Hacker News: film42

To be honest about software

film42 — Sat, 16 May 2026 15:46:57 +0000

Article URL: https://film42.substack.com/p/to-be-honest-about-software

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48161209

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by film42 in "Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained"

film42 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:28:40 +0000

Acquisitions change priorities and layoffs put the squeeze on people. AI is for sure in the mix there, but open source decay is a result of no room in budgets for anything but maximizing revenue.

New comment by film42 in "Claude Opus 4.7 Model Card"

film42 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:22:39 +0000

To be honest, I think it's just a more honest score of what Opus 4.6 actually was. Once contexts get sufficiently large, Opus develops pretty bad short term memory loss.

New comment by film42 in "LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash"

film42 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:02:20 +0000

I hope it comes down to the NTSB recommending more controllers (or better conditions for controllers) to avoid task saturation, not just more process. It's incredible what a single controller is capable of doing, but for major areas like NYC, it's not enough.

New comment by film42 in "North Korean's 100k fake IT workers net $500M a year for Kim"

film42 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:59:15 +0000

Camera cuts to a tech bro at his desk with 3 jobs and 5 instances of Claude Code running:

> I had [the Register] explain to me three times what [Kim] got arrested for because it sounds an awful lot like what I do here every day.

New comment by film42 in "Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)"

film42 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:55:06 +0000

Maybe. When it comes to actual payments, fee structures don't allow for this outside of the laboratory.

New comment by film42 in "Apple Studio Display and Studio Display XDR"

film42 — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 18:39:18 +0000

Maybe so. OLED comes with a risk, but I've run mine at 70-75% brightness with no issues. I probably drive mine ~2,500 hours per year, so if we make it 4 years that is a huge win in my book for something I stare at all day long.

Plus, coding at night on OLED just makes me want to write more code. It's great.

New comment by film42 in "Apple Studio Display and Studio Display XDR"

film42 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:33:43 +0000

I bought an LG 32" 4k OLED for $999 and it's hands down the best display I've ever used. No burn in even with lots of static browser/terminal windows for days and days. The fact that it's $3k and _not_ OLED is insulting.

New comment by film42 in "Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing"

film42 — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:51:23 +0000

Just 10 minutes ago I was working with a very large semi-malformed excel file generated by a mainframe. DuckDB was able to load it with all_varchar (just keep everything a string) in under a second.

I'm still waiting for Excel to load the file.

New comment by film42 in "I’m leaving Redis for SolidQueue"

film42 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:00:27 +0000

I made the switch on a new project and I don't regret it but it's still early days software despite the marketing. Concurrency control is fantastic, but it doesn't always work. I've woken up to see all threads occupied with a job that should be concurrency of 1.

I've also run into issues where a db connection pool is filled up and solid queue silently fails. No error or logs, just stops polling forever until manual restart. Far from ideal.

But, I can live with it. I am going for minimal maintenance, and the ability to run solid queue under puma inside rails on cloud run is just so easy. Having ~3 solid queue related issues a year is acceptable for my use case, but that doesn't mean it will be ok for others.

New comment by film42 in "Roam 50GB is now Roam 100GB"

film42 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:48:16 +0000

I spend a lot of time out of reception and starlink has been fantastic. So much so that I leave it on anytime I'm driving where I have cellular reception because it's just consistently good. I get ~100Mbps whether it's a forest service road, ATV trail, or on the highway through curvy mountain passes.

I'm on the 50GB plan so doubling for free is very nice, but it looks like they yanked the ability to optionally purchase additional high speed data for $1/GB. Maybe it's still there?

New comment by film42 in "Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales"

film42 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:27:20 +0000

Same here. I was told it would take a at least year on the waitlist. A month later I had 2 friends offer me their spot. They weren't impressed with the truck after a few reviews came out showing bad towing performance. I opted to buy a used ICE truck instead and have zero regrets.

New comment by film42 in "Mistral OCR 3"

film42 — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:55:21 +0000

Is open router still sending all OCR jobs to Mistral? I wonder if they're trying to keep that spot. Seems like Mistral and Google are the best at OCR right now, with Google leading Mistral by a fair bit.

New comment by film42 in "A Cozy Mk IV light aircraft crashed after 3D-printed part was weakened by heat"

film42 — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 22:05:38 +0000

Installed _on_ an engine that operates at 200ºC!

New comment by film42 in "Claude Opus 4.5"

film42 — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 19:49:31 +0000

This is why I migrated my apps that need an LLM to Gemini. No model degradation so far all through the v2.5 model generation. What is Anthropic doing? Swapping for a quantized version of the model?

New comment by film42 in "Gemini 3"

film42 — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:58:31 +0000

At this point I'm only using google models via Vertex AI for my apps. They have a weird QoS rate limit but in general Gemini has been consistently top tier for everything I've thrown at it.

Anecdotal, but I've also not experienced any regression in Gemini quality where Claude/OpenAI might push iterative updates (or quantized variants for performance) that cause my test bench to fail more often.

New comment by film42 in "GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT"

film42 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 16:24:30 +0000

It's a cash grab. More conversational AI means more folks running out of free or lower paid tier tokens faster, leading to more upsell opportunities. API users will pay more in output tokens by default.

Example, I asked Claude a high level question about p2p systems and it started writing code in 3 languages. Ignoring the code, asking a follow up about the fundamentals, it answered and then rewrote the code 3 times. After a few minutes I hit a token limit for the first time.

New comment by film42 in "Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%"

film42 — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 13:54:06 +0000

AKA... 70% of existing google cloud users have filled out a support ticket, which starts with a chat bot.

New comment by film42 in "AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS"

film42 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 18:59:16 +0000

Maybe look at R2 or Wasabi instead of S3. That would cut your storage bill by 3x and take your cloud network bill to zero. IMO self-managing DBs always sucks no matter what you do.

New comment by film42 in "AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS"

film42 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 18:54:58 +0000

Or you have PTSD after 10 years of being on-call 24/7 for your company's stack. I've built my next chapter around offloading the pager. Worth every penny.