News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Joeri

Re:My Favourite Laptop on Monday November 02, 2026 @05:49PM (#50345148)
I was told by the professor giving intro to programming during my compsci first year in 1997 that I was not allowed to bring my laptop into school, and I had to use the (much slower) computers that the school provided to do my coursework, because it would not be fair otherwise to the other students who lacked such luxuries.

In hindsight I think he was doing me a kindness because for sure that laptop would have ended up stolen.

Re:The AI cost of JavaScript frameworks on Sunday November 01, 2026 @04:37AM (#50323957)
The vanilla advantage is also there in a pure client-side pwa. Arguably it’s even bigger, because the bundle size ends up way smaller and the agent needs to hold less in context.

Plus all the other vanilla advantages: fewer dependencies, lower maintenance, less retraining, etc…

Belgium introduced dns blocking to block one child porn website, and then the slippery slope gears started turning. Over a thousand websites are blocked countrywide now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_Be...

Re:Apple Keynote now showing ads in its UI on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @12:21PM (#50090186)
I still don’t get why apple chooses to devalue their brand so much for so little additional revenue. They’re a luxury goods brand, their whole revenue model is based on the appearance of quality.
Re:Remove and Disable Apple Macos27 AI Models Tool on Monday October 05, 2026 @03:45AM (#49961856)
Those “small” models take up 25 gb. On an entry level mac that’s a double digit percentage of available space. It is very rude of apple to claim that much space in an OS upgrade and offer no easy way to get it back.
Re:When did Google get so f-ing weird? on Monday September 28, 2026 @04:05PM (#49883615)
If you’re logged in you get wildly different results from someone else’s. I have turned off history on my google account to make it give me a “neutral” search result, but it still seems to take a lot of info like my location, language and device type into account.
Re:Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face on Saturday September 26, 2026 @10:49AM (#49857135)
I wonder if they actually broke a law. The CFAA requires knowledge and intent to be present for criminal liability for hacking, and if we have to believe OpenAI they had no knowledge and did not intend.

At a minimum I would expect an FBI investigation, but given that the US government is right now a failed state I’m assuming no such investigation will happen.

Cybercrime legislation in other countries might not require intent, and then I would hope to see some prosecutions. OpenAI has clearly been negligent, and this negligence is causing harm in the world. Someone should be fined or jailed for this.

Re:Plan Mode Is Dead on Saturday September 26, 2026 @08:15AM (#49855804)
We got Opus 5.5 just a few days ago so haven’t had time to learn its ways, and Fable was/is too expensive for many people including myself. Insiders have months to learn the ins and outs of new models.

It would be nice if with new model releases claude code also gave a bit of a model 101 that tells you evolving ways of prompting it that the insiders have picked up. I know there’s the prompting guide in the claude docs, but this is often very broad and most people don’t know about it.

Re:Goodbye Google on Friday September 25, 2026 @02:45AM (#49840991)
Even aside from how aligned the plan is with us, what about how aligned we are with the plan?

I’m always intrigued by the duality and conflict of “I have free will and must choose to act the right way” and “God has a plan so everything will be alright”.

Either free will allows us to deviate from the plan, or the plan will always be carried out and free will doesn’t really matter in the end. Arguing for God’s plan as the thing that will save us is eerily similar to nihilism, because they’re really arguing none of our actions truly matter.

There are companies where the CEO reports to the board, and there are companies where the board exists to keep up appearances. We’re finding out in real time Automattic is the second kind.

This should discourage investors, since an unbridled CEO is bad for them in the long term. But it won’t, because nobody thinks long term anymore.

Re:Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher on Monday September 14, 2026 @01:00AM (#49692180)
My experience with opus 5 is that its results are lower quality in dutch, but that its dutch is more readable than its english.
Re:Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove on Friday August 14, 2026 @03:13AM (#49295569)
The web’s ad markets bake in a loss of privacy by design, and so every website that wants to participate in those ad markets has to dupe as many users as possible into handing away their privacy. Couple that with declining web ad revenues because of the move to mobile apps, and you get a web filled with malicious compliance cookie banners.

Had google offered a privacy-preserving ad model (basing the ads off the content of the page instead of who the user is) things would be very different.

Re:Gemini 3.7 Flash on Thursday August 13, 2026 @02:52PM (#49290373)
Why would they? Unless they have lots of unused tpu real estate that they could host it on “for free” they would be bumping more profitable workloads off of machines to give away that capacity to people with zero long term loyalty. There is no business reason for google to subsidize these models.

OpenAI has too much money. They’re spending their money in stupid ways.

Re:Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code on Monday August 10, 2026 @06:46AM (#49241976)
For running it in yolo mode I set it up in a devcontainer. It takes a bit of figuring out, but once set up the permission prompts go away and claude has no access to anything I haven’t explicitly added to the devcontainer (unless it hacks its way out).
At one point I ran graphical linux on a 20 mb ram laptop although admittedly that was very tight.

I also remember running nt4 with photoshop, word, and my IDE (borland delphi) all at the same time and comfortably in 128 mb of ram.

Re:The Valley of Webhooks on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @04:58PM (#49188914)
There’s also the Linked Data Event Streams (LDES) standard, which is a way of hosting a log as a set of linked http documents, fetched via polling and link navigation. Is there really anything more needed than a webhook for the notification and an LDES for the log?

https://semiceu.github.io/LinkedDataEventStreams/releases/1....

Re:Progressive Web Components on Friday July 31, 2026 @05:52PM (#49128957)
It’s on the page: https://elenajs.com/#why-should-i-use-elena

You can create anything and everything. Web components are about extending html to make it do more, progressive web components are about rendering that on the server and progressively enhancing with interactivity in the browser. Elena solves the major pain points in doing that. Components built this way can be used in any framework.

Without fundamental model architecture improvements the practicality largely depends on how Apple increases memory bandwidth.

Memory bandwidths (* = rumored):

  M1:       68 GB/s
  M2:       100 GB/s
  M2 pro:   200 GB/s
  M2 max:   400 GB/s
  M2 ultra: 800 GB/s
  M5:       153 GB/s
  M5 pro:   307 GB/s
  M5 max:   460 GB/s
  M6:       200 GB/s*
  M7:       240 GB/s*
  
  Nvidia 4090 1008 GB/s
  Nvidia H100 3.35 TB/s
Basically what we're looking at by the M7 generation is a tier shift, where the base M7 can do what the M2 pro did, and every tier moves up accordingly, with the M7 ultra becoming competitive with nvidia dedicated consumer hardware.
Re:Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @02:08PM (#48480311)
New cheap android phones are just as slow as old cheap android phones. The bottom of the market has been stuck in performance limbo for years, and modern web dev frameworks are ill designed to meet them where they are at.
Re:"They're made out of weights" on Thursday June 04, 2026 @05:55AM (#48396363)
Internal to what? The brain is not a monolithic thing, it is different parts communicating and interconnecting. When the connection between the halves is cut, the person objectively becomes two people, but still experiences and presents themselves as one. Observing ourselves is just one part of the brain responding to another, or theorizing on past behavior. There is probably no actual introspection going on inside of the human brain, only the perception of one.
Re:The Dead Economy Theory on Saturday May 30, 2026 @07:25AM (#48335064)
Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?

Before a covid hiring spree twitter had around 4000 headcount, now they’re around 3000. Basically musk stopped moderating and fired the moderators. What he did demonstrate is that the market didn’t care about moderation, because active user counts increased instead of decreasing.

Re:Can we have the day off? on Thursday May 28, 2026 @03:06AM (#48305632)
Nationalization doesn’t work because every country’s citizens except those of USA and China still get nothing. Basic income doesn’t work because most countries lack leverage to tax the AI companies. International frameworks to do such things don’t work because Trump just marginalized all international bodies that might host such a framework.

If AI is really about to automate away a lot of labor, I have yet to hear even a hint of a plan to deal with the fallout of that which doesn’t involve consigning much of humanity to the dustbin of history.

Re:Postmortem: TanStack npm supply-chain compromise on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @04:45PM (#48114283)
So what if they’re the biggest? They haven’t taken any meaningful steps to stop these attacks. The primary culprit for the sorry state of the npm ecosystem is npm inc, or actually their corporate overlord microsoft. They could be doing a lot more than they are.

I’m sort of reminded of how back in the day windows was swiss cheese and people kept saying “it is because they’re the biggest”, and then microsoft started caring about windows security and it improved enormously. When will microsoft start caring about npm security?

Re:Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit on Friday May 08, 2026 @12:20PM (#48065238)
Blaming the victim is too easy. NPM is unsafe at any speed. You cannot use it in any but the most trivial capacities without opening yourself up to supply chain attacks.

Why is npm the only package ecosystem that has so many problems? What are the other package system owners doing better? Let’s start there, instead of blaming the victims.

Re:DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal on Friday May 08, 2026 @07:19AM (#48061543)
It’s not just AU: https://9to5mac.com/2026/05/05/apples-most-powerful-mac-stud...

They’ve dropped all the mac studio configs higher than 96 gb, as well as the base mac mini. They’re also rumored to be considering taking the Neo base config off the market.

This seems to be how they’re dealing with supply constraints for fab capacity and RAM.

Re:Agents need control flow, not more prompts on Thursday May 07, 2026 @05:10PM (#48055074)
You could have a skill that is the combination of a minimal markdown file and a set of orchestration scripts that do the deterministic work. The agent does not have to “run everything”, it just needs to know how to launch the right script.
It’s such a lazy way of integrating AI as well, as if they asked AI to do it.

Why has no one tackled the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer? We know what AI-enhanced education should be, and we finally have the tech to build it.

The deeper I wade through Microsoft’s Azure documentation the more I feel the reality of this. There’s so much of it that it basically is unreadable in real terms, most employees will never get the time allocated, and when you do try to exhaustively read up on a specific area you find that the documentation is incomplete and wrong in subtle but important ways. I’m sure Microsoft spends a lot of resources on that documentation, but it seems somewhat of a hopeless mission.
Actually, a sizable chunk of the refunds will go to companies like Cantor Fitzgerald, the company of the commerce secretary Howard Lutnick (or his sons, which is the same thing), that bought the tariff refund rights last year for 20% of the refund value. While Lutnick was ostensibly pro-tariff, his company was betting against the tariffs being legal, and now will collect refunds paid by the American taxpayer.

So in reality, the tax payer is on the hook twice: once for paying the tariffs through increased prices, and once for the debt created by the people disbursing refunds to themselves.

Re:An update on recent Claude Code quality reports on Thursday April 23, 2026 @03:39PM (#47880640)
This sounds like one of those problems where the solution is not a UX tweak but an architecture change. Perhaps prompt cache should be made long term resumable by storing it to disk before discarding from memory?

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