In 1999, Intel received an absolutely massive amount of opposition when they decided to include a software-readable serial number in their CPUs, so much that they reversed the decision.
Then the "security" and Trusted Computing authoritarians continued pushing for TPMs and related tech, and contributed to the rise of mobile walled gardens. Windows 11's TPM requirements were another step towards their goal. The amount of propaganda about how that was supposed to be a good thing, both here and elsewhere, was shocking.
It turns out a significant (but hopefully decreasing) number of the population is easily coerced into anything when "security" is given as a justification.
The war on general-purpose computing continues, and we need to keep fighting.
Stallman was right, as always. Time to give his "Right to Read" another read. (If it hasn't been done already, an AI-generated short film of it would be a great idea...)
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
> AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed ahead with OpenSearch, Valkey, and DocumentDB anyway, capturing the hosted-service money after those communities and companies had built the markets; the result was a wave of defensive licenses like SSPL, Elastic License, RSAL, and other source-available models designed less to stop ordinary users than to stop AWS from stripping open-source infrastructure for parts, owning the customer relationship.
This is completely backwards, at least with OpenSearch and Valkey. AWS didn't create the forks until after the upstream projects changed their license, so it's really weird to say that the forks "resulted" in the license changes when those forks where a response to the license changes. With Valkey in particular it was members of the former redis core development team that created Valkey.
I've set a few rules for working with coding agents:
1. If I use a coding agent to generate code, it should be something I am absolutely confident I can code correctly myself given the time (gun to my head test).
2. If it isn't, I can't move on until I completely understand what it is that has been generated, such that I would be able to recreate it myself.
3. I can create debt (I believe this is being called Cognitive Debt) by breaking rule 2, but it must be paid in full for me to declare a project complete.
Accumulating debt increases the chances that code I generate afterwards is of lower quality, and it also feels like the debt is compounding.
I'm also not really sure how these rules scale to serious projects. So far I've only been applying these to my personal projects. It's been a real joy to use agents this way though. I've been learning a lot, and I end up with a codebase that I understand to a comfortable level.
Anyone considering leaving AWS and thinking they'll transfer all their data for free [1], I've got news for you: It's a lie.
AWS takes as long as possible (for me it was a month) to respond to the initial DTO request,
then require you to submit a multi-page form answering a barrage of questions about why you're leaving, where you're going to, what services you used, and estimated data egress. A week or so later, if they approve the request, you're not allowed to begin DTO until 60 days after the approval.
By the time you can egress your data for "free", you've been stuck on AWS for 3-4 months since you first made the decision to leave.
Bambu showed their true colours last year when they would've eliminated offline access altogether if not for public outrage. You don't own your Bambu printer, you're leasing it at a subsidised premium.
This move does not surprise me at all, and I'm genuinely happy that Louis is willing to shell out money to help those that can't defend themselves.
I'm happy that Bambu finally made Prusa care, but I will not cheer them even if they consistently innovate. It's just sad.
Plus they are super inaccurate. Gemini gets one of its three bullet subtly or very majorly wrong almost every time.
Just a few weeks ago Gemini said we’re rolling out our payment setup in Russia. You know the place where we have 20+ sanctions packages on? We were talking about France in the meeting.
I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context.
Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt.
For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, information load and things on THAT wave length the problem with that situation is obvious but I realised then that is not at all obvious to the average public. She genuinely seemed to think she's helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop.
There is zero understanding or consensus of acceptable practices around that sort of thing baked into societal norms right now.
I like to ride my bicycle with my friends in rides organized by the (Pacific Northwest) Cascade Bicycle Club. They require that I solve a Google reCAPTCHA in order to register for a ride. Google is already completely locking me out from being able to do that. When I try to click on the squares to select whatever items it's asking, it indefinitely loops. When I try using the audio version, it completely blocks me from using it saying that there has been suspicious activity.
That means that I ride alone these days. I did not renew my membership this year.
The last time I experienced something like this was when Facebook starting being the only way to participate in certain events. Back when that happened, I simply counted myself as excluded and did other things with my time and money.
This is gorgeous. I’m very afraid if I buy one it will trigger a wave of revulsion for normal everyday products and I’ll become one of these obsessive people who talk about fonts.
90% of his content is about advocating for consumer rights like ownership and repair, most of which is documented and sourced on his wiki [1]. If the only thing you see here is "drama and outrage" then you're not the target audience and you should return to mindless consumption until such a time that you find yourself affected.
I have been developing software for Macs and PCs as an Indie for 20 years now. I sympathize with the author of the post. You get the feeling that Apple thinks you should be grateful that they allow you to develop apps for their platform.
The author didn't mention Apple's contempt for backward compatibility. Apple like to regularly nuke their entire developer system from orbit. Try running an app developed 10 years ago on the latest version of macOS. It probably won't run.
Microsoft are much better at backward compatibility and they don't force you to join a developer program. But you get totally reamed every time you have to update your authenticode digital certificate for Windows. Just the digital certificate will cost you more than $99 per year. It is a total racket.
I think this conflates "old" with "killed". Most of the stuff is just old.
I would say the Mac Pro was "killed", left to languish after the trashcan model, then isolated from third party GPUs when it finally got upgraded to Apple Silicon, and then left to languish again until the lack of sales justified killing it.
Rosetta 2 will certainly deserve a spot on this list next year when they start yeeting it, an amazing piece of technology that has made Apple Silicon-era Macs uniquely capable of executing the widest range of software.
I don't know the show, but when I first watched this clip (under the title of "greatest shot on television") I totally bought in to the hype and thought it really was amazing. You start out just walking alongside him, and only slowly realize where you are and what is about to happen, and everything is perfectly timed and composed: he ends his walk, reaches the conclusion of his explanation, and you realize what is going on, all at the exact time the launch begins. Brilliant!
Except that this is not "a shot" at all. I just hadn't noticed on my first watch that there's a very obvious cut just at the end of the "walk". It's a different angle from a different location at a different time of day, and he just has one sentence to say before he looks back at the blast off.
It would be no different from any news reporter on location at the time, reading a prepared message ahead of the launch, timed to end before the launch itself with no need for extensive rehearsals, the launch timing is widely broadcast, you time yourself accordingly with your talking speed, by adding pauses, etc. And on top of everything they probably had to do it live too.
I have no issue with James Burke or his show. And this scene is really beautifully done. But it's not the greatest shot in television. It's not even one shot!
I have trouble understanding how the opinions of the historical right to repair guy are surprising or even considered drama, it’s not drama because it’s not interpersonal gossip, it’s right to repair activism.
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.
I’ll stop you here. Google offered it for free and, at the time, offered such an high amount of mail storage for free it sounded insane. At the time, my ISP gave me a 25MB or 50MB inbox and that was considered pretty decent, when Google was trying to get people in with 1-2GB.
They absolutely have a right to take ant steps they deem necessary to prevent malicious use of their product, and certainly aren’t obligated to provide it for free, but Google wasn’t forced to provide a free email service, much less one that went so far above and beyond their competition.
> The other change is simpler: I'm doing the design work myself, by hand, before any code gets written. Not a vague doc. Concrete interfaces, message types, ownership rules.
That’s the hard part of coding. If you have an architecture then writing the code is dead simple. If you aren’t writing the code you aren’t going to notice when you architected an API that allows nulls but then your database doesn’t. Or that it does allow that but you realize some other small issue you never accounted for.
I do not know how you can write this article and not realize the problem is the AI. Not that you let it architect, but that you weren’t paying attention to every single thing it does. It’s a glorified code generator. You need to be checking every thing it does.
The hard part of software engineering was never writing code. Junior devs know how to write code. The hard part is everything else.
I consider Gemma 4 31B (dense / no MoE), the new baseline for local models. It's obviously worse than the frontier models, but it feels less like a science experiment than any previous local model I’ve run, including GPT OSS 120B and Nemotron Super 120B.
On my M5 Max with 128 GB of RAM and the full 256K context window, I see RAM use spike to about 70 GB, with something like 14 GB of system overhead. A 64 GB Panther Lake machine with the full Arc B390, or a 48 GB Snapdragon X2 Elite machine, could probably run it with a 128K to 256K context window. Maybe you can squeeze it into 32GB (27.5GB usable) with a 32K context window?
Even last year, seeing this kinda performance on a mainstream-ish/plus configuration would have seemed like a pipe dream.
Louis is one of the most passionate YouTubers you can watch. I don't think he gets it right 100% of the time, but when you are that vulnerable (and what appears to be authentic) you're bound to not make the the right call every once in awhile (as we all do).
I support him even though people can pick him apart.
> They will be, and that moment is not that far off.
It's here, right now. I'm running quantized Qwen and Gemma on a decent, but three years old gaming rig (think RTX 3080 12GB and 32 GB RAM). Yes, it's slow, it has a small context window. But it can (given a proper harness) run through my trip photos and categorize them. It can OCR receipts and summarize spendings. It can answer simple questions, analyze code and even write code when little context is required. Probably I could get a half-decent autocomplete out of it, if I bother with VS Code integration. "128 GB VRAM on a MacBook Pro or a Strix Halo" is already a minimum viable setup for agentic coding, I think.
> And then we'll have the equilibrium we already have with the "classic cloud": you either self-host or pay for flexibility and speed.
Currently, it works exactly the other way. The cloud versions are orders of magnitude cheaper than self hosting, because sharing can utilize servers much more efficiently. Company can spend half a million bucks on a rig running GLM 5.1, and get data security, flexibility and lack of censorship, but oh it's so expensive compared to Anthropic per-seat plans.
If idempotent key was seen then send back response.
Clients intention is outside the scope. If contract says "idempotency on key" the idempotent response on key. If contract says "idempotent on body hash" then response on body hash (which might or might not include extra data).
APIs are contracts. Not the pinky promise of "I'll do my best guess"
When it was Copilot tab-completing lines, people would say, "yea, but you still have to make sure you're the one writing the whole functions".
Then when it was completing functions, people would say, "yeah, but you still have to make sure you're the one writing the logic around the functions"
Then when it was completing the logic around the functions, people would say, "yeah, but you still have to make sure you're the one writing the features"
Now it's completing features and people say, "yeah, but you still have to make sure you're the one writing the architecture"
I don't know if architecture is a solvable problem for these models, but it is interesting watching the expectations moving over time.
Rather than just having the options "Done" and "Move to Bin", give me an option to actually run it without having to manually go into System Settings each and every time without disabling security features?
The added friction feels more like a way to force developers to pay Apple an annual fee for distributing rather than for my safety. Not saying it doesn't help with safety, just that it's more weighed to the former.
> With Nullsoft gone and Frankel spending his time building a special-effects computer for his electric guitar...
I don't know what happened to the Jesusonic he was building then, but Justin Frankel ended up creating Reaper, the cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux digital audio workstation that is a solid Pro Tools competitor in a mere 16 MB download:
The installer for the whole DAW is smaller than most add-on VST effects. Some of my favorite albums have been recorded with Reaper, and obviously I'm a Reaper fan and use it too. Just like Winamp, you can pay for it, but if you really can't afford it, there's no time limit and it won't stop you from using it.
Showing my age here, but if you have a copy of the Walnut Creek CD-ROMs with demoscene archives, there's a demo by "Nullsoft" from pre-Winamp days hiding somewhere in there as well.
EDIT: Aww, fwirt beat me to it while I was typing! I guess I'll leave my comment here to add the Nullsoft demo mention. Found a link to his MSDOS demos here: https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1618
Then the "security" and Trusted Computing authoritarians continued pushing for TPMs and related tech, and contributed to the rise of mobile walled gardens. Windows 11's TPM requirements were another step towards their goal. The amount of propaganda about how that was supposed to be a good thing, both here and elsewhere, was shocking.
It turns out a significant (but hopefully decreasing) number of the population is easily coerced into anything when "security" is given as a justification.
The war on general-purpose computing continues, and we need to keep fighting.
Stallman was right, as always. Time to give his "Right to Read" another read. (If it hasn't been done already, an AI-generated short film of it would be a great idea...)
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."