Hacker News: mikestorrent

New comment by mikestorrent in "GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone"

mikestorrent — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 20:25:53 +0000

Sometimes you want more than text. This is one of the interesting divides these days - and I say this as someone who spends a lot of time in the terminal. Computer interfaces and interaction did not peak with the VT-100. Sometimes, there is a very legitimate need to show tables, graphics, interesting graphs, and to use colour and shade to draw the eye and lead someone through an experience.

This is why I use an IDE instead of a TUI agent... I'm on a computer with a multi-megapixel display, I want to use it. If I could be driving the same process with my Macintosh SE as a serial terminal, what the hell is the point of my recent Macbook?

New comment by mikestorrent in "Toronto-Based VPN Provider Plans to Quit Canada over Lawful-Access Bill"

mikestorrent — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 05:08:49 +0000

Step 1 is making back doors mandatory. Step 2 is banning anything they can't decrypt.

I don't know if the second part has been discussed yet, but it's only possible with the former in place, so it makes sense to just ram that in first.

Most people don't care about this at all because they cannot fathom what it actually means. It takes the government actually turning on you to understand at a visceral level and by then it's too late. It seems there have still not been enough historical examples of this to truly burn it into memory.

New comment by mikestorrent in "Xbox has secured exclusive GTA 6 streaming rights"

mikestorrent — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 05:04:11 +0000

It's absolutely optional. Why feel any pressure at all to do this? How much FOMO do you really suffer from? There's so much free or abandonware gaming material out there that you could never run out of new things to try without spending a cent... paying per minute is far from mandatory as long as you can still own hardware, and computers are still pretty cheap all things considered.

New comment by mikestorrent in "Xbox has secured exclusive GTA 6 streaming rights"

mikestorrent — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 05:02:20 +0000

Does that at some point not cross a line from pleasurable escapism into reality avoidance?

New comment by mikestorrent in "Mistral Large 4"

mikestorrent — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 04:56:05 +0000

Academic Grant Incinerator

New comment by mikestorrent in "Decisions API is in public beta"

mikestorrent — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:38:15 +0000

It's a problem for the security, legal, and IT teams, but not that much for developers, unless they get really particular about their harness. On the other hand, these are the high dollar value accounts that providers want to keep; but if there's no reason to avoid switching, this market really will feel like a utility market (i.e. it'll be like switching ISPs or cell phone providers - annoying but fungible).

The AI companies want to differentiate and become something more than a commodity, even if it's as critical as a utility is.

New comment by mikestorrent in "Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen"

mikestorrent — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:35:01 +0000

If they drilled down any further they'd reach the interior of the hollow earth, obviously not permitted

New comment by mikestorrent in "Tcl/Tk 9.1"

mikestorrent — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:22:43 +0000

Y'all remember TkDesk at all? https://tkdesk.sourceforge.net/

I loved it back in the day, tons of fun to configure with code, somehow friendly enough for me to play with in high school with no background knowledge and only some man pages to help me. Coupled with a lightweight WM like CTWM https://www.ctwm.org/index.html it lead to a really performant desktop on the single-core ~400mhz machines we had in our computer lab....

New comment by mikestorrent in "Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard"

mikestorrent — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:26:58 +0000

Yeah we need to see this

New comment by mikestorrent in "We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary"

mikestorrent — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 01:58:25 +0000

Imagine if we actually built a remote application delivery platform instead of cobbling one onto a glorified document reader

New comment by mikestorrent in "Cloud Agents Are Inevitable AI Prisons"

mikestorrent — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:07:50 +0000

This is why I am avoiding the use of agentic identities at my company - agent instances belong to people, act on behalf of individuals, and accountability needs to flow to the person who initiated the request. Letting it wash out in the aggregate is not acceptable (even if there's a hard to get to "paper trail" of audit logs).

New comment by mikestorrent in "Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats"

mikestorrent — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:05:57 +0000

I can't understand what the post-docs are suggesting.

New comment by mikestorrent in "Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived"

mikestorrent — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 02:43:52 +0000

moricons.dll holds a very special place in my heart.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250505-00/?p=11...

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6705/what...

I love the detail in these things... icons today don't take advantage of the incredibly high resolution of modern screens, they're just wishy washy corporate logos

New comment by mikestorrent in "Claude Opus 5.5"

mikestorrent — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 02:23:53 +0000

From my dabbling with policy writing and legalese, English kinda _is_ a programming language, but one with ambiguity as a first class principal. Sometimes you would like to say something that seems normal at first blush, but gives you the latitude you need to mean something different at the time it is actually being evaluated in a situation that matters. Weasel words, for instance, serve a purpose even if we eschew them. The idea is that it is deliberately NOT formally declaring the exact meaning of something, nor the fact that it is not doing this. How could you really do that in code without calling attention to the very thing you're trying to obscure?

New comment by mikestorrent in "Claude Opus 5.5"

mikestorrent — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 01:51:12 +0000

To be fair, there are other accelerators beyond GPUs, and the sooner people broaden out from nVidia and unlock a more open, more competitive ecosystem, the better. Allowing one company to control the flow of such a critical resource is just asking for problems.

New comment by mikestorrent in "Keep Using Your Intel Mac in 2025?"

mikestorrent — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 06:19:25 +0000

Ironically a true statement, eh? It's not a coincidence, the blog's author chose to leave that all in

New comment by mikestorrent in "Ask HN: Remember N8n? Anyone?"

mikestorrent — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 06:16:56 +0000

Look at this fancy lad with his 36.6 while the rest of us are cruising at 14.4

New comment by mikestorrent in "[dead]"

mikestorrent — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 06:15:29 +0000

ai;dr

New comment by mikestorrent in "Apple iPhone 18 Pro Camera test"

mikestorrent — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 05:47:30 +0000

I seriously don't understand what people are doing on a phone that iOS doesn't handle. I'd love to know what kind of interesting use case someone like yourself gets up to.

New comment by mikestorrent in "People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes"

mikestorrent — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 05:37:07 +0000

Thanks for the confirmation!