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or an iPad instead of a yearly subscription
> ... Cathedral is a better model than the Bazaar ...
well, for the desktop possible choices from the `Cathedral` are:
- windows, and
- macos
in `Bazaar` mode, xfce has been an *excellent* choice for quite a while now, and should probably serve `Cathedral` refugees quite well.
all in all, not super convinced of the argument that you seem to be proffering here.
I still love C++ Builder, regardless of all Borland misteps that lead to where Embarcadero is today, it is the survivor of C++ RAD IDE tooling, Visual C++ never was as Visual as it name implies.
> And yet it seems pretty clear that it would hurt the capabilities of regular people to not be able to fix things themselves
Yes, that's the point. People fixing things themselves doesn't make the line go up, therefore it will be made harder.
Delegation is a very useful part of composition. Almost all OOP languages have two techniques to delegate some methods to another object:
- manually write a bunch of forwarding methods and remember to keep them updated, or
- inheritance.
This doesn't make sense from Pebble hardware point of view.
Now it would be great if we could move on to C++, Zig or Rust, instead of coding C like I did in the MS-DOS days, where I was already able to develop C++ applications within 640 KB limitations.
They will keep ignoring Linux, because SteamOS plays Windows games, and everyone seems to appreciate being a second class user, that only gets to play thanks to Proton.
Even though Unreal supports Linux, studios will keep using Windows workstations, targeting Windows gamers, using kernel drivers, and let Valve do whatever they need with Proton to make it work on SteamOS.
Now if Valve actually made studios care about Linux, then yes, SteamOS would be interesting.
Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.
It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not. Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd.
Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial. Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.
moving changes from Windows 95 to Windows NT involved manually doing three-way merges for all of the files that changed since the last drop. I suspect that this manual process was largely automated, but it was not as simple as a git merge.
The first release of git was in 2005, around a decade after Windows 95.
> So much of it is focused upon memorization and regurgitation of information, which AI is unmatched at doing.
This applies both to education, and to what people need to know to do work. Knowing all the written stuff is less valuable. Automated tools can been able to look it up since the Google era. Now they can work with what they look up.
There was a time when programmers poured over Fundamental Algorithms. No one does that today. When needed, you find existing code that does that stuff. Probably better than you could write. Who codes a hash table today?
Given that those tend to have positive effects for the societies that practice this is that what you wanted to say?
I still have a Marantz amp from the 80's that works like new, it hasn't even been recapped.
I was perplexed too, but it turns out to be a straightforward paper on using natural materials to substitute for artificially produced ones for laser components. Birch leaves are apparently rich in carbon dots (which lase under the right circumstances) and simply stewing them yield a slurry with plenty of the desired substance. Peanuts have a molecular structure with plenty of large voids. Soak the peanuts in birch leaf slurry, excite them with a laser, and the organic medium demonstrates lasing behavior. Apparently this simpler and cheaper than the usual go-to materials, and has the potential to be manufactured with less toxic waste. I presume it's not as good as elemental materials but if it's good enough it might yield savings at industrial scale.
By expressing this relationship through a mathematical formula, the study identified a specific upper limit for AI creativity. Cropley modeled creativity as the product of effectiveness and novelty. Because these two factors work against each other in a probabilistic system, the maximum possible creativity score is mathematically capped at 0.25 on a scale of zero to one.
'It's just autocorrect', engineering version
> surgeons and researchers have shown that electrical stimulation of certain brain regions, can induce "perception" during procedures
I can carefully drop liquid reactants on a storage medium and induce nontrivial and reproducible changes in any computer reading it. That doesn't tell me how digital storage works, it just says I'm proximate to the process.
> Couple it with the tendency to please the user by all means
Why aren't foundational model companies training separate enterprise and consumer models from the get go?
> Women do not generally want men to stay at home and take care of kids. Women also demand that men make more money than themselves. For women, the period between the kids being born and going to school full-time is like a kind of sabbatical.
Domestic labor and being primary caregiver for children is not, in any way, like a sabbatical.
It’s an investment in the future. You might become a useful contributor and maybe lead a project someday and have the chance to pay it forward.
This is extremely not settled science. Education in fact does improve IQ and we don't know how fixed intelligence is and how it responds to different environmental cues.
> joining NATO would have required relinquishing its claim on Crimea.
That’s...not at all clear (there is no such legal requirement, though there were some NATO members who publicly suggested that resolving the territorial disputes with Russia first was their then-current diplomatic position at various times in the discussion of the possibility. But diplomatic positions are sometimes prone to change in response to inducements from parties with different preferences.)
The title looked like an AI image generator prompt, and I was curious what the output image would be.
Most lasers have a relatively small rate of gain per unit length so they depend on mirrors. Some lasers like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_laser
get enough gain that you can don’t need the mirrors —- it’s pretty easy to build one about a foot long that can make nanosecond pulses that are about as long as the laser.
Random lasers uses random particles to extend the optical path instead of mirrors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_laser
I studied condensed matter physics and knew a professor well who was one of Anderson’s grad students so the phenomenon of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderson_localization
which is relevant to random lasers is familiar to me.
I do wonder why there’s no way to operate qlc as if it were mlc, other than the manufacturer not wanting to allow it.
There is a way to turn QLC into SLC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40405578
If it was example code, it wouldn't let codegen be skipped, it would just provide guidance. If it was a dererministically-applied template, you could skip codegen, but that is different from an example, and probably doesn't help for what codegen is for (you are then just moving canned code from the MCP server to the client, offering the same thing you get from a tool call with a fixed interface.)
> but it still makes us unique in the west since it's just a "routine" clause that can be invoked to suspend almost every possible legal challenge against a law
It is not unique in the West, or even specifically in those parts of the West that share the same head of state as Canada; in fact, Britain itself has a more extreme form of it given Parliamentary sovereignty.
The HD brand is tied to a demographic that is dying out [1]. It’s actually a great private equity play to squeeze out what’s left of the enterprise value as Boomers slowly age out of their market. HD tried to market an electric motorcycle ("Livewire") [2], but ended up having to spin it out into its own company because HD riders are buying the HD aesthetic, not the motorcycle itself, which is simply a vehicle for said aesthetic. Livewire for younger buyers, HD for old men buying the exhaust note of a copyrighted engine that is purposely louder but less efficient.
> To be fair, revenues and unit sales have enjoyed a nice bounce since the pits of the financial crisis. But Harley will never get its old mojo back for one critical reason that is completely outside of its control: demographics.
> Down the road from my house in Dallas, there is greasy drive-in burger joint called Keller’s … a place I’ve been known to frequent a little more often than my doctor might recommend. On any given weekend, you might see a dozen or more bikers parked in the lot, showing off their chrome-laden Harleys. And nearly all of them are over the age of 45. Most are over 50.
> This isn’t a coincidence. Harley-Davidson is a brand whose sales depend disproportionately -- almost exclusively, in fact -- on middle-aged Caucasian males. Riders younger than 40 generally lack the time, interest or the bankroll to buy a Harley. But by the time they get into their 60s or older, the noise and joint pain have begun to make riding lose its allure. You might still ride in your 60s, but you’re doing it less frequently and you probably aren’t buying a new bike.
> The sweet spot is the mid-40s to early 50s. And with the Baby Boomers -- the largest and wealthiest generation in history -- now largely aged out of this key demographic bracket, Harley has a serious problem. Generation X -- my generation -- is not nearly large enough to pick up the slack, and Generation Y (aka “the Millennials” or “Echo Boomers”) are decades away from being in the demographic sweet spot for Harley, and this assumes they take to riding like their dads did. The number of American men aged 40-49 is set to decline through the early 2020s and won’t reach its old 2010 peak until 2035.
> CNN Money reported on this as far back as 2010, and demographic strategist Harry Dent -- my old boss -- has used Harley as a case study for decades.
[1] Blame Harley-Davidson's Downfall On Baby Boomer Demographics - https://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2013/11/13/harley-... - November 13th, 2013
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveWire_(motorcycle)
(for context, ~2M people 55+ die every year in the US, and ~4M Boomers retire; by 2031, the US population over the age of 65 will be ~75M, almost double what it was in 2008)
This is classic HN. At first infuriating if it corrects ME, and then amusing.
NSA wrote Dual EC. A team of (mostly European) academic cryptographers wrote the CRYSTALS constructions. Moreover, the NOBUS mechanism in Dual EC is obvious, and it's not at all clear where you'd do anything like that in Kyber, which goes out of its way not to have the "weird constants" problem that the P-curves (which practitioners generally trust) ended up with.
> Kids try their best not to learn
Often it is more work to cheat than just learn it.
IIRC, most child (under 18, at least; 18-21 is a problem with the trusted to drink standard) marriage laws in the US agree that the child can’t be trusted on this, so they trust the child’s parents.
(This is very much not an endorsement of those laws or that approach.)
I have thought about this for all of thirty seconds, but it wouldn't shock me if this was the case. The intuition here is about types, and the ability to introspect them. Agents really love automated guardrails. It makes sense to me that this would work better than RESTish stuff, even with OpenAPI.
When reading the article, I thought this would be an LLM call, ie the main agent would call `find_tool("I need something that can create GitHub PRs")`, and then a subagent with all the MCP tools loaded in its context would return the names of the suitable ones.
I guess regex/full text search works too, but the LLM would be much less sensitive to keywords.
LLMs have hit the wall since ChatGPT came out in 2022?
These are only problems if you assume the person later wants to come back to having human relationships. If you assume AI relationships are the new normal and the future looks kinda like The Matrix, with each person having their own constructed version of reality while their life-force is bled dry by some superintelligent machine, then it is all working as designed.
The over the top airport diorama - Minatur Wunderland.[1]
Even when you tell it to not coddle you, it just says something cringeworthy like "ok, the gloves are off here's the raw deal, with New Yorker honesty:" and proceeds to feed you a ton of patronizing bullshit. It's extremely annoying.
Azure has circa 60% of VMs running Linux, however the underlying infrastructure is built on Windows.
They're not. They are just a formalization of that pattern, with a very tiny extra feature where the model harness scans that folder on startup and loads some YAML metadata into the system prompt so it knows which ones to read later on.
It's gotten more and more shippable, especially with the latest generation (Codex 5.1, Sonnet 4.5, now Opus 4.5). My metric is "wtfs per line", and it's been decreasing rapidly.
My current preference is Codex 5.1 (Sonnet 4.5 as a close second, though it got really dumb today for "some reason"). It's been good to the point where I shipped multiple projects with it without a problem (with eg https://pine.town being one I made without me writing any code).
Team started in Australia, they use British spellings.
> a lot of liability law dates back to the railroad era. Another time that it took courts to rein in incredibly politically powerful companies deploying a new technology on a vast scale
Do you have a layman-accessible history of this? (Ideally an essay.)
Intellectual property rights should go away after 10 years.
There's a reason they're called "guidelines" and not "hard rules".
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/movies/herb-dorothy-50x50... | https://archive.today/ZtkkQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_and_Dorothy_Vogel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herb_and_Dorothy
https://archive.org/details/ExhibitionNotes41Summer2012
https://archive.org/details/dorothyherbertvo00ball
https://archive.org/details/witnde-Cafe_-_Fifty_Works_for_th...
https://archive.org/details/fromminimaltocon0000unse
https://archive.org/details/Charlie-Rose-1992-01-31 (starts at 39:20)
I don't think any of the mainstream vendor APIs require MCP for tool use - they all supported functions (generally defined using a chunk of OpenAPI JSON schema) before the MCP spec gained widespread acceptance and continue to do so today.
Related:
Zapier Security Incident Packages and Zapier Developers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038033 - November 2025
Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46032539 - November 2025
This was apparently a Linde installation custom built for TSMC in Arizona.[1] Nitrogen, oxygen, and argon are extracted from air on-site and purified. That's Linde's primary business; liquefying and distilling air. This isn't some little local company or a company operating outside their area of expertise.
Those gases are storeable, so it's surprising there wasn't enough tank capacity to deal with outages.
The site plan [2] shows "Gas Plant 1", and future "Gas Plant 2" and "Gas Plant 3". The gas plants are across a small road from the fab and feed the plant directly. Once Gas Plants 2 and 3 were built, there would be redundancy, but at this stage, there isn't a backup. The plan doesn't show a large tank farm, so they can't store gases in bulk.
[1] https://www.aztechcouncil.org/utility-company-makes-progress...
[2] https://semiwiki.com/forum/threads/tsmc-phoenix-arizona-fab-...
Why? They just closed a $13B funding round. Entirely possible that they're selling below-cost to gain marketshare; on their current usage the cloud computing costs shouldn't be too bad, while the benefits of showing continued growth on their frontier models is great. Hell, for all we know they may have priced Opus 4.1 above cost to show positive unit economics to investors, and then drop the price of Opus 4.5 to spur growth so their market position looks better at the next round of funding.
You can download the paper for free here: https://www.nber.org/papers/w33904
Looks very solid, they control for a large number of exogenous factors and do in-depth analysis of media coverage, policy response, and other salient factors.
It could happen in home computers connected through the antenna input. I think if power was slightly off the desired frequency this could also happen, but we’d need to test.
Great fun!
You should add the 80 character limit on the title as well!
Except being able to buy GNU/Linux laptops from known brands, the same that sell Android and Chromebooks with 100% supported hardware, at FNAC, Worten, Saturn, MediaMarkt, Publico, Dixon, CoolBlue,....
It would be great, however it died alongside netbooks.
I don't think so. Political trolling is kind of hard work because you have a lot of people who are suspicious and used to deconstructing arguments. If you just want engagement, is it' easier to pick a sports team or pop star and just bait passionate fans by pretending to support a rival?
That kind of false engagement is also a problem (for advertisers, genuine fans etc) but doesn't shape elections and thus come with policy consequences.
Notes and two pelicans: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/24/claude-opus/
Up until today, the general advice was use Opus for deep research, use Haiku for everything else. Given the reduction in cost here, does that rule of thumb no longer apply?
Yes, that's exactly how I use it. I've also had use cases where I needed something now and didn't mind a plastic part for actual use because I knew the load would be light.
Did anyone else notice Sonnet 4.5 being much dumber recently? I tried it today and it was really struggling with some very simple CSS on a 100-line self-contained HTML page. This never used to happen before, and now I'm wondering if this release has something to do with it.
On-topic, I love the fact that Opus is now three times cheaper. I hope it's available in Claude Code with the Pro subscription.
EDIT: Apparently it's not available in Claude Code with the Pro subscription, but you can add funds to your Claude wallet and use Opus with pay-as-you-go. This is going to be really nice to use Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation with the Pro subscription.
However, I noticed that the previously-there option of "use Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation" isn't there in Claude Code with this setup any more. Hopefully they'll implement it soon, as that would be the best of both worlds.
EDIT 2: Apparently you can use `/model opusplan` to get Opus in planning mode. However, it says "Uses your extra balance", and it's not clear whether it means it uses the balance just in planning mode, or also in execution mode. I don't want it to use my balance when I've got a subscription, I'll have to try it and see.
EDIT 3: It looks like Sonnet also consumes credits in this mode. I had it make some simple CSS changes to a single HTML file with Opusplan, and it cost me $0.95 (way too much, in my opinion). I'll try manually switching between Opus for the plan and regular Sonnet for the next test.
When all that people want to use is how to use an hammer, they see nails everywhere.
And, conversely, it (presumably) has no effect on VLMs using captive browsers and screenshotting to read webpages.
Their audience is the capital class (the wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of stocks). Longer device ownership and service life is fiscally responsible but suboptimal for shareholders.
> politicians and cops are private citizens
You may be confusing the civilian/military distinction with private citizens versus public officials. (A delineation American cops fuck with.)
Welcome to the rest of the world where stuff usually only gets replaced when it breaks, becomes unusable or gets stolen.
It's also wrong not to blame a technology presenting itself as a "friend" or discussion partner, which is a known sycophant, suffers from hallucinations, and has been shown to even advise people to off themselves directly.
Only 14% of expenses is a relatively small amount of overhead, especially since the extra cost could just be a tiny percentage on the real value, a mere rounding error.
And that's if we can trust the "AI findings" to begin with...
Harmonization is a thing.
We've done it for lots of other things, I don't see why it would not work for the #1 technological critical resource.
> remember the FBI attempting to compel Apple to decrypt a criminal's iPhone, only for Apple to refuse and claim that it wasn't possible
Apple refused “to write new software that would let the government bypass these devices' security and unlock” suspects’ phones [1].
> not sure exactly what happened after that
Cupertino got a lot of vitriol and limited support for its efforts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...
> It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
What are you talking about? These aren't human rights we're talking about, it's copyright we're talking about.
Of course you should be able to sell your copyright to something. That's a major way you can make money, and a major way to get funding to create something in the first place. Every day you go to work and write code, you're selling your copyright to that code in exchange for your salary. You're saying you don't think that transaction should be legal...?
Yes you can be swindled. Guess what -- you can be swindled when selling a house or a car too, if you don't check the market rate and sell it for too little. Do your research, your due diligence, and if something looks like a swindle, then don't do it.
Back when C++ was becoming famous, my favourite programming language was Object Pascal, in the form of Turbo Pascal, having been introduced to it via TP 5.5 OOP mini booklet.
Shortly thereafter Turbo Pascal 6 was released, and I got into Turbo Vision, followed by Turbo Pascal 1.5 for Windows 3.1, the year thereafter.
I was a big Borland fan, thus when you got the whole stuff it was Object Pascal/C++, naturally C was there just because all C++ vendors started as C vendors.
On Windows and OS/2 land, C++ IDEs shared a lot with Smalltalk and Xerox PARC ideas in developer experience, it wasn't the vi + command line + debuggers are for the weak kind of experience.
See Energize C++, as Lucid was pivoting away from Common Lisp, with Cadillac what we would call a LSP nowadays, where you could do incrementatl compilation on method level and hot reload
"Lucid Energize Demo VHS 1993"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk
https://dreamsongs.com/Cadillac.html
Or the Visual Age for C++ version 4, which introduced a database, image like system for doing C++ in workflows similar to Smalltalk.
https://www.edm2.com/index.php/A_Review_of_VisualAge_C%2B%2B...
https://www.edm2.com/index.php/VisualAge_C%2B%2B_4.0_Review
Then there is C++ Builder, still going on, even though the way Borland went down spoiled its market mindshare,
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder
You're right altougth C++ was born on UNIX at Bell Labs there is that point of view, and also a reason why I always had much more fun with C++ across Mac OS, OS/2, Windows, BeOS, and Symbian, with their full stack frameworks and IDE tooling.
However with time I moved into managed languages, application languages, where it is enough to make use of a couple of native libraries, if really required, which is where I still reach for C++.
> Is it worth it to unfairly limit one person's life in order to protect them and people around them from a short period of harmful behaviour? If that limitation was temporary, yes
I think the question turns on scale. If one person has the capacity to harm dozens, as one does in a city, the calculus may shift towards incapacitation. If it’s a small handful of non-violent interactions, on the other hand, as would be more likely somewhere less dense, then I agree with you. (Same turn on access to weapons.)
> Why stop with these examples though?
Because it’s a long list and I was being polite.
> wild that this isn't bigger news
Give it time.
So far, we only know that X’s “About This Account” feature says a number of accounts, “the most noticeable and largest group” being “those reporting to be Trump fans,” are from suspicious locations.
We don’t know if X fucked up. We don’t know what fraction are via VPN. We don’t know if this Substack author is considering a biased sample. It may be individual profiteers. It could be one, or multiple, coördinated campaigns. X may be complicit or clueless.
I’d be surprised if serious journalists aren’t tasked on this. But it’s going to need to be one of the papers with investigative resources, i.e. ones with paying subscribers, and I’m not seeing anything here that screams this should be a top priority right now versus any time between now and the midterms, nor that it will be remotely easy doing the needed verifications.
(That said, the premise is incorrect. In limited cases, it’s gaining traction [1].)
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/x-about-this-...
You can make a case that the relation with creators and media/publishing is,in formal structure, more petit bourgeois/haut bourgeois than proletarian/bourgeois, but even if strictly the class dynamic is different, the essential dynamic is broadly similar between those who do the work and those who purchase it and functionally, if not strictly necessarily, provide access to the broader market.
I doubt most of this is foreign government influence campaigns. I think it's more that Twitter will pay you to post clickbait, and if you are in Africa or many parts of Asia the amount you can earn is significant.
There was some great reporting about Macedonian teenagers doing this kind of thing back in 2016 - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-ma... - it was actually the origin of the term "fake news" before Trump redefined it to mean any mainstream media coverage that he didn't like.
I don't know, I (and lots of people I know) book multiple dates with free cancellation months in advance and just keep the one we can make, closer to the date. I think this is a pretty widespread and common thing?
> Businesses exist to make money
This implies that this is the primary reason businesses exist. Or did you mean "that's just one reason, it might even be very low on the list of reasons, but it is one"?
Because, if you meant that, I don't know why we're arguing about meaningless pedantry and conversational sleight of hand.
Definitely not my experience -- I find the price is usually better with aggregators.
The hotels sell rooms full-price on their site, and only release cheaper prices to budget aggregators. Often times the cheapest hotel deals are only available as part of a flight+hotel package where the cheaper price never gets revealed at all, because they never reveal which actual proportion of your package goes to the airline and to the hotel (hint: it's usually the hotel that gives the discount, even if the package is advertising a "$0 flight").
You're right about it being easier to change/cancel, for sure. But it's not also cheaper -- it's the opposite. You're generally paying more for that.
This is why when you travel for business and plans change and someone else is paying, book direct. Whereas when you're traveling for fun but on a budget with fixed dates you know won't change, use a budget aggregator.
Dupe. From yesterday (183 points, 82 comments):
And all we get out of CERN is… the entire modern economy.
Their ledgers are balanced just fine for a while.
Twitter’s monetization program rewards engagement. It’s not life changing amounts in the developed world. It is in much of Africa.
People experience latency but if you “saw like a corporation” you could only see throughput and never latency.
Yes, you will need Rust to compile git v3 from source.
Zero tariffs are good! That's why the US put "no internal tariffs between states" in the constitution!
So the tariffs had the intended effect? That’s great!
It is, but unfortunately the fact that to you - and me - it is obvious does not mean it is obvious to everybody.
I like your progression. It makes me wonder if intelligence could lead to technology absent societies.
Are you similarly frustrated that he didn't sit there 24/7, heating the oscillator with a small lighter when needed, but automated it instead? Why would this be more interesting for you if he'd written the script himself?