Hacker News: jvolkman

New comment by jvolkman in "Google I/O 2026 had nothing to say and said it badly ahead of Apple's WWDC"

jvolkman — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:36:57 +0000

> There's a supercut of the event on YouTube which solely shows every mention of the term "AI." It's about a minute long and by the end you want to cover your ears to shut out this sound and fury.

Amateurs. Apple would never allow something like this to happen.

Oh, wait: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-CPfqZgWTk

New comment by jvolkman in "'No way to prevent this,' says only package manager where this regularly happens"

jvolkman — Sat, 16 May 2026 04:11:10 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

Which one?

New comment by jvolkman in "A History of IDEs at Google"

jvolkman — Wed, 13 May 2026 23:00:39 +0000

IntelliJ was unsupported ("community supported") when I joined in the summer of 2015. I built a new protobuf editor plugin during that period as a side project, mostly for myself, which suddenly became used by thousands of Googlers when IntelliJ became the supported IDE again in ~2016?

I eventually handed it over to JetBrains and I think it ships by default with IntelliJ now.

New comment by jvolkman in "A History of IDEs at Google"

jvolkman — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:53:12 +0000

The settings in the internal version are "Antigravity User Settings". Pretty sure they're the same.

New comment by jvolkman in "Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results"

jvolkman — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 20:52:28 +0000

That's been Alphabet's site since the restructuring happened back in 2015. The site has barely changed in a decade.

New comment by jvolkman in "Newly purchased Vizio TVs now require Walmart accounts to use smart features"

jvolkman — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:57:37 +0000

While all of that is certainly true, even the DU6900 has the "Start with Smart Hub Home" option that defaults to enabled but can be disabled according to its manual. I assume that's what OP is seeing; it's a common thing to want to disable on Samsung TVs.

New comment by jvolkman in "Newly purchased Vizio TVs now require Walmart accounts to use smart features"

jvolkman — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:11:53 +0000

What is the half-screen display? On my Samsung S90D (new within the last year or so), I can set it to skip the "home" screen and go directly to the last input on power on. It works well.

New comment by jvolkman in "I dropped our production database and now pay 10% more for AWS"

jvolkman — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:53:53 +0000

Back in my day, we didn't need AI to accidentally drop production databases.

New comment by jvolkman in "Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest"

jvolkman — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 18:04:39 +0000

Feature request: put the original title in a tooltip (or similar).

New comment by jvolkman in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

jvolkman — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:55:10 +0000

If you look at web traffic when making Gemini web requests, you'll see that Bard is still in the URL (so are LaMDA (pre-bard) and Assistant (pre-GenAI)):

gemini.google.com/_/BardChatUi/data/assistant.lamda.BardFrontendService/StreamGenerate

New comment by jvolkman in "Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI"

jvolkman — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 22:17:49 +0000

Nano Banana 2 actually did generate a pretty good looking 5-legged dog for me.

https://gemini.google.com/share/e7a8b902ff67

But it didn't actually think it had done so, aligning with your observations. The last bits of its thinking were pretty sad (for it):

Analyzing Missing Anomaly

I'm focusing on the discrepancy - the persistent absence of the fifth leg in the generated images. Despite multiple attempts, the output consistently depicts a four-legged dog, contrary to the explicit requirement. This ongoing failure necessitates a shift in approach.

Acknowledge Leg Omission

I've made a final check, and unfortunately, the image still lacks the anomaly. The consistent absence of the fifth leg necessitates admitting my limitation. I'll provide the best image I could generate, clearly stating the missing feature.

New comment by jvolkman in "DOOM could have had PC Speaker Music"

jvolkman — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 08:08:17 +0000

In the Doom-era game Rise of the Triad, if you shrink the viewport all the way down to postage stamp size, it displays "Buy a 486!" underneath.

New comment by jvolkman in "Nano Banana Pro"

jvolkman — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 01:10:09 +0000

Just search the r/bard or r/geminiai subreddits for Logan. He's very famously a Google employee these days.

New comment by jvolkman in "Guideline has been acquired by Gusto"

jvolkman — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:09:18 +0000

The process is somewhat archaic (often involving mailing around paper checks) and I imagine many people just don't want to deal. Rolling over pulls your money out of the market which means you could miss a good day (or a bad day).

I left a trail of 3-4 accounts until just recently, when I rolled them all over to my current Vanguard 401k. They were all invested in the same Vanguard fund so there's not much change other than simplicity.

New comment by jvolkman in "Gemini 3.0 Pro – early tests"

jvolkman — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 23:29:41 +0000

I don't think Google was ever going to be the first to productize an LLM. LLMs say stupid shit - especially in the early days - and would've just attracted even more bad press if Google had been the front runner. OpenAI came along as a small, move-fast-and-break-things entity and introduced this tech to the public, and Google (and others) was able to join the fray after that seal was broken.

New comment by jvolkman in "Local LLMs versus offline Wikipedia"

jvolkman — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 13:44:40 +0000

https://www.prepperdisk.com/

It's not a USB stick, though. Probably a raspberry pi.

New comment by jvolkman in "Fstrings.wtf"

jvolkman — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 13:42:35 +0000

But if it were Perl, they'd be celebrating.

New comment by jvolkman in "Top DNS domains seen on the Quad9 recursive resolver array each day"

jvolkman — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 16:58:42 +0000

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22amazon.dev%22

Looks like their customer support rep portal. Presumably there are not A/CNAME records at the top level, but na.headphones.whs.amazon.dev resolves.

New comment by jvolkman in "YouTube's new anti-adblock measures"

jvolkman — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 04:54:50 +0000

But it is now. And there's no contract, so it's easy to cancel if that ever changes.

New comment by jvolkman in "Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf"

jvolkman — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 13:19:27 +0000

YouTube premium also includes ad-free YouTube Music. Yes there are still sponsorships in podcasts as usual, but no injected ads.