HackerLangs
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

mattbee

no profile record

comments

mattbee
·8 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Maybe he sold his company, or never completely owned the name himself?
mattbee
·11 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
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!)
mattbee
·เดือนที่แล้ว·discuss
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!
mattbee
·เดือนที่แล้ว·discuss
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/
mattbee
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
The risk of an "upstream cloud provider" is not something you need to tolerate in your supplier of internet infrastructure!
mattbee
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
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.
mattbee
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Sounds like a bargain. In the UK we'll be paying £0.03 per mile from April 2028.
mattbee
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
This is very cynical, why would you not thank the Wallet Inspector
mattbee
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
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...
mattbee
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
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.
mattbee
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
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.
mattbee
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
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.
mattbee
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
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.
mattbee
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
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.
mattbee
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Or just switch your browser to Reader Mode and it's free.
mattbee
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
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!"
mattbee
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
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.
mattbee
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
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.
mattbee
·4 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
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.
mattbee
·4 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
"I'm sorry to ask, but have you forwarded me unedited output from an LLM? I'd rather hear what you think!"