News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

gavinray

My spouse and I have a rule that if we think a discussion is going to be emotionally charged, we have it over text in different rooms.

It sounds autistic, but writing and reading allow you to be much more precise, careful, and deliberate with your words and helps reduce impulsive outbursts.

This has worked really well for us, as crazy as it sounds.

Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen on Monday November 02, 2026 @02:31PM (#50342333)
Based on our current understanding of LLM's, it shouldn't be.

This sort of throws a wrench in the whole "stochastic parrot" idea...

I am not surprised, though I expect many to be.

I think echoes of this still exist in Eastern European aptitude.

I've worked with a lot of outsourced development/contractors in my time. Consistently, the best experiences have been with Eastern Europeans.

Do you mind being slightly drizzled on?

If not, Seattle/Bellevue are a great option. Or Portland even.

I would agree with you, until I asked someone who lived there how it is that people working normal jobs like Bartenders can afford to live anywhere in SF.

I was told that there are rent-subsidy programs that allow people making relatively low wages to pay e.g. $300-800/mo for a 1-bedroom apartment

My thought after hearing that is that, unless you're making north of $300-400k, it's probably better to make around $50-60k and collect subsidies + benefits. The middle income group gets shafted.

Re:5-MeO-DMT sometimes cancels the Ebbinghaus illusion on Friday October 30, 2026 @01:49PM (#50307578)
Having done 4-AcO-DMT and Psilocybin (4-HO-DMT), I would not be able to distinguish them in a blind test.

I actually prefer 4-AcO because it's easier to get a consistent dose with (mushrooms vary in potency) and doesn't cause the nausea that consuming dried mushrooms sometimes causes.

Can anyone give an explanation in layman's terms for those of us finance/economic illiterate why this is happening?

The demand for compute for AI is increasing, why would a compute producer lose value?

Re:The first wired XR glasses powered by Android XR on Friday October 30, 2026 @09:26AM (#50303569)
Why root it? You can already mirror screens
Re:The first wired XR glasses powered by Android XR on Friday October 30, 2026 @09:25AM (#50303555)
I have Viture glasses and love them
Re:Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance on Friday October 30, 2026 @08:04AM (#50302780)
Not sure why this is getting downvoted.

One of the only surviving darknet markets only takes Monero as currency.

Make of that information what you will

Re:DoorDash to Acquire Instacart on Thursday October 29, 2026 @03:51PM (#50294815)
I spent years in prison and homeless, lol

Being denied housing or employment was not just a regular occurrence but the norm for me for a large portion of my life

Unfortunately they have to actually execute and have identical semantics to the target source

I recall seeing a project based on DuckDB parser and engine which emulated dialects for one of these but because the sortinh and other behavior is different it wasn't usable

Re:DoorDash to Acquire Instacart on Thursday October 29, 2026 @11:48AM (#50290967)
I think we're on the same page:

  > "a just society should generally tolerate the intolerant, reserving self-preserving actions for only when intolerance poses a concrete threat to liberty and stability."
Freedom of speech and self-expression applies to just that: words

If intolerance or hate poses a physical threat, or in any way infringes on the liberty and personal autonomy of others, a line has been crossed and must be swiftly dealt with.

Re:DoorDash to Acquire Instacart on Thursday October 29, 2026 @11:15AM (#50290416)
Sure, it's a dick move. But it's important to distinguish "shouldn't" from "legally can't".

Should you be racist? No. Should you call someone fat and ugly? No.

But personal liberty and freedom require we allow people to make choices and have opinions we don't personally agree with.

Re:DoorDash to Acquire Instacart on Thursday October 29, 2026 @11:06AM (#50290292)
I'm curious to hear other people's perspectives on why they think they should be illegal?

For example: Suppose you hire someone to help you move furniture.

You can decide you dont like the color of their shoes and tell them to kick rocks.

You dont owe anyone a job, and labor for pay is a contractual agreement, nothing more.

Because those tests are the only ones that prove the connector is working as intended

Our connectors receive a generic query IR from a Datafusion-based engine

Each connector is then responsible for faithfully translating the query IR into the semantically equivalent query for the underlying data source

For a SQL DB this would be a SQL query, for MongoDB a JSON predicate query, for csv/json files it would be an in-memory predicate engine, etc

Running the generated query against the target data source and asserting that this doesn't throw an error and that the records returned are both correct and in the right order is the true test

Re:Why Is This Fingerprinting Script Creating Bioweapons? on Thursday October 29, 2026 @10:53AM (#50290098)
In American English, poem is pronounced as rhyming with "tome"

I could imagine in British English it might be a two-syllable "poh-ehm" though

I'll publish a few of my convos

1. Sleep debts effect on muscle size and strength gain

https://share.gemini.google/Gvdb5Q02INrl

2. Fish oil and extra cellular vesicles

https://share.gemini.google/fem9EBCe4mfy

3. Pharmacology question about human-equivalent dose

https://share.gemini.google/RWNYJ2eiNjcU

Gemini, for whatever reason, has consistently been the best for explaining scientific concepts for me.

Especially with the recent addition of graphic visualization widgets

It manages to strike the perfect balance between depth and style of prose that other Frontier models just can't quite seem to match

Re:Nixpkgs for the Front End Impaired on Thursday October 29, 2026 @09:24AM (#50288649)

  > "Nix is lazy, so the emitted code wraps an expression in nix.thunk(() => ...)"
Why not use Generator functions rather than manually wrapping everything?

On-demand value materialization is what Generators are for

  > pgVolvra records every row change on the tables you choose. For each change, it keeps the row as it was, and the row as it became, along with who made the change, when, and in which transaction. When something goes wrong, it uses that record to put the affected rows back, and it touches nothing else.
You've essentially replicated the WAL s functionality

I'd imagine you could actually build this reusing a lot of the existing WAL code if you were Inclined

The English version is found in the second half of the page
Re:Why Is This Fingerprinting Script Creating Bioweapons? on Thursday October 29, 2026 @08:12AM (#50287725)
Second line is 7 syllables though?

  > "add_or_sub_big: Qwenputer scores 97.5%, the same as with a Python tool, and 87.5% for base Qwen."
More than one of the tests in the post show sub 100% accuracy with the embedded computer.

I'm sorry but I'm not sure I understand how a calculator that isn't 100% accurate is useful?

If this actually works, this is such a huge boon. Let me share why:

I work on connectors to various datasources, mostly SQL DB's

The most useful tests are the integration tests, sending actual queries to the source

For most DB's we have a giant Docker Compose which runs a local instance

But things like Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, Athena suck to test because we need an external hosted instance

I would kill to be able to run test versions of all of these locally

Re:Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @05:10PM (#50280932)
I used Gemini 4 Argon (High) from the Android app with the original image and following prompt:

  > "Edit this image to color code the benchmarks scores using a gradient scheme that is immediately obvious"
Here's the direct Gemini chat link:

https://share.gemini.google/g6LC7spTH0cO

  > are they essentially holding back sort of unweighted parameters built in to the model architecture which they can then populate with new context during 'sleep' and then using the techniques outlined in the 'dream' section to reinforce...
Sort of. As the model is interacted with, short term "memories" are accumulated in a sort of buffer/cache. During "sleep" these "memories" are given a ranking/score, and the useful bits are integrated into the weights.

They say the weight update can be done by computing a transform where the end state is the old weights with the addition of the useful semantic knowledge contained in memories. Rather than just additively chucking the entire memory concepts into weights. That's pretty neat.

The subtext for the memory architecture diagram sums the whole thing up pretty tidily I think:

  > Input streams from the active phase are stored in short-term memory before entering the sleep cycle, which bifurcates into Consolidation (transferring fragile short-term tokens into expanded long-term parametric memory using low-rank structures and MoE) and Dreaming (autonomous self-improvement via synthetic routing with random experts and RL refinement).
Re:Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @01:19PM (#50277130)
Benchmark scores recolored for readability:

https://i.imgur.com/IDFGuJU.jpeg

Re: on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @12:24PM (#50276248)
Spending up to 4.9% of their wealth to avoid a 5% tax is the fiscally logical thing to do

Older »