Hacker News: alkonaut

New comment by alkonaut in "Pijul a FOSS distributed version control system"

alkonaut — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 22:40:24 +0000

What’s the current state of it in terms of stability, performance, features?

New comment by alkonaut in "Claude mixes up who said what"

alkonaut — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:07:30 +0000

When you use LLMs with APIs I at least see the history as a json list of entries, each being tagged as coming from the user, the LLM or being a system prompt.

So presumably (if we assume there isn't a bug where the sources are ignored in the cli app) then the problem is that encoding this state for the LLM isn' reliable. I.e. it get's what is effectively

LLM said: thing A User said: thing B

And it still manages to blur that somehow?

New comment by alkonaut in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

alkonaut — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:38:26 +0000

Yes for a meaningful context you should need both the source repo and the work tracking system. But today most systems have apis (jira, ADO, gh, ...) so this should be fairly doable, especially using a bot like copilot cli. But it's not doable as a little shell script.

New comment by alkonaut in "Binary obfuscation that doesn't kill LTO"

alkonaut — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:36:47 +0000

That's orthogonal to this. That requires special hardware and using those doesn't really rule this out as an additional measure.

New comment by alkonaut in "Binary obfuscation that doesn't kill LTO"

alkonaut — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:47:37 +0000

My point is: the "security through obscurity is bad" and "security through obscurity isn't real security" are both incorrect.

They apply to different threats and different contexts. When you have code running in the attackers' system, in normal privilege so they can pick it apart, then obscurity is basically all you have. So the only question to answer is: do you want a quick form of security through obscurity, or do you not? If it delivers tangible benefits that outweigh the costs, then why would you not?

What one is aiming for here is just slowing an annoying down an attacker. Because it's the best you can do.

New comment by alkonaut in "Binary obfuscation used in AAA Games"

alkonaut — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:48:27 +0000

What would be "actual security" in this context?

This isn't about security of the same kind as authentication/encryption etc where security by obscurity is a bad idea. This is an effort where obscurity is almost the only idea there is, and where even a marginal increase in difficulty for tampering/inspecting/exploiting is well worth it.

New comment by alkonaut in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

alkonaut — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:33:29 +0000

Trusting the messages to contain specific keywords seems optimistic. I don't think I used "emergency" or "hotfix" ever. "Revert" is some times automatically created by some tools (E.g. un-merging a PR).

New comment by alkonaut in "Sonnet 4.6 Elevated Rate of Errors"

alkonaut — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 07:20:55 +0000

That would mean in a way accepting that they are suddenly a service company with the aim to create revenue by selling services to customers for money.

New comment by alkonaut in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

alkonaut — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:16:14 +0000

The roadmaps look messy if you look at them as coming from one company. But if you remember that windows and .net (or DevDiv) are more like competing companies then it makes more sense. Then for one side it’s Win32, MFC, WinSDk and for the other it’s Win32 (WinForms), WPF, MAUI

If Microsoft hadn’t been preoccupied with a failed mobile bet then this wouldn’t have happened. It’s a lost decade followed by a (much more successful) cloud pivot. The reason desktop is ignored is because it can be. No one is eating their lunch on desktop.

New comment by alkonaut in "Codex is switching to API pricing based usage for all users"

alkonaut — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:03:28 +0000

Not only do I not keep up with the tech itself, I don’t even keep up with how to pay for it.

New comment by alkonaut in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

alkonaut — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 10:45:14 +0000

It’s the one constant about this administration: you’re always wondering ”is this incompetence by not knowing what they’re saying or incompetence where they know what they’re saying”

New comment by alkonaut in "What Is Copilot Exactly?"

alkonaut — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:18:54 +0000

This is dumb enough that it can’t be accidental. I genuinely believe the strategy is to create vague but recognizable brands but avoid labeling _products_ with recognizable names.

Microsoft seem to think that it’s better to have some names we all know like 365, Azure, Copilot snd then the products are just floating around under those brands.

That’s the only conclusion I can draw but I have no idea why they would want this.

New comment by alkonaut in "What Is Copilot Exactly?"

alkonaut — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:15:30 +0000

Do you regularly talk to anyone in a Microsoft shop (like most enterprises)? If you work in a ms ”partner” company there’s rarely a choice between the Microsoft product and something else. Azure over AWS is a given etc.

New comment by alkonaut in "What Is Copilot Exactly?"

alkonaut — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:13:29 +0000

Copilot cli isn’t as good as Claude but it’s not just fancy autocomplete either. Copilot cli seems to be converging with the rest and you can use mcp servers, skills, launch fleets of agents that use tools etc.

New comment by alkonaut in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

alkonaut — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:08:50 +0000

> its not even source available

It _wasn't_ even source available.

New comment by alkonaut in "$500 GPU outperforms Claude Sonnet on coding benchmarks"

alkonaut — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:14:09 +0000

Great, it became a $1000 gpu while you were reading that.

New comment by alkonaut in "Show HN: ProofShot – Give AI coding agents eyes to verify the UI they build"

alkonaut — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:32:33 +0000

This would be _extremely_ valuable for desktop dev when you don't have a DOM, no "accessibility" layer to interrogate. Think e.g. a drawing application. You want to test that after the user starts the "draw circle" command and clicks two points, there is actually a circle on the screen. No matter how many abstractions you make over your domain model, rendering you can't actually test that "the user sees a circle". You can verify your drawing contains a circle object. You can verify your renderer was told to draw a circle. But fifty things can go wrong before the user actually agrees he saw a circle (the color was set to transparent, the layer was hidden, the transform was incorrect, the renderer didn't swap buffers, ...).

New comment by alkonaut in "MAUI Is Coming to Linux"

alkonaut — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 10:26:36 +0000

MAUI is a Microsoft project, this is not?

New comment by alkonaut in "MAUI Is Coming to Linux"

alkonaut — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 10:23:32 +0000

This isn't Microsoft. This is an open source project.

.NET has been on Linux for ages.

New comment by alkonaut in "MAUI Is Coming to Linux"

alkonaut — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 10:19:27 +0000

I think that's the trajectory they are on https://avaloniaui.net/blog/avalonia-partners-with-google-s-...