sebstefan

Creatine is very uncontroversial and the scientific consensus is that it's an all around good thing, so I wouldn't be surprised

I swear I'm not trying to be inflamatory, but this is the _worst_ programming language feature I could ever imagine. I'm not trying to be hyperbolic, if I try to reason about it there is nothing I can come up with that I would dislike more in the realm of recent features that have been pitched in the PL community

I was already in the camp that try/catch is "considered harmful", I dislike the concept of having a second, hidden, control flow that might get sprung up upon function callers, because it has side effects buried in the implementation of a callee that are not defined in the parameters or the returns, and I am not 100% sold on the benefits of "Things in the middle don’t need to concern themselves with error handling.", which I guess informs this opinion.

Now since I hate that, I really, really would hate that on top of this, another programmer could write a hidden control flow upstairs that could, potentially, not just crash my code, but also do a lot of other things, such as coming up with default values for unexpected NULLs or whatever, which could THEN take something that would have crashed immediately, and turn it into something that crashes later down the line, away from the problem, with a varialble set to an inexplicable value that I have never put there myself

What a nightmare to debug! I mean, come on

We don't have a red scare. Communist symbols aren't a dealbreaker in europe.

YouTube is eating itself from the inside out too. Everyone hates the demonetization stuff but the low effort AI slop content is what really kills it for me. YouTube got massive because it had real creators. Supply and demand. A real marketplace. But if you keep kicking off the actual suppliers and replacing them with low effort garbage, literally anyone can host that garbage.

I don't see slop on youtube and nobody I know is complaining about it. My current problem is private equity buying all the channels I love!

Veritasium, Fern!

Most of europe has communist parties running in elections and getting non negligible scores, then alliances and seats in parliaments, municipal councils, ...

So that's just one more win for formal verification despite the title it seems

I'm genuinely excited about AI agents and formal verification languages. To me it's obviously the way forward instead of moonshots trying to make agents that program in their own AI blackbox binary, or agents that code in current programming languages.

If we are heading in the direction of "huge codebases that nobody has written", or, "code is an artifact for the machine", I don't see a way out without making it proved.

If humans can review and edit the spec, then verify that the implementation matches it, suddenly leaving the implementation be an artifact for the machines seems okay

The downside of provers also being that they are a massive pain in the ass that very few want to use, this is also a complete win.

Woah I stand corrected. Not really when AI starts but when it starts getting useful for sure.

Every morning a few thousand people wake up and ship something. A tool, a SaaS, a newsletter, an app that does the thing the other app does but slightly differently. They post it on Hacker News. Nobody clicks.

This is not new. What's new is the scale. An AI can wake up (or whatever it does at 3am) and ship twelve of these before breakfast.

That's fun, I'm sure if somebody actually checked that and graphed it, you would not be able to pinpoint when AI starts on the graph

this is plenty of actual reasons already

A world championship with rapid timecontrols alone should have been enough reason

Hikaru Nakamura, the 2022 Fischer Random World Champion, declined his invitation to the event, citing the changes in the format, rushed arrangement, reduced prize fund, and his focus on the upcoming Candidates Tournament 2026. He said he had been invited to the first leg of the 2026 Freestyle Tour, with the same format and prize fund as the 2025 tour; however, a few days before the announcement of the world championship, he was informed there would be no year-long tour. Instead, only a three-day event with rapid time controls would be held, and it would be called a World Championship. He called it a "hastily arranged tournament with less than 1/3rd the prize fund it originally had", and lamented that the classical length format from the first event in 2025 wasn't continued.

For those wondering why Nakamura (who we're used to seeing winning, or in the top 3 in chess960 tournaments) isn't there

Hikaru Nakamura, the 2022 Fischer Random World Champion, declined his invitation to the event, citing the changes in the format, rushed arrangement, reduced prize fund, and his focus on the upcoming Candidates Tournament 2026. He said he had been invited to the first leg of the 2026 Freestyle Tour, with the same format and prize fund as the 2025 tour; however, a few days before the announcement of the world championship, he was informed there would be no year-long tour. Instead, only a three-day event with rapid time controls would be held, and it would be called a World Championship. He called it a "hastily arranged tournament with less than 1/3rd the prize fund it originally had", and lamented that the classical length format from the first event in 2025 wasn't continued.

You got that fact from my own comment a few ones above this

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo

It was a 3rd party

I'm not saying they won't ever start collecting it and selling it. I'm saying the day they do, it will be laid out in their privacy policy. Right now they're making statements that they're not even collecting it.

Nope, when corporate overlords sell your data they say it in their terms of use and privacy policies because no one is that stupid. If Discord says they're not selling that data, they're not selling that data. The day they'll start doing it, they'll put it in their policy.

You're making up a reality that doesn't exist in your head and claiming it's the truth.

You have in your head examples like facebook or spotify. Spoiler: They tell you exactly with what sauce you're gonna be eaten

How many users are paying?

7.3 million paying every month

How many use the service for "free"?

143 million times maybe 2 bucks once. Most likely five cents once.

Are you stupid?

Flagged

How much? 2 bucks per user?

Their paid users shell out 3 a month...

And then you think of the real world

secretly selling your IDs data behind your back, they have to account for that revenue in their books, put it in their privacy policies or do it illegally, it's weak to whistleblowers, third parties get breached all the time (as well as yourself), and you have to trust the people you're selling this to. It's not credible.

Oh hey Direwolf I've contributed some stuff to your mods.

You mean if they lied about just the IDs but not the faces? The paragraph quoted mentions that the verification is done client side, "never leaves your device".

If we admit that they're saying they won't store it, then secretly selling your IDs data behind your back, they have to account for that revenue in their books, put it in their privacy policies or do it illegally, it's weak to whistleblowers, third parties get breached all the time (as well as yourself), and you have to trust the people you're selling this to. It's not credible.

There's similar debates with Whatsapp and their E2E encryption. Read this

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/02/02/whatsapp...

Discord is an app that's so routinely reverse-engineered there are projects with a million+ users designed around patching changes to it, straight in the binary.

https://betterdiscord.app/

Do you think their big evil plan is to make up a lie that will last maybe 3 weeks, jeopardize the user trust and lose nitro revenue

Surely there is so much money to be made selling random people's faces.

If they tell you they're not selling your data they're not selling your data. What you should worry about is incompetence

Not even 6 months ago a third party they used for ID verification got breached

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo

No API, they sign the tokens with the government's private key and you verify them with the government's public key

If discord needs to contact an API, then the government can associate the token with you, and you with discord, and know what you browse online. No thank you.

Key privacy protections of Discord’s age-assurance approach include:

On-device processing: Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device.

Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.

Straightforward verification: In most cases, users complete the process once and their Discord experience adapts to their verified age group. Users may be asked to use multiple methods only when more information is needed to assign an age group.

Private status: A user’s age verification status cannot be seen by other users.

I didn't see that exploit showing up on Hackernews so here it is

https://hub.ivanti.com/s/article/Security-Advisory-Ivanti-En...

Ivanti doesn't explain how this happened or what mistake led to this exploit being created.

I've acquired one for curiosity (a relative used to teach engineering, he was thrilled I wanted one, gave me his own)

I used it a few times, it works, of course, ... but it's not fast and not precise so I don't think anybody would use it to be productive in 2026

It sits in a box

For anyone outside the U.S where most likely people around you will have Android devices and not iPhones, you are better off ordering trackers that are compatible with Google Find My Device

They're cheaper and allows third parties, plus the network is stronger.

I've tried asking Claude to optimize it further, it created a plan that looks reasonable (I've never interacted with Rust in my life) and it spent a day building many of these optimizations but at the end of the day, none of them actually improved the runtime and some even made it way worse.

This is the kind of thing where if this was a real developer tweaking a codebase they're familiar with, it could get done, but with AI there's a glass ceiling

The pricing page is messed up on Firefox

https://i.horizon.pics/dFFNvWFUZp

This isn't a result of optimizing things one way or another

yep

Not sure how I managed that

Probably very clear-cut, right? "No parking, no business" never made sense, but it makes even less sense in a city where cars are involved in less than a third of all trips

Especially considering that

* Congestion is an opportunity cost in itself already, which is paid in wasted time by all road users, impacting mostly those who spend a long time on the road, which is busses, taxis, professionals and delivery drivers, as they spend the most amount of time actually driving in congested roads

* Congestion pricing forces trips to self-select on cost/benefits in actual dollars, instead of time, so you optimize for wealthier trip takers, short stays or high value trips, where before you would favor long stays (which make looking for parking forever not so bad), and people who don't value their time very much

* Car use remains heavily subsidized, as motorists do not come close to paying the full costs associated with their road usage

We need as many checks as possible - and ideally ones that come for free (e.g., guaranteed by types, lifetimes, etc.) - which is why Rust might be the language for vibe coding.

Checking preconditions and postconditions is much easier to do for a human than checking an implementation

The thing that would really make sense is a proved language like Coq or Promela

You can then really just leave the implementation to the AI.

Being left alone to build your cathedrals is the dream for me. This seems nice.