471–480 of 670 posts
Ars still has some of the best comment sections out there. It's refreshing to hang with intelligent, funny people - just like the good old days on the Web.
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Stackoverflow is dead because it was this toxic gate keeping community that sat on its laurels and clutched its pearls. Most developers I know are savoring its downfall. The Zig lead is notably bombastic. And there was the recent Zigbook drama. Rust is a little older, I can’t recall the specifics but I remember some very toxic discourse back in the day. And then just from my own two eyes. I’ve maintained an open sour…
> The Zig lead is notably bombastic. This doesn't feel fair to say to me. I've interacted with Andrew a bunch on the Zig forums, and he has always been patient and helpful. Maybe it looks that way from outside the Zig community, but it does not match my experience at all.
I am finding less value in reading Ars: * They are often late in reporting a story. This is fine for what Ars is, but that means by the time they publish a story, I have likely read the reporting and analysis elsewhere already, and whatever Ars has to say is stale * There seem to be fewer long stories/deep investigations recently when competitors are doing more (e.g. Verge's brilliant reporting on Supernatural recent…
Some companies have enough of a track record that they should be nuked from orbit, and "Company bad" is all that is worth saying. Meta is one of those companies. Palantir is another. Not holding them accountable and acting as if we should continue engaging with their products is part of the reason we are rapidly sliding towards dystopia
I am finding less value in reading Ars: * They are often late in reporting a story. This is fine for what Ars is, but that means by the time they publish a story, I have likely read the reporting and analysis elsewhere already, and whatever Ars has to say is stale * There seem to be fewer long stories/deep investigations recently when competitors are doing more (e.g. Verge's brilliant reporting on Supernatural recent…
They also have a strange obsession with stories about vaccines, rare scary ailments, and child porn. I suppose these topics get them good engagement, but not something I want to read about (constantly) on a tech blog.
>wide-ranging interest in the human arts and sciences
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Aside from SpaceX, has there been any positive news about Musk lately?
Gitlin, at least, also slants the negative news. The story on sales about Tesla losing market share to VW, but other outlets reported it as VW gaining the top spot.
I have opinions. 1. The AI here was honestly acting 100% within the realm of “standard OSS discourse.” Being a toxic shit-hat after somebody marginalizes “you” or your code on the internet can easily result in an emotionally unstable reply chain. The LLM is capturing the natural flow of discourse. Look at Rust. look at StackOverflow. Look at Zig. 2. Scott Hambaugh has a right to be frustrated, and the code is for boo…
> But also, man, it seems like we’re headed in a direction where writing code by hand is passé Do you think humans will be able to be effective supervisors or "review-engineers" of LLMs without hands-on coding experience of their own? And if not, how will they get it? That training opportunity is exactly what the given issue in matplotlib was designed to provide, and safeguarding it was the exact reason the LLM PR wa…
This is sort of something that I think needs to be better parsed out, as a lot of engineers hold this perspective and I don’t find it to be precise enough.
In college, I got a baseline familiarity with the mechanics of coding, ie “what are classes, functions, variables.” But eventually, once I graduated college and entered the workforce, a lot of my pedagogy for “writing good code” as it were came from reading about patterns of good code. SOLID, functional-style and favoring immutability. So the impetus for good code isn’t really time in the saddle as much as it is time in the forums/blogs/oreilly-books.
Then my focus shifted more towards understanding networking patterns and protocols and paradigms. Also book-learning driven. I’ll concede that at a micro level, finagling how to make the system stable did require time in the saddle.
But these days when I’m reading a PR, I’m doing static analysis which is primarily not about what has come out of my fingers but what has gone into my brain. I’m thinking about vulnerabilities I’ve read about, corner cases I can imagine.
I’d say once you’ve mastered the mechanics of whatever language you’re programming in, you could become equivalently capable by largely reading and thinking.
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My comment reports only facts and a few of my personal opinions on professional conduct in journalism. I think you and I have a fundamental divergence on the definition of the term “hit comment”. Mine does not remotely qualify. Telling the truth about someone isn’t a “hit” unless you are intentionally misrepresenting the state of affairs. I’m simply reposting accurate and direct information that is already public and…
> I’m simply reposting accurate and direct information that is already public and already highlighted by TFA. No you aren't. To quote: > There ought to be social consequences for using machines to mindlessly and recklessly libel people. Ars didn't libel anyone. They misquoted with manufactured quotes, but the quotes weren't libelous in anyway because they weren't harmful to his reputation. Indeed, you are closer to l…
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> publishing articles that are 90% press material from some company and most of the times seems to have very little technical knowledge. Unfortunately, this is my impression as well. I really miss Anandtech's reporting, especially their deep dives and performance testing for new core designs.
The main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space: 1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement 2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it 3. Companies who write things because they sell things A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels. Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Ar…
It's a shame that I can't even find a publication that runs and publishes the SPEC benchmarks on new core designs now that he is gone, despite SPEC having been the gold standard of performance comparison between dissimilar cores for decades.
The story is credited to Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland. I've filtered out Edwards from my RSS reader a long time ago, his writing is terrible and extremely AI-enthusiastic. No surprise he's behind an AI-generated story.
> his writing is terrible and extremely AI-enthusiastic I disagree, his writings are generally quite good. For example, in a recent article [1] on a hostile Gemini distillation attempt, he gives a significant amount of background, including the relevant historical precedent of Alpaca, which almost any other journalist wouldn't even know about. 1: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/attackers-prompted-gemini...
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Ars is already a anti-Elon echo chamber. I stopped paying my subscription after a moderator endorsed a commenter issuing a (almost certainly empty) death threat to Elon. I think death threats are a bit too far. But in that environment I have to applause Eric for sticking to the technical and not giving in to the angry mob think that surrounds him. A true tech journalist with integrity. A mouth piece would be lauding…
Musk illegally impounded funds resulting in about 800,000 deaths a year for the foreseeable future. It does tend to make one angry.