Hacker News: sowbug

Spotify CLI

sowbug — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:12:59 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/spotify/save-to-spotify

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062612

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by sowbug in "I switched from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook"

sowbug — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:00:14 +0000

That's where I spend all my Chromebook work time. I run VSCode, Claude Code, and Opencode in the VM. The Tailscale package is wonky, so I use the Android app instead. Except for that wrinkle, it all just works.

It's not my main machine, but for $300 (2023 dollars) it's excellent for tinkering on the couch with Netflix on TV in the background.

New comment by sowbug in "Agents need control flow, not more prompts"

sowbug — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:42:08 +0000

A full-circle system prompt would be to "find every opportunity to put yourself out of your job by automating it away. When you are given a question that code can answer, answer the question by writing code and running it to obtain the result."

Such an LLM might have fared better with the strawberry test.

New comment by sowbug in "IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields"

sowbug — Wed, 06 May 2026 03:58:25 +0000

I can't do anything about Apple's culture, but it's been long enough that I doubt anyone would mind if I shared a story.

It was 1992. I was a summer intern on the System Software team. One of my projects was to improve a Disk Initialization Package feature to mark bad blocks found during disk init. The existing feature worked, but it was super slow, it didn't show progress, and it wasn't cancellable.

The UI was the trickiest part. I'd improved the speed a lot, but we still couldn't know how long the whole process would take, so every heuristic I used to show remaining time was awful.

I noticed this guy a few cubicles down had a "User Interface" title, so I wondered whether he'd be able to help. I asked him if he had a minute, and sat down and hashed it out with Apple employee #4, Bill Fernandez, the person who introduced the two Steves to each other.

He was truly the nicest person I met that summer, other than my manager. He completely understood the problem instantly and came up with a great solution: ditch the time estimate and replace it with an indeterminate progress bar that advanced as each disk track was tested. It worked, people liked it, and it shipped with the point release after 7.1.

Not quite as gee-whiz as any of Raymond's articles, but it's a start!

New comment by sowbug in "How Monero’s proof of work works"

sowbug — Mon, 04 May 2026 23:07:10 +0000

You seem to be earnestly and repeatedly attacking this strawman of "complete individual freedom" as antithetical to society, but I'd prefer that you not conflate it with the position I've taken in this discussion.

Happy to continue discussing if you'd like to reply to what I wrote.

New comment by sowbug in "How Monero’s proof of work works"

sowbug — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:28:57 +0000

Respectfully, I disagree that anyone has to make the case for it. That's exactly what freedom is: if society fails to "make the case" for prohibiting something, it defaults to legal. There's no general law requiring people to be good people, or to have common sense, which would be the same as defaulting to illegal. I presume you wouldn't like that, or the surveillance state that would be required to enforce it.

New comment by sowbug in "How Monero’s proof of work works"

sowbug — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:37:02 +0000

Some people think communication mechanisms shouldn't enforce policy. They don't want their phones automatically disconnecting if they talk to a friend about illegal or immoral things. They don't want their TVs shutting off if they watch stuff that's politically unacceptable. So it follows that they don't want their money throwing an exception if they try spending on an transaction too unsavory for Stripe or your bank.

Free speech is for all the stuff you personally detest and personally choose to avoid. In a free country you hold your nose and allow others to engage in it.

If money is speech, then having a kind of money that doesn't pass through policy gates is an essential component of a free society.

New comment by sowbug in "New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag"

sowbug — Sun, 03 May 2026 22:51:55 +0000

https://www.welikela.com/richard-ankrom-guerilla-public-serv...

New comment by sowbug in "Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?"

sowbug — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:33:29 +0000

Since this is a tech audience... the Supreme Court uses a bounded priority queue. An unbounded queue would risk growing impractically large.

There are some kinds of cases where the Court has "original jurisdiction," meaning they must hear them, but those are very rare.

New comment by sowbug in "Your phone is about to stop being yours"

sowbug — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:56:19 +0000

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling-off_period_(consumer_r.... It's an old solution to an old problem: give the potential victim a chance to think clearly while the damage can still be undone.

New comment by sowbug in "GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes"

sowbug — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:05:54 +0000

I have Gitea and Gitea Runner apps running on TrueNAS on an extra mini PC in a closet. Works better than GitHub for me.

New comment by sowbug in "Running Bare-Metal Rust Alongside ESP-IDF on the ESP32-S3's Second Core"

sowbug — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:28:38 +0000

My brain broke a little when I read this. Today I learned the C stands for Core, and the S stands for Speed, or Strength, or maybe Superior. My working assumption that C meant RISC-V and S meant Xtensa was incorrect.

New comment by sowbug in "Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race"

sowbug — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 23:02:17 +0000

You actually can get a ticket for driving 13 in a 25, at least in the US, so you're not entirely incorrect.

New comment by sowbug in "SWE-bench Verified no longer measures frontier coding capabilities"

sowbug — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:38:51 +0000

Why don't they ask their premier model to generate a bench for them?

It's not a crazy idea. Have the older model interview the newer one and then ask both (or maybe a third referee model) which one they think is smarter. Repeat 100x with different seeds. The percentage of times both sides agree the newer model won is the score.

New comment by sowbug in "I'm done making desktop applications (2009)"

sowbug — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:00:42 +0000

A similar dynamic is playing out with Anthropic, whose founders left OpenAI in part over a philosophical split that could be described, if you'll grant a little literary license appropriate to this thread, as Anthropic choosing the "don't be evil" path. No surprise that we now see HN commentary skewering Anthropic for not living up to it.

New comment by sowbug in "I'm done making desktop applications (2009)"

sowbug — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:27:51 +0000

The original expression came out of an internal company discussion that someone summarized (paraphrased) as "when there's a tough choice to make, one is usually less evil. Make that choice."

In the early days of Google in the public consciousness, this turned into "you can make money without being evil." (From the 2004 S-1.)

Over time, it got shortened to "don't be evil." But this phrase became an obligatory catchphrase for anyone's gripes against Google The Megacorp. Hey, Google, how come there's no dark mode on this page? Whatever happened to "don't be evil"? It didn't serve its purpose anymore, so it was dropped.

Answering your question really depends on your priors. I could see someone honestly believing Google was never in that era, or that it has always been from the start. I strongly believe that the original (and today admittedly stale) sentiment has never changed.

New comment by sowbug in "Scoring Show HN submissions for AI design patterns"

sowbug — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:17:49 +0000

Were/Are human-generated side projects better in this respect?

New comment by sowbug in "CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes"

sowbug — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:26:05 +0000

I used to own a truck whose fair market value would double, temporarily, whenever I filled the tank.

New comment by sowbug in "Show HN: GoModel – an open-source AI gateway in Go"

sowbug — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:03:49 +0000

Are these kinds of libraries a temporary phenomenon? It strikes me as weird that providers haven't settled on a single API by now. Of course they aren't interested in making it easier for customers to switch away from them, but if a proprietary API was a critical part of your business plan, you probably weren't going to make it anyway.

(I'm asking only about the compatibility layer; the other tracking features would be useful even if there were only one cloud LLM API.)

New comment by sowbug in "Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing"

sowbug — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:16:09 +0000

An older Stratechery article discusses the black-box point: https://stratechery.com/2018/techs-two-philosophies/

Apple and Microsoft want to be your robot exoskeleton, helping you do whatever you were going to do, but better. Google and Facebook want to do things for you and hand you the results.