Hacker News: nrabulinski

New comment by nrabulinski in "There are no instances in ATProto"

nrabulinski — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 08:41:06 +0000

It’s not more painful because there’s plenty of alternatives for activitypub instances, but only one bluesky. And you’re meant to either host your own instance, or pick one that aligns with your views and interests, such that the bulk of moderation is handled for you in terms of which instances you federate with etc.

New comment by nrabulinski in "I hacked into the worst e-bike and fixed it [video]"

nrabulinski — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:57:35 +0000

You’re either making a bad-faith argument on purpose, or on accident. What you’re saying is false equivalence. Leaving Claude overnight is in no universe comparable to getting some code running yourself, even if that code is 5 lines of python, with a bunch of libraries doing all the heavy lifting

New comment by nrabulinski in "I hacked into the worst e-bike and fixed it [video]"

nrabulinski — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:55:56 +0000

This is what he said though. I don’t doubt he could code if he put his mind to it, but in the video he shows the code that’s talking to the bike, displaying stuff, etc, and says it’s all AI generated because it’s outside his area of expertise.

New comment by nrabulinski in "I hacked into the worst e-bike and fixed it [video]"

nrabulinski — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:00:50 +0000

Except with an automatic lawnmower you’re still doing the work yourself. In the video he literally said he left Claude overnight. He did no reverse engineering and no coding

New comment by nrabulinski in "I hacked into the worst e-bike and fixed it [video]"

nrabulinski — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 06:11:49 +0000

I hate how he’s doing the kind of project a ton of people would like to help with, for free and on their own time, yet he’s making an LLM do all the interesting work. He can’t code so he vibecodes the whole frontend. He can’t reverse engineer so he leaves Claude with the uart connection. He doesn’t understand something so he makes an LLM explain it.

With his platform he could easily find a person (or a couple) who could do this work themselves, not only saving him money, but nerdsniping someone into hacking a bike. A win-win for everybody.

New comment by nrabulinski in "Stop the Apple Music app from launching"

nrabulinski — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 06:40:31 +0000

Counter anecdote, Apple Music is constantly pushing new niche artists to me whenever I check the home page. I never use radio or discover features, but the personalized results are actually pretty good. I’ve been using Apple Music for close to a decade now

New comment by nrabulinski in "The circus freaks of open source"

nrabulinski — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 11:15:57 +0000

It’s always obvious that people here comment only after reading the headline, and sometimes other comments, but this comment section makes it particularly clear.

New comment by nrabulinski in "Ferrari Luce"

nrabulinski — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:15:06 +0000

It has more character because it’s lower, has sharper, sportier lines, and more refined shape. Also the frontend just has a pleasant retro-futuristic design (as does the rest of the car). This ferrari, besides having none of ferrari dna, is an amorphous blob, high off the ground, and all the lines screaming family crossover. Even if someone likes the design, which I don’t doubt there are people that do, it’s objectively a worse looking sports car than the Hyundai mentioned above. More subjectively speaking, the Luce’s frontend also just does not flow nicely together. It almost feels weird for the sake of being contrarian, to show how much it’s not tied to a „regular” car shape, due to being an EV. You can design a car from the ground up for the sake of being an EV and not have it look… like that

New comment by nrabulinski in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

nrabulinski — Sat, 16 May 2026 11:46:08 +0000

It’s literally not. The most interesting and satisfying CTFs have never been grounded in reality, it’s just been an expression of mastery, both from players and authors, with a few notable exceptions. But they’re that, exceptions, not the rule.

New comment by nrabulinski in "Googlebook"

nrabulinski — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:16:42 +0000

Where are you getting the information that only signed apps are allowed on macOS? macOS will, just like windows, issue a scary warning when running a program of unknown origin, sure, but there’s no indication of just letting macOS open it anyway going away. As much as the quality of Apple’s software is declining, the macs are not getting more restrictive

New comment by nrabulinski in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

nrabulinski — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:29:11 +0000

Does a literal book nerd profit megacorporations when they bring up books to you? While burning through a household worth of energy in the process? Also, I’d like to talk with such book nerd because they’d have opinions on books, potentially if I brought up something I have read we could exchange thoughts about it, they could make recommendations for me based on their complex experiences instead of statistics from Reddit comments. An LLM can do none of those, while also doing the former. It’s a lose-lose.

Also, a book nerd doesn’t take roughly ~all human created text to train to produce meaningful results. It’s just such a misplaced analogy and people have been making it ever since OpenAI announced chatgpt for the first time - why do people think “an LLM is just a human who read a lot”

New comment by nrabulinski in "Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age"

nrabulinski — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 01:19:27 +0000

But this thread is discussing the technical solution and how many jurisdictions are pretending there’s no technical solutions just so they can pass surveillance legislation?

New comment by nrabulinski in "If you tax them, will they leave?"

nrabulinski — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 01:33:56 +0000

In my eyes they are not fair, because while they tax consumption, they very disproportionately affect buying power the less wealth you have. For a millionaire, paying let’s say 30% more for new shoes is not going to meaningfully change how much money they’re left with. If I’m poor and I need new shoes (because you can’t just afford a new shoes when you want them so it by necessity implies you’re in desperate need of them), that extra 30% means one less grocery trip. Or heck, even 30% on groceries potentially means one less grocery trip.

Which is to say, being poor is expensive, and sales tax only makes it more expensive, while literally not affecting the bottom line of those in higher income brackets.

New comment by nrabulinski in "Fedora Asahi Remix is now working on Apple M3"

nrabulinski — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 01:36:13 +0000

This is not exactly correct. They wouldn’t need to emulate SPTM, since SPTM is already running. And to be very correct, SPTM is a “process” running in a separate privilege level to the regular privilege levels found on arm processors. The reason it’s a pain is because pre M4 the bootloader gave you complete control over the CPU, including the Apple-exclusive extensions like GLx, the special privilege levels e.g. SPTM is running at. Since M4 the bootloader handles that, so asahi team has to either cope with being dropped after GL is already initialized and locked down, or running in a mode with all of Apple extensions disabled. So it’s not a problem for running Linux, but it’s a problem for running macOS with a thin abstraction layer to intercept talking with devices like the GPU, which made reverse engineering for them significantly easier.

New comment by nrabulinski in "Fedora Asahi Remix is now working on Apple M3"

nrabulinski — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 01:24:47 +0000

FYI, transsexual is an outdated term, with transgender being generally preferred instead :)

New comment by nrabulinski in "Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio"

nrabulinski — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 12:22:59 +0000

It’s very neat but I’m sorry, you can’t advertise yourself as a designer while prominently showcasing very obviously AI-generated graphics. The wallpaper and the avatar immediately undermine everything else, I can’t take you seriously seeing those

New comment by nrabulinski in "When did AI take over Hacker News?"

nrabulinski — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 20:55:05 +0000

I would generally file questioning and criticism under “neutral”, in some very specific cases “positive” or “negative”. Are you interpreting “negative” as “anything not strictly positive”?

New comment by nrabulinski in "Comptime.ts: compile-time expressions for TypeScript"

nrabulinski — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 20:09:51 +0000

It’s been introduced as part of ecmascript 2026 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

New comment by nrabulinski in "Incus – Next-generation system container, application container, and VM manager"

nrabulinski — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 08:11:15 +0000

Yes, it uses QEMU under the hood for VMs and runs LXC containers. But also, since recently, you can run docker images in it. Very handy, especially since it has 1st class remote support, meaning you can install only the incus client and when doing `incus launch` or whatever, it will transparently start the container/vm on your remote host

New comment by nrabulinski in "Getting forked by Microsoft"

nrabulinski — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 15:49:19 +0000

Why haven’t you threatened to sue yet? They very clearly violated the MIT license by getting rid of your copyright, which is literally the only requirement MIT imposes. Go after them, don’t let the corporation get away with