News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

kevindamm

Re:The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978) on Friday October 23, 2026 @07:07AM (#50207144)
I think it's more than an implementation detail. With an intermediate step of source code compiling & linking, there is a mechanical process that checks for well-formedness that would otherwise be skipped. This is especially important if you're editing a large codebase and not one-shotting something from scratch.

There are also times when you want the final product to be able to target different architectures and platforms. Generating into a higher level language allows for re-targeting the code with only changing a few compiler and linker flags. I would much rather that than hoping the LLM is feature- (and bug-)compatible between generation runs.

Re:Jeeves. Reasoning improves Jev-like decision models on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @08:58AM (#49908294)
You specifically said "digital" in GGP comment. I took that to mean that you were choosing the abstraction above which those details matter. Yes, at the physical level all circuitry is effectively continuous and stochastic. Analog circuitry is the manipulation of these to give a more continuous state, digital circuitry uses voltage ranges and a forbidden middle to enforce a kind of noise immunity. When you dig deep enough that the noise is a point of concern, you are no longer looking at a digital Boolean.

Just making sure we're being super pedantic.

Re:AI companies leak data to advertisers [pdf] on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @08:12AM (#49891861)
The same assumptions are true about giving any human that shareable link. They could pass it on to anyone, screenshot it, paste it into their own session. This has been true since before "share with link" permissions on Docs and elsewhere.

If you click "provide a shareable link" you should decide (and behave) as though that made it public.

I'm not saying it's good privacy posture on the side of the companies, but how else do you think that would work if there isn't any authentication step for the person viewing it? Even with authentication, "three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead."

Re:Jeeves. Reasoning improves Jev-like decision models on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @07:58AM (#49891701)
Not quite.. that boolean is about whether the voltage exceeds some threshold. It's not about how close the voltage is to the circuit's maximum possible threshold, or how much it exceeds the threshold.

In an analog circuit, maybe.

Re:What even is an OS now? on Friday September 25, 2026 @07:22PM (#49851349)
An AI assistant can give different answers for the same inputs. An application written by an AI assistant, if it doesn't just call an LLM at runtime, will mostly likely produce the same answer for the same inputs. That is, unless there's something intrinsic to its business logic that makes it nondeterministic.

Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.

Re:AI is breaking our proxies for expertise on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @12:17PM (#49714826)
They are different -- higher level languages like C++ and Python surface the abstractions, making them more apparent to the human reading the code. LLMs typically hide the abstractions. You can still read the source code, sure, but even the latest models will produce a lot of repetition of utility functions and produce data structures of various shapes without commonality or reuse. This is moving in the opposite direction that machine code -> assembly -> C -> ... were heading.
Re:Making Startups Powerful on Sunday September 13, 2026 @01:20PM (#49686251)
Prioritizing something other than 7% week over week growth. This doesn't appeal as much to venture capitalists so we may have to try it with some bootstrapped products first.
Re:I advertise malicious software on Google Ads on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @09:35AM (#49626317)
Having seen the abuse vectors that get thrown at this and similar products, I suspect it is less about whether they care and more about finding a suitable threshold for some arbitrary features, or moments of demand exceeding the available moderators. The repetitive 6 minutes make me suspect there are reports timing out in the moderator queue and the automod doesn't like images or something.

Or, perhaps a part of the process that is two or three teams away, like photo attachments being deemed too large (getting passed from Maps UI through internal task queues to some abuse analysis, or even as early as the frontends that take the request). Plausible, especially as phone photos have steadily increased in size while some thresholds remain ossified.

I'm outside that world now so I can't investigate or effect change.. there used to be people there who care about these things. I suspect there still are.

Even more likely is that other priorities exceed the capacity of the headcount on the relevant teams. I don't know if that counts as the company not caring. It's hard to attribute intent on corporate-scale embodiments. Perhaps that's the root of the problem, I wonder if any collective that reaches hundreds of thousands of members can ever exhibit that. Maps is a huge product that a small competitor could hardly compete with but I'd love to be proved wrong (either on the smallness or considerateness aspects).

Re:Black hole singularity is a surface not a point on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @04:36PM (#49440245)
Kind of, but not really.. though there are simple models with electrons as a point charge, a more accurate model involves the electron field describing the probability of an electron existing at any region in space (not to be confused with the electromagnetic field, the medium in which photons propagate).
Re:If you're a button, you have one job on Thursday July 23, 2026 @10:09PM (#49030498)
I get that's what you're suggesting. The locking per-axis or across all axes is fine but doesn't address the problem I'm talking about. In gimbal lock, which many graphics programmers first encounter by using only sequential rotations around the camera's axes, you can get into an orientation where you lose one of the three degrees of freedom.

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

I think they're referring to the Enterprise sales where people have felt pressured to sign six- or seven- figure contracts after usage goes above a certain point. However, all the articles I've read on it are from companies using Cloudflare to do suspicious things with rotating domains through IP addresses, or doing things to try and get around service costs. It also seems like they give you months of warning and will try to convince you to sign up for Enterprise, they don't just shut things off. But their sales team seems to portray themselves as legal, support, or compliance teams sometimes so not exactly forthcoming in their approach either.

I'm a happy user of Cloudflare, but if you're using it for domain registration and hosting infrastructure, you need to see it as a single point of failure. Any account issues and you won't be able to point your domain to an alternate host while you work things out. Any service outage in CF systems will similarly lock you out of routing around the failure. It's better to have DNS off of cloudflare if they're handling your hosting services also. Or host elsewhere and only handle domains on cloudflare. Their domain pricing doesn't add any costs over the base registrar cost, so the latter is a reasonable option.

It doesn't have to imply replacement. Do you stop thinking just because other humans can?
Re:If you're a button, you have one job on Monday July 13, 2026 @01:09PM (#48895697)
If you're suggesting that the different columns of a comptometer would relate to different rotational axes of the ball, you will likely run into gimbal lock in 3D.

You could build an interface in 4D around quaternions but that is much more complicated than my suggestion (even including the part where you learn morse code).

The quoted part of my comment is in reference to the core topic of TFA where iOS and Nothing/Android photo apps handle the "pressed again during rotation" action differently. That "rotate the typewriter ball" interface runs against the same problem, by necessity of rotating a physical ball.

Re:If you're a button, you have one job on Sunday July 05, 2026 @12:41AM (#48791312)
Now remove the spacebar, combine the two buttons into a single one for "tone" and adapt it to morse code. All the buttons still do only one thing and now there's only one button!

And, you don't have to worry about what to do in the case that someone hits the "rotate ball" button while it's still rotating.

Re:Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model on Friday June 26, 2026 @05:45PM (#48692382)
Why remove the code and binary artifacts, though? Don't you want to verify that the business logic is accurate and the processing is deterministic?

In some circumstances there is no substitute for something that you know will produce the same answer for a given input, consistently. And that's before even considering the watts per response.

Re:Game Engine White Papers Commander Keen on Monday June 15, 2026 @06:29PM (#48547894)
ELI5: explain like I'm five,

ELIF: explain like I'm forty.

Re:On Labubu and the Hyperreal on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @06:59PM (#48301916)
key chain furby lootboxes
Actually the reason people experience vection in VR is not focal depth but the dissonance between what their eyes are telling them and what their inner ear and tactile senses are telling them.

It's possible they get headaches from the focal length issues but that's different.

Re:The threat eating away at museum treasures on Tuesday January 27, 2026 @09:56PM (#46790494)
Would a high enough dose of UV also work? I suppose it would ruin most pigmentation too, though.
Re:Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead (2016) on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @10:25AM (#46527452)
Pure functional programming and lazy evaluation.. sure, you could create classes and a meta-function that selectively eval's thunks at a time, but the call site of that kind of library would look atrocious..

You might be able to hack on some of the datatype semantics into JS prototype-based inheritance (I'd rather start with TypeScript at that point, but then we're back at the "why isn't it a library" debate) to keep those ontologies from being semantically separate, but that's an uphill battle with some of JS's implicit value conversions.

I consider Logic Programming languages to be the go-to counterargument to TFA but yeah, anything with lazy eval and a mature type system are strong counterexamples too.

Re:Hash tables in Go and advantage of self-hosted compilers on Saturday December 20, 2025 @09:34AM (#46336462)
Almost made it into 1.18 but looks like it doesn't add enough value and has some open questions like what to use for a backing data type and what complexity promises to make.

https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/47331

Re:"Are you the one?" is free money on Monday December 15, 2025 @06:54PM (#46282763)
It's not a yes/no per contestent, it's per edge between contestants. There are n(n-1)/2 of these.

A true answer for a potential match is actually a state update for all of the (n-1) edges connecting either contestant, that's 2(n-2) edges that can be updated to be false. Some of these may already be known from previous rounds' matchups but that's still more than a single binary.

Re:I Tried Gleam for Advent of Code, and I Get the Hype on Saturday December 13, 2025 @04:16PM (#46258152)
I think that LLMs will be complemented best with a declarative language, as inserting new conditions/effects in them can be done without modifying much (if any!) of the existing code. Especially if the declarative language is a logic and/or constraint-based language.

We're still in early days with LLMs! I don't think we're anywhere near the global optimum yet.

Re:Is it a bubble? on Wednesday December 10, 2025 @08:08PM (#46226384)
Agreed; e.g.

Moon base. Blimp ports. Asbestos. Monorail. Radio newspapers.

There are others, I'm sure.

Re:Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration on Wednesday December 10, 2025 @05:05PM (#46224547)
Broccoli Man! classic

https://youtu.be/3t6L-FlfeaI (2010)

To be fair, a lot of this changed after that video became a meme.. but I'd bet that the broccoli man template is still trending on memegen

Have we abandoned the term "generate" already?
Re:HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers on Saturday December 06, 2025 @12:19PM (#46174938)
and you could shim these gaps with custom components, hypothetically
Re:Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months on Thursday December 04, 2025 @10:19AM (#46148605)
You can go one step further than that and calculate a fairness measure using something like the Gini coefficient (*) and analyze how much it has changed over time.

[*] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

Re:Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game? on Wednesday December 03, 2025 @11:54AM (#46136805)
replace the scope with a dimmable light and we might have a better solution than low-decibel audio hum

or perhaps live wire into the seat, tied into a transistor on this signal, so if performance drops enough you're sure to be alerted to it

Re:Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game? on Wednesday December 03, 2025 @10:53AM (#46135913)
The source is electrical noise, but the solution of isolating the audio chain from the computer's USB means that in the future you might not notice when you've introduced another GPU memory bandwidth hog into your rendering loop.

Good story, though.

Older »