Hacker News: lbourdages

New comment by lbourdages in "Elon Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology"

lbourdages — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 14:29:06 +0000

There are discussions of "associate membership" but since this is not a thing that exists yet speculation on the matter has ranged from "this is just an economic partnership" to "we are going to become de-facto EU members".

We'll see the details when this becomes a bit more concrete but I imagine it's mostly going to be an economic partnership via trade agreements, maybe aligning some regulations to facilitate trade, etc.

New comment by lbourdages in "Clinical trial of a prion disease drug candidate begins enrolling participants"

lbourdages — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 04:55:21 +0000

Prion diseases are one of the scarier things I've ever heard about. It is transmissible via fluids, but it can also just happen spontaneously in your body, and once that happens, it's basically a death sentence. There is so far still no cure.

If this works, this will be a game changer.

New comment by lbourdages in "Anthropic wants your thoughts on AI"

lbourdages — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:11:55 +0000

As soon as I saw that login was required, I closed the tab.

New comment by lbourdages in "The first fully implanted cochlear implant reaches patients"

lbourdages — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 14:03:27 +0000

We are routinely implanting pacemakers in people's bodies. I don't think this is fundamentally different.

Battery tech used in these devices is most likely very different from consumer electronics and I assume they can't just catch fire inside your body.

New comment by lbourdages in "Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]"

lbourdages — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:50:04 +0000

There is a meaningful difference between a generic "load all flag values" call that is identical for all users and some actual telemetry which sends application context to the back-end.

New comment by lbourdages in "Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]"

lbourdages — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 23:26:24 +0000

You can have flags work in a pull fashion, though. At boot, and every 5 minutes, query an endpoint which returns flag values. You don't need the client to send any information about what the user is doing.

New comment by lbourdages in "Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side"

lbourdages — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 14:20:09 +0000

In Québec, obviously :D

New comment by lbourdages in "Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side"

lbourdages — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:33:05 +0000

I worked at the provincial government as an intern. We had those keyboards.

I'm willing to bet that more than 99% of the Canadian Multilingual CSA keyboards on PCs are used by public servants. There is another (French Canadian)layout that is much more common among consumers.

Of course, the Mac side is different, having somehow chosen to align with the (IMO superior) CSA layout.

New comment by lbourdages in "iPhone Duo"

lbourdages — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:37:35 +0000

They failed to come up with a strong selling point. Health is the big seller for Apple Watch. But AVP, at its price point, needs something better than "well you can watch movies on a big screen or work in a café while looking silly".

New comment by lbourdages in "Decapitating a MacBook (2025)"

lbourdages — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 23:42:14 +0000

You can use the caffeinate command (CLI) to do that, IIRC.

New comment by lbourdages in "Agents still can't automate Excel"

lbourdages — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 16:59:47 +0000

I once tried using Gemini directly in Google Sheets to make a graph. I never managed to get it to do exactly what I wanted; after wasting way too much time on it I was able to fix the problem in a matter of seconds. It's fascinating because it is quite different from the situation in coding agents where they are in general really quick to read code and find issues/fixes.

New comment by lbourdages in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"

lbourdages — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:30:10 +0000

- load-bearing

- smoking gun

- I found the seam

New comment by lbourdages in "Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest"

lbourdages — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:07:37 +0000

As is the entirety of using an LLM? If you want something deterministic and efficient you get the agent to write a script, verify it, then run it yourself.

New comment by lbourdages in "Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest"

lbourdages — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:40:43 +0000

OpenAPI already exists, you can serve it on an endpoint for tool descriptions. Why did we need MCP again?

New comment by lbourdages in "Apple is getting this wrong"

lbourdages — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:39:30 +0000

I have a company-managed Apple account on my work iPhone and Mac. So I beg to differ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

It is quite nerfed compared to a normal Apple account - for example the App store is effectively disabled and you need some MDM to be able to install or update apps. But otherwise, it allows me to not use my personal Apple account which was the main objective.

Edit for precision: I don't work at Apple. My point is that it is possible - I guess Apple doesn't want to manage these accounts, but it is not for lack of technical feasibility.

New comment by lbourdages in "Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library"

lbourdages — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:28:49 +0000

Couldn't WASM solve that problem once and for all? Is there some limitation that WASM has that JS doesn't?

Disclaimer: I am very inexperienced at front-end development.

New comment by lbourdages in "SQLite should have (Rust-style) editions"

lbourdages — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 02:19:28 +0000

Well, it goes both ways. You'll see articles saying essentially "you don't need Postgres or any other fancy database, SQlite is enough" while ignoring the fact that some use-cases warrant a more conventional DB server.

Different tools for different situations!

New comment by lbourdages in "Apple's rumored M7 Ultra targets 1.5TB and Blackwell-class AI performance"

lbourdages — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:44:08 +0000

Maybe they are just for internal use? I doubt Apple is going back on the server market, and given how little they have invested in the Mac Pro, I doubt they are going to make a new version. There is little advantage compared to the Mac Studio for most users. External GPU support would change that, but it doesn't seem to be what they want.

New comment by lbourdages in "Incident with Issues and Webhooks – Resolved"

lbourdages — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:09:24 +0000

It's been unacceptable for months, but now it's at the level of "we should actively look for alternatives".

New comment by lbourdages in "Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day"

lbourdages — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:10:36 +0000

Didn't know that tool existed, thanks for that! I assume it's using the development features in order to bypass protections?