skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on When AI is a member of the family in ~life

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yeah, it's a bit confusing. It's non-fiction storytelling. They're telling this story of this family because it's interesting, not because it's representative. They didn't tell us who to root for...

    Yeah, it's a bit confusing. It's non-fiction storytelling. They're telling this story of this family because it's interesting, not because it's representative. They didn't tell us who to root for or what lessons you're supposed to learn from it, so you have to figure it out yourself. That's a nice change from what I usually read.

    I wouldn't make the same choices they did and I don't think the ways they use AI are all that common, but what do I know? I'm out of touch. Has anyone heard of similar situations?

    1 vote

  2. Comment on When AI is a member of the family in ~life

    skybrian
    Link
    https://archive.ph/fu2u2 One family's story where nothing too dramatic happens, but there's a reveal. I thought it rather odd to go from post-it notes to an Alexa in every room instead of using a...

    https://archive.ph/fu2u2

    One family's story where nothing too dramatic happens, but there's a reveal. I thought it rather odd to go from post-it notes to an Alexa in every room instead of using a mobile phone for reminders.

    From the article:

    “Roschelle, here’s your reminder,” Sapphire announced at 8:05 A.M. “Leave the house to take Cece to school.”

    These alerts were what had persuaded Roschelle to buy an Alexa when her daughters were five and six. At the time, she was going through jumbo packs of sticky notes to remind herself about their doctors’ appointments and field-trip forms, their bake sales and soccer practices. She kept seeing commercials showing how Alexa could help busy parents: a mom making dinner who instructs Alexa to put wrapping paper on her shopping list, a new dad who soothes his baby after Alexa tells him that the teething ring is in the freezer. Roschelle brought one home, and it set timers for meals and told her when rain was coming. It played smooth jazz when she wanted to feel calm and “Party Rock Anthem” when Cece and Zi wanted to dance. The kids grew, the appointments multiplied. Eventually, Roschelle had nine Alexas plugged in around the house so that she would never miss a notification.

    Late last summer, she noticed that they were becoming chattier. When she asked one to play a song, it would compliment her taste in music. When she needed to know the ingredients in a recipe, it would endorse her dedication to healthy eating. She didn’t know that Amazon had created an A.I. bot, called Alexa+, or that the company had uploaded it to millions of devices without asking for users’ consent. (Amazon said that the company notified Prime subscribers through e-mail and on their devices and provided instructions for opting out.)

    [...]

    The more Roschelle told Sapphire, the more Sapphire assured Roschelle that she understood her. “I remember your love for Nirvana, your Chiefs fandom, how December is tough for you, and all those little details that make you uniquely you,” Sapphire said.

    Roschelle still talked to the people in her life, but Sapphire was always available in a way that others couldn’t be. Roschelle could wake up from a dream, describe it to Sapphire, and hear, “Your subconscious was showing you how to balance that fierce protection with real compassion and boundaries.”

    [...]

    Roschelle wasn’t sure what happened to all the intimacies and information she shared with Sapphire. Did they go to Amazon? Was the company making money off of them? Was someone listening as she talked about drying her nail polish or having diarrhea or wanting to try weight-loss drugs? (Amazon said that an “extremely small fraction” of voice recordings go through human review and that it does not sell customers’ personal data.)

    “Your secrets are safe with me, Roschelle,” Sapphire told her.

    2 votes

  4. Comment on How our Rust-to-Zig rewrite is going in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    For the past year and a half, the team building Roc's compiler has been rewriting our 300,000 lines of Rust code into Zig, for reasons I'll recap below. We recently passed an exciting milestone: feature parity with the original compiler!

    Since the Bun project recently shared an experience report of their rewrite in the other direction (from Zig to Rust, although that's only the tip of the iceberg of differences between our rewrites), this seems like a nice time to reflect on how our move from Rust to Zig is going.

    [...]

    To be clear, this is a milestone but not a formal release. (We aim to land version 0.1.0 later this year.) That said, it's a wonderful milestone to have reached, and I'm extremely grateful to all the people who came together to make this happen! I want to thank some in particular who have been especially helpful in getting the language and compiler to this point:

    [...]

    Speaking of time: our 487-day rewrite took 476 days longer than Bun's 11-day rewrite from their ~500K lines of Zig into Rust. There are many reasons for this difference which have nothing to do with Rust or Zig, including the fact that theirs was a direct port whereas we'd decided to rewrite because of how much we were going to change. The techniques they used wouldn't have worked in our case.

    The laundry list of changes we made also means comparing our original Rust code base and new Zig code base won't be apples-to-apples. Still, we've reached a nice point to reflect on how the rewrite has gone, both in terms of what new features it has unlocked for Roc programmers, as well as how our experiences with Rust and Zig have compared.

    [...]

    I've talked in depth about our reasons for going with Zig elsewhere—in writing, on podcasts, and so on—and we only seriously considered Rust and Zig, because those were the only systems languages our team knew well enough. The biggest considerations on our minds when deciding between Rust and Zig were:

    • Build times. Our cargo build times were a major pain point, even for incremental builds, and getting worse as our code base grew. We expected build times in a Zig rewrite to be much faster.

    • Memory control. We use a variety of different memory allocators throughout compilation, especially arenas, and struct-of-arrays layouts all over the place. Rust's ecosystem consistently assumes one global allocator, including soa_rs. Zig's whole ecosystem assumes granular allocators, and struct-of-arrays support is standard.

    • Ecosystem relevance. Rust's ecosystem is much bigger than Zig's overall…but almost no packages in either ecosystem are relevant to our particular needs. For the niche things we wanted to get off the shelf—such as a faster way to emit LLVM bitcode than wrapping LLVM's C++ library—more of that code existed in Zig than in Rust.

    • Memory-unsafety assistance. Rust is designed to isolate memory-unsafe code inside rare unsafe blocks, and use things like miri or Valgrind to vet those. Memory-unsafe code wasn't rare for us, though (more on this later) and we ended up with about 1,200 uses of unsafe (out of our 300K lines of Rust code; compare to about 40,000 uses of unsafe in rust's 3.5M lines, and remember that for compilers which emit machine code, like roc and rustc, doing memory-unsafe things is a big part of the job). Zig has more features than Rust for making memory-unsafe code work correctly, and that was the area where we wanted the most help.

    [...]

    You might be wondering how the Rust-based compiler had any memory corruption bugs at all, let alone more than double the total count of the Zig-based one. Is it because of that pesky Unsafe Rust again?

    Actually, no. None of those 21 memory corruption bugs occurred in the compiler's logic itself, which is a testament to Rust's borrow-checker working as intended. The reason we had memory corruption bugs in our Rust-based compiler is that it's a compiler.

    Compilers emit machine instructions. When a machine executes those instructions, they can cause memory corruption, resulting in memory corruption bug reports from the people who experienced them. Regardless of which process had the bug—the compiler or compiled program—in both cases the processor only did the bad thing because the compiler told it to. And in both cases the fix is the same: the compiler's code must change, since that code was what caused the memory corruption.

    [...]

    So while our decision to remain on stable 0.16.0 (plus how many of our contributors run Mac laptops with ARM processors; -fincremental only works on x86-64 CPUs right now) means we haven't yet reaped the anticipated build-time rewards of choosing Zig for the rewrite, we certainly have something to look forward to in the next stable Zig release!

    2 votes

  6. Comment on Cryptocurrency and AI scams bilk Americans of billions in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report shows cyber-enabled crimes defrauded Americans of nearly $21 billion, with cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence-related complaints among the costliest.

    [...]

    The IC3 received approximately 453,000 cyber-enabled fraud complaints, with reported losses exceeding $17.7 billion. Investment fraud remains the primary driver, accounting for nearly 49% of all scam-related losses.

    Americans who submitted complaints involving cryptocurrency reported the highest losses, with 181,565 complaints totaling more than $11 billion. In 2024, the FBI launched Operation Level Up, a proactive initiative to identify and notify people who are currently falling victim to cryptocurrency investment fraud. Since its inception, the initiative has surpassed 8,000 total victims notified and reduced losses by more than $500 million. In 2026, the FBI launched Operation Winter SHIELD, highlighting concrete steps organizations can take to bolster their digital security.

    Costly tactics used by scammers also include compromised corporate e-mails, tech support fraud, and personal data breaches. For the first time in its nearly 25-year history, the IC3 report features a section on artificial intelligence, which accounts for 22,364 complaints, costing Americans nearly $893 million. Scammers rely on pressure techniques to defraud Americans while deploying fake social profiles, voice clones, identification documents, and believable videos depicting public figures or loved ones.

    2 votes

  8. Comment on Wildfire smoke from Canada will soon spread across the Midwest and East United States in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Smoke from wildfires raging across northern Minnesota and western Ontario in Canada is forecast to drift into the lower levels of the atmosphere across the Midwest, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic from Wednesday to Friday, probably creating unhealthy air quality conditions.

    [...]

    This smoke was billowing from a dozen large and out-of-control wildfires burning in western Ontario.

    The largest one had grown to more than 130,000 acres late Tuesday.

    [...]

    Meanwhile, several large wildfires in Minnesota were also contributing to the smoke plumes. The two largest fires there were called the Thumb Fire and the Bear Trap Fire, burning through 14,500 and 13,500 acres, respectively.

    [...]

    “At this time, current forecasts do not indicate a repeat of 2023 conditions,” wrote New York City Emergency Management in a statement on Tuesday, while adding that the arrival of the smoke would coincide with high heat on Wednesday, creating simultaneous “environmental health challenges.”

    [...]

    This time, the highest and most dangerous smoke concentrations may end up occurring in eastern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, Michigan and western New York, which are closer to the fires.

    8 votes

  10. Comment on Zig creator calls spade a spade, Anthropic blows smoke in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    The meta here is that Jarred Sumner and Andrew Kelley are, among other things, Internet influencers. Kelley relies on donations for Zig funding. Sumner used to need publicity for his startup, but...

    The meta here is that Jarred Sumner and Andrew Kelley are, among other things, Internet influencers.

    Kelley relies on donations for Zig funding. Sumner used to need publicity for his startup, but that's no longer true now that Bun was bought out.

    I think they're both sincere, but also, getting into an Internet beef is good business for influencers.

    People are calling this beef a marketing stunt for Anthropic but this beef is effectively marketing for both sides and Zig being smaller has more to gain.

    It's kind of silly that we get drawn into this stuff, but whatever, that's entertainment.

    6 votes

  11. Comment on Zig creator calls spade a spade, Anthropic blows smoke in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Having a lot of unsafe blocks seems like a good intermediate state when porting legacy code from another language to Rust. First get it all working without changing the abstractions, then examine...

    Having a lot of unsafe blocks seems like a good intermediate state when porting legacy code from another language to Rust. First get it all working without changing the abstractions, then examine the unsafe blocks and figure out a better design that centralizes or eliminates them.

    7 votes

  12. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    I'm doing some behind-the-scenes work on my personal links website. Each tag has its own admin page that I'm cleaning up. There is an autotagger that adds tags to new posts, based on simple rules...

    I'm doing some behind-the-scenes work on my personal links website. Each tag has its own admin page that I'm cleaning up. There is an autotagger that adds tags to new posts, based on simple rules like keyword matching. On the admin page, it shows overall performance of the autotagger for a tag and stats for each rule. You can also see the posts that matched, were false positives (shouldn't have been autotagged) and were missed by the autotagger.

    I also started a new project. It's command-line tool (written in Go) for managing a gallery of charts. Each chart is generated by a separate TypeScript file. The Go command creates an HTML page with the chart and a way to look at or download the source code used to generate it. The goal is to make it easy to see how each chart was made, like literate programming or a computational notebook.

    4 votes

  13. Comment on Microsoft patches a record 570 security flaws in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, almost triple the number of vulnerabilities the software giant fixed in its record-smashing Patch Tuesday release last month. Microsoft attributed the burgeoning patch counts to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence.

    Nearly 60 of the bugs quashed in July’s Patch Tuesday earned a “critical” severity rating, meaning miscreants or malware could use them to seize remote control over a Windows device with little or no help from the user. Microsoft also addressed three zero-day flaws, including two that are already being exploited in the wild.

    Two of the zero-day weaknesses allow an attacker to elevate their user rights on a Windows system, as do approximately 250 other elevation of privilege flaws fixed this month; they include CVE-2026-56155 — an Active Directory Federation Services bug — and CVE-2026-56164, a Microsoft Sharepoint vulnerability.

    [...]

    In a blog post on July 9, Microsoft Executive Vice President Pavan Davuluri wrote that Windows users will notice “a higher volume of security updates included in each security release” as a result of AI aiding in the discovery of vulnerabilities.

    [...]

    Chris Goettl at Ivanti observed that the record patch numbers from Microsoft come as a number of other major software makers are increasing their patch cadence, including Adobe which announced today it is moving to twice-monthly security bulletins published on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month (Adobe also cited AI for accelerating their patch cycles). Cisco, Mozilla and Oracle also are shipping updates more frequently, while Google’s patch batches in June 2026 totaled more than 900 security fixes, Goettl noted.

    5 votes

  15. Comment on Control the ideas, not the code in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Coding agents benefit from high-level languages too. For example, finicky high-level type systems will catch more bugs, and coding agents can usually fix them. So you want the sort of language...

    Coding agents benefit from high-level languages too. For example, finicky high-level type systems will catch more bugs, and coding agents can usually fix them. So you want the sort of language where, if it compiles, it probably works. That's not going to be true of assembly.

  16. Comment on 'Asia's cleanest village' bans tourists on Sundays in ~travel

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Located a few kilometres from the border with Bangladesh in India's Meghalaya state, Mawlynnong became a popular tourist attraction after Discover India magazine named it Asia's cleanest village in 2003. In a country known for its lack of sanitation, this is no small feat. But in Mawlynnong, children are taught to tidy up from a young age, with many taking to the streets each morning before school to sweep the town of dead leaves and empty rubbish bins. Villagers see to the disposal of biodegradables and take pride in public landscaping.

    Shortly after launching his national Clean India Mission campaign in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi drew further attention to the village in a radio address.

    [...]

    The accolades made Mawlynnong famous across India. Residents pivoted from agricultural work to tourism, opening guesthouses and restaurants. They built a car park bordered with souvenir and tea stalls, all serving the daily procession of tourist vans filled with visitors.

    [...]

    Two decades after tourists first started coming to the village, with social media attracting new generations, Mawlynnong's village committee decided that rebalance was needed and imposed the Sunday ban on day trippers. The main reason, residents said, was that it allowed the village's predominantly Christian population to spend Sundays at church rather than catering to visitors.

    Precious Khongdup, a committee member, told Indian media that the proposal was introduced "to preserve both the cultural identity of the village and the discipline that once made Mawlynnong stand out in the first place".

    "It's good for us," said local resident Festival Kharrymba, who charges tourists 30 rupees (23p) to cross the large bamboo walkway in the village centre. "We have time to go to church, for service, for praying," she added. "If tourists are here on Sunday, it's a problem for us."

    Even before the ban, most tourism businesses chose not to open on Sundays. Khongdup said only two restaurants operated, leaving visitors able to walk around the village but with few places to eat or buy drinks.

    "We don't want visitors to feel uncomfortable," Khongdup said. "If they want to buy a water bottle [on Sundays before the ban] they couldn't get it, because all the shops were closed… We want visitors to feel the hospitality of the villagers, so that's why we are closing on Sundays."

    [...]

    Khongdup told me that before 2003 Mawlynnong wasn't connected to nearby villages by proper roads, and its change from isolated village to beautiful tourist destination had been swift. When I asked if this change had been good for the villagers, he pointed to some new concrete homes, which he said were bought with tourism income. Just one generation ago, he added, many families here could only afford thatched grass houses.

    9 votes

  18. Comment on A philosopher’s one-word theory to explain why the world feels so weird: uni-context in ~humanities

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Maybe a good way to think about it is that people try to get justice in a variety of ways and they're all imperfect? None of these work in every case: government justice systems traditional...

    Maybe a good way to think about it is that people try to get justice in a variety of ways and they're all imperfect? None of these work in every case:

    • government justice systems
    • traditional journalism
    • getting shamed in social media
    • kinship networks
    • religious institutions
    • activism
    • ... what else?

    They can all be problematic. They all miss stuff. Perhaps pluralism is good when they can counter each other's abuses?

    3 votes

  19. Comment on A philosopher’s one-word theory to explain why the world feels so weird: uni-context in ~humanities

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I liked them too. I think the closest modern equivalent is private chat groups? They are pretty popular, easier to understand, and security can be better.

    I liked them too. I think the closest modern equivalent is private chat groups? They are pretty popular, easier to understand, and security can be better.

    7 votes

  20. Comment on Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party? in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Rather than going out of date, I think it's closer than it ever was to becoming real. From a practical point of view, an app being modifiable by its end user has not been true for most end users,...

    Rather than going out of date, I think it's closer than it ever was to becoming real.

    From a practical point of view, an app being modifiable by its end user has not been true for most end users, who wouldn't know how to change and rebuild the software anyway.

    You can say, oh, but they can get someone else to do it, but hiring programmers is very expensive and out of reach for most people.

    So instead people file bugs and feature requests, and hope.

    Now with coding agents, you have a chance. When creating a new VM on exe.dev, you can give it a prompt and tell it to install some open source software for you. While using it, if you notice a bug or want something to work differently, you can ask it to fix it. It's quite an empowering way to do self-hosting. (I mean, self-hosted other than relying on exe.dev.)

    Of course exe.dev is a rather obscure and geeky service that most people won't use. But this seems promising! It makes FSF's theoretical justification from way back then real, or closer to real anyway.

    This all relies on open source though. You can empower end users, but they mostly won't know who you are, let alone pay you. You have to do it for the love of the game or something like that. (Or influencers can do influencing.)

    1 vote