Hacker News: darkstarsys

New comment by darkstarsys in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

darkstarsys — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:13:44 +0000

Owners of capital, yes, but also owners of the means of production (which now means AI companies). See https://blog.oberbrunner.com/blog/ai-risks-taxonomy/#economi...

New comment by darkstarsys in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

darkstarsys — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:28:54 +0000

I'm on my third Surface Pro (an 11 this time) and basically love it. Tablet form factor, lightweight, multitouch, with a real desktop OS (I mean not ipad's iOS). Decent battery life. True, it's not perfect: slow to wake, the touchpad stops working once in a while & needs to be reset. Missing a GPS chip. But it runs Adobe, Resolve, Chrome of course, msys2, and Linux (WSL2) quite well. I love the absolutely gorgeous HiDPI screen. The software emulator system is a little weird (arm64/arm64EC/arm64X, with no true universal x64/arm64 binary) for software developers, but it basically works fine from a user perspective. I say all this as someone whose daily driver is an Arm M1 Macbook Pro, also nice but not a tablet and quite heavier. I don't use a dock, just a simple USBC hub with a magnetic USBC connector.

New comment by darkstarsys in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

darkstarsys — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:20:48 +0000

What happens to humanity when AIs are better at being human than most humans? (More patient, more empathetic even if it's simulated empathy, more knowledgeable)

New comment by darkstarsys in "Show HN: Audiomass – a free, open-source multitrack audio editor for the web"

darkstarsys — Mon, 25 May 2026 11:06:21 +0000

I spend a lot of time doing this too -- cutting up band rehearsal tapes into songs and exporting all. As weird as Audacity's UI is, I haven't found anything better than it at this.

New comment by darkstarsys in "Seeing Birdsong"

darkstarsys — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:21:22 +0000

Absolutely gorgeous as an art piece.

New comment by darkstarsys in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

darkstarsys — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:32:19 +0000

I'm newly mostly-retired as a VFX software developer & CTO. I'm writing about AI, climate change and more in my blog, https://oberbrunner.com, running Long Now Boston (https://longnowboston.org) to promote long-term thinking, and working through my lifetime backlog of "wouldn't it be great if somebody wrote this" ideas using Claude, at https://github.com/garyo.

You should check out my new open source software build tool, https://pcons.org.

New comment by darkstarsys in "Write some software, give it away for free"

darkstarsys — Wed, 06 May 2026 02:26:32 +0000

I'm mostly retired from a lifetime as a graphics programmer and CTO, and now I'm working through my lifetime of fun backlog projects. https://pcons.org, https://deep-timeline.org, https://pelorus-nav.com, https://packzen.org, https://github.com/garyo/sea-surface-temp-viz, https://globe-viz.oberbrunner.com/ and lots more. All open source and free.

Sure, make money from software. I did. But when you have enough and it's time to give back, open source it.

New comment by darkstarsys in "The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy"

darkstarsys — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:52:56 +0000

As a heavy AI-assisted open source code creator (and someone with 40+ years of dev experience), this seems wrong-headed to me. I think it is an excellent policy, as they say, to "value contributors over their contributions," but this policy excludes all potential contributors who use the latest tools. It will eventually doom zig to a smaller "artisanal" pool of contributors, rather than welcoming newbies and helping them become better open-source developers.

Show HN: Pcons: new software build tool in Python, inspired by SCons and CMake

darkstarsys — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 02:28:12 +0000

I've been really gratified to see a bit of uptake of pcons in the open-source community, so I thought I'd post an update since it's up to v0.14.1 now. Pcons is a new open-source build tool that's the best of SCons and CMake with fewer of their problems.

Since v0.7 (last HN post), there's now a porting guide, LaTeX toolchain, full C++20 module support, Fortran toolchain (including MODULE/USE), WebAssembly via WASI and EMSDK. It can generate pkg-config files, finds MSVC more reliably, added Ninja restat support for even faster builds, better target.depends(), better logging and debugging, CMake-style template-based config headers and a lot of improvements and fixes.

I was one of the original developers of SCons and helped maintain it for years. I love that Python is the configuration language — it makes build descriptions incredibly flexible. But over time, working with CMake on other projects, I came to appreciate things SCons doesn't do as well: the separation between describing a build and executing it, transitive dependency propagation, package manager integration, and modern python semantics. I'd been thinking about a fresh start for years but never had the time. Recently, working collaboratively with Claude Code, it finally became feasible. So, meet pcons.

You can use it as `uvx pcons` for true zero-install (great for other open source projects). There's a comparison with other common build tools here: https://github.com/DarkStarSystems/pcons/blob/main/COMPARISO... — corrections and updates appreciated!

Major features as of v0.14.1: - Toolchains for GCC, LLVM/Clang, MSVC, and clang-cl with auto-detection, LaTeX, gfortran, WebAssembly etc. - Generators for Ninja, Makefile, Xcode, compile_commands.json, and Mermaid/DOT dependency diagrams - Can create installers: msix on Windows, pkg/dmg on Mac, tgz on Linux - Package management via pkg-config, Conan 2.x, and a pcons-fetch tool for building dependencies from source - Compiler cache support (ccache/sccache), semantic presets (warnings, sanitizers, LTO, hardening), cross-compilation presets (Android NDK, iOS, WebAssembly) - Platform-specific helpers: macOS bundles/frameworks/.pkg/.dmg, Windows manifests/MSIX, and an msvcup module for installing MSVC without Visual Studio - An extensible module/add-on system for domain-specific tasks - Debug tracing (--debug=resolve,subst) with source-location tracking on every node - Plenty of examples included, unit tests for all features, tested on Mac, Windows and Linux

It's under active development — ready for experimentation, but it's quite stable — enough for light production. I'd love bug reports, feedback on the API design and what you'd want from a modern Python-based software build system. I take my tools seriously and intend to support it well, so please try it out!

Open source, MIT licensed. GitHub: https://github.com/DarkStarSystems/pcons | Docs: https://pcons.readthedocs.io | PyPI: `uvx pcons` or `pip install pcons`

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943555

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by darkstarsys in "Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive"

darkstarsys — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:51:39 +0000

But what about copyright? Asking for a friend.

New comment by darkstarsys in "Working on Products People Hate"

darkstarsys — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:56:52 +0000

I hate CMake as much as anyone, but I actually did something about it: https://github.com/DarkStarSystems/pcons. As one of the original developers of SCons, I tried to get the best parts of SCons and CMake into a simple, modern, python-based software build tool. I take toolsmithing seriously, so I plan to build pcons into a strong, useful open-source project.

New comment by darkstarsys in "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI"

darkstarsys — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:22:19 +0000

I find correction is rarely necessary with Opus 4.6. Definitely not so much that "it's not really the LLM writing it anymore." More like it's the author and I'm the editor (in this limited case -- of course architecturally the ideas are all mine.) But I totally respect that my prompt style, the type of app I'm writing, and other factors could be influencing my success vs. others' lack of success.

New comment by darkstarsys in "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI"

darkstarsys — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:11:48 +0000

I can't agree here. https://pelorus-nav.com/ (one of my side projects) is 95-98% written by Claude Opus 4.6, all in very nice typescript which I carefully review and correct, and use good prompting and context hygiene to ensure it doesn't take shortcuts. It's taken a month or so but so worth it. And my packing list app packzen.org is also pretty decent typescript all through.

New comment by darkstarsys in "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI"

darkstarsys — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:05:19 +0000

This post is excellent, and accurately describes my experience writing pcons (pcons.org) as a side project. I was one of the original developers of SCons and have wanted to rebuild it better for more than a decade. All the same roadblocks Maganti describes kept me from starting it, and Claude Opus 4.6 suddenly opened the door, and now it's live and people are starting to use it as a cmake or scons replacement. My experience over the last few months mirror Maganti's in many ways: ease of refactoring, investigating many more design ideas, getting frustrated with blind alleys and its not understanding the big picture, and ultimately getting a product I'm proud of.

Vision, taste and good judgment are going to be the key skills for software developers from now on.

New comment by darkstarsys in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

darkstarsys — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:38:39 +0000

I agree with this article, and I think it goes further than astrophysics or even physics. As agentic LLMs are starting to prove long-standing open mathematical conjectures and even invent new ones, I fear we may reach a point in mathematical research (which, as Hogg's article describes astrophysics, has no "right edge") where the machines are just better than us. At that point do we just mostly lose interest? You can see it already in the Go-playing community. Why study for years to be a "pretty good" 9P when machines will always play better? What PhD student will spend years on a hard, interesting, deep math problem? Sure, a few will. Some people become monks too. But not many.

New comment by darkstarsys in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

darkstarsys — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:26:16 +0000

Yes, and this is an incredibly powerful idea. Running fluid flow simulations inside an optimization loop (monte carlo + gradient descent) revolutionized aircraft design, nuclear simulations and geophysics. When the tool being called updates the LLM's training data, or runs experiments that the LLM can learn from, then that potentially becomes a self-improvement loop.

New comment by darkstarsys in "My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack"

darkstarsys — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:12:56 +0000

straight and elpaca etc. are just as vulnerable. Maybe more so.

New comment by darkstarsys in "Elevator Saga: The elevator programming game (2015)"

darkstarsys — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 15:17:16 +0000

I've been fascinated by elevator algorithms since visiting NYC as a kid. The interesting stuff starts to happen when you account for popular floors, people going to work, coming home at the end of the day, dog-walking times, subway arrivals, all the semi-deterministic behavior we see in real life.

New comment by darkstarsys in "OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network"

darkstarsys — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 13:12:57 +0000

All of this, the news articles, the social media discussion, this very discussion, will be part of the training set for future AIs. What will they learn from this?

New comment by darkstarsys in "What Claude Code chooses"

darkstarsys — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:45:13 +0000

This is at the top of my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md. Always use bun for web projects, uv for python.