Hacker News: dabbz

New comment by dabbz in "Virtual Oxide Labs: Emulating a Full Oxide Rack"

dabbz — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 06:55:05 +0000

Oxide is doing such fun stuff, really wish I had the skill set needed for their job postings.

New comment by dabbz in "The Origin Story of Kid Pix"

dabbz — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 21:07:17 +0000

oooopsss. Uhohhhhh. I can still hear those sounds in my head.

New comment by dabbz in "AOSP Source Releases Are So Late Developers Disassemble Libraries to Report Bugs"

dabbz — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 17:09:00 +0000

It's fully your right to want non-webkit for your browser, but just curious. Why? Why does it matter? I've never once wished for firefox to use firefox's engine instead. The UI/sync/extension stuff is all built on top anyway.

New comment by dabbz in "Show HN: SIM95 – a browser based 90s PC with it's own internet"

dabbz — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 21:36:50 +0000

I got tired of running 5 tabs to host each service, so I've moved them all under a single server called http://starthere.56k.net/ The index page is a directory to all the fun things I've built so far.

New comment by dabbz in "56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience"

dabbz — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:01:03 +0000

Keeping aggressive expiration could help "cleanup". Make it always required to point to an active and online machine for some duration.

You could just become ICANN and allow anyone to host any TLD they want and keep certain TLDs reserved for yourself/own vetted projects.

I feel like "in-game currency" changes the goal of the system a bit. Though I have considered building PaySimPal service. So maybe not?

I think right now, what resonates with me in this project is just how open and buildable everything is. No forcing function to do things a certain way. Like I was about to go build a basic BIND service to serve DNS traffic over and let my Internet Explorer browser use it for host name resolution. Just, that means only people on IE would be able to view my beautiful works of art.

New comment by dabbz in "56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience"

dabbz — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 17:22:26 +0000

If you're taking feature requests:

A BIND/DNS service built in so we can point multiple hosts to a single machine (the 5 tabs are burning my browser).

The ability to modify the core OS a bit. Would be fun to work on skins, change default behavior, or add capabilities into the Spark language itself. would love to add screenshot capabilities for screenshare service.

midi/audio sys calls.

New comment by dabbz in "56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience"

dabbz — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 16:17:22 +0000

I've been having a little too much fun with it honestly. I've tinkered with so far:

Simbook, ColdMail (email server, website for mail), Frostbird (a spark program for checking emails), AskSim (an ask jeeves search engine that actually crawls all of the machines in the network), Simxplorer (An IE browser with a javascript engine built into it), ELIZA (the preLLM chatbot with silly responses), Vapor (a Steam like program downloader that also has Doom and Snake). I'm toying around with a Clippy idea but haven't landed on if I like it or not.

tl;dr I'm having way too much fun

New comment by dabbz in "56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience"

dabbz — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:04:37 +0000

Sounds good: http://simbook.56k.net/

New comment by dabbz in "google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update"

dabbz — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 18:51:27 +0000

I mean, there’s more privacy protection on payment data than there is for email address and browsing habits. Plus most companies just push out payment handling to stripe. So most websites have little idea who actually transacted with them to begin with (email dependent).

New comment by dabbz in "OpenAI Agents API"

dabbz — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 04:17:01 +0000

This bothers me so much with the existing offerings. I start with the chat interface then as soon as I want to get technical/run scripts/automation, I have to copy the context into a fresh code session. So cumbersome.

New comment by dabbz in "OpenRouter is joining Stripe"

dabbz — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:24:31 +0000

Metronome has been experimenting with real-time payment on usage based billing for tokens. That technology leverages micro payments using crypto. It's cool but all it's doing is moving the accumulated balance from a provider onto your crypto wallet.

New comment by dabbz in "GitHub down again? no PR access"

dabbz — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:12:42 +0000

I mean one of those makes them look better than the other. That makes it tricky to be able to tell what is truth vs half truth vs a lie. You're right though, based off of what they claim, their great success is the cause of their failure.

How hard is it to up scale their servers though...

New comment by dabbz in "Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove"

dabbz — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:44:02 +0000

I was going to interject that very sentiment. The upfront costs of running any model of value to the average consumer is so large to be basically non-existent. We need hardware to become commoditized and capable of handling LLMs at the scale necessary to enjoy these agentic workflows.

New comment by dabbz in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"

dabbz — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:36:13 +0000

Hey everyone! I found the COBOL developer!

New comment by dabbz in "Stop Killing Games: It's time to sue Sony, join us"

dabbz — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:26:59 +0000

Your analogy falls apart somewhere for me but I can't pinpoint the exact correction to make your analogy work for me. Either way I agree. If they don't like only being able to buy digital PS games via Sony's platform, go to one where they can.

That's not the fight I'd personally focus on. I'd personally focus on them revoking digital access after you've "purchased it". Then again, I don't have a game console and I don't "buy" digital media. I either rent via streaming subscription or own the physical.

New comment by dabbz in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

dabbz — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:43:00 +0000

Weird conclusion to draw from my statement. Feels intentionally hostile of an assessment about me, but I digress.

New comment by dabbz in "A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website"

dabbz — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:28:25 +0000

Machines don't pay my bills though. If the content was free to share widely, then yea, who cares how it's accessed.

New comment by dabbz in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

dabbz — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:28:10 +0000

I see a lot of discourse about it being fast-to-deprecation. But I see it a different way personally.

Modern LLMs are trying to do more with less. Focus on doing the right thing the first time. Even if we squeeze dumb LLMs, the significantly faster speed means quicker iterations. So a bad decision doesn't cost the time and inference costs that it cost before. It theoretically changes the scale of errant token spend.

I compare it to the 1 thousand monkeys on a typewriter. In this case it's 1,000 monkeys with stale training data of everything ever written and the ability to search the web.

New comment by dabbz in "The AI Billboards Are Killing SF"

dabbz — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:22:19 +0000

Far better than the band 999mb, they don't do well in the gig economy.

New comment by dabbz in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

dabbz — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 23:58:42 +0000

This is my thought as well. Models have to be intentional about which tokens they burn because there's a real lag time. If you can just fork out 10 different reasoning sessions at once with no regard for token waste/lag, you can compensate a smaller model with just doing more at once with it. No idea if this is reasonably true though.