Hacker News: jamesu

New comment by jamesu in "Triton: DirectX 11 Driver for QEMU"

jamesu — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:51:08 +0000

Pretty cool to finally have a decent open 3d solution for windows vms. Now if only someone made an opengl driver for older intel macosx vms...

New comment by jamesu in "Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]"

jamesu — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 02:01:04 +0000

Its been getting pretty bad for a long while now. On the topic of UK privacy, there's an interesting requirement that if you are a "data controller" processing "personal" data for "non-exempt" purposes, you need to register with the ICO to go on the register. Even can apply to individuals.

Sounds great until you realize anyone that does that effectively gets their residential address publicly doxxed and archived by archive.org (unless they can use a separate company address or spend money on a po box). And to make it worse, unless you have an obvious named company it's basically useless for looking up data controllers.

New comment by jamesu in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

jamesu — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:02:28 +0000

I think mine when when I got one model to generate a spec for SDL 1.2, and another to generate a reimplementation of the whole thing in rust. It was pretty amazing to see the implementation getting fleshed out and fixed as I fed back results from a real project that still compiled with SDL 1.2. Kept pushing it. Added fully functional audio in 2 prompts. Applied optimizations with another.

Terrible code, but to think you can just rewrite whole libs with AI with relatively lazy prompting + feedback and get decent enough results is kind of mind boggling for me.

New comment by jamesu in "Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled"

jamesu — Sat, 30 May 2026 09:35:20 +0000

One bizarre related thing I've noticed is often you will find people who otherwise seem ok with people violating the copyright and other various licenses by "decompiling" a game, but as soon as AI is involved suddenly it's a big controversial ethical issue... as if totally violating the authors rights is a minor inconvenience.

New comment by jamesu in "Dumb ways for an open source project to die"

jamesu — Tue, 19 May 2026 23:02:02 +0000

I've invested time working with a project like that and it's kind of heartbreaking to see it lose its way and become a total mess. It's tempting to fork and try and go back to its roots, but that has its own problems e.g. needing to invest a magnitude more time.

New comment by jamesu in "PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs"

jamesu — Mon, 11 May 2026 00:35:59 +0000

We've seen a few takes on this kind of issue, but the solution I liked the best was the linux "developers take full responsibility" approach. The "Assisted-by:" tag was a pretty nice touch too.

The article unfortunately feels more like a rant than a good exploration of the problem space.

New comment by jamesu in "Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan"

jamesu — Sun, 03 May 2026 19:13:20 +0000

My take was more along the lines of: it wouldn't be convincing enough, if anything it would be too clean and perfect.

New comment by jamesu in "Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan"

jamesu — Sun, 03 May 2026 18:36:18 +0000

There is no way you could recreate a convincing enough 90s era codebase of a japanese videogame + its associated tools + scripts and commented out codepaths with current ai tools.

New comment by jamesu in "Super ZSNES – GPU Powered SNES Emulator"

jamesu — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 06:17:36 +0000

I find the specific singling out of vibe coding interesting for a different reason; thinking back to just last month, I recall one of the rationales behind the huge DLSS5 backlash was it ruined the artists original vision. And here we are a month later being amazed at an emulator that literally lets any casual player do just that through a funky point and click interface!

I guess if they added in an MCP server there would probably be a riot.

New comment by jamesu in "Running local LLMs offline on a ten-hour flight"

jamesu — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:50:29 +0000

I'm not a huge fan of working while travelling, it's way too distracting while trying to do intricate development work.

New comment by jamesu in "AI chatbots could be making you stupider"

jamesu — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:07:33 +0000

I often find AI makes me angry and stressed out, especially when it suggests dumb solutions to problems. Honestly makes me wonder if I'm more likely to die early from chronic AI-induced stress rather than dementia.

New comment by jamesu in "Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message"

jamesu — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:12:13 +0000

The current pricing model (for plus) feels deliberately confusing to me, I can never really tell if I'm nearing any kind of limit with my account since nothing really seems to tell me.

New comment by jamesu in "gRPC: From service definition to wire format"

jamesu — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 01:29:26 +0000

Using connectrpc was a pretty refreshing experience for me. Implementing a client for the HTTP stuff at least is pretty easy! I was able to implement a basic runner for forgejo using the protobuf spec for the runner + libcurl within a few days.

New comment by jamesu in "Resurrecting Crimsonland – Decompiling and preserving a cult 2003 classic game"

jamesu — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 13:19:55 +0000

Bumped into your project a while back - pretty impressive. I was a little disappointed it seemed to just convert the resources rather than use the original runtime formats (since there are a features that don't directly translate to gltf), but for a viewer it's perfectly reasonable. Are you planning on supporting tribes 1 maps at all? Theres still quite a surprising interest in reverse engineering and extending the life of torque games. I'm hoping on publicly releasing a refresh of the original torque codebase this year which improves support for modern platforms including wasm. It's amazingly easy these days to reverse engineer stuff and revive old codebases!

New comment by jamesu in "Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions"

jamesu — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:39:06 +0000

I really wanted to like it but the UI always put me off. Also tending to prefer a more open development model these days. Thankfully at least for dev gitea and forgejo have both come a long way and the CI is pretty decent now (though they still dont have a gui workflow builder!).

New comment by jamesu in "Serflings is a remake of The Settlers 1"

jamesu — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 15:32:26 +0000

The Settlers 2 was one of my favorite games growing up - really felt like they polished up the mechanics of the first game and made the UI more tolerable. If anyone is looking for a more modern 3d equivalent but in a slightly different setting, I'd recommend The Colonists.

New comment by jamesu in "FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter"

jamesu — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 11:47:05 +0000

A few months ago I used ChatGPT to rewrite a bison based parser to recursive descent and was pretty surprised how well it held up - though I still needed to keep prompting the AI to fix things or add elements it skipped, and in the end I probably rewrote 20% of it because I wasn't happy with its strange use of C++ features making certain parts hard to follow.

New comment by jamesu in "Silverbullet: Personal productivity platform built with Markdown and Lua"

jamesu — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 02:12:08 +0000

Back when this was first announced it was pretty neat, but I don't think it passes the long term reliability test for me. Last time I tried it I somehow managed to erase all the notes and the site broke - didn't exactly instil much confidence.

New comment by jamesu in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

jamesu — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 10:38:23 +0000

Lazarus is nice but both its apis and the ui feel like they're still stuck in the early 00's. It's not enough to look like VB6 / Delphi these days; you've got to keep up with what kinds of conventions we expect now.

New comment by jamesu in "Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs"

jamesu — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 09:20:23 +0000

Also switched to a UGREEN, in this case the DXP4800 Plus. Truenas runs pretty nicely on it! One critique I'd have of this setup is it's a lot noisier than my older Synology setup, but I think that's more to do with the HDDs than the case.