Just a thought - stop bloody soldering the RAM and the SSDs. That partially transfers the burden on to the customers and makes their product more repairable ... Mac Minis (with un-soldered RAM and HDD / SSDs) used to be sold with minimum 4 GB RAM, if I remember right). This, way, you can still sell devices with lower RAM, and customers can upgrade in the future when supply increases.
It takes up more space and costs more (connectors are surprisingly expensive), as well as adding an electrical overhead, while most (yes, not all) customers don't take advantage of it.
Even though I don't necessarily like it, I understand why they solder the RAM on the SOC: Higher bandwidth/greater performance, better power efficiency, etc. But they have no excuse for the SSD.
95-99% of first owners, maybe. But when you make devices that can be affordably repaired / expanded, they will be - and then they gain another 5-10 years of useful lifespan for a second owner.
If we ever want computers to be sustainably made - instead of scorching the earth with each new device - we need to stop thinking the way people treat their devices is some natural law of how things will always be.
Another problem is locked hardware. Newest Synology hardware has lifted the HDD locks but still doesn't allow third party SSD and RAM. Mac Mini storage upgrade is a DIY solution, why not use the standard M.2 2230 slot?
I once got abuse from an Income Tax official for claiming that an email with the details they requested had been sent to them, as the official opened Outlook and searched for it in front of me and couldn't find it! Had to convince the guy to try multiple different keywords before it luckily emerged in the search results.
It's a country with two power centres and two national armies. Thus, "divide and rule" politics works exceptionally well there and no one should be surprised their lack of political unity is working against them. While the Lebanese army has no love for the Israelis they are acting under US pressure and advise to not get involved as Hezbollah is taking the brunt of the attack, which the US and some Lebanese political actors hope will hope weakens it enough and eventually lead to its merger / absorption. It's an idiotic way to think of, ofcourse, because there is no guarantee that the US and / or Israel are likely to stop the war (or their ethnic cleansing / genocide), or stop making political demands on Lebanon once the Hezbollah is gone. The loss of Hezbollah fighters will mean Lebanon's military actually becomes weaker.
In some ways, Israel is a military State because everyone (with some minor exception) is required to serve in the military. If everyone is a trained soldier, the only true civilians are the children ...
Actually not true. Most of the ultra orthodox are exempted from service and are a huge source of the support for continued military operations. Because they don’t have to actually put themselves at risk.
It’s been the primary source of netenyahu’s ability to stay in power.
I completely share your sentiment about feeling irked about open source code being used to train commercial AI models. However, I think the battle is already lost - the nature of copyright and open source code philosophy (currently) means that there isn't any real way of preventing your code being used to train AI. Look at the legal precedents being set in courts where many of the BigTechs have actually pirated copyrighted media to train their AI, and the court has said "that's acceptable". (Ofcourse, the actual act of piracy - like Facebook did by downloading copyrighted material through torrents - may not be legal, but the courts may be lenient here too as there seems to be an undercurrent of government approval to do anything to win the "AI Race").
And, even if you move your repository somewhere else, can you really prevent anyone from uploading it to Github? To do so, you may have to create your open source license.
> However, I think the battle is already lost - the nature of copyright and open source code philosophy (currently) means that there isn't any real way of preventing your code being used to train AI.
Laws should make it a double-edged sword, make distillation explicitly legal.
> Laws should make it a double-edged sword, make distillation explicitly legal.
Knowledge-distillation is already legal. Current case law says none of outputs of any model are protected by copyright, so one could use model outputs for whatever they want - including distillation. That is why AI companies resort to ToS clauses to block distillation and/or training competing models.
It's just not with AI though. It's who they get their advise from. One of my friend was cribbing to me about his company management - apparently someone in management discovered that PostgresDB is a real good database and free, and so they authorised the IT department to migrate their application from Oracle Cloud to PostgresDB as it will "save a lot of money" (true, but...). However, they aren't willing to shell out for the commercial solutions (like EnterpriseDB, which would be still a lot cheaper than Oracle), and are insisting that the team also recreate "all and every" feature that Oracle DB has and is used by their application, but is lacking in PostgresDB - after all, "If Oracle can do it, why can't you!?".
Memories of me and my three developer team being told "we need to use Excel, but in a web browser. So just make an app that does everything like Excel"
47 years if you count from the first release. But now you have this super intelligent thing that enables anyone to create a billion dollar business - you have no excuse!
"Hey Opus, create me an fully tested code base for Oracle-like DB from scratch. Don't overcomplicate it, so it should be ready with when I get back from lunch"?
I had a similar experience but with MSSQL, was invited to join some meetings with MS Sales folks. I quickly learned the project was never meant to succeed, but was simply leverage to negotiate a better contract.
That's not SMTP or other industry standard protocol, incompatible with any mail client out there (?) -- it's for sending mail from backend services, not using as personal email.
Even if you make it work with some SMTP adapter, you still need external mail server as on reception side Cloudflare don't provide storage/IMAP service, only route/redirect mail.
I use it (routing to Gmail, Mailgun SMTP for sending) and it works. But it's not really a mail service if it depends on some another mail service to work.
If I put on my tinfoil hat, it seems to be something deliberate, to push us all towards accepting hardware / software attestation and better "online id" stuff - "Don't you want to identify and stop the spammers and phishers?".
Email scanning and file scanning (on our computer) became acceptable when the level of spam and malware became intolerable. But it was at cost of our privacy. Today, Gmail scans all your mails and makes money from it. Both Windows and macOS have built-in anti-virus or malware scanners, and file indexers, and thus know all the applications and files in your system (which provides for more data on your profile with them). Now with both OSes, and even browsers like Chrome and Firefox, including AI, they will now use our own computers to not only collect our personal data, but even process it on our system and use it to build even better profiles to more profitably exploit us.
It doesn't have to be deliberate; it's just the economic incentives at work. AI providers are inclined to sell AI to everyone with a pulse, and it just so happens that a lot of its use will for towards spam generation.
It also just happens that they're the ones best positioned to provide attestation and identity services.
This is an interesting project - kudos for executing it. I have to admit that when I was starting out in this field, I too fantasised about, "Would this software be faster, smaller and better in assembly?". Ofcourse, assembly programming made some sense in embedded electronics, which can be very resource constrained and even specialised for one particular application. Thinking from that aspect, perhaps you should consider making this a specialised program that runs on something like a Raspberry Pi - running such a web server directly on it, without an OS (or a very minimal OS), would make for a real cool and interesting project.
I did actually make an attempt at that once for BGGP5 [0]. (That is, making a minimal, horribly insecure 'client' implementing just enough behavior to get a response from a server.) But I got demoralized by how much space the binary blobs for the crypto algorithms took up, in comparison to the actual machine code.
I'd really like to see a TCP/IP stack written in native forth (if anyone needs a really good therapist, that sounds like a _great_ project to try ;)
I mean, it doesn't look _that_ daunting, but the fact that noone seems to ever have release an open source version (there are rumours of proprietary stacks though) speaks for itself.
Yes, well aware of it, that's actually very nice for building higher levels of the webserver.
I'd really like to have a complete forth machine dealing with everything, say on an esp32. I guess there's FreeRTOS, so I could use that network layer, but bare metal would be so much cooler. I admit I don't even understand how it would work - would I have to bit-bang the ethernet lines?
I never interface with the peripheral in an ESP32 directly. I guess I really need to read the Free-RTOS code. Micropython just uses that, last I checked.
I was thinking more of the memory usage. As another project posted on HN described, they were running the web server in the RAM of an RPi ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064312 ). Without a full-fledged OS, and a tiny (and fast) webserver coded in Assembly, more RAM would be available for the webserver and they could serve more users.
What on earth are you talking about? Assembly makes sense in desktop computing as well. Have you ever, for example, watched a video? What do you think powers the codecs, JSX?
The statistics reported by GitLab for the x264 repo (https://code.videolan.org/videolan/x264) report that the project is 13.5% assembly; common utilities used in the inner loops of the codec have optimized assembly implementations for several CPU architectures.
A lot of the encoding side on ffmpeg now uses hand-coded assembly optimizations to take advantage of avx512 instructions on newer x64 processors for "100x speed increase" since February 2025 in a stable form
Yes, I do know that some Assembly is used in systems programming and other niches where it makes sense. To be clear, I was talking about the phase some of us go through (as amateurs) when we think everything would be "faster, smaller, better" if written in assembly - Python is slow. What about C or Pascal? Wouldn't asm be faster? ... but, as we all realise sooner or later, there's a reason we prefer to code in high-level or very high-level languages, and why pre-mature optimisation can be a real handicap.
Ah yes, the niche that is video, audio, game and systems programming.
When those three to four amateurs still doing those niche things grow up they’ll move on to real programming, like putting together a solid skills.md file.
Your snide comments make me think that you are trying to create a parody account that matches your nick here (@hatefulheart). Just a heads up, unlike Reddit or other SMs, such things are not appreciated much here on HN.
Sounds like I was absolutely right alright, and so was @thisislife2. Just yet another pitiful case of falling for the "hard truths <-> hurt feelings" reversal.
Not even sure why. Something being niche is not a knock, not one way, not another. Such a weird thing to throw a sad fit like this about.
I interact with Assembly everyday and many of those around me do too. So I wouldn’t label it as niche. If there are thousands of people doing something in computing, it ain’t niche. It’s niche when the numbers are much smaller than that.
Judging by the downvotes that other guy got, he wasn’t “absolutely correct!” as you seem to claim.
> If there are thousands of people doing something in computing, it ain’t niche.
Quick web search suggests there are 4.4 million software developers in the US alone. For the record, I think a lot more people touch assembly weekly than your bellyfeel figure, but it's still nevertheless worlds apart. Such a weird thing to try and deny. Not even sure why you'd feel compelled to per se, it's not the coat that wears you.
> Judging by the downvotes that other guy got, he wasn’t “absolutely correct!” as you seem to claim.
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