Hacker News: avidphantasm

New comment by avidphantasm in "Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine"

avidphantasm — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 11:48:50 +0000

I think the major reason for the aggressive price point of the Neo, and for not raising RAM and SSD upgrade prices in the MBP much, is that Apple is willing to give up some hardware margin to have more devices to sell services to. Unless I am mistaken, services have been key to Apple’s recent revenue growth. This isn’t a bad thing at this point, but could auger poorly if they foolishly chase recurring revenue at the expense of hardware quality (their software quality has already slipped in recent years).

New comment by avidphantasm in "Peter Thiel's Antichrist Lectures"

avidphantasm — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:00:41 +0000

What would China do to such billionaires run amok?

New comment by avidphantasm in "Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage"

avidphantasm — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 16:21:56 +0000

And here I was hoping they would put an M5 Ultra in a MacBook Pro. Maybe they will add it as an option to the 16” at a later date.

New comment by avidphantasm in "Why I'm Worried About Job Loss and Thoughts on Comparative Advantage"

avidphantasm — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:37:45 +0000

It’s fun, but also tiring, watching people come to the same conclusions Marx did from first principles, over, and over again.

New comment by avidphantasm in "Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues"

avidphantasm — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:29:25 +0000

I kind of agree with you, but on macOS I still don’t have to ever think about drivers. The hardware just works. Linux isn’t quite there yet. My work XPS laptop running Ubuntu is close, but not quite the same.

New comment by avidphantasm in "Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags"

avidphantasm — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:55:53 +0000

I use Siri to set alarms on my watch, that’s it. I don’t want much more than that.

New comment by avidphantasm in "America could have $4 lunch bowls like Japan but for zoning laws"

avidphantasm — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:45:40 +0000

> The key point here (and biggest advantage of Japanese cities) is that nearly every building is mixed-use by default,

Also, Japan generally has good mass transit throughout their cities, which essentially doesn't exist in the US. Less mass transit -> more cars -> need for parking -> larger buildings with setbacks to include parking -> less density -> less mass transit... Land use and transportation systems in the US have been co-evolved to the present sub-optimal state we have now.

New comment by avidphantasm in "First impressions of Claude Cowork"

avidphantasm — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:23:49 +0000

I’m too dumb/lazy to run find and think for myself, so I’m happily digging my own grave. Yipee!!!

New comment by avidphantasm in "You are not required to close your
,
, , or
tags in HTML"

avidphantasm — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 16:34:53 +0000

…but civilized people do close them.

New comment by avidphantasm in "Microsoft May Have Created the Slowest Windows in 25 Years with Windows 11"

avidphantasm — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 18:38:17 +0000

There is a lot of idiocy/stubbornness among middle managers. I worked for a large consulting firm for a few years and would see hiring managers pass by candidates with good aptitude whom they could’ve trained in 4-6 weeks. Instead, they had the position open for several months waiting for someone who knew the exact technologies they were using and still didn’t find anyone in some cases. Seemed to me that the middle managers need more tolerance for non-billable time. But when everyone is incentivized to meet quarterly goals, this is what you get.

New comment by avidphantasm in "MCP is a fad"

avidphantasm — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 12:22:18 +0000

Yeah, but MCP provides a convenient layer of indirection where I can sandbox my app, allowing only files within a given directory tree (i.e., project workspace) to be read from/written to using my tools. How do I accomplish this when allowing an agent to call my tools directly?

New comment by avidphantasm in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

avidphantasm — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:12:08 +0000

Cool. Please check back in with us after they’ve raised the price 50x and you can no longer build anything because you are alienated from your tools.

New comment by avidphantasm in "Go away Python"

avidphantasm — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 13:09:19 +0000

Now try to call some C++ code from your Go script…

New comment by avidphantasm in "Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief"

avidphantasm — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 15:39:20 +0000

Since macOS went to a yearly cadence, I usually upgrade during Christmas break, this allows for a couple of point releases to work out the kinks. I won’t be upgrading this year. I hope macOS 27 fixes this abomination. Otherwise, this 30+ year Mac user will be moving on…

New comment by avidphantasm in "I'm returning my Framework 16"

avidphantasm — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:23:13 +0000

I know, the repairability isn’t great, and they’re not upgradable at all. macOS can be annoying and restrictive. But life is short, so I just buy MacBook Pros. I wasted too many hours in my 20s getting Linux to work on the desktop (not to mention a laptop).

New comment by avidphantasm in "DRAM prices are spiking, but I don't trust the industry's why"

avidphantasm — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 19:53:24 +0000

Quick, buy a Mac with higher-specced memory while the price is almost reasonable.

New comment by avidphantasm in "AMD GPUs Go Brrr"

avidphantasm — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 12:59:58 +0000

This is great, but why does the write-up read like it was written by someone with brain damage?

New comment by avidphantasm in "AI Broke Interviews"

avidphantasm — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 11:03:23 +0000

AI is breaking more than interviews. I recently overheard someone who is studying to be a psychiatric nurse practitioner (they are already a RN) via an online program say “ChatGPT is my new best friend.” We are doomed.

New comment by avidphantasm in "Hello-World iOS App in Assembly"

avidphantasm — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 13:50:05 +0000

Looks more sensible than having to use XCode and Apple's atrocious developer documentation.

New comment by avidphantasm in "Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade"

avidphantasm — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 22:42:45 +0000

I don’t get the hype either. Every time I’ve tried to use tools like pyenv or pipenv they fall down when I try to install anything that doesn’t provide wheels (GDAL), so I give up and stick to pip and virtualenv. Does uv let me install GDAL without hassle?