Hacker News: roblh

New comment by roblh in "'That's so AI ' What gen Alpha's biggest insult tells us"

roblh — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:52:51 +0000

Confessing to liking generated music is wild and legitimately embarrassing. Somehow, even compared to ripoff visual art, fake music is even more obviously plagiaristic. The stuff that it's ripping off already exists and isn't even hard to find since ALL of it is billed exactly as the style/genre that it's stealing from. That's the equivalent of framing and hanging a "ghibli style" generated print in your living room.

New comment by roblh in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""

roblh — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:39:27 +0000

I think I've written this before and generally people are horrified, but a neat trick I like to do for a little bit of concurrency is making the first argument an async function.

That means you have to await the accumulator at some point before you return it, but anything you do before that call all gets fired off immediately. Then each invidivual iteration waits for the one before it to finish before finishing itself.

It's a pretty niche pattern, but it's a good way to make your coworkers do a double take while giving you quite a bit of control over exactly how it behaves. Similar to Promise.all, but more expressive I feel.

New comment by roblh in "An update on Wayback Machine access"

roblh — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 19:10:42 +0000

Shouldn’t it follow that it’s illegal for the AI labs to profit off of all of that stolen copyrighted data too?

New comment by roblh in "Ending my elixir exploratory writing"

roblh — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:37:00 +0000

It's probably the language that punches the furthest above it's weight in community size vs. what you can do with it (and what is being done with it professionally), and I don't think it's even close really. The quality and capability and breadth of libraries people publish is really incredible, from web all the way down to embedded.

New comment by roblh in "OpenShot 4.0 – Open-source video editor"

roblh — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:43:48 +0000

Dunno if it’s just me, but I tried to download it the other day and couldn’t. The windows download link just punts you right back to their own site.

New comment by roblh in "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"

roblh — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:01:42 +0000

Maybe I’m naive, or misguided, or something else, but I decided almost 2 years ago that I’m going to bank on not using LLMs to do my job. I still write code by hand everyday. I don’t use AI to write code or lookup docs, or anything else. I just figure that if we really, truly, indisputably hit the point of AI assisted coding being mandatory, I can learn it and get up to speed in a few weeks (or at worst a couple months), whereas uncooking my brain is way way more expensive and time consuming and difficult. We’ll see how it plays out, but so far I don’t feel left behind at all really.

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.