bityard

Running 32-bit software isn't going away, just running a 32-bit kernel.

You aren't going to like what's coming down the pike for Thunderbird: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/115.0/whatsnew...

They are basically throwing away the existing UI asking with its decades of refinement in favor of something that looks like what you'd get if apple mail and outlook had a disfugured child.

UI designers think that an interface should look like an art project rather than a tool, and that discoverability and information density are bugs to be squashed.

On most forums, ending up with power-tripping asshat moderators is purely accidental.

In reading the site rules and meta discussions, SO always seemed to have been explicitly designed to invite, cater to, and directly nurture them.

> NOTICE: The NetBSD kernel has spotty hardware support, much less so than Linux. You cannot necessarily expect AlpineBSD to work on any random computer you have lying around.

Huh. I feel like the author has their BSDs mixed up! NetBSD's main claim to fame is that it runs on practically everything, even lots of platforms no longer supported by mainstream Linux distributions. The page links to the laptop wiki, which is about AMD64 laptops and their finicky peripherals and driver support. A better place to start for hardware support is https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/.

What is your favorite book on emergency appendectomies?

There are a fair number of people who seem to believe that LLMs contain "world knowledge" and are blissfully unaware of how inaccurate an ungrounded chatbot can be. They ask it questions, it gives them confident and plausible (sometimes even correct!) answers, and they leap to the conclusion that these are useful tools for end-of-civilization knowledge bases. I fought this battle countless times on HN and Reddit, generally unsuccessfully.

This project at least attempts to ground its answers with (presumably) human-vetted sources. That will make it much, MUCH more accurate and truthful than a bare model. But there is still a non-zero chance for it to hallucinate answers, especially when posed a question that it doesn't have any source material in its database.

As for why bother hooking up an LLM instead of a simple search engine, search engines don't synthesize data from multiple sources into a coherent answer for you, but LLMs are (mostly) great at that.

That said, while I like this pattern (LLM + knowledge base) for lots of things, this isn't necessarily something I'd trust with my own (or my family's) survival.

Once you learn how an LLM works, you can likely _begin_ to contribute meaningfully to numerous open-source AI projects: inference engines, training frameworks, etc. Or try to find an area of AI that is lacking research and start your own experiments. Or (potentially) go to work for a company doing similar or adjacent work.

Opportunity knocks, but you have to build the door first.

There are lots of reasons Chinese AI companies will always be cheaper than Western AI companies, but chief among them is that China is pouring ludicrous amounts of money into new energy generation projects.

Hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, coal, they are building it all, as we speak, at least 10x more than the US. They are aiming to not just be energy independent, but energy dominant.

You can't now (and certainly won't in the future) be able to run an AI provider in the West as profitably as you can in China.

You see it as money spent, others might see it as an investment. OP doesn't necessarily say exactly what they use it for, but if education is the goal, $25k and spending your evenings learning about AI theory and tooling is way cheaper than a university degree and can easily result in millions more dollars in lifetime earnings given the current early state of the technology.

Besides, I regularly see people here in HN spend a LOT more than that on hobbies and depreciating assets. A few years back, people with coastal salaries and tech jobs were tripping over themselves to spend $100k on a certain brand of trendy electric car.

I've been hearing people talk negatively about vocal fry for ages now with no idea what it meant. But this comment was finally the one that made me go look it up. And today I learned that I speak almost entirely in vocal fry.

I get irrationally angry when actual people interrupt me while I'm talking, I'll start throwing chairs when AI tech support agents start doing it.

Not bad, but I guess I lack the imagination to envision the use cases for such casual conversation. Other than... I suppose a certain demographic would be lining up to use this as the voice for their AI girlfriend.

Also I seem to be missing where/how they are selling this.

Last night I found a 3TB external USB 3.0 drive at the bottom of my "computer junk" drawer that I had completely forgotten I owned. It felt like winning the lottery.

Delicious irony that the site this is being reported on pops up a dialog over the content as you scroll down, with the following disclaimer:

> We use your personal data for interest-based advertising, as outlined in our Privacy Notice.

Sigh, this isn't the timeline I was hoping to end up in.

Or, and hear me out here, maybe throwing VC money behind slightly fancy terminals and workflow editors was always destined to be a risky move?

I don't have any questions, but I just wanted to say thank you for your work on this.

I was a huge Final Fantasy fan ever since FFIV came to the states (as FFII). In the US, console RPGs were a niche within a niche until the 2000's. So walking into the local theatre to watch The Sprits Within on a big screen just felt plain surreal.

I had to build and deploy my own Nextcloud images earlier today. :( Not a big deal because docker, just obnoxious that this got released into the wild and was being actively exploited before patches were available everywhere.

HN never lets me down when it comes to pedantic critiques of obvious humor!

A human could write either. The former is just slightly more formal and concise.

Before AI, I used to write everything in somewhat formal phrasing mostly because I enjoyed it and a tiny bit because I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that it made me sound smarter. Post-ChatGPT, I noticed that most LLMs had a writing style fairly similar to my own, so I changed my writing style to appear less formal in most circumstances. While I'm not anti-AI, I'm always fearful of being mistaken for a bot.

Being responsible for the quality of the submission means that when other kernel developers say, "hey this part sucks, please fix it," you are obligated to fix it or defend your position, if you want the patch to be accepted into the kernel.

That last part is worth highlighting: you always have the option to not follow-up and abandon your proposed change, in which case it won't make it into the kernel. (Unless someone else picks it up and volunteers to get it into shape for that is acceptable for merging into the kernel, but that is vanishingly rare, unless the change is trivial.)

You aren't expected to hang around and maintain your patch once merged, that's what subsystem maintainers are for. But you would be making their lives a lot easier and earn a lot of respect if you did.

> For over 20 years, Linux has been used everywhere, from servers to embedded devices. One area it has been lacking in, however, is the desktop space.

You know, I think I prefer it this way. Things that go mainstream tend to attract the kind of people who think they can improve a product by removing most of the features that made it powerful to begin with. They'll say that simplifying the UX by way of reducing the number of choices the user can make will ease user confusion and make the app easier to maintain as a side benefit. And don't forget, you have to chase the latest UI aesthetic trends coming from big players like Apple, Google, and Microsoft if you want people to think you're still relevant.

I love using Linux on the desktop and dearly hope it never, ever goes mainstream.

I'm always curious, what kind of software exactly are people building that requires multiple parallel agents and thousands of dollars per month in AI tokens per developer!

I see you are not familiar with enterprise IT hardware and software purchasing...

They were already a sub-par registrar a decade ago, or more. You can find many namecheap horror stories without much trouble. I moved away from them years ago due to various shenanigans and never looked back.

Friends don't let friends use namecheap.

Hams take pride in being largely self-policing because this is one of the things that keeps the FCC interested in reserving sections of the spectrum for ham use.

Also, I love hackaday for their articles but the comment section there is among the worst on the Internet. You'll find more enlightening discussions on the wall of a truckstop bathroom stall.

It's considered 2.5D: https://web.archive.org/web/20030616094237/https://www.phoen...

Something that always seems to surprise me when I remember it today: Playing an MP3 on my Pentium CPU in 1996 worked, but it _really_ brought the system to its knees. I could choose between listening to MP3 music or interacting with some other program (mIRC, Netscape, etc) but certainly not both.

Yeah, I was in the same boat. Lived in the middle of nowhere and long distance was expensive, so regular BBSes might as well have been on a different planet for me.

I heard there was a BARK magazine, and a BARK T-shirt but this is the first time I've heard about a cassette! Thanks for sharing that.