Hacker News: ozten

New comment by ozten in "Aphantasia Beginner's Guide"

ozten — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:16:38 +0000

I had vivid visual dreams as a child. Now my dreams are very abstract, but I think they sometimes include a visually striking element. I'm torn and not 100% sure. I don't remember my dreams as well as I did as a child.

New comment by ozten in "Aphantasia Beginner's Guide"

ozten — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:03:57 +0000

If you look at proper drawing instruction books from the 1940s, they show you all of the 3D rendering techniques later adopted by our modern CGI pipelines. To draw a head, you follow a pattern: draw a cube, carve it up into parts of the head and neck, carve that up into eyes, nose, ears, etc, establish a 3-point lighting system, and render materials. It is very time-intensive and analytical, and required if you didn't shoot a reference photo back then. This is needed for folks who can't visualize, like myself.

New comment by ozten in "Aphantasia Beginner's Guide"

ozten — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:36:03 +0000

Yes, of course. I was a visual artist for a decade before falling down the software hole.

New comment by ozten in "Aphantasia Beginner's Guide"

ozten — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:50:31 +0000

I can "hear" a song at will. I can "hear" it well enough to think about the instrumentation, etc.

I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound.

Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers. I've met both total aphantasia-suffering artists and artists who can visually project onto a blank page and trace what they are seeing. People are somewhere on this spectrum.

New comment by ozten in "A decades-old bug in Knuth's long division (TAOCP Vol II, Algorithm 4.3.1D)"

ozten — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 19:56:47 +0000

Given enough tokens, all bugs are shallow.

New comment by ozten in "Don't use your phone while you poop"

ozten — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:38:45 +0000

From an evolutionary perspective, this is a super vulnerable moment and are in a state of hyper vigilance.

New comment by ozten in "GPT‑Live"

ozten — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:43:40 +0000

Cool it sounds like they have improved. This the first time I tried back in the day voice chats were different and you could not get the transcript after the fact.

New comment by ozten in "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Video Lectures (1986)"

ozten — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:08:17 +0000

I worked through these videos and the full book. Via news groups I organized an in-person study group. What a blast and a big unlock for me. The study group started having attrition about halfway through the book.

New comment by ozten in "My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable"

ozten — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 20:13:43 +0000

And we don't know yet, but I am hoping for reliability. My gaming PC is a nightmare. Sometimes it works great. Other times, I have to sacrifice a goat to get the thing to work.

New comment by ozten in "Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?"

ozten — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 03:01:28 +0000

Yes, for client projects where privacy and security is important, but no enterprise contract:

Open code against Infomaniak hosted OSS models: Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-FP8, Kimi-K2.6.

I use API keys for billing. It performs like Dec 2025 in terms of my productivity back then.

New comment by ozten in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

ozten — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:55:01 +0000

There were two paid features of CapCut that I vibe-coded using Remotion as the basis.

1) Automatically editing out pauses 2) Making those TikTok-like captions

New comment by ozten in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

ozten — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:08:00 +0000

Too many to mention. Daily drivers: replacements for CapCut, Granola.

A remote image viewer to see screenshots in VMs.

A simple agent harness to drive spec to verification.

A YouTube video summarizer.

https://github.com/ozten - some public repos, but the majority are private repos

New comment by ozten in "Bun support is now limited and deprecated"

ozten — Fri, 22 May 2026 22:25:50 +0000

There is an implicit assumption that the other supported runtimes aren't being vibe-coded. Looking at commit metadata tells a different story.

New comment by ozten in "Google's Antigravity bait and switch"

ozten — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:46:30 +0000

For me it is their personable account reps and customer service. It’s the human touch we’ve come to associate with the “Don’t be Evil” brand.

New comment by ozten in "The quiet renovation at Bitwarden"

ozten — Tue, 19 May 2026 00:14:21 +0000

Interesting! I've been a LastPass and then 1Password user since 2009ish.

I left LastPass because of UX paper-cuts, but I've never lost passwords on either of them.

Honestly, it's something I don't want to think about and just need it to work on mobile and desktop, so the switching friction is very high for me. I'm not going to shop around and try different password managers.

Is "rug pull" a cost thing? I'm generally frugal, but pay for a family plan and don't think twice.

New comment by ozten in "The quiet renovation at Bitwarden"

ozten — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:51:25 +0000

How were you screwed over by these products?

New comment by ozten in "My graduation cap runs Rust"

ozten — Wed, 13 May 2026 03:56:05 +0000

There is a joke around ownership or borrowing that I'm going to take the high road and not make.

New comment by ozten in "US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos"

ozten — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:24:29 +0000

It's becoming clear that the true legacy of this administration is peddling files.

New comment by ozten in "Is my blue your blue?"

ozten — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:26:35 +0000

Showing the completion screen and giving the ability to use a slider to pick the center might be more useful.

New comment by ozten in "FBI looks into dead or missing scientists tied to NASA, Blue Origin, SpaceX"

ozten — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:39:19 +0000

Napkin Math by Sabine Hossenfelder:

- people working in space top secret research 20,000 (conservative estimate, probably much smaller)

- adult disappearances 1/50k to 1/100k per year

- demographics are stable, high earners, so more like 1/100k per year or less

- so for the pool of 20k, then 0.2 per year on average

- these disappearances are a 1:10,000 to 1:20,000 probability

- homicides made this situation even more unlikely 1:100,000

Conclusions: A conspiracy is highly unlikely, but the situation is very unlikely. Shrug.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEnvorobhEE