Hacker News: bsaul

New comment by bsaul in "Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it"

bsaul — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 19:15:44 +0000

Isn't it the passage of mathematics from the age of craftsmanship to the age of industrial making ?

My recent take on AI is that people haven't adapted to the new huge potential of the tool, and don't dream big enough (yet).

It's like seeing a car engine for the first time, lamenting about the future of horses, and not realizing it'll also help us fly.

New comment by bsaul in "Running the unmodified Linux amdgpu driver on an iPad"

bsaul — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 10:20:37 +0000

But then how do you even make the driver install on the ipad ? Aren't drivers supposed to run under system-level privileges (which iPadOS will never let you run under)

New comment by bsaul in "Running the unmodified Linux amdgpu driver on an iPad"

bsaul — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 08:26:55 +0000

can someone explains this project ? i understand nothing about what it's doing... Do iPads have amd gpus ??

New comment by bsaul in "What even is an OS now?"

bsaul — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 06:55:36 +0000

no idea you were working on fly !

As someone who's building its news project on it, it's both reassuring, but also not since you're leaving..

New comment by bsaul in "Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]"

bsaul — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:37:32 +0000

Totally disagree on the reevaluation of architecture best practices.

Agents are as prone as forgetting to update duplicated code as we are ( or almost ), because they work at the same level : text files spread everywhere that you have to open and read to know what's inside.

The fundamental reasons for those architecture best practices are still there, and it's actually quite convenient and also a good reason to remain optimistic in our ability to find a job as a professional software developer.

New comment by bsaul in "Developing provably correct Rust code with Verus"

bsaul — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 13:31:40 +0000

That's indeed a weird feeling when going back to another language after having coded in rust. First you're happy not having to write any "unsafe" keyword. Then you're horrified for the very same reason.

New comment by bsaul in "Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust"

bsaul — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:09:34 +0000

i'm surprised modular's doesn't get much traction. The promise seems super interesting, and chris latner has the record to back up his claims. If someone has an explanation..

New comment by bsaul in "So you want to use OpenRouter?"

bsaul — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:25:37 +0000

That looks absolutely horrifying. What are the alternatives ??

New comment by bsaul in "Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin"

bsaul — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:14:28 +0000

is there still no way to compile / execute ios apps on a linux machine ?

New comment by bsaul in "Zig’s io.threaded is neat"

bsaul — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:31:53 +0000

it's also my opinion. Which makes me wonder : isn't there an opportunity to create a variant of rust that would make absolutely zero compromise on UB and safety at the detriment of user experience ( which we don't care about now, with AI generating the code) ?

Like programming in a kind of super strict IL. Or the opposite : super poweful, super abstract language, yet extremely strict.

New comment by bsaul in "Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots"

bsaul — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:26:10 +0000

« Even America's closest postwar allies like the UK, Sweden and Japan did not get that type of diplomatic cover, it was exclusive to Israel.«

wasn’t echelon a joint collaboration between the US and the UK ?

New comment by bsaul in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

bsaul — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:59:04 +0000

That's actually a really good point... There's currently zero incentive to buying more hardware, and that's one very good reason do have a new one.

New comment by bsaul in "Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI"

bsaul — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:14:57 +0000

something i've just realized : today long-standing maths problems are falling. It's great intellectually but won't probably have an immediate impact on our lives.

Now, what will happen once long-standing physics ( and chemistry and biology) problems will start to fall and at the same rate ?

Then we're going to enter a totally different world.

New comment by bsaul in "US Treasury undertakes historic intervention in yen market"

bsaul — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 15:39:51 +0000

"was considering a mass sell off to raise cash to defend the Yen."

How would that have worked ? Selling US bonds in exchange for yens, to diminish the amount of yen in the economy, and pump up its price ?

New comment by bsaul in "Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9"

bsaul — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:08:52 +0000

Never developped a driver, but doesn't that require running the OS in some special mode, or in a VM, requiring a ton of time waiting for the thing to reboot over and over again ?

New comment by bsaul in "Scaling to 1M concurrent sandboxes in seconds"

bsaul — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:47:11 +0000

how complex is maintaining a firecracker cluster over bare metal in practice ?

New comment by bsaul in "A road to Lisp: Why Lisp"

bsaul — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:22:13 +0000

never understood why people say that: the syntax for defining code seems quite different from the syntax defining data structure. There's no homoiconicity in javascript..

New comment by bsaul in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

bsaul — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:12:14 +0000

Not a really nice post. It reads like someone refusing to accept bitter feelings (which is absolutely understandable given the circumstances), and then go on to personally attacking the person who hurt you.

He should have kept the "horrible manager" parts away, as it really doesn't have anything to do with the point of the post.

New comment by bsaul in "Postgres transactions are a distributed systems superpower"

bsaul — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:06:33 +0000

i don't understand the last point of UDF. Either you need the state to be updated atomically across different systems or you don't. But writing a row in a system in order to update the second one at any random time in the future isn't really much different from enqueuing a job in queue.

New comment by bsaul in "AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design"

bsaul — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 20:35:22 +0000

I wonder if our common expectation that true theories somehow had to be beautiful and elegant is going to survive the coming century. What if "real" nature phenomenon were actually best described by horrible mess of impossible equations, that only machines could actually manipulate and reason about ?

That would be really sad..