News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

skybrian

Re:Toit v2.0.0 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:45AM (#50352643)
It’s probably fine once you’re used to it, but I’m not sure that embedded development is the place to innovate on function call syntax.

Then again, nowadays, it’s not like you have to write code yourself.

Re:Resisting Cognitive Surrender on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @01:14AM (#50348673)
[delayed]
Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen on Monday November 02, 2026 @02:09PM (#50341970)
Amazing work. I wonder if it could rewrite an existing neural net to be cleaner and more interpretable?

(When they say "Writing a Go algorithm," they mean the board game, not the language.)

It depends on your assumptions. When Google is in "space crunch" mode, there are opportunity costs. Otherwise, there aren't, because you could do both.

You could also look at the opportunity cost of not letting Deepmind do quite as much research. How much is additional research worth on the margin? There will be diminishing returns.

It's a good question: why are the GAAP rules what they are? It needs to be investigated, though.

The reason it happens in multiple quarters is likely that Anthropic's valuation has increased in multiple quarters. Every time Anthropic's valuation increases, the convertible bonds are worth more money. Other shareholders have "lost" money compared to what would have happened if Anthropic had sold regular bonds instead of convertible bonds. Except that no, the value of their shares is increasing too. It's actually good for them.

That's how equity works. If someone owns 1% of a company and its valuation doubles, their share is worth twice as much and so is yours and we wouldn't even normally consider it to be diluting the other shareholders.

So the question is whether convertible bonds are worth more than regular bonds and the answer is, yes, absolutely, but they are partially equity, and it's the equity part that's increasing when the company's valuation is increasing.

And if the company's valuation went down then the value of the convertible bonds would decrease. Maybe that would be considered a profit?

It’s like shareholder dilution from issuing more stock or stock options. Existing shareholders might have a smaller share of the company than they thought. The accounting is weird.

We aren’t shareholders, though, so why should we care?

Pre-industrial societies were built on agriculture so whatever happens will be different. Recommended reading:

Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World https://www.amazon.com/dp/1780747411

Re:I Am the Reason OpenAI Is Killing Unlimited Chats on Sunday November 01, 2026 @09:54PM (#50332600)
But if you get a Claude subscription, don't you have to use Claude Code? Why not pay the $20/month for OpenAI and use your favorite coding agent?

I've been doing that and it seems like quite a deal.

Instead of looking at share you could look at each trend separately. They're both going up, but corporate profits are going up more:

Corporate profits versus labor income https://fred.stlouisfed.org/blog/2018/08/corporate-profits-v...

Why is labor going up? In part due to more hours worked:

Nonfarm Business Sector: Hours Worked for All Workers https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOANBS

If you divide labor income by hours worked, you should get hourly compensation:

Nonfarm Business Sector: Real Hourly Compensation for All Workers https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB

Working-age population is leveling off, though: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSQ647S

One would expect that retirees are mostly living off capital rather than labor. Wouldn't an increased elderly population result in a lower labor share?

Or maybe something else. This paper suggests that as workers get older, they switch jobs less and get fewer raises:

"We find that a 60-year-old worker receives half the marginal product relative to when they were 20. Together with recent demographic trends, this can account for 59% of the recent decline in labor’s share of earnings in the United States."

https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2023/04/staff-working-paper-2023...

And no matter how you slice it, this is all working with national averages, which tell us little about anyone's personal situation.

Yes, it’s not specific to nursing. Labor costs are often high in the US, which goes a long way to explain why labor-intensive services cost more in the US, relative to other goods and services.
I don't really know, but according to one graph, US nursing salaries are second only to Luxembourg:

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...

It seems pretty tasteful, but I don't see anything about character sets. How does it support Unicode? What does a string of 16-bit characters represent?

There do seem to be some Unicode constants in the standard library:

https://tibleiz.net/browser.html?path=std&title=Standard%20L...

Thanks!
Could you provide a source for that claim?
Re:Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @06:25PM (#50281794)
Maybe ChatGPT could figure it out?
Re:New iMac with M6 on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @11:17AM (#50275116)
It seems unfortunate to become so sensitive to frame rate that you can only buy high-end equipment. I wonder how that can be avoided?
I thought that post was interesting when I read it over a year ago, but the startup seems to have gone dark since then.
Re:Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale on Monday October 26, 2026 @09:10AM (#50243005)
They spent the tokens so you don’t have to. This is clearly AI-generated but doesn’t look low-effort, even with heavy AI assistance.

But if you’re sure it’s easy, why not give it a try?

Re:Lego collaboration with Daft Punk on Sunday October 25, 2026 @11:50AM (#50232874)
Yes that's true, but if someone were to infer that there are therefore no retired GenXers, they would be wrong.
Re:Lego collaboration with Daft Punk on Sunday October 25, 2026 @10:19AM (#50231880)
In the US, there are a lot more rich people than there used to be [1] and they're often driving prices up because they can afford to pay. (Most obviously in real estate.)

[1] https://pages.skybrian.com/2026/us-households-by-income-band...

Re:No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector on Saturday October 24, 2026 @06:23PM (#50226011)
Sure, but are there any examples of hospitals where lowered costs for transcriptions are significant enough to affect their financial reports? How much of an expense was it in the first place?
Re:Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans on Thursday October 22, 2026 @08:18PM (#50202930)
On the other hand, contrarianism isn't a shortcut to the truth, either. You still have to investigate.
It seems like some kind of network logging would be useful? Even if you don't catch it, you'd want to know what it did.
Re:Google cleared 300 hectares of Finnish forest on Thursday October 22, 2026 @04:35PM (#50200659)
Do you have a source for this? I'm curious about the details.
Re:What's Getting Pwned on Thursday October 22, 2026 @03:24PM (#50199853)
Such policies might not be legal in the US:

> The indefensible extension is that banks aren’t liable for defrauded customers. That is a potential policy regime, chosen by the polity of many democratic nations. The United States is not one of those nations. Our citizens, through their elected representatives, made the considered choice that financial institutions would need to provide extraordinary levels of safety in electronic payments. In reliance upon that regime, the people of the United States transacted many trillions of dollars over payment rails, which was and is very lucrative for all considered.

...

> With a limited number of carveouts (e.g. wire transfers), Reg E is intentionally drafted to be future-proof against changes in how Americans transact. This is why, when banks argue that some new payments rail is exempt because it is “different,” the correct legal response is usually some variation of: doesn’t matter—that’s Reg E.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/regulation-e/

Re:DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS "Cinnamon Teal" on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @05:58PM (#50188242)
I wonder how terrible would it be to use DuckDB as the main database (running transactions) for a small project?
Re:Tsrs: A Port of TypeScript to Rust on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:59PM (#50171821)
Another advantage of AI, though, is that it becomes easier to maintain more than one TypeScript compiler. Perhaps there's some benefits to having some diversity?
Re:Demographic "Doomsday" Misses the Mark on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:48AM (#50166392)
According to some people, AI will take most of those jobs anyway, so maybe it all works out in the end :)
It sounds like you're making a claim to someone else's profits with a very thin rationale for why you had anything to do with it. Basically, claiming something that never was yours and has next to nothing to do with anything you worked on.

Older »