Hacker NewsSaturday, December 27

Rob Pike, a prominent computer programmer, received spam that appeared to be an "act of kindness" but was actually AI-generated content. This incident highlights the growing issue of AI-generated spam that mimics genuine human interactions and goodwill gestures.

The author discovered that reading Lord of the Rings aloud at an extremely slow pace - treating each sentence with triple the usual attention - dramatically enhanced their enjoyment and comprehension. This principle extends to eating and other activities: slowing consumption speed to half or a third the normal rate releases much more meaning, pleasure, and satisfaction. The author compares this to vacuuming slowly to pick up more dirt, suggesting our default consumption speeds undermine the very rewards we seek. They argue that modern culture's emphasis on speed pushes us toward surface-level rewards, while slower consumption naturally leads us to prefer higher-quality books, food, and experiences over mass-produced alternatives.

Package managers like Cargo, Homebrew, CocoaPods, and others initially used git repositories as databases but encountered severe performance and scalability issues. These systems suffered from slow clones, massive repository sizes, and expensive git operations that degraded user experience, especially in CI environments. Most have migrated to HTTP-based solutions, CDNs, or sparse protocols for better performance, demonstrating that git's filesystem-based design makes it unsuitable as a database despite its initial appeal.

This is an Imgur post titled "Rob Pike Goes Nuclear over GenAI" that appears to be an image or meme about Rob Pike (likely the computer scientist known for his work on Go programming language and Unix) expressing strong criticism or concerns about generative artificial intelligence technology.

uv installs packages faster than pip primarily due to design decisions rather than being written in Rust. Modern Python packaging standards like PEP 658 enabled fast metadata access without downloading packages. uv achieves speed by dropping legacy support for eggs, pip.conf, and permissive parsing, while implementing optimizations like parallel downloads and global caching that pip could adopt but doesn't due to backwards compatibility constraints.

The author discusses their experience with a faulty diabetes monitoring device (CGM) from Abbott that killed seven patients due to falsely reporting low glucose levels. They argue that open-source software and hardware transparency could prevent such tragedies through peer review, criticizing the proprietary nature of medical devices and calling for accountability.

Ken Jin partially retracts his previous apology about Python's tail calling performance results, reporting that the tail calling interpreter now beats the computed goto interpreter by 5% on macOS AArch64 and 15% on Windows x86-64 using experimental MSVC. He explains that tail calling resets compiler heuristics and allows better optimization of CPython's 12k-line interpreter loop, with the feature now included in Python 3.15 for Visual Studio 2026 builds.

This appears to be a time schedule or calendar grid displaying time slots in 30-minute intervals from 10:00 to 17:30, but contains no actual events, appointments, or meaningful content - just empty time slots with no associated information or activities listed.

A school with over 2000 users and 470000 posts is experiencing a 10000-message limit issue after a Mattermost upgrade, preventing access to messages before September 26, 2025. They're questioning when this restriction was implemented and whether the date is calculated based on the message limit or represents access to recent months only.

After nearly two years of waiting, an FFmpeg developer took action against Rockchip for copying thousands of lines of FFmpeg code and changing the license in violation of LGPL terms. The copyright violation involved blatantly copy-pasting FFmpeg code into their driver with unauthorized license changes.