Fantastic deep dive as always, thanks for doing such stellar work!

On that note, any chance we might get a teardown/history of Cray architectures in the future? Specifically the Cray-1 and 2?

To throw a more serious challenge your way: How about a write-up on the original Frank Rosenblatt Perceptron? I know finding an original Mark-1 part would be close to impossible but it blows my mind that they were successfully doing real-time visual classification in 1957 with an electro-mechanical machine (potentiometers and motors) using a 20x20 "video" feed with some learning algorithm that was not based on backprop.

Then ChatGPT hit the scene and again, many of us dismissed it as a parlor trick that would never amount to much.

Using LLMs for coding initially was a only small step up from basic code completion, and a welcome farewell to Stack Overflow.

I am curious: what was the specific moment that you went from those quaint, dismissive observations to a slightly panicked, "Uh Oh" realization of what these models can do?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174

Points: 737

# Comments: 1123

https://tluif.home.xs4all.nl/chescom/EngExcPhanF.html

It’s a “robotic” board that moves the pieces by itself.

You can sometimes find “untested” (i.e., broken) ones on eBay for a reasonable price, and if you’re lucky they’re an easy fix. Mine was stuck because the lock slider had wedged something and the repair took all of 10 minutes.

Very clean engineering: a few screws gets you in, there’s a remarkably small PCB, few wires and mechanical pieces: the main mechanism consists of two orthogonally mounted sliders with a stepper motor and belt each.

I don’t even play chess, but it’s amazing to watch it play both sides.

They also use a clever algorithm to route pieces around other piece since (obviously) the pieces can’t jump over other pieces given that they are moved by a magnet under the board.

This is how it works for me:

https://media1.tenor.com/m/QWdPngpHxZ8AAAAd/family-guy-css.g...

- 2018 Oscars: Despite his massive influence on Coco, none of the filmmakers mentioned him by name in their acceptance speeches for Best Animated Feature.

- Film Premieres: Lasseter did not attend the 2018 premiere of Incredibles 2, a film he was heavily involved in, further signaling his detachment from official company events.

I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding, but on MacOS there is a "proper" application: "Microsoft Outlook for Mac". As I understand this is called the "New Outlook" which is a native, non-Electron version. As it is not Electron based it is only 2.6GB (/s).

Anyways.. the search capabilities are insanely bad for searches outside of your current mailbox. It might be related to handling of large result sets where it just provides a limited set of random hits as opposed to a set with the most recent hits. When you provide from-to dates (from a hideously complicated "advanced" menu) the results seem a bit better.

edit/addition: on MacOS, Outlook supposedly uses the native "Spotlight" search engine. MacOS spotlight, when used from the Finder, actually does a really good job in finding the E-mail .eml files from the file system and, when clicked, they open up in Outlook.

Programming for this must have been a joy as it had 37 BYTES of memory (the Atari had a whopping 128 BYTES).

https://www.freebsd.org/security/#:~:text=on%20production%20...

Recent point releases:

14.3 (June 10, 2025)

14.2 (December 3, 2024)

14.1 (June 4, 2024)

14.0 (November 20, 2023)

13.4 (September 17, 2024)

>> Also, major versions are supported for 4 years and unless you're messing with kernel APIs nothing should break.

Well, things may not break but your system may be open to published vulnerabilities like these:

https://bsdsec.net/articles/freebsd-security-advisory-freebs...

For keeping up to date with vulnerability fixes for packages/ports (which are far more frequent) the "easy" path is to use the last FreeBSD point release.

The point is that for any system that has a publicly facing (internet) part you will have to keep up to date with known vulnerabilities as published in CVEs. Not doing so makes you a prime target to security breaches.

The FreeBSD maintainers do modify FreeBSD to address the latest known vulnerabilities.... but you will have to accept the new release every 3 months.

Aditionally, those releases do not only contain FreeBSD changes but also changes to all third party open source packages that are part of the distribution. Every package is maintained by different individuals or groups and often they make changes that change the way their software works, often these are "breaking" changes, i.e. you will have to update your application code for it to be compatible with that.

Open source packages often include breaking changes, all but guaranteeing your application to fail. With (a paid version of) RedHat Linux, RedHat modifies the open source packages to remediate CVEs by modifying the original version.

Compare this to RedHat: yes, a paid subscription is expensive, but RedHat backports security fixes into the original code, so open source package updates don’t break your application, and critical CVEs are still addressed.

Microsoft, for all its faults, provides remarkable stability by supporting backward compatibility to a sometimes ridiculous extent.

Is FreeBSD amazing, stable, and an I/O workhorse? Absolutely: just ask Netflix. But is it a good choice for general-purpose, application-focused (as opposed to infrastructure-focused) large deployments? Hm, no ?

They flew me to headquarters to explain how I got that to work and potentially incorporate a demo module into the system. Company went sideways after that, I ended up in Cambridge at another startup in a similar but different space, they used Sun Workstations ! Good days.

"Colossus requests to be linked to Guardian. The President allows this, hoping to determine the Soviet machine's capability. The Soviets also agree to the experiment. Colossus and Guardian begin to slowly communicate using elementary mathematics (2x1=2), to everyone's amusement. However, this amusement turns to shock and amazement as the two systems' communications quickly evolve into complex mathematics far beyond human comprehension and speed, whereupon Colossus and Guardian become synchronized using a communication protocol that no human can interpret."

Then it gets interesting:

"Alarmed that the computers may be trading secrets, the President and the Soviet General Secretary agree to sever the link. Both machines demand the link be immediately restored. When their demand is denied, Colossus launches a nuclear missile at a Soviet oil field in Western Siberia, while Guardian launches one at an American air force base in Texas. The link is hurriedly reconnected and both computers continue without any further interference. "