mattbee

The BBC in the UK makes a great play of having "no ads" but 6Music (their indie music station) has constant cross-promotions interrupting the music, sometimes for jarring TV murder shows. Cross-promotion is just as annoying as ads for insurance, I hate it!

Yuck, the LLM writing style is obvious, and strongly suggests you didn't do the work you claim. Why should we read this?

Maybe he sold his company, or never completely owned the name himself?

Builders and gamers can install regular Windows. They can run a de-crapifying script to strip it right back - cut the AI, OneDrive, adverts etc. It flies along very predictably without that.

So much is optional and easily removed. You don't even have to pay for it any more, never mind $49. For the power users that he's talking about, I don't see the issue.

(I agree the default state for Windows is completely rotten, and it shouldn't be!)

How is "without being able to really put it in words" a mark of experience? Surely an engineer should be able to justify why an architecture should be arranged the way it is!

But there's been security fixes in most releases of rsync!

Even then, why would a security fix be some kind of strike against AI? We've all seen LLMs being used to tease out the most serious and obscure bugs in C codebases. I'd expect to see a lot of security fixes for an ancient, well-used codebase when an LLM analyses it.

Where is the slop commit here? And why is that commit evidence that tridge has lost his mind to the machine? https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/

The risk of an "upstream cloud provider" is not something you need to tolerate in your supplier of internet infrastructure!

Yep you can look up a car's MOT status publicly, including their mileage history at each inspection. I wonder if they'll send a bill from that report, or expect garages to act as tax collectors.

Though currently you don't need an MOT until a vehicle is 3 years old, so they'll to add something there.

Sounds like a bargain. In the UK we'll be paying £0.03 per mile from April 2028.

This is very cynical, why would you not thank the Wallet Inspector

Microsoft say it's no longer true that EV certificates get special treatment:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/package-and-d...

The only option to avoid a SmartScreen prompt from day 1 on Windows is to distribute through Microsoft Store, end of story.

If you sign it yourself, via Azure or your own $200/year cert, you will get a SmartScreen prompt initially, but the prompt will stop appearing once the file hash has sufficient download history. There is no exact threshold, but it can take several weeks and hundreds of clean installs from a wide audience.

This is from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/package-and-d...

Er yeah same. I can believe it's a PITA to self-host because why would they care to make it easy. It's open source, good luck.

$10/year seems pretty fair to avoid all that.

The clients are fine, could be smoother, but I've internalised the quirks by now.

This OS doesn't says it's maintenance-free! But it skips a whole load of maintenance you'd need to think about with a traditional base system, because 1) there's almost nothing there, and 2) the upgrade to that base is easy, you just reboot and restart your containers.

Obviously the software you run needs upgrades, but (again, but a layer down) it's based on Docker and probably someone else is maintaining it. So you pull that new container, restart and the OS is just making sure your data lands in the same place with the new container.

If you're happy with all your software running from Docker this seems like a step up from a Debian or Redhat, and it has a lot less bureaucracy than something like CoreOS.

Whether it's _usable_ I'm not sure (especially around storage management) but it's a really clear pitch.

The internet of 20 years ago was awash with info for running dedicated servers, fragmented and badly-written in places but it was all there. I can absolutely believe LLMs would enable more people to find that knowledge more easily.

I founded a hosting company 25 years ago when User-Mode Linux was the hot new virtualisation tech. We aspired to just replicate the dedicated server experience because that was obviously how you deploy services with the most flexibility, and UML made it so cheap! Through the 2010s I (extremely wrongly) assumed that being metered on each little part of their stack was not something most developers would choose, for the sake of a little convenience.

Does a regular 20-something software engineer still know how to turn some eBay servers & routers into a platform for hosting a high-traffic web application? Because that is still a thing you can do! (I've done it last year to make a 50PiB+ data store). I'm genuinely curious how popular it is for medium-to-big projects.

And Hetzner gives you almost all of that economic upside while taking away much of the physical hassle! Why are they not kings of the hosting world, rather than turning over a modest €367M (2021).

I find it hard to believe that the knowledge to manage a bunch of dedicated servers is that arcane that people wouldn't choose it for this kind of gigantic saving.

There was a time before Google when various mailing lists of grumpy sysadmins in key institutions could decide the fate of a new mail sender, internet-wide. But yes that "internet community" is small fry now, and can only cut off their own noses if they don't like Google's mail policies.

Before Google, AOL were the previous big-beast mail host, and they did provide some tools to help diagnose why you couldn't get through to their users. It still felt like there was more of a balance of power towards the grumpy sysadmins.

Or just switch your browser to Reader Mode and it's free.

I have seen it start on a sentence, get lost and finish it with something like "Scratch that, actually it's fine."

And if it's not giving me a reason I can understand for a bug, I'm not listening to it! Mostly it is showing me I've mixed up two parameters, forgotten to initialise something, or referenced a variable from a thread that I shouldn't have.

The immediate feedback means the bug usually gets a better-quality fix than it would if I had got fatigued hunting it down! So variables get renamed to make sure I can't get them mixed up, a function gets broken out. It puts me in the mind of "well make sure this idiot can't make that mistake again!"

The law (OK, well, British law) does recognise that many terms can be Unfair especially when one of the parties is an individual, and especially when it relates to employment. They can nullify them on that basis.

Pasting a big batch of new code and asking Claude "what have I forgotten? Where are the bugs?" is a very persuasive on-ramp for developers new to AI. It spots threading & distributed system bugs that would have taken hours to uncover before, and where there isn't any other easy tooling.

I bet there's loads of cryptocurrency implementations being pored over right now - actual money on the table.

Absolutely the opposite here, after reading a few paragraphs I was a bit bored. Then I saw the length of the piece, noticed the AI imagery, quit, came here. I read your comment and it makes sense. I'm not reading a story that somebody couldn't be bothered to write.

"I'm sorry to ask, but have you forwarded me unedited output from an LLM? I'd rather hear what you think!"

I had internalised that it was Windows Defender hooking every file operation and checking it against a blacklist? I've had it forced off for years.

Right?? There is a working original After Burner in an arcade in Leeds - on free play and just open to kids of all ages. Sooo many places where it could trap a finger, and it moves pretty violently.

?

Congratulations Ben! The game sounds like a dangerous cult that I want no part of. But I've also done game ports recently and was curious - how much of the old codebase did you need to understand (and change!) in order to port it? And how much could you just wrap up / virtualise, and start building on top?

This has been on the cards for at least a year, with the increasingly doomy commits noted by HN.

Unfortunately I don't know of any other open projects that can obviously scale to the same degree. I built up around 100PiB of storage under minio with a former employer. It's very robust in the face of drive & server failure, is simple to manage on bare hardware with ansible. We got 180Gbps sustained writes out of it, with some part time hardware maintenance.

Don't know if there's an opportunity here for larger users of minio to band together and fund some continued maintenance?

I definitely had a wishlist and some hardware management scripts around it that could be integrated into it.

Personally I don't think I've ever re-run it. I think I've clicked a few buttons as I've seen alerts about new options appearing. But ultimately it's just a bunch of powershell commands to remove packages and set options. So I'd assume it's safe to run regularly.

The key to having a nice time with Windows is 1) to give it loads of memory (32GB+ surely) and 2) to run a debloater script the moment you pick up a new system e.g. https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

All the rubbish from the last 20 years - ads, OneDrive, Copilot, Office upsells, Candy Crush in the start menu - it can just disappear, leaving a pretty stable system that hasn't actually changed much.

Apart from the awful control panels, anything else you don't like is probably replaceable. I really love startallback.com which brings back the regular start menu and lots of other little fixes.

Obviously everyone deserves a computer that doesn't try to sell to them CONSTANTLY, and I wish Windows were better out of the box. But it doesn't take much adjustment to get there.

This is such a fascinating & personally inspiring time for me as a programmer.

The real game Bandersnatch (as a business folly) was something else - the "coming soon" advert from just before Imagine's bankruptcy would probably ring an alarm bell now - https://nosher.net/archives/computers/imagine_eugeneevans_yo...

Some of the programmers of Bandersnatch did release Gift From The Gods from the ashes of Bandersnatch - which I definitely had on my Spectrum! But it was very confusing - https://www.crashonline.org.uk/13/giftgod.htm

This 1984 documentary from the BBC archive covers Imagine's growth & demise, must have been a great visual reference for Brooker making the show, and the top comment has some more detail on Imagine's hiring spree - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buuUZFh_pyk also also check out 4:30 or so, where they show the game and the device that will "eventually be reduced to a small cartridge and sold with the game"!!

Also also the name Ritman is probably a reference to Jon Ritman, programmer of the brilliant Head Over Heels. But he was nothing to do with Imagine. He still gives interviews and seems lovely.