Posted by paveworld 23 hours ago
Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died
Hadn't heard from him in years. Then he posted that he was going to start writing again and I was so very glad to hear it... And now...
The dude was to me what tech journalism was. Between Cringely and Dvorak leaving us, we're losing the old guard. I'm bummed.
> Look at his last few blog posts, outlining a radical alternative to LLMs. Read closely, and at the heart of that idea we find "assume enterprise search".
I found the patent for his company's technology (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20250259069A1). I always have trouble reading patents, but as far as I can tell it's basically a wrapper around commodity LLMs. The reliability improvements come from prompting the LLM to only source its data from an external database that you provide rather than from whatever it was trained on, and from prompting multiple LLMs simultaneously then doing semantic analysis on the responses to make sure they all agree. I imagine that doing this would probably reduce hallucinations, but there's no hard constraint to prevent them entirely and I'm not sure what the moat is.
That sounds liked LinkedIn speak.
RIP hacker from a bygone era..
It's especially tragic for his family as Bob had announced that his son Cole, aged 21, had passed away back in April. Condolences to all those who knew Mark, Cole, and their loved ones. RIP.
https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/27/where-the-heck-have-i-be...
I have rewatched this movie so many times and it was definitely one of the most formative movies for me as well.
(basically because every afternoon or most afternoon if there was no satellite connection I think, I would watch the movie and this was one of the only movies within the pen drives that I had I think.)
When I was in 5-6th grade, I even gave a speech in class about Steve jobs to one of the subjects which was more about personal development/personal trainer. The sir actually used to call me steve jobs afterwards for sometime whenever I used to meet him.
Man do I love pirates of the silicon valley, I really like this song[0]
and random trivia about this song, and that the director of the movie even commented on this song/youtube video (as the video is actually named: "What is the name of this music?") and it turns out that this is an unnamed song.
> As well as using a lot of 70's & 80's classic rock and roll classics appropriate to the era when Jobs and Woz were starting Apple, we also went for "sound-alikes" (for the Ella Fitzgerald number) and created some of our own music. This piece is one of those creations. There is no name for it that I'm aware of.
> Martyn Burke
> Director-Pirates of Silicon Valley