The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.
Money. The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want corn. So they decide that special gray stones that they can collect from a nearby riverbed will represent an abstract…
If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance you’ve seen this famous image of three iterations of SpaceX’s Raptor rocket engine.
Ask a team what they shipped this year and you’ll get a list. Ask what they killed and the room goes quiet.
I was reading Jason Gorman’s article “The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy” and he says: the journey from 90% to 99% reliability is just as hard…
In 2014 I wrote http_build_url, a temporary PHP polyfill for AOL's CMS. Twelve years and nearly 20 million installs later, I'm deprecating it.
[ thank you to claude fable 5.1, holden saberhagen, gabriel kammer, andres erbsen, alice mckean, and tristan wylde-larue for comments on this post ]
I find it very useful to be able to do everyone else’s job — it helps you learn how they work and what they need, and it helps even more when you need their job done, but they won’t do it themselves.
Of all the LLMs I’ve used and driven daily, Claude is the one that absolutely contradicts my instructions.
I accidentally clicked a shady YouTube ad that mimics an iOS “Storage Full” alert, reported it (twice), and Google still said it was fine. Meanwhile, Gemini flags it in seconds for deceptive design...
Small local libraries are now becoming travel destinations
Elite circles have their own cultural knowledge. So does the bottom 40%. Here's some of mine.
“We're nowhere near the ceiling.”
Some thoughts on Astra and newfangled long-horizon models.
A caller phones Radio Erywan. “Is it true that in Moscow, on Red Square, they give out cars?” “True. Not in Moscow, however, but in St. Petersburg. Not on Red Square, but on Revolution Square. Not cars, but bikes. And they don’t give them out, but steal them”. Edit: Through the apparent magic of Hacker News, my Google…
Lotus Notes had encryption, rich text, and read receipts before email did. Why it still failed, and the dangers of starting software from scratch.
This case involves Project Bluebird, a social media service previously named “twitter.new” and renamed to tweet.app immediately after this ruling (for reasons this post makes obvious). Project Bluebird’s service is designed to reimagine the Twitter service that Musk imploded when...
tautology.town is a blog that contains tautologies.
Broadcom pulled public VMware VDDK downloads, creating new challenges for customers migrating to Azure, Nutanix, OpenShift, KVM, and other platforms.
A couple years ago, GM made waves by saying that soon, all their new cars would be completely free of Apple's CarPlay and Android Auto support, instead opting for the "Android Automotive OS" in their cars. Admittedly, I'm a huge fan of CarPlay for basic safety reasons and
It’s very tempting to imagine that AI turns everyone into a tool-builder - now everyone can just ask the model to make the software they need, and apps as we know them are dead. I think that misunderstands how most people think and where software actually comes from, and more importantly, it isn’t
Two years of nightmarish smiles and makeup before anyone laid hands on Mimic Systems' actual product.
Sony would like you to know that any reasonable gamer would know that purchasing a game is just licensing a game (Video Games Chronicle), not owning it. And there is truth mixed in with a bold-face…
Nearly twenty-five years ago I registered neil.fraser.name to provide a stable presence on the Internet. It has been the home of this website, my email address, and a server for APIs. It predates YouTube, Facebook, and smart phones. Minutes after my daughter was born, I also registered beverly.fraser.name .
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
And why you should ignore demo videos
Across 380 software categories, 59.8% of the sources behind grounded AI recommendations sit outside the 100,000 most-visited websites, and several of the most-cited are sites built to be read by models rather than by people.
I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress position. For example, in 2022, I did a comprehensive look at predictions…
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
A few years years ago the curl project signed up and became a CNA. This means that we are masters of and can allocate our own CVE identifiers. For any security problems within our territory, it is we who decides if the issue should get a CVE or not. No more bogus CVEs. 57 CVEs … Continue reading a CVE dispute →
