Hacker News: flenserboy

New comment by flenserboy in "A domain can now say it is for sale, in DNS"

flenserboy — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:00:08 +0000

this is how we get under-the-radar marketplaces for llms

New comment by flenserboy in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

flenserboy — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 03:25:42 +0000

if you find this to be bleak, don't read his "The Small Assassin", or much of anything in The October Country.

New comment by flenserboy in "SwiftUI After 7 Years"

flenserboy — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:36:26 +0000

there's yet to be a decent-looking SwiftUI app on the desktop. elements are always too small, spacing is wrong, & the keyboard is a second-class citizen. mobile-first is a disaster.

New comment by flenserboy in "The Visual 6502"

flenserboy — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 03:15:09 +0000

M4 Max, Brave — 93Hz highest, usually around 90Hz. On Advanced it started at 22Hz & steadily dropped from there into the single digits as it ran. Safari held around 62.xHz. On Advanced it started at 40Hz & also kept dropping.

New comment by flenserboy in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"

flenserboy — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:43:05 +0000

the "safety" freaks are going to ruin the US industry, & with it a host of dominoes will fall.

New comment by flenserboy in "Unicode's transliteration rules are Turing-complete"

flenserboy — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 13:34:56 +0000

A Turing-complete system open to LLMs will be a security hole.

New comment by flenserboy in "It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history"

flenserboy — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 14:44:55 +0000

which could, for the most part, be boiled down to 2 hour-long segments. so much is stretched out for the sake of padding. the good news is that scrubbing through shows is possible — it is usually painfully clear when to stop & watch at double speed — & time otherwise lost is recovered in this way.

New comment by flenserboy in "The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock's License Plate Camera Empire"

flenserboy — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:24:35 +0000

they have little respect for precedent which they agree is wrong, which is a far better standard than letting terrible decisions stand because tradition or because popular.

New comment by flenserboy in "The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy"

flenserboy — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 23:56:46 +0000

There will be your internet-connected computer which will be assumed to be compromised, & which little, if anything of use will be kept on, & then there will be the airgapped system you do work on, which will probably be the last trusted version of a Linux distro you have multiple copies stashed away of. It will be a very old-fashioned experience, & moving/sharing data will become a dicey business.

New comment by flenserboy in "macOS needs its grid back"

flenserboy — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:04:37 +0000

Apple has a strange habit of making the first version excellent, then finding ways to degrade the experience. The grid pattern of spaces is definitely one; Spotlight, as it appeared in Tiger, is another.

New comment by flenserboy in "Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion"

flenserboy — Sun, 31 May 2026 12:54:41 +0000

It's clear they don't want stand-alone Office anymore. One gets the feeling, given how Windows has devolved, that they'd like to rid themselves of all desktop software so they can focus on the backroom, perhaps because the data they could acquire is tastier.

New comment by flenserboy in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

flenserboy — Wed, 27 May 2026 22:21:45 +0000

the ability to simply exclude such content from recommendations & search results would be welcome.

New comment by flenserboy in "Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success"

flenserboy — Fri, 22 May 2026 01:57:34 +0000

No problem! Myco Bliss has worked well for me.

New comment by flenserboy in "Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success"

flenserboy — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:09:31 +0000

I have added spores to my garden for a few years, & the results have been excellent. Not only have the plants thrived, the network spread through the lawn to a further extent every year, & the grass in that zone looks much healthier than the rest of the lawn. Mostly I sprinkle a bit in with each seed or row — it does the work from that point on.

Trees have shown the same pattern — we had a large, older tree go down, one which had quite a bit of fungus growing around it, & the trees planted near the old site did well while new trees on the other side of the yard did not, even with significant, regular watering.

New comment by flenserboy in "Google changes its search box"

flenserboy — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:33:08 +0000

We need a second, new internet that cuts these rent-seekers out. The backbone is there, we can use mesh, we could use Starlink (there's a real opportunity there) — locking out & starving the current titans of cash is where we need to be. It won't happen, but it should, for all sorts of economic, cultural, & liberty-oriented reasons.

New comment by flenserboy in "LinkedIn scans for 6,278 extensions and encrypts the results into every request"

flenserboy — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:57:06 +0000

Fun to have to spin up a whole VM just to use a particular website!

New comment by flenserboy in "Advanced Mac Substitute is an API-level reimplementation of 1980s-era Mac OS"

flenserboy — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 23:03:12 +0000

Efforts like this could be a nice way to get old apps to run "natively" on current hardware, as there are a ton of them out there which are perfectly good for work, but which cannot run today.

New comment by flenserboy in "Second Revision of 6502 Laptop"

flenserboy — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:48:59 +0000

Speed certainly wouldn't be there, but capabilities would. Plenty could get done on those old machines — most of it had to do with programmers having the imagination & skill to be able to shoehorn their ideas into spaces they weren't meant to be crammed into.

One memory this project brought to mind for me was a hack I came across which allowed simultaneously running DOS 3.3 & ProDOS on a 128k Apple II, giving each 64k (well, a little less due to overhead) & a way to switch between the two with a simple command. Two programs couldn't run at once, but one could step between the two OSes to run programs made for each pretty seamlessly. If this sort of thing was possible on basic consumer hardware, ten or twenty years of development would have led to many far more interesting & useful things.

New comment by flenserboy in "Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet"

flenserboy — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:51:37 +0000

this rhymes with the arguments for pullback at the end of Apollo, with the decades of stagnation that followed. doing things, & doing them at scale, is worth it if for no other reason than we can't know what spinoffs & useful developments will come of this. giving capable, motivated minds something to actually do, giving them a chance to explore & engage in trying things, is always preferable to keeping them tied down & hoping that they'll devote themselves to tossing away their dreams in order to make a beancounter happy.

New comment by flenserboy in "Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet"

flenserboy — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:45:47 +0000

but that isn't what would or will happen. at best there will be a wind-down where spending goes toward mollifying an aging, uneducated population with food & shiny baubles as infrastructure decays, access to resources & power is reduced year after year, & in a gen or two there won't be anyone left who knows how to make the old systems run (& if they do they won't have the resources needed because the supply chain will be gone).

without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.