Hacker News: nvarsj

New comment by nvarsj in "Kimi K3-256k"

nvarsj — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:56:11 +0000

tintinweb/pi-subagents. Then I use superpowers and it spins up subagents automatically. Works really well and you can customise the models and efforts you want to use with local AGENTS.md.

I’m primarily using gpt-5.6 and then opus for reviews.

New comment by nvarsj in "Kimi K3-256k"

nvarsj — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:45:52 +0000

Pi harness with subagents is pretty great. I’m using it for everything now.

New comment by nvarsj in "Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings"

nvarsj — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 17:47:46 +0000

Well no king would ever accept and propagate that religion.

New comment by nvarsj in "Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team"

nvarsj — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:06:21 +0000

Not hard to understand. People will pay for a better UX. Which Plex has, once you disable all the streaming junk.

Also there’s simply more clients for it. The only way to play Bluray Dolby Vision layers correctly is with an AM6B+ which has an amazing Plex frontend.

New comment by nvarsj in "Steam Machine: Between 12k and 15k Units Sold per week"

nvarsj — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:43:06 +0000

This assumes Valve isn't artifically bumping up the Steam Machine for more exposure.

New comment by nvarsj in "Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets"

nvarsj — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:14:44 +0000

Well I don't know the details from Apple's side, and this was 20 years ago. That was just the discussion on the ground. I personally experienced a senior Mot employee grilling me about some IP I had developed, then go to Apple the next week. Also saw many directors/VPs with extensive proprietary knowledge go to Apple. Apple opened up recruiting events 10 minutes down the street from Mot HQ in Schaumburg Hilton to poach the best people (which I went to, and flew to Cupertino to interview for the original iPhone ios team - wish I had passed that, I would be retired by now!). I know there was also a free flow of information as part of the ROKR collab while Apple was working secretly on the iPhone.

New comment by nvarsj in "Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important"

nvarsj — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:55:31 +0000

Psychotherapy. I've also done a lot of CBT in the past - but I found it didn't really solve my issues, just provides some temporary relief. I personally found going for a long walk to be better than CBT techniques.

New comment by nvarsj in "Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important"

nvarsj — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 21:27:16 +0000

Yep - meds. Tried a bunch and duloxetine is making a massive difference for me. On them for 4 months so far.

Also picked up therapy yet again but tbh I never found therapy to really solve things - it helps me understand myself better at a logical level but the underlying anxiety / depression (including suicidal ideation) has never really gone away until the meds.

I'd say right now I'm feeling quite content with life, and even find myself feeling genuinely happy throughout the day about things. Which is something I haven't really experienced before. I still have some of those feelings of anxiety crop up but they fade away pretty fast. Depression is completely gone for the most part. I'm still trying to understand this new reality as I'm not used to it at all. But I think (with some caution still!) it's pretty great.

I know anti depressants have a lot of bad press and I’ve even had therapists tell me it’s a crutch. So I’ve generally been hesitant to start them. But they work, not sure why they work, but they do for me at least and I’m glad I stuck with it to find the right one.

New comment by nvarsj in "Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important"

nvarsj — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:52:42 +0000

This... I finally changed my life by talking to a psychiatrist after 40+ years of suffering and trying a myriad of things. Mental illnesses are real and need real treatment.

New comment by nvarsj in "Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets"

nvarsj — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 11:47:32 +0000

The irony to me is Apple did the exact same thing to Motorola back in the day, which I saw firsthand as a Mot eng. Poached employees and IP. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.

Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.

New comment by nvarsj in "Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets"

nvarsj — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 11:45:28 +0000

As an old timer, I saw this firsthand happen with Motorola. Apple did the same shenanigans, stealing IP and engineers. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.

Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.

New comment by nvarsj in "GPT-5.6"

nvarsj — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 18:30:08 +0000

The harness is so much better than cc which is a buggy mess. Gpt is also way faster than Claude. I’ve been using gpt for a while now and I know a lot of people that swapped away from Anthropic for multiple reasons. However - fable still seems to be the best coding agent, it’s just slow and the harness sucks. So I still use it in some rare cases like to review codex. I’m hoping 5.6 lets me drop it entirely.

New comment by nvarsj in "The anatomy of an AI-native org"

nvarsj — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 21:58:46 +0000

Yikes, why is this AI slop post #1 on HN? I have to deal with enough of this at work.

New comment by nvarsj in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

nvarsj — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:53:01 +0000

Watching companies burn themselves to the ground at the altar of AI is really something.

New comment by nvarsj in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

nvarsj — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:06:43 +0000

This is the one great feature about Gmail I think.

But I haven’t touched Gmail in years, been on fastmail for about 6 years now.

I’ve solved this by using the fastmail-mcp plugin and have a skill that organises all my mails for me and highlights high priority ones. Works great - I run it every few days, takes about 5-10 minutes.

New comment by nvarsj in "Testing distributed systems with AI agents"

nvarsj — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:24:40 +0000

This sucks to hear.

I honestly think the rise of LLMs will be the death of open source in the long run. Already, apparently, quality of OSS has dropped significantly since 2025 (so most models stop training on github after this).

I don't think a lot of OSS authors quite understand the extent to which models like claude/codex rely on their work. I'd bet money there are extensive curated tasks using your tooling for post-training. With 0 attribution or anything, these models are using your work wholesale to build sophisticated agents that can do your job.

Yeah it's depressing as hell. I guess it's the same thing for artists and musicians and writers.

P.S. I can symphathise with the old house issues! I bought a 1901 terraced property, it's an absolute money pit.

New comment by nvarsj in "Google changes its search box"

nvarsj — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:26:37 +0000

Thank god for Kagi. It literally saved search for me, although I mostly use kagi.com/assistant these days.

New comment by nvarsj in "Agents need control flow, not more prompts"

nvarsj — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:25:12 +0000

I almost always use orchestration tooling nowadays. cc itself feels too basic, even with things like superpowers.

New comment by nvarsj in "How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale"

nvarsj — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:10:02 +0000

Can golang do zero copy networking nowadays? In the past golang was terrible at this kind of thing due to allocations and copies of all relayed data.

New comment by nvarsj in "Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic"

nvarsj — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 13:24:03 +0000

Don’t really agree with this.

That dev is productive with AI precisely _because_ they have a good mental model.

AI like other tools is a multiplier - it doesn’t make bad devs good, but it makes good devs significantly more productive.