Hacker News: freedomben

New comment by freedomben in "Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models"

freedomben — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:52:10 +0000

Great news: I was able to score you 10% off the next 12 months on your subscription!

New comment by freedomben in "Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models"

freedomben — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:35:21 +0000

> as a user there is no way of verifying the claims

I think this sums up what it's like to be an Apple user pretty well. With their heavy proprietary and closed approach, all users can do is "trust" them.

New comment by freedomben in "Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models"

freedomben — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:30:46 +0000

Just an interesting thought on the very different philosophical approaches. Let's imagine that Android had a terrible assistant, so bad that even most Google Fanbois admitted it was pretty bad. Apple became a leader in AI. Google approaches them to license the Siri model for Android. Would Apple have ever done that?

The Crystal That Could Destroy All Medicine [video]

freedomben — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:01:11 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksn5yrsC3Wg

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446278

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by freedomben in "Podman 6: machine usability improvements (2025)"

freedomben — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 19:00:21 +0000

I love podman and use it extensively, but am less sure how useful the machine functionality will be (to me). I use KVM (with virt-manager) extensively, and I could see how treating VMs as ephemeral like containers might be nice for some workflows, but for me I want my VMs to be stateful as they are now. Anything I want container workflow for I just use containers. I don't do any Windows though, all linux.

I might actually find machines useful for testing some old wordpress instances that I'd love to be able to iterate on with a full systemd and everything on the same machine (because that mirrors how prod is set up). I might dig into this use case a little deeper.

What are some things people would use this for?

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

freedomben — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:05:00 +0000

Nice, you have RPMs and DEBs in a remote repo we can add! Thanks for making it so easy to use :-)

Also, I can't break the swipe keyboard habit either. It's the worst, but still better than the alternatives. Someday I hope physical keyboard makes a return (but I"m not holding my breath)

New comment by freedomben in "Mouseless – keyboard-driven control of macOS/Linux/Windows"

freedomben — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:38:31 +0000

I've had "mouseless" on every system since getting a keyboard that supports it (in my case the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard). It's changed my compute experience and I can never go back (so I hope they don't go out of business)

New comment by freedomben in "Anthropic Urges Global Pause in AI Development, Flags 'Self-Improvement' Risk"

freedomben — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:11:13 +0000

Well said, I have the same instinct but couldn't quite articulate why until reading your comment. You said it well.

In life I find the key to understanding people/behavior (as much as is possible) is to look at the incentives*, motivation, what's driving them. It's rarely simple, usually multi-variable calculus, but you can predict reasonably better than a random guess by trying to understand motivations/incentives. Anthropic is split between the financial incentive and the zealotry, and it sure shows (wonder why Anthropic is doing this right after their IPO push?? Makes more sense given the incentives. Money + zealotry)

*Of course you don't want to anthropomorphize corporations too much, but they still respond heavily to incentives so it does carry over there, plus at least for now they're still run by humans making decisions (except for the Lawn Mower who runs Oracle of course)

New comment by freedomben in "Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other"

freedomben — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:01:49 +0000

But you can tell it to once (in CLAUDE.md for example) and it will nearly every time (it's getting much better at that). Since opus 4.7 (which I consider a downgrade overall) it's been much better at following CLAUDE.md . I even have an intentional contradiction in my user-level CLAUDE.md and the project levels, so I can tell which one is taking precedent or if both are disregarded, and it follows at least one of them most of the time, and it follows the local one 95% of the time.

New comment by freedomben in "Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses"

freedomben — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:46:42 +0000

> It's not like you can't tell your wife apart from your orthodontist.

I got a personal kick out of that example, because one of my good friend's wife is his orthodontist :-D

New comment by freedomben in "VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare"

freedomben — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:15:14 +0000

Thanks for the example. I'm skeptical of the claims that "nothing will change" but want to believe them, and examples are the only real data to go on (feels/vibes aren't data), so thank you.

Original blog post of the acquisition of BastionZero: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-acquires-bastionzero/

New comment by freedomben in "VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare"

freedomben — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:12:25 +0000

You might at least try to engage in good faith, or fake it enough to pass benefit of the doubt. I don't like the impact Cloudflare has had on the open internet, but GP was presenting their view, and you clearly misrepresented it.

New comment by freedomben in "VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare"

freedomben — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:09:16 +0000

> Before saying anything else, we want to make the most important thing clear: Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will stay open source, vendor-agnostic, and community-driven. Nothing about that changes.

Appreciate them putting that so clearly. I am highly skeptical of acquisitions now because we've been burned so many times in the past. Time will tell if this stays true, but at least it's clearly on the record. Would love to know if this is in contract/writing somewhere as part of the acquisition.

New comment by freedomben in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

freedomben — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 01:12:48 +0000

Thank you, appreciate the correction

New comment by freedomben in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

freedomben — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:23:01 +0000

For Java you need a JRE and JDK depending on whether you're just running or also building. That they are bundled (for Windows) is slightly convenient, but they're not bundled on Linux so what you're saying is OS dependent

New comment by freedomben in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

freedomben — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:21:27 +0000

If you're used to Java, Elixir is like `javac`, Beam is like `java`. Mix is like a (way better) version of Gradle. You need elixir to compile your app, you only need the Beam to run it. Once you've built your project, you don't need Elixir anymore exactly like java/javac. C and rust compile to machine code so don't have a runtime dep, but otherwise they still require you to have a compiler at build time, just like elixir.

New comment by freedomben in "Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux"

freedomben — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:00:02 +0000

Having 128 GB in my desktop, I can never, ever go back. It truly unlocks a whole different computing experience. I've only had one OOM in the last 5 years and it was in my own code where I had a bad memory leak. It's the only way to live

New comment by freedomben in "Nvidia RTX Spark"

freedomben — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 19:34:08 +0000

Indeed. Having a machine where I don't live in fear after every reboot is a killer feature for AMD

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

freedomben — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:24:58 +0000

I agree with you, but then to me this is a great reason why macOS (and Apple products in general) just aren't made for me. And that's ok, that's the beauty of diversity.

New comment by freedomben in "Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute"

freedomben — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:22:48 +0000

exactly. Claude is in a niche. It's a high-value niche right now, but a niche nonetheless. Normies don't use claude much based on the numbers I saw. Search is still highly relevant and Google seems well positioned to capitalize on it.