Hacker News: smith7018

New comment by smith7018 in "E Ink Kaleido 4"

smith7018 — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 21:00:20 +0000

Bringing full colour _and_ high refresh rate would move these out of the eBook world into more into every day technology. There's definitely a market for colour eInk monitors, tablets, phones, etc. but the technology just isn't there yet. More and more people are wanting to disconnect from tech or at least minimize its addictiveness and a colour eInk screen would be a great step for people. That way they can still watch youtube, take photos, scroll their apps but the experience will feel less saturated and alluring.

New comment by smith7018 in "I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it's my Home Assistant dashboard"

smith7018 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 07:21:23 +0000

"demanding money"

Do you "demand money" when you do the job you were contracted to do? You make it sound like they're money grubbing and greedy for expecting payment for their services.

New comment by smith7018 in "Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS"

smith7018 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 20:23:58 +0000

I'm sure it'll be a permission the user can toggle. So they won't be taking away the ability for apps to see all the files but they'll be adding an extra layer of security so users can choose what an app can see. They're being light on details at the moment though.

New comment by smith7018 in "56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience"

smith7018 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 03:09:09 +0000

I had the first iPhone and distinctly remember telling people "I have the entire internet in my pocket at all times" and people finding it strange. I said "I never really have to log off Facebook or Digg" and my friends didn't understand what I meant.

New comment by smith7018 in "PS5 Relapse Exploit"

smith7018 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:13:37 +0000

There's also a Switch emulator that's being made for the PS5 that's a port of Eden. It's called ProsperoEden and can already run some games [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXGiTuSAZ5o

New comment by smith7018 in "GPT-6 Sol and Luna"

smith7018 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 18:28:50 +0000

I read that there are rumors that they're getting rid of that tier. No idea where the rumor came from, though. This lends credence to it, I suppose.

New comment by smith7018 in "Apple Mac mini review"

smith7018 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:55:22 +0000

That would be ~$1,995 today due to inflation. That's basically what the entry-level 14 inch MacBook Pro costs today. You're comparing the Pro to the Air's pricing.

New comment by smith7018 in "M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review"

smith7018 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:40:34 +0000

Yeah, Apple has spent 3 years each on the 5nm and 3nm nodes with TSMC. There are some reports [1] that it will jump to 1.4nm after 2 years due to AI but there's no real proof. The source is Digitimes who are frequently wrong with their predictions and rumors.

[1] https://wccftech.com/apple-to-move-to-1-4nm-process-soon-to-...

New comment by smith7018 in "Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month"

smith7018 — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 15:11:25 +0000

This article is about the M5 and the A18 Pro so your M3 contributions will be extremely useful!

New comment by smith7018 in "Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month"

smith7018 — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:39:25 +0000

I imagine either they or others can take their discoveries and write a real driver now, though. The hard part was always the reversing the black box system.

New comment by smith7018 in "OpenAI buys smartphone camera maker Glass Imaging for $300M"

smith7018 — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 16:30:20 +0000

Then it comes down to cost of compute. Are companies going to add a multiplier on their compute costs to reach a platform with no users? It's still the same problem.

New comment by smith7018 in "OpenAI buys smartphone camera maker Glass Imaging for $300M"

smith7018 — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:46:17 +0000

That's unfortunately a rosy view of it. It might be easier to take source from one platform to another but that was never the issue; the issue is keeping it up to date with releases, testing it as often as other platforms, and handling user support tickets. The chicken and egg situation still applies here and companies aren't going to spend all the time and money on a new platform if users aren't asking for it.

New comment by smith7018 in "iPod Classic 6G in QEMU"

smith7018 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 20:37:48 +0000

Do you remember if it was named Musika? [1] If so, that game has actually been decrypted so I could work on a recomp. There's also Phase [2] which seems like the more likely pick. Unfortunately, it was never decrypted. I modeled out the Metadata db structure that the iPod OS exposed to games that represented its iTunesDB so I should be able to support custom songs/albums in a recomp in the future. Long term, I'd love to be able to BYO API key for Spotify and expose your Spotify library to the game as your "iPod's" music. I feel like that would modernize the experience. I'll get there when work calms down and I'm no longer working 60 hour work weeks :(

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfuF_i7N2M4

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9scEk1_lQXc

New comment by smith7018 in "iPod Classic 6G in QEMU"

smith7018 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:24:11 +0000

Great work! I'm the guy that's working on recompiling the iPod games for modern systems (I'm mentioned by the top comment in your Reddit post). Have you tried installing the games in the emulator? If so, this would be a huge step in figuring out the DRM so people can dump their own games. That would lead to more games being supported in siggifly's 5.5G emulator [1] and eventually the games can be brought to more modern platforms.

[1] https://github.com/siggifly/ipod-emulator/ I made the PR that allowed it to run dumped games fwiw

New comment by smith7018 in "Asahi Linux on M3"

smith7018 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 17:24:06 +0000

Bootcamp on Intel Macs was a different story because Apple's hardware was mostly an assortment of other vendors' hardware (with some custom components and set up). That means they could bundle drivers for Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, Realtek, Marvell, Synaptics, etc plus a couple of their own (the camera, the touchpad, the mouse, etc) and call it a day. Since the hardware was x86-64 it mostly just worked. That's an immensely different world from their custom hardware. They would need to write Linux drivers for all of their networking chips, each of their processors, their GPUs, work around Linux/Windows' 16KB memory page issues, their neural engines, the SEP, their DCP, the interrupt controller, IOMMU, their custom storage drivers, etc. You're vastly underselling or misunderstanding the size of the situation.

They were also in a different place back when they made Bootcamp. They were fighting a "Mac vs PC" battle head on and trying to convert other OS users to macOS. Now they don't really seem to care about that because their strategy is converting iPhone users into ecosystem members.

New comment by smith7018 in "Asahi Linux on M3"

smith7018 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 17:12:44 +0000

Sure but that's not really their point. They're not saying that Linux is a joke nor that it's useless; they're saying that the amount of people installing Linux on their Macs is so small that it wouldn't make financial sense for Apple to support them. Knowing how much an engineer gets paid, even staffing a small team to supporting Linux would cost Apple a couple million each year. That's not even taking support into account.

New comment by smith7018 in "Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices"

smith7018 — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:47:05 +0000

I genuinely can't take this comment seriously if you think BlueSky has a CSAM and bullying problem while staying on X.

New comment by smith7018 in "Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra"

smith7018 — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:23:04 +0000

I think it's great but it's important to remember that we haven't seen Xiaomi's chips in actual devices under real world tests. We don't know if the speeds are sustainable, under what wattage, etc. Competition is still great and I look forward to learning more, of course.

New comment by smith7018 in "Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded"

smith7018 — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 17:48:44 +0000

Specifically, the M7 is supposedly coming out in the Spring. The M6 band is going to be so small because the M7 will have a lot of AI-focused upgrades and Apple doesn't want to waste manufacturing on M6 Pro/Max/Ultra chips when they can start building the M7 sooner.

New comment by smith7018 in "A week of using Codex more than Claude"

smith7018 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 22:32:32 +0000

iPod Classic click wheel games. Specifically Mini Golf. I've also been working on an emulator for the others and it can now boot all of the 20 decrypted games released ~20 years ago and play most of them. There's a Sims Bowling, Sims Pool, and Lost game in there which is cool from a preservation standpoint. Less cool are the SAT Prep 2008 games which have actually been surprisingly annoying to emulate due to the way the text uses blend modes.

I plan on releasing all of this at one point. It's crazy it hasn't been done in 20 years!