Hacker News: mwcampbell

New comment by mwcampbell in "We built our house for LAN parties (2024)"

mwcampbell — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:37:30 +0000

I'm actually curious about why you didn't spend yours on reviving Sandstorm. If the terms of your employment with Cloudflare prevent you from doing that, then that makes sense. Or do you believe you've been building Sandstorm's true successor at Cloudflare? For a while the Workers platform didn't satisfy the self-hosted part, but I guess workerd addressed that.

For what it's worth, if I had $10 million, I currently think I'd spend it as follows:

1. Developing and bringing to market my dream open, general-purpose pocket computer specifically for blind people: https://toot.cafe/@matt/116788125409771800

2. If there's enough left, buying the ETI-Eloquence text-to-speech engine from whoever owns it now and open-sourcing it.

New comment by mwcampbell in "Feeling Sad about AI"

mwcampbell — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 15:28:53 +0000

I'm still inclined to question whether the agent harness needs to be a million lines, or even a hundred thousand lines, in the first place. I mean, isn't one supposed to just hook up tool calling and let the LLM's intelligence do the rest? At least, that's the way it appears from things like tptacek's post about writing an agent. https://fly.io/blog/everyone-write-an-agent/

Then again, I'm also sympathetic to the idea that the anti-AI backlash has also provoked an unreasonable backlash against development speed and scale themselves.

New comment by mwcampbell in "Feeling Sad about AI"

mwcampbell — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:35:46 +0000

I don't actually buy that tweet from Boris Cherny. When the Claude Code source leaked some months ago, there were many posts on Mastodon about how the revealed code was a shit show, a big pile of hacks. I wish now that I had bookmarked some of those posts.

New comment by mwcampbell in "Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin"

mwcampbell — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:32:30 +0000

This is probably biased by the specific multi-platform apps I've worked on, but my default assumption is that sooner or later, any non-trivial multi-platform app will need to reach for something that doesn't already have a KMP library and that, on Android, might require compiling native code via the NDK. Rust has a way bigger library ecosystem than KMP. So I figure one might as well do the cross-platform core in Rust and add that FFI boundary early, but managed by something like uniffi-rs. And, I've seen it work in a few real projects now, with just a little build system friction up front. So in what sense is Rust uncompetitive for this use case?

New comment by mwcampbell in "Zig: Pointer Stability for ArrayLists"

mwcampbell — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:03:46 +0000

So, steady-state performance that's about as good as Java or C# on average, but with memory safety, much smaller baseline executable size (yes, even compared to GraalVM Native Image; I haven't checked current .NET AOT), faster startup (yes, I know that's what Native Image does optimize), and lower memory footprint? I'll take that deal, even if there's a substantial gap between safe Rust and C++ or Zig. I badly wanted something like safe Rust when working on desktop applications throughout the 2000s and into the 2010s, and now it's here, with a strong and growing library ecosystem.

New comment by mwcampbell in "The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now"

mwcampbell — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 03:48:12 +0000

> People don’t get it. I’ve given up trying to explain. Systems thinking isn’t as titillating as conspiracism, doomerism, or misanthropic cynicism I guess.

OK, you've explained it, and I think I buy that explanation. But now what do we do about it? At least the conspiracism gives us an enemy to be angry at and maybe try to fight.

New comment by mwcampbell in "Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio"

mwcampbell — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 03:33:36 +0000

> Their stuff is already better than what nVidia is offering with stuff like the DGX Spark.

How so? In tokens per second when running major open-weights models, or something else?

New comment by mwcampbell in "Kubernetes on Oxide: How customer needs shaped our integrations"

mwcampbell — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 10:44:13 +0000

A heavy way that, as typically used, goes against the grain of the web, particularly for document-centric sites. For example, on the Oxide RFD site, the RFD links don't do a real browser page load, but use JavaScript to fetch the new content and update the page in-place. This breaks the experience of screen-reader users unless the site or framework does some kind of workaround (which, somewhat to my surprise, the Oxide RFD site doesn't do), and even then, it doesn't match the experience of doing a real transition between pages with a screen reader. For something like the Oxide RFD site, I'd be much more inclined to use something like Astro or Marko, with minimal client-side JavaScript and no SPA-style navigation.

New comment by mwcampbell in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"

mwcampbell — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:55:49 +0000

The difference is that with software before the rise of giant machine-learning models, the software is derived entirely from human-understandable source, and often a full software stack can be built on a single computer, as anyone who ever ran Gentoo knows. While the source of any non-trivial software stack is too large for any single human to understand in full, a single human can understand any part of it. That's not true of model weights. And my understanding is that even the smallest open-weights models that are remotely in the same class as LLMs require large computing clusters with powerful GPUs to train. That puts training a model, or retraining one from its true source materials (the training data and processes), in an entirely different class than rebuilding Gentoo, even with GNOME, Firefox, LibreOffice, etc., even if the training data and processes are available, which they're usually not. So, we should treat these models as a different kind of thing than the tools that we developers have worked with until now.

New comment by mwcampbell in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

mwcampbell — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:17:38 +0000

> It's just not that hard to link to the system's UI libraries.

Are you concerned that as SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose continue to become the preferred native UI frameworks on Apple and Android respectively, you're going to need to figure out a way to bridge to them from Rust?

New comment by mwcampbell in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

mwcampbell — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 10:39:53 +0000

Wait, why involve wasm in this?

New comment by mwcampbell in "Is it all just vapourware?"

mwcampbell — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:54:05 +0000

I respect the people who still haven't tried. They held a firm line when the rest of us were drawn to the shiny new thing. They're not becoming dependent on yet another centralized service (let's be real, the big centralized models are still way better than the open-weights models that most of us can run, particularly for coding). They can still develop software with nothing but their own computer, and that computer doesn't even have to be particularly new.

New comment by mwcampbell in "Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace"

mwcampbell — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:44:25 +0000

To steelman the haters, I think their view is that the industry is so uniquely shitty that it's unconscionable to help the industry at all by using the tech, which is a product of that industry.

New comment by mwcampbell in "Python 3.14 compiled to metal – no interpreter"

mwcampbell — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:03:23 +0000

I wonder how you arrived at that number. Is it perhaps a number that we should aspire to, if we want to write high-quality, maintainable code by hand?

New comment by mwcampbell in "Jamesob's guide to running SOTA LLMs locally"

mwcampbell — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 17:47:29 +0000

> once the RAM bottleneck passes

Do we have evidence that this will actually happen? Maybe the belief that it won't pass is what requires evidence, but I think there's a widespread feeling right now that things are just getting permanently worse and this is one example.

New comment by mwcampbell in "We need tech news sources which exclude AI"

mwcampbell — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:03:54 +0000

Compiler developers didn't hoover up as much human creative work as they could, legally or not, to evolve a giant inscrutable thing that does what it does probabilistically, with the explicit goal of replacing as much human labor as possible for the enrichment of the already rich. Whatever benefits we get out of generative AI are just a side effect, and one that may not last when the investors stop subsidizing our access to the big models.

New comment by mwcampbell in "Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI"

mwcampbell — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 22:14:46 +0000

Well, the frontier models aren't freely available in the same way that the training data (the public web) is; they're only available as a limited no-cost tier of a paid service.

There are models where the weights are released and you can run them locally, but one counter-argument I've seen is that these aren't really the models that people are excited about and making extraordinary claims about.

New comment by mwcampbell in "Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?"

mwcampbell — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:57:40 +0000

Rust with wxWidgets via wxDragon has recently become a viable option for some kinds of apps. It even has dark mode now. wxWidgets comes with a disappointing amount of bloat though.

New comment by mwcampbell in "AI coding at home without going broke"

mwcampbell — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:28:03 +0000

I invested about $4,000 in an NVIDIA DGX Spark several months ago. 128 GB of unified RAM, and the NVIDIA GB10 chip. With the RAM, the several CPU cores, and the 4 TB NVMe SSD, it's a very capable ARM64 Linux computer even without the GPU, and so far I've mostly been using it as such. But I wonder, what's the most capable model, specifically for coding, that can run well on that hardware?

New comment by mwcampbell in "Gooey: A GPU-accelerated UI framework for Zig"

mwcampbell — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 03:44:47 +0000

Have you found evidence that the code is actually low-quality, or is that just an assumption based on the fact that it's evidently largely LLM-generated?