Hacker News: majewsky

New comment by majewsky in "An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word in pure Rust"

majewsky — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:43:09 +0000

Yes, but there used to be a gatekeeping effect because the development of huge software packages like LibreOffice was too capital-intensive to be enticing for a criminal enterprise. If you have malicious intent and know your way around software, finding a security defect and exploiting it for the umpteenth ransomware campaign is much easier than building a full office suite from scratch and getting a userbase going in order to sneak malware in years down the line. The implied fear is that coding chatbots may make this attack economically viable.

New comment by majewsky in "Everybody's Lost Their Minds"

majewsky — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:14:52 +0000

I agree. AI skeptics are widely met with disbelief when describing the atrocities that LLM operators are inflicting on society right now.

New comment by majewsky in "Everybody's Lost Their Minds"

majewsky — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:11:31 +0000

That may very well be true, but as you're describing it, I think of all my fellow engineers, all of them very talented, who moved up into management, arguing exactly the same point of thinking at higher abstraction levels. And after one or two years go by, they will come to me with requests or opinions that are literally the dumbest shit I've ever heard. Like arguing that we (holding most of our data on MariaDB and Postgres) should move everything into Kubernetes custom resources because "the Kubernetes resource model is the best database ever". That's a real thing that I've had an engineering lead say to me. When I asked how you're gonna do an efficient table join on Kubernetes resources, I just got a blank stare.

New comment by majewsky in "One year of sponsored Servo development"

majewsky — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:49:11 +0000

Will you though? I like the adage: "We used to write software like hardware will get twice as fast every 2 years. Now we should write software like hardware will get twice as expensive every 2 years."

New comment by majewsky in "Audacity 4.0"

majewsky — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:00:42 +0000

Yes, because GTK2 is so difficult to upgrade to new versions, whereas Qt4 to Qt5 usually only involved replacing a few identifiers (cannot speak to Qt6 since I don't do Qt anymore). That's why distros need to drag GTK2 along even though we are already at GTK4.

New comment by majewsky in "How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?"

majewsky — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:37:00 +0000

Try living without a Google or Apple account in a country where most bank accounts or other services (incl. in some cases government services) require a smartphone app only delivered through the monopolists' app stores and (in the case of Android, where installing degoogled Android images is technically possible) requiring Google Play Integrity to pass.

New comment by majewsky in "CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO"

majewsky — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:10:08 +0000

"It does not make sense to call him a murderer because then there would be a ton of murderers."

???

New comment by majewsky in "CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO"

majewsky — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:07:41 +0000

> Understand human nature, incentives, and complex systems like markets and how they produce incentives.

We do. "Class war" is just the succinct phrasing for "people who earn money through capital returns have vastly different incentives than people who earn money from their labor, and they also have the means to turn those interests into political leverage".

New comment by majewsky in "Don't paste the AI, please"

majewsky — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:13:57 +0000

> Hello 911, our auth service is down following a malformed config deployment.

"Emergency" is not the same as "emergency services".

New comment by majewsky in "PostgreSQL for Everything"

majewsky — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:57:52 +0000

"Disclaimer" means "don't take this seriously because I'm not an expert". You mean "disclosure".

New comment by majewsky in "Incident with Github.com"

majewsky — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:52:01 +0000

Not for me.

New comment by majewsky in "Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering"

majewsky — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:22:41 +0000

Static analysis does not help if the type comes from a library and is _meant_ to be initialized using a literal.

And then upstream adds new fields where the zero value is different from the previous behavior, causing users to silently drift away from the intended behavior. I had this happen to me with a type from std, and had to add a specific test to guard against it with future std upgrades: https://github.com/sapcc/go-bits/pull/309/changes#diff-f5721...

New comment by majewsky in "Go 1.27 Interactive Tour"

majewsky — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:17:52 +0000

> for instance by setting MaxIdleConns in Transport to 0

Which a lot of libraries are doing because they wrote an http.Transport{...} literal in an earlier version, and then std added new fields to the type in a way that silently breaks existing users. The zero value should have matched the previous default behavior.

Case in point: https://github.com/prometheus/client_golang/pull/1885/change...

We had the same in our own library, and now have a testcase checking if our own custom instantiation of http.Transport matches http.DefaultTransport, so that the tests scream loudly when upstream pulls this shit again: https://github.com/sapcc/go-bits/pull/309/changes

New comment by majewsky in "Go 1.27 Interactive Tour"

majewsky — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:14:28 +0000

It's almost as if the choices that make languages "look like this" are the ones that are generally associated with a more productive development workflow.

New comment by majewsky in "Go 1.27 Interactive Tour"

majewsky — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:13:37 +0000

But you would still have to deal with the mental load associated with having templates in your stack. I don't know if C++ is still as bad as it was back in my day about vomiting 20-line error messages at you because "std::vector" or something has a billion implied template arguments. That was definitely a cost that one had to bear even if one never used the "template" keyword.

New comment by majewsky in "Go 1.27 Interactive Tour"

majewsky — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:03:59 +0000

I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but I'm following the single-letter convention because "TIn" or "InputType" looks too much like an exported symbol. Whenever I tried to write type arguments like that, this threw me off, so I reverted to single letters.

New comment by majewsky in "Go 1.27 Interactive Tour"

majewsky — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:54:02 +0000

> "Box" isn't really a useful type.

It is very close to one. My Option[T] type [1] cannot have a Map method in stable Go because of the type system restriction in question. Instead, I have a separate package with freestanding functions with the same purpose, including Map [2].

[1] https://pkg.go.dev/go.xyrillian.de/gg/option#Option [2] https://pkg.go.dev/go.xyrillian.de/gg/options#Map

New comment by majewsky in "git's –end-of-options Flag"

majewsky — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 08:36:27 +0000

Access to a well-established set of tools for operating on unstructured text (coreutils, grep, sed, awk, etc.).

New comment by majewsky in "git's –end-of-options Flag"

majewsky — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 08:34:47 +0000

> It is literally, the absence of a desire to participate.

I agree with this position, and yet I would argue that, by taking the time to write out this comment, you are acting inconsistenly with your own statement.

I have old repos with "master" and new repos with "main". If someone were to approach me about one of the old repos and ask about the default branch, I would immediately change it to "main" without any hesitation, because it is all but certain that trying to get into an argument will waste more of my time than just doing the change would.

New comment by majewsky in "Advertise in ChatGPT"

majewsky — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:15:17 +0000

> If your revenue is 25 billion

It isn't. They had a one-month period around February that, if every month ran like taht, would constitute a yearly revenue of 25 billion. The fact that they appear to not have published a new annualized revenue number since then suggests that the trend is not upwards, which would make sense with the growing number of companies that are asking questions about ROI on AI expenses and cutting their token spend.