codeflo

This is often quoted, but I wonder whether it's actually strictly true, at least if you keep to a reasonable definition of "works". It's certainly not true in mechanical engineering.

Why the hell would you need a blockchain for automatic payments? Bots that performed financial transactions existed long before “crypto”.

"We promise that we will not enforce" is perhaps a funny way not to grant a license, but making it sound like they do. This seems almost purposefully designed to look open-source to laypeople, while being carefully written in a way that ensures it will be vetoed by any corporate lawyer vetting the license.

This is intentional? I think delivering lower quality than what was advertised and benchmarked is borderline fraud, but YMMV.

I'm not fully onboard with the logic that we just have to live with a certain type of criminal behavior because the technology that could prevent it can be misused to enable another type of criminal behavior. We should aim to stop any kind of criminal behavior.

In my experience, there seems to be a limitless supply of newly crowned "AI shamans" sprouting from the deepest corners of LinkedIn. All of them make the laughable claim that hallucinations can be fixed by prompting. And of course it's only their prompt that works -- don't listen to the other shamans, those are charlatans.

If you disagree with them by explaining how LLMs actually work, you get two or three screenfuls of text in response, invariably starting with "That's a great point! You're correct to point out that..."

Avoid those people if you want to keep your sanity.

> Not sure whether the obfuscation is fully synchronous, i.e waiting for the server response before continuing.

The people who designed SSH aren't idiots, and also, you can answer this question by simple observation: When you connect to a server with ~200ms ping, which is somewhat common in the scenarios you describe and which I've done many times, it does not take 20 seconds to show a keystroke.

Postponed.

> apparently

When someone takes the time to explain undergrad-level concepts in a comment, responding with "are you an expert?" is a level of skepticism that's bordering on hostile. The person you're responding to is correct, it's rare that the theorem statement itself is particularly hard to formalize. Whatever you read likely refers to the difficulty of formalizing a proof.

> their GPUs can’t be used for much of anything (not really much for transcoding nor for AI)

It's both funny and sad to me that we're at the point where someone would (perhaps even reasonably) describe using the GPU only for the "G" in its name as not "much of anything".

Maybe that's not the dominant mindset anymore, but I for one would love to use a language that's actually built for functional/reactive programming instead of inventing half-baked JavaScript dialects for that purpose. Elm was a language in that spirit, but it never felt complete.

Am I misreading this, or is this person actually implying somewhere in the middle of this unreadable mess of an article that they feed their DIY blood test results into an LLM and then order whatever drugs the machine hallucinates in response? If so, I hope sane society doesn't have to pay for the consequences of this willful self-destruction.

> Most bug trackers have ways to triage submissions. When a rando submits something, it has status "unconfirmed". Developers can then recategorize it, delete it, mark it as invalid, confirm that it's a real bug and mark it "confirmed", etc.

As far as I'm aware, most large open GitHub projects use tags for that kind of classification. Would you consider that too clunky?

The author mentions in the article text (and re-emphasizes in a footnote) that you will want to use platform-specific APIs for improved accessibility even when this limits extensibility:

> you will want to support font fallback, input methods and screen readers, all of which require interacting with platform specific APIs and are thus much less customizable

May I ask the heretical question why of these two situations:

(a) you have one editor that makes compromises between extensibility and accessibility

(b) you have one non-accessible editor that goes all-in on extensibility, and one not-fully customizable editor that goes all-in on accessibility

one would prefer (a) over (b)? Situation (a) sounds like strictly more total effort for a worse outcome, as you have one much more complex system that tries to navigate both purposes.

That's no longer as true as it once was. I get the feeling that quite a few people would consider "benevolent dictator for life" an outdated model for open source communities. For better or worse, there's a lot of push to transition popular projects towards being led by committee. Results are mixed (literally: I see both successes and failures), but that doesn't seem to have any effect on the trend.

This is unfortunately a pure “feels over logic” comment that doesn’t engage with the parent poster’s argument at all. The point is impact, not what anyone has “in mind”.

There are plenty of locked down computers in my life already. I don't need or want another system that only runs crap signed by someone, and it doesn't really matter whether that someone is Microsoft or Redhat. A computer is truly "general purpose" only if it will run exactly the executable code I choose to place there, and Secure Boot is designed to prevent that.

> Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN.

The set of people who know the term "solid state drive" is likely a strict subset of the people (mostly tech enthusiasts of some shape) who know "SSD". Same for "USB" and many other terms that have entered the mainstream primarily as an abbreviation.

So the question is not whether to use an abbreviation or spell out the full term as a matter of principle; the question is whether it's the abbreviation or the full term that's more commonly known. I'd argue that way fewer people recognize "CTA" than know the term "call to action". I personally have done some front-end development, and didn't know the abbreviation either.

> Apple cares a lot about phone gaming

The kind of gacha games that dominate the in-app sales charts, sure. Actual gaming, they don't care about or even understand.

My theory: Some manager's KPI is to increase the number of sold GitHub runner minutes. So they did some market research -- not enough to have a clear picture, but barely enough to be dangerous -- and found that some companies use self-hosted runners for cost reasons. So they deploy a two-pronged strategy: lower the cost of GitHub runners, and charge for the use of self-hosted runners, to incentivize switching.

This fails for several reasons that someone who actually uses the product might have intuited:

(a) For some use-cases, you can't switch to GitHub's runners. For us, it's a no-go for anything that touches our infrastructure.

(b) Switching CI providers isn't hard, we had to do it twice already. Granted, most of our CI logic is in a custom build script that you can run locally, and not in the proprietary YAML file. But to be honest, I'd recommend that sort of setup for any CI provider, as you always want the ability to debug things locally.

(c) GitHub Actions doesn't get the amount of love you'd expect from something billed as a "premium service". In fact, it often feels quite abandoned, barely kept working. Who knows what they're brewing internally, but they didn't coordinate this with a major feature announcement, and didn't rush to announce anything now that they got backlash, which leads me to believe they don't have anything major planned.

(d) Paying someone -- by the minute, no less -- to use my own infrastructure feels strange and greedy. GitHub has always had per-user pricing, which feels fair and predictable. If for some reason they need more money, they can always increase that price. The fact that they didn't do that leads me to believe this wasn't about cost per se. Hence the KPI theory I mentioned above: this wasn't well-coordinated with any bigger strategy.

They have all kinds of costs hosting GitHub, which is why there's per seat pricing for companies. If those prices are too low, they can always increase them. Charging on top of that per minute of using your own infrastructure felt greedy to me. And the fact that this was supposed to be tied to one of the lesser-maintained features of GitHub raised eyebrows on top of that.

One problem is that GitHub Actions isn't good. It's not like you're happily paying for some top tier "orchestration". It's there and integrated, which does make it convenient, but any price on this piece of garbage makes switching/self-hosting something to seriously consider.

In the sense that when people want to use a piece of MIT-licensed software in another piece of software, they don't in practice find themselves restricted from doing so by the conditions of the license. "Permissive" might be a word I should rather have used.

That's a good point, entropy is only a heuristic for the thing you actually want to optimize, worst-case guesses (though it's probably a very good heuristic).

> Basically, using the entropy produces a game tree that minimises the number of steps needed in expectation

It might be even worse than that for problems of this kind in general. You're essentially using a greedy strategy: you optimize early information gain.

It's clear that this doesn't optimize the worst-case, but it might not optimize the expected number of steps either.

I don't see why it couldn't be the case that an expected-steps-optimal strategy gains less information early on, and thus produces larger sets of possible solutions, but through some quirk those larger sets are easier to separate later.

> For wordle, «most probable» is mostly determined by letter frequency

I don't think that's a justified assumption. I wouldn't be surprised if wordle puzzles intentionally don't follow common letter frequency to be more interesting to guess. That's certainly true for people casually playing hangman.

IANAL either, so my own legal theories are as creative as yours, but I'd like to offer the following data point: All unrestricted open-source licenses that were written by actual lawyers, from MIT to CC0, have found it necessary to include such a liability clause.

Before Minecraft, basically all voxel engines used some form of non-axis-aligned normals to hide the sharp blocks. Those engines did this either through explicit normal mapping, or at the very least, by deriving intermediate angles from the Marching Cubes algorithm. Nowadays, the blocky look has become stylish, and I don't think it really even occurs to people that they could try to make the voxels smooth.

To my eyes, this author doesn't write like ChatGPT at all. Too many people focus on the em-dashes as the giveaway for ChatGPT use, but they're a weak signal at best. The problem is that the real signs are more subtle, and the em-dash is very meme-able, so of course, armies of idiots hunt down any user of em-dashes.

Update: To illustrate this, here's a comparison of a paragraph from this article:

> It is a new frontier of the same old struggle: The struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the same presumption of humanity that is afforded so easily to others. My writing is not a product of a machine. It is a product of my history. It is the echo of a colonial legacy, the result of a rigorous education, and a testament to the effort required to master the official language of my own country.

And ChatGPT's "improvement":

> This is a new frontier of an old struggle: the struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the easy presumption of humanity that others receive without question. My writing is not the product of a machine. It is the product of history—my history. It carries the echo of a colonial legacy, bears the imprint of a rigorous education, and stands as evidence of the labor required to master the official language of my own country.

Yes, there's an additional em-dash, but what stands out to me more is the grandiosity. Though I have to admit, it's closer than I would have thought before trying it out; maybe the author does have a point.

Once you notice the pattern, you see it everywhere:

> Stability isn’t declared; it emerges from the sum of small, consistent forces.

> These aren’t academic exercises — they’re physics that prevent the impossible.

> You don’t defend against the impossible. You design a world where the impossible has no syntax.

> They don’t restrain motion; they guide it.

I don't just ignore this article. I flag it.

Are the rumors still hinting at a VR-only experience as they did a couple of years ago when Half-Life: Alyx released, or is that no longer the speculation? Because that would be unfortunate for me, I'd have to play with a bucket in hand.