News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

tazjin

Re:We Won't "Just Hang Out" on Friday October 30, 2026 @01:03AM (#50300044)
Muslim is not an ethnicity.
Re:We Won't "Just Hang Out" on Friday October 30, 2026 @01:01AM (#50300024)
Relevant sci-fi story (not exactly short, but you can get through it in a day): https://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html
Re:Overview of the German AfD email leak on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @01:41PM (#50184748)
It's baffling that these kinds of organisations which are obvious targets of attacks are still using stuff like Wordpress, and then getting exploited through it. Competence doesn't grow on trees ...
Re:The DNS Museum on Monday October 19, 2026 @12:33AM (#50148404)
At some point I hosted my blog in DNS; it was a bunch of chunks in TXT records which the frontend would reassemble. It had really strange side effects, e.g. editing a post could shuffle the chunks but then they'd end up being cached separately and some people would see weird artefacts in the text.

I don't know why I did that, but it was fun!

Re:Gemini 4 Argon on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @04:10PM (#49913673)
> Argon agents are working on migrating C/C++ codebases to Rust across Google

Man, I remember back in the days when the cppnext team was refusing to even consider Rust, instead looking at absurd stuff like Carbon and Swift (!), even though half of the engineering staff already knew where this was headed. I hope they got a few good promos out of the delays at least.

Re:F-Droid 2.0: A New Chapter for Android Freedom on Thursday September 24, 2026 @01:24PM (#49833931)
Currently, switching to GrapheneOS means giving Google money. Next year's Motorola-based alternative is also likely going to be several price classes above the Pixels you can currently put GrapheneOS on.
Yeah, we do - there's a famous episode where after rotating the board both contestants stubbornly kept picking 1, and after a couple of iterations one of them was Wangernumb.
I don't think that this produces correct results, as it seems to determine whether each individual number is Numberwang. However, whether a number is Numberwang can also depend on the previous numbers in the sequence or other factors.

So I think as it stands right now this model can only determine whether a number would be Numberwang as the first number of a sequence, but even for that I still wouldn't rely on this in the actual game show.

Re:How does IKEA come up with names for its products? on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @07:39PM (#49354500)
Currently 6833 people in Sweden have the last name "Malm", and some large fraction of them were born before 2005 (could not be bothered to check how many, sorry!).
Re:Almost no skill required to cook a steak on Thursday August 06, 2026 @02:40PM (#49200592)
Ironic, considering the content.
Re:Claude Opus 4.8 on Friday May 29, 2026 @07:05AM (#48321600)
Your posts are very much like "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain".

If a definitive answer on this topic was known then it, well, would be known.

Re:Claude Opus 4.8 on Thursday May 28, 2026 @01:38PM (#48312551)
Neither you nor any of the other people making confident takes in either direction actually know. You're just guessing.
Re:Peter Steinberger – WhatsApp CLI: sync, search, send on Wednesday April 15, 2026 @04:03AM (#47776021)
It does, but only for chats between two specific devices. Multi-device support is one of its best features that you lose with E2E.

Key distribution is just too hard. I think we won't get a messenger for non-tech people that works well with multi-device and E2E basically ever.

Re:Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager on Sunday March 15, 2026 @03:10PM (#47390782)
EWM implements a Wayland compositor as a native thread spawned by a dynamic module in Emacs, it's a full compositor within the Emacs process: https://codeberg.org/ezemtsov/ewm

So it is architecturally possible (but infeasible in plain Emacs Lisp).

For river (the thing this article is about) I wrote an Emacs WM, but also opted for a dynamic module for the Wayland protocol parts: https://code.tvl.fyi/tree/tools/emacs-pkgs/reka

This one could technically be written in plain Emacs Lisp, but I'm happy to use something that already has all the XML codegen stuff for Wayland figured out. Dynamic modules work pretty well, fwiw.

Re:Fontcrafter: Turn Your Handwriting into a Real Font on Monday March 09, 2026 @06:57AM (#47307412)
It is probably country and language dependent, I think. I don't know anyone under 40 who doesn't write in cursive (in Russian), and for other languages I personally also write in cursive (and learnt that in school). I'm in my 30s.
Okay, so which hardware are you buying that isn't using any Chinese components?) I don't think the empire can make this kind of hardware from scratch without China at the moment.
Re:Another GitHub outage in the same day on Monday February 09, 2026 @05:08PM (#46952206)
Killing off free repos is not going to happen. That would be a suicide move on the level of the Digg redesign, or Tumblr's porn ban.

It kind of would be good for everyone if they did do it though. Need to get rid of this monopoly, and maybe people will discover that there are alternatives with actually good workflows out there.

People go through all this trouble to host convoluted chat systems, and all this time IRC is right there. There's modern servers like Ergo and modern clients like Halloy (or for the JavaScript addicts: Convos, The Lounge, Kiwi, ...) providing all the multi-device history sharing and emoji reactions you could need. All on top of a super simple, extremely battle tested protocol.
These weird anti-Graphene posts confuse me. I use GrapheneOS, fwiw, and I believe some things the project does (like its attacks on F-Droid) are misguided for orthogonal reasons.

However, it all makes sense from the perspective of Graphene not attempting to be a general purpose OS like Lineage, but explicitly a security focused OS. Security is often in conflict with what the average consumer wants, and they can go use Lineage or whatever.

It's like writing lots of comments complaining about OpenBSD devs coming across as grumpy and refusing to support Bluetooth. That is part of their value proposition! You're just not the target audience and that is okay.

I've only seen the carrier locked phones and long-term contracts in a handful of countries. I've lived in a lot of countries on three continents.

In many places the default is prepaid SIMs with separately purchased phones. Sometimes the prepaying can be automated (e.g. in Russia), sometimes it involves you physically going to a shop once a month or so (e.g. in Egypt).

Re:Hung by a thread on Saturday January 24, 2026 @05:30PM (#46748391)
Haskell has exceptions, so dependencies can still do plenty of harmful stuff ;)
Re:Claude's New Constitution on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @02:20PM (#46710192)
The "assistant" is a personality that the "entity" (or model) knows how to perform as, it's strictly a subset.

The best article on this topic is probably "the void". It's long, but it's worth reading: https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/785766737747574784/th...

Re:Find a pub that needs you on Thursday January 15, 2026 @03:03AM (#46629527)
No. It was obvious from the title that this was about the UK, and also why should they - American sites don't indicate this either, and they have no monopoly on the language.
Re:AI is a business model stress test on Saturday January 10, 2026 @01:16PM (#46568360)
Huh? Clearly writing it is not easy, as per your own comment
Re:AI is a business model stress test on Saturday January 10, 2026 @12:58PM (#46568141)
Does anyone know of active work happening on such a license?
Re:I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great on Saturday January 10, 2026 @12:19PM (#46567674)
Xiaomi, Honor and Huawei make ARM-based notebooks like that. The closest to your description is probably the Qingyun line of laptops.
Re:Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15 on Saturday January 10, 2026 @11:43AM (#46567225)
I'm not in the US.

I spent some time on Google Maps, and the furthest spot I managed to find from a town was about 35km. Note that I didn't say anything about supermarkets - this is a thread about car reliability, so the context is how far you can be from a town where it's reasonable to expect that someone can help you with your car.

Re:Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15 on Saturday January 10, 2026 @10:53AM (#46566711)
Haha, how far is the middle of nowhere from the nearest town in Scotland? A few dozen kilometres?
Re:Changes to Android Open Source Project on Saturday January 10, 2026 @04:27AM (#46564184)
The EU is entirely dependent on US services, which don't much care about a fringe phone OS some fraction of people in the EU use. It's like adding duck/egg, crow/egg and other similar problems into the dependency web, too.
Re:Changes to Android Open Source Project on Saturday January 10, 2026 @04:00AM (#46564047)
You can sell the phones alright, and they might even work, but the fact is that participation in society - especially if you live in a city - will be much harder without Android/iOS.

Note, not impossible: You can always carry cash to avoid phone-based bank payments (which would be needed at e.g. my local farmer's market, where nobody has a card payment terminal), some taxi services (Yandex Go for example) provide a web view with some of the features, you can open map services in the browser ...

But for the browser-based cases the experience will be even worse than the standard app experience, and friction is overall much higher.

As a result, only a very small fraction of nerds are committed enough to buy and use these devices. You then have a chicken&egg problem about getting a third option to work.

The only way this has been done semi-successfully in recent years is Huawei's HarmonyOS - and they did it by way of a) already being an absolutely massive phone company, and b) keeping around an expensive Android-compatibility core for many years.

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