Following Rich Hickey, simplicity means parts that aren't braided together. That is a different property from size. Unix pipelines are small, yet their parts are coupled. A huge program like Google Drive can still be simple. So programs should aim for simple, even when that makes them bigger.
Argues that simplicity means one braid rather than few lines, using a Unix pipeline, Clojure, Bash and Rust to show where ordering, aggregation and representation get coupled, and the thread traces it back through Worse is Better.
Shopify is rewriting all its mobile apps from React Native in Swift and Kotlin. It went all-in on React Native six years ago. Shopify says coding agents now do enough of the porting, testing and review. So building every feature twice no longer costs what it did in 2020.
Shopify explains why it is rebuilding its React Native apps natively with coding agents doing most of the work, and stops maintaining FlashList, Restyle and React Native Skia.
A former nuclear and avionics controls engineer argues that companies using AI should build deliberate "manual gates" into their workflows. One example is debugging with the AI assistant switched off. The gates let junior engineers gain the skills they'll need when the automation fails.
A former nuclear-plant controls engineer proposes deliberate manual gates in AI-assisted engineering, drawing on the automation paradox and AF 447, and the thread disputes whether lost skills come back.
Ed West reviews James Marriott's The New Dark Ages. The book argues that television started a decline in reading. Smartphones sped it up. A post-literate public drifts back toward the habits of oral cultures, with repetitive, conservative culture and cruder politics.
Ed West on James Marriott's case that television and then smartphones undid mass literacy and reasoned public debate, with the studies behind it.
Sylvain Conchon and Jean-Christophe Filliâtre's French textbook on programming in OCaml is now free in English. Urmila Nair translated it, with funding from the OCaml Software Foundation. It is out under CC BY-SA 4.0, as PDF and EPUB with code. Commenters say it moves too fast for true beginners. Its own introduction aims it at an algorithms course.
A free, openly licensed English translation of Conchon and Filliâtre's OCaml textbook, and a thread arguing whether an ML language, C or Python should come first.
Opusfived is a short interactive game that parodies an AI coding agent asked to turn one "Add to Cart" button blue. The fake Claude's misfires include turning other buttons blue, lecturing about design tokens, spawning subagents and adding a gradient nobody asked for. It even invents a color called "Cyanide Blue" with its own terms of service. The player can only choose between frustrated replies.
A tiny interactive comedy in which an agent cannot simply make a button blue, and a 450-comment thread of first-hand reports on agents over-engineering trivial changes and how people rein them in.
Someone asks how people find, organize and test the skill files they give coding agents. They also ask whether models will make skills obsolete. Most answers say to stop downloading skill packs. Instead, write a few of your own for repeated, project-specific work. The most common setup keeps them in a git repo, symlinked into each agent's skills folder.
An Ask HN on organising agent skill files, split between people who keep only repo-specific skills and people describing whole skill-driven workflows in detail.
A Gamers Nexus investigation of LG's webOS smart TVs finds content recognition that fingerprints whatever is on screen. The TVs also scan and catalog other devices on the home network. They have several microphones the owner can't fully switch off. LG ad executives tell advertisers they "own the glass" and the living room. The video doesn't clearly show the TV recording the room on its own. Most of the microphone captures came after the team rooted the TV.
A report on LG TVs recording audio with the screen off, and a thousand-comment thread on whether click-through terms can consent for guests and bystanders under EU and US law.
In an older talk, Douglas Hofstadter argues that analogy-making is the basic act of thought, not a high-level reasoning trick. It runs from perception up to how we form categories in the first place.
Douglas Hofstadter's talk on analogy as the core of cognition, with a thread setting it against predictive processing and what LLMs suggest.
Visa and Mastercard don't issue cards, lend money or sign up merchants. They route authorization messages between banks and settle the money between them. They also set the fees and write the rules. On a typical $100 US credit purchase, the network takes about $0.15. The issuer, the cardholder's bank, keeps $2.
A clear walk-through of what card networks actually do (routing, settlement, interchange and dispute rules) through one $100 transaction, with commenters correcting the debit-versus-credit legal details.