Author of A Window on Intelligence. Software engineer. Founder @veritula. Ex Apple. Translator of The Beginning of Infinity. I build tools for thinkers.
Chicago
Joined August 2012
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New homepage 🥳
dennishackethal.com
ALT Dennis Hackethal’s new homepage at dennishackethal.com
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
GENIUS 🤣🤣🤣
He created a script to counter the new data tax the French government wants to adopt:
- He downloads a PDF file available on the Socialist Party's website on an infinite loop, which racks up €30 in taxes in 4 hours.
- In theory, if 1,000 people did this, they could drain their €16 million budget in 5 months 🤣🤣🤣
The law doesn't exempt associations or political parties, so honestly, part of me kind of wants it to pass 🤣🤣🤡🤡🤡
🚨 Il crée un script qui vide le budget du Parti socialiste via sa propre taxe sur les téléchargements ?
Un internaute a généré 30€ de taxe simulée en 4 heures en automatisant le téléchargement d’un fichier PDF hébergé sur le site du Parti socialiste.
La démonstration intervient après l’adoption à l’Assemblée nationale d’un amendement du député socialiste Laurent Lhardit, instaurant une taxe de 0,055 € par Go de données transmis aux abonnés français.
Avec un script simulant des téléchargements répétés d’un PDF de 44 Mo consacré à Marc Bloch, l’ingénieur a calculé une taxe théorique de plus de 30€ après moins de 4 heures, pour 13 109 téléchargements et 576 Go de données. Il a ensuite précisé n’avoir effectué qu’un seul téléchargement réel, les boucles étant simulées.
Il souligne que le texte n’exclut pas les associations ni les partis politiques. Selon son calcul, environ 1 000 personnes exécutant le même script pourraient théoriquement épuiser en moins de cinq mois le budget de 16 millions d’euros du Parti socialiste.
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
My company sends about 20 people a year to our office in America.
Before they go, HR gives them a 40-page manual. Most of it is visas and taxes.
Section 7 is different. It was written by employees who came back. HR adds to it every year. Nobody remembers who started it.
I was allowed to translate some of it.
SECTION 7: THINGS THAT WILL HAPPEN TO YOU
7.1 A stranger will ask how you are. This is not a question. Answer "Good, you?" Do not tell them how you actually are. (Kobayashi did. He was invited to a barbecue. It is now an annual event.)
7.2 You will be called "buddy," "boss," and "sweetheart" by people who do not know your name. All of them mean it.
7.3 At the hardware store, an older man will explain the thing you came to buy for 25 minutes. You will leave with the right part and a new grandfather.
7.4 If you are sick for a week, your lawn will be mowed. You will not find out who did it. (It was the man next door. It is always the man next door.)
7.5 By November, you will be invited to Thanksgiving. Accept. You will be sent home with more food than you brought.
SECTION 8: AFTER YOU RETURN TO JAPAN
Employees may experience:
- Waving at trucks
- Calling younger staff "sir"
- Small talk in elevators
- Asking the convenience store clerk how her day is going
These are not problems. Please do not report them to HR.
The last line of the manual was added in pen by our HR director. He was posted to Michigan in 1998.
"If you're lucky, you'll never fully come back."
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
great satire of EA-style reasoning lmao morewrong.lol
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Dennis Hackethal retweeted
I’ll absolutely fail any coding interview. Always have. But give me a problem and a model, not even a good one, and I’ll solve it. Pity companies haven’t caught up. The good news is, most of the market will end up like this as there are simply bigger problems so solve in a software stack, and this code nonsense is just a side effect.
Be real, you’re gonna pay most devs to talk to codex or Claude. How about you test them in the actual environment. But no. Let’s find the next leetcode
I’ve added a new feature to my experimental Apple Music frontend.
I call it: Context Switching.
If the currently playing song features in another playlist, you can switch to it *without interrupting the song.*
AFAIK no major music app can do this.
Would you use this feature?
The future of software is malleability. Every OS should be malleable in the name of error correction.
Just imagine it: a free, local, Opus 5.5-level LLM on every device. Including your phone.
Like, imagine Siri was actually smart. So smart it could rewrite the software on your phone in real time.
That bug you found in the Music app? ‘Hey Siri, fix that.’
Don’t like the color of a button? ‘Hey Siri, change it to blue, and move it to the top of the screen.’
In exchange, Apple could somehow collect the best changes and release them as part of the next OS upgrade.
No more waiting for software updates to fix bugs. Everybody wins.
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
So, basically, 500 million Europeans expect 300 million Americans to protect them from 120 million Russians who can’t even defeat 40 million Ukrainians while those 500 million Europeans don’t even realize they are being conquered by 2 billion Muslims who claim they are being persecuted by 8 million Israelis. Is that about right?
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Dennis Hackethal retweeted
We’ve raised $1.3M from YC & Afore Capital so you never have to type or speak again.
Typing is slow. Talking into your computer is awkward. Subvocal fixes both
Our glasses give you the speed of speech without you making a sound or touching a keyboard.
It tracks your internal speech muscles with non-contact sensing and decodes silent, almost invisible mouthing into text at more than 200 words/min.
Pre-orders are now live at:
subvocal.co/preorder?utm_sou…
One of the best things you can do right now is use AI for productivity gains BEFORE the moochers come for them
(Translation: German politicians considering AI tax)
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
100%
Very well said.
Apple was and is supposed to be the king of saying NO.
Saying no is one of the most important things in good product design.
And they increasingly seem to become yes-people.
I’ll explain it
When you buy Apple, you're buying CRITERIA: the best experience for each task.
I don't want 50 options. I want the best one, already chosen.
A buffet gives you 50 dishes and no idea which ones are good. Pick wrong, and the bad meal is your fault
A Michelin-star restaurant is the opposite: a fixed, opinionated menu where every dish is great
Apple is supposed to be the Michelin restaurant
This MacBook Pro is a buffet: “use whatever input you like, best for the task or not.”
That's why we're upset
Because we can't blindly trust Apple's CRITERIA anymore
And that trust is the #1 reason Apple got to the top!
Dennis Hackethal retweeted
This is what Bill had to say:
“Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
Xerox showed Steve Jobs the future of the computer for the right to buy $1 million of Apple stock. Ten years later it sued Apple for $150 million over what he saw.
In 1979, when Jobs was 24, Xerox's lab in Palo Alto showed him three things. He was so blinded by the first that he missed the other two, he said later.
The first was a screen of windows and icons run by a mouse. The others were networked computers and a new way of writing software.
In return for the visit, Apple let Xerox buy in before its 1980 IPO. Xerox put its own version, the Star, on sale in 1981. Apple's Macintosh followed in 1984.
In December 1989 Xerox sued, saying Apple had collected more than $100 million from the interface. In March 1990 a federal judge threw out most of the case. Copyright claims have a 3-year deadline, and the Mac had been out for almost 6.
In 1996, 17 years after the tour, Jobs said on camera for PBS that Xerox "could have owned the entire computer industry today."
Xerox Star, 1981: $16,595.
Apple Macintosh, 1984: $2,495.
Be honest. Did Jobs take the idea, or did Xerox give it away?