News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

junofan

Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @01:18AM (#50348696)
At least the Qwen3.5-0.8B loop bug isn’t that special (or rather not something worth extrapolating). I literally had this issue last week and told Astra to just go fix it.
There’s certainly cultural reasons. If investors could make a buck off Pierre Zuckerbeurg, they certainly would.
Re:Official Claude Code extension compromise on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:39PM (#50310512)
It’s like if 5,000 people bought iPhones at Costco and they all exploded, and Apple says “well we didn’t sell them.” Sure, but maybe not the perfect thing to communicate immediately.
Re:Official Claude Code extension compromise on Friday October 30, 2026 @11:06AM (#50304968)
Is the extension not Anthropic.claude-code developed by Anthropic? Been a while since I used Cursor.
Re:DoorDash to Acquire Instacart on Thursday October 29, 2026 @12:25PM (#50291626)
Dispatched? Don’t drivers pick their jobs? They choose to go to the restaurant with the line.

Also, why would those who pay to be there have to wait in line, but people who get paid by a third-party service to be there don’t? That doesn’t make sense.

I don’t get why we’re talking legislation; it’s basic courtesy.

If I said “hey, here’s $5 if you go cut the line at that restaurant,” does that make it right?

Somebody in the chain is likely getting profit sharing and, if so, definitely thinks about it (because that’s the whole point of such arrangements).
I mean more than a typo the keys look like some guy just typing in random numbers, and the company did say they had some deviations to procedure.
Re:The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @06:04PM (#50188303)
Aren’t they essentially Leninist? Like if they weren’t burning coal to make Nikes and iPhones they’d be burning it for something else? So what’s the point of my choices here? I’m not even complaining, but from a problem-solving standpoint, seems kind of irrelevant.
They were pretty much what we’d now call fraternity brothers recently out of William and Mary plus whomever else they could rope in.

You’re not really supposed to just vote in your self-interest. It’s a proxy for violence.

Re:US Suspends Visa Program for Tech Firms Including Microsoft on Thursday October 08, 2026 @02:20PM (#50009777)
> I know people get emotional on this matter but they don’t understand the process.

This kind of “logic”—the process is broken, therefore it’s okay to cheat—isn’t very popular with Americans.

The US can just declare extraterritorial jurisdiction. We do it for bioweapons. Uncle Sam doesn’t need an invite.

IIRC one of the FBI guys who investigated anthrax was like “yeah, it’s pretty obvious looking at what that lab was up to.”

The teams use a single homologated ECU to prevent driver aids. I would assume it doesn’t have a downlink on-track to prevent tampering, but presumably with umbilical cord connected in the garage during red flag they can make changes, which the FIA probably sent over. Who knows.
It’s already permitted and operating. Presumably they want the $XX million tax rebates, which haven’t yet been paid out according to this article. Maybe that’s the case in other places too.

Why not get people riled up over water under the bridge and not unpaid rebates? What can anybody do about it? Send the sheriff to lock out the facility?

The cult aspect is more salient. Ultimately the Atlantic piece comes down to controlling people, which is a little cult-like.
Re:Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance' on Saturday October 03, 2026 @06:43PM (#49948501)
A gram a day is more typical [1].

Still, that’s a lot to be tailgating like this lady was as shown in the court filing. Also, “[the arresting officer] told another officer that he ‘could see her carotid artery in my car. That thing was about to pop out of her neck.’”

Sounds like some wild decisions were being made.

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40385390/

Re:Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS on Saturday October 03, 2026 @12:38PM (#49945717)
Personally I’m switching to Omarchy the minute they’ve got an Apple silicon image. Been on macOS since the 90s. I just want to be able to tell the papercuts to go away. Not confident in Apple’s ability to scratch that itch anymore.
Re:Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city on Friday October 02, 2026 @11:39PM (#49941185)
There’s always Universal Basic Capital (owning stuff that makes more stuff) and you turn it up or down by allocating or deallocating stuff to making more stuff that makes stuff.
Re:Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe on Saturday September 26, 2026 @05:26PM (#49860693)
Feels like a hobbyhorse. The article discusses issues between the educator and the child, like:

> An even bigger problem, though, is muddle-headed thinking among educators. Some have fallen for the leftist canard that tests are harmful and grades are racist. Some have allowed reasonable worries about children’s mental health to warp into an excuse for low expectations. Some unhelpful habits acquired during the pandemic have stuck: children are still missing more lessons than before, and many teachers who relaxed their grading standards have failed to tighten up again.

I think we should look there and focus on what’s actually happening between the educator and the child.

I asked muse. It’s for codex-cli, and it routes through “OpenAI inference proxy”
That’s not even the end of the story. Anthropic has sued. They really want to sell their rifles to the government and retain control.
Re:The NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return mission has been canceled on Monday September 21, 2026 @05:03PM (#49793394)
> China stole design information regarding advanced thermonuclear weapons

Sounds like they blew it. What a shame.

Hah, our new ones are $1.3 million. https://www.sfmta.com/media/44081

Perhaps driven by restrictions on federal grants? https://media.api.sf.gov/documents/Briefing_Book_-_Muni_Fund...

Some cool tech. Wonder if we optioned the inductive charging system. https://www.gillig.com/buses/battery-electric/#1731934845437...

Re:Executive order on H-1B nonimmigrant visa administration on Saturday September 19, 2026 @01:00AM (#49763455)
A big problem is these political spectrums are not really coherent moral philosophies yet fulfill an individual’s need for that kind of structure. I think anyone would find that “a person in America has a larger carbon footprint than a person almost anywhere else; therefore it’s an ecological imperative to expel whomever we can“ is odious. So we just don’t think about it.
Re:I didn't sign the Fields medallists' letter on Thursday September 17, 2026 @05:54AM (#49738495)
Yes, and here towards the bottom the author gets to the reason he didn’t sign with the other medalists:

> I felt that there was nothing to be gained from criticizing AI companies for generating too many solutions too quickly.

> Under the circumstances, I think the best we can do is recognise the changes that are coming and try to work out the least unsatisfactory way of dealing with them.

Basically let’s make it a short-term problem and deal with it. Groups of people can deal with short term emergencies. Don’t turn it into a structural issue.

And in my view what’s the alternative in the letter exactly? The tools exist. Is there going to be drama every time somebody decides to use them?

Re:The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @02:40AM (#49622133)
Their privacy policy for normie subscribers says in plain English they use your Personal Data for research. I think it’s pretty unreasonable to use the service and expect otherwise.
You could probably train this out. I don’t think you need to develop elaborate filters. It doesn’t seem like that big a hill to climb if it’s important to people.
Re:100s of flights cancelled at UK airports due to ATC issue on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @04:06PM (#49616235)
Eh, I tried in 2017 with BA when their system went down and received nothing. There was magically a Black Lives Matter protest at Gatwick (or maybe LCY, can’t remember) on the same day, which isn’t covered apparently.
Isn’t their whole thing supposed to be spying on foreigners? They seem to be quite successful. There aren’t that many exchanges [1]. Could probably manage with cash, guns, and some know-how.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_poin...

Re:Stop Thinking of LLMs as Next-Token Predictors on Friday September 04, 2026 @03:49PM (#49569377)
Vacuous, like calling a V8 a “next piston firing predictor” because engines are designed so that one piston sets up the next in the firing order and technically there’s some nonzero probability any piston can (mis)fire next. It’s missing two pieces:

1. Useful work that has been done (the previously generated token sequence :: the mechanical work already accomplished)

2. The role of structure in relation to the application (post-training :: other components like crankshaft etc)

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