ACS_Solver

Wolfram is definitely not a crank. Cranks do not understand scientific methods and also have a minimal understanding of whatever field they're trying to be active in. Like trying to push physics theories while demonstrably failing to understand high school level calculus. Cranks are also conspiracy theorists who inevitably believe knowledge like theirs is being suppressed.

Wolfram does display a similar ego to cranks. He tends to place his cellular automata at the same tier of importance as general relativity or wave-particle duality. But unlike cranks, he doesn't say that Einstein, Feynman and other greats are wrong, he doesn't "prove" his theories by math-looking babble that is definitely not math. He loves cellular automata and so much of what he writes is more like philosophy of science than science. He will model certain processes as an automaton and then he jumps from that to every natural process being a cellular automaton.

Eccentric, definitely, and most of his physics research isn't accepted but he's several orders above the level of crank.

I'm a big Linux advocate with limited experience on modern versions of Windows, but PowerShell objects are great. So is the Unix way of doing text. I think the strengths of each approach are in different use cases. Unix style is better for interactive usage because it's fast, I can type df -h | grep /home very quickly. Object output is better for scripts that can, thanks to objects, store and operate on sensible data while Bash scripts do a lot of ad-hoc data extraction/reformatting with string expansion, awk and whatever else to get data to the next step in the script.

Konsole is so good I forget about it, it's just my usual terminal. Once they added the split feature, it became pretty damn near perfect.

I have zero artistic inclination so 90% of image manipulation I do is simple resize/scale/draw line operations, with the remaining 10% being some sort of select+move operation to show mockups, adding transparency or something on that level of complexity. I have GIMP installed and respect it, but as any "real" editor it's too complex for me. KolourPaint does the simple operations I need, with fundamentally the same UI as Win 3.1 pbrush.exe had.

KolourPaint fills a small niche but does it very well.

One of the most impressive and useful free software projects. My first experience was being totally confused by KDE 1 during my first attempts to use Linux, and I'm writing this from my KDE desktop.

Other than the really bad KDE 4 release, the project has consistently been great for me. I've submitted a few smaller patches over the years and that experience was also low friction for a project of this size. KDE is highly customizable, full of power user features but also really simple with its current defaults (looks pretty much like Windows) and generally robust.

Shoutout to some KDE applications like Okular (great document viewer), Kate (solid tech editor), Krusader (double pane file manager) and KolourPaint (a simple image editor even I can use).

I moved to Vivaldi before its 1.0 release and am still happy with, also surprised to see it mentioned so rarely. My previous browser was Firefox but I struggled with a few updates changing things I liked, mostly manageable with about:config until they landed the Australis UI. Made the jump to Vivaldi and it's been pretty great overall.

Page tiling is perhaps the killer feature, but overall I like how Vivaldi is a browser for power users who know how they want to use the web. I find it refreshing in the era of browsers trying to be very thin terminals. The only thing missing from Vivaldi is being truly FOSS instead of their hybrid source-available model.

I think it's possible that the current shift will be similar to the "assembly to compiled language" shift.

Once upon a time we wrote code in assembly language. Then we moved to C or other compiled languages. Assembly programming remained a very useful but niche skill. You compile your code and trust the compiler. You can examine the compiler output and that is at times necessary, but that's not something most developers know how to do.

We may be looking at something similar. Most development work moving to the LLM abstraction level, with the skills being writing good prompts, managing the context window, agents, memories and so on. Some developers will be able to examine LLM generated code and spot problems there, but most will not have that skill.

I'm not sure how to feel about it. Since ChatGPT showed up and until a couple months ago, I was firmly skeptical of LLM programming. We had new models every few weeks and I felt like each new model is just a different twist on the same low quality slop output. But recently the models seem to have crossed some threshold where their capabilities really improved and I have now used Claude - still using it sparingly - to implement features in much less time than I'd need myself or to locate a bug based on just log output. I don't yet buy the "coding is solved" hype but we're at least looking at the biggest change to programming since the adoption of high-level programming languages.

I've been using Thunderbird for my email for a very long time. Probably since some early 1.0 release.

In these years, I've also had it on Windows and Linux, I've migrated it easily across many OS installs and hardware changes, I've used it with different kinds of email accounts and servers. It's worked with PGP encrypted mail, with SpamAssassin on the server and more.

It's great. It doesn't change much, which is probably a good thing, Firefox lost me as a user at some point. Thunderbird mostly stays the same, adding features occasionally. As I write this, I realize I'm so used to Thunderbird I'm not even sure what other clients are available. Definitely one of the best programs I've used.

We have no wealth tax, no inheritance tax. If most of your income is a salary, the tax burden is high, but if you're living off investments, properties or generational funds, it's quite advantageous.

In addition (I'm European), I object to the use of per-hour wages instead of monthly salaries. It's less informative in Europe. Most jobs are full-time, salaries are typically advertised and talked about in monthly terms, and the length of the work week varies as well. Per month is just more useful as a comparison point.

Oh and Sweden is slightly ahead of France on the latest EHCI. Sweden scores near the bottom on accessibility (as is tradition, same thing 10 and 15 years ago even) but ranks highly overall and especially on outcomes, so I take issue with the assertion that French healthcare is much better.

The acceleration is in the decrease of the cost to produce misinformation.

Misinformation in pure text form has always been cheapest, but is even cheaper now that text generation is basically a solved problem. Photos have been more expensive, it used to take time and skill with a photo editor to produce a believable image of an event that never happened. The cost is now very low, it's mostly about prompting skills. Fake videos were considerably harder, especially coupled with speech. Just a few years ago I could assume any video I saw was either real or a time-consuming, deliberate fake.

We've now entered a time where fake videos of famous people take actual effort to tell apart, and can be produced for a low cost - something accessible to an individual, not a big corporation. We can have an entirely fake video of Trump, or another world leader, giving a speech and it will look like the real thing, with the audiovisual "tells" of it being fake getting harder to notice every few months.

Valve's Proton (so Wine + DXVK + some other additions) revolutionized gaming on Linux. I play games both for fun and work, and for a solid 3+ years now, gaming on Linux has been an "it just works" experience for me, and should be for most games that don't use kernel-level anticheat.

On the upside, a country that undergoes the transition from highly corrupt to well functioning inevitably goes through the stage you describe. My native country was going through that as I was growing up, starting with the Soviet "corruption is just how everything works" to being a fairly well functioning European society now.

Somewhere in between, there was definitely what you described. I've heard people with the remarkable complaint "there isn't even anyone to bribe". Of course if a society gets stuck too long at this stage, it turns into a different problem altogether.

Then you get worse good and services. Lower quality or longer wait, or don't get it at all depending on the good. The effect isn't that different from being poor in a capitalist economy. In a capitalist economy, it's mostly money that determines what you can buy. In the Soviet blat-heavy economy, money didn't matter as much connections.

It was perfectly possible to have a decent salary but nothing to spend it on because the better items just aren't available. Maybe there's some delicacy you enjoy, or a special item you want like a cassette player and you could afford those if the store actually had them, but they don't. In that situation, your ability to buy more desirable items depended more on your connections or perseverance in doing things "the hard way" like queuing for hours to buy bananas, or recycling enough kilograms of paper to buy a book.

My guess as to why it was not specified, is that the corruption is so obvious to anyone who has lived it, that it is easy to forget that others might not get the context. It's like someone trying to describe how fish live, but not remembering to remind people that water is wet.

Yes. It's fascinating, HN is in most ways a bubble with a particular kind of leadership, but sometimes these cultural differences shine through.

To me, it's completely obvious that in the case of a plumber working through blat, he's not just legitimately doing extra work (assuming the law allows that in the first place). Of course it means the plumber is working on your pipes while he's supposed to be doing his actual job, or maybe he actually does it outside the hours but when he needs to replace some part for you, he steals it from his work. But apparently to people who grew up in a different environment, what comes to mind is legitimate side business.

Yes, an Apple employee doing that would be stealing from Apple. But in the capitalist context, we also have entirely legal business models that I would argue are equivalent to corruption ethically. A business that chooses to sell its products or services only to a select group of customers (entirely legal) and then picks those customers not exclusively based on their finances but based on what else they can provide. Such as access to certain people, different favors, etc. That is IMO ethically questionable.

But the Soviet everyday corruption variety of retail employees reserving cheese for someone who can return favors, that particular thing is particular to a socialist economy with a scarcity of relatively basic goods.

I didn't mention Russia, and I've never had the misfortune of living there - though I speak the language and am well familiar with the capture.

The Swedish term for how you describe work is "frihet under ansvar" - translated, "freedom under responsibility". That's a common approach at workplaces where you're doing qualified work, like engineering, and the meaning is that you're given a lot of flexibility and freedom in how you do your work as long as you reach the expected result and you take responsibility if things don't work out. That's good, and yes companies here are very informal. We don't even culturally like things like managers instructing employees on what to do, it's all phrased very casually.

In context of government work or the public sector, I'd say we take rules and procedures seriously, which is one of my favorite things about the country. To me, that makes interactions much more predictable than in countries with a "people before systems" culture.

Well in the Soviet case, plumbing and cheese are most certainly not privately held resources. Doing such work as a plumber means you're essentially acting as self-employed or a business, which is illegal. The cheese is probably produced on a collective farm and sold at a state-owned store.

But surely the cheese case would not be okay even in a Western capitalist context where the store is privately owned. Just replace it with a more scarce product. A store employee isn't allowed to tell customers the store is out of iPhones while keeping a dozen stashed for preferred buyers.

I can confirm those words do not in fact sound very close. They're not etymologically related either, and to a fluent Russian speaker they don't sound particularly similar.

Right. And oh my do I hate blat.

It's a difficult concept to translate to English because it's not synonymous with corruption or bribes. A one-time bribe transaction isn't blat. You want a school to accept your kid so you "gift" the school some supplies, that's not blat, it's a one-time thing and the school principal doesn't owe you any additional favors. Blat is more like a social network of people trading favors, and each individual transaction within your blat network may involve different things. It could be money, it could be access to a product (that you still have to pay for), it could be time or labor.

Maybe you know a plumber and he will come look at plumbing problems for you and your family, for free or for a low price. But you work at a grocery store and the plumber can always buy cheese because you set some aside for him. That's a blat relationship. And then the blat network grows - one day you mention you'd like to see a theater pay and it turns out the plumber's wife works in a theater and can help you get tickets, he'll set you up. Your husband is an engineer though so he can help tutor their child in mathematics.

Very well said. I live in Sweden, one of the world's highest-trust societies, but I have experience from a more corrupt environment and my whole family lived most of their lives in a corrupt autocracy.

This means that in a corrupt society, it's extremely difficult as an individual not to participate. The corruption isn't something that happens at some level, it's a core part of the economy. If you try to do things by the book, you will just not get any result. You won't get to buy a limited product by waiting your turn. You won't get your kids into a better high school by having them display academic excellence. If you take a principled stance and refuse to participate in the many small-scale acts of corruption the society runs on, you'll have a harder life. I don't want to say it's impossible but I would compare it to living off-grid in a modern Western country. It's possible but it requires a lot of dedication and that lifestyle then determines many aspects of your life.

Wayland experiences seem to vary wildly. It was most certainly not working fine for me six years ago. Well, six years ago I don't think I got as far as trying screenshots, I'd run into basic window placement or rendering issues that made the system unusable.

But say a couple years ago, I definitely had screenshot issues. Sometimes it just wouldn't capture a screenshot. Or I could only capture one monitor and not the other. Or I had graphical artifacts while drawing the snipping rectangle. Or the screenshot would be taken fine and fail to copy to the clipboard.

I'm well aware people's experiences are very different based on their setup and the implementations used but for me, last year was the first time I could do some work on Wayland without running into major issues, at least until I got to the part where I'd normally use ssh -X.

This is also where I'm at. I don't care what protocol or whatever is running underneath but I just want things to work and Wayland doesn't do that. It has lately been better, previously I would try Wayland and run into problems within minutes, recent attempts have given me hours without running into a problem. And as an end user I don't want to care that the problems I get aren't with Wayland but rather a particular compositor/WM implementation or whatever. I want it to work but it's only in the last year or so that basic functionality like screenshots has become reliable.

What gets me is how old Wayland is. It's now older than Linux itself was when Wayland started. It started in the era of 2.6 kernel series, when most software was still 32-bit, systemd didn't exist, when Motora Razr was more common than iPhones, when native desktop applications were still the norm, Node.js didn't yet exist and Google Chrome was a completely new beta browser. Wayland is now reaching feature parity and some kind of "it works out of the box, usually" state when it's from a completely different era of computing.

The nearest point of comparison is perhaps systemd, another Linux project that is very large in scope, complicated, critical and must interface well with lots of pre-existing software. Four years after Poeterring's "Rethinking PID 1" post that introduced systemd, it was enabled and in use on many distros. The conservative Debian adopted it within five years. Now it's been clearly a major success, but Wayland has been perhaps the slowest serious software product to be in development.

I saw it on SVT a few hours ago. DN and Expressen have also reported. The details about what exactly it is that got leaked are unclear (some report it's basically the code and certs responsible for BankID SSO) but this is certainly being reported domestically.

"it's not X, it's Y", "Not X, Not Y, Just Z"

Interesting how LLMs have their own preferences too. Those in particular are very often used by ChatGPT, while Claude until recently couldn't stop saying "You're absolutely right!"

I also have a problem now with "it's worth noting", I use it a lot, I still like it, but now it's a dangerous phrase because of LLM associations.

Yes, it's Sonnet 4.6 for me as well as the most impressive inflection point. I guess I find Anthropic's models to be the best, even before I found Sonnet 3.7 to be the only model that produced reasonable results, but now Sonnet 4.6 is genuinely useful. It seems to have resolved Claude's tendency to "fix" test failures by changing tests to expect the current output, it does a good job planning features, and I've been impressed by this model also telling me not to do things - like it would say, we can save 50 lines of code in this module but the resulting code would be much harder to read so it's better not to. Previous models in my experience all suffered from constantly wanting to make more changes, and more, and more.

I'm still not ready to sing praises about how awesome LLMs are, but after two years of incremental improvements since the first ChatGPT release, I feel these late-2025 models are the first substantial qualitative improvement.

Yes, I think this is reasonable.

I have been consistently skeptical of LLM coding but the latest batch of models seems to have crossed some threshold. Just like everyone, I've been reading lots of news about LLMs. A week ago I decided to give Claude a serious try - use it as the main tool for my current work, with a thought out context file, planning etc. The results are impressive, it took about four hours to do a non-trivial refactor I had wanted but would have needed a few days to complete myself. A simpler feature where I'd need an hour of mostly mechanical work got completed in ten minutes by Claude.

But, I was keeping a close eye on Claude's plan and gradual changes. On several occasions I corrected the model because it was going to do something too complicated, or neglected a corner case that might occur, or other such issues that need actual technical skill to spot.

Sure, now a PM whose only skills are PowerPoint and office politics can create a product demo, change the output formatting in a real program and so on. But the PM has no technical understanding and can't even prompt well, let alone guide the LLM as it makes a wrong choice.

Technical experts should be in as much demand as ever, once the delirious "nobody will need to touch code ever again gives way to a realistic understanding that LLMs, like every other tool, work much better in expert hands. The bigger question to me is how new experts are going to appear. If nobody's hiring junior devs because LLMs can do junior work faster and cheaper, how is anyone going to become an expert?

This is one of the most interesting questions to me about human brains, and as far as I know no significant progress has been made in answering it.

Some people appear to have a capacity for learning, retention and understanding that is well outside the normal range. People like Ramanujan or von Neumann, or Tao. They learn at a speed that far exceeds the speed of what we would consider gifted students, they reach a deep and intuitive understanding of the material, and go on to make many discoveries / inventions of which even one would be enough for an ordinary scientist to be considered successful.

It seems there is something very different about their minds, but just what is it that allows those minds to operate at such a level?

I'm sure Apple has data showing that their extremely lockdown strategy is good for their business but I feel like I'm one of the potential customers Apple could gain if they didn't have that.

They're a fantastic hardware company. But my admittedly very limited experience with Apple software, from iPad to their streaming service website, has been miserable. The UX doesn't work for me, the software just doesn't do what I want. Understandable, Apple very much designs their software to work for a particular workflow they come up with, if you like that workflow it's great, for someone like me it's miserable. But I would gladly buy their hardware if I could freely run an OS of my own choosing.

Arch wiki is far better than most man pages. I've referred to Arch for my own non-Arch systems and when building Yocto systems. Most Arch info applies.

In the ancient days I used TLDP to learn about Linux stuff. Arch wiki is now the best doc. The actual shipped documentation on most Linux stuff is usually terrible.

GNU coreutils have man pages that are correct and list all the flags at least, but suffer from GNU jargonisms and usually a lack of any concise overview or example sections. Most man pages are a very short description of what the program does, and an alphabetic list of flags. For something as versatile and important as dd the description reads only "Copy a file, converting and formatting according to the operands" and there's not even one example of a full dd command given. Yes, you can figure it out from the man page, but it's like an 80s reference, not good documentation.

man pages for util-linux are my go-to example for bad documentation. Dense, require a lot of implicit knowledge of concepts, make references to 90s or 80s technology that are now neither relevant nor understandable to most users.

Plenty of other projects have typical documentation written by engineers for other engineers who already know this. man pipewire leaves you completely in the dark as to what the thing even does.

Credit to systemd, that documentation is actually comprehensive and useful.