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Tech

  • Hacker News 22

  • Hacker News: Best Comments 7

    • New comment by chromacity in "Someone bought 30 WordPress plugins and planted a backdoor in all of them"
      This is a perfect illustration of what cracks me up about the hyperbolic reactions to Mythos. Yes, increased automation of cutting-edge vulnerability discovery will shake things up a bit. No, it's nowhere near the top of what should be keeping you awake at night if you're working in infosec. We've built our existing tech stacks and corporate governance structures for a different era. If you want to credit one specific development for making things dramatically worse, it's cryptocurrencies, not AI. They've turned the cottage industry of malicious hacking into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise that's attractive even to rogue nations such as North Korea. And with this much at stake, they can afford to simply buy your software dependencies, or to offer one of your employees some retirement money in exchange for making a "mistake". We know how to write software with very few bugs (although we often choose not to). We have no good plan for keeping big enterprises secure in this reality. Autonomous LLM agents will be used by ransomware gangs and similar operations, but they don't need FreeBSD exploit-writing capabilities for that.
    • New comment by flibbityflob in "Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone to replace him in meetings"
      How will a machine ever replace his famous warmth or empathy?
    • New comment by ieie3366 in "Android now stops you sharing your location in photos"
      Most likely: actually using the geolocation is an extremely niche usecase for images uploaded from mobile browsers. I’d wager 99.9% of the users didn’t realize that they are effectively sending their live GPS coords to a random website when taking a photo. But yes, a prop to the input tag ’includeLocation’ which would then give the user some popup confirmation prompt would have been nice
    • New comment by boron1006 in "The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind"
      > A messy codebase is still cheaper to send ten agents through than to staff a team around. And even if the agents need ten days to reason through an unfamiliar system, that is still faster and cheaper than most development teams operating today. I’ve been on 2 failed projects that have been entirely AI generated and it’s not that agents slow down and you can just send more agents to work on projects for longer, it’s that they becoming completely unable to make any progress whatsoever, and whatever progress they do make is wrong.
    • New comment by leokennis in "The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind"
      > The obvious objection is that code produced at that speed becomes unmanageable, a liability in itself. That is a reasonable concern, but it largely applies when agents produce code that humans then maintain. Agentic platforms are being iterated upon quickly, and for established patterns and non-business-critical code, which is the majority of what most engineering organizations actually maintain, detailed human familiarity with the codebase matters less than it once did. A messy codebase is still cheaper to send ten agents through than to staff a team around. And even if the agents need ten days to reason through an unfamiliar system, that is still faster and cheaper than most development teams operating today. The liability argument holds in a human-to-human or agent-to-human world. In an agent-to-agent world, it largely dissolves. Then I'd wager it's the same for the courses and workshop this guy is selling...an LLM can probably give me at least 75% of the financial insights for not even .1% of what this "agile coach" is asking for his workshops and courses. Maybe the "agile coach LLM" can explain to the "coding LLM's" why they're too expensive, and then the "coding LLM's" can tell the "agile coach LLM" to take the next standby shift then, if he knows so much about code? And then we actual humans can have a day off and relax at the pool.
    • New comment by grtteee in "Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning"
      This is the classic apple approach - wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing (aka let others make sunk investments), envision a solution that is way better than the competition and then architect a path to building a leapfrog product that builds a large lead.
    • New comment by sriram_malhar in "Most people can't juggle one ball"
      Many of you might know of Noisebridge, a beloved hackerspace in San Francisco. They had (have?) a juggling workshop every saturday called "Juggling with Judy", taught by Judy Pinelli, founder of the famed Pickle Family Circus (and a huge influence on Cirque Du Soleil). I had no idea how famous or influential she was. She first taught us how to make our own juggling balls: snip the ends of a balloon, fill with enough rice to feel comfortable in the hand, then wrap that with another balloon to seal the rice in, then snip the ends of the second balloon. Then she went through the usual sequence: throw a ball, er, balloon, from one hand to the next, then practice with two and so on. By the end of that 2 hour session, we had got the essentials. The remarkable thing about this workshop was that Judy was at an advanced stage of multiple sclerosis at that point. She was pretty much completely immobile from the neck down, and couldn't even see our hands properly from her wheelchair. She could only see the arc of the ball, but that was sufficient information for her to tell us how we could improve. "Pull your elbow in". "Focus on the left hand, the right will follow". After the 2 hour workshop, she'd go to Golden Gate park to teach juggling. All for free. I feel extraordinarily privileged. She's been my polestar in life.

Weather

  • Wetterochs Feed 1

    • Wetter - freundlicher und wärmer, am Sonntag dann Kaltfront
      Hallo! Die Tiefdruckrinne bei uns löst sich langsam auf. Am Dienstag fällt in der ersten Tageshälfte noch Regen, der in feinen Sprühregen übergeht. Nachmittags klingen die Niederschläge dann rasch ab. Die Wolkendecke bleibt aber noch geschlossen. Die Höchsttemperatur beträgt 11 Grad. Der schwache Wind weht aus Nordwest. Ein schwaches Hoch bestimmt am Mittwoch und Donnerstag unser Wetter. Absinkende Luftbewegungen lösen die Wolken nach und nach auf. Längere Aufheiterungen dürfte es aber erst am Donnerstag geben. Vielleicht tröpfelt es hier und dort mal. Relevante Mengen von 1 mm oder mehr kommen aber nicht zusammen. Maximal wird es 15 bzw. 17-19 Grad warm. Die sehr schwachen Winde wehen aus wechselnden Richtungen. Am Freitag und Samstag ist es heiter bis wolkig und wahrscheinlich bleibt es niederschlagsfrei. Es ist angenehm warm, die höchsten Temperaturen zeigt mit 22 bzw. 24 Grad das AIFS-Wettermodell (bestes Mittelfristmodell). Die Winde sind sehr schwach. Für den Sonntagnachmittag wird die markante Kaltfront eines von der Nordsee nach Südosten ziehenden kleinen Tiefs erwartet. Wobei kleine Tiefs grundsätzlich schwerer vorherzusagen sind als große und da ist es natürlich fraglich, ob der Zeitplan für den Sonntag genau so Bestand haben wird. Aber immerhin gibt es unter den Wettermodellen aktuell eine gute Übereinstimmung für dieses Sonntags-Tief. Kuriose Ausnahme: Beim GFS-Wettermodell wird für den Sonntagnachmittag ebenfalls eine Kaltfront erwartet, aber aus einer ganz anderen Wetterentwicklung heraus, nämlich aus Nordosten von einem vom Baltikum nach Polen ziehenden Tief ausgehend. Nachtfröste sind in dieser Woche nicht zu erwarten. Aber hinter dieser Sonntags-Kaltfront könnte es in der nächsten Woche nachts dann doch noch einmal deutlich unter 0 Grad gehen. Wetterochs Bitte unterstützen Sie die Wetterochs-Wettermail durch eine Spende!

Development

  • CSS-Tricks 1

    • 7 View Transitions Recipes to Try
      Craving for a view transition? Sunkanmi has lots of common transitions you can drop into your website right now! 7 View Transitions Recipes to Try originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You should really get the newsletter as well.
  • daverupert.com 1

    • When moving fast, talking is the first thing to break
      When you make speed and “moving fast” the biggest priority on a project or in an organization, the first thing to breakdown is talking to each other. Talking takes time. Consensus is expensive and slow. In a pressurized environment there’s no time to schedule calls, get input from subject matter experts, or resolve key differences of opinion. ASAP makes a big assumption that all relevant parties are already in the room. Not everything needs to be a conversation. I’m a firm believer in “get the user something to see if there’s interest”. I’d agree that over-thinking a problem and under-thinking a problem both have pitfalls. But dozens of ways exist to get feedback from users on in-progress work without overcommitting to a particular design. By prioritizing speed over talking, cross-org collaboration suffers and a faulty design can steamroll ahead. I am no soothsayer, but I can tell you that you set your organization up for a messy merge conflict in the future between teams who have been traveling in different directions. I think the second organizational casualty is “the system”. When speed is the priority, there’s no incentive to improve or invest in the shared system (e.g. a design system or codebase) under a tight deadline. If everyone needs to move fast, even something simple like renaming a folder could have dramatic setbacks. Hypermovers will create a new project folder or detach a Figma component. And that new folder of files grows to create it’s own duplicative system of components that are ever-so-slightly different such that they are incompatible with the rest of the system. Resolving system gaps requires conversations, it’s easier to eject from the system at the slightest inconvenience, duplicate, and go your own way. Effectively hiding the time bomb of technical debt for the next unfortunate sucker. I think AI exacerbates this problem. I think AI can help you build faster (although data suggest otherwise), but I also believe that LLMs are the ultimate tool in the “Don’t talk to my coworkers” toolchain. Why talk to an expert who might tell me no, when the omniscient machine that always tells me yes is right here? Avoiding that friction doesn’t produce better products faster. It makes future conversations more difficult thanks to higher sunk costs and deeper entrenched opinions. Other pieces of infrastructure begin to chip away when moving fast too: documentation, security, performance, reliability, the fabric of modern American democracy, and developer satisfaction to name a handful. I’m pro-reducing bullshit, I’m pro-reducing toil. But I’m also pro-slowing the fuck down and doing actual human thinking before pulling a trigger… or sending a laser-guided Tomahawk missile… or whatever action-based analogy works best for your organization. We all love dopamine, we all love seeing new ideas come to life, but more lines of code and duplicate systems –our own little kingdoms in code– doesn’t produce horizontal strength. The job of Engineering Management is no longer pushing tickets across the board to make executives clap, it’s helping organizations row in the same direction together. It’s relentlessly focusing on your users over lines of code and cool project codenames.
  • Josh Comeau's blog 1

    • Squash and Stretch
      Have you ever heard of Disney’s 12 Basic Principles of Animation? In this tutorial, we’ll explore how we can use the very first principle to create SVG micro-interactions that feel way more natural and believable. It’s one of those small things that has a big impact.

AI