Hacker News: GZGavinZhao

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone"

GZGavinZhao — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 01:57:56 +0000

The biggest difficulty is probably that from my observation, there's a sharp cutoff line somewhere between Gen Y and Z where anyone born before that (and don't work in tech) genuinely have no idea how to navigate their digital life and gets preyed on by those subscriptions. And these people are still a super large portion of the population paying for those subscriptions.

Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and willing to spend the time and effort to self host. All the Gen X and Y people that I know of, including many that are very intelligent and accomplished in their field, literally have no idea how to operate a computer outside of watching youtube, checking emails, and opening Word documents. Ads? They hate it but have no idea how to disable them. iPhone running out of storage and iCloud says I can solve that for $2.99/mo? They would be like IDK what that is but sure I'll pay that $2.99 if that means I can record more videos of my kids.

I really hate this situation, and I try my best to help out the folks around me who I see are getting ripped off (either they don't know or they know but think that's what it is). But still, it's really hard to communicate or teach those people when the skill of operating a computer has become intuition and human nature to me. I really can't put these things into words on the fly that would help them understand :(

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI""

GZGavinZhao — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:27:30 +0000

Related: I find this self-assessed AI level for contributions [1] to be extremely useful, both professionally and personally, to communicate the level of AI assistance so that the person on the receiving end can evaluate how much time & effort they want to spend understanding my code.

[1]: https://www.visidata.org/blog/2026/ai/#self-assessed-ai-leve...

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Launch HN: Stoa Markets (YC S26) – A Marketplace for GPUs and AI Servers"

GZGavinZhao — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 02:51:56 +0000

Any chances of offering AMD cards :pleading_face: I would love to get my hands on some used MI210 or MI250X!

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"

GZGavinZhao — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:03:33 +0000

I'm confused: 1. If I run this on Mac, then inside the sandbox / microVM, am I still running MacOS or some Linux distribution? 2. If the only thing that's mounted from the host is the $PWD, how does it guarantee that it has all the system libraries that I have installed on my host system? e.g. my `/opt/homebrew` libraries or `sudo apt install libfoo-dev` headers

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard"

GZGavinZhao — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:40:58 +0000

Opened the site, thought it was teenage engineering... Which is a compliment to me, because I always love their designs! Unfortunately as a HHKB user I'm not a fan of low profile keyboards otherwise I would've bought this.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust"

GZGavinZhao — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:16:18 +0000

Maybe you should try using Pi [0] if you care a lot about owning your harness and making sure you're in control of what goes into your system prompt and context?

[0]: https://pi.dev

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Codex Micro"

GZGavinZhao — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 20:21:50 +0000

Stop giving me ideas to repurpose my AKAI Fire with a simple Pi extension!!

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "UPI: Anatomy of a Payment Transaction"

GZGavinZhao — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 21:26:39 +0000

How is this different from Alipay/WeChat Pay in China? Handling transactions of this volume is an amazing technological feat, kudos to the team! However, I don't think this mobile QR code paying system is anything novel. Alipay rose to popularity much earlier (I can't recall exact when, but it was already super popular in ~2010, and definitely ubiquitous by 2015).

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Steam Machine launches today"

GZGavinZhao — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:44:12 +0000

*sad poro noises

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers"

GZGavinZhao — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:17:50 +0000

There are still games you simply can't play on Linux, e.g. Valorant/LoL can't be played on Linux because of Riot Game's kernel-level anti-cheat. And as a highly addicted LoL player it's one of the only two reasons I still have Windows taking up 200GB of my precious hard drive space.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]"

GZGavinZhao — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:42:00 +0000

They're ultimately employees. Their employers hire them to write the code that the employers want. If they don't write the code, employers just fire them and move on to hire some other people to write code. As much as how ethically questionable it is, it's still very rare that people would give up their jobs to defend their viewpoint.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Show HN: Edsger – A handwritten Clojure REPL for the reMarkable 2"

GZGavinZhao — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:28:19 +0000

My reMarkable is still stuck on a super old version (v3.3 I think), precisely because of xochitl being closed source and there's no stable and efficient way of driving the display. It's super sad because I would love to have much more things appearing on my tablet yet I cannot develop reMarkable apps easily. I'm not talking about browsers, but more like my Linear TODO list, calendar, etc., so I don't have to reach for my phone.

I really want to try for further reverse engineering of xochitl now that I've heard those AI tools have gotten so good at doing it.

Man I really wish one day I could run mainline Linux kernel on this tablet with the display just works.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "'Fuck you, Bambu': How one private message could change the face of 3D printing"

GZGavinZhao — Sun, 24 May 2026 17:45:38 +0000

> I get voting with your wallet but not many people want to spend 4x more for a worse product.

Yeah as much as I like Prusa, I really hope they figure out how to cut down their prices because, let's be real, most of the people buying a 3D printer don't give a cent about how "open" it is, and if Prusa continues this trend I'm afraid it'll become obsolete. Having competitors with genuinely good products (like Bambu, despite them not being a good company) is healthy, but not helpful if Prusa doesn't do anything to catch up to their competitor.s

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "'Fuck you, Bambu': How one private message could change the face of 3D printing"

GZGavinZhao — Sun, 24 May 2026 17:41:35 +0000

Oops my bad, I mixed up Flashforge and Snapmaker. It was Flashforge that also started closing down their ecosystem. Snapmaker has been having a good track record so far with their open-source Klipper-based firmware and I hope they continue to do so!

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "'Fuck you, Bambu': How one private message could change the face of 3D printing"

GZGavinZhao — Sun, 24 May 2026 05:28:00 +0000

I assume you're into multi-material printing and want a true multi-extruder setup. Then, quality wise your remaining options are: Prusa, Flashforge, and Snapmaker. Snapmaker very recently just shot themselves in the foot in a similar way that Bambu did, so you're left with Prusa and Flashforge. Of the two remaining, I really only trust Prusa.

Yes you pay a lot more, but I guess that's some sense voting with your wallet... I'm personally going to buy a Prusa after I stabilize where I live.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract"

GZGavinZhao — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:55:04 +0000

My understanding is that you got your printer when the firmware was not blocking you from doing all of that. Right now if you want to remote print (and don't want to do it via sending models to Bambu Cloud), you can get away if you enable LAN only and developer mode. However, what if the newer firmware forces you to create an online account and connect to Bambu cloud to do the setup? What if Bambu decides to limit the features you can use if you print using a SD card? It has been quite a worrying trend, and now the company is trying to legally threaten an open-source developer building on top of Bambu's AGPL code trying to make remote print without going through Bambu servers possible. Other ppl more knowledgeable on the issue, please correct me if I'm misunderstanding the situation.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0"

GZGavinZhao — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:03:42 +0000

It's always sad to think what more can be achieved / how faster we might've arrived at M3 support if Asahi Lina is still active.

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "ZCAM: iOS camera app that cryptographically proves human authorship"

GZGavinZhao — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 01:40:55 +0000

*sad Android noises

Maybe some folks more familiar with iOS can comment on how reliable this is on the software side. For example, what's stopping me from feeding a video stream as camera input?

ZCAM: iOS camera app that cryptographically proves human authorship

GZGavinZhao — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 01:40:55 +0000

Article URL: https://zcam.succinct.xyz/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897852

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by GZGavinZhao in "OpenSSL 4.0.0"

GZGavinZhao — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 02:27:44 +0000

*Linux distro package maintainers screams