Hacker News: robby_w_g

New comment by robby_w_g in "macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL"

robby_w_g — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 16:40:51 +0000

Wait, this is terrible news. I was planning to migrate off of Gmail using that feature

New comment by robby_w_g in "New 'super ice' 10 times stronger, bringing it close to the strength of concrete"

robby_w_g — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 04:51:09 +0000

Ah but then the murder weapon would melt!

New comment by robby_w_g in "I never authorized an integration that scans my secrets"

robby_w_g — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 01:35:40 +0000

Nothing to be ashamed of? The behavior in that issue is petulant and embarrassing.

And it’s not bad faith to call out bad behavior. That’s some twisted logic.

New comment by robby_w_g in "Redesigning Source Control at Anthropic"

robby_w_g — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:13:15 +0000

The cliche “AI solves that” response to everything is even more annoying when it’s a problem that AI created.

New comment by robby_w_g in "Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray) released"

robby_w_g — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:13:59 +0000

This is the conventional wisdom, but there are some new distros that shake things up imo. For people who are migrating from Windows to Linux Desktop, I'd recommend the following:

* Low maintenance + most familiar to Windows Users => Linux Mint

* Low maintenance + don't want custom packages => Aurora (or any immutable distro)

* Low maintenance + gaming => Bazzite

* You want the ability to install or customize whatever you want => Arch Linux

Maybe there's a middle ground between the low maintenance distros and Arch Linux, but for me I'd rather go all in on low maintenance or all in on customizability.

New comment by robby_w_g in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

robby_w_g — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 03:39:43 +0000

> What matters more is that what will happen to us when we find the answer.

I'd imagine that it'd be like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when the answer is 42. The answer itself is not sufficient, we need to understand to appreciate.

New comment by robby_w_g in "Unsurprisingly, Meta's new Muse AI agent blatantly ignores users permissions"

robby_w_g — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:53:28 +0000

There is definitely a balance between utility and security/privacy gates. I think people are enjoying the freedom of YOLO for now until the consequences of gate-free agent use become too severe.

> And I also like pi, but it's probably one of the worst in terms of sandboxing as it's yolo by default.

Agreed, but the nice thing about pi is the plugin system and how configurable it is. I can easily hack on the pi harness, whereas a more opinionated one like opencode is more difficult

New comment by robby_w_g in "Unsurprisingly, Meta's new Muse AI agent blatantly ignores users permissions"

robby_w_g — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:52:28 +0000

I think sandboxing could be solved if effort was put into it. Webassembly seems like a great way to enforce data and execution boundaries for an LLM, for example.

I think the problem is that LLM providers are dis-incentivized from pursuing it because their ethos is gobbling up any and all data they can get.

> Oops, we accidentally yoinked your personal documents, photos, and videos and they’re now swimming in our model’s data ocean! We’re sorrrry, oh well let’s move on.

It’s up to the users to use tools that enforce security/privacy. Open source harnesses like pi.dev seem like a good path forward to me

New comment by robby_w_g in "Small programming tricks"

robby_w_g — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 17:19:31 +0000

Yeah, I don't buy the premise that branchless code is intrinsically easier to understand. Maybe OP's point is that adding unnecessary branches makes code harder to read? But that's generally the case for any unnecessary code.

New comment by robby_w_g in "Reverse engineering my ADHD test"

robby_w_g — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:12:40 +0000

> I feel like a diagnosis in my 20's would've been useful. Now it's like I got me my coping strategies and they work pretty well. If I do or don't have ADHD doesn't really change anything.

This is what I told myself before I started taking medication around age 30. But ultimately my coping strategies felt flimsy, and I felt like my life could fall apart at any second.

Getting medicated and getting therapy has improved my life and evened out my emotional state an incredible amount. I still feel like me, just with a bit more stability and consistency.

I don’t think it’s ever too late to start medication. If you think there’s a benefit to it, it’s worth trying out.

New comment by robby_w_g in "My agent.md to improve LLM-assisted code quality"

robby_w_g — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 14:39:08 +0000

The actual code output has improved a lot over the past year. I’ve found it matches existing patterns better, and the code is succinct so I can easily tweak it if I don’t like the way the agent wrote it.

The problem with comments is that LLMs tend to copy their verbose chat output format and insert session/prompt specific details. It makes me think that LLMs aren’t constrained in their comment output the same way they are with their code output

New comment by robby_w_g in "My agent.md to improve LLM-assisted code quality"

robby_w_g — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 23:53:41 +0000

How do you stop LLMs from making comments? In my experience, LLMs treat requirements for code output as suggestions

New comment by robby_w_g in "Figmimic – A bookmarklet to copy any webpage into Figma as editable layers"

robby_w_g — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 03:13:52 +0000

Bookmarklets were definitely more powerful than I anticipated, but they’re tricky to version and upgrade. I’ve deployed a bookmarklet for non-technical users to some success, but I’d generally lean towards browser extensions for anything that needs to be maintained and distributed long-term.

New comment by robby_w_g in "FFmpeg 9.0"

robby_w_g — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:46:04 +0000

Contrast with the Dolphin emulator release blogs. I swear I’ve spent more timing reading those releases than actually using the software

New comment by robby_w_g in "Windows 10 quietly gets one more year of support and updates"

robby_w_g — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:43:45 +0000

New games run really well on Linux. At this point, I don't even check. If it's an online competitive game, I can't play it. Otherwise, it almost certainly will work on Arch Linux

New comment by robby_w_g in "Madison Square Garden compiled a list of activists against facial recognition"

robby_w_g — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:13:10 +0000

I may be out of pocket here, but I think the Hacker News crowd of tech bros who spy on people for a living have a biased opinion on whether spying on people is normal

New comment by robby_w_g in "Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages"

robby_w_g — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 13:12:02 +0000

I’ve made a point of not installing any AUR packages. It’s really tempting when there’s a package that’s not available via pacman, but at the end of the day I’d rather build from source myself or use a docker image.

New comment by robby_w_g in "Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux"

robby_w_g — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 16:29:33 +0000

Torment doomers claim that the commodification of humanity’s suffering will usher in a dark age, but quarterly earnings have never been higher. I trust that Death Star Inc has humanity’s best interests at heart.

New comment by robby_w_g in "Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job"

robby_w_g — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:47:57 +0000

It’s both “exactly what the EO says” and “I can’t remember what the EO said”. He’s blatantly lying

New comment by robby_w_g in "Ape Coding [fiction]"

robby_w_g — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:35:25 +0000

> In the future, maybe by Thursday, I can have agents do all of that and relax.

Wall-E seems like it’s getting closer to reality every day