Hacker News: jimjimjim

New comment by jimjimjim in "Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods"

jimjimjim — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:37:28 +0000

I think I made a HN comment a few months/years ago about driverless cars having problems with floods across roads after watching a downpour in Kuala Lumpur flood half a street in minutes. The road was down to one lane and drivers in both directions took it in turns to use that one lane. That would be a difficult situation for a driverless car to handle.

New comment by jimjimjim in "WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward"

jimjimjim — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:52:05 +0000

Painful. A lot of the Microsoft interfaces these days are asynchronous and are built around the dev experience of c#/c++ with libraries/runtimes that do a lot of the heavy lifting. So you end up calling functions with ridiculously long names and they aren't like good old win32 calls where you pass in some parameters and you get a result back. Instead you create objects to pass function pointers and data around and who knows when you'll get your result values back.

New comment by jimjimjim in "WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward"

jimjimjim — Thu, 14 May 2026 20:41:00 +0000

Yep, it's 2026 and I'm still 8 hours a day in win32.

New comment by jimjimjim in "Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16"

jimjimjim — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:46:17 +0000

Yes! Thank you. That’s a blast from the past

New comment by jimjimjim in "Apple App Store threatened to remove Grok over deepfakes: Letter"

jimjimjim — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 03:56:53 +0000

With a TV there was no easy way to block ads. Sure you could change the channel or get up and do something else but people didn't bother.

Now with news websites most people are running ad blockers. What are the news sites meant to do? Their employees are working, and they expect to be paid for that work. just like I expect to be paid for my job. Where is the money going to come from?

New comment by jimjimjim in "Apple App Store threatened to remove Grok over deepfakes: Letter"

jimjimjim — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 02:33:03 +0000

People still have to be paid. or they won't be paid and you just get different flavors of slop.

New comment by jimjimjim in "Apple App Store threatened to remove Grok over deepfakes: Letter"

jimjimjim — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 02:32:10 +0000

Every newspaper had a price. People were happy with this.

New comment by jimjimjim in "App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off"

jimjimjim — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 05:10:15 +0000

The world has been given hay making machines. Now people of all walks of life can make their own hay at a greater rate and with much less effort. They can also proudly display them along with other examples in centralized locations that conceptually take the form of haystacks. Also, I should add, the machines tend to make the hay with the color of a needle and with a needle shape.

New comment by jimjimjim in "Ukrainian drone holds position for 6 weeks"

jimjimjim — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 22:50:54 +0000

I choose option 3, in favor of downvoting and at the same time not advocating for the old way.

New comment by jimjimjim in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

jimjimjim — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 01:09:40 +0000

But sir, how do we stop an old guy on the bow of a rusty fishing boat firing a $50 rpg at the oil tanker?

New comment by jimjimjim in "OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it"

jimjimjim — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:28:17 +0000

It is not by design! PDFs that are made from scanned documents or collections of images would require OCRing but that is true of any format that the scans/images are put into. These days the vast majority of PDFs do not need to be OCRed as the pages are just made up of text, line drawings and images. And although it can get tricky you can edit those text, line and image commands as much as you want.

For example: add this is in the contents stream for a pdf page and it'll put hello world on the page

  BT
    /myfont 50 Tf
    100 200 Td
    (Hello World) Tj
  ET

(Note: a bit more is required to select the font etc)

New comment by jimjimjim in "OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it"

jimjimjim — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:20:07 +0000

That's not really what I would call reverse engineering. If you read a pdf, and type it into word is that reverse engineering? Either way whatever you get is in no way going to convince anybody that it is the original.

New comment by jimjimjim in "Health NZ staff told to stop using ChatGPT to write clinical notes"

jimjimjim — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 22:57:05 +0000

The New Zealand Chief Digital Officer allowed Australian cloud providers to be used as there weren't suitable NZ data centers and this was many years ago.

New comment by jimjimjim in "Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?"

jimjimjim — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:58:07 +0000

"higher quality than the greatest engineers". right...

and why do so many articles or comments have a general approach of 'It's great and if you don't think it is it's because you don't understand it.'

New comment by jimjimjim in "Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?"

jimjimjim — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:48:55 +0000

It feels like during the previous hype cycle of bitcoins, blockchains and NFTs. People are trying to find uses for new technologies but it seems like a lot of the conversations come from people (at this point I guess it's still people?) trying to increase the hype. Maybe they are trying to be thought leaders or maybe they are trying to boost some stock valuations.

New comment by jimjimjim in "Kagi Small Web"

jimjimjim — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 22:09:20 +0000

Thank you! I was wondering why bookmarks are treated so poorly by browser, as if they are forced to include them but hate them with a passion. That explains it. I'm a bit of a bookmark hoarder to the point where I have a local html file that holds and displays all my bookmarks and I've got that page set as my default.

New comment by jimjimjim in "Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor"

jimjimjim — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 02:57:23 +0000

I feel your pain. PDF applications have the same problem. The thousand page PDF spec isn't actually the spec, Acrobat is the spec.

New comment by jimjimjim in "An articulated archer automaton [video]"

jimjimjim — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 21:40:24 +0000

Great series of videos. They seem to be an intersection of quite a few of my interests.

New comment by jimjimjim in "Omega-3 is inversely related to risk of early-onset dementia"

jimjimjim — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:26:57 +0000

This might sound crazy, but what if everyone in the country gave extra and as a result everyone in the country was covered?

New comment by jimjimjim in "Omega-3 is inversely related to risk of early-onset dementia"

jimjimjim — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 20:50:17 +0000

Wow, that is a depressing point of view. Advancements in "not paying for things" accelerates while advancements in "preventing things" just inches forward.