News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

tomjakubowski

Re:AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them on Friday October 30, 2026 @02:53PM (#50308514)
> Real ones are oncall for the systems they build.

Code of Hammurabi's Law 229: "If a carpenter has erected a poorly constructed house, so that the walls cave in and kill the homeowner, that carpenter shall be executed."

Re:About the compromised eMudhra intermediate CAs on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @02:21PM (#50278507)
AWK is a great hobby, if anyone's looking to get into a new one. If sed is map and grep is filter, then awk is reduce.
I thought the general partners of a VC firm usually did put their own money into the fund? It seems crazy to me to invest in a VC fund that operates without skin in the game.
Andon has a waitlisted beta product now called Pion, which they sell as a platform for running an entire business with AI agents.

> Pion is not a platform to set up workflows, or partially automate work. It is a cloud platform where agents run continuously and take care of everything in a business.

I admire entrepreneurs, and respect the intelligence and hard work it takes to build a new business and run it successfully. I also have a lot of respect for Andon's café, market, and radio station experiments, which have done a great job of testing and demonstrating the limits of model and harness capabilities in a very tough real-world intelligence test. I just don't know why anyone would buy Pion given the performance record of Andon's business experiments.

(Andon's done better in the VendingBench arena, but that's a pure simulation. Like trading with fake money or playing SimCity 2000, a lot of strategies which do well in sims don't survive contact with the real world.)

Re:What Is Gridifcation on Thursday October 22, 2026 @05:57PM (#50201634)
J Dilla was famous for nudging programmed and sampled beats for musical effect. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Dilla_time
I think GP likely meant "win the lottery" metaphorically, like playing the startup game and getting to a large exit.
Re:DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS "Cinnamon Teal" on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @04:15PM (#50186995)
[delayed]
Re:EMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:25PM (#50170532)
Well, all eight of the compromised certificates had keys which were < 256. So a really poor choice of range.
YCSE isn't an "alternative narrative" in the sense you're probably thinking. It makes no attempt to redeem Holmes. It shows starkly just how manipulative she is, in a way nothing else I've read or watched about her has done.
Re:Why is every rationalist blog post way too long? on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @06:41PM (#50096525)
I was so confused about how this could be chronologically possible, until I learned there is another famous Balzac besides Honoré.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Guez_de_Balzac

Re:Where is all the new, good software? on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @03:52PM (#50077661)
> A coffee break might actually help productivity

Always has done. Writing code was never the bottleneck.

Hammock-Driven Development: https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc

Seeing Like A State is essential reading, especially for anyone working in software or operations for a corporation.
Re:Integer multiplication below n log n on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @06:04PM (#49999406)
> The cost is measured in an exact complex-register model that assigns unit cost to exact complex field operations. The algorithm accepts every x ∈ Cn, with no bound on its entries or on intermediate complex magnitudes. Its computation on the input uses only addition, subtraction, and multiplication by prepared input-independent scalars. The magnitudes of those scalar coefficients are unrestricted as well.

I'm not very familiar with this kind of low-level theoretical computer science, so please forgive my possibly stupid question: is it common to use a model of computation like this, with registers which can store exact complex numbers? Since no computers like that really exist, would that limit the practical application of this finding?

"$120 price target" is a prediction about the price in some near-ish term time range.
There are earlier examples of eccentric religious beliefs in engineers too, like Jack Parsons and Thelema.
Re:Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city on Friday October 02, 2026 @09:07PM (#49940449)
There's a video of San Antonio Spurs players, including Tim Duncan and David Robinson, playing Starcraft 2v2 on the road during the 1999 NBA Finals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7WEJQfwniQ

I'll settle for NO SLOP, NICK! as an anagram of NICK POLSON.
One of the most memorable tech talks I ever attended was by a junior engineer who had just come back to the office from a major conference. Our workplace had an unusually oral culture -- decisions were made in meetings, and not always written down; there wasn't much in the way of bug tracking or work planning at the time; people generally preferred to talk through problems instead of working them out in email, chat, or forum posting.

He was supposed to present a topic he learned about at the conference. Instead, he gave a cheeky talk which introduced the very concept of written language to the audience, as if we had never heard of it. Starting from the history of writing on tablets and so on, and ending in practical advice like, "when words are written down, you don't have to remember what they were exactly; you can just read the words again." I loved the chutzpah and could barely hold myself from chortling out loudly at some of his slides.

Re:Without the Hot Air on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @03:06PM (#49898761)
A person riding a bicycle expends an order of magnitude less energy than does a car ferrying the same person the same distance. So I don't think this really holds.

For comparison: at 50 MPG, traveling one mile by car uses 0.02 gallons of gasoline. This is about 675 Wh of energy or 580 kcal. Travel by bicycle for a ~180lb person is about 60 kcal per mile.

Re:You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @01:18PM (#49896816)
"Doughnuts? I told you, I don't like ethnic food!"
Re:You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @01:17PM (#49896786)
That guy really ought to read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard.
Re:What Would a Serious AI Product Look Like? on Monday September 28, 2026 @04:34PM (#49883984)
That's an interesting example because spreadsheets are commonly and famously riddled with data errors and mistakes in their calculations. Despite this, many businesses are run successfully on the backs of them. Maybe a spreadsheet which acknowledges openly that it could contain errors would disincline a business user from trusting it; ignorance is bliss.
Not true that it's limited to certain states. It's a nationwide problem, according to AT&T.

https://about.att.com/pages/copper-theft-prevention

Here's an unsolved case from this August in Oklahoma. Oklahoma ranks top 10 in the country for copper theft.

https://about.att.com/ecms/dam/pages/copper-theft-prevention...

Different Rosenow. In July 1941 the SS was busy invading and beginning occupation of the Baltic states and western Russia.

https://www.maparchive.ru/nara-doc/Waffen-SS/3_SS_PANZER-DIV...

> Daily reports and sketches pertaining to offensive engagements across Lithuania in the Gvardeysk and Ukmerge areas, 22-28 Jun; advance across Latvia and offensive operations in the Deguciai, Daugavpils, Zidina, and Dagda areas, 28 Jun-4 Jul; and invasion of Russia and offensive and mopping-up operations in the Rasina (Rosenow), Opochka, Isaki, Zaborov'ye, and Gorki areas, 5-19 Jul 1941. Also periodic division circuit diagrams, 29 Jun-18 Jul 1941, and data on enemy operations.

To be clear, the text in the comment is the plaintext, not the ciphertext. The plaintext is what's full of typos.

The ciphertext of message Nr 172 was:

MVUEH IDEVS ARMCC NQTAT YEVFC DBZGG SMXWL PSYWZ YTCBS WURRT BZCVG ODVJU SLSOO MJQJZ SXSEB ZPEYM DNXJF TC

https://cryptocellar.org/bgac/g-army-july-1941.html

Tasks are completed in about half the time too. Although we'll see if it slows down in a few weeks as Anthropic's model services are prone to do.
Re:George Lucas Returns to Earth, Bearing Gifts on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @04:13PM (#49807438)
We're happy to have it. It's a gorgeous building and I can't wait to see the weird museum exhibits.
Re:Did OpenAI solve the wrong Navier-Stokes problem? on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @03:33PM (#49806917)
I learned from this charming lo-fi video that it is actually much easier to find singularities in the Navier-Stokes equation for compressible fluids (which is out of scope for the Millenium Prize problem). The first was found in 1998 by Zhouping Xin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wEn9B7pDV4

Re:English: A vs. An on Sunday September 20, 2026 @10:20AM (#49776186)
On the other hand it's a nice thing that "kein" and "nein" are different words.

Older »