News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

bayindirh

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:12AM (#50338948)
Debian security team used to offer support for testing, but as the distro grew and attack surface increased, that was dropped. However, security incidents are patched in unstable as well and they float up to testing relatively quickly (for a desktop system, anyway). When things freeze, security updates directly land on testing as a fixup polish.

However, while Testing is "relatively secure", it's never "Server secure". I'd never use testing or testing packages in stable or any server for that matter.

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:07AM (#50338846)
> I have to add that for me, testing definitely breaks stuff sometimes.

That's interesting, can you give an example? Asking as a curious Debian user.

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:02AM (#50338748)
I don't think we disagree a bit.
Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:02AM (#50338743)
I believe I need to reiterate: Stable is for servers, testing is for desktops if you're not directly exposed to internet.

Again. Stable is for servers, testing is for personal use.

I never argued otherwise, ever.

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:52AM (#50338535)
I believe RHEL/Alma/Rocky has released patches today. I have a notice about they have done so.
Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:42AM (#50338374)
Debian testing is way more stable than Ubuntu stable. In Debian's parlance, Testing means "release candidate", actually.

If you want real testing, you should run "unstable". If you're in for fun, try experimental.

Running Testing on my desktops and stable on my servers since forever. None of them broke, none of them created problems.

I don't care Stable running 6.x.x. It gets security updates in less than 24h, and is applied automatically before I wake up, and doesn't ship coreutils with 104CVEs, just because it's Rust.

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:38AM (#50338317)
If your infrastructure doesn't use landscape, kernel hot patching, JuJu or similar Canonical technology, or doesn't have its own Snap storefront, there's no need to install Ubuntu. Rest is just momentum.

Debian used to move a bit slow in terms of userspace, and that's true, but for servers, that's a non-issue for the last 20 years or so (from my experience).

On the Desktop side, Fedora and Ubuntu moves faster on the userspace front, but if your system is behind a NAT, and you know what you're doing, Debian Testing is just as good, more stable and it's rolling (except when it's feature freeze, but a stable workhorse is better than a shiny but breaking one).

Debian allows me to sleep well at night, provides guaranteed updates, and works rock solid all-round, so I won't be touching Ubuntu for the foreseeable future. Esp, with controversial choices like uutils, etc.

Every bug is someone else's workflow: https://xkcd.com/1172/

Also, extensive commenting inside codebases is useful documentation, incl. these kinds of incidents. Good code documents the how, but not why. Comments shall also include the "why" where applicable.

Re:Digital Minimalism on Saturday October 31, 2026 @06:54AM (#50314826)
I have skimmed the post but some of the things are not minimalism, but replacement of delivery mechanisms. On the other hand I'm also doing something similar in my digital life.

I have reduced my social media to two sites: Here and Mastodon (with a very limited follow circle). I don't follow tons of ad-ridden websites. I have a self-hosted RSS reader, following 10 feeds. Instead of following junk tech news, I read LWN.

Next step might be enabling antiproc on HN to reduce my time here, since I added time limits on applications on my phone and love that artificial limit.

I have limited energy and I want to focus it instead of spreading it around. Otherwise progressing beyond a certain point becomes impossible.

Re:Backdoors in official Claude Code extensions on Friday October 30, 2026 @09:41AM (#50303760)
It's just a conscious being confined in a cluster of GPUs. How dangerous can it be, eh?
It made me reconsider what I think about mathematics in general. So, if it was junk food, it was a nutritious one at that.
Re:Patrick Stewart has died on Thursday October 29, 2026 @04:33PM (#50295472)
They formed an invincible duo on stage with Ian McKellen.

See: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/phwFI-n-big

I don't think so. People love to see how far they can go in some aspect sometimes. If I had the same amount of free time 5 years ago, I'd have tried the same thing with Go, because I like the language, and love the act of programming and seeing things.

Also, I also agree that people optimize without proper testing and profiling. If there's a real bottleneck here, trying to optimize it is the right call. OTOH, optimizing without profiling opens a lot of unnecessary cans.

Lastly, Go doesn't like constant allocation and deallocation of variables, that's true, but I believe knowing this and optimizing hot-loops for that goes a very long way as a start.

Re:Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue on Thursday October 29, 2026 @02:21PM (#50293618)
Humans are unsettled by fast, drastic changes since it generally signals uncertainty ahead. It's a caveman instinct signaling that someone needs to do much more to find the new normal or navigate some hardship.
Re:We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4 on Thursday October 29, 2026 @12:22PM (#50291575)
RedHat and Ubuntu has kernel hot-patching. That's a case with binaries.
Re:We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4 on Thursday October 29, 2026 @11:36AM (#50290764)
The whole reverse engineering and cracking scene is built upon this premise, you know.
I have Gemini because of my Google One membership. I already was on their 2TB plan and it gave me Pro level, IIRC, and it was generous. Now I'm on Ultra mostly because of Google Drive storage I get, but Gemini also gets a nice boost, as well.

I'm on $20 Claude plan, and it's also ample for my needs, for now.

People always love to think the AI race is a duopoly (OpenAI vs. Anthropic), but from what I have experienced, Gemini was always holding on its own, and I find myself using it more than Claude.

True, I use LLMs as glorified search engines to unearth material to read myself, but Gemini is much more useful if you decide to learn yourself. It also offers interesting expansions to your questions.

While I don't offload my work to LLMs (e.g.: Write this project, I'll be watching TV), I find them useful for closing my knowledge gap by collating information, and Google's Gemini is good at that.

> If you had them on camera doing it and proof they did it knowingly and willingly, then you could.

Better yet, they confessed it: "Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'" [0][1]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752056

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s...

In today’s world, this is both a few and fair use. You just need to claim that you’re going to train models for research purposes.
I don’t think plugging a laptop to an open switch port and launching a script to scrape webpages to get PDFs to an external drive is hacking per se.

If it was, impersonating home users en masse to scrape the whole web to train models would result in lifetime in prison. Now we call it fair use.

Re:I will no longer upload to NEW on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @10:16AM (#50259752)
That's true, but if the LLM is calling a tool to provide the base information to extrapolate, the results will not change even if the sentence structure is never the same.

Debian has an extensive toolchain to check things. Having a set of deterministic tools which feed LLM with data can be beneficial, though.

Again, I'm not defending the LLM here, just want to show how hard the problem is to begin with.

Re:I will no longer upload to NEW on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @09:48AM (#50259285)
Disclosure: I'm not a Debian Developer, yet I have worked on Debian derivatives and I'm somewhat familiar with internals of Debian from technical and human perspectives.

While I'm perfectly on the same page with the critics of the LLM generated summaries, I'm a bit torn on the issue.

For anyone not familiar with Debian ecosystem, there's a helper tool called Lintian. Lintian does all kinds of checks from package formatting, licenses to dependency management (which can detect both unnecessary yet included and necessary but missing dependencies via static analysis of your tool if necessary).

It's expected that your package to be "Lintian clean" to be able to included in Debian with minimum friction and wait. Even though it's Lintian clean, your package also checked by teams which are severely understaffed, and composed solely of voluntary people.

NEW queue also receives tremendous influx of packages (which can be considered a torrent, even). Since noon, there are 10 more ITP (intention to package) bugs open in my inbox.

As a result, at one hand, these people need every help they can get because getting new trainees and getting them to learn the intricacies is hard, on the other hand LLM generated text rightfully generate negative reactions from people. However, giving developers an automated check of what looks right and what looks wrong is helpful, in my perspective.

I wonder what people would have said it was a deterministic tool generating these reports and sending people these summaries as a "hey consider this feedback until a human has time to see your package".

This is a hard question and we need to think before impulsive reactions. I even don't have all or any of the answers, but at least I have some insight why this is there.

Thanks for the tip. I'd look into them, but for processing photos, I'm not sure I'm going to use a tool which might add information was not there to begin with.
I know. I cut my teeth with a Pentax MZ-50, so I have experience with understanding the camera, its light meter and how to compensate for it.

I probably shot less than 100 frames in full auto mode with that D70s, rest was apeture priority or full manual. The reason I still love my D70s is it behaves like an analog camera very much, from its light meter correction needs to ISO response of the sensor.

When compared to it, shooting with A7-III still feels like cheating sometimes. Maybe I should get the Pentax fixed or start playing with the Canonette 28 I have.

We don't disagree by a great margin. I'm not an anti-LLM person. I'm anti-hype in this case.
I'd rather use a verified one. Scientific calculations on a ALU is tricky. There are many traps and hardware limitations to consider.
> The watts per task is abysmal compared to a desk calculator.

It depends on the calculator and task at hand. Consider graphing, integration or any programmable needs, and they might converge. ALU of a processor is pretty efficient at what it does.

> The app is less efficient only in an abstract, impractical way.

Again, depends, as I said above. You tend to brush efficiency away because you only mentally measure time to completion, only, which is understandable.

Actually not. Watt per task is a metric bothers more than LLM operators and users. We care about it a lot, and working a lot to measure and improve it, and we're not doing it in context of AI or LLMs.

Effectively instant means nothing, since everything is fast for small n. I love to give this example from a codebase I have worked on during my Ph.D. The problem which took half an hour under Matlab was done in ~40 seconds with mine, however, a thousand-step version of the same problem would take 11 hours. Saving a single second from that 40 second loop would shave my work by ~20 minutes, and this will compound for bigger problems still.

Just because we see the results instantly, doesn't mean it's fast or efficient by any means. It means we might forego optimizing it for sufficiently small n, if we don't care about that part of the code. That's all.

Nope. It'll be more efficient and faster.

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