Hacker News: lukeschlather

New comment by lukeschlather in "Every Frame Perfect"

lukeschlather — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:10:30 +0000

The OS shouldn't be making many big changes that force me to reorient. When I'm moving between different UIs I often want to compare them; animations make it harder to compare state A to state B. I can detect very fine differences between two images by switching between them within a second, if there's a 1-second animation it not only means it's going to add a second, it adds a bunch of visual noise which might make it impossible to be able to distinguish what's an actual difference and what's just noise introduced by the animation.

New comment by lukeschlather in "A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones"

lukeschlather — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 16:49:32 +0000

> Approximately nobody is throwing away phones because the OEM stopped providing security patches.

This becomes a practical reason more quickly than you think. If a company only provides 4 years of security updates and they only provide 2 android MV releases, you quickly become out of date. I had a BlackBerry Key2 that I bought in 2018, I had to replace it in 2024 and I was really holding onto it despite a lot of practical problems - Slack dropped support for the version of Android a year earlier, it was only when I tried to install Google Wallet and could not that I finally decided despite the hardware and software functioning fine it really wasn't practical to use a device that was stuck on such an old version of Android. (I would've tried to figure out the kernel myself if the bootloader wasn't locked.)

New comment by lukeschlather in "The new bibliomaniacs"

lukeschlather — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 17:07:22 +0000

I have mixed feelings about Kindle, but I mostly read books on my phone these days, and my Kindle library is always there. I also have a physical bookshelf, but if I'm not home I can't review it so in some ways it's often less tangible than my Kindle library which I always carry with me.

New comment by lukeschlather in "India's surprise baby bust"

lukeschlather — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:05:45 +0000

I wonder how those who have experienced the pleasure of having 1000 children experience that compared to the first one.

New comment by lukeschlather in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

lukeschlather — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 18:14:17 +0000

Binaries are source code outputs, they are copyrightable and patentable. Weights are not copyrightable so people can freely extract the weights and run them. If Google patents any of the novel algorithms here releasing it all freely isn't an impediment to making people license it.

New comment by lukeschlather in "GitHub and the crime against software"

lukeschlather — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:01:26 +0000

The flicker/signin redirects are a regression introduced post-Github acquisition. Really just evidence of the product being abandoned, or possibly of general operational decline at Microsoft which is affecting all their products. Definitely since the acquisition, both products have declined but Github has declined more to the point where I might prefer Azure DevOps.

New comment by lukeschlather in "Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute"

lukeschlather — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 22:16:40 +0000

Coding is a pretty small slice of the markets in play. Google's models are driving cars right now. Using coding agents doesn't give much insight into performance in the broader world; I would assume assume Google is performing better in general even if Claude or Codex is currently outperforming for coding.

New comment by lukeschlather in "Codex just found a "workaround" of not having sudo on my PC"

lukeschlather — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:53:39 +0000

I wasn't using Claude Code, but I told an agent to add something like this to the AGENTS.md, it did it and then a few minutes later it attempted to grant itself permission to do something and managed to delete the VM it was running on in the process. I have since adjusted the way I sandbox agents to make that less likely, but the moral of the story is clear.

New comment by lukeschlather in "Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions"

lukeschlather — Sun, 31 May 2026 21:27:46 +0000

Honestly it's all there, if you use the "feeds" view in the menu it cuts out all the random influencer garbage. The search, especially the event search, is not great, but honestly I hope they don't touch it because I'm more worried about them enshittifying it further than I am about getting some creature comforts.

New comment by lukeschlather in "Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions"

lukeschlather — Sun, 31 May 2026 19:12:24 +0000

> Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years? Its nothing like this at all.

I use it all the time. Yesterday I was talking to a friend, and we were reminiscing about visiting another friend's house, and we looked up some old birthday party invitations to help us remember when we had been there.

New comment by lukeschlather in "Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions"

lukeschlather — Sun, 31 May 2026 18:21:56 +0000

I actually cancelled my Discord subscription because they've gradually been adding more intrusive ads and subscriptions don't protect you from ads.

New comment by lukeschlather in "Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions"

lukeschlather — Sun, 31 May 2026 18:18:25 +0000

Signal is designed with the assumption that data is sensitive and you should err on the side of destroying it.

Facebook is designed more as a shared scrapbook, with the assumption that data is precious and you want to share it with your community, and you should err on the side of oversharing so you don't lose any precious moments. Signal is in no way a replacement for Facebook.

New comment by lukeschlather in "I put a datacenter GPU in my gaming PC"

lukeschlather — Sun, 31 May 2026 17:20:36 +0000

I skim a lot. I skimmed this article and appreciated the author documenting their process. I am indifferent to LLM or human writing for technical content. I suspect I skimmed most of the LLM parts, but judging writing quality was not why I read this post, I read it because I was curious about how useful the GPU is, and if I could replicate the author's work. Some carefully written prose wouldn't have helped me do that any better. The prose in this article did the job.

New comment by lukeschlather in "The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription"

lukeschlather — Sun, 31 May 2026 17:09:11 +0000

I had a coworker at Amazon who always said "just do what I do, accept the meeting invite and then don't go." Linkedin tells me he's now a director at Google.

Personally I make sure meetings are a good use of my time and I complain when they are not. I also am starting to complain about AI summarizers because they frequently misrepresent what is said in meetings and they're potentially worse than nothing, although I am starting to think that they're potentially valuable if Google is trying to datamine them for info about our company meetings as a way of poisoning their datasets. But I am worried my coworkers may be thinking they are reliable.

New comment by lukeschlather in "Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots"

lukeschlather — Sat, 30 May 2026 18:44:00 +0000

What's the gap between a fancy bidet with all the bells and whistles and the robot that doesn't exist yet? Showering is obviously harder.

New comment by lukeschlather in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

lukeschlather — Sat, 30 May 2026 07:04:39 +0000

At least twice a year, it is a big deal on July 4th. And that's not counting numerous forest fires that were started by fireworks.

And I mean, the EV thing just seems like a manufactured concern anyway. Walking around I'm very happy when I walk near an EV and don't breathe in exhaust. EV fires are remarkable because that's the only time their presence causes lung problems, while gas vehicles cause lung problems under normal operation.

New comment by lukeschlather in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

lukeschlather — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:48:19 +0000

Really the least risky thing right now would probably be if BO retooled their lander to fly on a Falcon Heavy. If asked, SpaceX could probably launch 4 Falcon Heavies to orbit before Blue Origin could launch as many New Glenns.

I really don't think there's anything particularly derisked about NG + Blue Moon 2 compared to Starship HLS.

New comment by lukeschlather in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

lukeschlather — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:34:41 +0000

I've never been downwind of a rocket explosion or an EV fire, Fireworks are something that make me annoyed at the air quality degradation quite often.

New comment by lukeschlather in "Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'"

lukeschlather — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:27:20 +0000

You just do a ride with two stops, one at the restaurant, and ask them to wait. It's not remotely clandestine or complicated.

New comment by lukeschlather in "What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications"

lukeschlather — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:29:38 +0000

I've definitely had notifications I consider spam direct from Google before. Apple/Google are not trustworthy.