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A lot of internet payments work this way already anyways, not many gateways require auth before capture, processors/payfacs just do it because it gives lower interchange and reduces risk.

"So are we in an A.I. bubble? It sure looks like it to me. That doesn’t mean we won’t get large economic advances (and disruptions) out of A.I. "

This is the most plausible looking path forward: LLMs + conventional ML + conventional software inverts how our economy operates over the next few decades, but over the next few years a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money when the singularity is actually a sigmoid curve.


I have been to northern Norway and Iceland a few times.

It all started when I was running my previous SaaS at the peak of its growth. I needed a break, and wanted to go far away, while still being close enough if sh*t hit the fan. My co-founder had recently talked to some friends who had been to Tromsø, Norway. The place looked perfect, so I booked a 5-day solo trip there.

Places that are so distant, with such harsh conditions and few people living there always give me a feeling I do not experience anywhere else in the world. I feel small, irrelevant, in the face of brutal, powerful nature.

And believe me, it is a feeling that is overwhelming. But never have I perceived it as something negative. The opposite was true. Feeling small made me feel calm, embracing that that was the right spot for me as part of God's creation. Suddenly, all those dark clouds that followed me everywhere I went back home were... Gone.

If you ever have the opportunity to go to one of these places - go. It might change you in profound ways.


My pulse today is just a mediocre rehash of prior conversations I’ve had on the platform.

I tried to ask GPT-5 pro the other day to just pick an ambitious project it wanted to work on, and I’d carry out whatever physical world tasks it needed me to, and all it did was just come up with project plans which were rehashes of my prior projects framed as its own.

I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools. It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways. Both will stick around, but fall well short of the tulip mania VCs and tech leaders have pushed.

I’ve long contended that tech has lost any soulful vision of the future, it’s just tactical money making all the way down.


Hashimoto is an absolute wizard, but what I find most compelling about him is his absolutely uncanny ability to segment and abstract systems and interfaces in a way for maximum composability and minimal entanglement. He's like the walking embodiment of Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy philosophy. It's like he designs software systems in such a way that they have no choice but to operate correctly and predictably.

Also I just tried Ghostty for the first time. With iTerm2 and the Zsh/Powerlevel10k theme, there's an extremely brief but perceptible lag from running a command and the render. In ghostty it feels actually instant.


I betting $10 Apple’s foldable will be two iPhone Airs where one side has 0 bezel hinged together with extreme mechanical precision and maybe some fairy dust to make the gap when unfolded unnoticeable.

This creates a foldable with no durability issues and no “crease” problems. Also the two halves of the display could be on the outside when folded, avoiding the need for a third display and getting a rear display for free. I would buy 3 of these.


For what it's worth, the Apple Watch since Series 7 has had 60GHz wireless USB communications for diagnostics, recovery, etc -- we're a few more steps closer to "portless" phones with everything they do.

Watching that video, the first thought I have is "So much engineering and I still need to buy a phone case with my new phone?"

I'm guessing phone cases are still pretty much required if you drop your phone once or twice a month onto cement/asphalt/marble/etc from pocket height.

I would be really curious to hear the internal debate at Apple wrt design tradeoffs + durability. E.g. how much of the iPhone design is only possible because Apple is assuming the average person will have a case on their phone.

I wouldn't be surprised if the typical consumer would be more impressed by "No Case Required iPhone" compared to "Skinniest and lightest iPhone yet!".


Last night I encountered a 3 min+ ad on YT about the construction of the iPhone 17 Pro. A few seconds were devoted to the cooling system. I watched the whole thing. It was better than the video it interrupted.

https://youtu.be/_-AS5DtDeqs?si=rTfubRDArVupqREt


> One hypothetical approach I could imagine, is that a dependency major-version release of a package can ship with AST-rewriting-algorithm code migrations

Jane Street has something similar called a "tree smash" [1]. When someone makes a breaking change to their internal dialect of OCaml, they also push a commit updating the entire company monorepo.

It's not explicitly stated whether such migrations happen via AST rewrites, but one can imagine leveraging the existing compiler infrastructure to do that.

[1]: https://signalsandthreads.com/future-of-programming/#3535


> If engineers can't even manage their own security, why are we expecting users to do so?

This latest attack hit Crowdstrike as well. Imagine they had gotten inside Huntress, who opened up about how much they can abuse the access given: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45183589

Security folks and companies think they are important. The C suite sees them as a scape goat WHEN the shit hits the fan and most end users feel the same about security as they do about taking off their shoes at the airport (what is this nonsense for) and they mostly arent wrong.

It's not that engineers cant take care of their own security. It's that we have made it a fight with an octopus rather than something that is seamless and second nature. Furthermore security and privacy go hand and hand... Teaching users that is not to the benefit of a large portion of our industry.


When I was young there were a few luminaries in the software world who talked about how there is a steady if small flow of ideas from video game design into conventional software.

But I haven't heard anyone talk like that in quite sometime (unless it's me parroting them). Which is quite unfortunate.

I think for example if someone from the old guard of Blizzard were to write a book or at least a novella that described how the plugin system for World of Warcraft functioned, particularly during the first ten years, where it broke, how they hardened it over time, and how the process worked of backporting features from plugins into the core library...

I think that would be a substantial net benefit to the greater software community.

Far too many ecosystems make ham-fisted, half-assed, hair-brained plugin systems. And the vast majority can be consistently described by at least two of the three.


I strongly suggest that you use something like Network Namespaces through Vopono[0] or Gluetun[1] if you use a commercial VPN for "privacy" or "security" aka torrenting and shitposting. Relying on these clients is always a gamble and if your software (Browser, Torrentclient, etc.) cannot know you public IP only the internal IP of the VPN you are also safe against some exploits and misconfigurations a desktop client won't protect you against.

[0] https://github.com/jamesmcm/vopono [1] https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun


Sure, here are some to look at :

https://iterm2.com/features.html

I'll just mention some that I have used and found good.

The drop-down visor like Yakuake is great.

Instant Replay is handy for ephemeral text that gets wiped from the terminal, like TUI apps and scaffolding tools. You can imagine that there's always something like Asciinema recording into a buffer, so you can stop and rewind to catch any output you missed.

The notifications are useful.. I can start a long running task, get on with other things, and get a MacOS notification when that terminal rang a bell.

Global search is good, and searches across tabs. I also set a large scrollback buffer, so I can do a reverse incremental search for strings. You can also use the Triggers facility to highlight any string matches (or regex) whenever they occur in the terminal output. This is great when you are tailing a log and want to know immediately when an expression is output, alerting you that a condition has occurred.

Jumping up and down through the command entry points in a session is useful, if there's a lot of output to cut through (I think vscode terminal also does this).

I've also used the toolbelt side-window when I want to repeat verbose commands on a host where I don't want to set up aliases. There is much more you can do with the toolbelt, including automatically capturing text that matches regex patterns.

There's a lot I haven't mentioned, but those are some features I can recall finding useful.


> Even if they choose AGPLv3, the creator still maintains full freedom since they own the copyrights.

Only if they either refuse all contributions, require contributions to be made under an MIT license or similar (and then immediately relicense back to AGPLv3 before publishing), or require a CLA.

I'm all for personal projects to be licensed AGPLv3, but we must acknowledge that the moment you take others' AGPLv3 contributions, in practice you won't be able to do those other things.


My take on this is that, from a SW development POV, user stories are not the right unit of work. Instead, I treat user stories as "Epics". Stake holders can track that Epic for progress, as the unit of work from their POV.

Internally, the team splits Epics into "Spikes" (figure out what to do) and "Tasks" (executing on the things we need to do).

- Spikes are scoped to up to 3 days and their outcome is usually a doc and either a follow-up Spike or Tasks to execute.

- Tasks must be as small and unambiguous as possible (within reason).


The fake death thought is very common. My brother drowned at the beach when he was only 17. We all stood there helpless, unable to find him. His body took some time to return to the shore, and a friend of a friend of the family was the one who identified him.

I was very young, only 7, but my cousin, who was 15 at the time, spent years searching for him, convinced the body had been misidentified. Later, when I grew older, I also went through the phase of thinking, "He was too smart and strong for that. Maybe he ran away somehow."


I have launched raspberry pi based PicoBalloons and had one fly for over a year at 40k ft. They are remarkably resilient.

I have used CubeSats in LEO to make amateur radio contacts. AMSAT is trying to get one to MEO/HEO. New cubesats are being released frequently. Not all RPi based and usually custom PCBs. You can buy desk based CubeSats for STEM


Fedora Silverblue is the closest feeling to the macOS experience I fell in love with that I’ve had on Linux in, well, ever. Very happy with it on my desktop and laptop. It’s not perfect but it is less imperfect than modern macOS has become.

Finding a laptop that works well is annoying, however.


This thread is going to be 400 comments of people talking about how stupid this is, how it won't work and never will, how no sane person could possibly want this. And you know what, I agree with all of that.

But there are a few people asking who is pushing for this legislation so hard. That's mostly police forces who are pointing out that they're unable to track the activities of criminal organisations. For example, in the UK sophisticated gangs steal cars and phones and ship them around the world where they're resold. They locate a buyer anywhere in the world who requests a specific car, find that car, steal it and have it in a shipping container within 24 hours. It's impossible to know who's done it, or track any of the communications involved.

In previous eras it wasn't possible to create international criminal organisations of this level of sophistication because it was harder to communicate securely. Now it's possible and we all pay the price of increased criminal activity. Everyone's insurance premiums go up, making everyone poorer. UK car insurance premiums are up 82% between 2021 and 2024 and insurance providers are still making a loss.

Just to drive this point home - watch/rewatch The Wire (2002-08), except make it impossible to tap the communications of the drug gangs because they're all using encrypted messengers with disappearing messages. Immediately the people running the organisation become untouchable. The police likely can't even figure out who the lieutenants are, let alone the kingpin. At best you can arrest a few street level dealers and that hardly disrupts the criminals at all.

On HN everyone is going to say "everyone has a right to private communication, even criminal empires". And sure, I'm not going to disagree. I'm merely pointing out that private communication allows criminal networks to be much larger, more effective and harder to disrupt. And all of society pays the price when we're victimised by criminals.

Edit: I'm not saying breaking encryption is a good thing or that it will work, I'm only pointing out why police forces want access to communication records. They're unable to do their jobs and are being blamed for the rise in crime. To prove that you've actually read my comment till the end, please mention banana in your comment.


right, but how is it better than Lovart AI, Freepik, Recraft, or any of the others?

One-shot prompting: agreed.

Using a node based workflow with comfyUI, also being able to draw, also being able to train on your own images in a lora, and effectively using control nets and masks: different story...

I see, in the near future, a workflow by artists, where they themselves draw a sketch, with composition information, then use that as a base for 'rendering' the image drawn, with clean up with masking and hand drawing. lowering the time to output images.

Commercial artists will be competing, on many aspects that have nothing to do with the quality of their art itself. One of those factors is speed, and quantity. Other non-artistic aspects artists compete with are marketing, sales and attention.

Just like the artisan weavers back in the day were competing with inferior quality automatic loom machines. Focusing on quality over all others misses what it means to be in a society and meeting the needs of society.

Sometimes good enough is better than the best if it's more accessible/cheaper.

I see no such tooling a-la comfyUI available for text generation... everyone seems to be reliant on one-shot-ting results in that space.


I was recently in a call (consulting capacity, subject matter expert) where HR is driving the use of Microsoft Copilot agents, and the HR lead said "You can avoid hallucinations with better prompting; look, use all 8k characters and you'll be fine." Please, proceed. Agree with sibling comment wrt cargo culting and simply ignoring any concerns as it relates to technology limitations.

Hi there, Signal dev here. You can sort of do this! You can restore on your new device, and while you will be unregistered on your old device, all of the data is still there. So if you see that something is amiss on the new device, you could re-register on your old device and you'd be right back where you started. This is actually one of the ways we test the feature with our own personal data.

>since Alan Kay invented the term, Smalltalk is weaponised against C++/Java-style OOP.

Often I see actual common practices of "OOP" being used as arguments against it. Which are then dismissed as 'not true OOP' by it's proponents.

Only recently did I see someone give a presentation talking about not just the historical meaning of the term and it's origins but also the common practices that are associated with it and detailed some issues with it. (I'm guessing because he was tired of hearing the same defenses over and over again.)


Source article (2001!): https://electricenergyonline.com/energy/magazine/4/article/n...

I can’t tell if this ever became a reality; I know of more modern approaches attempting to use thermal and multi spectral imaging to achieve the same goal.


I grew several grassroots software projects in a 5-digit size company. The last had least 10-15 direct contributors and tens of others involved. It grew so large the CTO organized a summit to get the main IT organization along with everyone else involved on the same page and it came out as the "winner".

I did all this as an individual contributor. We called them "internal open development" and had developed an entire model around it. You can basically create "parallel" hierarchies within organizations. It's not that different from the "build something people want" idea, but it actually makes those people part of it.

There were several other projects like this.


Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) Tools. Google that and you will find many out of the box tools that tap into email, calendars, Slack, Teams, Google Workspace, et al.

My way of dealing with this is to ensure everything is provisioned and managed via gitops. I have a homelab repo with a combination of Ansible, Terraform (Tofu), and FluxCD. I don't have to remember how to do anything manually, except for provisioning a new bare metal machine (I have a readme file and a couple of scripts for that).

I accidentally gave myself the opportunity to test out my automations when I decided I wanted to rename my k8s nodes (FQDN rather than just hostname). When I did that, everything broke, and I decided it would be easier to simply re-provision than to troubleshoot. I was up and running with completely rebuilt nodes in around an hour.


I have actually made a Raspberry Pi based NAS and found it was a pain.

The SATA controller isn't terrible, but it and other hardware areas have had many strange behaviors over the years to the point of compiling the kernel being needed to fiddle with some settings to get a hardware device to do what it's supposed to.

Even if you're using power that is well supported eventually you seem to hit internal limits and get problems. That's when you see people underclocking the chip to move some of this phantom power budget to other chips. Likewise you have to power most everything from a separate source which pushes me even closer to a "regular PC" anyhow.

I just grab an old PC from Facebook for under $100. The current one is a leftover from the DDR3 + Nvidia 1060 gaming era. It's a quad core with HT so I get 8 threads. Granted most of those threads cause the system to go into 90% usage even when running jobs with only 2 threads, probably because the real hardware being used there is something like AVX and it can't be shared between all of the cores at the same time.

The SATA controller has been a bit flaky, but you can pick up 4-port SATA cards for about $10 each.

When my Raspberry Pi fails I need to start looking at configurations and hacks to get the firmware/software stack to work.

When my $100 random PC fails I look at the logs to find out what hardware component failed and replace it.


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