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And yet... if they had instead invested in making the equipment operable locally we wouldn't be here today. This is the problem with thinking of your users as "nontechnical" lesser beings. The engineering problem becomes remove control and ownership from the user instead of make the product usable. In this case by removing control from the user they simply gave it to an attacker. Great job, guys.

The reason you don't need to secure your house like a medieval castle is twofold:

(1) We live in nations of laws. The threat of state violence deters most thieves.

(2) You don't actually keep most of your valuables in your home. The stuff the thieves want is (mostly) actually stored somewhere else.

Security work absolutely is productive if it actually prevents theft. Securing your home is the wrong analogy, because it doesn't really prevent meaningful losses. Securing the bank? Different ballgame.

That's kind of what I was afraid of. Both is really bad news. If you think of it in terms of average speed over ground, working on low quality reports is like spending a bunch of time at v=0.

Yes, exactly. The only question I have is whether the delay is attributable to high-quality bug reports or the burden of triaging low-quality ones. It's not completely clear which situation they're experiencing.

> The most common error for a search task is omission, and that's really hard to spot

NP-Hard, even[1]!

[1] https://www.i-programmer.info/news/112-theory/3830-physics-i...

I'm not very positive on the social, technical, or intellectual impact of AI on software development. Actually, that's understating it. I think AI is basically cancer for the mind. That said, this framing gave me pause:

> The long-term picture is less clear and in some ways more troubling: given that we have forty years of bugs that humans were unable to find but LLMs are quite capable of discovering, how are we ever going to catch up, and how will PostgreSQL continue to innovate? Right now, I’m not sure. What I do know is that I, and many others, are working really hard to figure it out.

Two thoughts:

1. If the signal quality is high--the bug reports are generally valid, the submitted fixes are generally viable (if needing some attention)--then this all seems great. Pause innovation for a while, you can afford it. Focus on burning down the bug count, and resume feature development when things are more stable.

2. If the signal quality isn't good, or is sufficiently mixed that a lot of time is being wasted on low quality contributions... that's more complex. I don't know what to do about that. Maybe stop accepting contributions from unknown contributors? No idea.

From the post I'm not sure whether they're experiencing a (1) or a (2). If it's a (1) that's really interesting, and gives me some glimmer of hope for the future.

[edit] this piece of shit website won't let me reply "you're posting too fast.." so I'll respond to the two replies here (gondalez and sverhagen had basically the same point):

Yes that's a very good point. Not every valid bugfix is equivalently urgent. That's another critical dimension of quality--not burdening maintainers with pedantic bugs. This kind of contextual nuance is, coincidentally, something AI is absolutely awful at.

I only have cynical takes these days. Tech has been completely taken over by charlatans, scam artists, grifters, and snake oil salesmen. I have zero tolerance for suspending disbelief. They can force me to believe with data, or they're deliberately lying. No middle ground.

Did they actually have to launch the thing to do that testing? I think a much simpler and more direct explanation is that it is simply a deceptive marketing stunt. "Hey look we're solving the power problem, don't worry we'll be able to build all these megawatts of compute we promised" when in reality it will never happen and they had no intention of even trying. It's a short term con to try to calm fears in the market that the promises exceed their capabilities.

The public doesn't need to. If these companies actually try to build datacenters in space they will bankrupt themselves. It's a ridiculously stupid idea.

The fact that this comment is being downvoted says so much about so many things. And so many people. This community--not just HN, I'm talking about tech at large--has totally lost its way.

Why yes, I sure can!

> The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/technology/google-suncatc...

Is this the piece of junk that can only run for 15min at a time before it overheats? They probably could have done some more analysis before launching it into space.. Like put the radiator in a vacuum chamber maybe? Or do some thermal modelling? Or did they know it would do this and launch it anyway? Would love to know why.

Why do you think so? To me it seems like they actually fit the textbook definition very well. They're firms that require constant injection of massive amounts of new capital to stay solvent, with no clear path towards profitability. The only way anyone gets their money back is if more investors buy in. It would be easy to prove me wrong, all they have to do is start turning a profit. But they can't.

[edit] And worse, they've dragged major established players in the industry with them--Microsoft, Google, etc. So now an uncomfortably large fraction of the world's economy is resting on.. nothing. To be fair, I don't blame OpenAI or Anthropic for the bad behavior of the other tech giants. It's the entire tech sector that has lost their minds collectively. At some point making things that actually work lost out to fantastic delusions.

I don't understand, could you please explain?

I'll concede that point, but it's still not enough to justify buying a used GPU datacenter on the cheap. To do so you need to believe that by powering up and running all those GPUs you will be able to turn a profit before you go insolvent. Or failing that, you need to be able to con enough investors into believing it, and then somehow make it happen before they stop believing. So far the AI industry has been very good at conning investors, and cataclysmically bad at generating profits.

So if you're in the market for a used GPU datacenter even at fire sale prices you better have a solid plan to profitability. So far, it doesn't actually seem like there's anything you can do with those GPUs that will get there in any known or even guessable timeframe. That makes it a really fucking dumb idea lol.

> OpenAI going bust would not cause those data centres to cease to exist, they’d still be there just owned for cheap by someone else that can run them at cost.

Someone would have to see value in that. Right now the value prop of AI is that maybe someday it'll get better and we'll be able to build useful, profitable consumer products on it. That's not really a great investment thesis, unless you're drunk on the hype.

Now that the market is sobering up a bit, will operating a "cheap" GPU datacenter at cost be worth anything? Not "future value", but present value. Can you turn a healthy profit running a GPU datacenter today? I doubt it.

They successfully turned the entire tech sector into a giant pyramid scheme. That's one hell of an accomplishment. I hope history forever remembers the names of everyone who aided and abetted them.

Guess they'll just have to tighten the belt and follow through on their promise to revolutionize work, capitalism, government, and everything by building AGI. Lol. Lmao.

Yes, that's what I meant. A lot of folks just build stuff in a Microsoft hosted actions runner which can talk to the entire Internet and pull deps straight from PyPI or whatever. Then those artifacts show up on the Releases page and go into production. Whee.

The whole actions/CI thing is really nice but there's no good reason the computationally heavy stuff should be running on Github's (Microsoft's) servers. They can run the control plane cheaply and make the user run an agent somewhere to act as the build box runner thing. The user experience would be identical, but they'd outsource the vast majority of the compute costs to the user[1]. It's shocking they didn't do something like that model in the first place, tbh. Moviepass for CI.

[1] It can also have supply chain security and reliability benefits too. You're not actually building deployment artifacts in your actions runners, right? Right? RIGHT?

Delicious, buttery fish. Makes excellent sashimi too.

Is there another way to do it? I suppose you could sort of fillet them all off in the initial cutting operation but you'd lose a large chunk of meat and it might not actually get them all. Deboning after the boil seems like a Pareto optimal time/ease/waste trade.

Only one company I've worked at maintained their own distro packages for deploying services. That was 13+ years ago. Every company since then had a containerized deployment strategy, some better than others. My most recent employer went through a massive effort to implement "golden base images" and tooling to ensure when the base image is updated all the dependents are rebuilt and redeployed. Most don't do that.

The harassment lawsuit that would follow, or at least a few rounds with my attorney.

lmfao what... If the police woke me up to fix anything the only thing they'd get out of me is "lawyer". And I wouldn't put a single iota of effort into fixing that thing until the entire matter with the police was resolved. If you want someone's attention on something, especially something nuanced and intricate like a software bug, that's absolutely not how you get it.

There's also the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (in the US).

Huh? A lathe is absolutely a tool by Hickey's definition and any sane person's. You can chuck multiple tools in a lathe (drills in the tailstock, boring bars, turning, facing, and threading cutters in the toolpost). But that doesn't change the fact that a lathe itself is also a tool.

The thing that makes a lathe a tool is that it behaves like a tool. Not an appliance. Its utility scales with the skill of its operator. Just like a hammer, or a saw, or a wrench. A skilled machinist uses his tools to achieve precise results. An amateur uses the same tools to achieve poor results.

AI appliances puke out randomly generated slop. You could argue there's some kind of skill involved in attempting to read the tea leaves in this slop, but in reality it's just not so. You don't get any depth of experience with these "tools", you just get an accept/reject decision point. Repeat enough and you might come up with something useful. Or you might not. Like accepting random outputs from some kind of vending machine.

This is very, very different from what you get from a skilled craftsman. "A good workman does not blame his tools" is not applicable around LLMs. They're always saying "this model is better than that one" and the like. A good machinist can get good results out of a worn out lathe. Why can't the AI pilots get good results reliably?

> the new agentic reality

As a senior engineer, I think the code quality and review rigour slippage came well before AI. It's cultural, not technical. People just don't want to hear criticism anymore, they're thin skinned and weak minded, and they don't want to do the work to become strong. They want to be handed the answers and told they're doing great work, regardless of whether it's actually true.

Generative AI coding tools have just amplified this problem.

To be perfectly honest, whenever I detect this pathology in a junior my effort reviewing their code drops precipitously. There's just no point investing in an individual who doesn't want to work hard and learn. If my employer wants me to green light their vibeslopped garbage then I'll gladly oblige. Unfortunately this is the norm now.

I'd be fascinated to know how much impact on TCO remote control actually has. There's definitely an economy of scale argument, if you can make tens of thousands of devices a couple percent more efficient that has a real impact, but does the remote control capability actually move the needle that much?

There isn't a complex real time control scenario here.. Obviously defrosting too much wastes energy, so you'll want to get that one right. But does having centralized control over that really make a difference at scale? Does having centralized control over temperature set-point make any difference?

From the basic physics of the process it's hard to imagine real time remote control being a decisive factor in efficiency.

> I know you had a solid 5-10 minutes of though on the topic but for supermarket chains that's how they manage to operate cheaper, that's how they don't increase the cost of the food.

I mean.. maybe? But nothing you wrote actually demonstrates that.

[edit] I guess if it's not about efficiency but instead a trust issue then it makes more sense from a marketing standpoint. But generally remote control isn't a great way to work around untrusted operators with physical access. They could just prop a door open or slice the seal if they wanted to..

You're confusing specialized refrigeration maintenance (which, at least in the US requires EPA certification) with general end user operations tasks. It is the store manager's job to know how to operate, optimize, and take basic care of their equipment. Just like it's an excavator operator's job to know how to check the fluids and grease the machine. They don't need to rebuild the engine or do specialized maintenance like lineboring, but they are responsible for basic care of the machinery.