Hacker News: allenrb

New comment by allenrb in "LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation"

allenrb — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:02:14 +0000

As a person who refuses to use “free” cloud products, and won’t even consider Office on Windows, I’m a big fan of LibreOffice. I’ve donated a few times over the years but probably not enough.

I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.

That said, my eyes crossed trying to read this. Do I need to ask an LLM to read the various messages and tell me what’s going on? ;-)

New comment by allenrb in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

allenrb — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:54:58 +0000

Absolutely! Think of the many new ways to display advertising that are being neglected while we foolishly launch people and things into space.

New comment by allenrb in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

allenrb — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:52:55 +0000

Strapped to one of the boosters?

New comment by allenrb in "I am leaving the AI party after one drink"

allenrb — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:16:08 +0000

For what it’s worth (ie, absolutely nothing), I agree with her 100%. I didn’t get into this field in order to prompt an AI to take care of the details. I got into it because I love the details.

I’m a strong performer on a good team at a company many people would want to work at… and I know the clock is ticking. Sooner or later, I will be too slow.

I’m not going to claim that this is the wrong way to go. It’s obviously the future, and the future doesn’t care what allenrb does or does not want. I’m somewhat hopeful that power and cooling requirements will come down by multiple factors of 10x over time, reducing the environmental damage.

The fact is, I love what I’ve been able to do “the old way” and just don’t feel the urge to move on. So it goes.

New comment by allenrb in "$96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor"

allenrb — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:36:50 +0000

There are no few smart, knowledgeable people in the world (perhaps self-educated, perhaps not) who for a huge variety of reasons may be either unwilling or unable to hold a typical job.

I’ll bet most of us here know at least a few people along these lines.

New comment by allenrb in "ASML unveils EUV light source advance that could yield 50% more chips by 2030"

allenrb — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:38:40 +0000

Seeing this news story made me briefly fear that they’d found a way to replace this glorious mechanism. Thankfully not. In fact, they’re going to shoot more droplets, more often!

So much more fun than LEDs.

New comment by allenrb in "Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter"

allenrb — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 23:21:51 +0000

I actually like that a lot. Does the job without providing a (practical) target for infotainment. TIL.

New comment by allenrb in "Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter"

allenrb — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 22:15:35 +0000

Give me a backup camera without a screen and then we’ll talk. Doubly so because once you’ve got that screen, no automaker will resist making it do other things.

New comment by allenrb in "xAI joins SpaceX"

allenrb — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:48:53 +0000

This makes me genuinely sad. SpaceX was the one thing of his that Elon has largely avoided screwing up. Imho, this is in large part due to Gwynne Shotwell. She seems to have the personality (not to mention, personal wealth) to kick Elon in the head when he tries to mess things up.

What’s happening now is nothing more than a transparent effort to couple the AI hype-wagon to SpaceX in order to drive the valuation higher in the minds of investors who still think that LLMs will completely transform society.

I’ll be thrilled if the rocket folks can avoid being distracted by this nonsense, but I’m not optimistic.

I’ve been following SpaceX since something like the 2nd Falcon 1 launch and this is the worst thing I’ve seen happen. Sad times.

New comment by allenrb in "Postmortem: Our first VLEO satellite mission (with imagery and flight data)"

allenrb — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 04:07:34 +0000

Not that kind of bus. A “satellite bus” is more of a standardized platform onto which mission-specific payloads are integrated. Saves having to design an entire spacecraft from scratch and gives you a known-good set of functionality.

New comment by allenrb in "Raising money fucked me up"

allenrb — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 22:18:45 +0000

Nothing about this struck me as a sign that money wasn’t well-invested. From the headline, I was picturing “we raised and then I blew it in Vegas”.

Nothing wrong with admitting to uncertainty and insecurity. I mean, there are two types of people — those who suffer doubt sometimes, and those who don’t admit it. Give me the first kind any time.

New comment by allenrb in "Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet"

allenrb — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 04:50:59 +0000

Did you miss the quotation marks around “upgrading”?

New comment by allenrb in "Europeans' health data sold to US firm run by ex-Israeli spies"

allenrb — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 18:36:40 +0000

> Maybe they can launch a taxpayer funded EuroTube and EuroGram.

Ok, but only if one of them is called “EuroVision”.

New comment by allenrb in "A supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine"

allenrb — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 01:51:59 +0000

Notice as well that no mention of efficiency was made. Perhaps I missed it, but I’m somewhat familiar with power generation, and usually efficiency is front and center.

Fact seems to be, nobody doing “AI” gives a damn.

New comment by allenrb in "Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros"

allenrb — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 03:03:54 +0000

To my eye, there are exactly two effective ways of dealing with the state of media distribution today:

1. Piracy 2. Just say no, recognizing that none of this stuff is necessary to live.

The alternative of jumping through the ever-changing set of hoops necessary to watch particular content is entirely unappealing.

New comment by allenrb in "An update on the Farphone's battery"

allenrb — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:44:47 +0000

I would’ve expected a hardware-based lithium-ion charge controller which would continue to work regardless of what software runs on the main CPU(s).

New comment by allenrb in "The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy"

allenrb — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:49:25 +0000

I have an idea:

Take that $1B, invest it sensibly, and use the income to fund the development of an open, free browser in perpetuity.

Nah, that’ll never happen.

New comment by allenrb in "China reaches energy milestone by "breeding" uranium from thorium"

allenrb — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 22:40:01 +0000

The typical 1 gigawatt rating for a nuclear power reactor is measuring electrical output. Given the various inefficiencies, the actual reactor output (as heat) is something like 3x that amount. Whereas a research reactor will be quoted as thermal output.

That to say, a typical commercial reactor might be 30x the power of a 100 MW research device.

New comment by allenrb in "Show HN: F32 – An Extremely Small ESP32 Board"

allenrb — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:25:39 +0000

Jesus. You had me at “hand-soldered 01005 components”.

I’m tempted to try a few of these just to see how disastrous my build efforts are.

How to Kill 2 Monopolies with 1 Tool (X-ray lithography)

allenrb — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 22:24:20 +0000

Article URL: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-to-kill-2-monopolies-with-1-tool

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45753886

Points: 5

# Comments: 0