zzzeek

how long before they start skimming OSS projects that are public but nonetheless have Github Sponsors income. I mean that's money right there for them right

SQLAlchemy has its own frozendict which we've had in use for many years, we have it as a pretty well performing cython implementation these days, and I use it ubiquitously. Would be a very welcome addition to the stdlib.

This proposal is important enough that I chimed in on the thread with a detailed example of how SQLAlchemy uses this pattern:

https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-814-add-frozendict-built-in...

but Japan is actually relaxing immigration rules due to the need for younger workers. I bet they can pay them pretty well for less than the R&D, maintenance, and loss of productivity of the robots costs

you may want to consider my use of the word "ambiguous" and consider what you're projecting by ignoring it

because it's AI and badly drawn, it's difficult to tell. A real artist with intent to state it one way or the other would make sure it was unambiguous. which is my point

> In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the need for automated harvesting using robots.

This is about Japan, but like the US, Japan has a restrictive immigration policy and an aging, not-replaced population that's at the core of this issue. Japan has been toying with expanding immigration in the area of health care workers [1] recently, but like in the US, there really isn't a labor shortage issue if immigration policy is liberalized.

So this is like so many other things a complex and mediocre technological solution to what's actually a political issue.

[1] https://www.bpb.de/themen/migration-integration/regionalprof...

the main thing "rare" engineers would have in common is that they think for themselves and dont need preachy blog posts with ambiguously sexist AI graphics to tell them how.

sure but then the citations are no longer "hallucinated", they actually point to something fraudulent. that's a different problem.

correct me if I'm wrong but citations in papers follow a specific format, and the case here is that a tool was used to validate that they are all real. Certainly a tool that scans a paper for all citations and verifies that they actually exist in the journals they reference shouldn't be all that technically difficult to achieve?

> I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most trafficked sites on the web in mod_perl in the early 2000s, so I have some thoughts.

Hey me too exactly! I wrote the CMS for mlb.com in 2003 entirely in mod_perl.

This post is indeed a little walk down memory lane of the Perliness of the 1990s. I spent most of the 1990s enforcing everyone in my team (yes, by 1998 they made me in charge, totally inappropriately) use Perl on awkward environments like Windows NT because giving in to horrendous systems like Active Server Pages or...shudder...Cold Fusion represented the heat death of the profession. Microsoft was determined to to murder the whole "RTFM / TMTOWTDI" culture and replace it with their own brand of corporate mediocrity (remember, there was no XBox at this time. Github? no, source control was in Visual Source Safe [narrator: your source code was, in fact, not very safe!]. MSFT was 1000% uncool and evil).

But ultimately mod_perl's decline was technical! It's syntax, organization and operation were enough to get us through the 90's but were at the same time doing violence to one's cognitive facilities. Python came along and fixed everything that was wrong with Perl. I started in Python porting things from Perl, like HTML::Mason, because I was not yet enlightened enough. But I got there eventually.

the agenda being pushed with the recent spate of articles to the effect of "people are saying they're autistic when they're really not, and should be classified differently" I think has mostly to do with RFKs overarching claim that people who are autistic are all suffering a horrible, debilitating disease, where in his words verbatim: “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go on a date” [1] , which from there goes into his bigger goal which is to create a "database" of autistic people [2], for which no valid reason has ever been given. By redefining "autism" to be only those who we've decided are those severely disabled who "will never pay taxes or hold a job", then creating a catalog of exactly who these people are, the final step is quite obvious if you've studied the treatment of autistic people in Nazi Germany [3].

So I'm going to flag these posts for now because the goal in the current US climate is pure eugenics. RFK is at his core a eugenicist, as are all high-level anti-vaxxers. Anti-vaxxers seek to blame the diseased for their disease, on such factors as "poor diet", "lack of exercise", or in the case of autism, "having your child vaccinated", against all scientific consensus, and would prefer people suffer and die of horrible and completely preventable diseases like measles and polio since they somehow "deserve it". Governments like the current one have plenty of plans for people they deem unworthy.

[1] https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5256614-autism-communi...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2025/05/08/nx-s1-5391310/kennedy-autism-...

[3] https://mjhnyc.org/blog/autism-and-disability-in-nazi-vienna...

how about we just tax billionaires at 95% instead. Have Elon buy his coffee at 7-11 like everyone else.

you had to choose between vinegar and glyphosate, I'd use the vinegar. your dogs aren't going to roll around in a too-strong concentration of vinegar, it has a smell and if it were actually going to cause burns (what kind of vinegar is this, something from a chemical supply house? ) animals would be immediately repelled by it (plus it evaporates quickly anyway). whereas with glyphosate, none of that applies, it's a fully synthetic chemical that stays in the atmosphere for days, would not send any cues to animals, and its effects on animals may be long term, concealed for years, and fatal.

but as someone else said above, if this is a certain area that your dog wants to be, you can always pull weeds for that area by hand, just make sure you get the entire root.

in that case it should be completely uncontroversial to raise the minimum wage and help that .5% of labor out. yet somehow, it's a non-starter. (btw, googling says the number is more like 1.1%. in 1979, 13.4% of the labor force made minimum wage. this only shows how obsolete the current minimum wage level is).

ive dealt a bit with ewaste kinds of machines, old Dells and such and have two still running here, the issue is they use a crapton of power. I had one such ewaste Dell machine that I just had to take to the dump it was so underpeforming while it used 3x more power than my other two Dells combined.

and times a hundred, Robert F Kennedy Jr., an absolute con artist with no qualifications of any kind

never give an LLM to your junior engineers. The LLM itself is mostly like a junior engineer and will make a complete mess of things if not guided by someone with a lot of experience.

Basically if people are producing code or documentation that looks like an LLM wrote it, that's not really what I see as the model that makes these tools useful.

my current job /role combinations has me working in a variety of projects which feature tasks to be done in: Python/SQLAlchemy (which I maintain), Go, k8s, Ansible, Bash, Groovy, Java, Typescript, javascript, etc. If I'm doing an architecture-intensive thing in SQLAlchemy, obviously I'm not going to say "Claude here go do this feature for me". I will have it do things like write change notes (where I'll write out the changelog in the convoluted and overly technical way I can do in 10 seconds, and it produces something presentable and readable from it), set up test cases, and sometimes I will give it very specific instructions for a large refactoring that has a predictable pattern (basically, instead of me figuring out a complex search and replace or doing it manually). For stuff I do in Ansible and especially Groovy (a horrible language which heavily resists being lintable), these are very simple declarative playbooks or Jenkins pipeline jobs, I use Claude heavily to write out directives and such because it will do so without syntax errors and without me having to google every individual pattern or directive; it's much easier to check what it writes and debug from there. But I'm also not putting Claude in charge in these places, it's doing the boring stuff for me and doing it a lot faster and without my having to spend cognitive overhead (which is at a premium when you're in your late 50s like me).

> The one part I would say LLMs seem to help me with is medium-depth questions about DirectX12. Not really how to use it, but parts of the API itself. MSDN is good for learning about it, but I would concede that LLMs have been useful for just getting more composite knowledge of DX12.

see there you go, I have things like this I have to figure out many times per week. so many of them are one-off things I really dont need to learn deeply at the moment (like TypeScript). It's also very helpful to bounce off ideas, like when I need to achieve something in the Go/k8s realm, it can sanity check how I'm approaching a problem and often suggest other ways that I would not have considered (which it knows because it's been trained on millions of tech blogs).

ive been programming for more than 40 years

the list of people who write code, use high quality LLM agents (not chatbots) like Claude, and report not just having success with the tools but watching the tools change how they think about programming, continues to grow. The sudden appearance of LLMs has had a really destabilizing effect on everything, and a vast portion of what LLMs can do and/or are being used for runs from intellectually stifling (using LLMs to write your term papers) to revolting (all kinds of non-artists/writers/musicians using LLM to suddenly think they are "creators" and displacing real artists, writers, and musicians) to utterly degenerate (political / sexual deepfakes of real people, generation of antivax propaganda, etc). Put on top of that the way corporate America is absolutely doing the very familiar "blockchain" dance on this and insisting everyone has to do AI all the time everywhere is a huge problem that hopefully will shake out some in the coming years.

But despite all that, for writing, refactoring, and debugging computer code, LLM agents are still completely game changing. All of these things are true at the same time. There's no way someone that works with real code all day could spent an honest few weeks with a tool like Claude and come away calling it "hype". someone might still not prefer it, or it's not for them, but to claim it's "hype", that's not possible.

"Joe Biden won the 2020 election" is not a "left wing" notion (or if you're looking for a more hefty one, "vaccines do not cause autism"). it is objective fact. the "left wing" has nothing to do with this, it's about the "right wing" has decided to reject objective fact as part of their ideological platform.

> This is specially problematic when active issues with developer notes begin to be filled with comments from users that have never contributed to the project and usually do more harm than good. This situation ends up causing burnout in developers.

This is a huge with github and I would desperately want a github where issues are visible, but the ability to create or modify them is STRICTLY locked down to project members, and non members can only post Discussions for problems. I really prefer that I write the issue(s) based an "intake discussion" so to speak.

How ironic it would be for Adobe, the literal 500 ton dreadnaught of copyright, patent, and intellectual property ownership, to be sucking down training content from unlicensed sources. At least something is not entirely wrong in the world today.

What would a "good" version be ?

Start putting real facts into a site and before you know it you're "woke" again with such untruths as Slavery was Bad, Biden won the 2020 Election and of course Full Self Driving is Impossible without Lidar

> We will work with the creators, writers, and artists, instead of ripping off their life's work to feed the model.

i support this but the Smarter Than Me types say it's impossible. It's not possible to track down an adequate number of copyright holders, much less get their permission, much less afford to pay them, for the number of works required in order to get the LLM to achieve "liftoff".

I would think that as I use Claude for coding, it would work just as well if it didnt suck down the last three years of NYT articles as if it did. There's a vast amount of content that is in the public domain, and if you're ChatGPT you can make deals with a bunch of big publishers to get more modern content too. But that's my know-nothing take.

maybe the issue is more about the image content. Screw the image content (and definitely the music content, spotify pushing this slop is immensely offensive), pay the artists. My code OTOH is open source, MIT licensed. It's not art at all. Go get it (though throw me a few thousand bucks every year because you want to do the right thing).

i dont see why, hacker news is loaded with enthusiastic young entrepreneurs and I posted this thinking some brilliant protege of Peter Thiel would be inspired to "disrupt" the "surveilling and abducting people" industry with the promise of a $280M reward....

A correctly manufactured chainsaw can be used safely by adults. Products like "MoonSoll and Magic Chems Fuel Bottles" [1], "Tesla Powerwall 2 AC Battery Power Systems" [2] and literally tens of thousands of other products listed at [3] have been determined that they can not be used safely by adults, and are literally taken off store shelves until the issues can be resolved. It is a normal, everyday occurrence that manufacturers are very motivated to not sell products that cannot be used safely, Hacker-Newsesque semantic nitpicking notwithstanding. If similar liabilities applied to software like Roblox (think "kids committed suicide due to interactions on Roblox" being held equivalently to "kids have been suffocated by this defactive crib"), there would not be a Roblox without effective moderation.

[1] https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2026/Demlar-Recalls-MoonSoll-an...

[2] https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2026/Tesla-Recalls-Powerwall-2-...

[3] https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls

Acetylene is being marketed to children as something fun to play with ?

Agree, in any other field if a product cannot be made safe for consumers, you just don't produce and sell it. The world does not need to have a Roblox app (my 11 year old would disagree very much)

Facebook : 3 billion monthly active users

Instagram : 3 billion monthly active users

X : 586 million monthly active users

Bluesky: 38 million *total* users .

Additionally, Bluesky allows third party moderation by any party through open APIs. Bluesky is also not a monetization platform, whereas Instagram and Facebook are very much so. Bluesky has essentially no recommendation algorithm that amplifies addicitive content; Instagram and Facebook are foundationally architected on this approach.

The article here is about Instagram shutting off their third party moderation teams, and there is no API for others to participate. The profit incentive combined with little to no moderation as well as Instagram's highly addictive recommendatation algorithms has the result that nazi and antisemitic content is flourishing and being spread to billions of users including children.

hopefully this clarifies why Instagram and Facebook should be talked about whereas bluesky is not that interesting