diffeomorphism

People making decisions.

Pay me 8x to get 10x, great. Pay me 8x to get 3x, nope.

Being a "failure" means it fails to meet its success criteria.

If you claim 10x and deliver 3x, that is a failure. The 3x may still be impressive or a gamechanger or ..., but it still falls short of its promises.

Entirely different perspective: If I have to add a separate repo, then this is a red flag.

Any serious project in this space supports as many distros as possible.

Wrong way around. Any serious product is supported by lots of distros. Distros curate their selection and if nobody bothered packaging your stuff, then your stuff is not good enough.

The US has it much easier not harder.

The average population density is pretty irrelevant here. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_population_map.pn...

Lots of high density cluster and much easier geography (Switzerland famously has lots of mountains in the way).

So the question is "Why do US metropolitan areas not have 25gbit fiber for about $60/month?".

There are different notions of "reproducible". Nix does not automatically make builds reproducible in the way that matters here:

https://reproducible.nixos.org

It is still good at that but the difference to other distros is rather small:

https://reproducible-builds.org/citests/

How would "bit-identical" or "free of side effects" make an actual difference in practice?

Rollback is already very easy with filesystem snapshots. Configs are already tracked by etckeeper. New laptop: either copy the whole drive or the package list and dotfiles. Also, how often do you have to get new laptops for this to be relevant ?

That reads like blatant nonsense.

For a 5 (five) document library you added 3 (three) documents just to override a single response. Nothing at all is hidden and all three documents are in clear human understandable language.

This is not an "attack" or "poisoning" but just everything working as intended.

Because AI needs so much more power and in particular RAM.

The apple pricing ladder is all about the confusingly named overlap.

The Air with more ram costs just a bit less than the pro non-pro. But then maybe you want the pro pro? Or do you need the pro max? Oh, and the ultra will come later but not for laptops. Also it will then be a smaller number M but ultra.

Oh, and the iPad air is, of course, heavier than the pro because "air".

Heavier than competing 14in laptops. Just okay res display. Low refresh rate. No oled or mini led. Basically unrepairable.

There are reasons the MacBook pro exists. The air is a nice machine but there are definitely trade-off.

Wrong question. If you sell a 6k€ machine "for AI", then you are judged on your own merits.

Replies like "but, but other laptops" are very weak attempts at deflection.

Under local deployment:

Local backend server with full API Local model integration (vLLM, Ollama, LM Studio, etc.) Complete isolation from cloud services Zero external dependencies

Seems open source/open weight to me. They additionally offer some cloud hosted version.

Because they are a fire hazard:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62vk0p5dn5o

Trash compactors break the batteries in these things. A deposit could help to ensure that the vapes are disposed responsibly.

Other option: Add an "electronics" bin everywhere. Though that would be more expensive and less clear how effective it would be.

Companies often have flex offices with docking stations.

So previously you would have a screen, mouse and keyboard at every desk and people would move a laptop (ignoring its low res screen and bad keyboard).

Here you would have just a screen at every desk and people move their mouse and keyboard.

Also, this does have a battery.

When do you think the "web 2.0 era" was?

Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years. Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate.

The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.

Nah, the irony is that you think that this was not done on purpose. E.g. look at the hamburger menu on the top right.

It is called "making fun of" not "irony".

Which is very much on purpose to make fun of exactly that. Try some of the other settings in the top right, e.g. the literal hamburger menu.

For matter over thread you do need a hub and you need more certifications for matter, so for manufacturers it is less open.

The standardization is a plus though.

Because an FFT (short for "Fast Fourier Transform") is nothing more than a curve-fit of sines and cosines to some given data

That is not even wrong. A Fourier transform is a basis expansion. In particular, the full expansion is exact (not just an approximation). Of course, truncated expansions are approximations.

The actually interesting part: Why is this basis expansion so much more useful than, e.g. expanding into some eigenfunctions, Hermite polynomials, etc.? The decomposition into (complex) exponentials converts between addition and multiplication, i. e. sin(x+y), cos(x+y) you get from multiplying sin(x), cos(x), sin(y) and cos(y). This in turn has important implications such as turning derivatives into multipliers. More generally you can consider nonlinear Fourier transforms with different groups and generators other than exponentials.

TLDR: It is a transform. What you are transforming between is what makes it so useful.

Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth,”

This is satire, right?

Unethical behavior does not become good just because it happens to hurt "bad people" (or more accurately, companies bought by bad people).

The robots.txt is pretty explicit that this scraping is "disallowed"

https://www.goodreads.com/robots.txt

So legalities aside, this seems unethical.

TLDR: regulations

The toothpaste maker wants to claim something like "Novamin is useful". In the EU this is treated as for cosmetics, so relatively low bar to clear. In the US this is treated as pharmaceutical, so a high bar to clear. The manufacturer has decided that passing that bar is not financially sensible for them.

History, venture capital, single language market, ... . Probably a dozen different factors you could point at instead.

Not inane at all, just your phrasing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

This is not about "X sucks", but the very first questions from an engineering perspective should be whY? What do you want to accomplish? Is X actually a good approach towards Y?

If it turns out that trying to shoehorn X into kinda accomplishing Y is very hard work, then suggesting to use X2 instead is a perfectly sensible suggestion.

If you have a hard constraint that you must use X, even if it does not fit well to Y, fair enough. Then you add that as a reply or state it in the beginning.

Out of interest: They talk a lot about how they think/hope their license is not contradictory. Has anybody with legal expertise verified this?

Open-ish source is one thing, but an untested custom license is an issue in itself.

The post title should probably start with "Show HN:".

What kind of security guarantees do you have?

It seems to meet that your "problem" usually is unanswered on purpose:

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/

This has access to sensitive knowledge, tool use and exfiltration. So, the tech seems nice, but I doubt I could ever get permission to deploy this.

Weird windows centric view.

There shouldn't even be a question where to put things much less a "wherever you want". Instead you want a sane, sensible standard.

Yeah, those people were apparently 100% correct and this was a colossal failure.

Instead of large, accountable providers, now three quarters of their customers use vpns or switched to sites without age verification.