Hacker News: brooksc

New comment by brooksc in "Show HN: State of the Art of Coding Models, According to Hacker News Commenters"

brooksc — Sat, 02 May 2026 23:21:24 +0000

It'd be interesting to also graph this over time to see how sentiment changes from when a model is released to today.

Tremendous Iranian Invasion: A Text Misadventure

brooksc — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 04:51:38 +0000

Oval Office There is the Resolute Desk here, along with a few gold-plated chairs. The presidential seal is in the middle of the room and there is a full-length mirror upon the wall.

> PUSH BUTTON

A valet enters and hands you a Diet Coke.

> INVADE IRAN

You are not able to do that, yet.

> GO RIGHT

MAGA Right You are firmly on the right of the political spectrum. Elon Musk is here. Tucker Carlson is here.

> GO RIGHT

Extreme MAGA You are on the absolute furthest right edge of the political spectrum. Laura Loomer is here. Nick Fuentes is here.

> INVADE IRAN

You are not able to do that, yet.

> TAKE VACATION

Mar-a-Lago You are at your beautiful club in Florida. Kid Rock is here. There is a box of classified documents in the bathroom.

> GO RALLY

Campaign Rally You are at an airplane hangar in Pennsylvania, along with a massive crowd of patriots and the Fake News media in the back. There is a teleprompter here.

> READ TELEPROMPTER

You ignore the teleprompter and complain about the water pressure in modern showers for twenty minutes. In the distance, Iran enriches uranium to 60% purity.

> READ TELEPROMPTER

You ignore the teleprompter and discuss how windmills are destroying the birds. Iran enriches uranium to 90% purity.

> GO HOME

You fly on Trump Force One back to the White House. Oval Office

> GIVE SPEECH

Who do you want to give the speech to?

> TRUTH SOCIAL

You type the speech in all caps on your phone.

> INVADE IRAN

You are not able to do that, yet.

> THREATEN ALLIES

You threaten to pull out of NATO and tell European countries they need to pay their bills. Emmanuel Macron is here, looking exhausted.

> INVADE IRAN

(Leaving NATO first.) You are not able to do that, yet.

> FIRE EXPERTS

"The generals don't know what they are talking about. I know more about drones than anybody."

> CAPSLOCK DIPLOMACY

"TO THE LEADERS OF IRAN: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE."

> APPLY MAXIMUM PRESSURE

You sanction everything in Iran, including the pistachio farmers.

> IGNORE INTELLIGENCE

You replace the Director of National Intelligence with a loyalist from cable news. Your plan to attack Iran now has the backing of zero international allies, but the base loves it.

> INVADE IRAN

Tehran Airspace You enter Iranian airspace, having launched a massive, beautiful, perfect wave of tactical strikes. You can't seem to find the promised regime collapse, but the footage of the explosions looks tremendous on social media!

> GIVE CONTRACTS

Who do you want to give the contracts to?

> ELON

What kind of contracts do you wish to give to Elon?

> NO-BID LITHIUM MINING

You give the no-bid extraction contracts to Tesla.

> DECLARE VICTORY

"We had a perfect strike. Many people are saying it was the most successful military operation in history."

> STAY COURSE

The situation in the Strait of Hormuz deteriorates.

> EXAMINE MISSION

The mission is tied up in asymmetrical proxy warfare.

> STAY COURSE

The situation in the Strait of Hormuz deteriorates. Some drone swarms arrive.

> STAY COURSE

The situation in the Middle East deteriorates. Global shipping halts.

> DO TARIFFS

You apply a 200% tariff on any country that complains about the inflation spike. The situation in the Middle East deteriorates. Some ballistic missiles arrive.

> STAY COURSE

The situation in the Middle East deteriorates. Gas hits $9.00 a gallon.

> SCORE

Your favorability rating is 38% out of a possible 100%.

> ADMIT MISTAKES

Syntax error. Command not recognized.

> ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY

Error 404: Concept not found in database.

> BLAME DEEP STATE

"The radical left Marxist generals completely botched the beautiful plan I handed them."

> QUIT

Oh, how we wish you would.

Inspired by http://bit.ly/42rw5X6

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47885689

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Show HN: MailScrub – terminal UI for bulk Gmail unsubscribing

brooksc — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 04:02:14 +0000

Built this for myself — I had 13K unread emails and no patience to deal with them one at a time.

Gmail's new "Manage subscriptions" is handy but it only unsubscribes going forward. It doesn't touch the 500 old emails already in your inbox from that sender. MailScrub does both: unsubscribe and nuke the backlog in one shot.

It's a terminal UI that pulls down your Gmail headers into a local SQLite db, groups them by sender, and lets you blaze through them. For senders with a List-Unsubscribe header it handles the HTTP/mailto request automatically. For ones without it, it opens browser tabs.

Nothing leaves your machine — you auth against your own Google Cloud OAuth client.

https://github.com/brooksc/MailScrub

Biggest gotcha: you need to set up a personal Google Cloud project to get an OAuth client (~10 min, instructions in the README). I couldn't find a way around this for Gmail API access. Open to ideas. Only tested on Mac so far.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47872143

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by brooksc in "Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project"

brooksc — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 21:21:40 +0000

During the Longhorn project (before the reset to use Win 2003 code and create Vista from it)... There was plans for a "Castle" feature which would allow you to roam your profile, data across multiple PCs in the home. Parts of castle made it into Win7 homegroups later, but it was very much scoped back.

At the time I was in the WMDRM team which handled content licensing. We had a feature that built on Castle if you purchased audio/video content (purchased music still had DRM then) we'd automatically roam the content licenses among all the PCs in the home. We had the typical challenges from content owners that this could be used to share content in a dorm, over the internet. We had to design in things like proximity detection to ensure you aren't sharing beyond a home network. It was somewhat complicated (DRM couldn't be simple), but it would have provided a far better user experience.

We also planned a centralized DRM licensing backup/restore service so you weren't beholden to the service you bought content from deciding to let you have another license years later.

All of this was cancelled with the reset unfortunately...

New comment by brooksc in "Amazon Echo Dot"

brooksc — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 17:42:14 +0000

Whenever I read these, I can't tell if the group is paranoid or prescient. But anyway I ordered one via my alexa. Amazon probably already knew I would.

New comment by brooksc in "Tech workers are increasingly looking to leave Silicon Valley"

brooksc — Mon, 29 Feb 2016 20:39:01 +0000

Having moved from Seattle area after 15 years to Tampa -- and having purchased a 2 acre property for my family (wife, 3 kids, 3 dogs). we need 2 acres.

Having owned a number of houses - the biggest reason is peace. I've owned houses where I felt the neighbors looked in your back window, everyone could hear what others are doing in their yard around you...

Walking out and having a bit of space is wonderful. And tools like slack and hangouts are making it easier to work remotely as well.