Hacker News: KerrAvon

New comment by KerrAvon in "Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning"

KerrAvon — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:04:52 +0000

Strangely enough, AI could turn this on its head. You can have your cake and eat it too, because you can tell Claude/Codex/whatever to build you a full-featured Swift version for iOS and Kotlin for Android and whatever you want on Windows and Mac. There's still QA for the different builds, but you already have to QA each platform separately anyway if you really care that they all work, so in theory that doesn't change.

Of course, it's never that simple in reality; you need developers who know each platform for that to work, because you must run the builds and tell the AI what it's doing wrong and iterate. Currently, you can probably get away with churning out Electron slop and waiting for users to complain about problems instead of QAing every platform. Sad!

New comment by KerrAvon in "Computer science enrollment data suddenly shows a big drop"

KerrAvon — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:57:16 +0000

Care to elaborate? This sounds like a prelude to an argument to funnel more people into vocational schools/more funding for vocational schools.

(Not a criticism! I don't personally feel informed enough to have an opinion on this subject.)

New comment by KerrAvon in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

KerrAvon — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 21:23:30 +0000

You're focusing on the executable format, which is very much not the driver model.

New comment by KerrAvon in "Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview"

KerrAvon — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:47:10 +0000

As one of those users: absolutely fucking not.

New comment by KerrAvon in "The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild"

KerrAvon — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:47:22 +0000

If anyone wants a deep dive on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert

New comment by KerrAvon in "Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act"

KerrAvon — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:52:21 +0000

GOPs and Democrats are the same on environmental, science, and public health policy completely, huh? You sure you wanna both sides it that hard?

New comment by KerrAvon in "MacBook Neo"

KerrAvon — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 21:34:03 +0000

Have you ever actually used macOS? It doesn't sound like it.

New comment by KerrAvon in "Something is afoot in the land of Qwen"

KerrAvon — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:07:33 +0000

"Goal" implies there's a plan instead of just wanton cruelty for the sake of cruelty.

New comment by KerrAvon in "MacBook Neo"

KerrAvon — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:59:35 +0000

How do you define "swapping?" Even on Intel Macs, the memory statistics don't map the way one might expect. Be careful when making assumptions about what those metrics actually mean.

New comment by KerrAvon in "Don't trust AI agents"

KerrAvon — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 20:32:19 +0000

obligatory Dabblers and Blowhards https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

New comment by KerrAvon in "Step 3.5 Flash – Open-source foundation model, supports deep reasoning at speed"

KerrAvon — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:10:00 +0000

Seems like the Japanese have had this major blind spot in software engineering since the 90's. Even Sony didn't bother to use what they learned from the PlayStations to produce their own TV OS, outsourcing it to Google. It's as if the 5th generation stuff not working out just burned out that circuit in Japan entirely.

New comment by KerrAvon in "Step 3.5 Flash – Open-source foundation model, supports deep reasoning at speed"

KerrAvon — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:04:42 +0000

of those, Q4_K_S is better

New comment by KerrAvon in "Step 3.5 Flash – Open-source foundation model, supports deep reasoning at speed"

KerrAvon — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:02:54 +0000

Is there a reliable way to run MLX models? On my M1 Max, LM Studio seems to output garbage through the API server sometimes even when the LM Studio chat with the same model is perfectly fine. llama.cpp variants generally always just work.

New comment by KerrAvon in "Apple XNU: Clutch Scheduler"

KerrAvon — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:04:12 +0000

CoreAudio was developed alongside xnu / IOKit for Mac OS X, so it’s kind of all of it. Apple had the opportunity to start fresh with a built-in super low-latency audio subsystem at the turn of the century, and they took it.

New comment by KerrAvon in "Apple XNU: Clutch Scheduler"

KerrAvon — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:58:26 +0000

Please take anything this fella writes with several grains of salt.

New comment by KerrAvon in "Data Processing Benchmark Featuring Rust, Go, Swift, Zig, Julia etc."

KerrAvon — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 02:52:07 +0000

Genuine question: Are GitHub workflows stable enough to be used for benchmarking? Like CPU time quantum scheduling is guaranteed to be the same from run to run?

New comment by KerrAvon in "Data Processing Benchmark Featuring Rust, Go, Swift, Zig, Julia etc."

KerrAvon — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 02:49:51 +0000

Why are you surprised? Java always suffers from abstraction penalty for running on a VM. You should be surprised (and skeptical) if Java ever beats C++ on any benchmark.

New comment by KerrAvon in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"

KerrAvon — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 18:37:56 +0000

macOS and Windows have a much smaller set of variants, and tend to ship a single UI with everything included with OS. Even the best single desktop Linux distros will ship divergent KDE and Gnome apps.

If you want essentially perfect high-DPI support out of the box and can afford higher end displays, use macOS. It just works. I see the comments above about scaling, and to that, I say: most people will never notice. However, a Win32 app being the wrong scale? They'll notice that.

But the real display weak point of Linux right now vs Windows is HDR for gaming. That's a real shitshow and it tends to just work on Windows.

New comment by KerrAvon in "Amazon cuts 16k jobs"

KerrAvon — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 18:03:53 +0000

We should want open borders. Immigration is a significant net positive. But we can settle for controlled immigration with liberal limits.

H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.

New comment by KerrAvon in "DHS keeps trying and failing to unmask anonymous ICE critics online"

KerrAvon — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:05:26 +0000

Arbitrary cruelty is the point. There isn't a coherent rationale. You're going to the gulags if the subhuman pig in the mask says you are. You'll be lucky (?) if they don't just decide to execute you in the street. This is the reality on the ground right now. In a blue state in America.