Staff Engineer on Monday August 24, 2026 @12:36AM (#49415219)
I suspect this is partly a function of your organisation.

Some places, do not care terribly, about what you _could_ achieve, or they have garbage internal practices which prevent you from doing this work effectively no matter how much you _care_, or maybe they’re just a garbage workplace but you need the job. In these cases, you may as well ruthlessly go-for-the-title, because they’re not going to change, so you may as well get something beneficial while you’re stuck somewhere shitty.

Now, if it’s a decent org, which looks after its people, produces a product it cares about, has actual career progression, sure, you can afford to do the work first and earn it properly, but let’s not pretend that’s amazingly common, and attempting to do this, in some places will just get you exploited and burnt out, with no pay or title bump to show for it.

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