Hacker News: gibsonsmog

New comment by gibsonsmog in "Deep under Antarctic ice, a long-predicted cosmic whisper breaks through"

gibsonsmog — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:08:39 +0000

Cthulu is supposed to rise and induce madness in the population, driving them towards death and destruction right? Seems like he'd be bored these days

New comment by gibsonsmog in "U.S. companies back Sam Altman's World ID even as much of the world pushes back"

gibsonsmog — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:53:05 +0000

The Butlerian Jihad looms

New comment by gibsonsmog in "GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing"

gibsonsmog — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:22:32 +0000

Yeah, local is clearly the future. Even beyond the cheap Chinese models you can install the apfel[1] stuff if you're on a mac and want a quick available onboard cli option. And I'm sure people will adapt the Flash-MoE[2] integration to be even better soon as well.

[1] https://apfel.franzai.com/ [2] https://github.com/danveloper/flash-moe

New comment by gibsonsmog in "Modern Front end Complexity: essential or accidental?"

gibsonsmog — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:14:51 +0000

One thing that has been driving me bat shit as an FE for years is the lack of browser engine implemented basic UI elements as default HTML. The fact that we still need to build custom carousels[1], tooltips, and other common patterns instead of just dropping a or is baffling to me. Stop making me write so much JS to do something that we know as a community is going to be a pattern! Just gimme the damn elements and a decent API to manipulate it reasonably! Not to mention all the custom, half ass a11y implementations I see.

There are some groups out there like Open UI[2] trying to push for this stuff but it seems like the standards bodies have no interest in a decent UI ecosystem instead favoring bloated APIs that make up 5% of your application versus the 95%. I'm mad! I'm mad online!

[1] I'm familiar with the newer carousel CSS/JS stuff but it's kind of clunky. I'll take it either way but damn

[2] https://open-ui.org

New comment by gibsonsmog in "NIST gives up enriching most CVEs"

gibsonsmog — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:39:24 +0000

At a previous job, we had to refactor our entire front end build system from Rollup(I believe it was) to a custom Webpack build because of this attitude. Our FE process was completely disconnected from the code on the site, existing entirely in our Azure pipeline and developer machines. The actual theoretically exploitable aspects were in third party APIs and our dotNet ecosystems which we obviously fixed. I wrote like 3 different documents and presented multiple times to their security team on how this wasn't necessary and we didn't want to take their money needlessly. $20000 or so later (with a year of support for the system baked in) we shut up Dependabot. Money well spent!

New comment by gibsonsmog in "US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification"

gibsonsmog — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:34:23 +0000

Feed, cloth and educate our population? What's next? Structure society in a way that benefits the people? How horrifying!

New comment by gibsonsmog in "Show HN: I pipe free sports streams into Jellyfin – no ads, just HLS"

gibsonsmog — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:14:54 +0000

I'm curious if there is a particular technical reason you chose to make this as a separate script rather than some kind of Jellyfin plugin? I actually appreciate that you did it in this fashion (more useful for me personally), just curious if there were limitations within the Jellyfin/dotNet system.

Either way, gonna make my World Cup viewing experience this year a lot easier haha

New comment by gibsonsmog in "Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac"

gibsonsmog — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:24:22 +0000

What a neat LLM question! Most of my results were the same as what you posted except for the first time I asked it which resulted in this pretty interesting answer: Taiwan is in the Taiwan Standard Time (TST) zone, which is UTC+8, while the Pacific Time (PT) zone is UTC-7.

To convert 9:30 AM Taiwan time to Pacific Time:

1. Subtract 15 hours (since 8 hours ahead is 15 hours behind).

9:30 AM - 15 hours = 6:30 AM PT.

So, 9:30 AM Taiwan time is 6:30 AM Pacific Time.

Never thought to use an llm for time zone stuff. Seems like it struggles as much as a normal person, which makes some sense given what they're trained with.

New comment by gibsonsmog in "12k AI-generated blog posts added in a single commit"

gibsonsmog — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:39:45 +0000

Louis Rossman recently posted a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc) where he had Gemini replace his 10+ year carefully curated content with AI slop and he instantly shot (back) up to the top of the rankings. They're very clearly favoring their own generated generic content rather than any sort of organic, well written or well informed entries. Shame.

New comment by gibsonsmog in "Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs"

gibsonsmog — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:23:52 +0000

I think a web ring combined with some kind of web of trust style system would be nice. Ideally they could be both centralized where an initial creator holds the keys to what's allowed and decentralized where it just sort of exists. I haven't quite been able to sketch out a reasonable way to keep sites persistent and consistent except DNS records, though. DNS of course making it hard or impossible for smaller and less tech-savvy creators while also having it's own issues regardless.

I'm a big web ring person though so I might be biased and trying to use a hammer in place of a screwdriver.

New comment by gibsonsmog in "Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise"

gibsonsmog — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 17:23:26 +0000

Go old school and have the script inject the "how did this get here im not good with computers" cat onto random pages

New comment by gibsonsmog in "Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge"

gibsonsmog — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 11:55:49 +0000

>Though a variant of the last one may well have happened here, and the justification we read is just the one less damaging to everyone involved

Hegseth was planning on getting the model via the Defense Production Act or killing Anthropic via supply chain risk classification preventing any other company working with the Pentagon from working with Anthropic. So while it wasn't Siberia, it was about as close as the US can get without declaring Claude a terrorist. Which I'm sure is on the table regardless

New comment by gibsonsmog in "The Codex app illustrates the shift left of IDEs and coding GUIs"

gibsonsmog — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:54:10 +0000

My understanding is that it's quite easy to poison the models with inaccurate data, I wouldn't be surprised if this exact thing has happened already. Maybe not an AI company itself, but it's definitely in the purview of a hostile actor to create bad code for this purpose. I suppose it's kind of already happened via supply chain attacks using AI generated package names that didn't exist prior to the LLM generating them.

New comment by gibsonsmog in "Show HN: Adboost – A browser extension that adds ads to every webpage"

gibsonsmog — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:28:55 +0000

This is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. I love it.

New comment by gibsonsmog in "Why I don't have fun with Claude Code"

gibsonsmog — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 13:48:22 +0000

Yeah, seriously. I've seen musicians nearly come to blows over tube vs solid state amps. Music has even more anger associated with brands and technique than gaming or tech. It's just not flooding the algos like AI currently is

New comment by gibsonsmog in "AI generated music barred from Bandcamp"

gibsonsmog — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 12:23:20 +0000

If you can, find an old tape deck at a thrift store and look into cassettes as well. They're super fun to find and you can buy new ones from groups on Bandcamp usually way cheaper than any other merch offerings and still get the high quality FLAC files. I spent some time last year going through a variety of tapes that were up to 40+ years old and was shocked at how good some of them still sounded.

New comment by gibsonsmog in "Netflix Open Content"

gibsonsmog — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 13:09:15 +0000

It's actually a regression overall compared to physical media like DVDs and Blurays. No director commentaries, no behind the scenes, no silly menu games, etc. Streaming would theoretically allow for tons of this type of content to be made and connected to a film at any time but instead we have this stagnant recreation of cable TV. C'est la vie

New comment by gibsonsmog in "Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools"

gibsonsmog — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 19:05:15 +0000

Based on the article headlines I've seen over the years, I don't think emacs users know what emacs does except "yes"

New comment by gibsonsmog in "Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas"

gibsonsmog — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 19:09:29 +0000

>improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For example, I click the same button in Epic every day because Epic can't remove a tab. Maybe Copilot could learn that I do this and just...do it for me?

You could solve that issue (and probably lot's of similar issues) with something like Auto Hotkey. Seems like extreme overkill to have an autonomous agent watch everything you do, so it might possibly click a button.

New comment by gibsonsmog in "Copyparty, the FOSS file server [video]"

gibsonsmog — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 14:08:40 +0000

Copyparty has been one of my favorite home lab tools since it popped up. Way better than Samba, less hassle than NextCloud, seemingly has more features than FileBrowser and similar. The config can be a bit daunting, but once it clicks it's pretty reasonable.

Plus you can change the UI color scheme to Hotdog Stand, the palette that signals you're hardcore and know what you're doing.