Hacker News: mastax

New comment by mastax in "Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher"

mastax — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:57:05 +0000

Well, AI do lack motivation unless you use goal mode or whatever.

New comment by mastax in "Nvidia is the central bank of AI"

mastax — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 16:57:14 +0000

But for the duration, there is more money. This isn’t some crank theory, it’s orthodox economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

New comment by mastax in "Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America"

mastax — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:08:45 +0000

Why wouldn’t you be surprised?

New comment by mastax in "The only road in London where you have to drive on the right"

mastax — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 13:48:02 +0000

No it makes it sound like much of the rest of the world drives on the right.

New comment by mastax in "VLC for Unity now supported on Linux"

mastax — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 02:16:45 +0000

My understanding is that VLC and FFMpeg are both projects which develop in house codecs and also incorporate codecs developed by third parties.

New comment by mastax in "VLC for Unity now supported on Linux"

mastax — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 02:05:14 +0000

I assume it’s a GPL workaround.

New comment by mastax in "Bitchat is now on Radicle"

mastax — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:40:32 +0000

Did banning it cause it to get adopted even faster in India than it otherwise would have? That seems like the salient point to me for the Indian government’s calculus. I don’t have a particularly good feel for Indian society but my prior is that this kind of official friction puts a pretty low hard cap on how popular an app can get. If the realistic ambition was only ever to reach a small circle of activists and nerds then sure, this event probably helped the app reach those people faster.

New comment by mastax in "Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful"

mastax — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 17:38:08 +0000

I found that if you allow any low value things into memory, Claude will notice that established pattern and start trying to add low value memories at an ever increasing pace.

New comment by mastax in "Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux"

mastax — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:20:20 +0000

If all you want is a chat interface you can install Claude.ai as a PWA. The value proposition of the Claude desktop app includes being able to screenshot and interact with desktop app windows, the file system, etc. That drags you into desktop environment and compositor API hell.

New comment by mastax in "Poll: How often do you check "newest"?"

mastax — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:44:38 +0000

The recents list on my browser got changed to newest so I end up checking it by accident.

New comment by mastax in "Claude Code – Everything You Can Configure That the Docs Don't Tell You"

mastax — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:52:08 +0000

There’s a slash command that’ll look through your conversation history to add allow permissions.

New comment by mastax in "What is a Demand Coop"

mastax — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:27:55 +0000

Pre-agricultural Hunter-gatherer bands aren’t a monolith. Many were radically egalitarian, yes, many others were strictly hierarchical including slavery and human sacrifice. A surprisingly large proportion of them were hierarchical for one part of the year and egalitarian for the rest (often coinciding with religious festivals and/or different means of sustenance depending on the season).

New comment by mastax in "Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets"

mastax — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:06:47 +0000

That isn’t how they were pitched to the FTC but it does appear to be their ultimate use case.

New comment by mastax in "Landmark L.A. jury verdict finds Instagram, YouTube were designed to addict kids"

mastax — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:38:17 +0000

That’s like saying the solution to cigarettes is that tobacco shops must be forced to sell clove cigarettes as a not-addictive alternative.

New comment by mastax in "Data centers are transitioning from AC to DC"

mastax — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 01:58:04 +0000

I was just looking at these funny parts: https://www.vicorpower.com/products?productType=cfg&productK...

130A, 48V -> 1.2V @ 94% efficiency! Except:

- $100 ea.

- Fixed 1/40 voltage ratio, regulation done by upstream regulator.

- Look at the minimum specs for efficiency…

New comment by mastax in "An incoherent Rust"

mastax — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:27:00 +0000

Language changes could help for sure. There’s a library implementation we can use right now though: https://facet.rs/ Basically a derive macro for reflection. Yeah it’s one (more) trait to derive on all your types but then users can use that to do reflection or pretty printing or diffing or whatever they want.

New comment by mastax in "The Ugliest Airplane: An Appreciation"

mastax — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 03:40:03 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PZL_M-15_Belphegor

The M-15 is still uglier. Also intended as a cropduster, though unlike the AirTruk it was really bad at that job in every way.

New comment by mastax in "Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout"

mastax — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:52:57 +0000

Was the Nuscale cost estimate somehow worse than AP1000 or EPR(2)? That seems very unlikely to me given the history of those programs.

New comment by mastax in "Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service"

mastax — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:26:40 +0000

Out of all the SSO login flows Microsoft has to have the buggiest. It’s the only one I can remember routinely having issues with. Why are there so many redirects? And why doesn’t the “remember me” checkbox ever work?

New comment by mastax in "Changes to OpenTTD Distribution on Steam"

mastax — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:48:08 +0000

The modern Atari has no relation to the original Atari. They’re essentially copyright trolls. I do not believe we owe them any moral obligation for the works they bought from the original Atari via a series of many intermediaries.