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thwarted

Re:Patrick Stewart has died on Thursday October 29, 2026 @05:37PM (#50296445)
There's a YouTube channel called "The Art of Storytelling"[0] that had a concentration on Star Trek, specifically TNG, that I've found entertaining and informative. One video covers that episode specifically.

[0] https://youtube.com/@theartofstorytelling1

Re:AI promised less work. I've never worked more on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @04:15PM (#50265145)
White collar work may have been phoning it in (literally and figuratively), but the drop is probably more likely due to "Labor Productivity (Output per Hour)" being measured using revenue from things like the social, entertainment, and travel industries taking a hit in customer spend (an empty restaurant has less output per hour than a busy restaurant, for example). It's not clear to me from that page/graph alone that an increase in stimulus spending is a cause, vs a correlation, for the drop.
Re:We should be more ambitious with the software we build on Sunday October 25, 2026 @02:30AM (#50228884)
> I'm old enough now that I don't have a lot of my time left to "hand stitch an amazing tapestry".

Why not? What is the goal of "having an amazing tapestry"? Do you need to do increasing more things in the limited time you have left and making a tapestry isn't one of those things? What will you have once you've "finished" an amazing tapestry, just something to hang on the wall and look at? How does one "use" a tapestry after it's "finished" such that the act of finishing it is the most important thing? If you've finished it, will you get more enjoyment from looking at it for longer because it was finished sooner and thus the length of time you can look at it before you die is maximized? Exactly what you are optimizing for here?

Re:No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector on Saturday October 24, 2026 @05:41PM (#50225652)
> We get way too hung up on data; especially when it reinforces our personal bias.

While I don't disagree that we generally get too hung up on data, "It's a problem when the data matches the hypothesis" is an odd blanket interpretation of the scientific method.

Re:No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector on Saturday October 24, 2026 @05:37PM (#50225609)
> Software creation tools have been worked on for decades to keep fallible human coders out of trouble as much as possible.

And the LLM-based coding agents provide the ultimate scapegoat for those who consider "the LLM wrote this code" to be an acceptable, deflecting response when issues occur.

Re:Why is AI generated language so hard to understand? on Saturday October 24, 2026 @05:32PM (#50225562)
>averaged about 1.3 suggestions per sentence.

It likely that no response at all or "This looks good, no suggestions" are not possible responses. They haven't figured out how to detect when a conversation should just end or that no response is necessary and include that in the training data.

> Go uses the system store with an additional revoke/deny list in crypto/x509 because it allows updating a deployed application on an out of date or slow moving platform or OS.

Reminder: Neither the CVE nor the linked go alert seem to say that you have to recompile and redeploy your application with the new go version in order to take advantage of this change. Just updating the tool chain and go stdlib isn't enough, because this stuff gets baked into the resultant binary. This is unlike, say, python, Ruby, or java where updating the runtime may be sufficient, depending on your development and deployment model.

"master" is less controversial?
One of those facts that mortgage owners refuse to internalize: the party responsible for the payments is not necessarily living on the property. There is absolutely no reason in this century to assume that the mailing address for real estate mortgage related correspondence is the address of the property. Related: the assumption that if there are two names on a mortgage with given names that are commonly understood to be gendered, the parties are legally married.
Re:Wayland desktop for Linux with skeuomorphic design on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:20PM (#50108847)
To say nothing of client side decorations, which diverge the user interface among apps and remove control from the user to globally customize some aspect of their application window management/theming.
Re:Wayland desktop for Linux with skeuomorphic design on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:16PM (#50108804)
I got bit by this recently. Brave on android has no "forward button in the app menu, it only has back. Chrome has both forward and back in the menu. Both browsers support swiping from the right side to go forward in the history stack (although this seems to be overloaded with switching tabs in a tab group), which I discovered by accident. What's odd about this though is that the device has a global back button that is also used for backward history navigation, but that's been duplicated in brave with an additional back action in the menu, but the forward history navigation is entirely hidden and has only one way to invoke it: via swiping.
Re:Wayland desktop for Linux with skeuomorphic design on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:08PM (#50108699)
> they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.

They started doing it on mobile in order to give more screen real estate to the content area. This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone (a 32" monitor at 1600x1200 used to be a luxury, now it's mundane). Now no one knows if there is anything "below the fold" without initiating a scroll action, which just encourages people to further only focus on the above the fold content.

Interestingly the response to that was sites adding horizontal "progress bars" across the top of the viewport to indicate how much you had read. And with application and website control of the styling and operation of these standard widgets, everyone is slightly different, which increases time to become familiar.

It's been a race to the bottom, in the name of (the subjective at best) "clean design".

Re:Recreational Programming on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @03:29AM (#50083755)
> Turns out typing in long listings from B&W hobbyist zines and then finding all the typos was a fine way to learn.

My mom and I used to take turns reading the code from the magazines out loud while the other typed the code into our Commodore 64. She used to say things like "I was just having fun, typing in the games and playing them, but thwarted was actually learning something" (no, my mom doesn't call me "thwarted").

Re:Redesigning Source Control at Anthropic on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @04:30PM (#50078254)
> Agents use source control, too. It's a pretty important part of the development process to understand how code has changed.

This is a great idea, now they just have to use/do it. Maybe they can use it effectively by cloning the repo and having all the history at hand, rather than continuously scraping web pages with git content formatted for human brwosing.

Re:Don't Put Tilde In Your Path on Sunday October 11, 2026 @10:11AM (#50043509)
In that case, you're not running a "shell command" from python, you're passing arguments to exec. A shell command would be a string interpreted by the shell, and you'd use that for shell syntax things like having the shell do variable interpolation or redirections as part of executing the command.
Re:One Month Without AI on Saturday September 26, 2026 @08:59AM (#49856085)
> I just wrote a book using Claude as an experiment, and while the thing got done and it was an amazing tool and a great experience, what I’m left with is a book where every line needs rewriting, there are logical inconsistencies throughout, and the style is so bad it should actually just be binned rather than rewritten.

How was this a great experience if what was produced needed such extensive changes that your own assessment is that it should be thrown out? At what point is the necessary rework so much that the thing being reworked didn't really contribute much to the end product at all?

Re:One Month Without AI on Saturday September 26, 2026 @08:49AM (#49856016)
> I have no idea how the code looks like, and barely even tested the app entirely, because it is still not released yet

This is worded as if knowing how the code works and testing it is hinged on it being released.

> "We ask that Australia clarify how exactly 'harm' and 'risks' shall be determined... ensuring these definitions do not encroach on protected speech," the US said in its submission.

Australia should put this submission in the circular file. The US government's opinion about any of this shouldn't matter to Australia, especially when the intent is to allow users to elect to use the natural state of no-algorithm time-based-ordering presentation of the content. This is like saying that an impact study needs to be done to determine if walking to the end of the block is safe enough to be allowed rather than blasting people out of a cannon towards the end of the block. Or saying that people should not be able to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in that order if they choose to.

> Another worry was that the proposed laws could affect Australia's "reputation as a jurisdiction that enables innovation," the submission said.

How magnanimous of the US to be concerned about this for Australia.

Re:Prompts Aren't Real on Sunday September 20, 2026 @01:43PM (#49778073)
There's no interop between video conferences services, no BYO-video-conferencing app, why would this be any different? It took government regulation to allow telephones other than those provided by the phone company to be plugged into the phone network. Can't control you or usage if they just provide dumb pipes/interfaces that anyone's tool and interact with.
Re:Hacking OpenAI on Friday September 18, 2026 @02:52PM (#49758586)
I used github as an example. It's not about what's available, it's about what's appropriate/expected to be used at any given scale and what those thresholds are. I question that there is anyone who says "well, we have 30 engineers now, it's time to start bringing things in-house and on-prem". I assert that the reasons/logic to do so are divorced from the size of the org (except where size of the org influences the dollar amount shown on an invoice, which can push it in either direction).

But, even if the hosting of the code is locked down behind a VPN, the nature of it requires copying it somewhere else, perhaps to a laptop that gets lost/stolen. But that is an attack vector and risk that is not addressed by having the revision control only accessible via VPN (although it may provide access auditing capabilities to help mitigate/observe where copies of the code exist).

Re:Hacking OpenAI on Friday September 18, 2026 @01:35PM (#49757619)
> I would expect any company with more than a few dozen developers would host their code on prem

(Ignoring what "on prem" means these days with so much being hosted and run on computers you don't own/physically control) Then you would be surprised. The threshold is probably multiple hundreds or thousands of developers, way more than "a few dozen". The lure of github purely because it's github is strong, and since Microsoft owns github now it falls under the "no one has been fired for choosing Microsoft" vendor selection logic.

Re:I don't like passkeys on Friday September 18, 2026 @12:30PM (#49756747)
I cannot speak to how accurate your description is, but this description sounds like there are multiple weak points and multiple attack vectors that open this up to increased risk of compromise, undermining the very security stance it's supposed to provide.
Re:Let's make quality the norm again on Thursday September 17, 2026 @09:22PM (#49749085)
> Turns out it is galvanized, not stainless. I’m not sure the average person knows the difference. To be charitable, perhaps that’s even why the listing advertised it that way.

The person (or who/whatever) that wrote the ad copy probably doesn't know the difference. "Stainless" (either grouped with the word "steel" or by itself) is maybe a filler word to lend a certain level of gravitas/authority to the description or maybe used in contrast to "painted"; despite that it does actually mean something to people who know, it's not being used in that way, which contributes to the confusion. You'll often see menu items described as having "fresh" ingredients. I saw this the other day while waiting to place an order at a cafe and was thinking "what do they mean by 'fresh', in contrast to what? to distinguish themselves from other cafes' menus? freshly purchased by this venue or freshly harvested?" You can't tell, so much so that "fresh" is now meaningless. Perhaps "stainless" is going that way too.

Re:Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously on Monday September 14, 2026 @04:02PM (#49703098)
Most/all of these LinkedIn influencer types are showing off what amounts to busy-boxes, but for adults rather than for babies, presented as if these are at all useful for real world use or are showing anything useful. That YouTube channel does an okay job of calling it out.
Re:Google no longer provides direct URLs in search results on Saturday September 12, 2026 @05:10PM (#49677244)
What does this mean?

This text appears on this page https://www.autom.dev/blog/google-search-goto-links

> The real URL is in the Location header on /goto. Request that URL. Do not follow the redirect.

And this text appears on this page https://www.autom.dev/blog/google-goto-url-fix

> Do not follow the redirect. Read Location.

That's what a redirect is, reading the value of the location header and then requesting it. How do you not follow the redirect by reading the location header? Once you've made the request to the /goto url, with GET or HEAD, to get the location header, google knows you're interested in whatever it is putting in the location header and can assume you're going to go there, if you're letting the User Agent (curl or the browser) go there for you or not.

Re:Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h? on Thursday September 10, 2026 @10:24AM (#49644233)
This is a really interesting video that explores this topic, pointing out that at near light speeds, the entire universe becomes accessible in a single human lifetime.

The Overview Effekt: Time Dilation Visualized

https://youtu.be/8FT-oz9aZU4

Re:Marx, Keynes, and A.I on Monday August 31, 2026 @01:03PM (#49512070)
> the rational thing for these rational competitors to do would be to agree

This is the bit that is tripping you up. The market is composed of more than just the these potentially agreeing parties, so there is no case where all parties can even come together to agree. It's rational for any party to break the agreement or be stealthy and attempt to take the upper hand while the visible players are all patting themselves on the back for their self-inflicted restraint. It's rational for one party to encourage everyone to come together to agree, to distract from their own actions to undercut everyone else.

On top of that, such agreement would potentially qualify as collusion, allowing an upstart to cry foul.

It's all game theory.

Re:Stopping the smart TV from being used against you on Friday August 28, 2026 @05:48PM (#49484644)
If the TV only plugged into the wall for electricity and showed the video that was fed into it via one of its inputs, does that TV qualify as "yet another extra piece of hardware that needs to be maintained"? The only reason it needs "maintenance" is because it does all this extra "smart" stuff. A separate device that has the "smarts" and treats the TV as a bare monitor screen would still be only one device to "maintain".
> Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft. - Neuromancer

This is an interesting call out when it comes to the communication/presentation of aesthetics of technology in the book. There's no narrative about actually relieving himself, just the mention that, of course, he has to and this is how it's being handled; the reader fills that in from these few scant details. The need to relieve himself, and ultimately the mention of the Texas catheter, is used as an indicator of how he's able to remain jacked in for so long, and as foreshadowing of expected jacked-in duration as they approach the final stages of the Villa Straylight run (when he purposely neglects to put it back on). So even in the "advanced" technology of the cyberpunk future of Neuromancer, people still gotta piss and wearing a catheter is still uncomfortable.

Heh, and cool hunting is the setting in Pattern Recognition.

That they are cool is the only thing that needs to be said. The reader fills that in with their own perception, which is how we're ending up with the Torment Nexus, because some people think the Torment Nexus is cool.

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