objclxt (u/objclxt) - Readit News

objclxt commented on Coding agents have replaced every framework I used blog.alaindichiappari.dev... · Posted by u/alainrk

echelon · 5 days ago

Please forgive me for being blunt, I want to emphasize how much this strikes me.

Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation. Why can't we just use radios and slide rules?

If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript?

There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code. I've written years of five nines high SLA code that moves billions of dollars daily. I've had my excitement setting up dev tools and configuring vim a million ways. I want starships now.

I want to see the future unfold during my career, not just have it be incrementalism until I retire.

I want robots walking around in my house, doing my chores. I want a holodeck. I want to be able to make art and music and movies and games. I will not be content with twenty more years of cellphone upgrades.

God, just the thought of another ten years of the same is killing me. It's so fucking mundane.

The future is exciting.

Bring it.

objclxt · 5 days ago

> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation [...] There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code [...] I've had my excitement

I don't read the OP as saying that: to me they're saying you're still going to have plumbing and bullshit, it's just your plumbing and bullshit is now going to be in prompt engineering and/or specifications, rather than the code itself.

objclxt commented on US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7

TZubiri · 12 days ago

With all due respect to Stallman, you can actually study binaries.

The claim Stallman would make (after punishing you for using Open Source instead of Free Software for an hour) is that Closed Software (Proprietary Software) is unjust. but in the context of security, the claim would be limited to Free Software being capable of being secure too.

You may be able to argue that Open Source reduces risk in threat models where the manufacturer is the attacker, but in any other threat model, security is an advantage of closed source. It's automatic obfuscation.

There's a lot of advantages to Free Software, you don't need to make up some.

objclxt · 12 days ago

> in any other threat model, security is an advantage of closed source

I think there's a lot of historical evidence that doesn't support this position. For instance, Internet Explorer was generally agreed by all to be a much weaker product from a security perspective than its open source competitors (Gecko, WebKit, etc).

Nobody was defending IE from a security perspective because it was closed source.

objclxt commented on iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan developer.apple.com/suppo... · Posted by u/eklavya

concinds · a month ago

I can't wait until regulators do their job and take away Apple's dictatorial control, in all areas, and all these doom-and-gloom predictions on all these tangential issues end up proving ludicrous.

What kind of control would Chrome have over the web? Adding APIs doesn't force the billions of websites to adopt them. So what if a website adds WebBluetooth? You don't want the web to have that anyway, and if you keep using Safari, you still won't have it. Happy you!

If scrappy Firefox on open platforms could save the web from 95% IE, then why are we all dependent on Apple, alone, to save us from ~60% Chrome? It's learned helplessness and Stockholm syndrome. I wonder how our species survived before the trillion-dollar company started taking such good care of us!

objclxt · a month ago

> What kind of control would Chrome have over the web? Adding APIs doesn't force the billions of websites to adopt them.

You are assuming adding APIs is a net positive, and the debacle that was Chrome’s privacy sandbox initiative suggests that’s not the case

> why are we all dependent on Apple, alone, to save us from ~60% Chrome?

How’s Firefox doing now? They’re literally dependent upon Chrome to exist. Without Google they have no money to fund development.

The only viable non-Chromium browser engine today that is not funded by Google is WebKit.

objclxt commented on Reverse engineering a $1B Legal AI tool exposed 100k+ confidential files alexschapiro.com/security... · Posted by u/bearsyankees

gbacon · 2 months ago

This is HN. We understood exactly what “exposed … confidential files” meant before reading your overly dramatic scenario. As overdone as it is, it’s not even realistic. A likely single mother is likely tiny potatoes in comparison to deep-pocketed legal firms or large corporations.

The story is an example of the market self-correcting, but out comes this “building code” hobby horse anyway. All a software “building code” will do is ossify certain current practices, not even necessarily the best ones. It will tilt the playing field in favor of large existing players and to the disadvantage of innovative startups.

The model fails to apply in multiple ways. Building physical buildings is a much simpler, much less complex process with many fewer degrees of freedom than building software. Local city workers inspecting by the local municipality’s code at least has clear jurisdiction because of where the physical fixed location is. Who will write the “building code”? Who will be the inspectors?

This is HN. Of all places, I’d expect to see this presented as an opportunity for new startups, not calls for slovenly bureaucracy and more coercion. The private market is perfectly capable of performing this function. E&O and professional liability insurers if they don’t already will be soon motivated after seeing lawsuits to demand regular pentests.

The reported incident is a great reminder of caveat emptor.

objclxt · 2 months ago

> Building physical buildings is a much simpler, much less complex process with many fewer degrees of freedom than building software.

I don't...think this is true? Google has no problems shipping complex software projects, their London HQ is years behind schedule and vastly over budget.

Construction is really complex. These can be mega-projects with tens of thousands of people involved, where the consequences of failure are injury or even death. When software failure does have those consequences - things like aviation control software, or medical device firmware - engineers are held to a considerably higher standard.

> The private market is perfectly capable of performing this function

But it's totally not! There are so many examples in the construction space of private markets being wholly unable to perform quality control because there are financial incentives not to.

The reason building codes exist and are enforced by municipalities is because the private market is incapable of doing so.

objclxt commented on NTSB Preliminary Report – UPS Boeing MD-11F Crash [pdf] ntsb.gov/Documents/Prelim... · Posted by u/gregsadetsky

anshumankmr · 3 months ago

Very fast. Quite sad to see it happen. Also quite puzzling is how the Air India disaster still does not have a root cause analysis done (though supposedly it will be released end of this year)

objclxt · 3 months ago

> quite puzzling is how the Air India disaster still does not have a root cause analysis done

Not that puzzling: the most likely explanation is pilot suicide and the Indian government does not want to acknowledge that.

objclxt commented on China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show bbc.com/news/articles/cq5... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

inglor_cz · 3 months ago

I remember reading that while the admissions were theoretically blind, in practice a nicely stuffed list of high-brow extracurriculars would give away the upper class candidates and thus undermine all attempts for actual class mobility.

IDK if this is true.

objclxt · 3 months ago

"Need blind" here just means that your ability to pay the fees doesn't factor into the admissions decision, not that the admissions office doesn't know how wealthy you are (...since as you note, this is often easily inferred).

In other words, you won't be refused an offer simply because the university thinks you can't afford it.

objclxt commented on The Swift SDK for Android swift.org/blog/nightly-sw... · Posted by u/gok

chrsstrm · 4 months ago

I'm just getting started in iOS development as a hobby, but what does this mean? Can I now build my app in Xcode with an Android target and use that binary in the Play Store? It surely can't be that easy now is it?

objclxt · 4 months ago

> Can I now build my app in Xcode with an Android target and use that binary in the Play Store?

No. The vision document[1] lays out the direction of travel. Currently the focus is on shared business logic and libraries, rather than full native applications (although that's certainly a goal, albeit a very long term one).

[1]: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/pull/2946/files

objclxt commented on Focus Is Saying No medium.com/@HobokenDays/s... · Posted by u/HideInNews

objclxt · 4 months ago

> These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams

...the author has reached the wrong conclusion from this. The problem is they weren't able to articulate why the modernization tasks were business priorities, not that the modernization wasn't a business priority in the first place.

If the tech debt is problematic, fixing it will presumably bring a number of benefits (faster development cycles, reduced defect rates, etc). They were doing the wrong work - they were doing a terrible job explaining why that work was necessary.

In many ways, tech debt and modernization is a near guaranteed way to have business impact, in a way product work is not. If you're at Meta and you figure out how to save 1% of total CPU time on the server by fixing some tech debt you can expect to be showered with money.

objclxt commented on Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026 riksbank.se/en-gb/press-a... · Posted by u/sebiw

Aurornis · 4 months ago

> The online function shall apply to physical payment cards and accompanying PIN code when purchasing essential goods such as food, medicine and fuel.

Is this a typo where they meant to say “the offline function”?

If I’m reading this right, the goal is to allow food, fuel, and medicine purchases with card + PIN in offline mode.

Seems like a reasonable goal. I wonder what the technical details will look like. Will there be a periodically updated list of cancelled cards/accounts distributed to endpoints? Even a hashed list of all cards cancelled before their expiration date within a country is a reasonable amount of data for modern storage systems.

Or would they simply rely on the ability to track down account owners by their originally registered contact info in the event that someone gets an invalid transaction through during an offline period?

objclxt · 4 months ago

> I wonder what the technical details will look like

It’s already a thing, the EMVCo standard predates ubiquitous internet connectivity. Mass transit systems typically use it, airlines used to for in-flight purchases before the advent of reliable WiFi.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV#Offline_data_authenticat...

It is somewhat common to maintain a denylist of known fraudulent cards, but as you note the main mitigation is on the bank to track the card down. One of the key things you need to figure out with an offline payment system - and what I imagine is needed here - is a consensus on who has the liability for offline transactions and what the dollar limits are.

objclxt commented on Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol openai.com/index/buy-it-i... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

skeeter2020 · 4 months ago

This is textbook strategy, adding layer after layer of pseudo protocols and "standards" on top of (surprise, surprise) their hard to defend against competition offerings, and ironically attempt to build a moat around something that ideally is open and interoperable. I haven't ruled out that I'm actually an idiot who doesn't get it, but it sure feels like the emperor has no clothes. It's like a recent Cloudflare post about how we're using LLMs to code all wrong; we just need to build (yet more) APIs specifically for MCP servers and then have very simple tools that only use those APIs. Yet more extra effort, time and energy optimizing for someone else's benefit.

objclxt · 4 months ago

> This is textbook strategy [...] attempt to build a moat around something that ideally is open and interoperable

It's so textbook that Google two weeks ago came out with their own competing "open" standard for doing the same thing!

https://ap2-protocol.org