Hacker News: Xymist

New comment by Xymist in "I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets"

Xymist — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:51:50 +0000

Others have covered why that isn't what's being done, but also if it was that would be a _fabulous_ joke.

New comment by Xymist in "UK to require ID or face scan before you can make social media accounts"

Xymist — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:35:51 +0000

If the price of privacy is children, damn the children. We're having fewer (nowhere near few enough, but fewer) of them anyway, they should not be used as a reason to restrict everyone else. Especially as they become that everyone else after a few short years.

New comment by Xymist in "GitHub Is Down"

Xymist — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:57:45 +0000

The phrasing they chose is particularly amusing, since it's always false regardless of the day. They could have said "usual service", and left in the plausible acknowledgement of the fact that it's hot, cramped, miserable, grubby, loud, plague-ridden, mouse-ridden, and generally unpleasant.

New comment by Xymist in "The fun has been optimized out of the Internet"

Xymist — Wed, 06 May 2026 10:52:30 +0000

Yes, ish. Shopping is delivered, cooking is a hobby (or takeaway), cleaning services for a couple of hours a week is often practical even if actually having a full time housekeeper isn't. Convert money from the unenjoyable part into time in the enjoyable part.

New comment by Xymist in "FracturedJson"

Xymist — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 13:31:31 +0000

It's a pretty sensible policy, really. Corollary to Hyrum's Law - do not permit your API to have any behaviours, useful or otherwise, which someone might depend on but which aren't part of your design goals. For programmers in particular, who are sodding munchkins and cannot be trusted not to do something clever but unintended just because it solves a problem for them, that means aggressively hamstringing everything.

A flathead screwdriver should bend like rubber if someone tries to use it as a prybar.

New comment by Xymist in "Build Your Own 100TB NAS in 2025: Complete TrueNAS Storage Guide"

Xymist — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 14:57:42 +0000

16GB is _not_ sufficient if you have Jellyfin or Immich or similar and a lot of media you want to scroll through quickly; I've found I need a lot of ZFS cache for that to be as responsive as I want, even with SSD storage.

New comment by Xymist in "Is Firefox Firefucked?"

Xymist — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:56:43 +0000

Straightforwardly, nobody with the resources to build and maintain a browser could ever be trusted to do so, as they get those resources from somewhere, and it's going to be somewhere unacceptable (ads, trackers, Google, taxes, selling the browser or addons/features as a product, hostile nation states).

These things are far too complex and expensive to be produced as they should and as most FOSS is: for free, by a group of individuals who could fit around a breakfast table and don't answer to anyone but each other.

New comment by Xymist in "Thieves steal crown jewels in 4 minutes from Louvre Museum"

Xymist — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 19:46:04 +0000

I feel like you're trying to be sarky with the "#winWin", but genuinely yes. If the tradeoff is that someone gets to feel important and have a plaque put up with their name on it, and something good but expensive happens which otherwise could not, everyone absolutely does win. Even better than taxes because it's a specific goal and consensual on all sides.

New comment by Xymist in "Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis"

Xymist — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 16:22:49 +0000

ESP32-C6, and associated dev boards.

New comment by Xymist in "Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity"

Xymist — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 19:31:22 +0000

This factor (95% of "your audience" not being interested at the time) is the core of why all marketing is unavoidably scummy.

I don't want to hear about your product _ever_, except on the day I am looking for a product which provides the function your product does. On that day, I don't want to hear about it from you or anyone you have anything to do with; I want a list of products in that space, curated by an independent third party you have never spoken to and cannot influence in any way, with a clear featureset and upfront costs comparison table that does not have any variant on "talk to their sales team" anywhere near it.

New comment by Xymist in "Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members"

Xymist — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 21:49:41 +0000

Seagate have an Exos M in 36TB for about £450, so 24 of those could do it. Three vdevs with one parity drive each? Call the project £13k?

Not exactly a production grade setup, but it'd do the job and you'll see fewer failures each year than in 544 10k SAS drives.

New comment by Xymist in "America's stock-market dominance is an emergency for Europe"

Xymist — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 14:19:35 +0000

This seems entirely sensible to me. If I was offered the choice between doubling my salary or keeping the same one but halving my days worked in a year I wouldn't consider the former for more than about half a second.

New comment by Xymist in "“The Bitter Lesson” is wrong. Well sort of"

Xymist — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 20:52:32 +0000

Relevant - and old enough that those five years have been successfully granted!

New comment by Xymist in "Claude Pro Max hallucinated a $270 Notion feature that doesn't exist"

Xymist — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 18:03:50 +0000

The AI's assessment of him seems somewhat apt, really, even if it doesn't know much about Notion.

New comment by Xymist in "Self-Study Plan for Electrical Engineering"

Xymist — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 21:41:46 +0000

Note for people who were interested in these: Wowki want you to pay for their highest level plan to get the thing that is actually useful/necessary - a fully offline and private version that integrates with VSCode. Everything else, as far as I can tell, uses their servers, build system, etc.

New comment by Xymist in "Synadia Response to CNCF"

Xymist — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 10:14:20 +0000

There is a lesson in these repeated incidents that really needs to be learned by both industry and individual developers - if you intend, when putting the first publicly visible version of a project out to the world, that it might _ever_ be financially self sustaining or profitable, don't start with an OSS licence. Start with BSL, or whatever suits your taste, but don't start with OSS and change your mind after a few years when you realise it's a money pit. They are all money pits, it's inevitable.

New comment by Xymist in "AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog"

Xymist — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 08:40:30 +0000

Why? I'd venture that a plurality, if not a majority, of people who can write well cannot create good digital art, and vice-versa. The use of AI images on a blog post, assuming you're there for the written content, seems at best a very weak signal of any kind.

New comment by Xymist in ""Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed""

Xymist — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 20:46:29 +0000

They just shouldn't do that. If they can afford to sell the Ferrari for $20k, they should do so. To everyone who wants one, for whatever reason.

New comment by Xymist in "Against the Dark Forest"

Xymist — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:40:23 +0000

The degree to which a science is valuable is proportional to the degree to which it would keep working if we finally wiped out humans and the goddamned whining stopped. Physics wouldn't notice, sociology would become irrelevant.

New comment by Xymist in "Welcome to the Era of the $20k Family Car Insurance Bill"

Xymist — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 18:29:06 +0000

It also needs to be able to do this _literally door to door_ and without having to sit next to, speak to, or touch anyone I don't know.

Cars are a privacy bubble and a shield, not just a transport mechanism; no form of mass transit will ever be an acceptable substitute in the way that, for me, is the most important factor.