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TacticalCoder

10,158 karma · joined December 4, 2013

email: I'll add a suitable email one of these days
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TacticalCoder··on We found a division by zero bug in FFmpeg with a vibecoded fuzzer
> You're suggesting that LLMs get better at fixing bugs/vulnerabilities, but at the same time stop getting better at finding them?

Are you implying that all code writing by LLMs atm is bug-free?

TacticalCoder··on GLM-5.3-Flash Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis
> The analysis is still not compelling for me to switch from gtp5.6-luna to GLM-5.3-flash given ...

So Luna is competitive because a few weeks ago they did a 80% price drop?

Many here said that 80% drop was not a move against Anthropic but a move against chinese models and your comments indicate that's the case.

TacticalCoder··on GLM-5.3-Flash
> $4,000 isn't priced insanely? ye gads

It depends.

My bicycle was in the 5-digits brand new (now I paid it 1/5th of that and I do thank the first owner for that: the 8 000 out of 10 K I saved were put into stocks, that's his opportunity cost, not mine).

Or I know a great many a going to cry "audiofool", but I can say with certainty the following does sound better than the stereo setup of those crying audiofool:

https://youtu.be/TQg9FTBMcTQ

(not my setup but I've got those speakers: same thing, 15 K EUR brand new for the pair... Previous owner forked the money to buy these brand new and, well, I didn't... And I just hooked them to a wonderful, cheap, fully-integrated Yamaha amp: amazing sound).

If your hobby is DIY job around the house, the cost of tools can very quickly add up too: having 20 K worth of tools is definitely not unthinkable.

You like old cars? Pricey hobby.

Some here even track their cars: tires and brake pads budget (and overall car budget and depreciation)... Through the roof.

There's a saying that you're not really into computers if your setup doesn't cost more than your car.

Is $16 K ($4 K x 4) a lot? It's six months of rent for me and for many here I'm sure. It's not "crazy crazy".

Can anyone afford that? Definitely not. But there are way more insane things out there.

And thanks to the individuals that go through to all the pain of setting those up, we've got feedback, tutorials, explanation, numbers, etc. as to how to run those at home.

For example I helped my brother set up VMs and GPU passthrough and he's now running uncensored models locally and showing me the different answers between the uncensored models and the commercial, censored, ones.

So to GP who bought four of these: we need more people like you on HN, keep it going, blog about it, be "crazy"!

TacticalCoder··on Spain wants data centres on 80% renewables every hour, or no grid connection
Remind me: which one of OpenAI, Anthropic, NVidia, Google, Starlink, etc. was started in Spain?

This strikes me as a move that shall keep Spain a totally irrelevant country on the world' tech scene.

Once again: China emits 3x more Co2 than the US. The EU is posturing and it's going to change exactly jack shit regarding pollution.

And while China emits 3x more Co2 than the US, remind me how many products do spanish people import that have been made in China?

TacticalCoder··on A curmudgeon tries a language server
> They don’t have to restart the program on exceptions, because the condition system allows resuming the crashing code from anywhere in the stack after the system has been patched with a fix.

I'm "only" using Clojure (which some shall say is not a proper Lisp) and elisp (which is, well, elisp) but I catch every exceptions (including any yet uncaught ones) and I rarely need to restart the app. I've got an helper function to "restart" the app and I can pass a parameter: reset the state of the app or not (usually I don't and keep working with my current app state). As to the main process: I very rarely need to restart the JVM / get a new REPL.

The whole thing is basically a very, very, very long REPL session.

> A consequence of this way of working is that early in a Lisp project, there may not even be any source code to speak of. Instead, the evolving definition of the system exists only in the memory image of the running process and nowhere else.

Yes but be careful... At times this shall bite you: you've got this function or this new definition of that function that you only had working in the REPL and which is not in source code yet. I typically have tests and I run them, from another process, totally unrelated to the one I'm developing in, that I regularly run (not just when I commit): this helps catch at least the most serious "desynch" issues (where the Lisp source code doesn't correspond anymore to what's in the REPL).

> A Lisp programmer does not need to “switch over” to something else because they are already inside their program process. They never “compile and execute” the code because the code is already running and they edit it by hot-swapping code. They never restart in a debugger because they are already inside their program process and can inspect anything they want.

Yup it's all really very sweet. But really: those are all part of that family of languages and not a kludge added later on to the language.

Some people believe that because they have a console in the web dev tools in their browsers that can execute JavaScript code they've got the same thing as a Lisp. It's not anywhere near close to that.

TacticalCoder··on France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026
Currently typing this from my vacation house in France, in a rural area, with vineyards nearby. Closest highway is a 45 minutes drive (!). Now, sure, it is a fancy place in that it's Provence's seaside and, well, I can see big yachts from my couch but it's still in the middle of nowhere. At night it's wild boars (which my cat hates), snakes (which my wife hates) and toads everywhere.

It's a very sparsely populated area, we're kilometers away from the nearest village and indeed we've got fiber to the home (since years and years already now).

Now it's not all rosy: they filter traffic/block IPs/force website to imposes checks (like age checks) that aren't done elsewhere, block torrents, etc.

I'd say it's the least open Internet I've seen in any EU country (now of course there's VPN and I can use a SOCKS5 proxy through ssh to one of my server etc. but still: France are complete control freaks and it shows).

TacticalCoder··on Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War
They royally screwed up by signing an exclusive deal with the back-then no-name Microsoft company. IBM created the 3 trillion behemoth that Microsoft is while killing themselves in the process.

It's really sad but also infuriating: had IBM not fucked up and not signed Microsoft, that mediocre company that Microsoft is would have gone nowhere and we wouldn't have to suffer their turds since decades.

P.S: in their dying breath (and I know IBM still exists), they did commit one billion dollar to Linux early on (which back then was a big deal). When we see the tens of billions of devices that now run Linux, IBM at least partially participated in Linux taking over the world. So there's that.

TacticalCoder··on Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues
> ... collection of security issues which I can only describe as regrettable (because I promised my mum I would swear less). There are bangers like video title bash injection or all notifications being able to run arbitrary bash on your machine.

Bash injection using video... Titles !? Moterfucking shit (mom's not there anymore to ask me to swear less, RIP)

TacticalCoder··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
> Just because it says "modern art" ...

I think we can all agree that naming anything "modern" or "new" or "nu" (for new) is simply deeply dumbfucktarded.

GP talks about the 1860s: I'm sorry but nothing about the 1860s is "modern" in 2026. Just as nothing from 2026 shall be "modern" in 2160.

It's nearly as if at least one of the two hardest problems in computer science, naming things, applied to other things too.

TacticalCoder··on US removes Syria from terrorism sponsor list, lifting major investment obstacle
> Hopefully the Syrian state officials are not corrupt

They're already literally Al-Qaeda islamist terrorists. Imagine if, moreover, they were also corrupt.

Rotten to the core doesn't begin to describe such individuals. They've got buddies at the helm in Iran: they slaughtered 30 000 unarmed civilians and publicly hung athletes... In January 2026.

Wonderful people.

TacticalCoder··on What's new in Emacs 31.1
> The part the author shared about the huge overhead cost of firing up emacs

TFA's wording on that is a bit misleading.

My Emacs with no config starts in 0.1s (110 ms). My Emacs with my huge config (between 3 000 to 4 000 lines of custom Elisp code) starts in 1.2s or so.

And then of course modern day Emacs is so stable that the thing can stay up for weeks without needing a restart.

It's been a very long time that the "cost of firing up Emacs" is smaller than the cost of firing up 99% of all the software out there (looking at you AppImage , flatpaks, browsers, any desktop app really, etc.).

Stock Emacs: 110ms (Debian Trixie / AMD 7700X / WD-SN850X SSD).

Boom.

TacticalCoder··on Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms
> I had assumed that JPEG XL was for JPEGs that are Xtra Large, since that's what XL means on clothing and pretty much everywhere else.

Yup the name isn't the best pick indeed.

What most people don't know is that JPEG XL can be used to crush JPEG files by 15% to 25% without any single quality loss. And the resulting .jxl file can be used to then reproduce the original .jpg file bit-for-bit.

People can test this at the CLI for themselves.

TacticalCoder··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
> Plus watching the Children of Men style xenophobia and callous disregard for climate refugees set in all over the world.

There are no climate refugees... Yet.

TacticalCoder··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
> A more fair metric would be Co2 emissions/person and I’m getting

We don't care about that notion of "fair": the cold hart truth is that China has 1.4 billon people.

Another way to put it: China has one billion more people than there are in the US.

Or another way to put it: 4.1x more people.

Which means China is emitting nearly 3x more Co2 than the US.

Our only hope is that China is using coal and fossil fuels only has a mean to sustain its insane growth while they transition to solar and nuclear (which they also do, at an amazing speed).

Hillbillies and redneck with their gigantic pick-up trucks in the US are really the least of worries.

TacticalCoder··on Could we dredge the Netherlands without fossil fuels? (2018)
> Why do many environmental activists seem to want to go back to a shitty past rather than move forward to bright future.

So do care about the environment but many "green" activists do not care at all for the environment: for those it's just another version of communism. They want to crush the notion of the individual: they cannot understand the notion of a free, happy, individual.

They're rather have unhappy people united in communism, living miserably like under the USSR, than having a more advanced, richer, country if more advanced and richer means people are free.

Many don't care a yota about the environment: it's just an excuse to try to remove freedom from others.

TacticalCoder··on How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs
Spain also smashes foreigners owning a property in Spain.

They see tourists and foreigners (even if they're from the EU) as a gigantic target to squeeze and screw as hard as they can. That's what you get when your economy is based on tourism and rich foreigners owning property there: you have to squeeze those hard for it's basically all you have. Officially tourism is "only" about 15% of the GDP but Spain is a service economy and so many of those services revolve around tourism and foreigner owning properties there. Same for the construction sector: they love it when rich tourists have fancy villas built there.

My wife used to own a house there. So did her mom. They sold it all and kissed Spain goodbye once and for all: too disgusted by how the fiscal authorities were treating them.

I won't go on vacation there anymore. Both my wife and my daughter speak spanish and yet we don't plan to go there anymore: she's done giving money to Spain to be seen, in return, as a lemon out of which more juice can be squeezed.

Vote with your feet and you wallet: when a country tries to fuck you, give it the middle finger.

TacticalCoder··on My favorite nonfiction books about cults, scams, and schemes
> One definition of a cult I've liked is "A cult is a group you can't leave with your dignity intact". You can really get a good understanding if something is a cult by the way they talk about their ex members. A healthy organization will pretty much just say "Sad to see you go, come back anytime". Unhealthy organizations spend a fair amount of time warning members about how how dangerous/bad/sinful/sad/miserable their ex members are.

OK but those without dignity here are the ones acting like that, not the person leaving.

> And yes, I'd call several mainstream religions cults because of this.

Oh definitely. And it's disgusting that their hate speech is protected because it's religious.

TacticalCoder··on NYTimes opinion article proposes default as a way to deal with US National debt
If they do reset it all, then I want to see several acknowledgment:

    1. we ran out of other people's money

    2. we probably shouldn't have abandonned convertibility to gold

    3. goldbugs correctly saw it coming (and unlike in the past, this time we won't confiscate their holdings and moreover we promise, in the future, to never ever make fun of goldbugs)
TacticalCoder··on There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
> I've install debian onto my fairly ancient Lenovo X201 Tablet and it is exceptionally snappy.

I'm running Debian since Debian 1.1 (1.1, not 11). My install has always been very lean: a minimal WM I love.

Computers have only ever gotten fast and Linux more optimized.

It's extremely snappy indeed and feels like it. The problem is what happens inside browsers: are great many websites are just lame. So many pointless connections to so many pointless "telemetry" services, trying to track your every single habit/clicks. Just open the dev tools and look at all the trafic exchanged: that's where the bloat is.

The SV JavaScript "punch the monkey" ads bros at work.

TacticalCoder··on I dream of quieter computing
That's a great article too. I hope we'll see it comig back frontpage once in a while.

He differentiates between "things that last" (knowledge that transfers) and the rest...

Something has to be said about dodging a lot of the last shiny new tech that's going to invariably be tomorrow's long lost and not regretted turd. I make my friends laugh when I say that if there's one tech I know nothing about I don't feel bad because...

I think of all the long gone things I never bothered learning.

Just think about the graveyard of crap you're better off for never having wasting one cycle learning: tech is full of it.

It makes people smile but they know deep down it's true: most of the noise shall disappear.

Don't feel bad about not knowing it all: just look ten years in the mirror at all that was shiny and new and that's now totally obsolete.

It's literally how I cope with not knowing it all.

And I somehow managed to bet, for three decades, on techs that did stay a very long time. For example I adopted Linux in the very early Slackware days: I did dive all in and learned all that I could. And I've been using Linux on the desktop (and on my laptops and on my servers and on my VMs etc.) ever since.

Hypervisors and hardware-virt? Bought the first consumer mobo that supported it and was running Xen happily more than two decades ago.

Much less sexy but: one day I ran into one my best friend who had left the city and he told me "I found this new language, it's called Java, it's going to be big" and I did dive into Java. Only certification I ever got: Sun Certified Java Programmer. It was was it was (the cert), nothing stellar. But it was obvious Java was here to stay.

Then I saw a post on HN in the very early Clojure days: I decided I had to learn Clojure. It's not the most used language but, darn, is it stable (and on top of the JVM, mostly: so the Java thing helped).

I'm using Emacs since so long I don't exactly remember when (I did try it when I discovered Linux, back when Emacs took 45 minutes or something like that to compile on my 486 but really adopted it only later on).

I basically use the same window manager and same windows layout (and virtual desktops) since 15 years: when I upgrade my Linux distro, I just reuse my configuration.

Monitor is 9 years old (38" 3840x1600, I love it because I can do many different layouts, including 3x 1280x1600 side by side "columns).

Chair is 13 years old (out of warranty since one year) and still going strong.

Keyboard is 10 years old: Happy Hacking Keyboard.

It's a fast-paced, ever evolving world and all that helps brings some quietness.

P.S: as for present techs, you bet I'm using LLMs: three subscriptions and lately I'm support for my less-tech savvy brother who's running models locally using GPU passthrough on a Proxmox rig I helped him set up. But I like to think I'm using them in a sane way: not drinking the kool-aid.

TacticalCoder··on I dream of quieter computing
> I mean CRT is inherently bulky, it's hard not to see why LCD panels became popular.

But going from, say, a Sony Trinitron CRT [1] to one the first LCD was a huge step backwards, which is what GP is saying.

I did wait for the first LCD with DVI support before switching: for the difference in crispyness between an analog video cable and a DVI one was night and day (I also won many points when I helped friend set up a startup in southern california and we realized one person out of two had picked the VGA cable instead of the DVI one when setting up its desk / computer: so with the CTO late at night we went through every PC and changed all those with VGA cables to the DVI ones).

We're not saying modern days flat monitors aren't better than old CRTs: we're saying the first flat screens were complete suckage.

[1] even though on a Trinitron you could see two faint horizontal lines (Trinitron were still amazing)

TacticalCoder··on Belgian car salesman becomes prince after DNA test proves royal parentage
As TFA pointed out, it's not the first time in the belgian royal family (which has no power btw and they're not anywhere near as rich as, say, the royal british family). A few years ago it was revealed that Delphine Boel was the daughter of the then belgian king.

And contrarily to his son, prince Laurent, who's been classy and accepted immediately the DNA test, the king refused and went to court but lost his case and had to submit to a DNA test. He later on abdicated IIRC.

It's interesting to think of the number of kids from kings and princes that, through the ages, never got recognized because DNA tests didn't exist and they could just deny it, even if the offspring was a near identical copy (in the case of the son of prince Laurent: he looks just like his father).

But yup in Belgium we've got a monarchy and king/queen/princes/princesses (princes and princesses either from the royal family or not), counts/countesses, dukes, many barons, a lot of knights and some esquires (I think we have esquires). And even more "Madame/Monsieur": people from the nobility but without any title.

The title appears on the identity card but that's basically it: it's more of an historical thing than anything else really.

Several of my friends hold such titles: it is not uncommon and it brings you exactly jack fucking shit advantage in life (unless you're really from the royal family).

TacticalCoder··on Scrap (2006)
> His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copper

It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables. They've been found to steal, too, heavy road grate if they were of any value: which created actual serious accidents (where a car's tire falls into the hole).

Regarding the electrical cables for trains, one solution is, slowly , replace them with cables with basically the same properties but 1/10th the copper.

Other funky solutions have been implemented: chemical sprays with a composition that is watermark and that cannot easily be removed. So when caught the thieves cannot deny because for x weeks the watermark stays, invisible and harmless, on their skin.

One question of course is: what does society think we should do with thieves who create road accidents and who render trains inoperable?

TacticalCoder··on How Thailand Resisted Colonization
What about an article about Eritrea? It's a country from eastern Africa that's never been colonized and it's one of the poorest country on earth.
TacticalCoder··on Stop Making TUIs
> i spend >80% of my time in terminal,

My life is spent inside terminal and Emacs. Every time I reach for the mouse, I consider it a major fail. Like: big time failure.

Now at times I'll use the mouse: for example when I'm designing a 3D part to then 3D print to fix something around the house. In that case a mouse makes sense. Or for gaming: a mouse makes sense.

But for most of what I do, even just moving my hand away from the home row position to reach for the mouse is a massive fail.

TacticalCoder··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
I'm in the EU and my masters did hand over the car market to chinese cars and this was a very stupid move.

Some EU carmakers are fighting back but it's very hard when politicians managed to have energy price in the EU being about 7x higher than those carmakers in China do pay.

I'm not for tariffs but China is dumping and if we don't all want to end up being vassals of China, we should at least protect some of our industries.

And as "good" as chinese EVs are, I'm sorry but they're not anywhere near the quality of, say, what German cars used to be.

If western carmakers had been given a reasonable timeline to switch to EVs and reasonable energy price, the situation would be different.

EU carmakers may be saved by people preferring to buy cars from their own continent but that remains to be seen. The latest BMW EVs, for example (once you remove the spying / remote control issues: but that affects chinese EVs doubly so), are apparently very fine machines.

TacticalCoder··on Z80–The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive
Yup and Moore's law about transistors doubling every 18 to 24 months did basically hold, which is even more impressive.

Foreseen it was.

TacticalCoder··on HN: The Good Parts (2016)
SO was already well DeadOverflow way before LLMs were a thing. For reasons people explained when SO came out: just as FaceBook was bound to be filled with accounts of dead persons (earning it the name "DeadBook"), SO was bound to be filled with outdated answers. That the people asking the question could pick what was, according to him, the proper answer was a huge mistake and it's been immediately pointed out as stupid and they didn't fix it: not only wrong answers were picked, but also answers bound to be soon outdated were picked as "correct" too.

Don't get me wrong: I used SO a lot in the beginning, but the problems --that many foresaw-- quickly became obvious.

And I'm not saying not allowing to pick one correct answer would have saved SO: but its downfall probably wouldn't have been so abrupt.

Not all is rosy with LLMs but at least we don't have to suffer SO answers and SO comments anymore.

TacticalCoder··on Linus: "A debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI"
Linus also wrote:

"the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it"

and:

"So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above."

FWIW in the end it was a one-line fix.

TacticalCoder··on Dolphins observed using sea snail shells as tools outside Western Australia
> The second observation, on 1 October 2025, involved a mother and calf pair (Maserati and Bentley respectively).

I don't know if I'm more impressed by dolphins using sea shells as tools or by researchers naming dolphins after fancy car brands!

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