Bruh.

2 weeks ago I was getting full kernel crashes on Ubuntu Server due to an Intel iGPU on a Dell Laptop with a 7th gen i7. Fortunately Claude Code fixed it after a couple of attempts, but still.

Audio was completely corrupt on a Bazzite HTPC I tried to set up 6 months ago, until I changed some setting on my TV related to 10-bit colour. Then, when that was sorted Kodi would only run in 30Hz despite the fact that other apps supported 60.

My previous laptop with Arch (circa 2020) sometimes wouldn't wake from sleep.

When I ran an OpenSUSE Desktop (circa 2019) I picked Noveau instead of the proprietary drivers, and the picture was all corrupt. Then when I installed the proper Nvidia drivers, I did the wrong thing and my whole screen turned black, Linus-style.

I then switched the same desktop to Ubuntu, which was better out of the box, but would stop reading my USB SD card reader after unplugging it a few times. WiFi would also randomly drop out until I rebooted the whole system every few hours, and when talking to my Brother Laser Printer it would only print in like 30dpi or somthing ridiculous. I was emailing the files to myself, rebooting back into Windows and then printing from there because it was so bad.

The 5 year gap between the current Linux attempts and the last one had less to do with Linux improvements and more to do with agentic LLMs being able to paper over all the cracks. To be fair, though, I expect regular people having access to Opus 4.5-tier or higher models will result in all kinds of minor issues that would normally be overlooked actually getting fixed on Linux. (Thinking about it a bit more, regular users will have access to subsidised tokens too, so a million open source devs running $20 Claude Pro subscriptions might between them be able to do way more with that $20 million than Microsoft could with Enterprise API access).

I guarantee you that there's one small company that put 1,000 of these chips in a server room or datacentre though, and they're now completely boned.

I don't think the word "inauthentic" quite captures why people react negatively to this sort of communication.

At least part of it comes from the fact that this particular style of "kindness-is-cool-coded" (for lack of a better word) communication happens to be the preferred style of insanely passive-aggressive people who take it upon themselves to brutally sabotage anyone who they deem unacceptable. It can also feel like you're being lead on by someone who actively dislikes you but is too polite to say it. Or you just start second-guessing every single thing they say and do.

But honestly, there's a pretty sizable minority of people who are repelled by this type of person and if you're naturally bad at reading the room you're probably better off making friends with other people that say and do dumb things.

I know I went through a "How to Win Friends and Influence People" phase when younger and basically ended up just putting off a whole of people.

The trend is called "retail polarisation".

Smaller retailers switch to targeting wealthier customers - higher margins and less bullshit.

The less wealthy customers then get served by ultra-value megabrands like Temu/Shein or Kmart/Walmart, or second hand marketplaces.

The net result is both more yacht makers and more dollar stores, but less mid-range stores like Target or Toys R Us.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48554680

Points: 67

# Comments: 57

"Progress" consisted of someone finding a new algorithm that just so happened to get good performance on one particular dataset (but not others).

Everyone knew it was bullshit but did it anyway, because it was easy to convince people to give you grants if you have a sexy, sellable hypothesis and a willingness to handwave away the two decades of prior non-progress.

But why did the the CX33 only go up by €2 whereas the CPX32 went up by €21.50?

Both have 8GB of RAM, but the CPX32 has 80GB more storage and a bigger slice of CPU time.

You can see the same trend with CX23 vs CPX22.

In fact, CPX22 is now more than twice the price of CX23, despite having the same amount of disk and half the RAM.

Is there a CPU shortage now too?

I guess in a roundabout way, what I'm trying to say is that I wonder how much of this is a change in PR rather than a change in the people themselves.

It's completely reasonable for the establishment to reject a request for an alcoholic drink, and suggest something alcohol-free instead.

It is not reasonable for them to say "sure, here's your alcoholic drink as you requested" and give them an alcohol-free substitute without telling them.

The fact that the patron broke the rules has nothing to do with it.

Asked it to check to see if a particulr bug related to an in-memory cache had been fixed. Fable confirmed that the caching bug had been fixed, but found adjacent issue while looking at the code (hash keys were not uniquely generated per-user; quite serious and real!)

Ran the same prompt through Opus and it also found an adjacent issue, but it was a red herring (deliberate per-user hardcoded value for a "local pickup" delivery profile).

Frontend stuff also seems to be much better than before, from the one prompt I tried!