Hacker News: alchemist1e9

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "Ahoy, DECmate II the little PDP-8 that could"

alchemist1e9 — Sun, 31 May 2026 12:36:25 +0000

I was also thinking about the prices and what problems they were being used for to motivate the investment.

It then occurred to me that loaded Mac Studios and DGX Stations have some comparability in CAPEX scale. Here are some other prices for example:

> The VT278 started at $6,795 [$23,700].”

> This was sold as the DECmate III+ for $5145 [$15,400] alongside the standard III.

> The VAXmate finally hit the market in September 1986 starting at $4045 [$12,100].

> For the back end DEC announced a turn-key MicroVAX II system with 5MB of RAM, Ethernet, 16 ports and a 30-seat ALL-IN-1 plus WPS wordprocessing starting at $81,160 [$243,000].

Pope Leo Compares AI Threat to Biblical 'Tower of Babel'

alchemist1e9 — Mon, 25 May 2026 11:01:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/world/pope-leo-ai-encyclical-c5e1af6c

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265488

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation"

alchemist1e9 — Mon, 18 May 2026 17:30:50 +0000

> PostmarketOS is amazing on supported arm chromebooks.

Any tips on best models that are abundantly available used on the cheap and work well?

> I have a few that I throw in a bag for beach/jungle holidays - they are literal e-waste, something liberating about carrying a laptop that's worth significantly less than a decent family meal.

I definitely do this with a few Thinkpad 11e I have laying around from a failed project 4 years ago.

However I’d really like to switch to e-waste as what you describe would be very liberating. An e-waste Linux device with encrypted disk that you just wifi tether to phone and works fine for use old school types. I wonder how cheap they can go? How easy to flash? etc

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation"

alchemist1e9 — Sun, 17 May 2026 16:36:29 +0000

It’s a great example and I have recently been thinking a lot that AI assistance maybe enable rapid porting progress and bringing life to recycled devices for 3rd world situations.

Linux can be trimmed way down and with an efficient stack on top can make many devices extremely useable.

Here is a related comment on user software side I made recently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alchemist1e9#4800737...

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "Principles for agent-native CLIs"

alchemist1e9 — Thu, 07 May 2026 21:32:58 +0000

Well we will have to agree to disagree because my understanding of what has been generally the case is that the LLMs might vibe-coding spam, that’s true, but the interesting difference is generally speaking their “suggestions” are very reasonable and represent in hindsight useful changes that make the commands more useful for everyone, humans included.

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "Principles for agent-native CLIs"

alchemist1e9 — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:48:10 +0000

I don’t remember exactly the specific examples off the top of my head (some are definitely ffmpeg commands) but I do know that when LLMs keep hallucinating command line flags that don’t exist for that specific command their “suggestion” is actually very reasonable and so many developers are adding support to their tools for common hallucinations.

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "Principles for agent-native CLIs"

alchemist1e9 — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:25:55 +0000

It’s also likely that agents would also be better if they didn’t deal with json vomit either. I’m optimistic that agent frameworks will eventually come full circle and realize concise teletype linear CLIs aka old school UNIX is actually very effective and efficient for agents as well as humans!

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "NPR finds "no sign" of Polymarket at its Panama HQ address"

alchemist1e9 — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:48:50 +0000

Does anyone have a good source that details these negative effects? I’m not doubting they exist, I mean gambling in general has many negative externalities, but I’m just interested in identifying the cancer aspects more specifically.

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"

alchemist1e9 — Mon, 04 May 2026 11:43:37 +0000

You mean leverage/borrowing? Pretty time tested mechanism of risk taking in free markets.

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "A desktop made for one"

alchemist1e9 — Mon, 04 May 2026 11:34:51 +0000

You’ve reduce the memory requirements so much that it could all run on an early 90s computer easily. When I see such extreme examples I think back to the OLPC machines and this idea of how can extremely cheap but with useful software computers be available in very impoverished areas. I understand this has nothing to do with your argument or anything you’re writing about. It just made me think if LLM assisted software production might make the failed OLPC idea viable again. Could a minimalist but useful set of tools be created to run on old chromebooks for example.

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"

alchemist1e9 — Mon, 04 May 2026 11:16:07 +0000

> garbage capitalism.

How is this defined?

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "A couple million lines of Haskell: Production engineering at Mercury"

alchemist1e9 — Sun, 03 May 2026 04:46:23 +0000

> I’m convinced the only reason people don’t use Mercury is that they don’t know what they’re missing.

Very well could be true because I had no idea who or what they are.

Do they have strong low level automation support for the customer programmatically even for personal accounts? I use ledger for plaintext accounting for both personal and business and sync of data is slightly annoying, perhaps Mercury’s products solve that trivially?

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "High Performance Git"

alchemist1e9 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:27:26 +0000

They wouldn’t be able to publish this useful knowledge easily without it though. And it’s the author’s guidance and vision which the LLM just helps materialize and so I think we should be studying how to generate content with less “slop” features and make it more natural and satisfactory for human readers, not discouraging it.

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "High Performance Git"

alchemist1e9 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:24:21 +0000

I think it’s great and you should be doing it, I have no problem at all if there is LLM assistance in authoring, I think it’s a good thing because like you said it enables solo writers with good ideas to produce valuable work that they otherwise wouldn’t!

What I’m interested in is how to address the “grating” or whatever characteristics the readers detect to have them focus on the LLM aspect. I feel it’s probably soon or already removable with some methods.

Ignore the haters they are just wrong to blanket criticize, however their observations are helpful to try and improve the process. We want LLMs to assist in creating useful and effective content for humans.

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "High Performance Git"

alchemist1e9 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:44:11 +0000

I think it’s likely there will be methods to fix this soon, some de-slop algorithms, or is there a deep reason it will always be detectable? Perhaps there are some PhD linguists who have figured out how to quantify the “slop” effect and are writing their thesis on it. Once that is done it will be possible to smooth it away.

The book is definitely LLM assisted authoring yet it also has great content, so not sure we can immediately jump to shaming it entirely for being slop.

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

alchemist1e9 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 01:58:40 +0000

Or Jack Dorsey.

https://x.com/financeguy74/status/1890850549035110558

https://x.com/matthew_sigel/status/1891852538376487327

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

alchemist1e9 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 01:52:34 +0000

What if Satoshi is already a billionaire?

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

alchemist1e9 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 01:47:42 +0000

It can’t be Finney because there was an entire send reply send reply sequence that was while Finney was in a marathon race between Satoshi and others which could not have been scripted.

The case for Jack Dorsey is much stronger than the Back claim.

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

alchemist1e9 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:30:46 +0000

What if he is already very wealthy and very famous … and knows there is no upside for Bitcoin if they disclose it.

New comment by alchemist1e9 in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

alchemist1e9 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:00:59 +0000

I’m think a great marketing line for local/selfhosted LLMs in the future - “You can swear at your LLM and nobody will care!”