Hacker News: smetj

New comment by smetj in "People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account"

smetj — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 06:48:05 +0000

I run Linux. If there's something I'm missing out because of that, then I accept it rather than going through this hell.

New comment by smetj in "Why isn't LA repaving streets?"

smetj — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:43:15 +0000

red tape, regulations, corruption, low pay, inflated prices, a gamed system. Although the topic is unrelated, I came across this the other day ... makes one think https://youtu.be/JTEJH-tKv9Q?t=910

New comment by smetj in "Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop"

smetj — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 10:42:31 +0000

Generally speaking, the value of these contributions was determined by "proof of work". Time and effort are precious to a human hence its a somewhat self-regulating system preventing huge amounts of low quality contributions being generated. This is now gone. Isn't that an interesting problem to fix?

New comment by smetj in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

smetj — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:01:55 +0000

Here's mine: https://smetj.net/

New comment by smetj in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

smetj — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:00:32 +0000

Beautiful! Nice work.

New comment by smetj in "Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales"

smetj — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 08:28:00 +0000

Be it as it may, its aesthetics are so distinct it isn't for everybody. Also a big part of the target audience expecting to buy an utility vehicle have cheaper, proven and more practical alternatives. I guess the fact its not road legal in the EU doesn't help either whilst other Tesla models are quite popular there.

New comment by smetj in "I hate GitHub Actions with passion"

smetj — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:02:24 +0000

Its not Github Actions' fault but the horrors people create in it, all under the pretense that automation is simply about wrapping a GitHub Action around something. Learn to create a script in Python or similar and put all logic there so you can execute it locally and can port it to the next CI system when a new CTO arrives.

New comment by smetj in "I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too"

smetj — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 18:25:56 +0000

Its simple. If you require specific software which only runs on Windows, then you cannot use Linux. If that's not the case, the Linux desktop these days is entirely capable of helping you achieve your goals.

New comment by smetj in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

smetj — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:14:54 +0000

Well ... IMO this is literally replacing (entry-level) engineers, but lets agree to disagree on that. Be it as it may ... task automation is also "a product" then not? 5 years ago, this wasn't possible. Now it is, so extrapolate that to the future ...

ps: If you can guarantee the Powerball lottery continues forever, I can give you a guaranteed winning combination.

New comment by smetj in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

smetj — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 11:46:40 +0000

At work, I was involved in a project where a large number of individual tasks defined as declarative code had to be translated into JS based equivalents. Due to the unpredictability of each task we would have to do this pretty much manually, one by one. I would estimate at minimum 2 months of grunt work for 4 entry level engineers. Thanks to coding agents and LLMs we were able to achieve this task in a week. Quality of the end result is top notch.

If that's not a product ... then I don't know what it is.

- What was the state of AI/LLMs 5 years ago compared to now? There was nothing.

- What is the current state of AI/LLMs? I can already achieve the above.

- What will that look like 5 years down the road?

I you haven't experienced first-hand a specific task before and after AI/LLMs, I think its indeed difficult to get insight into that last question. Keep in mind that progress is probably exponential, not linear.

New comment by smetj in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

smetj — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 11:02:41 +0000

it is happening, just not everywhere at the same time at once

New comment by smetj in "KDE onboarding is good now"

smetj — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 10:24:22 +0000

This has not been my experience at all ... I run KDE + Fedora or Ubuntu on laptops for years as my daily driver doing professional work. Its an absolute joy to work with and stable. If there's a hickup then its because some unrelated process is consuming all memory or hogging all CPUs (Slack, Teams I'm looking at you) which would crash any desktop.

New comment by smetj in "Avoid Mini-Frameworks"

smetj — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 13:19:53 +0000

Somehow, somewhere there is a pleasant balance between DRY and non-DRY which is different for everybody. God forbid having a colleague who sees a thing repeating and slaps an abstraction over it at whatever cost because DRY!

New comment by smetj in "Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?"

smetj — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 15:25:00 +0000

Exactly! Linkportals and webrings ...

New comment by smetj in "What Killed Perl?"

smetj — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 15:27:29 +0000

Perl became popular because there was not really an alternative on par with its capabilities and because it was bundled with every Linux distro. But then Python came along and picked up momentum and because of that, people realized Perl's syntax is actually not very intuitive to read and understand compared to Python.

New comment by smetj in "Helm 4.0"

smetj — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 10:27:55 +0000

> What is the essence of the complaint here?

As said, that I often cannot relate the managed application's documentation to the Helm chart's interface?

Reason for it can vary ... poor Helm chart documentation, poor Helm chart design, Helm chart not in sync with application releases, ... The consequence is that I often need to grep through its templates and logic to figure out how to poke the chart's interface to achieve what I want. I don't think that's reasonable to say that's part of the end-user experience.

PS: I have no gripes with YAML

New comment by smetj in "Helm 4.0"

smetj — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 19:10:15 +0000

Came here to feel the temperature of the comments, and unsurprisingly, most folks seem to have plenty of gripes with Helm.

A Helm chart is often a poorly documented abstraction layer which often makes it impossible to relate back the managed application's original documentation to the Helm chart's "interface". The number of times I had to grep through the templates to figure out how to access a specific setting ...

New comment by smetj in "David Lynch LA House"

smetj — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 05:15:26 +0000

Beyond stunning, worth its asking price imo.

New comment by smetj in "Unsafe and Unpredictable: My Volvo EX90 Experience"

smetj — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 14:02:06 +0000

Yes, I deliberately left that out for personal reasons. With a little sleuthing you should be able to figure out the brand.

New comment by smetj in "Unsafe and Unpredictable: My Volvo EX90 Experience"

smetj — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 08:56:23 +0000

Understood ... thanks for clarifying ... I'm genuinely intrigued. You're right that image is generated by a generative model, however my humble blog content .... I do write myself. "Don't judge a book by its cover!" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯