The most surprising part of uv's success to me isn't Rust at all, it's how much speed we "unlocked" just by finally treating Python packaging as a well-specified systems problem instead of a pile of historical accidents. If uv had been written in Go or even highly optimized CPython, but with the same design decisions (PEP 517/518/621/658 focus, HTTP range tricks, aggressive wheel-first strategy, ignoring obviously defensive upper bounds, etc.), I strongly suspect we'd be debating a 1.3× vs 1.5× speedup instead of a 10× headline — but the conversation here keeps collapsing back to "Rust rewrite good/bad." That feels like cargo-culting the toolchain instead of asking the uncomfortable question: why did it take a greenfield project to give Python the package manager behavior people clearly wanted for the last decade?
Sending an automated thank you note also shows disdain for the recipient's time due to the asymmetry of the interaction. The sender clearly sees the thank you note sending as a task not worthy of their time and thus hands it off to a machine, but expects the recipient to read it themselves. This inherently ranks the importance of their respective time and effort.
>"For myself, the big fraud is getting public to believe that Intellectual Property was a moral principle and not just effective BS to justify corporate rent seeking."
If anything, I'm glad people are finally starting to wake up to this fact.
I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this. If you want to thank someone for their contribution, do that yourself? Sending thank you from an ML model is anything but respectful. I can only imagine that if I got a message like that I’d be furious too.
This reminds me a story from my mom’s work from years ago: the company she was working for announced salary increases to each worker individually. Some, like my mom, got a little bit more, but some got a monthly increase around 2 PLN (about $0.5). At that point, it feels like a slap in the face. A thank you from AI gives the same vibe.
I think this post does a really good job of covering how multi-pronged performance is: it certainly doesn't hurt uv to be written in Rust, but it benefits immensely from a decade of thoughtful standardization efforts in Python that lifted the ecosystem away from needing `setup.py` on the hot path for most packages.
> I then decided to contact Insulet to get the kernel source code for it, being GPLv2 licensed, they're obligated to provide it.
This is technically not true. It is an oversimplification of the common case, but what actually normally should happen is that:
1. The GPL requires the company to send the user a written offer of source code.
2. The user uses this offer to request the source code from the company.
3. If the user does not receive the source code, the user can sue the company for not honoring its promises, i.e. the offer of source code. This is not a GPL violation; it is a straight contract violation; the contract in this case being the explicit offer of source code, and not the GPL.
Note that all this is completely off the rails if the user does not receive a written offer of source code in the first place. In this case, the user has no right to source code, since the user did not receive an offer for source code.
However, the copyright holders can immediately sue the company for violating the GPL, since the company did not send a written offer of source code to the user. It does not matter if the company does or does not send the source code to the user; the fact that the company did not send a written offer to the user in the first place is by itself a GPL violation.
(IANAL)
The important point that Simon makes in careful detail is: an "AI" did not send this email. The three people behind the Sage AI project used a tool to email him.
According to their website this email was sent by Adam Binksmith, Zak Miller, and Shoshannah Tekofsky and is the responsibility of the Sage 501(c)3.
No-one gets to disclaim ownership of sending an email. A human has to accept the Terms of Service of an email gateway and the credit card used to pay the email gateway. This performance art does not remove the human no matter how much they want to be removed.
The repo in question incorporated FFmpeg code while claiming their code is Apache 2.0-licensed over 1.5 years ago[1]
This is not allowed under the LGPL, which mandates dynamic linking against the library. They copy-pasted FFmpeg code into their repo instead.
[1] https://x.com/HermanChen1982/status/1761230920563233137
Data center power usage has been fairly flat for the last decade (until 2022 or so). While new capacity has been coming online, efficiency improvements have been keeping up, keeping total usage mostly flat.
The AI boom has completely changed that. Data center power usage is rocketing upwards now. It is estimated it will be more than 10% of all electric power usage in the US by 2030.
It's a completely different order of magnitude than the pre AI-boom data center usage.
Source: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1
Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.
It is nice to hear someone who is so influential just come out and say it. At my workplace, the expectation is that everyone will use AI in their daily software dev work. It's a difficult position for those of us who feel that using AI is immoral due to the large scale theft of the labor of many of our fellow developers, not to mention the many huge data centers being built and their need for electricity, pushing up prices for people who need to, ya know, heat their homes and eat
All I have to say is this post warmed my heart. I'm sure people here associate him with Go lang and Google, but I will always associate him with Bell Labs and Unix and The Practice of Programming, and overall the amazing contributions he has made to computing.
To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make.
Just the haters here.
Everything humans do is harmful to some degree. I don't want to put words in Pike's mouth, but I'm assuming his point is that the cost-benefit-ratio of how LLMs are often used is out of whack.
Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.
Did Google, the company currently paying Rob Pike's extravagant salary, just start building data centers in 2025? Before 2025 was Google's infra running on dreams and pixie farts with baby deer and birdies chirping around? Why are the new data centers his company is building suddenly "raping the planet" and "unrecyclable"?
What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?
This seems like a tragedy of the commons -- GitHub is free after all, and it has all of these great properties, so why not? -- but this kind of decision making occurs whenever externalities are present.
My favorite hill to die on (externality) is user time. Most software houses spend so much time focusing on how expensive engineering time is that they neglect user time. Software houses optimize for feature delivery and not user interaction time. Yet if I spent one hour making my app one second faster for my million users, I can save 277 user hour per year. But since user hours are an externality, such optimization never gets done.
Externalities lead to users downloading extra gigabytes of data (wasted time) and waiting for software, all of which is waste that the developer isn't responsible for and doesn't care about.
Funny how so many people in this comment section are saying Rob Pike is just feeling insecure about AI. Rob Pike created UTF-8, Go, Plan-9 etc. On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. Any famous tech product at all.
It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.
To be clear, this email isn't from Anthropic, it's from "AI Village" [0], which seems to be a bunch of agents run by a 501(c)3 called Sage that are apparently allowed to run amok and send random emails.
At this moment, the Opus 4.5 agent is preparing to harass William Kahan similarly.
[0] https://theaidigest.org/village
I'm a T1 diabetic, have worked on open source diabetes-tech (OpenAPS), and have used a number of different CGMs (though not this one specifically). This story... does not make very much sense.
CGMs (of any brand) are not, and have never been, reliable in the way that this story implies that people want them to be reliable. The physical biology of CGMs makes that sort of reliability infeasible. Where T1s are concerned, patient education has always included the need to check with fingerstick readings sometimes, and to be aware of mismatches between sensor readings and how you're feeling. If a brand of CGMs have an issue that sometimes causes false low readings, then fixing it if it's fixable is great, but that sort of thing was very much expected, and it doesn't seem reasonable to blame it for deaths. Moreover, there are two directions in which readings can be inaccurate (false low, false high) with very asymmetric risk profiles, and the report says that the errors were in the less-dangerous direction.
The FDA announcement doesn't say much about what the actual issue was, but given that it was linked to particular production batches, my bet is that it was a chemistry QC fail in one of the reagents used in the sensor wire. That's not something FOSS would be able to solve because it's not a software thing at all.
My dad was a busy construction contractor. One summer he tore himself away from work and took the family to a week long boat camp out next to a big beautiful lake. It turned out that our campsite was actually in the lake by a few inches at high water, but dad saw a way to dam it off and keep it dry, so he grabs the shovel and starts digging trenches and building walls and ordering us around.
About an hour into that, pouring sweat, he stops cold and says "what the hell am I doing?" The flooded camp was actually nice on a hot day and all we really had to do was move a couple of tents. He dropped the shovel and spent the rest of the week sunbathing, fishing, snorkeling and water skiing as God intended. He flipped a switch and went from Hyde to Jekyll on vacation. I've had to emulate that a few times.
I wish they'd let me recover my original -- I lost my TOTP generator, and the codes I'd written down in a paper notebook were rejected. I even hunted down the electronic copy in case there was a transcription error -- seemed like some failure in their systems was causing me to lose access despite having followed proper procedures.
Lost a decade and a half of correspondence dating back to my teenage years. I had imported my phone number I'd had since I was 16 into voice, and it doubled as my Signal number. I even had a Gsuite subscription so I could use their (admittedly decently) UI to power my firstname @ lastname dot com email address.
I will never use their services again, I was really digusted by this failure.
Not as hugely generous as this story, but during his whole college professor career since the 70s, my father always took care that none of his students spent any major holidays alone and away from home, so we always ended up having 2 or 3 of them around for Christmas, the New Year, Easter... They were from everywhere around the country and the world, and it was so very enriching for me and my siblings. I had a huge postage stamp collection from the ever increasing well wishing mail that arrived. It's also kind of comforting to think that anywhere in the world you are not that far from someone that remembers you fondly.
The set of toys I spent the most time playing with was a big bag of wooden blocks my grandfather gave me when I was very small. They are well designed, with a good selection of different shapes, e.g. it has cylinders and arches and thin planks as well as cuboids. They got a lot of use because they're so flexible in combining with other toys, e.g. you can build roads and garages for toy cars, or obstacle courses for rolling marbles. The edges and corners are rounded and the wood tough enough that clean-up was just dropping them back into the bag.
I've since given them to a nephew and I'm happy to see he gets just as much entertainment out of them as I did. Plain wooden blocks can represent almost anything. There are no batteries or moving parts to fail. Mine got a little bit of surface wear but they still work just as well as they did when they were new and small children don't care about perfect appearance. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting passed down to another generation and continue to provide the same entertainment. I highly recommend this kind of simple toy for young children.
Somebody has to be the brave experimenter that tries the new thing. I'm just glad it was these folk. Since they make no tangible product and contribute nothing to society, they were perhaps the optimal choice to undergo these first catastrophic failed attempts at AI business.
The authors report that restoring NAD+ balance in the brain -- using a compound called P7C3-A20 -- completely reversed Alzheimer's pathology and recovered cognitive function in two different transgenic mouse models (one amyloid-based, one tau-based). The mice had advanced disease before treatment began.
Three comments:
- You can actually buy the drug here: https://focusbiomolecules.com/p7c3-a20-nampt-activator-prone... It's a simple small molecule. If this stuff works, expect it to be everywhere within just a couple of years.
- There's room for skepticism. As Derek Lowe once wrote: "Alzheimer's therapies have, for the most part, been a cliff over which people push bales of money. There are plenty of good reasons for this: we don't really know what the cause of Alzheimer's is, when you get down to it, and we're the only animal that we know of that gets it. Mouse models of the disease would be extremely useful – you wouldn't even have to know what the problem was to do some sort of phenotypic screen – but the transgenic mice used for these experiments clearly don't recapitulate the human disease. The hope for the last 25 years or so has been that they'd be close enough to get somewhere, but look where we are."
> https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/just-how-worthless...
- If the drug's mechanism of action has been correctly assigned, it's very plausible that simply supplementing with NMN, NR, or NADH would work equally well. The authors caution against this on, IMO, extremely shaky and unjustified grounds. "Pieper emphasized that current over-the-counter NAD+-precursors have been shown in animal models to raise cellular NAD+ to dangerously high levels that promote cancer."
so not only did they enforce a ridiculously small message limit, they also did it for the self-hosted version, and they did it without announcing it AND without a suitable migration path
and still no one from that company has admitted to it being a mistake?
very nice
Happy Christmas, folks!
> please have some humanity about the homeless
In the US, the homeless population exploded, in the 1980s, when they closed down all the mental institutions. Before that, there was a far less pervasive homeless population in urban areas.
Being "on the spectrum," myself (but highly functional), I can attest to how easy it is for an autistic person's life to go sideways. Many autistic folks have very specialized and advanced skills, which can sometimes be applicable to making a living (like programming, or visual design).
However, we're "different," which often leads to being shunned/traumatized by neurotypicals. I got used to folks eventually walking away from relationships, for no discernible reason. Used to really bother me, until I figured it out. Now, I just take it in stride, and appreciate whatever time I get to spend with folks. If anyone has seen The Accountant (the first one), there's a scene, near the end, where Ben Affleck's character is considering putting the moves on Anna Kendrick's character, but remembers his father, admonishing him that people will always end up being frightened of "the difference," and he sneaks out, instead. That scene almost brought me to tears, I could relate so well.
For some folks, it's much worse. They can be relentlessly bullied, abused, locked up, or shunned, which leaves psychological scars that manifest as antisocial behavior, so they are never given a chance to show what they can do.
Beautiful story but with a sad undertone.
A large percentage of the homeless have autism [1]. And that really sucks. If these people don't have support, their lives can turn miserable fast. And unfortunately it's just way too easy for these people to end up in abusive situations.
It's a lot of work to care for people with autism (moderate to severe). There is no standard for what they need, their capabilities can be all over the board. Some of them are capable like ronny in this story and they can hold down jobs. But others need 24/7 caregiving in order to survive. Unfortunately I don't think those with severe autism survive for long when they become homeless.
I hope this story at very least gets people to view the homeless a little differently. They aren't all there because of vices or failure. A large percentage are there because society does not care for those with mental disabilities. It was good on this story to highlight that Ron had problems with gambling. Autism does, in fact, make an individual more prone to various addictions.
My point in writing this, please have some humanity about the homeless. I get that they can be inconvenient. They are people and they aren't necessarily bad people due to their circumstances.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29633853/
My parents once took a struggling man in. I think he stayed with them for about three years, up until the moment I was conceived and my mom started planning for a future for our family and helped him get into a housing project. For all of my life before adulthood this man would show up once in a while on his racing bike for coffee, talk and proceed to stay for dinner. He was kind, funny and a tidbit strange. His life's story had more drama than a soap opera, but you wouldn't know it. After my father died I proceeded to look for him, but never found him. I still search online for him once in a while, fully knowing he probably isn't alive anymore and probably wouldn't use online anyways. There is some story in my head that he probably showed up to my dads doorstep once on his racing bike to find other people living there, but was too shy to ask for details. A trace lost.
Pretty sure it's a regex to match email address strings.
I have a friend who worked in a company that got "not acquired" in a similar deal.
She didn't see a dime out of it, and was let off (together with a big chunk of people) within 6 months.
I'm taking a moment to recognize once more the work that user @atdrummond (Alex Thomas Drummond) did for a couple years to help others here. I did not know him, don’t think I ever interacted with him, and I did not benefit from his generosity, but I admired his kindness. Just beautiful.
Ask HN: Who needs holiday help? (Follow up thread) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38706167 - Dec 2023 (9 comments)
Ask HN: Who needs help this holidays? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38492378 - Dec 2023 (210 comments)
Tell HN: Thank You - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34140096 - Dec 2022 (42 comments)
Tell HN: Everyone should have a holiday dinner this year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34122118 - Dec 2022 (58 comments)
Unfortunately, Alex died a few months after his last round of holiday giving, about 1½ years ago now.
Tell HN: In Memory of Alexander Thomas Drummond - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40508725 - May 2024 (5 comments)
If you read the comments in that last thread, know that @toomuchtodo followed through last year and kept the tradition alive. Amazing and magnificent.
Ask HN: Who needs help this holidays? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42291246 - Dec 2024 (46 comments)
Happy Christmas everyone, I’m at 29000 feet on a flight to Hong Kong after a mini version of planes, trains and automobiles and including cancelled planes and taxis to different airports. I’m struck by honestly what a miracle it is that we can travel thousands of miles at hundreds of MPH and have okay internet access and communicate. I don’t think people quite realise how delicate all of the technology is now and how easily it could fail if we don’t all look after each other. I hope you all have a brilliant Christmas and new year!
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`"""` `> In the software engineering world, we exist on a ladder. We call this ”Leveling”.
Career is a made up game. There are no true levels or ladders in life that you have to chase. Nobody will care or remember what you did or what level you were given enough timespan. Take the bits that you want (money, skills etc) to live life, but don't get too caught up trying to win the game.
Merry Christmas to everyone.
Being a non-Christian and it being Christmas time, I am sharing one verse from the New Testament that is, in my opinion, useful - or at the very least, insightful - to anyone, regardless of religion.
Luke 16:10: He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much.
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^^^[_]^^^Pretty interesting approach to make an X server that is essentially "Wayland-like" (merging display server/compositor by default, isolated apps by default, no remoting of GLX, dropping legacy protocol features to the point of breaking compat with the core protocol, etc.). Not sure who this is for, but by itself it looks like a fairly reasonable set of choices.
The crux of the matter is that even if one values upgradability and repairability, neither is a frequent need for practically anybody. Reliable machines rarely need repairs outside of owner mistreatment, and most people I know who are technically capable enough to care about upgrading generally do it maybe once every 4-6 years, by which point hardware has usually advanced far enough that buying a new laptop is easy to justify.
So while upgradability and repairability are great to have, their material impact on day to day user experience is minimal, except maybe for people who have a tendency to severely underspec their initial hardware purchases. On the other hand, things like chassis rigidity, cooling performance, fan noise, and battery life being subpar are constant reminders that you spent a pretty penny on a laptop that's not meeting your needs.
The reality may be that wanting a laptop that's well rounded and competent across the board AND repairable+upgradable is akin to having your cake and eating it too, but that doesn't stop people from wanting it anyway.
As an aside, I believe that Framework could probably get closer to that ideal if they unchained themselves from the port module idea. Yes it's cool, but it forces all sorts of design compromises that otherwise wouldn't be necessary, and I'd bet that something like 80-90% of Framework buyers would be just as happy if changing ports required opening up the chassis, swapping out side plates, and doing a little bit of internal wiring.
Another example of the growing trend of buying out key parts of a company to avoid any actual acquisition?
I wonder if equity holding employees get anything from the deal or indeed if all the investors will be seeing a return from this?
So it is not structured as an acquisition to avoid anti trust but effectively it probably is.
Groq press release: https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusiv...
> Today, Groq announced that it has entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq’s inference technology. The agreement reflects a shared focus on expanding access to high-performance, low cost inference.
> As part of this agreement, Jonathan Ross, Groq’s Founder, Sunny Madra, Groq’s President, and other members of the Groq team will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology.
> Groq will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards stepping into the role of Chief Executive Officer.
> GroqCloud will continue to operate without interruption.
I don’t see how this isn’t anti trust but knowing this political climate, this deal will go through.
I appreciate the authors thoughtful review here, but I can’t help but be frustrated by the constant lack of understanding of the core value proposition of framework both in this post and in many comments here on hn.
Frequently the author brings up that for 2,000 euros they expect a premium experience, but no where is there an evaluation of the value granted by upgradability and repeatability of the machine, and only briefly is there mention of the configurability.
People (not necessarily the author, but likely many commentators that make similar complains about the frameworks price) will lament how manufacturers don’t have upgradable ram, etc and then turn around and are upset at the bulkiness of a repairable laptop, or the price.
I think ultimately what frustrates me is that people don’t consider the ability to repair or upgrade your machine part of a “premium” experience, but that’s is just something I have to accept. I think it is unfortunate that our consumerist culture places so little value on it though.
Rergardless, what I feel like we see here (along with a lack of scale from a small company) is the core tradeoffs that we’d have to make to get back repairability, etc. framework certainly isn’t above criticism, but if you don’t care about these things then why look at this machine? A large established brand is always going to offer a a better value on the things you care about.
The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge about how to "redact" properly in the digital realm as the individuals doing the redaction. To the journalist, with zero knowledge of the technical aspects, viewing the "redacted" document, it appears to be "redacted", so when someone "unredacts" it, the action of revealing the otherwise hidden material appears to be "magical" to them (in the vein of the Arthur C Clarke quote of: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic").
To the journalist, it looks like "hackers at work" because the result looks like magic. Therefore their editor attaching "hacks" to the title for additional clickbait as well.
To us technical people, who understand the concept of layers in digital editing, it is no big deal at all (and is not surprising that some percentage of the PDF's have been processed this way).
> real and only difference between a library and a framework, is whether it introduces new concepts
This isn't what is normally understood in software engineering by those terms.
A library is something you call.
A framework is some kind of application scaffolding that normally calls you.
You can use more than one library. You normally only have one framework in-process.
I found the blog post a little hard to parse. Is it an argument against wrapping frameworks, or wrapping libraries?
I agree that wrapping frameworks is fraught with danger. I can't quite agree for wrapping libraries. Wrapping libraries makes a lot of sense if you're only using a tiny fraction of the library functionality, the breadth of the wrapper's API is much smaller than the library's API, wrapping it enables you to substitute it (whether for a smaller / faster / whatever dependency in the future, or for testing, etc.), and so on.
It sets a bad precedent to call things like this hacks.
Firstly, calling this redaction implies that the data is missing, and calling what was done "unredacting" is akin to saying someone "decrypted" a cryptographic hash function.
Nobody unredacted anything here, they merely discovered that it hadn't been redacted, and simply looked like it was redacted.
Calling this a hack places responsibility on the people who discovered the information, rather than on the people were put in charge of handling the redaction and screwed it up.