News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

dabinat

Re:How we use Finder color tags on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @03:11PM (#50357507)
> Did you know that Finder has had colored tags since 2013? We've asked a few people and found that most users try them once and then never again.

The reason for that may be because Apple made them less useful than they used to be. The color used to cover the entire name of the file but now it’s a dot next to it and is a lot less noticeable at a glance.

The drives are expensive but once you have one, there’s nothing cheaper per-TB than tapes, especially now.
Re:Web host Squarespace lays off 19% of its employees on Monday November 02, 2026 @06:07PM (#50345405)
Who said they were software engineers? It’s not specified in the article. AI is replacing the need for Squarespace at all.
The average consumer isn’t going to buy an electric car for climate reasons - they’re going to buy it to save money. So they want it cheap and they want to not have to wait ages for it to charge. The Chinese cars deliver on both fronts (provided sufficient infrastructure for fast charging). If the car doesn’t last 10 years that’s okay if they’re saving enough money.
Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @03:07PM (#50342922)
It’s not a good look that Ubuntu is taking its time with this patch even for paying customers, but I do have to question how widely exploitable this is. If your site is mission-critical, it most likely has a load balancer or reverse-proxy in front of it that’s probably already filtering it out. Companies like AWS have already confirmed that their load balancers filter it.

Remember that the AI companies benefit from creating panic every time there’s a new security exploit.

Re:Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault on Sunday November 01, 2026 @10:32PM (#50332832)
If software as mature and widely-used as Postgres has this level of hidden bugs, what about the average software product?
Re:Trump Demands a Cut of Alina Habba's $50M Pardon Deal on Sunday November 01, 2026 @09:49PM (#50332558)
This is why the President should not have the power to pardon. If it turns out the justice system is sending people to jail who should not be there, we need to reform the justice system, not provide the President with a veto that keeps the bad system intact.
Re:Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:42PM (#50328390)
The danger is that we give good leaders too much power, and they’re then replaced by someone who abuses it. And that’s why we need to be careful how much power we give someone, even if we’re sure they will use it wisely.
Re:Fair Use Benefits Everyone on Friday October 30, 2026 @08:03PM (#50311781)
Is distillation fair use then?
Re:French national assembly votes 0.055€/GB internet tax on Friday October 30, 2026 @06:57PM (#50311185)
I currently pay $0.005/GB for bandwidth, which works out to a similar amount in Euros. So this tax would constitute a tenfold cost increase to deliver data to France.
Universal basic income is the new trickle-down economics. What it means is the wealthy get most of the money in the economy and they give everyone else a few scraps - the minimum amount possible to avoid pitchforks at their door.
I’ve never encountered in my life a new technology that was adopted this quickly. In just a few years AI is being used in some way by almost everyone, no matter if they’re tech-savvy or not. It’s also interesting that everyone uses it but it’s also pretty widely hated at the same time.

The demand is there - I just don’t think the revenue streams have been fully figured out yet. Ultimately I think the AI providers will converge on allowing their AI to respond to queries with sponsored suggestions, quite simply because there’s too much money being left on the table to not do that.

Google is making these massive investments because they’re terrified that they’re going to be eclipsed or turn into IBM. But Google has way more of a buffer to play the long game than OpenAI or Anthropic.

There’s a lot of focus on the price of Chinese cars but they’re also beating US cars on specs too. Many have fast charging in less than 10 mins - provided the charger is powerful enough. And China is building the charging infrastructure to support that too, with 480KW, 600KW and even 1MW chargers.

I would like to see Chinese EVs allowed into the US market to compete if not on price, at least on specs.

Re:Democrats' Secret Effort to Stack Alaska's Ballot on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @08:30PM (#50282864)
This might be the evidence Republicans were looking for to enact onerous voting restrictions. And they probably didn’t need to do it either: voters are extremely angry right now and Democrats probably could have won the Senate without this. Once again I’m reminded of a Jon Stewart quote: (to the effect of) “Democrats have America behind them…. how will they screw it up?”
Luckily Elon was born in South Africa and is therefore ineligible to be president. Although he has enough money to pull the strings of whoever’s in power, so it probably doesn’t make much difference.
They don’t have a right to privacy when they’re at work. The Supreme Court has said it is legal to film officers, including their faces, while carrying out their duties.
Part of the problem is that the justice system is as slow as molasses. They tried to hold him accountable for things he did in his first term and four years wasn’t long enough.
Re:MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @03:00PM (#50279126)
Yeah, piano playing was a bad example. There’s a reason MIDI keyboard manufacturers try so hard to replicate the weighted feel of a real piano. Your fingers need feedback.
Re:MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @02:55PM (#50279059)
Kids will grow into the next generation of adults and having a screen you can’t touch will probably feel like an anachronism to them.
Re:What a 50-year-old tractor taught me about UX on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @02:42PM (#50278869)
I personally don’t think there’s such a thing as user error. If a user can’t figure out how to use your product correctly, that’s a problem with how the product is designed.

Built-in chatbots that you can ask how to do something make things easier for users but they may be masking UX problems.

Why post at all if you don’t consider it important enough to spend time writing yourself?
Isn’t it bad if it doesn’t upload to the cloud? The officer can just seize it and you don’t have another copy.
Re:Lula wins election after final votes tallied on Monday October 26, 2026 @01:26AM (#50239495)
Flavio promised to pardon his father, so the other effect of this is that Bolsonaro stays in jail. Although by jail I mean house arrest, which is something that rich, powerful people manage to get somehow and is barely a punishment.
The bigger issue here is that even if they don’t cheat and work hard to get all As, there may be no career for them at the end of it.
If you take away all regulation you’d probably end up with a monopoly anyway, as companies would no longer be prevented from merging with their competitors or using underhand tactics to gain market share.
This is comparatively a bargain compared to what the DoD wanted to charge:

> In 2015, the Department of Defense told a Freedom of Information Act requester, who was asking for records on tools used to preserve data on seized devices, that fulfilling their request would take 15 million hours and cost $660 million.

(15 million hours = over 1700 years)

Re:No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector on Saturday October 24, 2026 @06:01PM (#50225814)
I agree - it is easier to prove that a software implementation is correct. In many other industries the definition of what’s good work is less tangible. There are also jobs where the liability for mistakes is extremely high.

Older »