News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

LevGoldstein

Re:I don't like passkeys on Friday September 18, 2026 @03:17PM (#49758913)
The responsible product owners will already have bounced 18 months prior after tweaking the stats to falsify the customer satisfaction rate and grabbing their bonus on the way out.
Consider that the people who have never have never had to be on-call for a product that results in losses for the company in the event of an outage, and/or have never had to attend an RCA meeting have just as much of a voice in this discussion. Some segments of the software industry don't even have to worry about those sorts of things, and it's easy to get myopic after a while...I doubt that a long time dev at hobbyist-centric wearable manufacturers or audio plugin shops has the same sorts of concerns as someone who has specialized in ad delivery for social media sites.
They profited so thoroughly from building the addiction machine that they sought to lobby for legislation that imposed restrictions on internet usage that will actively and permanently add friction to computing and make the internet as a whole less free, just to try to avoid culpability for their actions. They knew what they were building.
It's a grovel-for-investor-dollars site that we've long pretended is for serious technical discussion. Comments should always be filtered through that lens.
Not OP, but here's a link from one of the previous times this was discussed.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...

Almond farming uses massive amounts of water, which has caused environmental impact concerns in the past.

Re:The Window Chrome of Our Discontent on Monday March 09, 2026 @01:43PM (#47312476)
I'm very curious what their workaround plan for something like U&I MetaSynth would be.
Re:The Brand Age on Thursday March 05, 2026 @03:52PM (#47267118)
My least favorite of that eras Gerald Genta designs. The original Royal Oak is comparatively far more attractive. Both are outdone by the 222 (different designer though), but it's all subjective.
Re:Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @10:01PM (#47161257)
> M$ has now introduced web-latency into the desktop along with their adoption of web-tech into the OS.

So we're back to the woes of Active Desktop on Windows 98. Everything old is new again.

Re:A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @12:08PM (#46888432)
This only lasts until dark patterns can be inserted that disrupt the ease of use that agents are currently providing. If I can't force the end user to watch unskippable ads or trick them into spending money on a service they don't need, what are we even doing?
Re:The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar on Sunday January 18, 2026 @06:14PM (#46673178)
I recall stuff like the Intel icc compiler being expensive and desirable, and things like client access licenses, hardware licenses (to allow using non-trivial amounts of RAM and multi-processing) and support plans for proprietary OSes being rather expensive. Consulting a SCO Unix price sheet from that era, a license that allowed 150 users and up to 32GB of RAM was $10k.

Prices also varied around OS features used. Vendors loved to nickel-and-dime you (separate *-user client licenses for file services, print services, remote access, etc), generally to drive you towards bigger packages that seemed like a better deal.

Which is why you take the time to put usage docs in the repo README, make sure the script is packaged and deployed via the same methods that the rest of the company uses, and ensure that it logs success/failure conditions. That's been pretty standard at every organization I've been at my entire professional career. Anyone who can't manage that is going to create worse problems when designing/building/maintaining a more complex system.
Re:AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering on Friday November 14, 2025 @11:26AM (#45928420)
People have been sounding the alarm about excessive water diverted to almond farming for many years though, so that doesn't really help the counter-argument.

Example article from a decade ago: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...

Re:They Thought They Were Free (1955) on Sunday September 21, 2025 @12:16PM (#45324016)
> Armed civilians with their puny little guns and little organization are right out as soon as any part of the military joins a fight, that's why I only mentioned the latter to begin with.

We have several recent real-world examples of that not working out for the military. Assuming like minded people wont self-organize is a bad starting point, and jets and tanks have a tough time doing things like enforcing curfews. That's also ignoring that such a scenario would involve portions of said military force joining the civilian resistance, including those in leadership positions.

Besides, I've always hated this argument, because why fight the military when they can just target the politicians directly.

Re:Claude Can (Sometimes) Prove It on Saturday September 20, 2025 @03:49PM (#45316721)
Having encountered this spread across our orgs greenfield codebases which made heavy use of AI in the last 90 days: Restating the same information in slightly different formats, with slightly different levels of detail in several places, in a way that is unnecessary. Like a "get up and running quickly" guide in the documentation which has far more detail than the section it's supposed to be summarizing. Jarringly inconsistent ways of providing information within a given section (a list of endpoints and their purposes, followed by a table of other endpoints, followed by another list of endpoints). Unnecessary bulleted lists all over the places which could read more clearly as single sentences or a short paragraph. Disembodied documentation files nested in the repos that restate the contents of the README, but in a slightly different format/voice. Thousands of single line code comments that just restate what is already clear to the reader if they just read the line it's commenting on. That's before getting into any code quality issues themselves.
It's been around for over a decade at this point, so I'd say it's as likely to disappear as Ableton Live at this point. Bitwig was made by ex-Ableton engineers and outside of some of the more niche features, they're similar enough that anything you learn about Bitwig is transferable to using Ableton Live. Much more so than trying to move to one of them from Reaper, for instance. If you depend mostly on 3rd party plugins and less on what's built into the DAW, then they're effectively the same outside of simple navigation quirks unique to each.

I have active licenses for both and have used both for personal projects. I find Ableton to be slightly faster to navigate, probably because I've been using it for longer. If manufacturers of high quality multichannel interfaces had better Linux support, I'd migrate fully to Bitwig.

Re:Buy a Faster CPU on Sunday August 24, 2025 @02:20PM (#45006418)
...and we're back to trying to convince a penny-wise pound-foolish company to buy twice the computing hardware for every developer.
Re:Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears on Thursday August 21, 2025 @12:39PM (#44974838)
Is it imminent? Reading the article, the only thing that's actually changed is that the CEO has stopped hand-picking AI hires and has placed that responsibility on Alexandr Wang instead. The rest is just fluff to turn it into an article. The tech sector being down is happening in concert with the non-tech sector sliding too.
How long before a handful of entities, having already ingested the available content into their proprietary systems, bankroll assaults on Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.
Re:The Future of WATMM on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @03:14PM (#43106990)
Depends on what you mean by alternatives. Some gear focused forums (ModWiggler, Lines, Elektronauts, etc) necessarily cover some of the same ground. The Dogs On Acid forum is also still around, though it's changed hands over the years.
Re:What It's Like to Work on Cold Cases on Monday August 26, 2024 @02:24PM (#41360103)
You say that as though this is a brand new problem and not something that's been an issue for many, many decades regardless of what party has majority control at the federal level.
Re:Cash payments above €3000 to be outlawed in Netherlands on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @12:56PM (#37238899)
Perhaps they are a self-employed mobile pharmacist.
> people in their cars pretended to ignore me, and one couple leaving theirs just walked away, as I asked if they could move so we could unload my dead car

I wonder if they would have started responding if you motioned the tow truck driver to unload your car directly behind them, in a position that would obviously seriously inconvenience the other driver(s) or prevent them from leaving entirely...of course, also mentioning that was your plan to them loudly so you're sure they can hear.

Re:Legal Use of Hallucinogenic Mushrooms Begins in Oregon on Tuesday January 03, 2023 @01:26PM (#34235554)
> leapt through the eighth story dorm window to his death while tripping on magic mushrooms

So if keeping them illegal apparently utterly failed to prevent people from having ready access to them as your anecdote suggests, what was the benefit of keeping them illegal in the first place? Other than funneling government coffers into the prison-industrial complex, itself perpetuating far more tragedy and engendering a far more dangerous society as a result...and not just for your daughter, but for everyone.

Re:Unusual login activity was due to bug on Thursday December 30, 2021 @09:33PM (#29744220)
Or more likely, there were probably some legitimate alerts that would have gone out at the same time as per normal operations, and they do not want to conflate these with the ones sent in error.
>Is it really a terrible idea to restrict your software from being used to control weaponry?

Seems reasonable until you do something unrelated to offend the licensor and they decide to leverage a very loose definition of weaponry/munitions against you. For example, have a look at what is consider munitions for the purpose of export controls in the USA, and consider what additional items have been regulated as munitions in the past:

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

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

Re:The first two hours of MTV (1981) [video] on Sunday August 08, 2021 @11:59PM (#28112625)
HBO also aired videos periodically between movies, prior to MTV's existence.
I'm sure he's open to hearing your ethical, compassionate, and politically viable alternate proposal. Go ahead and post it.
The US also has considerably higher wealth inequality than the other countries you've listed, and hence higher motivation for violent crime:

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

That said, I wouldn't consider those countries directly comparable as far as their position in the world, and how their culture is affected by that position. Russia is probably it's most direct peer, and is comparably closer when looking at wealth inequality and homicide rate.

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

I've worked in several in larger/Fortune 500 companies, including one where the desk setups were handled by a labor union, any changes required multiple approvals, and DIYing anything (using personal equipment or even adjusting the existing desk position or height) was a rules violation and prohibited. You wouldn't be able to get past security with personal equipment larger than what could fit in your pocket, and carrying so much as a monitor or laptop that didn't have a company barcode on it already would get you stopped.

So yeah, these sorts of workplaces exist and thousands of people have to contend with their on-site limitations.

He continues to believe that it is undervalued, as per his witness testimony to the congressional committee:

https://docs.house.gov/Committee/Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?Event...

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/BA/BA00/20210218/111207/HHRG...

Older »