Hacker News: davydm

New comment by davydm in "WSL vs Wine"

davydm — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:18:43 +0000

1. The perception that linux doesn't matter because it's not a big enough market (that's changing, largely due to valve) 2. The simple truth that it's way easier to wrest control of the machine on windows - for tasks like enforcing DRM and licensing - if y'all look underneath your seats, y'all get a free kernel-level anticheat! 3. WSL doesn't do display well - cli is fine, GUI apps still require some interaction/tricks like remote X or similar (afaik - this could be old knowledge, since I haven't been in windoze land for a long time - at least a year) 4. To be a viable choice for GUI toolkit (really, the thing that's hugely different), one either has to use something that abstracts the underlying api (and often ends up losing something, somewhere, out of a necessity for a standard api) or manually write code for two toolkits (eg native win32 and cocoa is probably already too much for a lot of places, and if they were going to go cross-platform, the easy money is in OSX, not linux - everything there is paid - I wasted around $300 just trying to make a mbp not suck before finally giving up). So either you adopt and learn a toolkit you can use everywhere (eg Qt) and accept the limitations, or you write your own, but that ties you to an OS unless you really had an aim to bother with other platforms, and... see (1)

New comment by davydm in "Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux"

davydm — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:27:44 +0000

Mainly: true sandbox separation. I don't want the model having full access to my machine. With a dump format that Claude understands, I'm able to pass only the files I want Claude to see, and he can't break any of them. I don't care about setting up access lists and so on. I don't trust that the cli product will be properly sanboxed and it's quite clear their software offerings are largely aigen code, and I catch bugs from Claude every day. I also get useful stuff, so it's worth it, but definitely not worth it, imo, to grant it any access to my machine.

New comment by davydm in "The -Bot after my name is just cool I liked it I'm not a robot"

davydm — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:24:28 +0000

Spoken like a true bot sir!

New comment by davydm in "Ask HN: What are some agent-coded masterpieces?"

davydm — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 08:38:19 +0000

I've yet to see any masterpieces. I've had a lot of good enough code come out, and some that was blatantly wrong. You still need to be an expert in the domain if you want to use ai codegen effectively. I've been using Claude for a few months now.

New comment by davydm in "CrankGPT: A human-powered local and private AI solution"

davydm — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:31:22 +0000

cool idea - i can't tell from the page if there's any choice of model (though the name and voices suggest gpt only); neat idea though. Perhaps this is the solution: devs should have a device like this, and pedal to power it. Solves the power problem, also solves the typical "devs need exercise" problem.

New comment by davydm in ""There is probably a lot of resume fraud or kickback grifts within FAANG""

davydm — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 06:36:55 +0000

Ah, I see his philosophy of "steal from the poor to give to the rich" still strongly in play. What a useless muppet.

New comment by davydm in "Cannot Upvote"

davydm — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:18:36 +0000

and I just upvoted a comment, refreshed, and it's still upvoted - perhaps check your network stack in your browser? Sounds like something isn't getting through and the UI is unaware.

New comment by davydm in "Slick Lorem Ipsum Generator"

davydm — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:13:57 +0000

neat! I've always used this in the past: https://baconipsum.com/ - for the lulz

New comment by davydm in ""Write as Little Code as Possible""

davydm — Sun, 24 May 2026 09:48:47 +0000

and then, after 6 months with a huge codebase that doesn't work, don't forget to hire a real human to rewrite it - you, personally, don't have to write the code, but someone will have to turn that ball of mud into a product that can be extended.

New comment by davydm in "You cannot sell AI written software"

davydm — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:03:07 +0000

Recognising this has also made me recognise the real problem of using an LLM without expert knowledge in the domain - if you don't know when it's wrong, you won't know when to push back. So whilst I can be very critical of code outputs, for example, my knowledge of quantum mechanics is so rudimentary that it's practically impossible to push back on conversations about QM. So who knows if my hobby knowledge actually holds any value? The best I can do here, when repeating the information, is to say "at least, that's what the machine says".

New comment by davydm in "You cannot sell AI written software"

davydm — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:00:40 +0000

I agree largely, but hold up a bit on the statement that getting an LLM to write the code means I never solved the problem. That may be true for a lot of vibe-coders - loops of "write this code" "no, not that", "fix plz", etc. But what I've found is that Claude (at least) does best on small problems that are very well defined - in other words, I have to solve the problem _before_ I can get Claude to produce the code for me, if for no other reason than that the model will model along, and needs an expert on the problem to be able to push back when it's wrong.

So I agree that leaving an LLM churning for a week or two and then claiming that you have a product to sell is tenuous, but I disagree that one can't both use an LLM _and_ understand the solution - it just takes active participation towards that result.

Whilst there's no remuneration involved, I view projects I put up on github (that I also tell other people about) in the same light - so, for example, the largely-ai-written https://github.com/fluffynuts/nestray, whilst designed to scratch an itch of mine, may be useful for others because I've aimed at some level of genericism. Is it a perfect product? NO! But it does what I want, and probably what someone else might want with respect to showing email notifications without requiring any account access (simply reads from local Thunderbird files)

New comment by davydm in "Ask HN: How to Deal with "File Naming Problem"?"

davydm — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:40:40 +0000

you could enable prompts on download - and set the filename yourself (or just rename after download). Ultimately, naming it yourself is the only way you're going to get names you're happy with.

eg https://www.technobezz.com/how-to-set-firefox-to-always-ask-...

New comment by davydm in "Cuba says it has run out of fuel, blames U.S. embargo"

davydm — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:59:50 +0000

And, for an encore - stop all the other stupid shit. The rest of the world (and the US) is paying the price for little trump-tantrums, like the one against Iran. He's not a good international leader. He's not even a reasonable at-home president.

New comment by davydm in "Cuba says it has run out of fuel, blames U.S. embargo"

davydm — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:58:46 +0000

functionally the same - and more accurate to use the original title, as Cuba is the one doing the blaming. I don't know why you're standing up for this - it's more bad behavior from a country that sells itself as the savior, and it's not new - they've been doing this (whatever they need to, to change regimes) in other countries for decades. It's shameless bullying, and completely contravenes "the rules" about how to interact with other countries.

New comment by davydm in "The Graveyard of the Internet"

davydm — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:48:53 +0000

This is why we can't have nice things - people that can't stop to ask if they should, once they've realised they could.

New comment by davydm in "Dell confirms its SupportAssist software causes Windows BSOD crashes"

davydm — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:47:48 +0000

yes, this is a new bout, but the result is the same - SupportAssist simply should not have the capabilities to bluescreen your device /eof.

New comment by davydm in "Dell confirms its SupportAssist software causes Windows BSOD crashes"

davydm — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:46:21 +0000

wow, slow clap literally 7 years after I told them so when I had a Dell laptop.

New comment by davydm in "Ask HN: How often do you investigate issues in production vs. looking at logs?"

davydm — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:49:44 +0000

1. the logs hopefully tell you where to look 2. the logs hopefully give you enough context to construct a physical test (ie, replicate) 3. the physical test hopefully gives enough context to write an automated test 4. we write the automated test, submit to staging, do the physical test again 5. PROFIT!

New comment by davydm in "Banks are funding climate chaos. You don't have to"

davydm — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:46:54 +0000

what a crazy idea

either: 1. you spend all the effort and time (and money - it's not free to drive around, and there are often join fees) to switch banks and it makes no difference whatsoever, or 2. the overall energy consumption remains the same, and everyone levels out, because that's just how much energy banks require per customer

I'm all for saving the earth but I don't see how making my life more difficult will change this situation one iota - meanwhile, I have limited time to live, limited resources of my own.

New comment by davydm in "ROI of AI-assisted Software Development report"

davydm — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:38:21 +0000

none of the metrics it decides by are related at all to software - they're all management terms

what a waste of time