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ltbarcly3

Re:uBlock Origin filter to block autoplay videos in TechCrunch on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:45AM (#50349211)
I know I didn't wake up in 2011 because uBlock Origin exists. Yet someone is talking about TechCrunch, so the most likely conclusion is that uBlock Origin existed long before I thought it did, like 2011.
This is a great example of modern attempts to claim that disagreeing with someone is 'literally violence'. Whenever I hear it I recognize it for what it is, an attempt to flip the script and turn a complete lack of any evidence or logic into a winning hand. Everyone has lived experience, and it's all equally worthless as a trump card to shut up people who are saying things that displease you.
Re:Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault on Sunday November 01, 2026 @08:17PM (#50331857)
Are the features bad by design? Like are they bad even if they work perfectly because they add bad abstractions to pg's SQL syntax, or are just broken in how they are supposed to work? If so the process is dysfunctional to let them get this far before noticing.

Are the features designed well (from a product perspective) but implemented poorly? Again, the process is dysfunctional to let them get this far before it notices.

Were there known issues with these that were planned to be fix, but the fixes didn't happen in time? That would make sense and it happens, but how is an LLM making that worse? LLMs in the worst case let you get the same work done more quickly, because you can always get the work done as quickly as you ever could by just not using an LLM. So the strongest thing you might say here is that you thought LLMs would let you get a feature into shape before it was too late, and for whatever reason that was overly optimistic.

Well I think this grain is just for fun and useless. There is no benefit to growing it apart from maintaining the genetic diversity it may contain.
Re:Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault on Sunday November 01, 2026 @08:00PM (#50331726)
I have found major bugs in late beta's of postgres long before AI came along. I found a bug where malformed json would segfault the entire server (a segfault in a server process forces the entire cluster to shut down by design) when using jsonb in a release candidate once. They fixed it rather than ripping the entire feature out.

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20140818195634.2543.56...

It seems quite possible that someone wants to make it seem like LLMs are causing problems by over-reacting to things that could just be fixed, or delay the release slightly (or maybe waiting until late before a release to kill features they don't like?) Whatever it is, this seems like a dysfunctional process.

Re:Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:37PM (#50328335)
"The college professor or the people who wrote the textbook and set up the university and arranged for students to come to it or..."

I think we can let him take a little credit for the work he did without trying to exactly determine how much of that credit is his exactly.

The article is effectively an advertisement.

The yield of this wheat is 1.5 (Miracle Wheat) vs 5.8 (Standard) tonnes/hectare. That's about 25%. Since wheat can easily be stored for many years, you would have to have droughts in 3/4 of years before you break even due to drought resistance. In the meantime farmers can barely break even financially growing this stuff.

*HOWEVER* Miracle Wheat is very very susceptible to lodging (falling over and dying in the rain). So in years where there isn't a drought you would sometimes lose almost 100% of the crop. So even if there were droughts 3/4 of the time, you would still never break even.

By "novelty" I mean a niche or specialty product. I think that's basically the definition of novelty in terms of a product being sold, correct me if I'm wrong.

There are numbers for this specific wheat. Emilia-Romagna's 2016 agricultural economic assessment compares grano del miracolo with conventional wheat [1]:

  Yield: 1.5 vs 5.8 tonnes/hectare.
  Variable costs: €527 vs €570/hectare.
  Selling price: €390 vs €203/tonne.
  Gross margin: €58 vs €607/hectare.
That's roughly 74% less grain, with only 8% lower variable costs per hectare. Even selling at nearly twice the price, its gross margin is about 90% lower. These are the government's planning estimates, with Miracolo's yield based on agricultural experts consulted for the assessment.

Preserving genetic diversity is valuable, and specialty buyers may pay enough to make growing it worthwhile. But that specialty market is precisely what I mean by "novelty." The economics of growing it as ordinary commodity wheat are poor.

[1] https://agricoltura.regione.emilia-romagna.it/psr-2014-2020/...

I don't think you are responding to what my post actually says.

Statistically there is still room for there to be some unexplained physical reaction to gluten that is not explained by Celiac. However, nonexistence of such a reaction is also compatible with the studies. What is not compatible with the studies is more than a single digit percentage of non Celiac having people, as a % of people who claim to be gluten sensitive, being able to even detect whether they are fed gluten vs a placebo, despite it being very trendy to claim that you are 'gluten sensitive'.

Gluten allergies are relatively rare and extreme. People with Celiac have a major, sometimes life threatening reaction to gluten.

People who do not have Celiac and say they are gluten sensitive usually are not. They are either experiencing a nocebo effect or have gas from other components of wheat rather than gluten. Actual non Celiac reactions to gluten are minor if they exist at all. So when someone says they are gluten sensitive it is overwhelmingly likely they either have Celiac and even a very very tiny amount of gluten will cause them horrible consequences, or they are incorrect and they are not sensitive to gluten at all.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27523634/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29102613/

These are all just unsubstantiated claims from someone promoting a product. The reason the entire world switched to dwarf varieties is that full height wheat falls over in heavy storms and this can lead to a loss of entire harvests and major famines.

This grain, while interesting, is far far less productive than modern varieties and less efficient to grow. It's valuable for genetic diversity and rediscovering it is wonderful and valuable, but it is more or less worthless for farmers as anything other than a novelty.

A poor craftsman blames the tools.
The way benchmarks work is very very different from how you work with an agent.

The benchmarks often have ambiguous instructions, and there is no interaction with the agent. So a docker image is started, the agent is called in non-interactive mode with a prompt saying to read the instructions and finish the task. The instructions are often somewhat ambiguous and the agent has no way to ask for clarification. If it picks the wrong option out of many seemingly equally likely options that test will be mark as failed.

How can you determine if it's explanation is good if you don't already know the answer? You are not qualified to know if it's answer is correct, by hypothesis.
Yea, but you are just accepting AI slop.

Here is your first example, "corrected": https://share.gemini.google/DCSLT4PPap5q

Having an AI do a quick check of research studies is about as effective as just trusting a Vogue magazine article. You are just fooling yourself into thinking there is something useful there, there is not.

Gemini is the best at convincing you that you understand scientific concepts. Unless you have applied that knowledge in other contexts and been given feedback that your understanding is correct you have no idea whether it is good at actually explaining them.
It's late in life to learn this, but let me be the one to let you in on a little secret: people often say only some of the things they know, they often selectively tell you things while not revealing everything they know.

You are assuming that Carbon is ready for release, deployed to their datacenters, that all scaling and other issues have been worked out, and they are confident in all of the above. Not to mention additional internal constraints like alignment testing or other safety procedures their own policies and guardrails require.

If they are smart, which they clearly have some smart people if they are making the best frontier model, they would account for the above needs in their timeline, and announce the model when they can prove they have it but also before they are ready to release it. This is so they can be at the top of the frontier model lists, boost their brand for both Gemini and Google, get the bump in stock price and investor confidence, steer adoption decisions for people making decisions for what platform they might adopt, etc.

They changed the title, it said github client before I believe.
Microsoft had a small golden age with Azure and Windows 10, and now they are going right back into a Vista-era-like rot. Github is down an awful lot. The reliability is worse than the product I work on for work by like 2 orders of magnitude and we have no ops team. It's a joke.

Windows 11 is awful, lots of the fixes and modernization started in windows 10 has totally stalled, leaving users with 5 different places to change a setting instead of the one old place or one new place. Look how many different UI's there are to adjust sound card / sound settings or display settings. It's a complete mess. Their attempts to jump into the AI game have been a complete joke, despite already having integrated Cortana years ago. Putting Cortana on an llm is such an obvious thing to do, and they already did so much work to make that fully integrated into windows and force it on everyone even though it was trash, and now it's still trash and they don't seem to be able to adapt at all.

Now they can't respond to a complete insecurity in one of their major products in weeks? Why do they even validate certs? Why doesn't revocation work in their app? I don't think they can really be trusted at this point.

You are responding to points I didn't make.

I said that their strategy is self defeating. You are arguing they will do it anyway.

You are arguing that people are delusional about their worth. My point agrees with that, most people are, but there are some people that are actually valuable and companies are very bad at telling the difference.

This is true if you are running a car wash. Even the mid tier employees satisfactorily do the job and customers can be given what they paid for. You are competing on geographic location and ability to do a very easy task repeatedly over and over. You get another chance to sell your product every single day, and you can adjust your prices up and down to find the sweet spot because the sales cycle repeats every day.

It is not true if you are determining the correct feature to add to microsoft's money making products. That requires deep knowledge of users and the industry and the existing product. It requires understanding the industry and users far in advance, the turnaround time for a feature in Windows or Azure is likely 6 months or longer, sometimes years. It requires acumen and an ability to think about customers and the market and sales. Microsoft doesn't have 5000 people who can do this. They probably don't have 1000. These people can go start their own business or consulting firm today. There are lots of people they worked with in the past who know how good they are so they can get another job.

The same is true for engineering. Out of 500 engineers, there are 10-20 that are doing the really important work that you can't just find someone else to do. They know everything about the system and everyone comes to them for advice or to get explanations about how things are put together and why. You can't just find some average engineer and put them in the same desk as these 10-20 and magically things are fine, the mid tier person doesn't have the years of experience nor the potential to fill this role even if they did have the experience.

Because every once-in-a-lifetime AI is invented and finds security flaws in PHP? Seems like you are coming to an overly broad conclusion here. Besides, you have to serve the static HTML somehow, and Apache and Nginx have had plenty of security vulnerabilities.
Because every once-in-a-lifetime AI is invented and finds security flaws in PHP? Seems like you are coming to an overly broad conclusion here.
Now you will get a taste of life in the new world order, one without Pax Bitterballen.
Re:Mozilla Introduces Firefox Enterprise on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @12:01PM (#50073861)
Nobody cares about that and also puts their devices on the internet. Literally nobody.
Re:Mozilla Introduces Firefox Enterprise on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @12:00PM (#50073834)
Nobody needs 2 browsers to support on locked down computers. There's no increase in functionality apart from making between 0 and 1 extremely niche users slightly more happy (but not more capable).
Re:Mozilla Introduces Firefox Enterprise on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @11:59AM (#50073809)
Prediction: Nobody is going to use this. They won't get a single sale.
Re:Why aren't AI companies being charged for hacking? on Monday October 12, 2026 @11:39PM (#50066335)
If you released the worm without intending for it to spread the way it did, it is arguable that it wasn't a crime at the time he did it. The court decided intent wasn't necessary.

Shooting someone is an intentional act. Setting up a booby trap to shoot intruders is automating something that you could have done legally (shoot an intruder) except there is NOT intent. Intent to shoot the intruder is what makes it legal, so long as you meet the other requirements for self defense or the castle doctrine. Shooting someone without intending to shoot someone is negligence or worse. Building a contraption to shoot someone is setting in motion a chain of events specifically to cause a person to be shot with no possibility of satisfying the requirements to justify it.

Here's another scenario: you are cleaning your gun, when unknown to you a home invader is preparing to kick your front door in. Your gun goes off accidentally, shooting the home invader before he gets to your door. Legally it is not self defense, you have negligently shot someone. However, the robber can't sue you as felons do not have a recourse for injuries proximately caused by their own felony (if they are convicted) in California. In other states, the robber may be able to successfully sue even if he is convicted. Laws are weird.

Re:Why aren't AI companies being charged for hacking? on Monday October 12, 2026 @11:36PM (#50066318)
Sooner or later one will hack the government and then they will test this.
Re:Leaving Tech on Monday October 12, 2026 @11:34PM (#50066306)
I'm sure the author is going through a very hard time, and I want to say up front that it sucks and I hope he lands on his feet.

Looking at his linkedin I see one programming job he had for more than a few months, and a lot that are about 8 months give or take. At one job he started as a programmer after a year and was moved to be a trainer, which he did for 2 more years. That's such a bad sign.

The most likely explanation, to me, of this resume is that there's something more to this story. He gets hired, they give him a few months and then pull the plug. This pattern is there 5 or 6 times, and then one programming job longer than 2 years, which is remote.

I don't know him and I can't say for sure, but this pattern of employment does not fill me with confidence.

Then there are macro issues. He has spent almost his entire career doing Ruby on Rails, which is nearly dead. Jobs for Rails are at 2007 levels as a % of overall tech jobs, and going down year over year for a decade. The tech job market is also saturated with applicants in general.

Finally, and overwhelmingly most importantly, he is only looking for fully remote jobs in Australia.

Overall I would say if he is only willing to consider remote work in Australia, applying to 36 jobs and not getting any is not that surprising. Things are rough out there and he is excluding 99.99% of the job market.

If I were giving him advice, it would be to go get whatever job he can and keep applying to programming jobs if that is where he wants to continue his career. He hasn't been looking very long and his experience in the market he is limiting himself to does really reflect on him or his abilities. I would give him further advice to clean up his resume, remove several of the short-time jobs that nobody cares about because they are so long ago (but do care about because of the pattern of short term jobs), and combine that job that is split into programmer/trainer stints into one long job with both responsibilities summarized (I programmed and trained people). Finally spend your free time learning a technology that is growing and has relevance, like Rust or Go, and keep applying.

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