simjnd

The comment I replied to didn't mention anything about being close to frontier, just a blanket statement about Chinese Labs models being slow and inefficient.

People talk about frontier as if it's the only innovation worth pursuing. Deepseek V4 is far from fontier, but it's architecture is super innovative and efficient and what it achieves at that size (especially V4 Flash) is incredible.

the Chinese models really are slow and token-inefficient

This totally depends on the model. Deepseek V4 is very fast and efficient.

A wrapper class if you want, a wrapper type with methods / dedicated functions. Still, seems pretty ergonomic to me. Yeah we went from one line to three, but the three lines guarantee safety whereas the one doesn't so?

Also I'm not sure the token count is very relevant for an Anthropic employee who just spent 165k worth of token rewriting the whole thing in Rust. Sprinkling a few defers here and there and swapping types surely would have been immensely cheaper in tokens.

Yeah since my whole point is about the technical merits of the rewrite article, I don't count that as justification.

Why is just a wrapper type "less ergonomic"? Everybody does that all the time in every language. And then if you can convince me it is less "ergonomic": why does it matter if it solves the problem? And that is considering humans write the code manually. Why does it matter if agents write the code? This makes no sense.

Not about the things that matter.

If you write a blog post about "I switched from X to Y", I expect the WHY: the pros and cons of X, of Y, and of the alternatives that were considered and dismissed before considering Y.

This is more a blog post about how to use Fable to switch from X to Y, than it is about X or Y.

I don't think Zig community is triggered, I think only Zig's creator is triggered because he is afraid of people interpreting this as "Zig is unsuitable for X".

I think a lot of people will, but those who do probably weren't the target audience for Zig in the first place?

I could point to the same examples this article refers to: the Bun blog post says "Having a rigid style guide [in Zig] with clear ownership expectations explicitly spelled out in the type system was a real option for Bun" and presents no technical reason why they didn't choose (or even TRY) that. They handwave it with "This is and ergonomic than the Zig we expect".

Why was it in their own words a real option? And why did they not go for it? This is the technical substance I'm looking for: an engineer explaining what options have been considered and what wanted and unwanted tradeoffs they present.

Also only mentioning figures for the platforms that saw an improvement is sketchy. "With ICU and code folding Windows and Linux get 20% smaller", what about macOS? Why did it not see the same gains? The fact that they don't mention it makes me think that they don't KNOW, and isn't confidence inspiring coming from the engineer who SHOULD know.

Thank you. I was left confused after people praised the Bun to Rust blog post eventhough it contained very actual technical substance. No clear evaluation of options, very biased report on impact, missing figures. It absolutely didn't feel like an engineering blog post.

Maybe people were more interested in the agentic part more than the actual rationale for the port in the first place, because it was very disappointing from a technical standpoint.

Where have I claimed that it isn't worse, or that it is the same?

It's far from the top shelf, and even then I can totally still compare. I would say the very concept of privacy (at least when it comes to digital presence) does not exist in China. There are no expectations of privacy and if you need it you have to circumvent the rules.

This is worse don't get me wrong. But doesn't take away anything from the fact that the case here is indeed abysmal.

Surprises me that on Hacker News of all places, where people are tech-literate and educated, people still seem to trust our companies and governments as if they didn't have an established track record of spying and screwing us over.

The fact that (for now) there are no consequences has no connection to the original point about privacy.

The fact that China acts punitively with the data they gather on their citizens, and the US does not (yet), doesn't change at all the fact that the US actively harvests that data in a very aggressive way.

There may or may never be a time where the US starts acting on it, covertly or openly. But still, they're siphoning all of my data, and all of yours too and I don't see why we are downplaying it by saying it's worse elsewhere.

Counter-example to this would be 3rd-party app stores on iOS, which are only enabled in the EU, Japan and more recently in Brazil (maybe I'm missing some).

Legislation in one market didn't impact the state of things in the others, and some countries get screwed over.

Thank you. It doesn't make sense to me how much people trust our companies so much more than Chinese ones for no reason. This country has an abysmal track record when it comes to respecting its citizen's rights or privacy. Propaganda working as intended I suppose.

Exactly this. Today I can get a physical copy at release date for ~10 EUR cheaper than on the Playstation Store, then resell it for 3/4 of the price, or lend it to a friend easily.

Everything about digital-only is anti-consumer. Games will be more expensive with fewer and less important discount, the second-hand market will be dead, and so will be sharing games to friends so they can experience it for free.

Nintendo has implemented lending a digital game, but with arbitrary limits (you HAVE to be in physical proximity for the lending process, it lasts a maximum of two weeks, and you can lend 3 / borrow 1 game at a time). Sony and Microsoft don't let you do that.

Got my Steam Deck for a little above 300 a few years ago. Still use it, sad to see how much the price has gone up.

And I'm assuming you're not going to pay for them to have that someone on-call, even though you're worried about this scenario

You could assume that if someone has the technical level to identify a vulnerability and how to exploit it, they probably have the technical level to fix it.

In most cases researchers have no interest in actually "making the software better" and publishing vulns is just a way to increase their cred to land a better job.

FFMPEG's position as a well know very popular open source project means it's very interesting for this type of researcher to find a vuln and put their name on it.

It's an exhausting dynamic.

FFMPEG has consistently expressed their frustration with the fact that there is a large number of people willing and eager to publish vulnerabilities found in the project, but a comparatively minuscule number of people willing to work on patches to fix them.

Why would it be ideological? There was an AI involved, sure, but your comment ignores the continued disrespect for these volunteers time AND RESOURCES/MONEY (because as the post mentions several times: letting that AI go on could have shut down the whole network exhausting resources at least temporarily).

If you think it's ok to send an agent (or a human) wasting a bunch of people's time and resources, but it's not ok for them to do the same to you then you may have some reflecting to do.

Louis Rossmann's consumer rights wiki has an article about this issue [1].

The TLDR is that support officially ended in 2023, but Microsoft's notice back then assured that the app would keep on working.

That notice has been edited this year to remove the assurance that the app would keep working, with no explanation and redirecting people to the free trial of their subscription offering.

It seems to be due to a Microsoft certificate expiring (in all apps) [2] and causing the app to lose editing capability because no new build of the 2019 suite will be released with an up-to-date certificate.

[1] https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Microsoft_Office_2019_and_2021...

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-apps/mac/cer...

but developed to be [...] integrated in another product that handles documents, for example a file sharing solution, an online wiki, a project management tool and so on

It looks like it only provides the document editing part and you need an app around it to actually open the document from a filesystem and provide its content to this editing interface, and take the output and save it back to the filesystem? (Filesystem, or whatever persistent storage medium)

Of course, but I'm replying to a comment that speaks like surveillance doesn't exist in the EU because there is not a European NSA, so I'm talking specifically about the EU surveillance risk.

Generalization. "You guys" who? Most people actually know DMA has nothing to do with privacy. There are ways to hand off PID-stripped data to a 3rd-party.

Of course, but the iPhone could send slightly altered data to avoid fingerprinting (tweaking age / weight / height slightly) like browsers do with sensors.

Some data could outright be replaced (names, etc) and swapped back on device.

It couldn't do it with ALL the data (eg. calendar data needs to be accurate) but just because you need to give context doesn't mean sacrificing privacy.

Everything would go through an Apple proxy before reaching a theoretical 3rd-party provider.

These wouldn't provide privacy GUARANTEES but could make it reasonably difficult and expensive to fingerprint?

Yes, same. I'll still get one because I think it being a standalone Linux computer is huge, and I'm so interested in the Proton / Lepton stacks to run Windows and Android games but yeah this is a pretty big compromise.

Sadly the passthrough is black and white only. That's the one thing I love about the Vision Pro is it never feels claustrophobic thanks to very good passthrough quality.

Ah, I see. I overestimated the amount of stripping / anonymization that was being done on device. Thought the server-side could be quite generic. Thanks!

Yeah I overestimated the amount of stripping / anonymization that was being done on device and didn't realize how much plumbing was required server-side too to have good enough privacy guarantees

Yeah I overestimated the PID stripping that was being done on-device before being handed off to a server. After other comments I realize there needs to be a lot of plumbing on the server-side too.

There is a 2-week delay too, if you arrive in the EU you will still have access to the features for two weeks. When you leave the EU, it will take two weeks outside to gain access to the features. At least that's been my experience having a EU account and living mostly in the EU. Might be different with foreign accounts.