There have been wars ongoing since more than centuries. Since way before the US even existed. We could name names and point to movement that have enslaved people, conquered many countries and brought misery everywhere they went way before the european/american slave trade took place, for example. And countries in which slavery persisted long after that one slave-trade was stopped.

Even if you don't go to war, war and misery has a way to come to your country.

While in the US the current president is 2/3rd of his total terms (counting the eight years) and things may go better later on, there are beliefs and cultures in other parts of the world that make it so they are nearly always at war. And this won't stop even should the US "play nice".

Mine neither although the grandparents were moderately wealthy but my mom understood very early on that it was a match for me and that computers would really take off.

Fun story: first BASIC I ever got was an Atari 2600 cartridge that came with some key of a "keyboard" in two parts you'd plug in the joystick ports. When my parent bought that Atari 2600 they tried it and spent the entire night playing "Tank Attack" on the TV in their bedroom. She only told me that years later.

Then as I was writing tiny BASIC programs on the Atari 2600 gaming console, she realized I needed a "real" computer, so she bought me an Atari 600 XL a bit later. Then I began salivating on the neighbours' Commodore 64, which I could see trough a window. And she thought: "If I buy the exact same computer as the neighbours, maybe my son and the neighbours shall become friends!". 42 years later one of our neighbor just went to visit my brother in another country and his brother we exchange Telegram messages nearly daily.

Then the Amiga. Then the 386, 486, etc.

What a mom. RIP.

And even without a big player, the number of people who are entirely operational with just a browser at work is huge.

Many SMEs already realized they can switch seamlessly between Windows and OS X / MacOS and I see people working on either one or the other. For example a desktop PC running Windows and a Mac laptop is not uncommon.

I switched an employee at my wife's SME to... Debian! And the transition has been more than fine: they live in the browser (Google Workspace, paid company subscription). Unattended-upgrades, a user account that cannot sudo, and that's it.

The number of desktop PC running Windows that are actually glorified browsers has to be through the roof.

Once people realize there's no need to pay the double-whammy Microsoft tax (pay for a new Windows / also pay for a new PC), suddenly installing Linux becomes an option.

Now I know: using Linux and Google is not "getting rid of US tech". But it's "getting of Microsoft" and that is fine with me. I'll never ever forgive the mediocrity this company has brought onto the world.

> I ran many brutal tests, including reconstructing for QEMU the SCSI controller (not longer accessible) of a SVSY UNIX of the early 90s used in a 386.

QEMU is one project that, for a variety of reasons, said that atm they simply refuse any code written by a LLM. Is this just as a test? Or just for you? Or do you think QEMU shall accept that patch?

I think he was confused and what he meant to write is this: "To build this driver, more Linux source files have been read than any human except Linus Torvalds and a select few have ever read".

I'm not discussing whether or not license do still apply after code has been used to train a LLM and then the LLM spouts back another implementation (although it's been shown if I'm not mistaken a LLM reproduced Harry Potter verbatim and I take it that if it's word-for-word, license to apply after all)...

But saying "No Linux source file were ever read" when LLMs have been trained with every Linux source file ever, going back to when Linux wasn't even using Git yet, is quite something.

That's literally how LLMs are trained: by being fed a shitload of data.

P.S: I'm no hater btw: I pay Anthropic and use Claude Code daily (today we're writing some elisp code that calls tree-sitter).

Yes! Speaking of Linux, I'm personally very font of Terminus.

I like it so much my main coding font is a modified, pixel-perfect (no AA at all) version of Terminus since forever (I modified a few letters like the 'l' and the 's' and took a few glyphs from a pixel-perfect Monaco font [like %, &, @ and modified those a bit too). I did it so many years ago I don't remember the process (but I've got notes about it, so I could redo it).

I'm on a (non-retina / non 4K) 38" ultra-wide display that does 3840x1600 natively (and it's the resolution I use). I love it for I can have three 1280x1600 "columns" side by side (but I'm using a tiling WM so I've got many preset layouts anyway). YMMV.

This one is such a gigantic clusterfuck... They're mimicking ASCII tables using Unicode chars of varying length and, at times, there's also an off-by-one error. But the model (not Claude, but the model underneath it) is capable of generating ASCII tables.

P.S: I saw the future... The year is 2037 and we've got Unicode tables still not properly aligned.

    "Send messages, not metadata"

Project(s) whom, moreover, have often weird shills that, if you squint your eyes just a little bit, suddenly look like xxxINT moles.

So if only for that tagline, thanks a huge lot: metadata are more important than the content of the messages themselves and you have no privacy if your phone number and contacts are known.

Oh that's intriguing. Well I still have one, so now I'll have to find a VGA card and see if my code even works on a 286!

It requires a VGA card and those were more common in 386 IIRC and, anyway, performance-wise to run at 60 Hz it needs a 386. I never tried to run it on a 286 with a VGA card: don't know if that was a thing.

It's funny looking at that old assembly code and see ax, bx, cx, dx registers and not the eax, etc. ones.

The utilities I've compiled to .EXE so far are self-contained in one file and I just use UASM to create directly the .EXE:

    uasm -mz myutil.asm

https://www.terraspace.co.uk/uasm.html

I haven't tried yet to compile the entire game yet: that one is more involved as it implies many files.

I've got my Emacs set up to display next to every file that is versioned the number of commits that file has been modified in (for the curious: using a modified all-the-icons-ivy-rich + custom elisp code + custom Bash scripts I wrote and it's trickier than it seems to do in a way that doesn't slows everything down). For example in the menu to open a file or open a recently visited file etc.: basically in every file list, in addition to its size, owner, permissions, etc. I also add the number of commits if it's a versioned file.

I like the fix/bug/broken search in TFA to see where the bugs gather.

It was quite something... I take it there are quite a few hotshots on HN who used to be in the top groups. I was in a group and we were writing small intros for BBSes with a couple of friends and then we'd get infinite leech/upload ratio on those BBSes. Best memory was driving through Belgium / the Netherlands / Denmark / putting the car on the boat / Sweden (Uppsala) with our computers (Amiga, Atari ST and PCs) to participate at a demo compo. Forgot its name but in the PC category we tied first place with Future Crew (we would have been first had I not screwed the sound playback routine which crashed half-way the demo), before they had their big breakthrough on the PC demoscene. I think that was in 1991.

Cops/customs stopped us as the boat arrived in Sweden and thought we were dealing drugs: they tore the car apart and had no idea what we were talking about when we were explaining them in broken english that we were going to participate in a demo compo :-/

I still have a few effects as executables but I don't have the code anymore for these.

Thankfully I still have the entire source code of a game I made in assembly (for PC / 386+) in 1991 (never published but it's how my career started, long story) and lately I've been having a huge lot of fun trying to compile it again with Claude Code CLI / Sonnet. I'm using UASM, which is compatible with MASM which I used to use. I managed to have all the utilities I wrote back then (picture converters / sprites extractor / etc.) compiling and running (in DOSBox) but haven't managed to compile the main game yet. A few more hours with Claude Code CLI and I should get it running.

FWIW it's hilarious to go back to code from 1991 and see comments in my code talking about this and that bug and asking the LLM: "Find where that bug could be" and the LLM manages to find it. It's also insane the lack of version control: version control was copying entire directories. Copy/pasta code everywhere. And then 10 000 lines of code per source code file.

What an era. Diving in that old code of mine brings me back: the decades they've been flying.

P.S: funnily enough by lack of luck a macro I had used back then happen to become a reserved keyword/macro in assemblers later on. I had named back then a macro "incbin" and that was preventing my code from compiling in UASM: Claude Code / Sonnet 4.6 found that issue instantly.

P.P.S: 0x777 in hex gives 1911. RZR, legendary: probably the most legendary of them all. Probably still have a few 5"1/4 floppies (both C64 and Amiga for I had an Amiga with a little software mod to read 5"1/4 floppies as if they were 3"1/2 for the 5"1/4 were way cheaper) with Razor 1911 "cracktros" (even if they weren't called that yet) still working (back in 2020 quite a few of my floppies were still reading: maybe half to 2/3rd of them). I know it won't last, nothing will.

Seen that many are already moving to QC-resistant cryptography and that more are shifting by the day... I've got a question: what are the implications of quantum computers going to be if we consider that the entirety of cryptography will have moved to quantum-resistant cryptography?

In other words: I only ever read about quantum computing when it's to talk about breaking cryptography. But what if all cryptography moves to quantum-resistant scheme, all of it... Then what are the uses of quantum computing? Protein folding? Logistics?

Basically, so far, quantum computing research has the effect of many companies and projects adding quantum-resistant cryptographic schemes.

If, say, we've got a $10 million quantum computer that can break one 256 bit elliptic curve key in an hour... Great, EC is broken. But what if browsers, SSH, auth, etc. just about everything moves to PQ schemes...

Then what are those quantum computers useful for?

I understand that breaking even a single EC 256 bit key in a few hours on a $$$ machine is a very big deal.

But what else are they going to be useful for? For breaking ECC doesn't help humanity. It doesn't bring anything. It only destroys.

EDIT: for example I read stuff like: "Estimates are about three years to break a single 256 bit EC key on a 10 000 qbits quantum computer". What's a 10 000 qbits quantum computer going to be used for when everybody shall have moved to quantum-resistant algos?

We're not reading the same numbers I think. Compared to Opus 4.6, it's a big jump nearly in every single bench GP posted. They're "only" catching up to Google's Gemini on GPQA and MMMLU but they're still beating their own Opus 4.6 results on these two.

This sounds like a much better model than Opus 4.6.

How? I just googled: about 55 million addresses with bitcoin in them, about 144 blocks per day, about 3000 to 5000 tx per block.

In something like 100 days all the coins would be moved to other addresses.

I gotta say it'd be hilarious if to speed up that migration-to-quantum-resistant-addresses process, the Bitcoin community were to finally allow bigger blocks.

EDIT: I take it if the network had to have full blocks for 100 days, then "shit would happens". Maybe they should force an orderly move: e.g. only addresses ending with "3a" are eligible to be moved in a block whose hash ends with an "3a", etc. to prevent congestion?

Yup same. The software I install as root are those shipping stock with the distro. Others I compile and run from user accounts (like Emacs, which I always compile from source).

It's not a proof vibe-coding doesn't work. It's a proof it's shitty, rube-goldberg, crappy code. It doesn't mean there aren't other shitty products out there (the heavy turds Microsoft produced throughout the years do comes to mind for example).

But when you've got a project upvoted here recently complaining that people do run into issue while quickly cut/pasting from Claude Code CLI to, say, Bash to test something because of Unicode characters in Claude Code CLI's output... And when you realize that it's because what Claude Code CLI shows you in the TUI is not the output of the model because there's an entire headless browser rendering the model's output to a webpage, which is then converted to text (and changing at that moment ASCII chars for Unicode ones), you realize that some serious level of fucktardery is ongoing.

It's normal that at times people aren't going full agentic and shall want to cut/paste what they see. I'm not the one complaining: I saw a project complaining about it and people are affected by that terribly dumb ASCII-to-Unicode conversion of characters.

When you can produce turds by the kilometer, a near infinity of turd is going to be produced.

We're not saying it's not working: I pay an Anthropic subscription and use it daily... We're saying it's a piece-of-shit of a codebase.

Shit that works is still shit.

If anyone from Anthropic is reading: STOP FUCKING CHANGING THE CHARACTERS THAT YOUR MODEL DOES OUTPUT.

(now of course it's just one issue out of thousands, but it'd be a nice one to fix)

You cannot compare tools that can outlast humans (like my grandpa and now myself) with an Apple watch that's going to be junk in a few years at most.

Even for oil that needs changing, things that needs lubricating once every blue moon (like, say, a mechanical watch): it's quite different to drop a tiny bit of lubricant inside a mechanical watch that's already 30 years old compared to having to update the firmware of whatever Internet-of-insecure-and-shitty-Thing gizmo that's going to be a thing of the past in a few years.

And if you really let a nice mechanical watch idle for decades, at least someone can do this:

"Restoring a Vintage Rolex Submariner with the Original Box, Paperwork... Even the Receipt!"

https://youtu.be/WsImSuG-dLY

While I'm really not sure there are going to be people out there keeping a connected wristwatch from 2026 going in the year 2066 (not sure about the value of that either).

To add to France's problem: in 2024 the PIB growth was 1.2%, which doesn't even counter inflation. And it's been like that since 2008: inflation adjusted in USD, no growth (while both the US and China's GDP inflation-adjusted skyrocketed).

The EU, and the eurozone in particular, is totally losing the plot: 1 company in the top 50 companies by market cap, ASML (and it's not french).

One.