kibwen
Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:49AM (#50352694)
The idea of surnames is an anthropologically recent tradition. Humans living in small communities had no practical need for multiple names. Surnames mostly arise in societies with relatively strong centralized states so that the government has an easier time tracking its citizens.
Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:41PM (#50341495)
Common nicknames eventually just become given names on their own, like "Jack" or "John" or "Alex".
Re:Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault
on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:44AM (#50338400)
The purpose of the above comment is to highlight the flaw in the original premise. Surely we all agree that we would rather not be using a vibecoded cryptography library. But why is cryptography special? Why stop there? I would also rather not be using a vibecoded regex library, or a vibecoded codec parser, or a vibecoded web framework, etc.
The point being, if you weren't committed to maintaining your own implementation of a library before the advent of LLMs, having access to LLMs does not fundamentally change the calculus. The ability to generate code more quickly does not automatically grant an organization the capacity to maintain more code.
Re:Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault
on Monday November 02, 2026 @08:09AM (#50336354)
As every cryptographer will surely agree, having every company vibecode their own bespoke in-house replacement to OpenSSL will be a great improvement to security across the industry.
Re:BioWare co-founder: game execs "have never made a game" and don't g...
on Monday November 02, 2026 @07:55AM (#50336189)
It's even worse than that. The execs at these companies don't just not make games, they don't play games, either. They fundamentally cannot understand what makes a good game because they don't engage with the medium, and do not care to.
Re:AI delivers 'zero financial payoff' to most companies, Apollo econo...
on Sunday November 01, 2026 @09:15PM (#50332296)
No goalpost is being moved here. Don't assume that an aphorism coined in one domain generalizes to other domains, especially when we have evidence to the contrary.
Re:An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted...
on Sunday November 01, 2026 @08:36PM (#50332006)
Bad example, both cane sugar and corn syrup are extremely terrible for you in the quantities that exist in soda.
Re:Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault
on Sunday November 01, 2026 @08:30PM (#50331951)
I wouldn't say it's "interesting", rather that it's a natural result of incentive structures. If the AI labs try to sell their product as being good at finding bugs, then their expected valuation is the entire market cap of the existing static analysis industry, which is not very high. If they instead sell their product as being good at writing software, then their expected valuation is the "market cap" of the code-writing industry, a.k.a. the total spent on software development labor, which is very high. It doesn't matter what's true, only what promises to make them the most money.
Re:AI delivers 'zero financial payoff' to most companies, Apollo econo...
on Sunday November 01, 2026 @07:15PM (#50331389)
If that were universally true in all domains then all the best and most reliable software in the world would be written in interpreted languages, because they have the fastest iteration speed. Sometimes rapid low-quality iteration is just spinning your wheels.
Re:US Jobs Pickup May Keep Fed on Track to Hike Rates Again
on Sunday November 01, 2026 @02:53PM (#50329102)
Years of ZIRP have conditioned people into believing that rates at 5% are "high", when the historical reality is that 5% is approximately the mean rate over the past 70 years. Volcker famously broke the back of inflation in the 80s by pushing the interest rate up past 20%. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
Re:Brazilian Court Sanctions Lawyers for Prompt Injection in Court Filing
on Sunday November 01, 2026 @08:01AM (#50325244)
False advertising is a form of fraud that is already illegal.
Re:It's the Memory Latency, Stupid
on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:31AM (#50322953)
Heap allocations aren't really the culprit of the waste that the root comment is talking about. Indirection in general is, and passing around an allocator doesn't guard you against that. Virtual dispatch occurs even for objects on the stack.
Re:Code-execution flaw in UEFI firmware threatens most servers on plan...
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @04:16PM (#50280263)
To be fair, the misery of software developers is often directly attributable to the decisions of hardware engineers.
Re:Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption...
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @01:16PM (#50277056)
People do things based on motivation. People motivated by pride and passion know that their work reflects upon them, so they have an incentive to care about quality. People motivated by money know that their paychecks will keep arriving as long as they keep meeting a minimum bar, so they're not incentivized to care about quality, but they are incentivized to care about responsiveness and consistency. For critical software, adding in legal liability for one's work creates the quality incentive that's lacking in most professional roles, while retaining the accountability that we can't expect of volunteers.
Re:Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption...
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @11:43AM (#50275568)
Those percentage of SWE working on critical infrastructure should be licensed and legally liable, yes. You shouldn't need a license to build a CRUD app, just like nobody needs a license to build a treehouse in their backyard. You should need a license to work on a car's braking system (https://safetyresearch.net/toyota-unintended-acceleration-an...) or radiation therapy machines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25), just like you need a license to engineer a highway bridge.
Re:Four Months of Zig
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @10:03AM (#50273747)
Arenas aren't a free lunch either. You need a specific sort of memory access pattern, where large, conceptually related chunks of memory are being rapidly and predictably reclaimed, and if you don't have such a pattern then arenas are ceremony for no benefit. And the performance tradeoff is that you end up using more total memory than RAII because you're no longer eagerly reclaiming memory the moment it stops being used, but purposefully delaying your frees so that you can batch-reclaim it all at once. There are many cases where this makes sense, which, to reiterate, is why crates like bumpalo exist, which work gloriously well with Rust's lifetime system.
Re:Four Months of Zig
on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @10:03PM (#50268491)
Dropping vecs that contain strings does not make any Rust code in the real world slow. You would need to have a vec containing billions of strings, occupying several gigs of memory, before dropping such a structure took any perceptible amount of time. And for extreme cases like that, you can simply use arenas. The bumpalo crate is approximately as old as Zig is. The reason that people so rarely turn to arenas in Rust isn't because you can't do them, because you've always been able to, but rather because arenas are a very specific solution to a specific sort of memory access pattern, and going out of your way to strictly adhere to that pattern doesn't produce measurable differences for most software.
Re:Police are using AI to pull over drivers for 'suspicious' behavior
on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @08:38PM (#50267918)
That will require too much parking capacity. Cheaper to just instruct the cars to lock the doors and drive directly into the ocean.
Re:The new iPad mini
on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @10:08AM (#50259630)
> Which is why most of the PC world is on cheap 4k monitors still.
According to the Steam Hardware Survey for last month, 47.91% of Steam users are on 1920x1080; adding the 2.56% on 1920x1200 means that a majority of users are still on 2K. The next biggest chunk of users are on 2560x{1440, 1600}, at about 32%. Only 5% of users are on 4K resolutions or greater.
And these are gamers, who are more likely than the average user to care about graphical fidelity. Most of the PC world just does not care about 4K, period.
Re:Python's experimental JIT to be removed
on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @09:28AM (#50258961)
Assuming that the biggest bang-for-buck of JIT compilation is optimizing hot loops (which is also the biggest bang-for-buck of optimization in every other context as well), and assuming that, per the historical best practices, all hot loops in Python are already written in C (or Rust, these days), this outcome is somewhat what I would expect.
Re:Announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, ...
on Monday October 26, 2026 @09:50PM (#50253751)
Anyone credible? A nontrivial number of people also believe that humans used to ride dinosaurs around like in the Flintstones.
Re:The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf]
on Monday October 26, 2026 @09:44PM (#50253718)
Predictions markets are terrible mechanisms for this, because they require imposing an arbitrary time limit at which point the prediction will pay out. IOW, even if you religiously believed P=NP, but you think it would take at least two years to prove it, you would vote against the prediction if the deadline were one year.
Re:Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
on Monday October 26, 2026 @02:42PM (#50248854)
> It is impossible to quantify if they are now 13% less evil.
We could, but we would need access to Larry Ellison and a scale.
Re:Anthropic S-1
on Monday October 26, 2026 @09:30AM (#50243350)
The analogy doesn't check out. When a firearm company sells you a gun, they give up ownership of the gun. But Anthropic isn't giving up ownership of anything. They're a services company.
A better analogy would be a firearm company offering a service where one of their employees takes one of their guns and fires it off at whatever you ask them to. One can imagine that the liability implications of this service would be rather different from the perspective of the company.
Re:No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector
on Saturday October 24, 2026 @06:29PM (#50226072)
Microogletazon, here we come!
Re:Sony Retires Its Last 4K Blu-ray Player in Japan, PS5 Is All That's...
on Saturday October 24, 2026 @05:47PM (#50225687)
I think it would be fair to allow a hypothetical 1920s CD player to occupy most of a room. I'd be interested to see exactly how hard it would be to produce such a thing using the available technology of the era, though I'm still somewhat skeptical regarding the complexity and precision required of the laser motor (which unlike a vinyl needle needs to be controlled manually, rather than just following a groove mechanically) and the spindle motor (which needs to accelerate precisely depending on the laser's distance from the center, unlike a record which revolves at a constant rate).
Re:Sony Retires Its Last 4K Blu-ray Player in Japan, PS5 Is All That's...
on Saturday October 24, 2026 @10:20AM (#50221486)
In addition to the circuitry, I was also assuming that the laser would pose a difficulty.
Re:Sony Retires Its Last 4K Blu-ray Player in Japan, PS5 Is All That's...
on Friday October 23, 2026 @06:36PM (#50216306)
Better yet, you don't need any components in the supply chain that weren't well within the means of people 100 years ago. Vinyls and Edison cylinders will outlive every CD ever made.
Re:Apple Music 404 Not Found
on Friday October 23, 2026 @03:48PM (#50214390)
The haptic trackpads on a Steam Controller use the same circling motion to perform scroll wheel actions, and the haptic feedback is superb at selling the effect both audibly and from the feeling on your thumb.
Re:Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans
on Thursday October 22, 2026 @07:08PM (#50202350)
> discovering a convergence here is noteworthy
The LLMs are all trained on the same broad corpus, which includes untold quantities of output from every other LLM, not to mention that companies are distilling their rivals left and right. It would be more interesting if they didn't converge.