Hacker News: dwb

New comment by dwb in "macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess"

dwb — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:31:39 +0000

Thanks. I might try it, but to be honest I don't particularly dislike the animation.

New comment by dwb in "macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess"

dwb — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:54:36 +0000

This post prompted me to try my pet long-standing bug, where you have Dock auto-hiding on, show it, mouse away, mouse back before the sliding animation is finished, and see what happens. Previously the animation would just finish and it wouldn't show again, but in Golden Gate it does. Praise be. I did respond to an Apple survey a little while back and mentioned this one so maybe it got through...

New comment by dwb in "Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS"

dwb — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 11:17:51 +0000

I’m sorry, but this isn’t the case. I don’t like it, on balance, but managed responsibly and steered well, plenty of LLM code is fine.

New comment by dwb in "Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop"

dwb — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:30:01 +0000

This is why people find nerds irritating. No one is forcing you to use anything you don’t want to. I use the CLI too, and I’m an Emacs fan, just about the opposite of trendy-flashy. But those of us who also like GUIs for the things they’re good at are interested in making them better.

New comment by dwb in "The darker side of being a doctor"

dwb — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 06:59:04 +0000

There wouldn’t be half the complaints if we didn’t see the wealth disparity that we do, or the horror that is the US healthcare system. If you are running a respectable business that pays your employees fairly, has as good working conditions as you can, isn’t profiting from some fully privatised necessity, and pays its taxes, while it may not be my idea of utopia, you’re not the target of my ire.

New comment by dwb in "The darker side of being a doctor"

dwb — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 21:21:21 +0000

You’re talking at cross purposes here, there’s nothing “kumbaya” about what I’m saying. We all have to work hard for the stuff in this world and that would be the case whatever the economic system, for the foreseeable future. I just don’t want the result of that hard work to be hoarded by the bosses, that’s all.

New comment by dwb in "The darker side of being a doctor"

dwb — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 21:14:01 +0000

None of the countries you’ve cited were prosperous first-world countries before the events described. And I didn’t necessarily advocate for central planning in the same way that Stalin or Mao directed it. I don’t pretend to be an expert in such things, but fundamentally I think we can do a lot better than how we organise things now, and that profit for natural monopolies is stupid. If you think that naturally entails famine, I think you have a sad lack of hope and imagination.

New comment by dwb in "The darker side of being a doctor"

dwb — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:10:15 +0000

You don’t have to read very far into each of these to see that the historical conditions in each are very different to any first-world country right now.

New comment by dwb in "The darker side of being a doctor"

dwb — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 18:09:16 +0000

Saying “always” and then pointing to a single event doesn’t make sense.

New comment by dwb in "The darker side of being a doctor"

dwb — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:04:46 +0000

Okay: it’s obviously inefficient for some people to collect profit on essential services where competition is meaningless. That money should be going to improving the service for all, or paying the workers better, or ideally both. It would be more efficient to collectively organise food, shelter, healthcare, and other natural monopolies. Market competition can be for non-essentials where some inefficiency is acceptable.

New comment by dwb in "The darker side of being a doctor"

dwb — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:31:01 +0000

> By that logic all food production and distribution should not be privatized because is should be for the public good rather then the profit of the few.

Sounds like good logic to me, at least for essentials!

New comment by dwb in "Firmware Freedom"

dwb — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 07:45:31 +0000

Depends on the genre and what settings you play in. If you have the right amp, you may not need any pedals at all for the blues, or jazz, etc. But other styles have different expectations. And there’s nothing wrong with experimentation. There’s a lot of analogue pedals that haven’t meaningfully changed since 1995, but if we’re talking about anything digital, there’s obviously been big changes.

New comment by dwb in "Attention is all you have"

dwb — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 18:30:51 +0000

I remember reading an article in I think “net” magazine (Brits, remember that?) in the, I guess, early 2000s, that was predicting the “push” (as opposed to “pull”) internet. At the time I thought that sounded awful, and yep, it’s not good.

New comment by dwb in "I don't like passkeys"

dwb — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:47:41 +0000

All right, my framing was a little too tight. Sure I can see why an email/SMS passwordless loop is easier for you, but it’s a more annoying user experience than your OS/browser/password manager just filling in your credential directly.

New comment by dwb in "I don't like passkeys"

dwb — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:40:56 +0000

I understand many passkey complaints but not this one. Why, for you as a service provider, are passkeys not just better (or at least equivalent to) passwords? You collect and verify an email address at signup and the account can be recovered in the same way as with passwords, or passwordless-email. No CS-verified recovery needed.

New comment by dwb in "Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?"

dwb — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 07:51:32 +0000

You should be comparing the value you get. If you get as much value from a local model as a hosted one, the size difference doesn’t matter.

New comment by dwb in "Why the software industry needs a lot of regulation"

dwb — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:17:27 +0000

It’s very different. It’s doesn’t matter that source code (as “speech”) is useless without running it (though I don’t think that’s quite true) - the definition doesn’t care about how inconvenienced you are. The point of having free speech is to be able to freely express views. Running code isn’t expressing a view, it’s a machine that’s having an independent effect in the world. You may as well say that running industrial equipment is “speech”. It generalises so much it loses meaning.

New comment by dwb in "Why the software industry needs a lot of regulation"

dwb — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:55:42 +0000

> Software is speech.

You might be able to argue source code is “speech”, but running software definitely isn’t. It’s so different it’s difficult to know where to start.

New comment by dwb in "ElevenLabs Music v2.5"

dwb — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 22:55:02 +0000

Way, way worse than an utter waste of resources and ingenuity. Any musician using this is nothing in my eyes, unless it’s the weirdest, most subversive thing I’ve ever heard. Like maybe there are three or four actually creative uses for this, maybe, but all the rest of it will be a talentless void. Awful.

New comment by dwb in "ElevenLabs Music v2.5"

dwb — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 22:45:31 +0000

Any DJ playing this shit deserves to have all their equipment taken from them.