Hacker News: mmcnl

New comment by mmcnl in "Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise"

mmcnl — Sun, 17 May 2026 18:05:08 +0000

I don't think so. AI use is still very limited. For OpenAI and Anthropic and the AI boom to match their valuation, AI adoption needs to increase substantially. The current constraint is data centers. Pricing will be heavily influenced by market dynamics. Plenty of things that should be cheap aren't because of scarcity (simple example: RAM).

New comment by mmcnl in "I don't think AI will make your processes go faster"

mmcnl — Sun, 17 May 2026 17:18:05 +0000

This is true, but funny thing is: it was also true before AI.

New comment by mmcnl in "Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0"

mmcnl — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:30:37 +0000

I doubt that. The developer community is what made the MacBook predominant in every tech organization. Before that Macs were mostly popular in the creative sector.

New comment by mmcnl in "Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0"

mmcnl — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:39:37 +0000

I was trying to come up with a response but you're right. It would be easy for Apple and Apple would get so much goodwill from the community in return.

New comment by mmcnl in "Framework Laptop 13 Pro"

mmcnl — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:52:31 +0000

CPU decoding/encoding for video means warm chassis + spinning fans. Fan noise is very annoying with video calls.

New comment by mmcnl in "How Complex is my Code?"

mmcnl — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 07:43:32 +0000

I'm a tech lead and pushing back against accidental complexity is basically my fulltime job.

New comment by mmcnl in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

mmcnl — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:52:34 +0000

Ofcourse this has been tried, the highest possible resolution with HiDPI is limited to what the article says.

New comment by mmcnl in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

mmcnl — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:51:09 +0000

Yes, BetterDisplay offers this functionality and it kind of works, with some drawbacks.

New comment by mmcnl in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

mmcnl — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:49:50 +0000

Scaling up before scaling down is a sensible approach, especially when you want to run at a slightly lower scaled resolution. It worked fine up to M3 Pro. So whatever you think of it, it's something that worked fine for many years and suddenly doesn't anymore on the newer MacBooks.

New comment by mmcnl in "LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life"

mmcnl — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 14:55:09 +0000

It doesn't. They take extreme use cases such as watching video until the battery depletes at maximum brightness where 90% of power consumption is the display. But in realistic use cases the fraction of power draw consumed by the display is much smaller when the CPU is actually doing things.

New comment by mmcnl in "The MacBook Neo"

mmcnl — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:10:49 +0000

Decent package manager, brew is awful compared to apt. Window snapping can only be done on Apple keyboards not on external keyboards. No Alt+Tab, Cmd+Tab is not the same. No window previews when hovering over dock, ridiculous animation speed when switching workspaces that can't be changed (and somehow Ctrl+1/2/3 is 2x faster than Ctrl+Left/Right? What is that all about). Needing third-party apps for basic things like: setting a custom resolution (BetterDisplay), setting scroll direction for mouse wheel independent of touchpad scroll direction. And the Settings app is super slow.

New comment by mmcnl in "The MacBook Neo"

mmcnl — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:06:33 +0000

True for Geekbench.

New comment by mmcnl in "The MacBook Neo"

mmcnl — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:04:15 +0000

Agreed, macOS has hardly improved in the past decade. The only improvements are about ecosystem integration, which I don't really care about. Everything else is stuck in the 2010s. UI has regressed if you ask me.

New comment by mmcnl in "The MacBook Neo"

mmcnl — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:01:58 +0000

I had high hopes for Surface as well, but the pricing is ridiculous. The Surface Laptop 7 is more expensive than a MacBook Air, with the added benefit of having worse battery life and performance. Pricing hasn't come down in almost 2 years either. Availability is almost 0, I've never seen one in real life.

New comment by mmcnl in "The MacBook Neo"

mmcnl — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:57:14 +0000

This still doesn't tell me how they differ. What are the factual objective measurable differences between E/L/T/P?

New comment by mmcnl in "macOS Tahoe windows have different corner radiuses"

mmcnl — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:30:18 +0000

It's incredibly ugly, part of the value of Apple was esthetics. Also it's distracting, when I want to focus on something I want distracting elements to get out of the way.

New comment by mmcnl in "Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions"

mmcnl — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:12:18 +0000

I don't know, the majority of my colleagues have no idea how to do anything in a greenfield environment. They need guardrails.

New comment by mmcnl in "How I estimate work"

mmcnl — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 20:06:04 +0000

I don't get the fight against estimates. An estimate is an estimate. An estimate can be wrong. It likely is wrong, that's fine, it doesn't have to be perfect. There is a confidence interval. You can communicate that.

Very often something like "6-12 months" is a good enough estimate. I've worked in software a long time and I really don't get why many people think it's impossible to give such an estimate. Most of us are developing glorified CRUD apps, it's not rocket science. And even rocket science can be estimated to a usable degree.

Really you have no idea if feature X is going to take 1 day or 1 year?

New comment by mmcnl in "I hate GitHub Actions with passion"

mmcnl — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:43:31 +0000

But very often the CI operations _are_ the problem. It's just YAML files with unlimited configuration options that have very limited documentation, without any type of LSP.

New comment by mmcnl in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

mmcnl — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 13:59:35 +0000

Personally I think this is an extreme waste of time. Every week you're learning something new that is already outdated the next week. You're telling me AI can write complex code but isn't able to figure out how to properly guide the user into writing usable prompts?

A somewhat intelligent junior will dive deep for one week and be on the same knowledge level as you in roughly 3 years.