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habitue

5,290 karma · joined February 26, 2009

Writing and coding
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habitue··on Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.3
Yes, but aside from the trademark issue (the fork cant call itself Asahi), GPL is 100% on board with letting you fork. It's on the tin, part of the freedoms it guarantees.
habitue··on Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.3
I mean, for sure, if they are worried about someone building a shoddy product on top of asahi, and then not open sourcing their shoddy additions then GPL will fix their problem.

However, I think, what they want is for people to stop making those shoddy additions altogether. And open source does not solve that problem because that's exactly what open source exists to allow.

habitue··on Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.3
I do genuinely appreciate the hard work, and I don't appreciate being told what I appreciate.

Regardless, I think you're also confused.

"How it is being used ... to build cheap distributions on it slapping a different name on front"

I'm sorry but this is literally exactly the thing GPL is designed to allow. I don't understand why this is so confusing.

Copyleft is designed to prevent people from improving on the code and then keeping their changes secret and closed source. That's not what Omarchy or anyone else is doing, they're all already sharing their changes.

Let's walk through it from the Asahi linux perspective so we're all on the same page:

- Asahi makes software licensed MIT

- Omarchy takes that software, slops the AI-iest slop on top.

- Omarchy releases the source code of those changes to Omarchy's users.

- Asahi is mad because they hate AI, but they have no recourse unless Omarchy violates their trademark.

Now compare how it works under GPL:

- Asahi makes software licensed GPL

- Omarchy takes that software, slops the AI-iest slop on top.

- Omarchy releases the source code of those changes to Omarchy's users.

- Asahi is mad because they hate AI, but they have no recourse unless Omarchy violates their trademark.

habitue··on Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.3
No, I am saying the maintainers are saying they're mad that people are using AI to extend Asahi, and in response they are switching to GPL.

Normally you do something in response that would solve your perceived problem. In this case, it seems to be a random unrelated action they've taken to the problem they identified.

habitue··on Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.3
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.

> As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

I appreciate all of the hard work that's gone into Asahi linux, but this statement is basically nonsensical. Making the license copyleft does not prevent people from monetizing it, using AI to develop on it, improve it or wreck it. All it does is make sure that anyone who does will share their source code modifications.

It doesn't sound like they want their code to be open source. It sounds like they want it to be closed source or at least restrictively licensed enough that they can tell users of the source how they're allowed to interact with it and modify it.

The entire point of open source / free software is that it lets you do what you want with it. The original author doesn't need to accept your AI patches or write AI code themselves, but downstream users are not restricted.

I am just baffled by how confused even very smart people seem to be about how open source and permissive licenses work and what they are for.

(Now, should they use trademark law to ensure others can't use the name Asahi Linux confusingly? Absolutely. But that's got nothing to do with copyright.)

habitue··on Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.3
What is vibe-copying? The code was permissively licensed specifically so other people could do what they want with it. I'm so confused what people think permissive licensing is
habitue··on Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.3
That's not really true, and it's only even potentially true if we talk about the absolute cream of the crop developers. Most human written code is quite bad actually
habitue··on Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code
Bun obviously: they swapped the engine under claude code from zig bun to rust bun and it worked fine.

pgrust, high profile rewrites all over the place.

When you have an oracle to check behavior against, it is really easy to build a robust testing machine with property tests against the original.

habitue··on Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code
Not necessarily, a rewrite can just move to a language that's easier to maintain (off C / cobol).

Honestly though, it's pretty clear the AI rewrites work, we have a ton of high profile examples. It's just a holdover attitude about rewrites from before AI. In reality, AI is going to make the code better when it rewrites

habitue··on Your Phone Is About to Stop Being Yours: 70 Days Until Lockdown
Why exactly? Even after this move, iPhone is less open. Apple doesn't have the 24h escape hatch.
habitue··on FTL: A new operating system for clouds
Now people just wonder why you didn't write it in rust
habitue··on C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
It was intentional, sure. It was an attempt to solve a particular kind of problem.

In hindsight though, it was a mistake.

Evidence: when the world moved to 64 bit, we didnt just let int mean 8 bytes on amd64. That's a clear acknowledgement that the design was not correct once we understood things better.

habitue··on Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI
Ideas can stand for themselves, the quote can stand for itself. You don't need to take all the things Tolstoy ever said and average their badness to decide whether a quote is true. You can read it yourself and see if it resonates with how you think of things.

Similarly, if you find that the quote resonates with you, you are not on the hook as endorsing every bad thing he ever did, or stupid thing he ever said.

habitue··on Google Maps Renames Lake Ontario to Lake America
You kind of need to be more specific about what you mean by sovereign. Federal pre-emption exists[0]. There are lots of ways in which the federal government can enforce their will (constitutionally!) on states.

But it's super complicated, and in this particular case does the state have some special right to name the body of water it's adjacent to that pre-empts the federal government? I dont know. Probably not, but I think the argument would need to be more explicit about what that right is rather than just claiming states are sovereign.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_preemption

habitue··on Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search
Exact match on a typo brings up a submission with that typo, which is likely low quality
habitue··on Rich Sutton on AI creativity and discovery
[flagged]
habitue··on Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels
I'm no Musk fanboy but I think this kind of maximally cynical take is tiresome. They thought it would work, they expended significant engineering effort and money making it real and producing it and selling it to customers.

The simplest explanation is that they did all that and the market didn't want it. The economics of traditional panels outweighed the aesthetic advantages of tiles and they're pivoting. No conspiracy or fraud need be invoked.

habitue··on Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in
I am confused about why Gary Marcus thinks it's so obvious that Claude isn't conscious. As he points out, Dawkins is just taking a bog-standard behaviorist position: that he can't distinguish Claude from a conscious being just by the behavior here.

Marcus is saying "Well, if you knew they were trained to mimic, then you'd understand it's just mimicry and not real consciousness" The problem with this argument is that we just don't have a good idea what "real consciousness" is. What if, in order to simulate human text prediction with sufficient accuracy, the model has to assemble sub-networks internally into something equivalent to a conscious mind? We could disprove that kind of thing really quickly if we knew how to define consciousness really well, but we kinda don't!

Philosophers are genuinely split on this question, it's totally reasonable to be on either side of this based on your personal intuition. Marcus's position seems to be actually based on his own personal incredulity, despite his claims that understanding LLM training methodology gives him some special insight into the internal experience (or lack thereof) of an LLM.

(The Claude Delusion is a banger title though)

habitue··on An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus, the Strangest Book Ever Published
The first edition is expensive. The current edition is ~$90 for a full color hardcover (expensive but not ruinius if you really want it)
habitue··on Spec driven development doesn't work if you're too confused to write the spec
Sometimes, in the interest of having something rather than nothing, I have to press publish. This entails getting things wrong, which is regrettable.

I will say, that I'm trying to steelman the code-as-assembly POV, and I dont think the exact historical analogy is critical to it being right or wrong. The main thing is that "we've seen the level of abstraction go up before, and people complained, but this is no different" is the crux. In that sense, a folk history is fine as long as the pattern is real

habitue··on Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing
This is an interesting distinction, but it ignores the reasons software engineers do that.

First, hardware engineers are dealing with the same laws of physics every time. Materials have known properties etc.

Software: there are few laws of physics (mostly performance and asymptotic complexity). Most software isnt anywhere near those boundaries so you get to pretend they dont exist. If you get to invent your own physics each time, yeah the process is going to look very different.

habitue··on What is intelligence? (2024)
This just doesn't explain things by itself. It doesn't explain why humans would care about reasoning in the first place. It's like explaining all life as parasitic while ignoring where the hosts get their energy from.

Think about it, if all reasoning is post-hoc rationalization, reasons are useless. Imagine a mentally ill person on the street yelling at you as you pass by: you're going to ignore those noises, not try to interpret their meaning and let them influence your beliefs.

This theory is too cynical. The real answer has got to have some element of "reasoning is useful because it somehow improves our predictions about the world"

habitue··on Don't Force Your LLM to Write Terse [Q/Kdb] Code: An Information Theory Argument
...and will also have a deeper understanding of the problem that will help solving other problems down the line?
habitue··on Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
Skills wont use less context once invoked, the point is that MCP in particular frontloads a bunch of stuff into your context on the entire api surface area. So even if it doesn't invoke the mcp, it's costing you.

That's why it's common advice to turn off MCPs for tools you dont think are relevant to the task at hand.

The idea behind skills us that they're progressively unlocked: they only take up a short description in the context, relying on the agent to expand things if it feels it's relevant.

habitue··on Flowistry: An IDE plugin for Rust that focuses on relevant code
These kinds of tools should be standard in understanding code
habitue··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2025)
Pylon (https://pylonlending.com) | ONSITE Menlo Park, CA

What Stripe did for payments, Pylon is doing for the mortgage industry: We're taking a sleepy industry with backward technology and re-building the stack from the ground up. We're first-principles thinkers, and our team is small, talented and ambitious.

I'm hiring generalists who love coding and want to build something beautiful in an industry where technology written in the 90s is the norm. We're Series A, well funded, and we have traction with customers. Come to Menlo Park and help us turn the $13 trillion US mortgage industry into a set of APIs.

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pylon?utm_source=hn-whos-hiring

If you like:

- Programming languages

- Functional or Logic programming

- Operations research & optimization

- Working on an amazing team on a really hard problem

Come join us!

habitue··on Bcachefs removed from the mainline kernel
I mean, bcachefs is basically the equivalent of rewriting all that code, without explicitly trying to be a clone. Same for btrfs
habitue··on Anti-*: The Things We Do but Not All the Way
I think Co-* is probably better, though more obscure I guess
habitue··on The Deletion of Docker.io/Bitnami
We did this at stripe when deprecating TLS 1.0, and called it a brown out (I don't know the origin of the term in software).

You do it when you have a bunch of automated integrations with you and you have to break them. The lights arent on at the client: their dev teams are focused on other things, so you have to wake them up to a change that's happening (either by causing their alerting to go off, or their customers to complain because their site is broken)

habitue··on Meta Freezes AI Hiring After Blockbuster Spending Spree
There has to be adverse selection here from the amount of money being offered right? Like ok, very few people could turn it down, but it's not going to result in a motivated team.

I am imagining all these overpaid founders etc just sitting in a room like reality show contestants. Trying to make smalltalk, brainstorm jamming for months, not really producing much because... who cares, they have unbelievable money and this is the weirdest scenario ever.

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