ACS_Solver

I think the whole framing of climate issues as "saving the planet" is misguided. Yes, the planet will remain livable pretty much no matter what. The threat of climate change isn't the literal destruction of the planet, or even the literal extinction of humanity. Rather it's such severe changes to the planet's biosphere that human civilization would be threatened.

Potential climate catastrophe scenarios where rapidly rising sea levels submerge many inhabited areas and various knock-on effects disrupt the food chain, even in those scenarios the planet is fine on geological timescales. What's not fine is human civilization, on human timescales. And I think this is what gets inadvertently hidden behind planet-saving rhetoric. If the worst case scenarios are "only" about billions of people dying due to resource scarcity and conflicts over said resources, this is something to be avoided.

I see a parallel with global nuclear war. Such a war would probably not end the species, there would be groups of survivors here and there. But human civilization as we know it would be over, with the global population being back to what it was in the hunter-gatherer era.

Yes, sure. But I am talking about Europeans, not Americans, who know 911. I see kids here who are familiar with 911 just through American media, which is really the only source here for anyone to know the number.

More accurately, 112 is the EU emergency number (and the GSM standard) but actual organization of emergency services is entirely national so who deals with your call and how will be local. The article also points out that handling of 911 is local in the US, even if apparently most 911 dispatchers are somehow subordinate to the police.

Also, like 112 forwards to 911 in the US, most cell networks in the EU will forward 911 to 112. American cultural dominance has made it so everyone knows 911 and even Europeans apparently end up dialing it.

I am not surprised - the general pattern with Torvalds seems to be that he's maximally pragmatic. His problems with say Nvidia drivers aren't the fact that they're proprietary, it's that they are difficult to interface with the kernel. I have a strong impression that what matters to Linus is software that works well, so he cares a lot about the quality of the kernel and ideally wants other software to be similarly reliable.

If he judges that Claude does the best job, it'd be very much like him to use Claude. It would be unlike him to use an open program if he considers it inferior.

Most tablets were air dried, which would take a day or two. But some tablets were fired - dried in a kiln. I don't know about Hittites but at least in Mesopotamia, air drying was by far the most common method and only some important ones were fired. So methods were certainly available to dry a tablet quickly if necessary but I doubt if air drying delays made much of a difference. Messages and goods were limited to the speed of horse after all.

Yes, good name and I also feel that was a major inflection point. Up until then I found all AI models to be terrible at programming, with the difference between GPT o3, Sonnet 4 and every other model since GPT-3 being just the exact flavor of terrible they were.

November 2025, with Opus 4.5, was the first time I was impressed by an LLM doing something non-trivial with a reasonably good level of quality.

I love displays from space vehicles and nuclear plants for the same reason. Data and controls organized in a dense but presumably highly usable manner. And it covers the more specific view of an expert in a particular subsystem, as well as the higher level view of those responsible for the whole system.

> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself. After all, many of us decided we wanted to be developers before learning to code, just to create video games or websites. The desire came before the code.

This is a big disconnect that I think has been at the root of many different reactions to LLMs lately. Here on HN I see a lot of "I hate what LLMs did to programming" and equally a lot of "LLMs are awesome, I've never had a better time". I think the disconnect is between people who build software for the end result (having users, the joy of completing a thing, etc) versus building it for the process itself (architecting, coding, debugging).

I'm mainly the kind who enjoys the process. I think of an awesome startup job I had that solved real problems for real customers including some really big firms, but I can't honestly say I ever cared about those problems or the customers. I loved the job because it was technically challenging with a lot of freedom, and the customers were great because they were a source of new interesting details to solve, as well as confirmations that the previous solutions worked.

As such LLMs make me sad because they effectively replace a lot of what I like doing. Doing a refactor to support a new feature, digging through the code to try and understand a bug. One of my strengths as a developer, I think, is that I am fast at familiarizing myself with unfamiliar codebases. That's also a somewhat redundant skill as Claude can answer "how does feature X work in this code" in a small fraction of the time it'd take me.

A few years ago (before the LLM craze) I moved to game dev as my main job, which makes a lot of this easier because I actually care about the end product and the customers (players), so that's a whole new layer of satisfaction in addition to the usual technical one.

Which isn't to say that it's all bad. I've used Claude to get a few things done where I mainly care about the final result and not the process. There was one such project I wanted to get done, I'd had the idea and the data for five or six years, but I found that the implementation would be time consuming, often manual work and much of it involving the kind of tech I don't really enjoy. So I never worked on that but last month, I did the whole thing in a few days with Claude and got exactly the result I wanted.

This can't be the first time you're seeing such use of Я? It's very commonly used in Western typography / graphic design as a symbol to invoke associations with Russia. It's not being used as a Cyrillic letter, it's being used a "think of Russia" and people unfamiliar with Cyrillic will mentally associate it with R so TETЯIS is easily read as "tetris". Even if yes, people familiar with the alphabet find it harder because the first reaction to Я is to in fact read it correctly.

Same with Σ being used as a "think of Greece" symbol that people from Latin-script languages are expected to process as E, leading to "brilliant" designs in GRΣΣK. Or how the Chinese character 山 would remind a Russian speaker of Ш so ПО山ЛИ would be easy to read.

I'm in game dev but I also have very poor abilities for mentally operating on visual or geometrical data. I'm normally far away from the graphics parts but sometimes I take a look and shaders are by far the least intuitive type of code to me. I've learned enough about what shaders do to sort of parse the simple ones, but anything with shaders definitely feels like working against my brain's natural tendencies.

However, protective equipment is taken seriously and then shoes stay on. Here in Sweden, of course ordinarily all shoes are taken off (for 8-9 months of every year they're wet and dirty) but if workers come in to do some work, they keep their shoes on because they're protective equipment. If you're having them come during a particularly dirty time of the year, you may want to cover your floor with newspapers or give them shoe covers.

> Even worse, recently, after getting another opus in a tiny bugfix session, I prompted directly, "drop the comments from the current code changes" — Claude instead just slightly trimmed them. I couldn't believe my eyes.

For me, Claude knows how I want the comments due to all the memories and CLAUDE.md, so funnily it's now enough with even a brief groan from me like "Come on, the comments" and then Claude goes through its recent additions and fixes comments quite well per my long-term instructions. But only ever during an extra pass that I initiate, never during the initial writing of the code.

I also suspect comments are very much tied to how Claude reasons because not only are they bad comments, I can't get rid of them. Commenting is the one area in which I've been unable to get Claude to respect any rules. It can follow code conventions I prefer, it can do other things, but it can't keep the comment volume down.

My CLAUDE.md has rules about not including any redundant comments in the code that are obvious from the code itself. I reiterate that occasionally while working. It's absolutely disregarded and any Claude-written code is full of comments. Some of them are simply redundant, like "Collect Foos and pass them to the requested sink" on a function that's void CollectFoos(IFooSink sink). But worse, many comments include in the moment reasoning like "added parameter bar because we can no longer use the frob to automatically derive bar". That's stuff for a commit message, or just a mental note, and absolutely not for comments.

I haven't found any way to stop Claude from doing these, so I have to tell Claude afterwards to clean the comments up. Which it does, making a note in memory to comment less, and it still does the exact same thing next time.

I wouldn't generalize Europe like that, our differences in the normal schedule are massive from north to south.

Here in Sweden, it's a morning culture. Blue collar workers often start work at 7, daycare is open from 6 in the morning for parents with early jobs, dinner is at 18 or even 17 for people. At 22, most places are closed including supermarkets and restaurant kitchens. Lunch for the vast majority of working people is at noon.

That is totally different to a country like Spain, where you see families - with kids! - start dinner at 21 or later. In Sweden people would say it's strange not to have your kids in bed by then. Lunch is at 14, cities are full of life until midnight every day.

A large part of that is probably due to daylight hours. A big chunk of Sweden is dark by 16 for the winter half of the year. During November-January there's minimal light and it's gone by 15.

> Even if you deeply into tinkering, 1 can be an insanely exciting and rewarding step: for example "how could an abstraction look like in which 2-4 become trivial special cases for many classes of programming problems?".

Yes, but I think there's really two different definitions of point 1. It's "figure out what non-software problem you can solve with software" vs "figure out what technical problem to solve".

As the tinkering type, I also find 1 very rewarding but using the latter definition. Exploring a sizable code base and finding the part that, if simplified, cascades to a lot more simplification, that's very exciting. Figuring out what problem some companies or people have that could be solved? Very hard, very unexciting, not rewarding.

Yes, it's a very well written, touching tribute and I think it's all the more touching when you're familiar enough with Wolfram's writings to notice the contrast here.

There's practical considerations with AI like it being a probabilistic layer and not deterministic in the way that compilers and deterministic, yes.

But the "letting go" point is I think about what people enjoy. Personally, I enjoy code. I've had jobs where I really enjoyed what I was doing because they gave me the opportunity to write interesting code. The end product wasn't interesting to me. I had a great job building tools for companies that build a very popular consumer product that I've never owned or been interested in. So the software we were building to assist in creating those products wasn't interesting to me in terms of what it is, but the job was motivating and interesting because of the technical problems I got to solve.

I think that's one of the big divides we're seeing in comments now. There are people who want to build things for the sake of the final product. They're happy because LLMs speed that up by a lot, at least initially. Then there are people who enjoy the process and craft of writing code. For them it's hard to let go of manual coding because that's the enjoyable part of the work.

I don't buy into the huge LLM hype but I certainly think late 2025 was the inflection point. Up until then, I thought LLMs universally sucked at code. GPT-3.5, GPT-4, o1, o3, Claude 3.5, Sonnet 4, the whole bunch. Each iteration got marginally better, hallucinated APIs less and so on, but my overall evaluation of them all was that they wrote crap code and were unsuitable for anything other than one-off scripts.

Then the incremental improvements did, in my experience, cross some kind of threshold in late 2025 where the things became useful. It is of course anecdotal and personal judgment. But I asked LLMs to implement a small feature in my codebase (my usual test) and finally it produced code I was happy with. They've also been able to locate and diagnose a problem based on logs. In my view it's now a markedly different level of capability than we had a year ago, though I would call the previous two years equally useless.

Wolfram is definitely not a crank. Cranks do not understand scientific methods and also have a minimal understanding of whatever field they're trying to be active in. Like trying to push physics theories while demonstrably failing to understand high school level calculus. Cranks are also conspiracy theorists who inevitably believe knowledge like theirs is being suppressed.

Wolfram does display a similar ego to cranks. He tends to place his cellular automata at the same tier of importance as general relativity or wave-particle duality. But unlike cranks, he doesn't say that Einstein, Feynman and other greats are wrong, he doesn't "prove" his theories by math-looking babble that is definitely not math. He loves cellular automata and so much of what he writes is more like philosophy of science than science. He will model certain processes as an automaton and then he jumps from that to every natural process being a cellular automaton.

Eccentric, definitely, and most of his physics research isn't accepted but he's several orders above the level of crank.

I'm a big Linux advocate with limited experience on modern versions of Windows, but PowerShell objects are great. So is the Unix way of doing text. I think the strengths of each approach are in different use cases. Unix style is better for interactive usage because it's fast, I can type df -h | grep /home very quickly. Object output is better for scripts that can, thanks to objects, store and operate on sensible data while Bash scripts do a lot of ad-hoc data extraction/reformatting with string expansion, awk and whatever else to get data to the next step in the script.

Konsole is so good I forget about it, it's just my usual terminal. Once they added the split feature, it became pretty damn near perfect.

I have zero artistic inclination so 90% of image manipulation I do is simple resize/scale/draw line operations, with the remaining 10% being some sort of select+move operation to show mockups, adding transparency or something on that level of complexity. I have GIMP installed and respect it, but as any "real" editor it's too complex for me. KolourPaint does the simple operations I need, with fundamentally the same UI as Win 3.1 pbrush.exe had.

KolourPaint fills a small niche but does it very well.

One of the most impressive and useful free software projects. My first experience was being totally confused by KDE 1 during my first attempts to use Linux, and I'm writing this from my KDE desktop.

Other than the really bad KDE 4 release, the project has consistently been great for me. I've submitted a few smaller patches over the years and that experience was also low friction for a project of this size. KDE is highly customizable, full of power user features but also really simple with its current defaults (looks pretty much like Windows) and generally robust.

Shoutout to some KDE applications like Okular (great document viewer), Kate (solid tech editor), Krusader (double pane file manager) and KolourPaint (a simple image editor even I can use).

I moved to Vivaldi before its 1.0 release and am still happy with, also surprised to see it mentioned so rarely. My previous browser was Firefox but I struggled with a few updates changing things I liked, mostly manageable with about:config until they landed the Australis UI. Made the jump to Vivaldi and it's been pretty great overall.

Page tiling is perhaps the killer feature, but overall I like how Vivaldi is a browser for power users who know how they want to use the web. I find it refreshing in the era of browsers trying to be very thin terminals. The only thing missing from Vivaldi is being truly FOSS instead of their hybrid source-available model.

I think it's possible that the current shift will be similar to the "assembly to compiled language" shift.

Once upon a time we wrote code in assembly language. Then we moved to C or other compiled languages. Assembly programming remained a very useful but niche skill. You compile your code and trust the compiler. You can examine the compiler output and that is at times necessary, but that's not something most developers know how to do.

We may be looking at something similar. Most development work moving to the LLM abstraction level, with the skills being writing good prompts, managing the context window, agents, memories and so on. Some developers will be able to examine LLM generated code and spot problems there, but most will not have that skill.

I'm not sure how to feel about it. Since ChatGPT showed up and until a couple months ago, I was firmly skeptical of LLM programming. We had new models every few weeks and I felt like each new model is just a different twist on the same low quality slop output. But recently the models seem to have crossed some threshold where their capabilities really improved and I have now used Claude - still using it sparingly - to implement features in much less time than I'd need myself or to locate a bug based on just log output. I don't yet buy the "coding is solved" hype but we're at least looking at the biggest change to programming since the adoption of high-level programming languages.

I've been using Thunderbird for my email for a very long time. Probably since some early 1.0 release.

In these years, I've also had it on Windows and Linux, I've migrated it easily across many OS installs and hardware changes, I've used it with different kinds of email accounts and servers. It's worked with PGP encrypted mail, with SpamAssassin on the server and more.

It's great. It doesn't change much, which is probably a good thing, Firefox lost me as a user at some point. Thunderbird mostly stays the same, adding features occasionally. As I write this, I realize I'm so used to Thunderbird I'm not even sure what other clients are available. Definitely one of the best programs I've used.

We have no wealth tax, no inheritance tax. If most of your income is a salary, the tax burden is high, but if you're living off investments, properties or generational funds, it's quite advantageous.

In addition (I'm European), I object to the use of per-hour wages instead of monthly salaries. It's less informative in Europe. Most jobs are full-time, salaries are typically advertised and talked about in monthly terms, and the length of the work week varies as well. Per month is just more useful as a comparison point.

Oh and Sweden is slightly ahead of France on the latest EHCI. Sweden scores near the bottom on accessibility (as is tradition, same thing 10 and 15 years ago even) but ranks highly overall and especially on outcomes, so I take issue with the assertion that French healthcare is much better.

The acceleration is in the decrease of the cost to produce misinformation.

Misinformation in pure text form has always been cheapest, but is even cheaper now that text generation is basically a solved problem. Photos have been more expensive, it used to take time and skill with a photo editor to produce a believable image of an event that never happened. The cost is now very low, it's mostly about prompting skills. Fake videos were considerably harder, especially coupled with speech. Just a few years ago I could assume any video I saw was either real or a time-consuming, deliberate fake.

We've now entered a time where fake videos of famous people take actual effort to tell apart, and can be produced for a low cost - something accessible to an individual, not a big corporation. We can have an entirely fake video of Trump, or another world leader, giving a speech and it will look like the real thing, with the audiovisual "tells" of it being fake getting harder to notice every few months.

Valve's Proton (so Wine + DXVK + some other additions) revolutionized gaming on Linux. I play games both for fun and work, and for a solid 3+ years now, gaming on Linux has been an "it just works" experience for me, and should be for most games that don't use kernel-level anticheat.