News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

dimitrios1

Re:If you love a website, back it up on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:26AM (#50352393)
I feel like a dinosaur here -- I just go file -> print as pdf and save them off on a drive.
Re:My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii on Friday October 30, 2026 @08:41PM (#50312076)
Xbox 360 was pretty great. My favorite game to play online there was fight night round 3. It was an incredible experience. Managed to climb to the top 50 on the leaderboards!
I have hope we will get there eventually, once all the hype/wealth extraction/boys club giving all their buddies money cycles end, and the specialized tools with real value start to emerge.
Re:Claude partial outage on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @11:34AM (#49895135)
> Then again with social security set to go bankrupt it’s not like we’ll be able to retire

I don't know about you, but my notion that my social security check is all I will need to survive my retirement years died when my father started drafting his own social security in the 2010s, and it was literal peanuts after being a small business owner his entire life (restaurants) and paying more than his fair share in taxes. Do the average folk still have this notion that social security = retirement? Hopefully not, it's certainly misguided now, but it was misguided then, too.

Re:iPhone Duo on Thursday September 10, 2026 @11:30AM (#49645456)
We've been with Apple long enough now to know exactly what their playbook is, and much to the dismay of their competition, they do it well.

They let other tech companies break the ground, release something new and truly innovative and unique -- say a folding phone (it's basically a solidified meme amongst the IT crowd now - "Oh Apple will get all of samsungs features from 2 years ago finally!" -- not realizing that this is intentional), and they will let them front all the risk of whether or not it has staying power -- then they will come in and innovate at the margins and bring it into the Apple ecosystem, which is an advantage in of itself at this point.

Re:GPT-6 Astra on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @07:50PM (#49618799)
What is the way humans are general? How general is the average human? What constitutes average here?

The goalpost moving is getting exhausting.

Re:GPT-6 Astra on Saturday September 05, 2026 @12:13AM (#49573013)
The G in AGI stands for general, correct?
Re:GPT-6 Astra on Friday September 04, 2026 @12:11PM (#49566611)
Here's my definition of AGI

Would I trust to let an AI, with zero human input or oversight, to diagnose, come up with treatment plan, and ultimately operate on my l5/s1 disc that's been bugging me for the better part of my adult life?

Would I take a novel drug "discovered" by AI (I mean entirely by AI, no human input, remember we are talking AGI) that promises to cure some chronic neurological disorder?

In both of those cases, they are the biggest hell-no's I can emphatically say.

Until I can say hell yes to that question, we aren't close.

Preempting those who say "Well your doctor/drug companies are probably mostly using/going to be using AI to do that" -- not what we are talking about here, and in both cases, not AGI (and I would probably find a new doctor)

Be the change you wish to see in the world!

Hopefully you are apprenticing many junior engineers!

How nice it is to live in complete comfort with no worries whatsoever of your own government coming after you.

For many that lived during the times of the Stazi in East Germany, or late Soviet days, or currently in China and North Korea however...

Ask one of those people who survived those regimes and ask if they should "just get over yourself" -- it shouldn't be too hard to find one.

Luxottica, the owners of Ray-Ban since 1999, realized after they survived the expose on their blatant monopolistic price gouging that none of this sticks. People just see something they recognize and go with it.
Re:Hello, me. It's been a while on Friday August 14, 2026 @09:29AM (#49298409)
Two reflections from me:

- Starting my career during the beginning of and through the peak of the open floor plan office trained me to use headphones as a signal to others that I wanted to be left alone / needed to focus on my task. Now I catch myself doing it in other contexts subconsciously, like the gym, and have to stop myself sometimes to make sure I am doing it intentionally. I am at the age now where like you, I either prefer silence, or reminisce about the bygone days where people struck up conversations, past the usual pleasantries - just deep conversation with a total stranger that you may or may not ever see again, which wearing headphones takes away that possibility.

- silence is generally, in my opinion, for content people and/or people not struggling with a mental illness. I'd venture a guess that our field skews towards people who have negative internal voices. Having something playing as a distraction can take you away from those destructive thoughts. I had to do a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy and soul searching to be content with silence.

Please, for the love of God, speak to someone who is actually from a war torn country and understand how privileged all of us have been to live in the west. Even the wars we have been part of in the middle east have been minor disruptions to the Pax Americana: we really don't feel the effect of the wars we are in.(another problem in of itself).

99% of us got to grow up without the fear of military violence, and go about our lives.

And its going to be incredible to watch how many of our own country will be gleefully cheering this on as if the replacement will be better for them.
Unrelated - but reminds me of my favorite quote by tenderlove:

"microservices turn function calls into distributed computing problems"

Re:Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop on Thursday July 23, 2026 @10:47AM (#49022531)
"I will say nothing new!"

- St John of Damascus

> it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.

Thank you for recognizing this. As much as the developer community has come out against companies non-competes in the past, we should come down on even harder on one of our own stealing, because this does the most harm against the case against non-competes. It's grosser in the sense that one company doing a foul thing is bad, but ideally people can band together and work to dismantle the foul thing. But a person legitimizing the foul thing is the greater harm.

Re:GPT-5.6 on Thursday July 09, 2026 @04:47PM (#48852163)
I have both as well. I trust the output of Claude to a higher degree than what I get with Codex. I always have claude review codex output. That being said, I find gpt 5.5 more generically useful at a wider breadth of tasks. Straight coding though, it's no contest.

Obligatory YMMV, maybe your prompting style fits gpt better. We forget that this matters a lot

Re:TabFont – guitar tabs rendered as you type on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @04:05PM (#48836770)
I was excited for a second, because this is one piece of the puzzle (chords), then numerals solve melodies (you can just type something like 0-1 for open string first string, etc), then just need something for ornamentation. Seems like it only matches against a known set of chords, though.
I am glad! But you are indeed selling your own product here, correct?
This reads like a paid testimonial.
I know that these types of comments are not really popular here, but this struck a chord with me because I feel the same. They aren't remotely close.

I have codex right now purely because they gave me a month free of ChatGPT Pro, so I have been using it in between my usage resets with claude. Since it's "free money" for me I have been using it exclusively on xHigh.

One of my most frequent prompts is "hey codex worked on ____, but it didn't quite hit the mark, can we review the work..."

Yes, part of this is normal even within the same model -- you have the highest power model review the work for correctness, refactoring opportunities, and so on, but man I tell you, I don't know what it is about codex, this is obviously one guy's anecdote -- same prompting style, same repository documentation ala MD files, same skills, way different results.

All that to say, maybe the bug report is on to something here, and it can be fixed.

Re:Vite+ Beta on Thursday July 02, 2026 @09:13AM (#48761057)
Don't be so negative nancy here!

I have been doing "modern web" things since essentially day zero (you kids with your fancy JIT compiled javascript interpreters!)

SvelteKit, and by extension, Vite, has been the single most productive webstack I have ever used. If this offers anything on top of that, I welcome it with open arms.

Far from being a meme!

Re:What to Learn to Be a Graphics Programmer on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @09:52PM (#48755475)
My focus area in college was Computer Graphics. There is not enough focus about the math in this article, it just kind of passively mentions it. "Well you can get by with just a little bit of this and that" -- Linear Algebra is huge! So is an Engineering style Calculus course -- not your business calc. Those two require a year of their own to gain mastery. IMO, pick up:

Linear Alegbra Done Right Calculus Better Explained Concrete Mathmetics.

Then you can move on to the low level APIs.

Re:Claude Sonnet 5 on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @12:02AM (#48742102)
I am another skilled senior, have been coding since I was 7, although you have a few more years of experience on me, and am commenting here just for the goldilocks moment, as I have read and reflected on both of your comments and find my reality is somewhere in the middle.

On personal projects, where I am in charge of all the hats (product development, UI, UX, backend, security, server admin, etc) -- absolutely crazy force multiplier. You get a nice suite of backend and e2e tests running, with full business scenario layered on top of that, and constantly running agents to do the coding, another agent on a higher level of reasoning to review that work, and sometimes occasionally poping into another competitors model to review their work just for added comfort -- it feels like wizardry. I am not vibing it, but I wouldn't say I am carefully scrolling through every line. I review whats fundamentally important, especially when it comes to data, overall structure, and large, cross cutting concerns, but I would be lying if I say some code doesn't land that I don't read. But I have the security of the test suites and validations , so I pour more effort into that.

It's a nice self reinforceing loop.

All of this might sound like I agree with you, and to some extent I do, but I am realizing as the apps I have built out like a cannon shot out of hell with tremendous speed and polish right out of the gate are starting to slow down. Feature adds are getting more complex. My memory is not what it used to be. Each run and pass through the code consumes more of my tokens and limits. I am starting to do less in the same amount of time. Codex did a vertical slice of a feature for me (well defined and well planned). It contained functionality that has historically plagued us developers -- the dreaded time. I used xHigh GPT 5.5. It had obvious bugs, but I wanted the robots to catch it. I popped it in claude (on the new sonnet 5! heyo!) -- Claude caught the bugs. Even said they "immediately stood out" I wondered how this happened. Frontier model from company A was evaluated by workhorse model from company B. All of this again took massive amounts of usage. And time.

And this is -- best case scenario, perfect world, everything is in perfect alignment.

Now for the work reality.

Multiple product and experience owners. Multiple dev teams. Different enterprise teams support services you rely on. You don't have full unfettered access to frontier models. You have to use copilot, or some other enterprise harness, and you run out of credits for the month, you are SOL. It's not as good as your claude, you think to yourself, but hey, its familiar enough, and you have 5k credits left for the month for Opus 4.8, better make the best of it. But now you burned half of them working on that Transactional Bug that was mixing synchronous and asynchronous semantics that the other guy's model should have picked up on. What happened? Maybe he didn't use Opus, maybe he used Haiku, maybe his prompt was bad. Who knows. Gotta fix it. Oh, you gotta reach across the isle and put in a request to get the Enterprise team to look at this caching inconsistency on user data that you need and is really the source of your race conditions. Tick tick tick. Model limits approaching. You start wondering if you just did all this by hand like "in the old days" would you have got it done correctly faster? Or at least, cheaper. You'll never know.

Yes.

I quoted something from deep in the article.

Did you read my entire comment, and assume the least bit of positive intent?

I acknowledged the main points the article brought up. I highlighted a glaring discrepancy, from my point of view.

When police act unjustly, hastily, or rash, in my country, it gets at least equal weight (typically more). We don't just focus entirely on the person or party who triggered the reaction.

Anyways, the reason I commented anything at all was, as someone who values true unbiased and objective journalism, something we need now more than ever, this is clearly falling short of their stated goals -- from their editorial policy:

"Doing journalism means taking responsibility for the public. We are aware of our biases and strive not for artificial objectivity but fairness."

Seems like a complete lack of awareness of the strong Anti-american bias, and a lack of taking responsibility for the Belgian public.

"Belgian police willingly comply with U.S. ambassador's request, and Belgian police stopped your reporting"

FTFY

> a foreign ambassador had Belgian police remove us

Belgian police removed us.

FTFY again.

The article is making a good point, especially the hilarious irony of all the private companies, and US being complicit in limiting press freedom. But it also fails to recognize the agency and complicitness of the Belgian authorities as well, and makes them out to be some sort of innocent bystandards -- "Oh look those poor Belgians being bullied by the big bad US!" If they didn't want to remove you, they simply could have not.

Re:Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development on Monday June 29, 2026 @04:07PM (#48724453)
I tried to run it on a M4 Air for shits and giggles.

After about 1 minute the entire machine basically bricked and I had to hard reset :D

Re:Apple increases MacBook and iPad prices by 20% on Saturday June 27, 2026 @10:52AM (#48698800)
I imagine your work machine, just like mine and everyone I've ever had, has application level limits to how much resources it can consume, spotify picks up on the limits, and adjusts accordingly?

As to what its doing with all those extra resources on your linux box... shrug maybe using your laptop to train its models or mine crypto?

Re:Apple increases MacBook and iPad prices by 20% on Thursday June 25, 2026 @03:36PM (#48678202)
"Hey Opus, migrate this site from jekyll to astro" doesn't work?

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