ricw (u/ricw) - Readit News

ricw commented on The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/cyclecount

llm_nerd · 24 days ago

Users all got to complain that the EU are the meanies responsible for their old wires and chargers and accessory no longer being compatible, but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede.

To be clear, Apple had already moved their laptops and computers to USB-C -- long in advance of almost any one else -- and had moved their iPad Pros and Air to USB-C, building out the accessory set supporting the same, years before the EU decree. Pretty convenient when they get to blame the EU for their smartphones making the utterly inevitable move.

ricw · 24 days ago

Apple probably wouldn’t have changed to usbc for their phones. Lightning was a mobile phone / other development, whilst usbc and its contributions came from their Mac department.

They did not like each others standards. I know Apple engineers working on the phone who dislike the change even up to this day…

ricw commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025) · Posted by u/whoishiring

ricw · 2 months ago

Truetax | Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Elixir/Phoenix LiveView | San Francisco (Hybrid) or REMOTE (US) | Full-time

Truetax builds software to streamline government tax administration and make society more equitable. We're working with state and local governments to modernize their tax systems using GenAI agents and workflow automation.

We're looking for a Senior/Staff engineer who can ship fast while maintaining quality. You'll work directly with our co-founders (experienced entrepreneurs with multiple venture-backed exits) to design and build cutting-edge GenAI-powered systems.

If you're curious, self-motivated, and energized by complex government workflows, we'd love to hear from you.

For full details and to apply please visit: https://wellfound.com/l/2BLYjJ

ricw commented on Apple M5 chip apple.com/newsroom/2025/1... · Posted by u/mihau

biohazard2 · 2 months ago

I can think of multiple ways to pass the message to Electron developers:

- Open a GitHub issue explaining those private APIs shouldn't be used.

- Even better, open a PR fixing their use.

- Make those API calls a no-op if they come from an Electron app.

- Fix those API calls not to grind the OS to a halt for a seemingly simple visual effect.

- Create a public API allowing the same visual effect on a tested and documented API.

Choosing to (apparently violently) downgrade the user experience of all Electron app users, without a possibility to update at the launch day, if a deliberate decision and not an overlooked bug, is a rather shitty and user-hostile move, don't you think?

ricw · 2 months ago

The beta has been accessible to the public including the electron devs for 2+ months.

ricw commented on Qualcomm to acquire Arduino qualcomm.com/news/release... · Posted by u/janjongboom

estimator7292 · 2 months ago

Shame to see Arduino go, but honestly how relevant are they anymore? The Arduino framework is one of the worst ways possible to write firmware for any slightly serious use, and their hardware is... quaint in the era of Espressif and the Cambrian explosion of devboards with any number of highly advanced features.

Arduino was a great way to get into microcontrollers back when the only alternative was vendors' native libraries in straight undocumented C and wiggling CPU registers manually. But that's not really a niche anymore, there's plenty of other, better designed, frameworks and libraries. Arduino has always been the worst, slowest framework available.

Honestly it's high time to replace Arduino with something else that doesn't instill such awful habits in new engineers.

ricw · 2 months ago

Curious what the better frameworks are these days? Are they tied to specific hardware like arduino was? And what language do they use?

ricw commented on TikTok 'directs child accounts to pornographic content within a few clicks' theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/01-_-

teekert · 3 months ago

Not just TikTok, I checked out SnapChat because my kid is the last one in his class to not have it (according to him). First movie I see 2 people falling off an e-bike, pretty painful, then someone making fun of someone with down syndrome, then some weirdly squirming middle aged women with duck faces, and then some very young ones (pretending to?) * off someone off screen while staring into the camera.

Also I denied all access but it still suggested all my sons friends? How? Oh, and it won't even start without access to cameras.

I was pretty shocked. Still, friend off mine, a teacher tells me: You can't let your kid not have SnapChat, it's very important to them.

The Chinese apparently say: Just regulate! TikTok in our country is fun, educational even with safeguards against addiction. Because they mandate it. Somehow we don't want that here? We see it as overreach? Well I'm ready for some overreach (not ChatControl overreach, but you get what I mean). We leave it all up to the parents here, and all parents say: "Well my kid can't be the only one to not have it."

Meanwhile the kids I speak to tell me they regularly have vapeshops popping up in SnapChat, some dudes sell vapes with candy flavors (outlawed here) until the cops show up.

Yeah, we also did stupid things, I know, we grew up, found pron books in the park (pretty gross in retrospect), drank alcohol as young as 15, etc. I still feel this is different. We're just handing it to them.

Edit: Idk if you ever tried SnapChat but it is TikTok, chat, weird AI filters and something called "stories" which for me features a barely dressed girl in a Sauna.

ricw · 3 months ago

Instagram is the same. Had to install it for a dev project and it was disgusting. Social media just can’t be trusted.

ricw commented on AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/kjhughes

neom · 6 months ago

One area of business that I'm struggling in is how boring it is talking to an LLM, I enjoy standing at a whiteboard thinking through ideas, but more and more I see push for "talk to the llm, ask the llm, the llm will know" - The LLM will know, but I'd rather talk to a human about it. Also in pure business, it takes me too long to unlock nuances that an experienced human just knows, I have to do a lot of "yeah but" work, way way more than I would have to do with an experienced humans. I like LLMs and I push for their use, but I'm starting to find something here and I can't put my finger on what it is, I guess they're not wide enough to capture deep nuances? As a result, they seem pretty bad at understanding how a human will react to their ideas in practice.

ricw · 6 months ago

Just do both? Need an adequate network for that though which new school ai vibe entrepreneurs might lack…

ricw commented on LLMs and Elixir: Windfall or deathblow? zachdaniel.dev/p/llms-and... · Posted by u/uxcolumbo

CompoundEyes · 7 months ago

Tried Pheonix framework / Elixir in Cursor out of curiosity last weekend and it was the best experience I’ve had so far with agentic coding. I don’t know either yet — purely an experiment. My instructions doc required TDD, a feature list, had links to pheonix/elixir/tailwind/postgres doc and sonnet 4 did a great job utilizing pheonix cli which reduces a lot of boilerplate generation. Proved changes worked with tests at each iteration. The key thing was it didn’t lose its bearings as the project got more complex. Other web app frameworks I’m familiar with invariably get lost adding npm packages left and right, fiddling with config files and wrapped in an “extension cord” needing rescuing. I think there is something to so many node world version changes and approaches in framework implementation in training data that pollute the decision making. Also I realized watching sonnet construct the project was actually a really compelling way of learning a new framework/language to me. I can stop and ask “why are you doing this? how does that work?’ and inspect the code. Made me interested in learning more about elixir.

ricw · 7 months ago

I've been using elixir / phoenix / liveview for a year now, basically since LLM coding has been a thing and it's been transformative. The usual "getting started" problems were so diminished that i feel like i hardly missed a beat. The usual "this won't compile / how do i do this in a new unknown language" issues that previously could have taken hours to resolve were basically gone. My LLM pair programmer just took care of it. Coming from python / django / cue, it's a breath of fresh air. It's so much easier as all the paradigms come built in with the stack (async workers, etc). The elixir / erlang library is surprisingly complete.

With regards to producing code, it seems to be doing very well. The most impressive thing it did for me was a PDF OCR from scratch using google cloud. All i had to do was plug in my credentials, hook up the code and it just worked. Magic.

Highly recommended.

ricw commented on Web search on the Anthropic API anthropic.com/news/web-se... · Posted by u/cmogni1

camkego · 7 months ago

Do you have any references to the point that the Google Custom Search API is for a subset of the regular Google search index?

ricw · 7 months ago

No reference here but found this out the hard way too. Google search Ali is Utterly useless in fact and entirely different search results vs using the web. Bing is better. Haven’t tried ksgi yet

ricw commented on Waiting for Postgres 18: Accelerating Disk Reads with Asynchronous I/O pganalyze.com/blog/postgr... · Posted by u/lfittl

powerbook5300CS · 7 months ago

Why not MongoDB?

ricw · 7 months ago

The question should be the other way around: why mongodb? It’s not ACID compliant so has major down sides…

ricw commented on Heat stress mitigation by trees and shelters at bus stops sciencedirect.com/science... · Posted by u/rntn

wodenokoto · 7 months ago

It is. Sunscreen recommendations usually also applies if you plan on staying in shade. UV (like visible light) reflects off of walls too.

ricw · 7 months ago

It’s actually much more that the ozone layer, which filters uv, is much thinner than it was even 60-70 years ago. The ozone layer might be growing again, but at a very slow pace.

Simple fact is, we’re much more exposed to uv than prior generations.