Hacker News: porphyra

New comment by porphyra in "DaVinci Resolve – Photo"

porphyra — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:00:50 +0000

Wow, that's great news!

New comment by porphyra in "DaVinci Resolve – Photo"

porphyra — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 05:37:03 +0000

Darktable is great, but notably, it doesn't have any neural network-based denoising, even though that's now standard in Lightroom, Capture One, and other apps. Darktable only has rather outdated wavelet and non-local means denoising. So a photo that would be perfectly fine at ISO 6400 in other apps will still look grainy, or worse, splotchy in Darktable.

New comment by porphyra in "Building a CLI for all of Cloudflare"

porphyra — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 23:50:03 +0000

Actually if you read the first five sentences of the article, the point of the CLI is to be friendlier for AI agents (in addition to being useful for humans presumably).

> Increasingly, agents are the primary customer of our APIs. Developers bring their coding agents to build and deploy applications, agents, and platforms to Cloudflare, configure their account, and query our APIs for analytics and logs.

> We want to make every Cloudflare product available in all of the ways agents need.

New comment by porphyra in "The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)"

porphyra — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 23:32:25 +0000

It doesn't work.

> You’ve just missed out—free access to this article has expired. Register to view

New comment by porphyra in "Building a CLI for All of Cloudflare"

porphyra — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:26:28 +0000

Exactly. Talking in plain English is a lot less mental overhead than reading the man page and figuring out the right command. Nowadays I just use AI instead of remembering ffmpeg commands too. Your point about authentication is important too.

New comment by porphyra in "Building a CLI for All of Cloudflare"

porphyra — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:13:11 +0000

Ironically, with the advent of AI agents and stuff, we're going back from "checkbox engineering" in GUI webpages to CLI tools. Every time I need to clear cache in cloudflare when I upload a new version of an asset, I have to click through a bunch of things. Would be nice to just message my openclaw agent to do it.

New comment by porphyra in "Filing the Corners Off MacBooks"

porphyra — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:14:39 +0000

Virtual machines aren't the solution for day-to-day computing though. You're missing out on the graphics acceleration, being able to plug things in that just work, and so on.

New comment by porphyra in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

porphyra — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:57:53 +0000

For real. Doesn't help that the three/four finger swipe between full screen windows/workspaces has a mandatory animation that you can't disable (you can turn on "reduce motion", but it simply changes the scrolling animation into an equally time-wasting fading animation).

New comment by porphyra in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

porphyra — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:47:18 +0000

> windows should be square

found the Windows 8 enthusiast! haha, I kid. (I myself use a tiling window manager , i3, with completely square windows without any gaps or rounding)

New comment by porphyra in "Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth"

porphyra — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:34:26 +0000

Newer backside illuminated sensors have better quantum efficiency and are sensitive to a greater fraction of the light hitting the sensor thanks to the lack of electronics physically blocking the photosites. Not to mention advances in read noise and other stuff (less relevant for high end CMOS sensors for short exposures, which are shot noise dominated, but still).

New comment by porphyra in "Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth"

porphyra — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 04:31:58 +0000

Sure, but less grain is often worth it. There's a reason why fast lenses exist. The high quality lens being used here can probably still resolve 20 MP adequately even wide open.

New comment by porphyra in "Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth"

porphyra — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:35:24 +0000

The good low light performance was amazing for its time (10 years ago), and it still holds up decently today. But let's not kid ourselves -- it has been clearly surpassed by modern backside illuminated CMOS sensors like the one on the Z9.

EDIT: sorry, it seems I'm wrong. I just checked https://www.photonstophotos.net/Charts/PDR.htm and while the Z9 has the clear edge with 2 more stops of dynamic range at low ISO, the D5 actually pulls ahead at high ISO. Perhaps the technological improvements haven't been that much for the shot-noise dominated regime.

New comment by porphyra in "Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth"

porphyra — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:34:31 +0000

Noise that's easier to see will not be compressed away by the JPEG compression. JPEG is basically just DCT + thresholding. Any higher amplitude noise is going to stay and increase the final file size.

Also, pulling more data from your 14 bit or 16 bit raws results in more noise in the end compared to the straight-out-of-camera 8 bit JPEGs.

New comment by porphyra in "Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth"

porphyra — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:43:33 +0000

The Lightroom one was processed from raw. Also, by brightening it a lot, the noisy high-ISO grain becomes more apparent. Noise is famously incompressible, so it leads to a much larger file size.

New comment by porphyra in "Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth"

porphyra — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:03:10 +0000

I'd have probably shot it wide open at f/2.8 rather than cranking the ISO up to 51200. Incredibly impressed at the steady hands for a sharp image at 1/4 s shutter speed though! Maybe they just let the camera float in space with the mirror up, triggering it remotely.

New comment by porphyra in "Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth"

porphyra — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 21:59:44 +0000

They did bring the Z9: https://petapixel.com/2026/04/02/a-nikon-z9-made-it-aboard-t...

But yeah the grainy photo of the Earth with the D5 at ISO 51200 shows the shortcomings of the ancient DSLR. Still, great shot.

New comment by porphyra in "A second Starlink satellite exploded in orbit"

porphyra — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:37:29 +0000

Fortunately,

> Due to the low altitude of the event, fragments from this anomaly will likely de-orbit within a few weeks.

New comment by porphyra in "Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem"

porphyra — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:05:32 +0000

There are ways to go beyond the human-quality data limitation. AI can be trained on better quality than average human data because many problems are easy to verify their solutions. For example, in theory, reinforcement learning with an automatic grader on competitive programming problems can lead to an LLM that is better than humans at it.

It's also possible that there can be emergent capabilities. Perhaps a little obtuse, but you can say that humans are trained on human-quality data too and yet brilliant scientists and creative minds can rise above the rest of us.

New comment by porphyra in "Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains"

porphyra — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 19:51:10 +0000

Wine actually does run some ancient Windows games better than Windows 11 itself.

New comment by porphyra in "Honda is killing its EVs"

porphyra — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 22:31:58 +0000

The newer versions of FSD are soooooo much better. Don't listen to the "comments on the Tesla forums".