News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

zaphar

Re:Apple introduces the new 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6 on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @12:26PM (#50261604)
Why? Apple devices have the best battery life in the market right now to my knowledge. It's an important part of the evaluation for a laptop which is the opposite of cringe.
I would argue that recognizing if the agent is an adversary also requires breadth and a willingness to dive deep when you need to. Both things that the article highlights.

Before agents that is what every high performing person I've ever worked with was like. It was the kind of person I wanted to hire when I was in charge of that sort of thing. Enough breadth to know where to dive deep and enough willingness and curiosity to dive deep.

I think this is probably a good way to think about it. Breadth is going to be important if you want to reasonably navigate the new world. In an emergency even if you are using an agent you will be much quicker if you know what questions to ask the agent and how to guide it.
You sound like you are projecting a bunch of motivations and assumptions about character onto other people. But you projecting such things onto another person is a terrible way to begin to understand something.

There are genuinely people who enjoy learning how something works by doing smaller scale versions of it themselves. This site happens to have a much higher average percentage of them than most other places.

Re:Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone on Friday October 23, 2026 @02:34PM (#50213449)
I don't personally want them to stop. I like what they produce and how they produce it. As long as there are enough people like me there will be a market for this.
Re:Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone on Friday October 23, 2026 @02:32PM (#50213426)
Since part of what I'm purposely purchasing from Google or Apple is a more secure by default system I'm probably the wrong person to ask. My wallet vote is effectively for something different than yours.
Re:Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone on Friday October 23, 2026 @01:27PM (#50212498)
No it's not. You can vote with your wallet right now. Nothing is stopping you.
Re:The Decoherence Trap on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @01:34PM (#50184653)
The article was absolutely talking about individual ships though. His analogy was about a long-lived codebase under constant change.
Re:The Decoherence Trap on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @11:19AM (#50182513)
We did not take the black pearl and continuously evolve it directly into the USS Iowa. That is the analogy the article is making. You are objecting to something that isn't in the article.
Re:Wayland desktop for Linux with skeuomorphic design on Friday October 16, 2026 @09:02AM (#50117875)

    Notifications arrive in a post box
This is genius. Absolute genius. There when you are ready to peruse but not in your face constantly.
For what it's worth Firefox is my daily driver and I've never run into a site that was broken in it. Safari I definitely have.
Re:Why is every rationalist blog post way too long? on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @07:41AM (#50086104)
I score way above average on reading skill and I can still tell that many rationalist articles have a word count higher than the subject matter itself requires. If the point of a rationalist article is to exclude people by requiring them to have a willingness to absorb long overly verbose writing then they have succeeded admirably. But that is still bad writing.
Re:Redesigning Source Control at Anthropic on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @03:06PM (#50076947)
For anthropic internal use it means more revenue not less.
It's cute that you think they have level of sophistication in their strategy.
I use safari regularly and it has not really kept up. All kinds of stuff that is partly broken for rendering. Especially on heavily dynamic sites. Chrome at least works for any web standard which IE did not.
Re:11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @07:49AM (#50070173)
Old C software is generally more trustworthy than new C software. I don't think this rule of thumb transfers across languages very well. And the definition of new vs old has a fairly large effect. If a language has been under constant change it doesn't matter when it was started a large part of the codebase is "new".
Re:Theranos.World on Monday October 12, 2026 @10:47AM (#50057209)
I think we said the same thing? Understanding why you perceive someone that way involves understanding not their tone but primarily the content of what they said. Tone is more often misunderstood than people think.
Re:Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf] on Monday October 12, 2026 @08:28AM (#50055433)
I'm not necessarily an AI booster but I don't think it's at all true that "humans would follow the spirit of the trial process" Some of them will. But I've met far too many humans in all areas of life who will happily follow the letter and not the spirit. Sometimes out of malicious compliance, sometimes out of sheer exhaustion, sometimes because they can't tell the difference between the letter and the spirit and sometimes for a whole host of other reasons like laziness. There will be a not insignificant number of humans are not at this vary moment following the spirit of the thing.
Re:Theranos.World on Friday October 09, 2026 @11:27AM (#50021912)
If someone is coming off as superior to you then you should probably figure out why. Because sometimes the reason is because they have too high an opinion of themselves. And sometimes it's because you are in defense mode and they are right.
Re:Theranos.World on Friday October 09, 2026 @08:26AM (#50019505)
And also a good reminder that if someone is coming off to you as "at a higher perch of morality and business wisdom" maybe you should listen to them.
Re:Show HN: Doom or Bloom, map your AI worldview on Friday September 25, 2026 @03:19PM (#49848749)
Depending on what exactly this analysis means by Human Choices I either think it captured me well or got me completely wrong:

   Human choices can make limited changes, but dominant forces constrain the outcome.
I actually believe Human Choice is the dominant force here. But I expect aggregate human choice to limit the changes a single individual can have on the global outcome.
I've given up on not buying "smart $thing". It seems nearly impossible in many cases. However I absolutely refuse to connect them to my wifi which mostly makes them "dumb" for me.
Re:The Price of Intelligence Is Falling Rapidly on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @11:10AM (#49817367)
I have been searching for a good term or name for what we are actually buying. A "probabilistic search for a reasoning chain through a semantic space" is about as close as I've gotten and I have a feeling it's not exactly accurate either.
Re:Good people refuse to do bad things on Monday September 21, 2026 @05:07PM (#49793434)
I was not referring to corporations.
Re:Good people refuse to do bad things on Monday September 21, 2026 @12:54PM (#49789873)
Personal responsibility leads to corporate responsibility which is the solve for structural problems. You can never impose a new structure to fix it unless you embrace some form of corporate responsibility which requires personal responsibility.
I don't really feel like permissions is the hard bit here. The hard bit is that for an agent to do any kind of useful work it needs access to a lot of stuff. Further, the stuff it needs access to probably has vulnerabilities the agent can do. We have not exactly designed our environments for a use case like this. I've gone through the sandboxing exercise for an agent and by the time I had given it enough permissions to do anything useful my sandbox looked like swiss cheese.
There are really just two ways to avoid the inflationary spiral. You can either increase income (i.e. grow gdp) or you can decrease spending (i.e. cut entitlements).

This is as close as it can be to clearly explain. The problem is that most of our politicians are not explaining it and instead ignoring it. As an individual the only thing you can do is vote for candidates who are willing to have that hard conversation with the public. Unfortunately it looks like that would require voting for a third party candidate and a vanishingly small minority of the electorate is willing to do that. So given all of that context I'm not really sure that the term "Catastrophically indebted" is wrong.

Re:Show HN: Pelican-bicycle alternatives (updated for 2026) on Monday September 14, 2026 @01:13PM (#49700443)
I notice none of the octopi seem to be actually facing the organ.
Re:Who People Talk to When They're Struggling on Thursday September 10, 2026 @12:08PM (#49646112)
That sucks and I'm sure it feels hopeless. But there are ways forward you can investigate. Look for a local community you can plug into. Ease into them and after some time you will be able to make the kind of connections you need.

My personal preference is a local church but there are other options out there. Club's around a shared interest you have. Community center events in your area. It's won't be quick and it won't be easy but you can reverse this.

Re:This Month in Ladybird – August 2026 on Monday September 07, 2026 @07:30PM (#49604111)
The value of a feature or a bugfix is not calculated from the effort required but from the need or desire for said feature or bugfix. So whether or not the barrier to entry has been lowered by llm's is irrelevant. What matters as to it's value is the result.

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