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whimblepop

My preferred Nix package for this patches at least that behavior out, afaict: https://github.com/numtide/llm-agents.nix/blob/dc285bfd94ec7...

https://github.com/numtide/llm-agents.nix/

A well-behaved application should not only use XDG on Linux, but it should use platform-native conventions on macOS as well: "~/Library/Application Support", etc.
What makes ACP deficient for headless uses of LLM agents? Maybe fixing that or standardizing on another protocol designed for pluggable LLM agents (I guess ACP is more oriented towards pair programming in an IDE, at least originally) is a better idea imo.
This kind of stuff often breaks for applications packaged with Nix, so it's often removed from Nix packages for compatibility reasons. Both behaviors you mention are helpfully patched out of the Claude Code package I use: https://github.com/numtide/llm-agents.nix/blob/dc285bfd94ec7...

As a result, I never knew that Claude Code does a nasty thing like this, either. :-\

Fwiw, packages in that repo get version bumped each day, so if that's a fast enough pace for you it may be a good alternative.

There aren't any documented settings to disable this, but there is a feature flag it currently sits behind. You can flip it in your ~/.codex/config.toml[1]:

  [features]
  daemon_auto_start = false

There are also some files that it writes to in ~/.codex at startup: pid files, lock files, things like that. You can delete them and replace them with symlinks to /dev/null, then mark those unwritable with `chattr +i` or similar. Presumably then the background daemon will crash on startup, if the feature flag ever goes away.

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1: https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/0c329ad2c9d5a2592128a1d...

I bet if you contribute in those various other ways for a while, you can probably eventually submit patches. Not as exciting as being able to jump right in, for sure. But it sounds like there's a way in, and I guess you can carry your own patches in a downstream fork in the meantime.
One thing I hope IBM understands here is that healthy F/OSS projects aren't really the kind of thing you can buy and proprietarize even by "forking"/re-licensing your own code. Ages ago, Oracle learned this when they bought Sun, particularly with the birth of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. More recently, Hashicorp is facing the same phenomenon with the departure of the chief maintainer of Terraform to work on OpenTofu at Spacelift.

Many F/OSS maintainers care pretty deeply about things like software freedom, taking good care of our digital commons, and leaving their mark on the world in a public way. I imagine that's especially true at Red Hat. You can buy the company, you can change the relationship to the community of "outside" contributors, and you can even release new versions of the software under a proprietary license. You can create upheaval for a lot of people, including the users. But you will often not only fail to walk away with key maintainers on your team, but watch them go on to form your competition on a new fork.

I don't personally know anyone who works at Red Hat, but even from the interactions I've seen recently in issue trackers and PRs to projects maintained in part by Red Hat engineers, I'm inclined to have a bit of faith. The upstream-first culture there still seems pretty strong and pretty quality-oriented to me. I don't think you can reliably keep engineers like that and turn them into drones who don't care about the craft and their impact on users and developers.

Does "external" contributors effectively mean drive-by contributors? I assume there's still more than a single developer, and it's somehow possible to be admitted as a member of the project if you have some existing public reputation.
Re:ElevenLabs Music v2.5 on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @11:05AM (#49728185)
Good luck with your game! I hope you get there. :)
Re:ElevenLabs Music v2.5 on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @02:16PM (#49716545)
Why not treat AI-generated art as scaffolding in cases like this? Use the AI-generated music or sprites so that in early stages, your game can more closely resemble a complete game and you can think through your aesthetic preferences with concrete examples.

Then, if the project lives and grows long enough to be published, you start soliciting involvement from human artists but with minimal budgetary commitments. If your project gains momentum, you start allocating more realistic incentives for human collaborators.

Re:ElevenLabs Music v2.5 on Friday September 11, 2026 @05:27PM (#49665615)
I chose to listen to the blog post instead of just reading it. I don't know how much if it is just the idea of AI-generated music for me, but the listening experience was extremely repulsive.
Re:What's New in Emacs 31.1? on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @12:54PM (#49437092)
GNU Emacs isn't the first Emacs, although it's still an impressively long-lived and vivacious one.
Re:What's New in Emacs 31.1? on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @12:53PM (#49437062)
In fact, the author of this blog post is also the author of a book on Emacs, which includes a section about Vi(m) bindings and migrating from Vim: https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/switching-from-vim-to...

And Emacs is strictly more powerful than Vim. :)

(I mean that seriously, actually— I don't think people who have used both but prefer Vim would generally list "more powerful" among their reasons for preferring Vim. It's usually more about not liking Lisp, some kind of "minimalism", or a different sensibility about composability.)

Re:DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 on Friday August 07, 2026 @04:08PM (#49215595)
I thought it went without saying that GPT 5.6 Sol is the wrong model to use for things like filtering tweets. Apparently not?
Re:Vulnerability Reports are not Special Anymore on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @10:27PM (#48654390)
Almost never do software companies even attempt to design secure systems. I'm not sure this requires new fundamental research so much as slightly giving a shit.
Re:GLM 5.2 Performance Benchmarks on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @09:59AM (#48570670)
Bullshitting is how LLMs work. It doesn't require active encouragement. All it takes is a machine without consciousness or physical access to the world and an actually-lived life. A training set that contains lots of confident answers and few to no refusals doesn't help either.
Re:macOS Container Machines on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @01:47PM (#48479985)
When Apple Sherlocks something, aren't their implementations usually worse? Typically the thing being Sherlock'd is very mature and featureful, and Apple's implementation is much less capable and has undergone much less user testing, at least at the outset.
To be clear, this does technically meet the very minimal commitment[1] they gave when announcing the acquisition:

> In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730194)

In this case they moved from one source-available license (Fair Source License v0.9 with seat restrictions) to another (Fair Source License 1.1-ALv2 without seat restrictions), with the same sort of restrictions on field-of-endeavor as before.

Why they've chosen this isn't super clear, as (1) there are already open-source alternatives that use the same storage formats as Tart, like Lume[2]; and (2) Tart is certainly already in the training sets of all of OpenAI's "direct competitors", who are practically held back little or not at all by the restrictions of the FSL. The only entities this really restricts are F/OSS distributions which might otherwise include Tart as a first-class package in their distros. :-\

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1: https://web.archive.org/web/20260412071019/https://cirruslab...

2: https://github.com/trycua/cua/tree/main/libs/lume

Writing better exams, even if they're more expensive to grade, and removing homework from grading as far as possible addresses this problem well wherever it's applicable. Senior-level math courses at many universities are already like this: homework is ungraded, or counts for little, and it's possible for students to "cheat" on the homework by copying another student instead of struggling through the exercises. But the students who do that don't learn much, if at all, and predictably fail the exams. Professors warn students at the beginning of the class and tell them how this will work, something like:

> You can always ask me for feedback on your homework and I will mark up every part of it, but you won't receive a grade for homework. However, if you don't do the homework and take your time with it, you will fail the class. My office hours are in the syllabus and you're strongly encouraged to use them. There will be an early exam to give you a chance to know whether you are likely to fail this class before you lose your chance to drop it.

Correctness is harder to adjudicate in some humanities disciplines but the format of these exams is actually not super different from essay tests (when a math professor grades a proof, they're inspecting specialized prose for validity, coherence, persuasion in a way that also reveals knowledge).

When you don't rely on homework for determining whether or not a student passes the class, you make cheating on the homework into the student's problem instead of the professor's or the university's. Students have the right incentives to solve problems for which they are the ones responsible, and they figure it out after one failed (or ideally, dropped) class at worst.

Re:My Students Can't Read on Thursday June 04, 2026 @01:08PM (#48401527)
Whether things like "intelligence", "cognitive ability", and "aptitude" (some of which may be synonyms depending on your view) are innate vs. learned or fixed vs. variable over time are orthogonal to each other. And for each of those pairs, the answer may not be as simple as a binary division or even a gradient (it may decompose into something weirder, being causally determined by multiple factors where some of those factors are fixed and others aren't).

Moreover, both of those questions are separate from questions that get at what IQ measures (does it measure aptitude, does it measure factual knowledge, does it measure social knowledge or acculturation within a specific context, etc.).

Lots of things are easy to identify as both substantially genetically determined and variable over time and mediated by environmental factors, e.g., height. Lots of things are likewise easy to identify as significantly environmentally determined but also largely stable over time if not altogether fixed (e.g., personality, attachment styles).

It's also at least possible for all of the following to be true at the same time:

  - IQ tests correlate with socioeconomic status
  - IQ test scores vary over time and can be increased
  - some IQ score increases, or some part of a given IQ score increase, reflects a genuine aptitude increase
  - IQ tests are somewhat gameable in that training for IQ tests can increase scores so that some of the measured increase does not measure improved cognitive ability
where aptitude means something like fluid problem-solving ability, speed of learning, etc.
Re:My Students Can't Read on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @10:16PM (#48379061)
IQ is about aptitude and credentials on specific topics are about knowledge and skills. It's the wrong thing to optimize for.

Besides, high-IQ students can still underperform for many of the same reasons that average-IQ students often do (e.g., under-preparation, lack of discipline, disorganization, mental illness, financial distress, unstable living situation). We should be better addressing those things before students get to a university no matter what their IQ is.

Beyond that, if you have good competency tests on both ends (i.e., the credentials before a four-year degree are accurate signals, and university degrees effectively prove a high degree of competency), who cares if someone manages to get those credentials by working harder while being dumber? I like working with clever people. I also like working with people who know their shit because they take their time to study and consider things. (When I'm lucky, I get to work with people who are both!)

Re:My Students Can't Read on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @09:57PM (#48378897)
You can't make people more knowledgeable by not attempting to measure their knowledge. You can maybe try to improve things for subsequent generations. But issuing a false credential won't solve the problem.
Re:My Students Can't Read on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @09:52PM (#48378857)
https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293%2FS...

The average university attendee's IQ is virtually indistinguishable from the average person's IQ.

People don't go to college because they're smart. They predominantly go so they can earn more money and/or work more enjoyable jobs when they graduate. Being smart isn't the main reason that adults encourage teenagers to pursue college either. It's mostly a matter of class reproduction; it's the "default" for anyone whose parents are college graduates.

And failing out once you get to the university isn't generally an IQ issue, either. Mediocre and slightly stupid people graduate from universities with degrees they've earned fair and square every year. You don't have to be smart to finish a degree. You do have to be reasonably prepared, and that's the primary issue.

Re:It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12 on Friday May 29, 2026 @02:45PM (#48327560)
I love the Asahi project and I'll probably keep my oldest M-series Mac around to continue to play with Asahi. But even for the oldest Macs it supports, the feature list is not quite complete. The way Apple does a lot of things is bespoke and involves a different division of labor between firmware and operating system than conventional UEFI systems. It's hard to support. I don't want to be required to wait years for features like full support for Thunderbolt docks, and I also want to give my money to a company that proactively supports Linux (e.g., sending hardware to kernel developers, FreeDesktop graphics driver developers, DE maintainers, and distro maintainers in advance of the release of new products) rather than always buying used or giving my money to a company that merely tolerates Linux support.

Again, I love the ambition of the Asahi project and what they've done. They're impressive hackers, and thousands of people will doubtless get years of happy Linux life out of their work— maybe including me! I have no complaints for them, and no wishlist I want to bring to them. In fact, I think maybe I should send them a donation or a kind email or both upon their next release.

But I want to give the bulk of my financial support to a computer vendor who offers me first-class, day-1 support for software environments that make me feel happy and respected. The Asahi team can't turn Apple into that by themselves.

Re:It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12 on Friday May 29, 2026 @01:10PM (#48326142)
I was seduced by Apple Silicon after experiencing the exceptional battery life and performance. Those things are great, as are the screens and the speakers.

But I'm still excited about the Framework 12 because I don't love macOS. I don't need an alternative to beat Apple on every line of the spec sheet. I just need them to align with my values, support Linux well, and cross a certain "good enough" threshold. The latest laptops from Framework meet all of those requirements, and I'm excited to buy one after I've saved up enough money. I've missed Plasma for a long time. At the same time, I wouldn't even consider a MacBook Neo.

Thanks! Love the game as a whole :)
I got "overblocked" for this one:

  rm -rf node_modules && npm install
but actually if you're only removing `node_modules` and you have a working package-lock.json already, what you want is `npm ci`; `npm install` can mutate package-lock.json and potentially expose you to supply chain attacks. If you use `npm ci` I think you don't need to `rm -rf node_modules`, either.

Anyway you should generally run `npm ci` except when you're deliberately updating your actual dependencies. I'd only permit an `npm install` if I was adding or updating a dependency, or I'd just reviewed an `npm ci` failure.

Re:Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @09:39AM (#48279746)
> It surprises me because I'm often asked why I knew X or Y odd perhaps esoteric fact or design pattern. Usually it's because I came across it in a book interested in something else.

It was like this in the days when the primary shortcut was StackOverflow as well. People who are allergic to RTFM treat things that are covered in the docs as "esoteric" knowledge because they never read anything except as a shortcut to solving their immediate problem.

I think the stats are clear that reading is in decline in general, though. I'm sure LLMs will add to this much like YouTube has.

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