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stabbles

3,479 karma · joined April 19, 2016

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stabbles··on Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of
To be fair, many shells have command caching, so they effectively roll their own exec syscall wrapper:

    $ python3 -c 'print("hi")'
    hi
    $ hash
    hits command
       1 /usr/bin/python3
stabbles··on Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of
Indeed, it's a libc construct.
stabbles··on Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of
Nice, PT_INTERP is the only non-relocatable thing of ELF files and typically requires wrapper scripts/executables.

Regarding shebangs, I've never understood why the kernel cannot resolve e.g. `#!sh` relative to PATH instead of CWD. Posix prescribes that you should look for `sh` in PATH and don't expect it to be in `/bin/sh`. And using `/usr/bin/env sh` has the same issue: what if coreutils is installed elsewhere.

stabbles··on Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled
Not really, a theorem with a hard proof can have simple but important corollaries. It's also not unthinkable that theorems exist with proofs that cannot reduce to something simple/short.
stabbles··on NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook
Banana Paper was on the shortlist
stabbles··on Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot
If you take a frame you see it's neither random nor dots:

https://i.imgur.com/CgtyGjl.png

From a single frame you can definitely identify boundaries because the dots are sliding and get truncated.

stabbles··on Nano Banana 2 Lite
So the image model's benchmark is to generate an image with the corresponding SVG sources.
stabbles··on I hate compilers
Nix hashes the build inputs, for which deterministic builds are not required, only desirable.
stabbles··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
Speeding up C/C++ compiler bootstrapping, starting at a single binary of <1KB. Currently it gets to GCC 4.7 in 2-3 minutes on x86_64 and aarch64: https://github.com/haampie/shpack
stabbles··on Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end
This begs for a modern version of https://csszengarden.com/, where the CSS is generated by different LLMs and prompts.
stabbles··on Moving beyond fork() + exec()
Isn't that covered by O_CLOEXEC?
stabbles··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
A medicine for those who anthropomorphize LLMs is to run the LLMs deterministically (without randomness and memory files).

It feels very unnatural to get the same conversation verbatim at a different point in time.

stabbles··on You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)
David Hume pointed this out in 1740, and his advise still applies:

    A reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treatise_of_Human_Nature/Book...
stabbles··on You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)
I think this is fair criticism. It's hard to read this blog cause its premise is based on an "appeal to nature" fallacy.
stabbles··on Italians and Dutch share the same gestural instinct for teaching
The Dutch version of this is to wave at the cheek.
stabbles··on Staged publishing and new install-time controls for npm
Is one day enough to find vulnerabilities? Who keeps an eye on new releases? Otherwise the problem continues to exist, just delayed by one day.
stabbles··on Linux security mailing list 'almost unmanageable'
Isn't it mostly the medium that's problematic? With an issue tracker it's easier to close as duplicate
stabbles··on Content-defined chunking added to Bazel
Isn't that rather difficult given the `.tar.gz` layers?
stabbles··on They Said It Would Cost $54M. We Said "No Thanks."
You can look at a histogram of number of words per sentence, and you'll find immediately that it's written by an AI.

    When?
    Today.
    Minutes.
    Four years.
    $54 million.
    Collect feedback.
    Delivered faster.
    Not days.
    Not weeks.
    It's free.
    ...
    No $19 million in upfront costs.
    They're now doing meaningful work.
    Let me put that in context.
    That's a 95% cost reduction.
    But think about what that represents.
    And we can show you how.
stabbles··on Debian must ship reproducible packages
This comment is misinformed. Non-deterministic builds would also result in one tarball redistributed to all distro users. The ROP exploits don't work because of ASLR.
stabbles··on GNU IFUNC is the real culprit behind CVE-2024-3094
Yeah, that suggestion made me roll my eyes. It's the wrong granularity, there's no build system support, it's inconvenient (executable wrappers? require the user to understand all transitive deps?).

It also fails to mention glibc-hwcaps, which would've been a cleaner solution in the context.

stabbles··on GitHub Is Down
I noticed the same https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47940213. My working hypothesis is that, given that a filter was always required (prs and issues are likely rows in the same database with a bool property to distinguish them), someone thought it'd be good to use the search API uniformly. But search is on the derivative of the underlying data, in contrast to the specific APIs for listing issues and prs.
stabbles··on GitHub Is Down
What are you referring to when you say it's "fundamentally computationally inefficient"? It's pretty efficient because it's content-addressed, plus optimizations to reduce storage and data transfer with packfiles.
stabbles··on Zugzwang
If chess is solved and white wins, black is always in Zugzwang. We might not know.
stabbles··on Zugzwang
It's not necessarily an illusion. If chess is solved and it turns out white wins with perfect play, black's first move is zugzwang.
stabbles··on Ti-84 Evo
This made me double check if it wasn't someone's vibe code scam website.
stabbles··on Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey
Sure, in the days of Markov chains you could already generate nonsense in the style of Shakespeare, so it shouldn't be surprising you could also do the inverse.

But the LLM will trigger on a typo you've made only once, and argue "that's a typical mistake for an Italian" and use those clues. It has a much better prior to make informed decisions.

stabbles··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
After yesterday's outage they admitted that their elasticsearch index for issues/prs lost data.

They seem to have changed the primary source of data in the issues and pull requests tabs (w/o filters applied) from the underlying database to the elasticsearch search index, which has the side effect that there's a noticeable delay between state change of an issue/pr and an update in the UI. But as seen today, these can get out of sync, and apparently they even had data loss in the index.

I would really like to know their reasoning for making that change. I can totally imagine that they wanted to "simplify" so the UI uses only a single data source instead of two.

As a user it's incredibly annoying to have a delay between issue/pr state changes and the search index picking it up.

stabbles··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
Is "migration to azure" or "microsoft acquisition" a cause or a symptom?

I'm wondering to what extent the natural life cycle of SaaS products comes down to: the company grows, the old guard with good technical taste move on, bad technical decisions are made, quality declines, users move on.

stabbles··on GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
I was surprised to find that this sentence

> Plan prices aren’t changing

did not continue with an em-dash followed by something profound that is changing.

Plan prices aren't changing -- the value you get out of it is.

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