benrutter

It's definitely possibly I have. I agree completely with you in terms of carrying out small experiments to cautiously move towards irradiating something harmful.

But when I look back to the article, I don't see that, I see:

> with minimal environmental cost.

Stated with absolute certainty. No need for experimentation, no need to proceed with caution just "its fine, get on board or you're part of the problem".

I can't tell what the writer is really thinking, and it's definitely possible I'm projecting behaviours I see elsewhere onto the article.

Either way, I really do think, now we have these kind of capabilities, we need to improve our understanding and caution using them, or else the side effects will risk being significantly worse than the positives.

> Note that (for the time being), we started geopolars developement under: https://github.com/pola-rs/geopolars/tree/dev

This is awesome!! I'd looked at the project only a month or so and it appeared abandoned, but I must have missed the off-main-branch development going on!

Meta: I feel a bit sad to see this is light grey for me due to the number of "down votes" it's had. The question is in good faith, and you may think the answer is no, but down voting good faith discussion about the implications of tech doesn't help foster the open discussion vibe that makes hacker news special.

> We have new ways to wipe out mosquito-borne diseases with minimal environmental cost.

Am I the only one who finds the hubris in this sentence chilling? Surely there's absolutely no way that we can be sure of the impact on the ecosystem of eradicating an entire species? And more so, surely we just can't be that confident of something like that when we have so little understanding of the complexities of most ecosystems mosquitos exist in.

The article has a tone of "we can't we wipe out mosquitos as fast as we should because of all this regulation slowing us down", but I can't help feel that's a good thing.

Even if it is somehow true that mosquitos don't play an important part in any ecosystems, surely it's a good thing that the mechanisms for wiping out an entire species are highly regulated, and can only be used if there's an extremely high bar of certainty.

We should know from global warming, that the cost of accidentally messing with nature systems can be really high, and we should tread carefully.

Edit: I know this is hacker news, and a lot of people are likely to be annoyed that I'm advocating for slowing down bio-tech developments. But I really think "care" is such an under-appreciated asset these days.

From my experience it feels like the "de facto" server choice for CICD jobs that can specify. I don't know why that is, possibly just that it's widely available.

Ubuntu do a lot of work bundling proprietary drivers I think- probably the reason a bunch of popular distros are built on top of it (pop-os, elementary, mint)

> I don't think that's how the market works

I think you're sort of right, but then I'd have found it very strange / deeply suspicious, if during the time of slavery being legal, advocates of abolitionism were practicing slave-owners.

If you think AI is going to destroy humanity, it still feels absolutely crazy to leap to "well I might as well be the one to profit from destroying humanity".

This rings really true for me as well. I really dislike AI as a solution to problems that have a better solution already in place.

Translation and search for facts are both good examples - since AI isn't completely reliable, even if the fact or translation gets surfaced quicker, I then have to then spend more time verifying it through a second source which completely defeats the point.

A couple years ago, if I searched "are Oak trees native to Spain" I would have probably got a text quote from a website at the top of google search results, and I could be 100% sure that text was on the website. Now, instead there's an AI summary with citations that may, or maybe not, contain citation for what it's telling me.

There's obviously good use cases of AI, but I'm surprised by how many bad use cases are being shoveled out on the regular.

I guess that gets to my question a little more - I can see them being helpful for reviewing. Do you go back to them after the review?

I work in data and machine learning, it's pretty common to attach artifacts like charts, images, data outputs to a PR for me, but not include them in the codebase.

I'd only want to do that if it was going to be useful at some future point - do you go back to chats / transcripts etc months after a PR is merged to understand its design? (that sounds rhetorical, but I promise it's a genuine question!)

Yeah, the Guardian's "pass notes" series has been going for a while and is regularly absolute gold[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/sep/07/death-o...

I actually think there's some awesome UX innovation in the world of Linux. In fact, one of the things I love and appreciate about Linux, is that there's such a variety of what the desktop could be. I personally use Elementary OS, which is very polished and reliable, but very much not trying to innovate how a desktop environment fundamentally works.

But for those who want to experiment, I've seen: - Tiling window managers (I3, Awesome, etc) - Highly customizable panels and launchers (Rofi, Lemonbar, etc) - Scrolling window managers (Nori, and others I think)

Honestly, the linux desktop has a lot of criticisms you could level at it, but lack of innovation isn't one. Where Windows and Mac have agreed on a standard that hasn't changed much in the last 10 years, Linux has about a zillion different visions for what a desktop can be.

I think I'm with the majority of commenters here in thinking this would just wind up being clutter. Markdown might now generate code, but it isn't user facing and doesn't get shipped (I don't want to install a library and have a tonne of prompt text unnecessarily downloaded). I also don't really want to be on the hook for maintaining my co-workers past prompts etc.

For people who like this idea, or do something similar, how do you make use of prompts used to create code checked into your codebase?

I can see it valuable at the review stage, but if I was trying to trace-back a regression to a previous commit, I feel like I already have enough noise without this attached.

My take here is, I think the real issue is AI pretending to be human by mocking a human style.

I'd always rather read an actual person's thoughts, clearly communicated and written down in their voice. But, there's clearly a subsection of people who don't want to (or aren't confident in / etc) writing their ideas fully.

If they have a bullet point list, and they want to use AI to neaten up the bullet point list and present it back, that's fine by me. I wouldn't have minded reading their thoughts in a messy list, but AI is serving to make it more readable.

What I think everyone hates, is AI being used to convert the list into pseudo-thought-out-prose. It just contains a bunch of bloat that wastes people's time.

So my advice if you use AI to write and don't want to change: keep going, just stop seeing the desired output as human prose. Just neaten up your bullet point list / promot / whatever, and send me that.

> Also, I gotta say I do not think Bitcoin is a bubble or whatever (IMO a real value there)

It's worth saying something with real value can still have a bubble - both bicycles and the internet were huge market bubbles at one time, but they're also undeniably valuable.

Yeah, that's a really good point that I hadn't really considered. Although, maybe the same argument stands? If X's lockdown leads to less users, then doesn't that translate to less control over the information landscape too?

> How do I opt out?

Linux I guess?

Seriously though, I'm in the same boat. I think the curse of big products is you wind up paying for 100% of the features when you only want 10% of them.

I agree, but also, it gets kinda messy here because Musk's "free speech" purchase if twitter was based on his understanding that Twitter not publishing content they deemed inflammatory or misinform was a violation of free speech, which I also don't think is true?

So I guess we're several layers of misunderstanding deep at this stage, and X's lockdown is ironic if its not free speech according to the flawed understanding of free speech it advocates? I dunno.

> My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.

Boy this would be nice! X have obviously decided that using the law to take down people fixing its issues is more profitable than fixing them. I'm really curious though, are they right? (Ignoring ethics etc)

I used to glance at Twitter when it was less hostile, now I don't bother since it tries to force you to sign in before viewing content and I don't have an account. But now my interaction is 0, nothing is going to get me to make an account. If other people are like me, X will just continue to lose users without gaining any. Which the limited available data on use suggest is in fact happening.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but it's worth pointing out that most businesses outside of tech don't operate a "build a monopoly then bleed it dry" model, and are a lot nicer for it, while still making money.

Shops, cinemas, B2B consultancies etc generally make money by selling something people want.

(I do get that tech VC doesn't work under this principle and it's not simpld to just change a sectors funding model, but it is worth pointing out that making money does not normally equal making a bad product)

A lot of stuff showing its folding allowing you to "use it as a bedtime clock" - have apple done any kind if battery use trickery to make this a non-battery-draining thing to do? Or maybe I'm overestimating how much battery a screen uses? (I'd have thought a lot)

> I'm not sure how to translate this to the smartphone market though. Fairphone and LaJolla seem to do well in this regard though so back to brand reputation for a lot of this.

I'm not here with a silver bullet or anything, but I'd say the EU's energy efficiency labeling works well and has a fairly low level of being gamed/falsified.

I don't think there's any big reason why the EU couldn't enforce labeling of a similar kind to IFixit's repair-ability scoring[0] for set devices.

On a separate note, the article mentions the lousy attempts some smart phone makers are guilty of with regards to repair instructions:

> Some records even refer customers to Temu or AliExpress for spare parts and repair instructions.

There are at least a lot less smart phone manufacturers than restaurants and cafes (comparing to scores on the doors) - if the EU really wanted to, it wouldn't be a huge resource to produce clear guidance on what expectations are for smart phone spare part provision, and issue fines whenever they're violated (you might think is a bad idea, and too much regulation, but my point is just that it's at least feasible)

[0] https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairabilit...

> There's no way SQL is more unreadable than polars. IMO it's the other way around.

I think on basic queries, SQL is really nice, but when stuff gets more complex, with a bunch of CTEs, let alone functions requiring loops, it becomes pretty obtuse.

> We don’t aim to make a big feature release of Polars 2.0. In fact we hope it to be a boring experience for you. The reason we bump this major version is that we can get rid of design decisions made in the past that currently block us and then we want to change defaults to more sensible settings that will benefit a greater audience

I know this take reveals me as a very dull person, but I love seeing projects take semver seriously like this! Version bumps should really be about removing deprecated cruft rather than shiny new features.

I've used polars for a while now, and their focus on stability was a big part if convincing me to make the jump initially!

I don't stream and buy all my music (aside from radio etc), I get music from:

- Bandcamp (for new music)

- Second hand CDs for charity shops and discogs (for older music)

- Quoboz / Amazon (for new music not on bandcamp or something specific I can't find elsewhere)

> Borrowing Disesdi's logic in their arithmetic (which is hard to argue against), after four years of open source LLMs, we should have three AirBnBs,1 two Stripes,2 and three Dropboxes3 thanks to the power of AI. > > So. Where the fuck are they?

I think this is a great question, and I have a completely unqualified theory.

I work in a fairly specialised field, I've notice when I use AI to try to generate code in fields where I'm very experienced, it produces a worse output at a slower rate than I can produce manually[0].

When I use it in fields I'm not an expert in by any stretch, like webdev, genAI massively improves my output by a huge factor.

I think this makes the productivity gains a little fuzzy. Claude code makes me 10x faster at webdev, but I'd be a very slow webdev. Ultimately, the next innovation in a field, will probably be from an expert in that field, and they therefore won't see the kind of "10x productivity boost" that non-experts do.

[0] I still find AI helpful for exploring code etc, just not so much producing output.

> There's evidence of global warming. There's no evidence of a climate catastrophe.

This is a ridiculous requirement to suggest. CO2 lasts around 100 years, waiting until your satisfied of "evidence of catastrophe" is like waiting for evidence that a car crash has fatalities before considering swerving.

> Yet at least in my social circle, I don't really hear anyone pining for an 'artisan internet'.

It definitely is a thing at least, to pine for the "small web" [0].

I think as well, dissatisfaction with major social networks is pretty widespread, I don't know how often it comes.alongside a pining for something more "artisinal" though.

[0] https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/

I don't really seem to be sent very much unfiltered AI output - do other people? I'd love to hear horror stories.

Да, тоа изгледа како среќна средина.

Wearing a Casio as I type this. The "24hr" button switches 12/24 modes on the "watch" mode, when using stopwatch it starts the watch, and when using alarms it turns the alarm on/off.

It has pretty critical functionality for those, I think the way its labeled on the watch face just makes it sound a little odd.

It's worth stating plainly: It's not just a common occurrence, it's a load bearing feature of modern tech writing. Full stop.