Hacker News: abotsis

New comment by abotsis in "Happy 45th Birthday to the IBM PC and Model F/XT"

abotsis — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 04:07:30 +0000

I love the keyboard casually hanging off the desk like it’s not 20lbs!

New comment by abotsis in "Our position on open-weights models"

abotsis — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:57:33 +0000

No- and that’s the point. Any open weights model, regardless of the origin can be abliterated. So effectively he’s saying he’s all for open weights models as long as they’re safe, which by the very nature you can’t guarantee.

New comment by abotsis in "Our position on open-weights models"

abotsis — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:52:49 +0000

I’m simply making the point that any model can be abliterated to sidestep guardrails. It’s similar to the argument that open source software like nmap or netcat shouldn’t be allowed because it can be used for evil.

To continue the analogy, he’s basically asking for some magic guardrails in nmap that doesn’t allow it to be used for scanning a network you don’t own. Of course even if you could add that- you could modify the source to bypass it.

It’s basically “open weight models are a public good if you can guarantee safety” .. which you can’t. So the only viable alternative is a hosted nmap that requires you to prove you own a network before scanning it. Which is impossible. So it’s all the right words and sounds nice, but making an impossible ask.

New comment by abotsis in "Our position on open-weights models"

abotsis — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:58:48 +0000

China releasing open weight models, powerful or not, does nothing to prevent their development of models they’ll use for evil. Nor does it stop someone from abliterating a non-Chinese model and using it for evil.

Sorry- I don’t see any other reason aside from Anthropic protecting their own interests.

New comment by abotsis in "Proxmox virtual environment 9.1 available"

abotsis — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 15:24:15 +0000

I’ve been looking at incus, and some aspects are appealing (creating a vm/container via cli). But I think proxmox having better clustering, and built in support for ceph, backups (with proxmox backup server)… proxmox just had a little more maturity behind it. I’ll be watching incus though.

New comment by abotsis in "Jacqueline – A minimal i386 kernel written in Pascal (2019)"

abotsis — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:45:21 +0000

Ha! I do the same thing at about the same time age. That was turbo pascal. I also got suspended for writing a TSR in turbo pascal during library time that used inline assembly. It scrolled “hello there, how are you today?” In the 5 characters of the top-right corner of the screen.

New comment by abotsis in "Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?"

abotsis — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 18:43:14 +0000

Whatever you choose, make sure you leave enough money in your budget for a second printer. Easiest way to double your print throughput :)

New comment by abotsis in "Open office is giving you secondhand ADHD"

abotsis — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 12:59:30 +0000

I wonder what would happen if you repeated the test while going into the office constantly for a few months. Would you develop better habits to alleviate the distractions?

New comment by abotsis in "Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on AI?"

abotsis — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 12:32:12 +0000

I feel like people almost pay that already with pair programming.

New comment by abotsis in "Apple introduces AppleCare One"

abotsis — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 13:40:55 +0000

I usually buy AppleCare+ for my new products (laptop, etc). I think an awesome use case here is the “hand me downs” that my 8yo gets. All are out of warranty, but he’s a lot tougher and more clumsy with the equipment. Covering all that (Mac, iPad, iPhone) for $20/month seems like a good deal.

Then again, when he breaks something, I don’t get to justify buying myself a new one :)

New comment by abotsis in "Most people who buy games on Steam never play them"

abotsis — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 02:37:25 +0000

I’ll often buy a game (esp an Indie game) and just not have time to play it. I don’t have a ton of free time, so if a game doesn’t immediately draw me in and keep my attention, I don’t play it. I think that’s pretty common.

I’ll also buy games on a whim and never get much past the title screen.

I have more money than time these days. But when I was younger I had more time than money. So I’d pirate games. This is kind of my way of atoning.

New comment by abotsis in "Binary Wordle"

abotsis — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 06:25:55 +0000

Yea, it’s too easy. Maybe if it were a “guess the number” but in binary? Hints are just “too high” or “too low”?

…though now that I’m playing it in my head that’s too easy too. (Start at MSB and shift right if too high and add bits if too low)…

Maybe if you reduced the number of guesses to 5 that’d add enough chance to make it fun?

New comment by abotsis in "Rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia"

abotsis — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 01:12:00 +0000

I continue to be happy that Apple continues to enhance and embrace the posix side of osx vs gradually stripping it away in some kind of attempt to make it more like iOS.

New comment by abotsis in "TikTok goes dark in the US"

abotsis — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 04:13:24 +0000

Is this a big surprise? The law banning it was rooted in national security, presumably because of location tracking. Them knowing where users are was kind of the problem…

New comment by abotsis in "I've acquired a new superpower"

abotsis — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 21:43:47 +0000

I have strabismus and have always been good at these games. I wonder if it helps me for similar reasons? The examples on his page were pretty easy for me, though the universe one took maybe 45 seconds.

New comment by abotsis in "Gource: Software Version Control Visualization"

abotsis — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 03:40:18 +0000

I can across this years ago, it’s a really useful way to view any actor/target relationships in the time domain- not just source control.

New comment by abotsis in "The Evolution of SRE at Google"

abotsis — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 03:32:52 +0000

Couple thoughts here: 1. The “rightsizer” example mentioned might well have had the same outcome if the outage was analyzed in a “traditional” sense. That said, it is much easier and more actionable with this new approach. 2. I’ve always hated software testing because faults can occcur external to the software being tested. It’s difficult to reason about those if you have a myopic view of just your component of in system. This line of thinking somewhat fixes that- or at least paves a path to fixing that.

Unfortunately, while this article says a lot, much just repeated itself and I’d wish there was more detail. For example: who all is involved in this process? Are there limits on what can be controlled? How (politically) does this all shake out with respect to the relationships between SREs and software engineers? Etc..

New comment by abotsis in "Arnis: Generate cities in Minecraft from OpenStreetMap"

abotsis — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 01:28:32 +0000

I'm just here to say thanks, as I'm not above taking credit for creating our neighborhood in Minecraft for my 8yo. There's nothing in the GPL that prohibits creating false heroes AFAIK.

New comment by abotsis in "OpenZFS Driver for Windows"

abotsis — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 14:46:10 +0000

As a huge ZFS fan, this looks promising. There's little documentation on it. Not sure it needs much, but I'm curious how they do things like malloc()ing the ARC and how it might interfere with memory pressure in windows. They also seem to have rewritten the "zfs mount" command in this latest build, which is a release candidate. So it seems like fun awaits, just not a place to store your most valuable pr0n. :)

New comment by abotsis in "Are We PEP740 Yet?"

abotsis — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 03:07:34 +0000

It still doesn’t protect against rogue commits to packages by bad actors. Which, IMO, is the larger threat (and one that’s been actively exploited). So while a step in the right direction, it certainly doesn’t completely solve the supply chain risk.