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diffeomorphism

> Would this be unethical if it was a human who heard rumors about a solution then attacked the problem, solved it and published first?

Yes.

Re:New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @08:54AM (#49448252)
Except that you then have to pay a "use tax" of 6%:

https://tax.idaho.gov/taxes/sales-use/use-tax/online-guide/

This is difficult to enforce, but it seems that "taking advantage" is strictly speaking just tax fraud.

Buttons etc. have direct binding. So even if your hub goes up in flames those will just keep working.

The automated stuff like "starting at sunrise gradually adjust the lights" might be delayed by 30 seconds. Annoying but hardly rage inducing.

People making decisions.

Pay me 8x to get 10x, great. Pay me 8x to get 3x, nope.

Being a "failure" means it fails to meet its success criteria.

If you claim 10x and deliver 3x, that is a failure. The 3x may still be impressive or a gamechanger or ..., but it still falls short of its promises.

Re:Podman v6.0.0 on Friday July 03, 2026 @09:57AM (#48775127)
Entirely different perspective: If I have to add a separate repo, then this is a red flag.

> Any serious project in this space supports as many distros as possible.

Wrong way around. Any serious product is supported by lots of distros. Distros curate their selection and if nobody bothered packaging your stuff, then your stuff is not good enough.

The US has it much easier not harder.

The average population density is pretty irrelevant here. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_population_map.pn...

Lots of high density cluster and much easier geography (Switzerland famously has lots of mountains in the way).

So the question is "Why do US metropolitan areas not have 25gbit fiber for about $60/month?".

Re:Open Source Security at Astral on Thursday April 09, 2026 @03:33AM (#47700419)
There are different notions of "reproducible". Nix does not automatically make builds reproducible in the way that matters here:

https://reproducible.nixos.org

It is still good at that but the difference to other distros is rather small:

https://reproducible-builds.org/citests/

Re:Why I love NixOS on Monday March 23, 2026 @04:10AM (#47486621)
How would "bit-identical" or "free of side effects" make an actual difference in practice?

Rollback is already very easy with filesystem snapshots. Configs are already tracked by etckeeper. New laptop: either copy the whole drive or the package list and dotfiles. Also, how often do you have to get new laptops for this to be relevant ?

Re:Show HN: RAG knowledge base poisoning lab, 100% local on Friday March 13, 2026 @04:54AM (#47362048)
That reads like blatant nonsense.

For a 5 (five) document library you added 3 (three) documents just to override a single response. Nothing at all is hidden and all three documents are in clear human understandable language.

This is not an "attack" or "poisoning" but just everything working as intended.

Re:MacBook Neo on Thursday March 12, 2026 @03:01AM (#47347398)
Because AI needs so much more power and in particular RAM.
Re:MacBook Neo Is a 'Shock' to the PC Industry: Asus Co-CEO on Thursday March 12, 2026 @02:50AM (#47347325)
The apple pricing ladder is all about the confusingly named overlap.

The Air with more ram costs just a bit less than the pro non-pro. But then maybe you want the pro pro? Or do you need the pro max? Oh, and the ultra will come later but not for laptops. Also it will then be a smaller number M but ultra.

Oh, and the iPad air is, of course, heavier than the pro because "air".

Re:Apple introduces the new MacBook Air with M5 on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @08:23AM (#47247062)
Heavier than competing 14in laptops. Just okay res display. Low refresh rate. No oled or mini led. Basically unrepairable.

There are reasons the MacBook pro exists. The air is a nice machine but there are definitely trade-off.

Wrong question. If you sell a 6k€ machine "for AI", then you are judged on your own merits.

Replies like "but, but other laptops" are very weak attempts at deflection.

Re:Eigent: An open source Claude cowork alternative on Thursday January 15, 2026 @03:34AM (#46629782)
Under local deployment:

> Local backend server with full API Local model integration (vLLM, Ollama, LM Studio, etc.) Complete isolation from cloud services Zero external dependencies

Seems open source/open weight to me. They additionally offer some cloud hosted version.

Re:There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @03:29AM (#46613675)
Because they are a fire hazard:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62vk0p5dn5o

Trash compactors break the batteries in these things. A deposit could help to ensure that the vapes are disposed responsibly.

Other option: Add an "electronics" bin everywhere. Though that would be more expensive and less clear how effective it would be.

Re:HP Reveals Keyboard Computer with Ryzen AI Chip on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @09:53AM (#46601750)
Companies often have flex offices with docking stations.

So previously you would have a screen, mouse and keyboard at every desk and people would move a laptop (ignoring its low res screen and bad keyboard).

Here you would have just a screen at every desk and people move their mouse and keyboard.

Also, this does have a battery.

Re:Owners, not renters: Mozilla's open source AI strategy on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @09:23AM (#46601274)
When do you think the "web 2.0 era" was?

Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years. Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate.

The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.

Re:It's hard to justify Tahoe icons on Monday January 05, 2026 @08:18AM (#46498432)
Nah, the irony is that you think that this was not done on purpose. E.g. look at the hamburger menu on the top right.
Re:It's hard to justify Tahoe icons on Monday January 05, 2026 @08:17AM (#46498420)
It is called "making fun of" not "irony".
Re:It's hard to justify Tahoe icons on Monday January 05, 2026 @08:15AM (#46498407)
Which is very much on purpose to make fun of exactly that. Try some of the other settings in the top right, e.g. the literal hamburger menu.
For matter over thread you do need a hub and you need more certifications for matter, so for manufacturers it is less open.

The standardization is a plus though.

Re:Fourier Transforms on Monday November 17, 2025 @02:51AM (#45951639)
> Because an FFT (short for "Fast Fourier Transform") is nothing more than a curve-fit of sines and cosines to some given data

That is not even wrong. A Fourier transform is a basis expansion. In particular, the full expansion is exact (not just an approximation). Of course, truncated expansions are approximations.

The actually interesting part: Why is this basis expansion so much more useful than, e.g. expanding into some eigenfunctions, Hermite polynomials, etc.? The decomposition into (complex) exponentials converts between addition and multiplication, i. e. sin(x+y), cos(x+y) you get from multiplying sin(x), cos(x), sin(y) and cos(y). This in turn has important implications such as turning derivatives into multipliers. More generally you can consider nonlinear Fourier transforms with different groups and generators other than exponentials.

TLDR: It is a transform. What you are transforming between is what makes it so useful.

Re:iPhone Pocket: a beautiful way to wear and carry iPhone on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @12:28PM (#45890203)
> Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth,”

This is satire, right?

Unethical behavior does not become good just because it happens to hurt "bad people" (or more accurately, companies bought by bad people).
The robots.txt is pretty explicit that this scraping is "disallowed"

https://www.goodreads.com/robots.txt

So legalities aside, this seems unethical.

TLDR: regulations

The toothpaste maker wants to claim something like "Novamin is useful". In the EU this is treated as for cosmetics, so relatively low bar to clear. In the US this is treated as pharmaceutical, so a high bar to clear. The manufacturer has decided that passing that bar is not financially sensible for them.

History, venture capital, single language market, ... . Probably a dozen different factors you could point at instead.
Not inane at all, just your phrasing.

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

This is not about "X sucks", but the very first questions from an engineering perspective should be whY? What do you want to accomplish? Is X actually a good approach towards Y?

If it turns out that trying to shoehorn X into kinda accomplishing Y is very hard work, then suggesting to use X2 instead is a perfectly sensible suggestion.

If you have a hard constraint that you must use X, even if it does not fit well to Y, fair enough. Then you add that as a reply or state it in the beginning.

Out of interest: They talk a lot about how they think/hope their license is not contradictory. Has anybody with legal expertise verified this?

Open-ish source is one thing, but an untested custom license is an issue in itself.

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