News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

giamma

Re:Google struggling to make money from AI Mode on Thursday October 29, 2026 @07:38AM (#50287432)
AI Mode raised overall searches by 12%, yet Google is loosing money because they cannot serve advertisement like before.
Re:Swedish government offices to ban ChatGPT and Claude on Friday October 23, 2026 @09:45AM (#50208900)
I believe the problem is related to staff using free plans of Claude and ChatGPT.

I don't know for ChatGPT but Claude claims that it will keep your chat private and not use your data for training if you are on a paid plan [1], unless you decide otherwise: "By default, we will not use your inputs or outputs from our commercial products (e.g. Claude for Work, Anthropic API, Claude Gov, etc.) to train our models."

The same statement is missing from the free plan policy page [2] So it's totally reasonable for a Government to block its staff from using free services as this may leak sensitive information. We are doing the same in my organization hoping to protect our intellectual property.

[1] https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/7996868-is-my-data-us...

[2] https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023580-is-my-data-u...

Re:Google Cloud Service Disruption in UK on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:59AM (#50163666)
Affects not only UK but also Western Europe [0]

[0] https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/Xs2XTHzAVC9YnafnPy...

Re:Java sealed classes and exhaustive pattern matching on Monday October 19, 2026 @03:53AM (#50149574)
I like the approach. As interesting as certain JVM languages can be (e.g. Scala, Kotlin, Clojure) they are not widely adopted in the industry.

I have been working in product development for 25+ years, and I have friends in different organizations all over Italy, where I live. They told me many horror stories of clients who had custom software built by consultants using Scala because it was cool, and few years later the consultants disappeared and the client remained with a sophisticate piece of software that is crucial for their business, which was written in a language that no other consultant wants to touch.

In short, while there are better languages out there, Java is a decent language with a large developer base and from a long term perspective and from a risk management point of view, Java is still the best choice for me. The latest revision of the Tiobe index shows Java at fourth place while Kotlin and Scala rank respectively 32nd and 40th place.

Re:Nitter project received cease and desist on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @08:31AM (#49447866)
Possible alternative? https://twitterwebviewer.com/
Re:X sends in the lawyers to shut down open source project on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @08:30AM (#49447857)
Possible alternative? https://twitterwebviewer.com/
Re:The Amazon Tax on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @11:45AM (#49347450)
I live in Italy, Amazon opened its Italian branch about 15 years ago. Initially it had a smaller catalog of products, with products sold almost entirely by Amazon. They were delivering packages in 3 days and the price was almost always much better than any other online or physical shop.

Over the years they largely improved the delivery time. Now if I am ordering a package before 4PM there is a high chance I will get it the next day in the morning. Prices however became higher and higher, at the point that for many products Amazon is not that convenient anymore: if you need home appliance (TV, dishwasher etc) other online or physical shops are now significantly cheaper. If you look sport equipment (e.g. climbing, mountain bike, hiking) the specialized shops are usually cheaper as long as you are OK to wait for longer delivery time and maybe combine 2 or more products to reduce the shipping costs.

I still find Amazon convenient during prime days and black Friday, and because of the large catalog with many alternatives and sometimes useful reviews (need a new shower head, a new mouse, a hole puncher, a tire for the bicycle...) but prices are not as good as they used to be. But if you need something in a hurry, the fact that you can order today and get it tomorrow is a big plus.

Re:Tesla Balance Bike on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @11:45AM (#49008641)
It depends what you do with such bikes. My son at 5 y.o. rode green trails in a bike park with a woom bike (not a balance bike), and I have seen other dads bring kids with balance bikes to bike parks.

If that is your objective you are ok to spend a few hundred dollars on a kid bike if that gives you the hope you will be saving a lot more than that from the dentist.

This said, a dad like me whose passion are expensive bikes, is very likely to be willing to spend a few hundreds on a kids bike, especially if you have more than one kid and you plan to pass the bike to the other son when the elder one outgrows it.

Re:Tesla Balance Bike on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @11:33AM (#49008438)
I agree, my sons learned cycling on woom bikes. They were the only brand in Europe that offered brake levers for small hands and crank arms with appropriate length.
Re:Tesla Balance Bike on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @03:51AM (#49003190)
This is a balance bike meant to attract the dads who are fans of the brand rather than a balance bike meant to be good for kids.

First the handlebar is too large for small hands and comes with no grips, second the top tube is too wide to be comfortable between the legs and the whole frame is just edges.

If you want a good balance bike look for brands like prevelo [0] or woom [1] who have been designing kid bikes for years.

[0] https://prevelo.com/products/alpha-zero

[1] https://woom.com/en_INT/balance-bikes/self-balancing-bike/wo...

Re:Orion Browser by Kagi on Monday July 20, 2026 @04:00AM (#48975571)
As a Firefox user, I make extensive usage of the location bar and the fact that Firefox allows you to search in history, bookmarks etc. etc.

It's so convenient to me, that I rarely use bookmarks. I keep a large history, and Firefox will efficiently allow me to find web sites I previously visited because it will effectively search in my browsing history when I type one or more words in the location bar, looking not only into the URL but also into the title.

This is something that I always miss when I try a different browsers. Also, while Mozilla Foundation has many issues, Firefox is opensource. I am looking forward into Ladybird but it will take time before it's usable. Until then, Firefox remains my favorite browser.

Re:Xiaomi-Robotics-1 on Monday July 20, 2026 @03:21AM (#48975319)
Cool video but it forgot to pack underwear in the bag!
Re:Xiaomi-Robotics-1 on Monday July 20, 2026 @03:20AM (#48975315)
I watched it on mute and was still satisfying, so I guess it's not the music.
Re:I also filed the corners off my MacBook on Thursday July 16, 2026 @10:44AM (#48935320)
Kind of, for example I play games with motion blur activated, but my son switches it off.
Re:I also filed the corners off my MacBook on Thursday July 16, 2026 @06:13AM (#48932537)
It's always entertaining for me to realize that there are people who find very annoying things that I don't even notice.
I think that there are several points in the article.

1. Bun had quality issues. The quality issues were known to the Zig maintainers because Bun was one of the most popular and biggest projects using Zig so they were closely monitoring it.

2. The Zig maintainers considered the quality of the Bun codebase itself not good (but it's also true that typically implementors of programming languages have high expectations for code quality).

3. Bun has been rewritten in Rust using Claude

4. The fact that the test suite for Bun passes now that the code has been rewritten does not guarantee a better quality, because the coverage of such test suite was not enough in the first place to detect the quality issues when the code was manually written in Zig. So how can it be sufficient now to certify the code quality of the Rust rewrite?

The investigation is about interoperability of Apple’s operating systems iOS and iPadOS with alternative consumer clouds

Older »