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ojosilva

Re:OccupySaaS on Monday November 02, 2026 @02:36PM (#50342420)
That's why all these projects are bound to fail after a short run, they have no guarantees, no skin in the game.

In the hyper NIH, not-invented-here world we live in now, 3rd party software, if any is to be trusted, is about the trust in the humans, and the humans behind this project are not selling it well by declaring war on their employers. We're talking about replacing million-dollar software deals here.

Re:Frontier AI on Your Own Hardware on Monday September 21, 2026 @07:22PM (#49794785)
Education needs to adapt. Currently CS graduates barely compete with Gemma-4 26b in programming while seniors are feeding tons of expertise at armies of frontier AI agents. The market now needs junior employees good at "using AI like an expert". Once employers see that junior armed with AI can replace senior at half the salary, we're back where we were 10 years ago.

Senior (now): - AI build me an app that uses a graph DB that will deploy in the edge. Batch DB requests to keep costs low. Oh, use good cache + memoization to reduce hits. Write great tests, some logging and implement hot-reloading for a great dev-to-ops workflow that is also resilient. Man, before I had to do this all by hand, this is a godsend!

Junior (now): - AI build app please.

Email from boss: Junior! Whatever it is you've deployed, it's making 1M reqs/min to the DB and ate up our quota 2h ago. Shut it down now!

Junior (future): - AI1 design for cost. AI2 eval for performance. AI3 align for business goals. AI4 criticize AI1 and AI2 using top standards. AI5 set up a competing swarm. AI6 here's a budget, spend on real users and action on telemetry and their feedback.

High altitude Equatorial populations and air crew exposures are different beasts. A 10h flight close to the North Pole is like living in Quito for almost a month. The type of dosage (bursts x contínuous) also matters as the body can probably accommodate more easily, but that's just me saying. Then add natural selection to that mix that should have helped prepare high-altitude populations residents for those living conditions, which will heavily skew the data. Finally, the cosmic shower has lost a lot of energy from 12,000m to say 2,500m, so the "hit" is not the same. It all may end up having an exponential effect reducing cancer rates...

So a flight attendant that clocks ~700h a year, that's roughly 5 years of living in Quito in a year of flying in Sieves. Now, given that the air crew studies are not all that conclusive yet, take high-altitude populations at 5x less exposure and all these other factors I've mentioned, and they will end up having an even lower chance of showing up in any cancer studies.

So... not remotely comparable.

Cosmic radiation is mainly protons and heavier nuclei. It's called radiation for legacy reasons, but it's a different beast from Earth's medical CT scans and X-rays which are manly photons.

Cosmic radiation hitting planes is also not the original cosmic protons and He nucleus etc, but secondary N and O nucleus hit by Cosmic particles creating a shower of neutrons, secondary and gamma protons, muons, pions, nuclear fragments... There's also a high dose of photons from these collisions, but proportionally it can be 500x less photons than a CT scan for a 10h USA-Europe flight.

What's biologically significant for air crew are these secondary protons and neutrons, which punch above their weight in damage interactions, they are not comparable to X-rays in Sieve alone.

Teslas do glithcy speed limits readings often, from GPS drift (ie. it thinks the car is on the highway) or may be deceived by some sign with numbers on the street.

When that happens and depending on Autopilot [1] settings, the car will shoot out to reach the new limit. If the driver is distracted enough not to notice or react in time, the car could crash. GPS inaccuracy does sound plausible given Teslas slow down if an abrupt change of direction is near (ie roundabout) per GPS and map data.

The house sits at a corner, not a culthesac.

1. It's not clear the driver allegedly said "autopilot" or "FSD"

Just tell AI to write your copy and that's what you get, overhype-as-a-service.
Re:There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing on Saturday June 13, 2026 @08:40AM (#48516713)
This is the first impression I got, a glass ceiling on AI that will hit the market hard. Timing was right at the late Friday's let's-avoid-the-crash point, we'll see how this flies on Monday.

But it's also, as sibling comments mentioned, a bend-the-knee between Government and Anthropic. Once OpenAI catches up, and Anthropic lawyers-up as well, it will probably be reversed or morphed into a "models must have the US seal of AI-approval and, therefore and hereafter, we AI-approve the new US-verified Fable 5.1" - which will coincide with a at-large deployment at the DoD, Pentagon, and friends.

Otherwise the Chinese will catch-up and, heavens forbid!

Re:Google Plans to Invest Up to $40B in Anthropic on Saturday April 25, 2026 @03:04AM (#47899367)
MS is not so deep with OpenAI, it's not all black and white, they have signed several distribution deals where Claude drives Copilot [1], since Anthropic and MS are better aligned in the Enterprise market, it makes sense. It also makes sense for MS not to lose ground anywhere at this point and play with the best. Actually, any cash rich company that is not OpenAI or Anthropic wants to be close-by when any of the two needs money. That's the ultimate win they can aspire for right now, get a financial slice of frontier models on one hand while not losing revenue on the other given the existential ordeal AI represents for them.

1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/03/0...

Re:Opus 4.7 to 4.6 Inflation is ~45% on Saturday April 18, 2026 @02:55PM (#47818458)
I have it as failover to Opus 4.6 in a Claude proxy internally. People don't notice a thing when it triggers, maybe a failed tool call here and there (harness remains CC not OC) or a context window that has gone over 200k tokens or an image attachment that GLM does not handle, otherwise hunky-dory all the way. I would also use it as permanent replacement for haiku at this proxy to lower Claude costs but have not tried it yet. Opus 4.7 has shaken our setup badly and we might look into moving to Codex 100% (GLM could remain useful there too).
We hit that problem 3 or 4 weeks ago and then we rolled back to version 2.1.44 and that apparently solved the fast consumption issue.

Our problems started when we moved to the claude code installer (it only affected the people who had updated) instead of using the npm version. Last week someone tried the installer version again and problems seem to have gone away. This is somewhat very anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt.

Re:The dead Internet is not a theory anymore on Thursday March 12, 2026 @06:24AM (#47348696)
I'm trying to imagine this new paid app in different angles and versions, ie a new Reddit... Pay to be in there, get paid for being in there, only humans can be in there, ads pay for humans being there, humans use some govt on-line ID system, karma systems improve so that only humans are rewarded, Voight-Kampf captchas, humans mail the app their dna to verify their identity, humans login on a street 24/7 login post (think phone booths).... I just don't see any good, unbreakable, viable and/or sustainable way. We just need to get used to coexist with bots everywhere while we adjust our expectations and social codes. Fast forward until AI is massively on the streets and indistinguishable from us physically (or very distinct and fascinating), and all supposing that we can keep them in control...

Dead internet is the prequel to dead world, let's seize the opportunity to learn how to coexist with synthetics and develop the code that will make life with a higher intelligence species possible on Earth. And remember, we humans vary widely, and just like there are people happy to share LinkedIn slop today, there will be humans gladly living surrounded exclusively by overpowering synthetics. So lower your expectations for universal solutions and focus on niche.

Re:Anthropic Made a Big Mistake on Monday January 12, 2026 @11:04AM (#46590279)
Their target is the Enterprise anyway. So they are apparently willing to enrage their non-CC user base over vendor-locking.

But this is not the equivalent of Oracle over Postgres, as these are different technology stacks that implement an independent relational database. Here were talking about Opencode which depends on Claude models to work "as a better Claude" (according to the enraged users in the webs). Of course, one can still use OC with a bazillion other models, but Anthropic is saying that if you want the Claude Code experience, you gotta use the CC agent period.

Now put yourself in the Anthropic support person shoes, and suppose you have to answer an issue of a Claude Max user who is mad that OC is throwing errors when calling a tool during a vibe session, probably because the multi-million dollar Sonnet model is telling OC to do something it can't because its not the claude agent. Claude models are fine-tuned for their agent! If the support person replies "OC is an unsupported agent for Claude Code Max" you get an enraged customer anyway, so you might as well cut the crap all together by the root.

Re:Anthropic Made a Big Mistake on Monday January 12, 2026 @09:22AM (#46588899)
They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain, which has proven itself to be a winner among devs (me included, after trying everything under the sun in 2025). If anything, Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market, where ChatGPT reigns: ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now.

Apparently nobody gets the Anthropic move: they are only good at coding and that's a very thin layer. Opencode and other tools are game for collecting inputs and outputs that can later be used to train their own models - not necessarily being done now, but they could - Cursor did it. Also Opencode makes it all easily swappable, just eval something by popping another API key and let's see if Codex or GLM can replicate the CC solution. Oh, it does! So let's cancel Claude and save big bucks!

Even though CC the agent supports external providers (via the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL env var), they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc). The move totally makes sense, like it or not.

That's a legal non-starter for all car companies. They would be made liable for every car incident where self-driving vehicles were spotted in close vicinity, independently of the suit being legit. A complete nightmare and totally unrelated to the tech. Makes would spend more time and tech clearing their asses in court than building safe cars.
Re:Google is dead. Where do we go now? on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @10:19AM (#46434141)
Google is in that game too with "AI Mode", stealing traffic from ChatGPT.

But as OP and other threads here highlighted, the other ~half of the gold sits in more fenced communities like WhatsApp, IG, Telegram, and other messaging and non-digital communities that are getting their "news" and "information" from viral shorts from IG, TikTok and YT Shorts.

Re:Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself? on Wednesday December 17, 2025 @06:42AM (#46300883)
3% market share is 150 million active users give or take. That's no death by any count in the software world.

Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?

Re:IBM to Acquire Confluent on Tuesday December 09, 2025 @04:46AM (#46203121)
Just the set the record straight on how and why these acquisitions go at IBM. This is a first hand account working at and with IBM and competitors and being in the room as tech-guy accessory to murder.

IBM lives off huge multi-year contract deals with their customers, each are multi-multi-million dollars worth. IBM has many of these contracts, maybe ~2000 of them around the planet, including your own government wherever it is that you live. This is ALL that matters to IBM. ALL. That. Matters.

These huge contracts get renegotiated at every X years. IBM renewal salespeople are tough and rough, in particular the ones on the renewal teams, and they spend every minute of every hour in between renewals grooming the decision makers, sponsors, champions and stakeholders (and their families) within these big corporations. Every time you see an IBM logo at a sports event (and there are many IBM-sponsored events), that's not IBM marketing to you the ad-viewer. They are there for grooming their stakeholders, who fight hard to be in the best IBM sponsored-seats at those venues, and in the glamorous pre and after party, celebs included. IBM also sponsors other stuff, even special programs at universities. Who go to these universities? Oh, you bet, the stakeholder's kids, who get the IBM-treatment and IBM-scholarship at those places.

But the grooming is not enough. The renewal is not usually at risk - who has the balls to uninstall IBM out of a large corp? What is at risk is IBM's growth, which is fueled by price increases at every renewal point not the sale of new software or new clients - there are no new clients for IBM anywhere anymore! These price increases need to happen, not just because of inflation but because of the stock price and bonuses that keep the renewal army and management going strong, since this is a who-knows-who business. To justify the price increase internally at those huge client corps (not to the stakeholder but to their bosses, boards, users, etc) IBM needs to throw a bone into these negotiations. The bone is whatever acquisition you see they make: Red Hat, Hashicorp... Or developments like Watson. Or whatever. They are only interested in acquiring products or entering markets that can be thrown at those renewal negotiations, with very few exceptions. Why Confluent? Well, because they probably did their research and decided that existing Confluent licenses can be applied to one (yeah, one) or many renewal contracts as growth fuel for at least 1-to-N iterations of renewals.

Renewal contracts correspond anywhere from 60% to 95% of IBM's revenue, depending on how you account for the the consulting arm and "new" (software/hw sales/subscriptions). I particularly have not seen lots of companies hiring IBM consultants "just because we love IBM consultants and their rates", so consulting at a site is always tied to the renewal somehow, even if billed separately or not billed at all. Same for new sw sales, if a company wants something IBM has on their catalog from their own whim and will, then that will just probably be packed into the next renewal because that's stakeholder leverage for justifying the renewal's increase base rate. Remember, a lot of IBM's mainframes are not even sold, they are just rentals.

Most IBM investment into research programs, new tech (quantum computing!) etc are there just to help the renewals and secure a new Govt deal here and there. How? Well, maybe the increase in the renewal for the, ie, State of Illinois contract gets a bone thrown in for a new "Quantum Research Center (by IBM)" at some U of I campus or tech park that the now visionary Governor will happily cut the ribbon, photo op and do the speech. Oh wait! I swear I made this up as an example, but this one is actually true, lol:

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-12-12-ibm-and-state-of-illinoi...

You get the drill?

Re:Perl's decline was cultural on Saturday December 06, 2025 @05:24PM (#46177114)
Yes there was a reason as Perl took inspiration from Lisp - everything is a list- and everyone knows how quick C's variadic arguments get nasty.

So @_ was a response to that issue, given Perl was about being dynamic and not typed and there were no IDEs or linters that would type-check and refactor code based on function signatures.

JS had the same issue forever and finally implemented a rest/spread operator in ES6. Python had variadic from the start but no rest operator until Python3. Perl had spread/rest for vargs in the late 80s already. For familiarity, Perl chose the @ operator that meant vargs in bourne shell in the 70s.

Re:Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros on Friday December 05, 2025 @06:51PM (#46168968)
Not only the movie theater, Netflix killed social life. Well, streaming, feeds and their algorithms in general, but Netflix is very much the ones that really owned the narrative of what to do on a weekend night.

This is very anecdatal, certainly, but I've spoken/overheard a few neighborhood hospitality business owners that had to forclose or cut down due to the constant decline of people leaving the house to just meet in a bar or coffee shop. Only sport nights keeps them going, because sports online remain expensive in most places.

Maybe just my observation or my neck of the woods, but seems to fit the general sentiment of a reduced social environment on the streets in certain parts of the world.

Re:Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig on Thursday December 04, 2025 @05:27PM (#46154034)
Fine, but there's a noticeable asymmetry in how the three languages get treated. Go gets dinged for hiding memory details from you. Rust gets dinged for making mutable globals hard and for conceptual density (with a maximally intimidating Pin quote to drive it home). But when Zig has the equivalent warts they're reframed as virtues or glossed over.

Mutable globals are easy in Zig (presented as freedom, not as "you can now write data races.")

Runtime checks you disable in release builds are "highly pragmatic," with no mention of what happens when illegal behavior only manifests in production.

The standard library having "almost zero documentation" is mentioned but not weighted as a cost the way Go's boilerplate or Rust's learning curve are.

The RAII critique is interesting but also somewhat unfair because Rust has arena allocators too, and nothing forces fine-grained allocation. The difference is that Rust makes the safe path easy and the unsafe path explicit whereas Zig trusts you to know what you're doing. That's a legitimate design, hacking-a!

The article frames Rust's guardrails as bureaucratic overhead while framing Zig's lack of them as liberation, which is grading on a curve. If we're cataloging trade-offs honestly

> you control the universe and nobody can tell you what to do

...that cuts both ways...

Re:Anthropic acquires Bun on Tuesday December 02, 2025 @07:00PM (#46128619)
Yeah, now they are part of Anthropic, who haven't figured out monetization themselves. Shikes!

I'm a user of Bun and an Anthropic customer. Claude Code is great and it's definitely where their models shine. Outside of that Anthropic sucks,their apps and web are complete crap, borderline unusable and the models are just meh. I get it, CC's head got probably a powerplay here given his department is towing the company and his secret sauce, according to marketing from Oven, was Bun. In fact VSCode's claude backend is distributed in bun-compiled binary exe, and the guy is featured on the front page of the Bun website since at least a week or so. So they bought the kid the toy he asked for.

Anthropic needs urgently, instead, to acquire a good team behind a good chatbot and make something minimally decent. Then make their models work for everything else as well as they do with code.

As far as the data goes, adjusted for inflation, tuition and fees have eased up in the last ~5 years [1]. But overall, college enrollment has been going down anyway [2], except for 2025, where it hints at a slight rebound.

So I'd say we have to consider the full set of drivers that can correlate: overall rising cost of living making it very expensive to be at a university full-time, general labor market sentiment which is mostly down since covid, interest rates and debt risk which are still high despite recent cuts, etc.

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/college-costs-working...

2. https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics

Re:Voyager 1 Is About to Reach One Light-Day from Earth on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @06:38PM (#46063577)
Not very encouraging to imagine ChatGPT to be the first earthling to reach another star system, but that's an option we'll have to keep on the table, at least for the time being...
Re:Roblox CEO Makes a Fool of Himself in Car-Crash Interview on Saturday November 22, 2025 @06:53AM (#46014093)
Around that time in the video what I see is a journalist that did not do his homework, as he crumbled under the CEO's snarky "do you know this research company went out of business?" - he should just started to read the report findings and ask if they are true [1] or popped out the 16 public arrests [2] tied to Roblox in the US of A.

Both journalists were VERY agreeable and were like trying not to pick a fight. Want to talk about the fun stuff Mr CEO? There's no fun when so many kids are being systematically harassed by evil adults in the platform.

[1] https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/

[2] https://thebearcave.substack.com/p/problems-at-roblox-rblx-4

Re:Shop Sans is a typeface for curved text paths on Friday November 21, 2025 @03:57PM (#46008913)
Red Hot Chili Peppers!
Re:What Killed Perl? on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @11:37AM (#45981638)
Perl was the internet in 1990s. People (me) who were doing unix systems work (C, shell, Perl and some DBs and FTPs) could now quickly throw a CGI script behind an Apache HTTP server, which tended to be up and running in many unixes :80 port back then (Digi, HP, Sun, etc). Suddenly I had a working app that would generate reports directly to people's browsers or full-blown apps on the internet! But Perl CGI did not scale at all (spawn 1 short-lived process per request will choke a unix fast), and even after mod_perl [1], that got quickly superseded by PHP, which was really built for the web (of the 1990s). Web frameworks and fastcgi arrived too late to Perl, so internet Perl was practically dead at the turn of the century.

The enterprise, who either did not have any webapps or had tried Perl CGI first and suffered it dearly, got pinged by their sales reps that Java and .NET (depending if you were a IBM, Sun or MS shop) were the way to go, and there they went with their patterns and anti-patterns for "scalable" million-dollar web stacks. That kicked-off the age of the famed application servers that resist up until today (Websphere, Weblogic, etc).

So Perl went back to being a glue language for stitching up data, C/C++ and shell, and that's how the 2000s went by. But by then, Ruby and Python had more sane communities and Ruby was exciting and Python was simpler - Perl folks were just too peculiar, funny and nerdy to be taken seriously by a slick new generation that coded fast and had startup aspirations of the "only $1B is cool" types. Also the Perl6 delusion was too distracting to make anyone event care about giving Perl5 some good love (the real perl keeping servers running worldwide), so by the 2010s Perl was shooting down to collective ostracism, even though it still runs extremely well, fast and reliably in production. By the 2020s the release cycles were improved after Perl6 became a truly separate project (Raku, renamed in 2019), the core has gone through a relative cleanup and finally got a few popular features in demand [3]. The stack and ecosystem is holding up fine, although CPAN probably needs some good tidying up.

The main issue with Perl at this point is that it has not been a target for any new stuff that comes out: any cool module, library, database, etc that is launched does not put out a Perl api or a simple example of any kind, so it's up to the Perl community to release and maintain apis and integrations to the popular stacks on its own, which is a losing game and ends up being the nail-in-the-coffin. By the way, nothing (OSS) that comes out today is even written in Perl. That reduces even further the appeal of learning Perl.

Strangely enough, lately Perl has seen a sudden rise in the TIOBE index [4] back into a quite respectable 9th position. TIOBE ranks search queries for X language and is not much of a indicator, being quite noisy and unreliable. My guess is that those queries are issued by AI agents/chats desperately scraping information so that it can answer questions and help humans code in a language that is not well-represented in the training datasets.

[1] mod_perl was released in 1996, and became popular around 1999: https://perl.apache.org/about/history.html

[2] PHP was released 1994, took off ~1998 with PHP3: https://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php

[3] Perl's version changes simplified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_5_version_history

[4] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Re:Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @07:10PM (#45974052)
This is the multi-million dollar .unwrap() story. In a critical path of infrastructure serving a significant chunk of the internet, calling .unwrap() on a Result means you're saying "this can never fail, and if it does, crash the thread immediately."The Rust compiler forced them to acknowledge this could fail (that's what Result is for), but they explicitly chose to panic instead of handle it gracefully. This is textbook "parse, don't validate" anti-pattern.

I know, this is "Monday morning quarterbacking", but that's what you get for an outage this big that had me tied up for half a day.

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