Hacker News: modeless

New comment by modeless in "Native Instant Space Switching on macOS"

modeless — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:23:40 +0000

This is nice. Sounds like it wouldn't solve the slow animation when entering or leaving full screen mode though. I'm fed up enough with macOS's poor window management (among many other things) that I'm looking for MacBook alternatives.

The M5 chip is way ahead of Intel's latest, even Panther Lake. But the Snapdragon X2 Elite looks like a viable alternative. It's the only competitor with comparable single core performance, and it comes with 48 GB of extremely fast RAM for a reasonable price with great battery life. Unfortunately Linux support isn't really there yet, but hey M5 MacBooks don't support Linux well either.

New comment by modeless in "A WebGPU implementation of Augmented Vertex Block Descent"

modeless — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:18:08 +0000

> your options are basically having a GLES renderer that you can restrict to WebGL2 (so no compute shaders, etc. and other things that make desktop OpenGL acceptable for writing a modern renderer) or having to abstract over Vulkan/WebGPU yourself

I don't understand this complaint. What's worse about using WebGPU over using GLES? Seems like a strict improvement. You can use WebGPU anywhere, you're not required to "abstract" over Vulkan. If you're talking about using it outside of the web, you just choose wgpu or Dawn as your implementation, it's the same API and even the same implementation as you'd get in a browser.

New comment by modeless in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

modeless — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:09:45 +0000

I don't believe anyone claiming that Satoshi is still alive. There is zero chance any human who put so much effort into creating something would remain silent while it became a $2 trillion phenomenon that succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Satoshi is certainly dead.

New comment by modeless in "Muse Spark: Scaling towards personal superintelligence"

modeless — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:22:47 +0000

It's a decent model if the benchmarks are to be believed, but it won't be close to Opus in usefulness for programming. None of these benchmarks completely capture what makes a model useful for day-to-day coding tasks, unfortunately. It will take time for them to catch up, and Opus will keep improving in the meantime. But it's good to have more competition.

New comment by modeless in "Lunar Flyby"

modeless — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 04:43:28 +0000

Works of the US government are not copyrighted.

New comment by modeless in "Lunar Flyby"

modeless — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 04:42:41 +0000

Thanks, these make some kickass ultrawide wallpapers.

New comment by modeless in "System Card: Claude Mythos Preview [pdf]"

modeless — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:10:44 +0000

The price is 5x Opus: "Claude Mythos Preview will be available to [Project Glasswing] participants at $25/$125 per million input/output tokens", however "We do not plan to make Claude Mythos Preview generally available".

New comment by modeless in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"

modeless — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 21:48:10 +0000

I didn't see this at first, but the price is 5x Opus: "Claude Mythos Preview will be available to participants at $25/$125 per million input/output tokens", however "We do not plan to make Claude Mythos Preview generally available".

New comment by modeless in "Gemma 4 on iPhone"

modeless — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:20:18 +0000

If this Gemma tokenizer I found online is accurate then my Pixel 10 Pro XL is getting ~22 tok/s on Gemma 4 E2B using the NPU, vs. 40 tok/s is what people are saying the MLX version gets on iPhone.

Actually I found official performance numbers from Google saying iPhone gets 56 tok/s and Qualcomm gets 52. They don't even bother listing Tensor in their table. Maybe because it would be too embarrassing. Ouch! https://ai.google.dev/edge/litert-lm/overview

New comment by modeless in "Gemma 4 on iPhone"

modeless — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 06:56:13 +0000

It's so ridiculous that Google made a custom SoC for their phones, touting its AI performance, even calling it Tensor, and Apple is still faster at running Google's own model.

Google really ought to shut down their phone chip team. Literally every chip from them has been a disappointment. As much as I hate to say it, sticking with Qualcomm would have been the right choice.

New comment by modeless in "Demonstrating Real Time AV2 Decoding on Consumer Laptops"

modeless — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:43:53 +0000

Are you suggesting that I read the whole spec and then read the whole AV1 spec and diff it in my head? Or are you referring to the only text in that link describing differences with AV1: "enhanced support for AR/VR applications, split-screen delivery of multiple programs, improved handling of screen content, and an ability to operate over a wider visual quality range"? This is not a description of technical features, it's a high level statement of aspirations. I'm asking what features they added to achieve these goals.

I was hoping someone familiar with AV2 might be frequenting this site alongside the much larger population of smartass pedants, and they might be able to summarize the new features in a way useful to me and others.

New comment by modeless in "Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]"

modeless — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:13:35 +0000

My problem isn't that these people exist in the world. My problem is they're increasingly drowning out other voices in a community I'm part of. I would prefer significantly more active moderation against politics and general non-technical negativity on this site.

New comment by modeless in "Demonstrating Real Time AV2 Decoding on Consumer Laptops"

modeless — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 07:15:58 +0000

Huh, I didn't know AV2 was out. What are the new features besides (I assume) incremental compression efficiency?

New comment by modeless in "GabeN Is Shitting Yacht Money into Flatpak and You're Still Arguing Init Systems"

modeless — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 07:04:18 +0000

I am actually interested in an explainer of the technical differences between AppImage and Flatpak and Snap and why one is better than the others, but I didn't find it here.

Personally as a user I have found AppImages annoying as there's no install process to get a binary in your PATH and an app launcher icon automatically, and updating them is a manual process usually, and also I always get this FUSE error that I have to google how to fix. Snaps I have found annoying as the applications packaged that way seem to have limitations that the non-snap versions don't have. Flatpak I have no experience with.

All that said, I like the idea of an app being a single file, and if they just provided a standard way for AppImages to register with app launchers and your PATH on first launch, and made them update themselves automatically in a way as seamless as Chrome, and fixed that damn FUSE error, then I'd prefer them.

New comment by modeless in "Extra usage credit for Claude to celebrate usage bundles launch (Pro, Max, Team)"

modeless — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 05:25:33 +0000

I guess it was just delayed. I received the credit banner just now and redeemed it successfully.

New comment by modeless in "Extra usage credit for Claude to celebrate usage bundles launch (Pro, Max, Team)"

modeless — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 03:10:45 +0000

That's not really a qualification so much as a required step, as you can do it anytime in the next two weeks to get the credit. And I have, but no credit.

New comment by modeless in "Extra usage credit for Claude to celebrate usage bundles launch (Pro, Max, Team)"

modeless — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:03:46 +0000

Because it lets you ignore your 5 hour quota for a while.

New comment by modeless in "Extra usage credit for Pro, Max, and Team plans"

modeless — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:02:04 +0000

The only listed qualification is "You’ve subscribed to a Pro, Max, or Team plan by April 3, 2026 at 9 AM PT", however I am not getting the banner for this credit. I suspect that there's an unstated additional qualification: that your account hasn't previously received an extra usage credit.

I don't know if they should be handing out more credits right now considering that my Sonnet requests in Claude Code are routinely delayed by several minutes, presumably due to capacity issues...

New comment by modeless in "Understanding young news audiences at a time of rapid change"

modeless — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:52:17 +0000

If I have a specific interest in a topic I can do extensive research over many hours and come to my own conclusions. But for the vast majority of news headlines I see, including almost all "national" or "world" news, I don't have the time to do hours of research. In this case, reading or one or three news articles is far more likely to give me a biased and ultimately incorrect take than looking at a prediction market, which takes all the available information and condenses it into one number that matters.

New comment by modeless in "Understanding young news audiences at a time of rapid change"

modeless — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:23:29 +0000

Agreed, watching national or world news is useless. If you want to know what is likely to happen instead of what someone wants you to think will happen, we now have prediction markets. Whenever I see a headline I'm curious about, now instead of reading the article I just go to a prediction market and check the probabilities.