Hacker News: TheRealPomax

New comment by TheRealPomax in "EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security"

TheRealPomax — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:37:26 +0000

From the people who brought you "we used AI to undercut a project we use rather than pay them fairly for the work we relied on" comes an exciting new lawsuit by Mullenweg for using Wordpress in their product description.

New comment by TheRealPomax in "JSSE: A JavaScript Engine Built by an Agent"

TheRealPomax — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:51:09 +0000

Pretty neat as a real-sized-project experiment to see what a programming program can actually do.

New comment by TheRealPomax in "OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent"

TheRealPomax — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:26:55 +0000

I want to love this, but the "just install it globally, what could go wrong?" is simply not happening for an AI-written codebase. Open Source was never truly "you can trust it because everyone can vet it", so you had to do your due diligence. Now with AI code bases, that's "it might be open source, but no one actually knows how it works and only other AIs can check if it's safe because no one can read the code". Who's getting the data? No idea. How would you find out? I guess you can wireshark your network? This is not a great feeling.

New comment by TheRealPomax in "Video Encoding and Decoding with Vulkan Compute Shaders in FFmpeg"

TheRealPomax — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:08:56 +0000

A GPU's job is to take inputs at some resolution, transform it, and then output it at that resolution. H.264/H.265 (and really, any playback format) needs a fundamentally different workflow: it needs to take as many frames as your framerate is set to, store the first frame as a full frame, and then store N-1 diffs, only describing which pixels changed between each successive frame. Something GPUs are terrible at. You could certainly use the GPU to calculate the full frame diff, but then you still need to send it back to the CPU or dedicated encoding hardware that turns that into an actual concise diff description. At that point, you might as well make the CPU or hardware encoder do the whole job, you're just not saving any appreciable time by sending the data over to the GPU first, just to get it back in a way where you're still going over every pixel afterwards.

New comment by TheRealPomax in "Node.js needs a virtual file system"

TheRealPomax — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:30:21 +0000

But then you go "hang on, doesn't ESM exist?" and you realize that argument 4 isn't even true. You can literally do what this argument says you can't, by creating a blob instead of "writing a temp file" and then importing that using the same dynamic import we've had available since 2020.

New comment by TheRealPomax in "LibreOffice Writer now supports Markdown"

TheRealPomax — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:53:55 +0000

Except under GFM, html is explicitly part of the spec[1], not just "it's not a parse error, but that's because it's just text that doesn't fall in any predefined markdown syntax category", and good luck finding a WYSIWYG markdown editor that gets them right. The number of editors that completely break on

alone is disheartening.

[1] https://github.github.com/gfm/

New comment by TheRealPomax in "LibreOffice Writer now supports Markdown"

TheRealPomax — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:58:38 +0000

GFM, because HTML in markdown should not be a parse error, and getting twenty different markdown "specs" to all agree on new syntax for bits they are obviously missing (like details, classed scoping, transclusions, etc) is not happening.

New comment by TheRealPomax in "Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning"

TheRealPomax — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:13:24 +0000

labelled "high priority" a month ago. No actual activity by Anthropic despite it being their repo. I'm starting to get the feeling they're not actually very good at this?

New comment by TheRealPomax in "We gave terabytes of CI logs to an LLM"

TheRealPomax — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 19:04:40 +0000

Title tells us nothing: what's the tl;dr?

New comment by TheRealPomax in "Man accidentally gains control of 7k robot vacuums"

TheRealPomax — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 23:02:31 +0000

I reject this razor on the basis that the author is more than clearly not stupid.

New comment by TheRealPomax in "Man accidentally gains control of 7k robot vacuums"

TheRealPomax — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 23:01:58 +0000

Every single one relevant to where you live? If you're in the US, the US. "Good fucking luck and lol" and all that, but do it anyway. In the EU? Your country has agencies for this, as does the EU as a whole. Perform your civic duties, they still count in the EU.

Somewhere else? I don't know man, the author sure seems to live in either of those two regions.

You know where to report things if you live on Earth and use the internet.

New comment by TheRealPomax in "Man accidentally gains control of 7k robot vacuums"

TheRealPomax — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 18:08:07 +0000

Surely this also requires reporting DJI to the authorities for gross negligence? This is not an oopsie, this is deploying a surveillance network without telling anyone.

New comment by TheRealPomax in "Facebook is cooked"

TheRealPomax — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:01:32 +0000

"Facebook is just clickbait slop and is making billions" is more the opposite of cooked. They managed to turn garbage into dollars, and people are eating it up for as long as they're allowed to do exploit their market position.

New comment by TheRealPomax in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"

TheRealPomax — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:09:26 +0000

This document makes the mistake of thinking the LLMs (a) have any sort of memory and (b) care. They will violate llm instructions not 2 prompts after being given them because the weights simply generated results.

New comment by TheRealPomax in "Mark Zuckerberg Lied to Congress. We Can't Trust His Testimony"

TheRealPomax — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:08:02 +0000

Same, I read the first few and it just read as conspiracy theory material, where the "evidence" that refuses the claim has nothing to do with the claim unless you're already halfway down the koolaid pitcher.

Always better to leave the "maybe, if you squint, but just as easily no" stuff out if you're trying convince others that there's a serious, objective problem with receipts.

New comment by TheRealPomax in "I converted 2D conventional flight tracking into 3D"

TheRealPomax — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:48:18 +0000

Ah, I was hoping to see the full flightpaths in 3D space when you click on a plane, like on flightradar but then not just a flat line with colour.

New comment by TheRealPomax in "Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship"

TheRealPomax — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 01:48:31 +0000

You... should watch him stream. That'll pretty much answer your questions. Age is far less relevant to chess compared to keeping up with the current "meta" (in gamer parlance).

New comment by TheRealPomax in "News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns"

TheRealPomax — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 19:17:32 +0000

Kind of the "think of the children" argument: most things that are worth archiving have nothing to do with content that can be used against someone in the future. But the raw volume is making it impossible to filter out the worthwhile stuff from the slop (all forms of, not just AI), even with automation (again, not AI, we've been doing NLP using regular old ML for decades now).

New comment by TheRealPomax in "My smart sleep mask broadcasts users' brainwaves to an open MQTT broker"

TheRealPomax — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 17:18:02 +0000

fun fact, LLMs come in cheapest and useless and expensive but actually does what's being asked, too.

So, will they? Probably. Can you trust the kind of LLM that you would use to do a better job than the cheapest firm? Absolutely.

New comment by TheRealPomax in "Monosketch"

TheRealPomax — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:11:22 +0000

That "seems" is doing so much heavy lifting I got a hernia just from looking at it.