Lutger (u/Lutger) - Readit News

Lutger commented on Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels scrollguard.app/... · Posted by u/adrianhacar

A lot of discussion is about the security of these devices (resistance to false open states). But most of the time the safety (false closed states) has even higher stakes associated to it. Having to wait because some api server is slow is annoying but can quickly become life threatening in a different context. Fail-Safe vs Fail-Secure is (imo) often overlooked and probably just as important as the actual implemented security.

Lutger · 13 days ago

Wait, are there smartlocks that depend on the availability of some api service to even open the door? I'd rather call that stupidlocks instead. I mean, just because you're an IoT device it doesn't mean you are smart, ffs.

Lutger commented on With waters at 32C, Mediterranean tropicalization shifts into high gear phys.org/news/2025-08-32c... · Posted by u/pseudolus

Lutger · 16 days ago

> "In the Red Sea, lionfish have predators. There are sharks and barracudas. Here, we have none of that."

I don't know when the sharks will move in, but this final sentence of the article points to a broader problem with climate change induced migrations: species don't move at the same pace. Plants move much slower than insects, and insects faster then their predators. This will create imbalances, which will lead to big problems with new diseases and pests.

Eventually things will re-calibrate, but a lot of species may go extinct and we could see a very long period of reduced biodiversity. It takes a long time to adapt.

Lutger commented on Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context anthropic.com/news/1m-con... · Posted by u/adocomplete

fnordsensei · 18 days ago

The brain can literally not process any piece of information without being changed by the act of processing it. Neuronal pathways are constantly being reinforced or weakened.

Even remembering alters the memory being recalled, entirely unlike how computers work.

Lutger · 18 days ago

I've always find it interesting that once I take a wrong turn finding my way through the city and I'm not deliberate about remembering this was, in fact, a mistake, I am more prone to taking the same wrong turn again the next time.

Lutger commented on GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation theverge.com/news/757461/... · Posted by u/Handy-Man

gmueckl · 20 days ago

This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.

IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.

They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.

I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have missed a few instances.

Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.

Lutger · 19 days ago

Not really. They still have the same sales tactic as they always have: make an inferior product that barely ticks the boxes, then manipulate everyone to ditch their competitors in all kinds of ways except for making a better product. These manipulative tactics are sometimes fair game, most are quite unethical and some even illegal.

You can make a product that pleases its users, or just cater to the interests of the ones with the buying decision, for enterprise users they are almost never the same. Microsoft, like Oracle, leans heavily on the second strategy. Their developer tools are often (not always) an exception to this principle. I think this is the true reason Microsoft is so disliked as a brand.

Lutger commented on How we made JSON.stringify more than twice as fast v8.dev/blog/json-stringif... · Posted by u/emschwartz

teaearlgraycold · 25 days ago

In my other comment in this tree I mentioned that with TypeScript you can do even better. You don't need codegen if you can import types from the back-end. OpenAPI is fine, but I really hate having an intermediary like that.

Just define your API interface as a collection of types that pull from your API route function definitions. Have the API functions pull types from your model layer. Transform those types into their post-JSON deserialization form and now you're trickling up schema from the database right into the client. No client to compile. No watcher to run. It's always in sync and fast to evaluate.

Lutger · 25 days ago

You're right of course, it is better without an intermediary. But only if you already are, can or want to use typescript in the backend. If you have good reasons to not do so, then those usually outweigh the cost of having to go through an intermediary codegen step. The tooling is often good enough.

Plus, openapi can be useful for other things as well: generating api documentation for example, mock servers or clients in multiple programming languages.

I'm not disagreeing with you, what is best always depends on context and also on the professional judgement of the one who is making the trade-offs. A certain perspective or even taste always slips into these judgement calls as well, which isn't invalid.

Lutger commented on I'm Archiving Picocrypt github.com/Picocrypt/Pico... · Posted by u/jaden

latexr · 25 days ago

It was clearly AI generated. So the author is clearly OK with using AI to generate slop in an area they don’t work in, while simultaneously decrying its use in an area they do work in. If they believe so strongly that AI use is destroying their industry, they should reflect on its effect on other industries too (it is well-documented how artists are being negatively impacted).

I agree with the commenters above that it makes the critique fall flat. The author is saying “This thing is so frustrating and harmful it makes me want to stop working in a field because of it. Oh, by the way, I use this tool myself for other things, and will indeed pivot to contribute directly to them”.

Lutger · 25 days ago

I didn't interpret it as decrying the use of AI. Especially because he plans to dedicate his time and energy into researching the very same AI he rants about, basically promoting its use!

Instead, I see it as a deeply personal rant about the state of affairs which he considers inevitable himself. That is why he leaves the ship.

Before AI slop, there has always been just the agile slop of the bare(ly) minimum product, good enough to woo the ones making a buying decision, or at least until the career sharks have moved on to the next thing. That kind of slop has always been there and everywhere actually. Its called capitalism, or consumerism. The trick is to work for a place that isn't squeezed too hard, because its still in the investment phase or because it just earns money on its own merit.

AI will certainly transform things, just like higher level languages and frameworks have done so. Maybe programming without AI will be the 'micro optimization' of the future: something that is still there and valuable, but only sometimes and only in a certain niche. Slop is eternal, it just has a new face and a new name.

This blog to me is a nice personal rant about a smart young developer coming of age, trying to find his way and guard his ideals or standards against the onslaught of consumerism, just as ambitious young developers always have tried to do.

Lutger commented on How we made JSON.stringify more than twice as fast v8.dev/blog/json-stringif... · Posted by u/emschwartz

teaearlgraycold · a month ago

I'd say the value prop is you can share code (and with TS, types as well) between your web front end and back end.

Lutger · a month ago

That is useful, but you can achieve a similar benefit if you manage to spec out your api with openapi, and then generate the typescript api client. A lot of web frameworks make it easy to generate openapi spec from code.

The maintenance burden shifts from hand syncing types, to setting up and maintaining the often quite complex codegen steps. Once you have it configured and working smoothly, it is a nice system and often worth it in my experience.

The biggest benefit is not the productivity increase when creating new types, but the overall reliability and ease of changing stuff around that already exists.

Lutger commented on Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language ponylang.io/... · Posted by u/RossBencina

Timwi · a month ago

Honestly, I get it. The document wants to tell you what's new and different under the hood, not what the language looks like superficially. Code examples don't actually tell you what the language feels like in production. It's kinda like judging a person's character by how they dress.

I would be torn if I had to write intro documentation like this. On the one hand, people demand code examples, but on the other hand, the majority of people reading code examples will nitpick minor pet peeves in the syntax and completely detract from the actual new ideas and concepts that go way beyond just the syntax.

I found the descriptions of the concepts very enlightening and I honestly think they gave me a better idea of what the language would “feel like” to program in than a code example (or a description of the syntax) would have.

In theory, syntax should be interchangeable. It's conceivable to parse a syntax into an AST and reexpress it in another syntax without changing the AST. In practice, this is not done for many reasons (incl. tooling like diffs) but a big reason is that individual bits and bobs of the syntax are tied to the new concepts in subtle ways. There could absolutely be multiple syntaxes for the same concept, but if the concept is new, even in small and unobvious ways, then no prior existing language’s syntax will map it exactly. For this reason, a code example can't really express the new concept, especially if the syntax is superficially similar to another language that doesn't actually have that concept.

Lutger · a month ago

In a way, leading with the core ideas and not with the syntax also shows what this language is about, and selects for people who are more interested in the PL concepts than its looks. After all, syntax is the bikeshed of programming language.

Lutger commented on An unprecedented window into how diseases take hold years before symptoms appear bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/helsinkiandrew

Lutger · a month ago

As someone who has seen multiple people close to me, including my wife, struggle with long covid, I can tell you the answer is simply no. Anecdotal, yes, but this shouldn't be an argument.

We are several years in now. These statements are actually pretty hurtful for people who have been through a lot. It's like saying you could beat cancer if you only wanted to, or if you didn't think all those negatives thoughts, you wouldn't be so ill now.

Not only is it suggesting that this misery is in some way 'your own fault', but it also implies that it isn't real, or serious, at least not in the same way other diseases are.

And yes, psychological problems are real too, indeed. But it is not the same. The origin narrative around a disease does in fact matter for people trying to cope with it, and how others see you, for insurance, for politics and medical care. Please be more respectful about it.

Lutger commented on Uv: Running a script with dependencies docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/... · Posted by u/Bluestein

bb88 · a month ago

Kenneth Reitz has been good and bad at times. And while things of his are genius level, he also has done asshole level things. But on the other hand, we get that with a lot of geniuses for some reason or another. Really smart people can be really dumb too.

It would be like saying, "Don't use Laplace transforms because he did some unsavory thing at some point in time."

Lutger · a month ago

Looking at this drama for a bit, I haven't seen anybody advocate for 'canceling' requests itself.

Maybe it's more like: Laplace created awesome things, but let's be fair and also put in his wikipedia page a bit about his political shenanigans.

A lot of of so-called geniuses, especially the self-styled ones with some narcissistic traits, get away with being an asshole. Their admirers have different norms for regular, boring people. I don't think that is fair or healthy for a community.