Hacker News: locusofself

New comment by locusofself in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

locusofself — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:09:02 +0000

Yeah, it’s not a great name. But it originates from the government. When somebody without a security clearance needs to go to a secure area, they must be escorted by somebody.

New comment by locusofself in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

locusofself — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:05:40 +0000

You also make it sound like getting a JIT approved is getting keys to the kingdom. It's not -- every team has it's own JIT policies for their resources. Should there be far less manual touches? Ideally. But JIT is better than persistent access at least, and JIT policies should be scoped according to principle of least privilege. If that is not happening, it's a failure at the level of that specific org.

New comment by locusofself in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

locusofself — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 05:57:17 +0000

I'm only commenting on parent comment's understanding of what digital escort process is specifically. Escort is used by all kinds of teams that are just doing day-to-day crap for various resource providers across azure. I've never worked anywhere close to Azure Core so I don't know about these more low-level concerns. Overall I agree and sympathize with your assessment of the engineering culture.

New comment by locusofself in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

locusofself — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 05:37:57 +0000

That's not what the "problem" was. It's that cheap American support people were "escorting" foreign Microsoft SWEs, so they could manage and fix services they wrote and were the subject matter experts for in the sovereign cloud instances which they otherwise would have no access to.

And this was NOT for the government clouds we have that hold classified data. Those are air-gapped clouds that physically cannot be accessed by anyone who doesnt have a TS clearance and physically go into a SCIF.

source: I work in a team very closely related the team who designed digital escort.

New comment by locusofself in "Do your own writing"

locusofself — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:14:44 +0000

I had an interesting experience the other day. I've been struggling with some lyrics to a song I am writing. I asked Claude to review them, and it did an amazing job of finding the weak lines and best lines, and nearly perfectly articulating to my why they were weak or strong. It was strange because the output of the analysis almost perfectly mirrored my own thoughts.

When I asked it for alternatives/edits, they were not good however.

New comment by locusofself in "Meow.camera"

locusofself — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 02:24:02 +0000

one of them I clicked on was totally covered in flies (the cat food). eww

New comment by locusofself in "Some Things Just Take Time"

locusofself — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 18:30:50 +0000

I love this, and it applies to a lot more than software and trees :)

New comment by locusofself in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)"

locusofself — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 06:16:55 +0000

I did this once and was scolded by my date:

!!! (Serious) To stand chopsticks upright in a bowl of rice. This is taboo, as it is the way rice is presented as a Buddhist funeral offering.

New comment by locusofself in "Why I'm Not Worried About Running Out of Work in the Age of AI"

locusofself — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:40:05 +0000

right, must be nice. I live in a HCOL area and have a mortgage and family to support. If big tech lays me off, it's going to be stressful and probably mean me selling my house and moving to LCOL.

Show HN: Download entire/partial Substack to ePub for offline reading

locusofself — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 03:36:37 +0000

Hi HN,

This is a small python app with optional webUI. It is intended to be run locally. It can be run with Docker (cookie autodetection will not work).

It allows you to download a single substack, either entirely or partially, and saves the output to an epub file, which can be easily transferred to Kindle or other reading devices.

This is admittedly a "vibe coded" app made with Claude Code and a few hours of iterating, but I've already found it very useful for myself.

It supports both free and paywalled posts (if you are a paid subscriber to that creator).

You can order the entries in the epub by popularity, newest first, or oldest first, and also limit to a specific number of entries, if you don't want all of them.

You can either provide your substack.sid cookie manually, or you can have it be autodetected from most browsers/operating systems.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47450177

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by locusofself in "Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager"

locusofself — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:02:29 +0000

BSP?

New comment by locusofself in "Centuries of selective breeding turned wild cabbage into different vegetables"

locusofself — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 06:31:57 +0000

I love these vegetables. Especially Broccolini and Brussel Sprouts. YUM

New comment by locusofself in "GIMP 3.2 released"

locusofself — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 21:18:33 +0000

I see you are getting downvoted but I don't blame you for this question. I've been curious about what developers of established products are doing with LLM assisted coding myself.

New comment by locusofself in "Windows To-Do-Lsit in the Taskbar"

locusofself — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 18:43:09 +0000

Definitely nice to see native, non-bloated apps :0

New comment by locusofself in "Mouser: An open source alternative to Logi-Plus mouse software"

locusofself — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 17:43:30 +0000

It really is a terrible piece of software. I usually find that when I do weird things with my mouse, like assign workspaces switching to extra buttons or whatever, I end up un-doing it.

I've switched all my mice to a ~$25, super ergonomically shaped, corded mouse[1], and I prefer to to my logitech mice.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FPAVUHC?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_...

New comment by locusofself in "Show HN: Remotely use my guitar tuner"

locusofself — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:00:39 +0000

There is something magical about hearing an orchestra all tune up to eachother

New comment by locusofself in "Show HN: Remotely use my guitar tuner"

locusofself — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:59:58 +0000

Innacarute, jumpy, slow response.

The most popular tuner of all time is the BOSS pedal, and the LED lights are too far part from eachother, it's simply not granular enough to really get in tune to my ears.

Stroboscopic tuners are the way to go

New comment by locusofself in "Show HN: Remotely use my guitar tuner"

locusofself — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:58:23 +0000

For $49 it's very, very good

New comment by locusofself in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

locusofself — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:22:15 +0000

If you spend 5-15x the time reviewing what the LLM is doing, are you saving any time by using it?

New comment by locusofself in "Show HN: Remotely use my guitar tuner"

locusofself — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 05:53:46 +0000

I love it.

But in all seriousness, if you are looking for a good guitar tuner, a lot of the ones on the market are actually not very good.

I highly recommend TC Electronic for clip-on tuner, or Sonic Research or Peterson for pedal tuners.

source: playing guitar for 32 years