AI and the ironies of automation – Part 2

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The user continues discussing Lisanne Bainbridge's paper "The ironies of automation" and its relevance to AI-based automation, highlighting the need for humans to make quick decisions under stressful conditions and the importance of designing user interfaces that support human operators in detecting problems. The user also discusses the training paradox, where human operators need to be ...

Apple Maps claims it's 29,905 miles away

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An AirTag was lost on a flight from London and has traveled over 29,000 miles to Guatemala, passing near volcanos and various locations. It may have met its demise, but its journey has become a bizarre and entertaining story for those tracking its path.

Europeans' health data sold to US firm run by ex-Israeli spies

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Zivver, a Dutch data security company, was sold to Kiteworks, an American company with Israeli intelligence links, putting European citizens' sensitive information at risk. Experts warn that the takeover poses serious security concerns due to invasive US laws and potential data misuse by Israeli intelligence.

Illuminating the processor core with LLVM-mca

The RISC versus CISC debate ended in a draw: Modern processors decompose instructions into micro-ops handled by backend execution units. Understanding how instructions are executed by these units can give us insights on optimizing key functions that are backend bound. In this episode, we walk through using llvm-mca to analyze functions and identify performance insights from its simulation. ...

Linux Sandboxes and Fil-C

Memory safety and sandboxing are two different security measures. Combining them with Fil-C runtime is more effective to prevent attacks than having either one.

Shai-Hulud compromised a dev machine and raided GitHub org access: a post-mortem

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Trigger.dev was compromised by Shai-Hulud 2.0, a sophisticated npm supply chain worm, through an engineer's compromised laptop. The incident was contained within 4 minutes, but it highlighted the need for improved security measures, including branch protection and OIDC for npm publishing.

Kimi K2 1T model runs on 2 512GB M3 Ultras

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Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev environments

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Dagger is a programmable open source CI/CD engine that allows developers to write CI/CD pipelines in their favorite programming language and run them in containers, eliminating remote engine dependency and advancing all processes in the local environment. It provides a container-based swiss army knife for CI operations, creating LLM agents, and more, with tons of integrations and open-source ...

Compiler Engineering in Practice

A compiler is a translator that converts input language to output language, preserving computation behavior. Compilers are complex but can be debugged like any other command line program if built correctly.

Using e-ink tablet as monitor for Linux

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User set up an Android E-ink tablet as a display for reading and writing with less eye strain. They used TigerVNC server and AVNC client to mirror their computer screen with low latency.

I fed 24 years of my blog posts to a Markov model

You shared a Mark V. Shaney Junior program on github.com/susam/mvs, a minimal Markov text generator inspired by the 1980s Mark V. Shaney program. The program generates gibberish by training on text data, such as your blog posts.

Efficient Basic Coding for the ZX Spectrum

Recovering Anthony Bourdain's Li.st's

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User worked on a project to recover lost Anthony Bourdain lists from publicly available crawl archives, specifically Common Crawl. They were able to recover most of the lists with the help of Claude and a python script.

Building a Modern C64 Assembly AI Toolchain

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Gemini 3 successfully generated a functional Snake game in 6510 Assembly for a Commodore 64 despite its limited resources. It demonstrated modern engineering principles such as clean separation of concerns, semantic naming, and low-level optimization.

Cat Gap

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The cat gap is a 7 million year period in North America where few cat-like species fossils were found, possibly due to climate change, volcanic activity, or competition with other carnivorous mammals. The gap ended with the arrival of felids from Eurasia 18.5 million years ago, which are descended from the genus Pseudaelurus.

Vacuum Is a Lie: About Your Indexes

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There is common misconception that troubles most developers using PostgreSQL: tune VACUUM or run VACUUM, and your database will stay healthy. Dead tuples will get cleaned up. Transaction IDs recycled. Space reclaimed. Your database will live happily ever after. But there are couple of dirty "secrets" people are not aware of. First of them being VACUUM is lying to you about your ...

I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

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The user enjoyed using Gleam for Advent of Code, appreciating its clean syntax, helpful compiler, and strong functional programming style. They found the language to be well-suited for the challenges, with features like fold_until and pipelines making solutions feel clearer.

The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps?

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Physicist Enrico Fermi's question about the lack of visible extraterrestrial civilizations may have parallels in the current software industry where numerous claims of easily generated code and products fail to yield tangible results. This mismatch between expectation and reality remains unaddressed.

Show HN: Cargo-rail: graph-aware monorepo tooling for Rust; 11 deps

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cargo rail is a tool that helps manage Cargo workspaces by unifying dependencies, detecting dead features, and reducing CI minutes. It provides features like automatic version unification, dead feature detection, and graph-aware change detection.

Baumol's Cost Disease

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The Baumol effect, also known as Baumol's cost disease, is a tendency for wages in jobs with little productivity growth to rise due to competition with jobs that have experienced high productivity growth. This results in increased costs for services like healthcare and education.

Getting into Public Speaking

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The user shares their experience and advice on public speaking, emphasizing the importance of starting small, practicing, and being authentic on stage. Key tips include starting with a joke, owning the stage, embracing imperfections, and staying hydrated to deliver a successful and engaging talk.

Lean theorem prover mathlib

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Mathlib is a user maintained library for the Lean theorem prover containing programming infrastructure, mathematics, and tactics. It has detailed installation guides and documentation on its website and GitHub.

An Implementation of J (1992)

J is a freely available dialect of APL with a simpler and more powerful spelling scheme. It is implemented in C and specified by the J Dictionary.

Create a Markdown Editor in Ruby on Rails

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The article explains how to build a Markdown editor like GitHub's using Ruby on Rails, Tailwind CSS, and StimulusJS. It covers implementation details, including Markdown conversion and live previews.

Closures as Win32 Window Procedures

The user describes a technique to enhance Win32 window procedure callbacks with a fifth argument to pass extra context, which is useful for libraries with weak custom allocator interfaces. They provide a solution using a trampoline function that allocates executable memory from the loader and uses GNU-styled toolchains targeting COFF to create a new section for the trampoline.

An off-grid, flat-packable washing machine

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A former Dyson engineer invented the hand-crank Divya washing machine for deprived communities, reducing laundry time by 75% and halving water consumption. The machine has impacted 50,000 people with plans to reach 1,000,000 by 2030 through a network of partners and localised production.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Definitive Oral History of a TV Masterpiece

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Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a comedy series that originated in the late 1980s, where a host and his robot friends would mock and comment on bad movies. The show was created by Joel Hodgson, who was a comedian and writer, and was initially produced in Minneapolis before moving to Comedy Central, where it became a cult hit and gained a loyal fan base.

No-Tifier (2017)

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You created a portable wooden notifier at the 2017 Stupid Hackathon, using an AVR microcontroller and cell phone buzzer for notifications. It allows users to receive notifications on-the-go through the wooden device.

Useful patterns for building HTML tools

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The user has built over 150 HTML tools combining HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file, using LLMs to generate code and has discovered useful patterns for building these tools. They share their collection of tools and provide tips on how to build and host HTML tools, including using CDNs, local storage, and CORS to enable features like file uploads and API access.

Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

Copywriters are struggling with their careers devastated by AI-generated copywriting tools. They now offer discounted jobs like editing AI drafts, questioning the creation of new employment opportunities in an AI-infested economy.