Hacker News: qalmakka

New comment by qalmakka in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

qalmakka — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:57:43 +0000

Fantastic job, albeit a 120 GB download is a herculean task though. I would have provided just the disk image as a separate image, most people on HN probably already know how to spin up their VMs and you can always download UTM, VirtualBox or whatever by youself without having to put it in the ZIP file

New comment by qalmakka in "Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port"

qalmakka — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 04:31:34 +0000

Look at https://github.com/dail8859/NotepadNext

New comment by qalmakka in "Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving"

qalmakka — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:31:39 +0000

The problem with B2C is that you need to have leverage of some kind (more demanding applications, planned obsolescence, ...) in order to get people to keep on buying your product. The average consumer may simply consider themselves satisfied with their old product they already own and only replace it when it breaks down. On the contrary, with the cloud you can keep people hooked on getting the latest product whether they need it or not, and get artificial demand from datacentres and such.

New comment by qalmakka in "Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving"

qalmakka — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:15:53 +0000

Currently, yes. But I don't find it hard to imagine that in a while we could get reasonably light open models with a level of reasoning similar to current opus, for instance. In such a scenario how many people would opt to pay for a way more expensive cloud subscription? Especially since lots of people are already not that interested in paying for frontier models nowadays where it makes sense. Unless keep on getting a constant, never ending stream of improvements we're basically bound to get to a point where unless you really need it you are ok with the basic, cheaper local alternative you don't have to pay for monthly.

New comment by qalmakka in "Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving"

qalmakka — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:55:39 +0000

I think they're in a win-win situation. Big AI companies would love to see local computing die in favour of the cloud because they are well aware the moment an open model that can run on non ludicrous consumer hardware appears, they're screwed. In this situation Nvidia, AMD and the like would be the only ones profiting from it - even though I'm not convinced they'd prefer going back to fighting for B2C while B2B Is so much simpler for them

New comment by qalmakka in "I still prefer MCP over skills"

qalmakka — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 07:03:39 +0000

CLI is massively superior to MCP in my experience. First, because I also understand what's going on and do it myself if necessary. Second because it's so much cheaper in terms of tokens it's not even funny

New comment by qalmakka in "New patches allow building Linux IPv6-only"

qalmakka — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:43:16 +0000

NAT is arguably a very broken solution.IPv4 isn't meant to be doing address translation, period. NAT creates all sorts of issues because in the end you're still pretending all communications are end to end, just with a proxy. We had to invent STUN and all sorts of hole punching techniques just to make things work decently, but they are lacking and have lots of issues we can't fix without changing IPv4. I do see why some people may like it, but it isn't a security measure and there are like a billion different ways to have better, more reliable security with IPv6. The "I don't want my devices to have public, discoverable IPs" is moot when you have literally billions of addresses assigned to you. with the /48 your ISP is supposed to assign you you may have 4 billion devices connected, each one with a set of 281 trillion unique addresses. You could randomly pick an IP per TCP/UDP connection and not exhaust them in _centuries_. The whole argument is kind of moot IMHO, we have ways to do privacy on top of IPv6 that don't require fucking up your network stack and having rendezvous servers setting that up.

We may also argue that NAT basically forces you to rely on cloud services - even doing a basic peer to peer VoIP call is a poor experience as soon as you have 2 layers of NAT. We had to move to centralised services because IPv4 made hosting your own content extremely hard, causing little interest in symmetrical DSL/fiber, leading to less interest into ensuring peer to peer connections between consumers are fast enough, which lead to the rise of cloud and so on. I truly believe that the Internet would be way different today if people could just access their computers from anywhere back in the '00s without having to know networking

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

qalmakka — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:57:33 +0000

AFAIK it's more like a reimplementation of NT APIs in userspace - aka basically Wine with extra steps, or Linux UM. There was a slide deck going around about Project Drawbridge, here: https://threedots.ovh/slides/Drawbridge.pdf

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

qalmakka — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 07:08:03 +0000

Ironically, SQL Server AFAIK in order to run on Linux uses what basically amounts to a Microsoft reimplementation of Wine. Which always makes me wonder if they'll ever get rid of Windows altogether someday in favour of using Linux + a Win32 shim. I think there are still somewhat strong incentives nowadays to keep NT around, but I wouldn't be that surprised it this happened sometime down the line.

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

qalmakka — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:30:56 +0000

LPG isn't a good metric of a "weird" fuel, there are countries such as Italy where it's immensely popular

New comment by qalmakka in "If you thought code writing speed was your problem you have bigger problems"

qalmakka — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:52:50 +0000

This. The comparison between compilers and LLMs is so utterly incorrect, and yet I've heard it multiple times already in the span of a few weeks. The people suggesting this are probably unaware of the fact that Turing complete languages follow mathematical properties not just vibes. You can trust the output of your compiler because it was thoroughly tested to ensure it acts as a Turing machine that converts one Turing complete language (C, C++, whatever) into another Turing complete language (ASM) and there's a theorem that guarantees you that such a conversion is always possible. LLMs are probabilistic machines and it's grossly inappropriate to put them in the same category as compilers - it would be like saying that car tires and pizzas are similar because they're both round and have edges.

New comment by qalmakka in "Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine"

qalmakka — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 11:26:58 +0000

Yeah I wasn't aware that Microsoft allowed that nowadays. Still, it's not ideal anyway, because in my experience Windows apps that are compatible with ARM are 90% either FOSS or portable on other platforms anyway. You use Windows to use x86 apps; if you don't need x86 apps you are generally better not using Windows at all, and if you need them they'll probably run poorly on ARM due to multiple layers of emulation. Wine is still an option, though. They support Rosetta on Mac and FEX/Box64 on Linux, so they may lead to better performance than Parallels

> I was pleasantly surprised how fast you can run x64 windows apps

In general as long as you have a fast enough machine emulation isn't that bad. Apple was doing that already for 68k with PPC and most people didn't noticed due to how massively faster their first PPC computers were. Still, the issue is that here we're not really talking about a high-end CPU aren't we

New comment by qalmakka in "Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine"

qalmakka — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 07:58:20 +0000

There's a big difference between running native ARM software on ARM and emulating x86 to run Windows. If this Mac was x86, it could have probably run Windows much faster thanks to virtualization

New comment by qalmakka in "EVi, a Hard-Fork of Vim"

qalmakka — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:29:02 +0000

I originally switched because neovim was more polished, had better plugins and Lua config files. I then never had a reason to go back

New comment by qalmakka in "Germany's Solar Boom Eases Power Costs as Gas Price Jumps"

qalmakka — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:51:04 +0000

It's a paramount imperative for Europe to wean itself from fossil fuels, regardless of environmental arguments (which are extremely relevant still). Getting a safe, unfettered provider of fossil fuels is getting a basically unsolvable problem. China is trying to build as much solar and nuclear capacity as humanly possible; we should do the same too. We've been having these energy shocks since the Yom Kippur war basically, it's like a broken cycle of instability and crisis we can't leave behind. There's no shale to be found in Europe, we just have wind, sun and nuclear to save our backs. And maybe geothermal pretty soon?

New comment by qalmakka in "EVi, a Hard-Fork of Vim"

qalmakka — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:47:00 +0000

Honest question: why would anyone use Vim and not NeoVim nowadays? I've switched what, 12 years ago? And I've never had to look back. Just curious, to be honest. Especially since neovim is full of new features, while the Vim9 scripting language kind of tanked

New comment by qalmakka in "FFmpeg at Meta: Media Processing at Scale"

qalmakka — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:18:56 +0000

Isn't this like telling the world you ate a full meal by eating samples at Costco? Meta is ranking in billions as we speak, they ensure the FOSS projects they rely on are properly funded instead of shovelling cash to bullshit datacentre developments. Otherwise we're basically guaranteed to end up with another XZ fiasco once again when some tired unpaid FOSS maintainer ends up trusting a random Jia Tan in their desperation

New comment by qalmakka in "Agent Safehouse – macOS-native sandboxing for local agents"

qalmakka — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 06:39:04 +0000

> What would native containers bring over Linux ones?

What would a Phillips screwdriver bring over a flathead screwdriver? Sometimes you don't want/need the flathead screwdriver, simple as that. There are macOS-specific jobs you need to run in macOS, such as xcode toolchains etc. You can try cross compiling, but it's a pain and ridiculous given that 100% of every other OS supports containers natively (including windows). It's clear to me that Apple is trying to make the ratio jobs/#MacMinis as small as possible

New comment by qalmakka in "Google Workspace CLI"

qalmakka — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 09:14:45 +0000

> gws doesn't ship a static list of commands. It reads Google's own Discovery Service at runtime and builds its entire command surface dynamically

You're not exactly describing rocket science. This is basically how websites work, there's never been anything stopping anyone from doing dynamic UI in TUIs except the fact that TUI frameworks were dog poop until a few years ago (and there was no Windows Terminal, so no Windows support). Try doing that in ncurses instead of Rataui or whatever, it's horrendous

New comment by qalmakka in "AMD will bring its “Ryzen AI” processors to standard desktop PCs for first time"

qalmakka — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 09:03:43 +0000

> all CPU/RAM capacity is being sold to LLM companies, and as a result we can't get the hardware needed for good local LLMs.

yeah... Ironic I guess. It's as if they've realised that it's only a matter of time until we get a "good enough" FOSS model that runs on consumer hardware. The fact that such a thing would demolish their entire business of getting VC hyped while giving out their service for a loss surely got lost to them. Surely they and Nvidia have not realised that the only thing that could stop this is to make good hardware unreachable for anything smaller than a massive corp

Mark my words: in less than one year, we'll probably get something akin to Opus 4.6 FOSS. China is putting as much money into that as they can because they know this would crash the US economy, which is in the green only thanks to big tech pumping up AI. China wants Trump either gone or neutered as soon as possible, which they know they can do by making Republicans as unelectable as possible - something that will probably do if the economy crashes and a recession happens