News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

shadowfacts

What on Earth is a “greco-roman Markdown editor” and if I’m not someone who writes RETVRN posts on X, the everything app, why is that a desirable attribute?
Re:Apple increases MacBook and iPad prices by 20% on Thursday June 25, 2026 @07:03PM (#48680321)
Then you overpaid a year ago. A 2x16GB DDR5 kit was around $90 a year ago and is over $400 today.
Re:The Eternal Sloptember on Monday May 25, 2026 @02:11AM (#48263916)
When people write blog posts about how LLMs failed for some particular task, the responses from boosters invariably fall along the lines of "just use this other model/just tweak your prompt like so/you're just not skilled enough—you can't make fundamental arguments about AI by citing specific examples."

So we can't make arguments by citing specific examples, and also can't make arguments by not citing specific examples. Whelp, I guess that's the ball game.

(yes yes, I'm committing a group attribution error, but still)

It’s listed on the agenda here as “Automated License Plate Reader Contract.” https://mountainview.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1352...
> The Constitution of the United States was a layman's document, not a lawyer's contract. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-constituti...

The Supreme Court is not the ultimate decider of what the layman's document means. It was wrong when it decided, for instance, Plessy v. Ferguson. The law that the Court upheld patently violated the Fourteenth Amendment and was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court was simply wrong.

Re:X Chief Says She Is Leaving the Social Media Platform on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @11:09AM (#44510982)
... yes, that's the complaint. The prompt engineering they did made it spew neo-Nazi vitriol. They either did not adequately test it beforehand and didn't know what would happen, or they did test and knew the outcome—either way, it's bad.
Re:Should we design for iffy internet? on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @06:23PM (#44313786)
The big digital music stores are DRM-free these days (iTunes and Amazon both are). There's also Qobuz if you want to avoid the tech giants (though most of your money ends up going to record labels, so does it really matter?).
Re:The 12-bit rainbow palette on Monday April 28, 2025 @09:27PM (#43827891)
Four characters counting the pound sign.
Re:Out of the Fog on Monday April 21, 2025 @11:58AM (#43753417)
The Verge has been publishing non-tech related stories for ages. Technology still seems to be their main focus, but this isn't new.
They did not have "every right to remove him." As the article you linked says, Abrego Garcia was specifically granted a withholding of removal order.
Re:Obituary for Cyc on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @11:26PM (#43628629)
A beanbag is a chair? Perhaps a chair should be something on which one can comfortably sit without breaking that has a back and four legs. I suppose then a horse would be a chair.
Re:FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies on Thursday March 20, 2025 @11:59AM (#43425018)
In my case, no small fraction of the traffic was from OpenAI and Anthropic. There were also other user agents that literally said "AI".
Re:I ate and reviewed every snack in our office kitchen on Monday February 24, 2025 @08:18PM (#43166929)
> He straight-up ate someone else's salad?

... no, it's clearly a joke.

Re:Apple squandered the Holy Grail on Monday January 06, 2025 @12:32PM (#42612753)
Soulver has indeed been doing this without large language models (so far as I know) for many years: https://soulver.app/
Re:Why is Apple Rosetta 2 fast? (2022) on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @06:07PM (#42189032)
It is not directly accessible from user-space. Making it so requires kernel support. Apple published a set of patches for doing this on Linux: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/acc...

Without that kernel support, all processes in the VM (not just Rosetta-translated ones) are opted-in to TSO:

> Without selective enablement, the system opts all processes into this memory mode [TSO], which degrades performance for native ARM processes that don’t need it.

Re:DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @11:13AM (#42185051)
There is a separate, ongoing antitrust lawsuit over Google’s adtech business. Closing arguments in that case are scheduled for Nov. 25, next week: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/google-antitru...
Re:Maybe Bluesky Has "Won" on Friday November 15, 2024 @05:11PM (#42151794)
> When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the entire network, so its a bad comparison.

That's the point, though. You don't need (nor, I imagine, would most people want) to mirror the entire network. If not needing to mirror the entire network makes self hosting simpler, then that is an advantage for the people interested in self hosting.

Re:OpenID Connect specifications published as ISO standards on Sunday November 10, 2024 @09:45PM (#42104223)
Yes. This is how, for example, Tailscale implements bring-your-own identity provider: https://tailscale.com/blog/custom-oidc

It is, to date, the only non-selfhosted service with which I can use my self-hosted SSO setup.

Re:Former President Trump is projected to win the presidency on Wednesday November 06, 2024 @08:24PM (#42072239)
If you genuinely believe that number, you have fallen for the propaganda. Ten million people did not enter the country in such a short time. DHS estimates the _total_ unauthorized immigrant population at around 11 million as of 2022.

https://ohss.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-06/2024_0418_o...

Re:Former President Trump is projected to win the presidency on Wednesday November 06, 2024 @08:01PM (#42072078)
> Can you name a policy of today's republican party that is further right than the republican party of 20 years ago?

Sure I can: "mass deportation now"

Re:Former President Trump is projected to win the presidency on Wednesday November 06, 2024 @10:31AM (#42063823)
In principle, that is true. But that is simply not the reality on the ground. States ban abortion with such exceedingly narrow exceptions that doctors and hospitals delay until the point of actively endangering women.

Four deaths, reported on by one outlet, in the past couple months:

- A Texas teenager died after going to three emergency rooms and being misdiagnosed and denied treatment: https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-...

- Another Texas woman died after a miscarriage as a result of doctors not treating her due to the state's fetal heartbeat law: https://www.propublica.org/article/josseli-barnica-death-mis...

- A Georgia woman with chronic health conditions, which can make pregnancy highly risky but did not exempt her from Georgia's abortion ban, died of complications from a medication abortion: https://www.propublica.org/article/candi-miller-abortion-ban...

- Another Georgia woman died because doctors delayed 20 hours after she arrived at a hospital—9 hours after she was diagnosed with sepsis—before treating her: https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-ambe...

The police following one person’s car isn’t unconstitutional, but following everyone’s cars very much is. The IJ press release mentions this: the 4th Circuit (which covers Virginia) ruled several years ago that Baltimore’s near-continuous aerial surveillance was unconstitutional in part because it “ transcends mere augmentation of ordinary police capabilities.” I think there’s an entirely reasonable argument to be made that what the City of Norfolk is doing by contracting Flock to create a database of where every car has been for the past 30 days similarly crosses that line.

https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/201495A.p.pdf

Re: on Sunday October 20, 2024 @11:01AM (#41895774)
It's not a random blog making some conjectures, Rick Hasen is a law professor who is an expert in this area and, moreover, he cites specifics statutes and DOJ information that's not all that ambiguous.
Re:Bluesky Adds Direct Messages on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @04:13PM (#40445825)
I'm a little bit sympathetic, but they've also kinda tried to have it both ways. They spent ages inventing a new protocol for decentralized microblogging, and then ages more before you could actually use a server other than theirs. But DMs is now where they don't want to spend the time up front to do it the right way?
Re:Bluesky Adds Direct Messages on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @03:22PM (#40445110)
Not only are they not end-to-end encrypted, Bluesky's DMs seem like they're entirely centralized. From their 2024 roadmap:

> We looked closely at alternatives like linking to external services, re-using an existing protocol like Matrix, or rushing out on-protocol encrypted DMs, but ultimately decided to launch a basic centralized system to take the time pressure off our team and make our user community happy.

https://docs.bsky.app/blog/2024-protocol-roadmap

Re:AI Copilots Are Changing How Coding Is Taught on Saturday May 04, 2024 @12:50AM (#40254944)
Yes, it does matter. While there are plenty of situations where it's foolish to forbid calculators, that's not universally true.

Forbidding calculators and requiring students to do mental math for absolutely everything is unnecessary. But requiring students to solve integrals by hand when they're learning about integrals? Entirely reasonable.

If your goal when teaching coding is to teach the mechanical process of writing code: sure, go ahead and use LLMs for that process. But if your goal is to develop a deeper understanding of how to code, then LLMs can very easily obscure that. The end goal is not always just the answer.

The article says, "However, Peer noted Section 6 states health risks should be weighed “without consideration of costs or other non-risk factors”."

Peer is not the court, it's a non-profit involved in the litigation. You can read the opinion, and the court doesn't tell the EPA to use section 6, just that they can't use section 5: https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/23/23-60620-CV0.pd...

It is permitted on the App Store. The developer had a thread on the fediverse several days ago.
You may believe it's the future and be happy to be included, but that's certainly not for everyone.

> I don't get the complaint here.

> Sure their ability to choose whether or not their art was commercialized was taken away

That is exactly the complaint: that their agency was taken away. It's entirely reasonable to lament that loss.

That's not surprising at all? The M3 Pro has 2 fewer performance cores than the M2 Pro.

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