BertvB posted a photo:
A dramatic sunset over the North Sea coast, captured from a high vantage point overlooking a row of beach cabins.
Verse beelden, veel Lamers. ja het heet ook niet voor niets archief. En oude wijn in nieuwe zakken: Jongeleen doet een geenstijltje. Waanzinnig zakkende Simon Schrikker. Sorry! zegt Lamers. Ralph van Meijgaard – IM Lamers [Meer...]
Rijnmond: Renovatie museum Boijmans pakt fors duurder uit dan 360 miljoen, gemeente grijpt in
Het Argentijnse elftal heeft woensdagavond de halve finale van het WK voetbal gewonnen van Engeland. Dat betekent dat de Argentijnen zondag de WK-finale spelen tegen Spanje, dat…
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FreeBSD 16 has removed the last GPL-licensed code from its base system, retiring the old GNU 'dialog' implementation after the installer moved to 'bsddialog' and the final dependency was disabled. Phoronix reports: This ticket to retire dialog was opened back in February while is now merged to the FreeBSD source tree for what will become FreeBSD 16.0. With dialog removed, the latest FreeBSD code now retires the GNU sub-tree of the FreeBSD base system now that no more GNU code remains. FreeBSD 16.0 is working its way toward release that is expected to happen in December 2027.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Dave Brown, a 19-year veteran of AWS and member of its S-team leadership cabal, is leaving Amazon for parts undisclosed. It's hard to overstate Dave's impact on AWS; the few times I've met him, it was very clear that there was nothing I could trot out in the realm of "arcane EC2 trivia" that he didn't go orders of magnitude deeper on with zero forewarning. This is a titanic loss for AWS, because that's roughly how deep Dave routinely dove. He'll be handing the reins over to fellow S-team member Dave Treadwell, currently the head of Amazon Retail's "eCommerce Foundation" (itself an upscale term for "bargain basement"). Brown probably isn't going to be a direct competitor (though he's definitionally going to some Amazon competitor short of his next move being "philanthropy"), unless the two-week notice period is simply a bunch of Amazonian goons beating the tar out of him in a dark room around the clock until August. But the interesting part to me is that suddenly Dave Treadwell has an enviable job. Think about it for a second: Amazon retail was, for a time, the largest AWS customer — and certainly one of the most complicated. If I think I have beef about AWS-isms, there's no doubt that "Tread," as he's apparently called, has mountains to my molehill of complaints. So if I can slip into his role for a second, here would be my to-do list if I were coming from an Amazon Retail background and suddenly had EC2 bequeathed to me to run: GPU capacity acquisition: Special people get special allocation rules, balanced between Capacity Blocks, war-clicking past InsufficientInstanceCapacity screens, and having to know a guy. Amazon has an entire internal project to solve this for its own teams. If I'm Tread, take a page from retail and smash Spot Fleet dynamics into a proper capacity marketplace. "Only 2 p6-b300.48xlarge left in stock. Ships from and sold by GPUZ4LOLZ (91% positive feedback)." Savings plans / Reserved Instances archaeology: These sometimes-but-often-not overlapping discount vehicles were clearly designed by folks who never had to explain them to a CFO with anger management issues. Treadwell has a golden opportunity here to roll out dynamic raw pricing: on-demand rates that themselves fluctuate hourly like a third-party listing on discontinued and incompatible printer ink, replacing traditional commitment vehicles with a "Subscribe & Save 5%" toggle on vCPUs. Instance type proliferation: As of this writing, there are 1,354 EC2 instance types available in us-east-1 alone, and the console picker assumes that you already know the correct answer. Riiiight. There's a solution here! "Customers who launched m7i.large also launched ..." combined with sponsored placement by EC2 sub-departments means the top result is now suddenly the instance family that AWS overbought. Is this the best instance for the customer? Who gives a rat's ass; it's what's best for Amazon, a north star that Amazon Retail has been chasing for years. SageMaker is someone's empire-building project: There are over 35 SageMaker products, or features, or whatever the distinction is supposed to be at AWS. Tread should leave this alone, and introduce the amazing source of truth that is Customer Reviews. "1 star. Not as described. Arrived as Jupyter notebook; what the hell do I do with it?" They can repurpose their fake review detection to take down fraudulent reviews from other SageMaker sub-teams. Quota request supplication: You know the drill; beg, plead, and wait for the privilege to give AWS more money. The fix here is almost too easy; y'know who doesn't have to wait for quota increases? That's right: Amazon Prime members. That's the easy punch list if it were me. But I'm me, and Tread is not. I'm sure he's got planned more treats with far greater nuance and customer hostility; we'll know for sure that he's settled in when the EC2 section of our AWS bills starts including ads - and when Josh Pigford's excellent Knockoff extension starts working in the EC2 console. ®
Another day, another programming language feels the heat from AI. A prominent Haskell-based software platform is shifting new development to Python, with its founder arguing that Haskell's tooling and ecosystem have been slow to adapt to AI-assisted development. “Haskell is in real danger,” warned Scarf founder Avi Press, in a post entitled “After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell.” “AI is here to stay. The people and ecosystems that use it well are going to move much faster than the people and ecosystems that do not.” Press’ post set off a firestorm of controversy within the Haskell community, which is small but vocal, and likely felt the sting of one of its most prominent users defecting to the comparatively toy-like Python to better serve the needs of agents. “Trying to change the language to work better for some metric of ‘better’ with AI is foolish for many many reasons,” wrote one user on Reddit. “It's foolish to try to change to LLMs in a kneejerk fashion because no one knows what's on the horizon.” Putting the fun into functional programming Haskell, a functional programming language that debuted in 1990, may not appeal to fast-moving startups. It ranks No. 46 in the latest TIOBE index of programming language popularity, with a rating of less than half a percent. Favoring recursion and immutable data over conventional imperative loops and mutable state, the language's mathematical underpinnings can intimidate even experienced developers. Nevertheless, it has attracted a highly dedicated following, particularly within academia. Press has been one of Haskell’s most vocal proponents, and has even served on the language’s foundation board. “Learning it made me a much better programmer,” he admitted. Press used Haskell to build Scarf, which provides usage analytics for open source software. In a 2023 talk entitled “Why Haskell is a Terrible Choice for Startups (and why we picked it anyway),” Press admitted it was difficult to find Haskell programmers, yet the language’s rigorous type safety comes with other benefits. Refactoring is a cinch, which is valuable as business priorities change. Also, documents can be auto-generated from data types. Plus, once you get the hang of it, programming in Haskell is downright fun, Press argued. Because AI But going forward, Scarf’s new features will be added in Python instead. “At Scarf, we started doing all new API work in Python,” he wrote. “New API routes go into Python, existing Haskell code keeps running, and over time the new server becomes the main path and our Haskell footprint will shrink.” Press said Python plays better with AI, which is the direction he sees development heading. A huge part of the problem is Haskell's sluggish compilation times. “If an LLM can produce a working implementation in a few minutes, but your compile step takes dramatically longer, then your language and build system have become a bottleneck in the development loop,” he wrote. Long compilation times, once a minor annoyance, become prohibitive when running multiple coding agents at once. Caching can help, but incurs its own overhead to manage. “I want to spin up multiple worktrees, fork off different lines of work, let agents try things, review the results, and keep the useful ones. In that world, cold start time matters a lot,” Press wrote. Rigor for runtime Using Python with AI practices immediately improved the Scarf production team’s workflows, allowing them to fix bugs with minimal oversight, Press noted. In some cases, AI can fix a bug “before I get off the call with a customer,” he noted. “Resisting this kind of productivity is not an option anymore,” Press wrote. Yet, Press doesn’t feel that the Haskell ecosystem is addressing the shift to agentic-led development. Many of the language’s maintainers focus more on restricting the use of AI, or restricting its use on Haskell entirely, rather than looking for ways Haskell can better serve AI, or vice versa, he argued. Agents have different bottlenecks than human code jockeys, he noted. “They are cheap at generating code and expensive when blocked. They benefit from fast feedback, clear examples, low setup friction, and errors that help them repair the code quickly,” he wrote. Press listed ways Haskell could be made easier for agents to use: Better documentation with actual copy-and-paste industry-targeted examples (rather than “beautiful types”), more informative error messages, and – most importantly – faster build times. Optimize and chill Press’ missive set off a firestorm of discussion across Hacker News, X, Reddit and Haskell’s own message boards. Many questioned the move from Haskell to Python, given Python’s own arguably inferior typing. They also questioned whether it would have been a simpler move to optimize the Haskell compiler for faster builds than switching languages altogether. Other Haskell fans voiced more philosophical concerns. It was as if they were taking the language’s tongue-in-cheek motto, “Avoid success at all costs," seriously. Longtime UK-based Haskell programmer Chris Done questioned the motivation of making Haskell more AI-friendly, given that production use is only one way that people use Haskell. “I don’t subscribe to this growth mindset anymore,” he wrote. “I’ve come to accept Haskell on its own terms. If it dies out and becomes irrelevant like Elm or PureScript, I’ll be fine and still enjoy it.” “It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth,” wrote another contributor on the Haskell forum about Press’ post. “I don’t feel like you take our concerns about the harm of AI seriously at all.” Another accused Press of having a financial stake in AI companies (to which Press replied, “Nope”). Haskell Foundation Executive Director José Manuel Calderón Trilla urged folks to chill in an X message. Haskell is a community that prides itself on doing things “the right way,” he noted, but that shouldn’t “let that blind you into thinking that your way is the only ‘right’ way, and then attacking someone for violating your idea of what the party line is.” ®
"Meta has spent years tracking us online," said a spokesperson for Everybody Hates Elon. "Now it wants to track us in the real world too." [...] "Meta and Ray-Ban's new AI glasses can be used to secretly record women and young people for sexual reasons," the EHE spokesperson continued in their statement. "Simply put, that's abuse."
EHE poses one simple question: "Billionaires could fund cures for cancer -- so why are they funding glasses for perverts instead?"