Hacker News: roblh

New comment by roblh in "Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results"

roblh — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:57:54 +0000

Me too. The longer I use it, the more I like it. Initially I found myself going back to google fairly often, but unless I'm specifically trying to find a product for sale in my region, Kagi is almost always better now. Maybe Kagi got better, or google got worse, or probably both.

New comment by roblh in "Los Puesteros, solitary men who look after ranches and livestock in Patagonia"

roblh — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 22:25:58 +0000

For real. Amazing work. And also, there’s a reason people refuse to give up shooting on film. Especially medium format film.

New comment by roblh in "The Color of White Light"

roblh — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 14:33:13 +0000

Consider looking at TM-30 as well as CRI, it's a more useful metric that better takes R9 into account. I've gotten a little bit obsessed with colour in the last few months, and have been buying different bulbs for the purpose of making DCP profiles and doing film scanning. What you want, specifically, is violet pumped LEDs. They're expensive and it seems like there are only a handful of them on the market, but they're a lot more balanced spectrally and tend to have low flicker (probably just because they're a premium product).

New comment by roblh in "Darktable"

roblh — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:30:55 +0000

You’re right, it’s just that editing and organizing are so tightly coupled that it’s difficult to use something that just ignores one. Like if your oven and sink were on different floors. I want to like darktable, but I need useful organizing built into the program otherwise I just get annoyed. Also the choices of where they put different editing panels are baffling to me. I can never find anything.

Also, an aside. I would love an image editor that would let you build your own chain of editing modules in an arbitrary order. Like audio plugins, with the ability to have more than one instance of each one.

New comment by roblh in "Bun has an open PR adding shared-memory threads to JavaScriptCore"

roblh — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 05:25:40 +0000

Putting on my tinfoil hat. Did Anthropic even buy Bun because they actually use it or was it just an excuse to lob ridiculous PRs at things with at least a little bit of credibility behind them. Their way of trying to set a precedent for accepting AI code into bigger open source projects.

New comment by roblh in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

roblh — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:53:20 +0000

Great find, grabbed that. Thanks!

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

roblh — Sat, 23 May 2026 03:43:53 +0000

Seriously, “just review 5k lines a day for a month” is the most out of touch manager suggestion I’ve seen in a hot minute. As though you only need to read each line one single time in a review before magically committing its exact purpose, content, and overall implications to memory. The absurdity of which is multiplied for AI generated code which, based on what I see from my coworkers, is clunkier and weirder and less focused even than regular human code, on average.

New comment by roblh in "Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD"

roblh — Thu, 21 May 2026 22:43:04 +0000

pm2 has been buggy every time I’ve used it, no matter the OS. Incredibly convenient to begin with but simultaneously unpleasant to use software. Updating environment variables with a deployment has not once ever worked as intended.

New comment by roblh in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

roblh — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:29:36 +0000

Yeah, no. I installed a browser, I expect it to install the required components for it to work _as a browser_. I do not need a local AI model for it to do that. If there are features that need that, fine, but I expect it to at the very least ask permission since those are absolutely not required functions. It’s like if Word installed a bunch CAD modeling software in the background. There’s just no way it needs that to function for it’s primary purpose.

New comment by roblh in "Incident with multple GitHub services"

roblh — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:58:36 +0000

GitHub is going for “eight 8’s” at this rate.

New comment by roblh in "Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games"

roblh — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 06:03:53 +0000

And Void Stranger. I’m surprised not to see it mentioned anywhere in the comments.

New comment by roblh in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

roblh — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:45:29 +0000

For the love of god, yes. Slack is the worst for this with backticks. Editing the start/end points is a giant pain.

New comment by roblh in "My astrophotography in the movie Project Hail Mary"

roblh — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:14:17 +0000

I feel like the stars are probably pretty easy to mask out since they’re very bright relative to the rest of the image. Once you have the mask, each one is small enough that you could probably fill it with the values from adjacent pixels. Kinda like sensor mapping to hide dead pixels. That’s just a guess though, I’m sure there’s more to it than that.

New comment by roblh in "Six ingenious ways how Canon DSLRs used to illuminate their autofocus points"

roblh — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:07:31 +0000

I haven't used all of them, but I have used both the 9 point and the 45 point types, and the difference is massive. The 45 point was far, far more tactile and responsive. I don't mean speed of autofocus, but the actual way that the points sit over top of the viewfinder and light up, it's hard to explain. I'm sure part of that is software, but owning an older model and then trying out a newer one in the camera store in like 2013 really was eye opening, it blew my mind. The 9 point feels like a toy.

New comment by roblh in "Nobody ever got fired for using a struct"

roblh — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 04:04:07 +0000

I kinda love this. That sounds like an incredibly entertaining place to work for between 1 and 2 years in your late 20s and not a second longer.

New comment by roblh in "MacBook Neo"

roblh — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:42:58 +0000

Yeah, not even having an upgrade to 16gb or more makes this dead on arrival for anyone doing real work. Bummer, since otherwise it looks great. I guess it'd be the same price as a macbook air after that upgrade anyways though, so it doesn't really matter.

New comment by roblh in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

roblh — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:13:12 +0000

Kinda funny that the top image is capture one when Apple literally owns Photomator and gives you the option of bundling it when you buy.

New comment by roblh in ""Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name"

roblh — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:45:34 +0000

It's a not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. There are many elements of uncertainty in every action imaginable. I'm inclined to agree with the other commenter though, the LLM slot machine is absolutely closer on that spectrum to gambling than your example is.

Anthropic's optimization target is getting you to spend tokens, not produce the right answer. It's to produce an answer plausible enough but incomplete enough that you'll continue to spend as many tokens as possible for as long as possible. That's about as close to a slot machine as I can imagine. Slot rewards are designed to keep you interested as long as possible, on the premise that you _might_ get what you want, the jackpot, if you play long enough.

Anthropic's game isn't limited to a single spin either. The small wins (small prompts with well defined answers) are support for the big losses (trying to one shot a whole production grade program).

New comment by roblh in "What functional programmers get wrong about systems"

roblh — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 06:09:38 +0000

My experience with elixir, as a scrub who spends every day at work writing javascript, is pretty in line with that. The language forces you to work that way, and you spend half your time just architecting your supervision tree. But the language itself is so easy to write business logic in that it takes half as long as it would in another language. So it works out to the same total time investment but the return is so much higher cause your program is better and more predictable and has scaling for free.

New comment by roblh in "HTTP Cats"

roblh — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:50:42 +0000

I unironically use this website everytime I forget a status code at work. The name is instantly memorable, it loads immediately, and I can ctrl-f it. It's basically muscle memory at this point.