<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: billti</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=billti</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:32:03 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=billti" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> the product is mediocre at best<p>I'm not a Tesla fanboy, last year was the first time I bought one (new Model Y), but it is by far the best car I've ever owned, and the FSD blew my mind with how much better it was than I expected.<p>My wife hates Elon, and has a new hybrid Mitsubishi, but she still drives my Model Y all the time because it's just so much better to drive.<p>What are you basing the 'mediocre' opinion on?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Mar 2026 01:00:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372149</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372149</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372149</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "Why Objective-C"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've been playing around with low-level Metal a bunch lately, any many of their docs and samples seem still be mostly in Objective-C/C++ and not Swift, so have been forcing myself to get into it.<p>At first I had the usual revulsion to the syntax, but after a few days getting used to it, I actually don't mind it at all now. (I still wouldn't say it's "elegant", but I can live with it).<p>Being Metal shader code is basically C++ anyway, and C++ is a language I'm familiar with, having a couple of .mm files to hold the Objective-C++ for API bridging and working in regular .cpp (and .h) files for the rest is pretty straight forward compared to having to learn Swift. (Especially with all the complaints I've heard about its complexity, including from Chris Lattner himself lately, which aligns with some of the other comments here).<p>Though to be fair, "Swift seems overly complex so use C++ instead" seems like a tough argument to make with a straight face ;-p</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:02:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220701</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220701</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220701</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "xAI joins SpaceX"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Starship will deliver millions of tons to orbit and beyond per year<p>Excuse my naive physics, but is there a point at which if you take enough mass off of earth and launch it into space, it would have a measurable effect on earth's orbit? (Or if the mass is still tethered to earth via gravity, is there no net effect?)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Feb 2026 23:54:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46864133</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46864133</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46864133</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think the timing of the Cybertruck starting deliveries roughly aligning with when Elon got heavily involved in politics hurt it quite a bit. It is such a distinctive vehicle with a strong association with Elon, that there was an immediate brand association. It may have had poor sales anyway, but it certainly didn't help that many folks on the left, who are typically the most 'pro EV', had a large 'anti-Elon' shift around its launch.<p>That said, even though it's not to my taste, I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it. So many vehicles, especially in the truck space, are almost indistinguishable and lack any kind of imagination. Kudos to Tesla for trying to break the mold and push the category somewhere new.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:08:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46619762</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46619762</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46619762</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is the most disappointing aspect of the slide in quality for me.<p>I working in software and "build features" for a living, and over the years I've come to prioritize reliability, performance, and an intuitive experience over all else. No matter how good the feature set is, if it crashes, is painfully slow, or I can't figure out how to use it, then I don't want it.<p>Apple used to have that focus, but seems to have lost it of late.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 12 Jan 2026 21:30:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594552</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594552</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594552</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "Meta plans to cut around 10% of employees in Reality Labs business"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Andrew Bosworth ... has called a meeting for Wednesday ... Mr. Bosworth said the meeting was the “most important” of the year<p>That's a bold claim on Jan 12th!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 12 Jan 2026 21:21:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594482</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594482</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594482</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "Apple picks Gemini to power Siri"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Or the even more frustrating:<p>Me: "Hey Siri, play <well known hit song from a studio album that sold 100m copies"<p>Siri: "OK, here's <correct song but a live version nobody ever listens to, or some equally obscure remix>"<p>Being these things are at their core probability machines, ... How? Why?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 12 Jan 2026 21:16:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594428</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594428</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594428</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was hesitant buying my Tesla this year (first one) as I really liked having CarPlay in my prior car (Jeep). But after having it a while, it's really a non-issue. The Tesla Apple Music app is pretty good. Their maps and navigation is pretty good (and integrated with FSD). And I can easily just use the bluetooth connection for a couple other minor things I occasionally use.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2025 06:14:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46241358</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46241358</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46241358</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It was disappointing to see one of the most advertised Apple “AI” features was “Genmoji”, which falls squarely in the “gimmick” category for me.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2025 04:36:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214133</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214133</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214133</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "AMD GPU Debugger"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I didn't even notice who I was replying to at first - so let me start by saying thank you for Ghostty. I spend a great deal of my day in it, and it's a beautifully put together piece of software. I appreciate the work you do and admire your attitude to software and life in general. Enjoy your windfall, ignore the haters, and my best wishes to you and your family with the upcoming addition.<p>The project I'm mostly working on uses the wgpu crate, <a href="https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu</a>, which may be of interest if writing cross-platform GPU code. (Though obviously if using Rust, not Zig). With it my project easily runs on Windows (via DX12), Linux (via Vulkan), macOS (via Metal), and directly on the web via Wasm/WebGPU. It is a "lowest common denominator", but good enough for most use-cases.<p>That said, ever with simple shaders I had to implement some workarounds for Xcode issues (e.g. <a href="https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/issues/8111" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/issues/8111</a>). But still vastly preferable to other debugging approaches and has been indispensable in tracking down a few bugs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2025 01:51:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200378</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200378</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200378</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "AMD GPU Debugger"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a full featured and beautifully designed experience, and when it works it's amazing. However it regularly freezes of hangs for me, and I've lost count of the number of times I've had to 'force quit' Xcode or it's just outright crashed. Also, for anything non-trivial it often refuses to profile and I have to try to write a minimal repro to get it to capture anything.<p>I am writing compute shaders though, where one command buffer can run for seconds repeatedly processing over a 1GB buffer, and it seems the tools are heavily geared towards graphics work where the workload per frame is much lighter. (Will all the AI focus, hopefully they'll start addressing this use-case more).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2025 20:50:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46197483</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46197483</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46197483</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This reminds me of the whole Lerna debacle a few years back.<p><a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/open-source-devs-reverse-decision-to-block-ice-contractors-from-using-software/" rel="nofollow">https://www.vice.com/en/article/open-source-devs-reverse-dec...</a><p>That aside, even if something like this was “legally enforceable”, it adds enough friction, risk, and uncertainty to downstream consumers compared to a “vanilla” open source license that I expect most folks would choose an alternative to the “bespoke” license project where they could. Fine if you don’t care about getting usage, but that defeats much of the value that open source brings.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 30 Nov 2025 07:54:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46094732</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46094732</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46094732</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "CUDA Ontology"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Also, code that compiles with older CUDA toolkit versions may not compile with newer CUDA toolkit versions. Newer hardware may require a CUDA toolkit version that is newer than what the project maintainer intended.<p>This is the part I find confusing, especially as NVIDIA doesn't make it easy to find and download the old toolkits. Is this effectively saying that just choosing the right --arch and --code flags isn't enough to support older versions? But that as it statically links in the runtime library (by default) that newer toolkits may produce code that just won't run on older drivers? In other words, is it true that to support old hardware you need to download and use old CUDA Toolkits, regardless of nvcc flags? (And to support newer hardware you may need to compile with newer toolkits).<p>That's how I read it, which seems unfortunate.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 17:26:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995157</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995157</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995157</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "GHC now runs in the browser"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That’s one of the primary reasons we built the tooling for Q# to run in the browser (by writing in Rust and compiling to wasm). The “try with copilot” experience [1] and the “katas” for learning [2] all have a full language service and runtime in the browser.<p><a href="https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-coding" rel="nofollow">https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-coding</a><p><a href="https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas" rel="nofollow">https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 01 Nov 2025 19:00:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45784324</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45784324</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45784324</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Horses for courses. Better camera (for those special moments while the kids are young) and better battery life are two big ones for me, so I'll likely upgrade. (Kind of digging the orange color too).<p>It's not the dullest refresh, and they always sell plenty. I'm sure this will be no exception.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Sep 2025 20:13:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188163</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188163</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188163</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "Some users have noticed settings that let Meta analyze and retain phone photos"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's what I do. Works great. Yes a couple of extra clicks is annoying, and apps are often "Hey how about you go into settings and let me access all your photos for a better experience!", but I'm happy with 2 or 3 extra clicks the few times a month I share a photo in order to limit access.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 Aug 2025 18:53:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45067973</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45067973</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45067973</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "I did 98,000 Anki reviews. Anki is already dead"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah. Anki (and flashcards in general) are great for helping you remember something _you_ learned (from a book, video, class, etc.). Not for transferring knowledge someone else learned.<p>Writing my own cards as I'm learning is the only way I've found it effective.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 Aug 2025 19:37:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44977082</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44977082</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44977082</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "Grok 4 Launch [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Isn't that kinda why we have collaboration and get in room with colleagues to discuss ideas? i.e., thinking about different ideas, getting different perspectives, considering trade-offs in various approaches, etc. results in a better solution than just letting one person go off and try to solve it with their thoughts alone.<p>Not sure if that's a good parallel, but seems plausible.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Jul 2025 18:36:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44524102</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44524102</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44524102</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "Apple introduces a universal design across platforms"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah. On Windows some apps (the new Terminal) used to have the opacity set to 0.9 or something by default. First thing I did was set it to 1.0. Having the background bleed through is distracting for no real value.<p>I’m usually a big fan of Apple design and UX. Any change faces some initial resistance, but this is first real “Ugh, hard no” reaction I can recall after seeing some of those.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2025 06:16:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44233217</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44233217</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44233217</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billti in "U.S. Economy Contracts at 0.3% Rate in First Quarter"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> While the U.S. often has a goods trade deficit, it maintains a surplus in services, including finance, education, and technology<p>Maybe a naive question, but are only goods considered? I had always assumed the 'deficit' was "money in minus money out", and thus selling services, etc. would be included in it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2025 18:19:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848953</link><dc:creator>billti</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848953</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848953</guid></item></channel></rss>