pronik

I'm probably not the only one to have a deep distrust in passkeys. I've deep-dived in to what they are and how they work and I think I can accept them on their technical merits, but I can't shake the feeling that the adoption has been way faster than we've been used to, for whatever reason. I think it was half a year between the settling down of the specification to being bombarded by a "Get a passkey!" from every goddamn website on this earth. I don't really see what the conspiracy to move the whole world to passkeys would be here, but it certainly feels like there is one.

I think my problem with passkeys is the same as with almost everything today: if I lose my phone, my digital life will be almost as difficult to recover as if I lost my ID and my birth certificate at the same time. Yes, that's why you don't create one passkey (phone), but maybe two or three (browsers), but that's mental load on myself -- I don't even try to explain that stuff to my parents, even something as (somewhat) easy to use as a password manager is out of their scope. Add TOTP and passkeys on top of that and you've got perfect security that no-one in their right minds is using. No idea how to resolve the problem, but it's not by shoving a solution down our throats with a vengeance.

Which was completely bonkers -- it happened completely in the open, people were just outraged that something like this happens without asking them and not on a schedule they perceive as adequate. Most of them haven't really grasped what was happening and why. Many still don't.

blanket-closed all issues submitted before the rewrite

You'll need a citation for that. While I'm still not sure whether Claude Code's issue tracker is worth much (Anthropic doesn't seem to engage with individual issues a while lot), it still has 5k+ open issues ranging back to March 2025. Bun also still has all of its Zig-timeline issues, all 5k+ of them. So what's this about?

If you need to point to Anna's Archive for knowledge preservation, then we as a society are not intentionally preserving knowledge, quite the opposite actually.

To me, this seems like a typical "how hard can it be" startup mentality. People, especially those "fast to the market" type, tend to vastly underestimate all the corner cases of the technology, mostly tending to the happy path and outsourcing the pain to their customers. The reason they still have customers is because most of the market has the same problems and a solution that covers those corner cases is way more expensive and also way more extensive in terms of infrastructure you'd need. You would have hoped there is middle-ground there, i.e. a startup on the cheaper side with a vision for corner cases, but knowing how markets and marketing works I'm not holding my breath for that.

A big part of those corner cases is the assumption of the user being an independent responsible adult without problems. Voice control is only acceptable if you don't startle anyone with or don't have anyone talking or screaming while you are talking. Booking tickets with "one ticket per smartphone" doesn't work when you have kids. Doing basically anything that's smartphone-only requires you to have it on you, charged and for the most part with an internet connection -- great for underground parking garages. God forbid you have lost your smartphone while drunk or have been robbed -- forget driving home with the virtual car key only being in your phone, forget paying for a taxi, forget entering your home protected by a smart lock. All of this assuming the tech works perfectly and durably, which we know is not the case for most of modern tech.

I'm so so tired of this Alpine fetish. Alpine has its uses, but most of the time a slim Debian image (or indeed any distro out there) is just fine. With Alpine you are trading size for a lot of unexpected pain, so it's a move that has to be well-understood instead of being a blanket recommendation. The most common problem is building Python images, where you suddenly have to build most of your packages instead of using wheels, but subtle musl incompatibilities will bite you at the most inconvienient time.

People say "States" or even US all the time, usually forgetting the other country that has "United States" in their name.

The good old "malware patches Windows so that sending spam is stable again".

Meaning you would be pressing LMB and RMB with your index finger, moving it from the trackpoint itself? I can imagine controlling the trackpoint with the middle finger and use the index and ring finger to press the buttons, but it's far away from the "original" way to do it.

Would be enough if Claude Code moves without major issues

Sure, but which of those buttons would be suitable? Keep in mind, it will be your thumb that needs to land naturally on that button while your index finger rests on the trackpoint. And the scroll button is also usually the middle button even though there are cases where you need middle-mouse drag (looking at you, Blender) for which a fourth button might go quite nice.

For such a niche area, it's astonishing how many of these projects miss some or indeed all of relevant features of the TrackPoint. In this particular case, it has already been mentioned that this doesn't make any sense outside of the keyboard. Additionally, it looks really awkward to use for someone used to the classic and there seems to be no button suitable for scrolling. It really looks like a "we heard geeks like trackpoints, let's do one" kind of project.

By reading this thread I've learned that, apparently, you are not allowed to rewrite a large piece of software backed by a large test suite in another language within two weeks otherwise you are a witch and need to be burned on a stake. You are also not allowed to move from the PoC phase to lets-do-it phase within a couple of days without being called names. Why are we concerned with speed all of a sudden? Are we in the "people will literally die if a car moved faster than 25 mph" era of software engineering? Let them do whatever they want, they've shown the will to move on from wrong decisions, they will do it again if the Rust port fails to deliver and the whole industry gets to learn from it, whatever "it" might become.

an agent running on your computer, organizing your files, your schedule, your messages, your bills, bank accounts, etc. All the parts of your life that were routine drudgery should be able to be offloaded to a smart agent, based on your preference, to bring you the information you needed with natural language queries, contextualized to what you were doing at the time, when you need it.

The hard reality is that you are still responsible for all of these things. If anything goes wrong at all, you are liable. Might not be devastating if it's just your shopping list or your photos mangled, but with taxes or bills? Even if the agent is running completely locally in your home, you still won't trust it fully if your livelihood depended on it.

The killer app is only possible if software is fully reliable, which we all know is not the case. Software is just that: software, it still has bugs, undefined behaviour etc. Agents are the same, they just break in different way and fixing them might be even more difficult.

Bottom line: you will always be liable for things happening in your name and we've been sold a fairy tale a very long time ago.

One thing I'm constantly baffled by in current technology is how it seems to be targeted at one pretty precise subset of human population: young, healthy, single people without any problems with perfectly pre-defined schedules and organized lives. Speaking English, having an OCD and being relatively wealthy is a bonus.

Only when you live alone might you be comfortable constantly speaking with your devices. Only if your life if perfectly predefined can you let your fridge order the same food that just gone stale or has been eaten. And only when you are young and healthy and not in any way differing from the "standard" would you be capable of working like these "researchers" imagine you to.

I'm not that person. I'm constantly failing at doing "triple-finger-taps" whenever I'm in need of one. I have a smartwatch with pedestrian navigation and never bothered to remember which vibration pattern means which turn. I don't configure different vibration patterns for different callers on the phone. I have a folding phone, but I almost never do side-by-side windows and when I do, I need to find out how to do that first -- and then how to leave that mode without losing my mind. I almost never use AI features on my phone not because I don't want to, but because I never remember how to activate them. I don't re-configure my gadgets to "fit my mood". I hate recommendations like "you like X, here's Y, it's the same!" I hate that I can't rest my mouse cursor on websites anymore without selecting something actionable, moving, animating or autoplaying.

All of the examples on the linked page are workflows I would never do this way. I won't be talking to my shopping list to double the ingredients. I won't be drawing gestures with my mouse on a document to activate a voice command. I won't use voice commands in general because as it turns out, I'm not capable of bringing out a complete coherent sentence without pausing and/or changing my mind and/or realizing I'm wrong once.

I appreciate those demos for the progress they are showing. It's impressive and astonishing to see restaurants getting extracted from videos or pictures getting expanded or text edited better than I ever could. It's all modern-day magic in a way. One thing it all isn't is a product. We don't have those anymore -- all we get are gimmicks. We don't do common interfaces anymore either, we are separating people in Google/Apple/Xiaomi camps.

And most importantly we don't use that technology for good except for a bunch of people writing e-mails all day, doing shopping lists and booking one of top restaurants in Tokyo for the same evening on a whim. We are long overdue for a remake of "American Psycho", but this time it will be a documentary instead of a satire.

There is so much technology that we are unable to reproduce locally, I don't think LLMs are in any way different. There will be large LLM manufacturers, small LLM manufacturers, LLM artisanals, LLM enthusiasts and of course LLM consumers, just like with everything.

They will be, and that moment is not that far off. We've got the progression in place already: first, large data centers could have performant LLMs, we are now firmly in "a bunch of servers with a couple of H100s each" territory, slowly going into "128 GB VRAM on a MacBook Pro or a Strix Halo". Within the next year, the pattern of "expensive remote LLM for planning, local slow-but-faster-than-human LLM for execution" will become the norm for companies, slowly moving to "using local LLM for everything is good enough". And then we'll have the equilibrium we already have with the "classic cloud": you either self-host or pay for flexibility and speed. The question will be: how much of the current compute capacity craze will local hosting give the kiss of death to and what that means for the market.

I've taken that comment to be very sarcastic, but maybe it wasn't.

Ursula von den Leyen has been pushing internet blocks in Germany for the sake of the children since 2009. Which is when "Zensursula" nickname has been coined. You don't need to look far to find the same thinking by the people in power.

But they had the guts to back away. Not everyone does.

Speaking of the size: my first PC, built by a family friend, had a 80MB disk, split into two partitions. The second 40MB partition had Windows 3.1 and about two Norton Commander columns full of games on it, largest of which were Wolfenstein 3D and Lost Vikings with about 1.4MB each. Truly a different era.

Around the time DirectX came around and first games requiring it appeared, which in my memory coincided with hard drives getting way bigger and first games being delivered on a CD instead of floppies, I've been apalled at how I could see literal BMPs being written to disk during the installation. This was the same time when cracked games were being distributed via BBS at a fraction of the original size with custom installers which decompressed MP3s to their original WAV files. I've asked the same questions then: why WAV, why BMP, why the bloat? With time I've learned the answer: disk space is cheap, memory and CPU cycles are not, if you can afford to save yourself the decoding step, you just do it, your players will love it. You work with constraints you have and when there loosen up, your possibilities expand too.

Maybe they are being acquired to improve the quality of Codex.

Code speed or not, people talk about how coding agents have taken away their passion. I've been reflecting on that for quite some time now and quite honestly, I don't miss a single thing.

My passion has always been building something, but my building has always been hindered by a myriad of small paper cuts -- it's just what technology is and, if we are being honest, always has been. It's not being able to recall an exact syntax or a function name for something I know exists, it's frantically searching for whether something I need exists at all and if so, in anything I'm using alredy, it's a CI build not doing the simplest thing after working for months, it's a TypeScript error with a new library not wanting to compile until I change a dozen of things in tsconfig.json, it's my editor deciding not to update diagnostics today at any cost, it's deprecated syntax, it's documentation not describing what functions do and functions not working like the documentation describes them, it's hunting after weird bugs in fourth- and fifth-party code triggered exactly by four people in the world, one of them being me right now.

This list goes on and on and all of those things are great when I finally manage to solve the problems. However, in terms of building things, I find it extremely liberating to have a literal assistant capable of sorting this shit out in seconds or minutes instead of me banging my head against the wall the whole night. Code writing speed wasn't my problem, but I appreciate when I can think about the code as the whole and change it as a whole in an instant. My time spent on building something hasn't changed much in absolute terms, but in the same spent time I will have taken a dozen detours, experimented with alternatives and provided enough context to tell anyone who asks why something is built this way and not another.

An anecdote: for a while now I've noticed or imagined Claude Code becoming ever so slightly dumber around 3-4pm CEST, I've been calling it the "Americans are awake" syndrome, because of assumed higher usage while keeping the latency the same (which is something Anthropic surely keeps an eye on) and thus lower quality.

I'd be more concerned about confusing it with https://github.com/sindresorhus/got, which is well-established (15k stars on GitHub is nothing to sneeze at).

Our life has become so dumb in certain ways. There are people who invested heavily in learning their mother or a foreign language, its spelling, grammar, syntax and idiosyncrasies, like when to use an em-dash, an Oxford comma, a semicolon, an ellipsis -- these smart educated people now seriously deliberate whether using wrong dashes and adding a spelling mistake or two would be a good way to prove you are a human (I think we never should have allowed the framing of CAPTCHA to be "prove you are not a robot", it was demeaning back then and still is now, it's just that the alternatives were not and still aren't clear-cut). The same things that would have made you fail a written essay in school are somehow becoming a requirement, but not in "haX0r" or online communities where "writing funny" has always been a differentiating factor, but for absolutely everybody who has to communicate with others in written form.

It's of course not a surprise that an LLM would be most proficient in language use and, adjacent to that, in proper formatting of said language. But it's a good thing and a good tool for writing, as anyone who has ever used a classic spell or grammar checker will attest to. But apparently we as a society have once again managed to completely overlook and demonise the good and now people who have paid attention in school have to bow to people who are somehow convinced that perfect spelling is a sign that someone cheated. This is not LLMs' fault, it's people's who think they've understood something when they really haven't, crying heresy over others doing things the correct way.

That being said: of course there are social and technological challenges with cheating, spam bots and sock puppets and what not, but the phenomenon itself is not really new, just the scale, cost and quality is way different now. We need to find a balanced way to approach it -- trying to weed out every last possible AI cheater while hurting real innocent people in the process is not worth it. Especially since we don't have a proper metric to actually prove who's a cheater and who is not, it's gotten way harder since the days of "As a large language model" being in every second sentence.

The problem is that US is actively exporting all the plagues they call their own worldwide, so that tipping (the mandatory-on-the-card-terminal kind) is currently actively infecting Europe. Which you could have gathered by reading this very discussion.

It's not the tipping culture that's invading Germany, it's the "begging for tips" culture. The worst kind. You buy a piece of bread at the bakery over the counter, pay with card, the card reader is begging for tips. This is exceptionally out of the ordinary, but I'm afraid there is not enough explicit resistance and there is still too much "looking up to the USA" happening so that the society might accept this idiocy as normal some day.

An especially egregious case I've encountered was at Berlin train station.

Normally in Germany, you've got those distinct card terminals with a display where you see your total before paying. Some of those have started nagging you for tips which you need to explicitely accept or decline first before tapping your card. Not in this case though: after you've ordered your food, they point you to the combined order/pay display and while you awe at the technology marvel of combining both, you tap your card on that and then you notice that 15% tip has been automatically included and charged. You needed to notice some small text and small buttons in the corner of that display beforehand and actively tap on "0%" or something before tapping your card. I'm already furious they've let this tip begging to be added to the card terminals, but charging tips without explicit consent should be completely illegal.