Hacker News: smcleod

New comment by smcleod in "Show HN: Waffle – Native macOS terminal that auto-tiles sessions into a grid"

smcleod — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:01:20 +0000

I like the tiling concept but I don't see the source code linked, is this closed source? There's no way I'd run a terminal that didn't have publicly inspectable source, there's just too much that could go wrong.

New comment by smcleod in "Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read"

smcleod — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:14:37 +0000

Whoops! I was confusing refinedHN with modernHN (https://www.modernhn.com)

New comment by smcleod in "Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read"

smcleod — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:14:33 +0000

Whoops! I was confusing refinedHN with modernHN (https://www.modernhn.com)

New comment by smcleod in "Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read"

smcleod — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:15:51 +0000

I tried contacting the author to see if he would open source it but he's gone dark and doesn't seem to really exist on the Internet anymore. So I grabbed the source code and modernised it, added additional feature and it's what I've been using ever since. I haven't open sourced it out of respect for the original author however the software does not actually have any license that prevents it so I have been considering what the best approach might be (any ideas?).

*Edit: Whoops! I was confusing refinedHN with modernHN (https://www.modernhn.com)

New comment by smcleod in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

smcleod — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 09:12:16 +0000

It might be crisp but everything in the UI will be massive leaving you little space to work with.

New comment by smcleod in "Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS"

smcleod — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:14:03 +0000

Yeah props to Handy, really nice tool.

New comment by smcleod in "Running Gemma 4 locally with LM Studio's new headless CLI and Claude Code"

smcleod — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 10:33:00 +0000

Did you try the MLX model instead? In general MLX tends provide much better performance than GGUF/Llama.cpp on macOS.

New comment by smcleod in "New laws to make it easier to cancel subscriptions and get refunds"

smcleod — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:37:11 +0000

Brother to Jeff Gates?

New comment by smcleod in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

smcleod — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:30:07 +0000

If you're feeling brave, I've hacked up a way to make proper 4K scaling work, I only have a 60hz screen so it will need some modifications for 120hz but - https://github.com/sammcj/force-hidpi

New comment by smcleod in "Show HN: Coasts – Containerized Hosts for Agents"

smcleod — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:27:20 +0000

Does it support native macOS containers?

New comment by smcleod in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

smcleod — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:03:23 +0000

That's a 404, but if it only says 5120x2880 then you're not running full 4K HiDPI which would show 7680x as per the blog post.

New comment by smcleod in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

smcleod — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:40:20 +0000

5k might be a different story, are you actually running it at 5120p with 2.0 scale? You can get that from running `system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType`, if you are running HiDPI with 5k that'd show something like Resolution: "10240 x 5760", UI Looks like "5120 x 2880"

New comment by smcleod in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

smcleod — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:04:18 +0000

The 4 values in MaxSrcRectWidthForPipe are sub-pipes within each display controller, not separate display outputs. Every external display controller on the M5 Max has the same pattern: sub-pipe 0 = 6720, sub-pipes 1-3 = 7680. A single-stream 4K display only uses sub-pipe 0. Sub-pipes 1-3 are for multi-pipe configurations (8K displays use 2 sub-pipes, which is why an 8K EDID causes the DCP to assign PipeIDs=(0,2) with MaxPipes=2).

Your scaler clock theory could be right: the single-stream scaler path may genuinely have a lower throughput limit than the multi-pipe path.

Interestingly, the M2 Max uses a completely different IOMFBMaxSrcPixels structure. Instead of per-sub-pipe arrays, it has a flat MaxSrcRectWidth=7680 and MaxSrcRectTotal=33177600 (exactly 7680x4320) per controller. Every external display controller gets the full 7680 budget. Apple seems to have restructured the display controller architecture between M2 and M4/M5 to per-sub-pipe budgets, and the single-stream sub-pipe got a reduced allocation (6720 vs 7680) in the process. Whether that's a hardware change in the scaler or a firmware allocation policy is hard to say without Apple's documentation.

New comment by smcleod in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

smcleod — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 06:31:45 +0000

Without it - running 2160p@1x results in very low quality text rendering on macOS.

New comment by smcleod in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

smcleod — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 06:21:13 +0000

Yeah that would work, that's just 2k HiDPI, not 4k HiDPI.

New comment by smcleod in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

smcleod — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 05:53:24 +0000

I tried quite a few things in the "Advanced" section of BetterDisplay - is there something specifically you're suggesting?

New comment by smcleod in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

smcleod — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 05:40:08 +0000

Out of interest - whats the output of `system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType`?

New comment by smcleod in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

smcleod — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 05:38:00 +0000

Parts of it were pasted from my Claude Code Logs, Parts were written by me - and the table - that was me!

New comment by smcleod in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

smcleod — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 05:36:32 +0000

Unfortunately BetterDisplay cannot set HiDPI @ 4K on the M5 machines - that was the first thing I tried.

New comment by smcleod in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"

smcleod — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 05:35:22 +0000

Hey, thanks I hadn't tried screenresolution but that seems to simply set the resolution and refresh rate without controlling the scaling which is what is needed for configuring the HiDPI mode scaling.