Hacker News: beej71

New comment by beej71 in "AURpocalypse now: a look at the recent AUR attacks"

beej71 — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 02:08:50 +0000

I do. I just keep reading the diffs on the PLGBUILDs.

New comment by beej71 in "Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school"

beej71 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:42:33 +0000

Be careful. Speed of learning isn't necessarily the goal. Durability is another metric. I learn more quickly with LLMs, too, but it's certainly questionable if that learning is as durable or deep as learning through struggling with a book.

The students of lowly-rated profs had better 10-year outcomes than those with highly-rated profs according to a study that I think came out of the Naval Institute a decade or two ago. "No shine without friction."

We need more data. Certainly turning students loose with AI stunts them. There's probably some happy medium. But where kids need the most practice with fundamentals when they're young, a blanket ban for now seems sensible. And it also seems like a good plan to introduce it when they get older. I suspect we'll learn a lot from this Norwegian experiment.

New comment by beej71 in "Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good"

beej71 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:21:21 +0000

How many of you feel this, anecdotally? I had to come up with a class hierarchy for a roguelike game the other day. This should be something that's dead simple, off the top of my head, no problem.

And suddenly I was stuck! It was like thoughts weren't forming properly. My instinct was to use Claude to help brainstorm, but I resisted. 5 minutes later, I finally broke free and instantly came up with the plan.

What the hell?

I realized I'd offloaded my planning onto AI. I would ask it for plans and then choose the best one, but that's a different skill than coming up with the plans in the first place. My skills were rotting.

New comment by beej71 in "Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore"

beej71 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:44:34 +0000

Where is the demand coming from, is what I'm getting at. Because it's not from the population on this case, it would seem.

New comment by beej71 in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

beej71 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:41:15 +0000

In this case it was to settle a bill. And I know I'm channeling a bit of Leonard McCoy here, but there's no fucking way I'm letting an AI take money out of my bank account. :)

New comment by beej71 in "Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore"

beej71 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:36:20 +0000

The claim is that if you increase supply the price will drop. The counter-example is a case where supply was increased and the price doubled. The question is why did that happen?

It very much looks like the "just build" model is insufficient to explain what's happened in that case.

New comment by beej71 in "Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore"

beej71 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:20:40 +0000

I don't think it's that simple. In my town, we're building like mad (thousands of units) and it is possibly slightly impacting pricing in that the rise is not as meteoric as it was 7 years ago. But new buyers are still priced out. Houses are vacant. There must be other factors.

New comment by beej71 in "I found 10k GitHub repositories distributing Trojan malware"

beej71 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:09:29 +0000

I added keyoxide proofs everywhere. It's not really protection against victims using the wrong repo, but at least people who look can be certain that the person who controls my domain and website is the same person who controls that particular GitHub account.

New comment by beej71 in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

beej71 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:55:48 +0000

This reminds me that I have to write my dentist. They replaced their beep answering machine with an AI chatbot, and the experience is horrible. I just want to say what I want, have it transcribed to text, and then have a human do something about it. It. I don't want to have to slowly explain to a bot who is just going to do the same thing.

Plus, the first time you encounter it, it doesn't identify itself as a bot for a couple sentences. And it's convincing enough that you fall for it. The feeling of being let down and realizing that you were just talking to a chump robot is severe, and is now associated with my dentist's brand.

New comment by beej71 in "U.S. science is in chaos"

beej71 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:42:37 +0000

We had one that mentioned "mineral inclusion".

New comment by beej71 in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

beej71 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:49:40 +0000

It depends on the topic, of course. I have a self-help book for my computer science students that talks about the best way to get a computer science bachelor's it weighs in at 64 pages. It's too small to print, but it really doesn't need to be any bigger.

New comment by beej71 in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

beej71 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:46:38 +0000

The author even mentions this. Why watch a 20-minute video when you can just scrub to the 40 seconds you need?

A lot of self-help books fall into this category. But if you go to a publisher and say that you're going to publish a 20-page book, they're going to laugh you out of the room.

New comment by beej71 in "Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages"

beej71 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:29:04 +0000

The wrapper will give you a nice diff of what changed. You can do that by hand, too, though.

New comment by beej71 in "Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages"

beej71 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:26:16 +0000

There are 15k orphaned packages on AUR. I just adopted 3 rarely-updated ones this morning (sorting by most popular) and got them built. If you're using an orphaned package, consider adopting it so the baddies can't.

New comment by beej71 in "Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages"

beej71 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:24:12 +0000

This makes me want to adopt more packages. Lots of the orphans barely need updating.

New comment by beej71 in "Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages"

beej71 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:17:53 +0000

I hear you, but consider xz. I'm a professional with decades of experience and I'd be lying if I said I'd have caught that. How long would an audit have taken, realistically? You're not wrong, but I don't think the GP is, either.

New comment by beej71 in "Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages"

beej71 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:07:16 +0000

There's some big stuff in AUR like the binary VS Code and Chrome, fwiw.

New comment by beej71 in "A dumpster arrived behind my university's library"

beej71 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:34:35 +0000

Also, when I (GenX) open my ereader on my phone, I read it just like anything else. And I read paper books, on two e-readers, my phone, and my computer screen.

If it's some online article, though, I definitely skim. And I'd skim if it were printed, too.

New comment by beej71 in "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort"

beej71 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 02:40:36 +0000

FMFL. I'm going to build a paper-based social network where non-handwriting is prohibited. Like in the 70s.

New comment by beej71 in "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension"

beej71 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:56:29 +0000

I feel for people who have this issue--wish I could help you solve it, but I can't repro. My 10-year-old laptop with 16 GB runs it great with low memory usage.