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Yeah, this article has all the telltale signs of being AI generated.

By "Astral" do you mean "Spinel"? Also, what paid services? So far the only paid services they've mentioned is retainer services that essentially amount to priority customer support. The tools themselves are only ever described as free

EDIT: Misread the comment and thought it was only about `rv`, not both `uv` and `rv`


What is Spinel? Astral is the developer of uv, and they have announced their hosted platform service, pyx [0]. It appears it will be FOSS as well, but they'll have a hosted version of it.

[0]: https://astral.sh/blog/introducing-pyx


My mistake, I completely misread your comment and thought you were _only_ talking about `rv` as opposed to both `uv` and `rv`!


spinel is the company spun up around rv, ruby's uv version.

https://spinel.coop/


"If it's free, you're the product"


What makes you think they _haven't_ tried to work things out with Ruby Central? As per a separate article[1], this seems to be a last resort:

> “Since Ruby Central has informed us they will never allow us to continue working on the projects they now claim they own, that we successfully maintained and operated for the last ten years, the former RubyGems team is launching gem.coop today.”

[1]: https://socket.dev/blog/gem-cooperative-emerges-as-a-communi...


I suspect many of these maintainers are making absurd ultimatums of RubyCentral.


That's a strange suspicion. Why?


Because many mass-resigned unless Andre was re-instated.


I think many mass resigned when their commit access was taken away from their own project by a company that doesn't have a right to do that.

Some people might consider that a dick move.


Some additional context is that Justin Searls is close friends with people who are or have been on Rails Core and/or at Shopify. I've long been a fan of Justin's work, and I've spent time with him at conferences so I can attest to him being a nice person in my experience… But, given the alleged parties at play here, it's hard to take this piece as unbiased when it lacks that disclosure


It's an opinion piece by a trusted member of the community. He doesn't need to act unbiased but be credible and informative. As he wrote in his disclosure:

> People whose livelihood depends on the health of the Ruby ecosystem deserve more information than they're getting, especially now that its operational stability has come under threat.

On this count, Searls' article has done the work. I didn't know that Andre Arko baselessly threatened Google with lawyers, or that Andre played fast-and-loose with people's donations. That information was excluded from "unbiased" analyses and fact-checks which seem to largely target Andre's enemies.


The problem is not that Searls has opinions, it's that this petty hit piece against Andre was heavily wrapped in neutral, 'all I can do is offer a little bit of context', 'I'm not rushing to take sides' framing language, resulting in a disingenuous, passive-aggressive tone.

Why is Justin dredging up that one time eight years ago when Andre mistakenly called out a repo for infringing upon his employer's work (for which he publicly apologized five hours later)? Why is he harping on anecdotes from nine years ago in order to suggest Andre may have allegedly (gasp) expensed technology purchases and business meals to his employer? What does this all have to do with the current situation, other than unnecessarily stir the pot with a laundry list of old petty grievances fed to him by a bunch of anonymous contacts ('a lot of different people told me a lot of concerning stories')?

I think the author's close ties to Rails Core / Shopify employees is extremely important context for this post, especially since it's context that's been intentionally hidden by a neutral, unbiased framing.


Someone vibe coded a PR on my team where there were hundreds of lines doing complex validation of an uploaded CSV file (which we only expected to have two columns) instead of just relying on Ruby's built-in CSV library (i.e. `CSV.parse` would have done everything the AI produced)


That’s a good example of ‘getting a desired outcome based on prompt’ - use a built-in lib or not.


And when it hallucinates a non-existant library, what are the magic prompts that you give it that makes it stop trying to bullshit you?


> what are the magic prompts that you give it that makes it stop trying to bullshit you?

Maybe keep your eyes open? :-)


Okay, so at this point it is strictly worse than just searching for and reading the very simple docs for the Ruby CSV parser, surely?

Because, as part of your verification, you will have to do that _anyway_.


As I thought.

And for the record - my eyes are open. I'm aware I'm being bullshitted. I don't trust, I verify.

But I also don't have a magical lever that I can pull to make it stop hallucinating.

... and every time I ask if one exists, I get either crickets, or a response that doesn't answer the question.


Ask it to write tests, then let it run until the tests pass (preferably in a sandbox, far from your git credentials). It is quite good at developing hypotheses and tests for them, if that is what you explicitly ask for. It doesn’t have (much) ego, so it doesn’t care if it is proven wrong and will accept any outcome fairly if it is testable. Although sometimes it comes to the wrong conclusion and doubles down that the fact should be true so it prepares to write and publish a library to make it true


Sorry! Didn't mean to BS you. I've not come across a scenario where it hallucinated me with a non-existent library. Can you share what you were trying to do when that happened?


I wish I had the transcript. I don't, and I'm afraid that the passage of time has muddied the interaction to the point of uselessness (when it comes to listing specifics).


I wonder how many times the LLM randomly tried to steer back to that library only to get chastised for not following instructions.


Craft coffee is a luxury item that isn't part of Japanese culture in the same way that it is in the west. In the early morning, when you're a salaryman trying to get to work as fast as possible, you get coffee from a vending machine or convenience store. Craft coffee is something to enjoy leisurely, which is why most specialty coffee shops don't open until much later than we're used to


Thanks. I guessed that. I got downvoted so I assume people think I am complaining. I am not. Just observing and curious as to why they open later I assume there are different rituals and I never found out. Thanks for replying!


The post covers this:

> Our API is a Ruby on Rails application. For all public-facing models, we have added a `public_id` column to our database. We still use standard auto-incrementing BigInts for our primary key. The `public_id` is only used as an external identifier.


Their office has an entire team dedicated to physical security. If you're walking around by yourself and you don't have an employee badge, they find you pretty quick.



> In fact when most recipes specify a volumetric measurement of salt they mean table salt

That’s really not true. Most food writers would tell you that the standard is kosher salt, and many would specify diamond kosher


Maybe, just maybe, in the last 10-20 years when this trend for flakey salt has taken off. Any recipe you see older than 10 years I would safely bet that they meant table salt, and I would still recommend using table salt unless otherwise specified on anything more recent, that goes triple for any baking recipes. Again, unless for finishing.

Of course if the recipe specifies weight rather than volume, the point is moot.

And speaking as a former fine dining line cook, any food writer specifying kosher for anything other than fininshing/curing is a dolt IMO :)


Flakey salt is not the same as kosher salt. I just flipped through my four most used cookbooks and they all say "salt measurements are for kosher salt" in the preface somewhere. Three of them specify diamond crystal.

I've also got a coffee table book written in 1999 that says the same.


Agreed. Kosher salt is mainly not flaky, it just has slightly larger granules than table salt. I think the poster above might be conflating some of the flakier salts you can get which might also be kosher with standard kosher salt.


I think the main reason people go for kosher salt in recipes, cooking, and even baking is that it doesn’t taste of iodine. Table salt with iodine tastes slightly metallic, which will basically make your food taste worse. I’m an amateur cool, but you can simply taste the difference, so why make food taste worse/weirdly metallic?


I defy you to taste the difference between iodized and not in a blind test. All else being equal of course, size and shape differences would be a giveaway. So equal mass dissolved in water.


You can taste a slight difference between iodized and non iodized salt on its own but I very strongly doubt anyone would be able to detect that difference once the salt has been added to anything.


In America perhaps.

In the UK the term isn't used, iodine is not (or it's so rare I've never seen/heard of it, and can't find an example now) added ever, and anti-caking agent is only added if it's marketed as a table salt.


In the UK, iodine is added to cattle feed instead of salt, so it's contained in dairy products. No idea whether this can be a problem for vegans.

"Kosher salt" isn't a thing this side of the pond (at least in Germany). Even regular coarse salt is not something you can expect to find in an average kitchen.


In Switzerland, I never was able to find kosher salt. Coarse yes, table yes, but flaky kosher salt? Nope


Exactly, same here (also Suisse). It boggles my mind why would anybody use any other type of salt for anything, I guess lessons from primary school about iodine and its roles are long forgotten.

I never ever felt any bad taste from iodized salts. Had to actually google what kosher salt means, the connection with real kosher food is 0 and it seems purely US term.

There are whole articles about why you should never use iodized salts... seriously wtf


You typically use different types of salt based on the size/shape of the grains. You want something larger and hollow for finishing, because it gives a nice texture, as an example.

Every time I get the chance, I take a small amount of kosher salt (which is just salt used for koshering, not salt that is kosher) and a small amount of iodized salt and have visitors do a taste test. I've never had someone prefer the iodized salt, and they can always tell the difference between the two.

Maybe they have different labels in different countries, though.


Table salt is so fine that it is hard to sprinkle over food evenly and in controlled amounts. The taste isn't the issue.


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