Hacker News: Demiurge

New comment by Demiurge in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

Demiurge — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:17:17 +0000

It’s harder depending on the language, which is clearly the point.

New comment by Demiurge in "Show HN: We missed Winamp, so we built an audio player for macOS"

Demiurge — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:07:26 +0000

Time to fire up the vibes, Xcode here we come!

No, but seriously, thanks for sharing.

New comment by Demiurge in "Show HN: We missed Winamp, so we built an audio player for macOS"

Demiurge — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:32:30 +0000

I actually prefer VLC to foobar2000. However, I still prefer classic Winamp to to all other music players, and I wish I could get Apple Music work in the same interface. I like 100% of the classic Winamp player UI/UX.

- I like the separate player, playlist, EQ windows.

- I like that I can re-arrange the windows, and resize the playlist separately.

- I like that the main player has a little EQ built in.

- I like the layout of the main window. It's perfect.

- I like the layout of the playlist window, it's also perfect. I can add "directories", "albums", etc. and again, I can resize the window.

- I like the skins. I like the classic skin, but I also love the Sonicated skin. I still have it on my Windows laptop.

- Conversely, I really dislike the "native" UI elements.

- I like that lack of rounded corners on the classic Winamp windows, such that when windows stick together, they appear as whole, and I can drag them around as one.

Mostly, it's a bunch of seemingly small and aesthetic things, but if a player doesn't have those things, I might as well just use iTunes.

New comment by Demiurge in "I keep tripping over "true, false, true""

Demiurge — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:32:01 +0000

Named arguments are a great feature in Python. I often forget TypeScript doesn't have this, but I use the object form all the times. As a bonus, you can also declare these arguments in an object an interface type, aptly named.

New comment by Demiurge in "I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left"

Demiurge — Sun, 10 May 2026 19:05:21 +0000

I do not downvote comments when I disagree, and I think it’s better to explain why I would strongly disagree. Downvoting in this case almost reinforces the notion that the downvoted comment makes such a good point that it causes people to give up on the discourse and just smash the panic downvote button. It’s obvious to me why this is not the case for this comment.

The suggestion to setup some kind of IAM policy to shut things down and stop resource usage is insanely complicated for users who need this kind of feature the most. If I’m learning AWS and just added my CC to it, I am the last person to be qualified to setup this kind of an alert and policy from scratch. This needs to be a single text input in the billing page, like it is for countless spend-as-you-go services. When the limit is hit, the service needs to stop the usage at the customers peril, because that’s what they customer requests.

Hope this helps.

New comment by Demiurge in "GeoJSON"

Demiurge — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:19:22 +0000

Is this actually GeoJSON falling down, or decades of convention extended to JSON? Topology is great, but it is sidestepped by Shapefile/WKT/WKB/etc, in favor of independent primitives like POINT, LINE, POLYGON. If GeoJSON did not exist as a new JSON GIS data format encoding these primitives, TopoJSON would not have "replaced" it, due to the added mis-match with other non-topological formats.

From what I can tell, the top criticism of GeoJSON is the under-enforced winding order specification, and crossing the antemeridian.

New comment by Demiurge in "GeoJSON"

Demiurge — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:09:40 +0000

Also, JSON! Wow.

New comment by Demiurge in "VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage"

Demiurge — Sun, 03 May 2026 00:28:14 +0000

That’s not an accurate take. Microsoft has had a monopoly on the PC desktop OS. Anyone writing applications for users was targeting Windows and using Microsoft. To call most of these developers “not serious” is quite and overstatement. This includes all PC game developers, DAW, CAD, Adobe…?

Azure expanded the Microsoft franchise, and provides another prong to their whole integration story just like cloud AD services and online Office 365 provide another way to stay integrated into their ecosystem.

Yeah, they needed to work on their image somewhat, but their image never negatively impacted them

New comment by Demiurge in "Zed 1.0"

Demiurge — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 23:58:29 +0000

I love Zed. I was a fan of Sublime Text, and could never get used to VSCode. I thought I'd try Zed a try when it was still extremely raw, before the AI integration, and I loved the simplicity and speed almost immediately. When they added better python linting features, I switched, and haven't used anything else. I know that there are many anti-AI folks here, but I feel lucky that we they added the Zed Agent, and all the integration. It's been great not having to switch back to VSCode for copilot.

New comment by Demiurge in "MiniMax M2.7 Is Now Open Source"

Demiurge — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:13:25 +0000

It should be at least cheaper if anyone can host it, no?

New comment by Demiurge in "MiMo-V2-Pro LLM nearing GPT-5.2, Opus 4.6 performance at a fraction of the cost"

Demiurge — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:00:57 +0000

Im surprised this did not get any comments.

New comment by Demiurge in "MacBook Air with M5"

Demiurge — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:39:51 +0000

The question is, why has Apple been able to figure this out, but Lenovo and Microsoft haven't?

New comment by Demiurge in "One Formula That Demystifies 3D Graphics"

Demiurge — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 17:36:06 +0000

Is “neural computation” a thing, or a poetic metaphor?

New comment by Demiurge in "Python numbers every programmer should know"

Demiurge — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 01:27:02 +0000

That's what I just said. There is zero value to me knowing these numbers. I assume that all python built in methods are pretty much the same speed. I concentrate on IO being slow, minimizing these operations. I think about CPU intensive loops that process large data, and I try to use libraries like numpy, DuckDB, or other tools to do the processing. If I have a more complicated system, I profile its methods, and optimize tight loops based on PROFILING. I don't care what the numbers in the article are, because I PROFILE, and I optimize the procedures that are the slowest, for example, using cython. Which part of what I am saying does not make sense?

New comment by Demiurge in "Python numbers every programmer should know"

Demiurge — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:33:48 +0000

I agree. I've been living off Python for 20 years and have never needed to know any of these numbers, nor do I need them now, for my work, contrary to the title. I also regularly use profiling for performance optimization and opt for Cython, SWIG, JIT libraries, or other tools as needed. None of these numbers would ever factor into my decision-making.

New comment by Demiurge in "When square pixels aren't square"

Demiurge — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 21:14:07 +0000

My first thought was that pixels are never square. Squares are an artifact of nearest sampling to another grid. I suppose pixel art assumes knowledge of this final grid, but most media doesn’t?

Furthermore, the referencing of a raster can assume any shape or form. It makes some sense some signals are optimized for hardware restrictions.

Another interesting example are anamorphic lenses used in cinema.

New comment by Demiurge in "Quake's Player Speed (2017)"

Demiurge — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 01:47:15 +0000

I wouldn't call advanced movement "speeding up Quake". Speed in Quake and other FPS is an important factor that influences what you based on the speed that you have. Bunny hopping, air control, rocket jumps are not as useful when the base speed goes up. Also, less maneuverability, like in Quake 2, and bigger maps, mean that you have to be more judicious about your next move, and plan ahead more, stock up on more items, etc. There is an important balance to these things.

New comment by Demiurge in "Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash"

Demiurge — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 01:25:11 +0000

I get GPT 5.2 responses on copilot faster than for any other model, almost instantly. Are you sure they’re slow as fuck?

New comment by Demiurge in "The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know"

Demiurge — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 02:05:53 +0000

Anytime this topic comes up, I ask: Why not both? I don't want to modify my SQL strings every time I change a column. Django ORM lets me combine custom SQL snippets with ORM code. I never hesitate to use custom SQL, but its just not a reasonable default for basic CRUD operations that my IDE can autocomplete. Not only that, but also provide nice feautures pike named arguments, walking relationships, sanitizations, etc. At the same time, I can do a UNIONS, CTES, anything I want. I just don't understand why it's worth arguing against ORMs, when no one is forcing you to stop using raw SQL.

I completely agree, it is absolutely essential to understand what SQL is emitted, and how SQL works. Perhaps the strawman argument against ORMs is that they preclude you from knowing SQL. They don't.

New comment by Demiurge in "Coarse is better"

Demiurge — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 14:01:15 +0000

I don’t see splashes of primary color as more artistic. Anyway, what if you just ask it “more coarse”? I see impressive depth in the latest outputs, but as with all technically proficient performers, you might just have to consciously scale it back.