Hacker News: tao_oat

New comment by tao_oat in "Track your workout from the iPhone Lock Screen"

tao_oat — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:08:52 +0000

I think this app is a great example of AI-driven app creation!

New comment by tao_oat in "Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence"

tao_oat — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:58:59 +0000

I generally rely on LMArena for this: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/code/webdev/pareto

But it does take some days after model release before they collect enough data.

New comment by tao_oat in "Track your workout from the iPhone Lock Screen"

tao_oat — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:41:56 +0000

Interesting; I was looking for a replacement for Strong for iOS just yesterday. Strong was a great app but the dev hasn't been keeping up-to-date with iOS features like live activities and such.

I found that there are loads of apps like this out there, with varying degrees of polish / paywalls. Don't get me wrong, this one doesn't look bad! But what I really want is a demonstrated long-term commitment to the app.

If I can give one piece of feedback, the LLM copy on this website doesn't inspire confidence. Like it mentions "Identical layout: kg always on the left, reps on the right." Is that really a feature? Or "Confetti, only when earned. Never as filler." -- idunno, that doesn't seem like it deserves a spot on the landing page to me.

New comment by tao_oat in "At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic"

tao_oat — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:30:51 +0000

I tried to list all the traits I could think of:

- Orange/beige-ish colors - Rounded corners - Cards with a thin border - A thicker colored border on the left of cards - Serif font for headings - Monospace fonts for small text - Headings that often have an unnecessary subheading / pre-heading - Little badges, often with a "status indicator" dot on the left - Obviously LLM-generated text / language

I'm sure I'm missing many but the above are dead giveaways!

New comment by tao_oat in "How Version Control Will Evolve for the Agent Boom"

tao_oat — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 13:48:06 +0000

> moving code repos into a decentralised hosting environment

It's unclear to me what Entire means by decentralized. Based on their most recent blog post (https://entire.io/blog/an-entirely-new-git-hosting-network) it seems like they just mean globally distributed, but all controlled by them.

In contrast, Tangled at least offers something where you can own your own data!

New comment by tao_oat in "GTA 6 will cost $80"

tao_oat — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 16:00:18 +0000

The price seems sensible to me, these AAA titles are expensive to create.

Not that it'll affect me personally; I'm not buying this game after Rockstar's [union busting][1]!

[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9v10rr1meeo

New comment by tao_oat in "We're making Bunny DNS free: because a faster internet won't build itself"

tao_oat — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 09:55:40 +0000

I'm using Bunny DNS and it's been mostly unremarkable (which is a very good thing for a DNS provider)!

The only annoyance is that their domain import auto-detects existing records, but it seems to miss a lot of them so you end up manually copying a lot of things over anyway.

New comment by tao_oat in "Danish privacy activist Lars Andersen raided by police"

tao_oat — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:32:03 +0000

Sure thing. If you view his X profile without logging in, nearly all his top posts demonstrate what I mean: advocating for remigration (i.e. ethnic cleansing), comparing Muslims to monkeys, supporting far-right figures like Tommy Robinson and Rasmus Paludan, sharing YouTube comments with racial slurs...

New comment by tao_oat in "Danish privacy activist Lars Andersen raided by police"

tao_oat — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:16:14 +0000

Because no one has mentioned it here: Lars Andersen is also a right-wing extremist who regularly posts racist content on social media. His privacy/free speech activism seems to be (at least partly) motivated by this.

I think this is useful context for evaluating his judgment.

New comment by tao_oat in "There are no instances in ATProto"

tao_oat — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 10:47:59 +0000

When Bluesky got DDoS'ed then, many people switched to using another AppView like Blacksky and things worked just fine.

But this is indeed somewhat technical; in an ideal world clients would automatically fall back to alternative AppViews.

New comment by tao_oat in "There Are No Instances in ATProto"

tao_oat — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:56:06 +0000

In AT you also get communities, in the same way that twitter had weird twitter, black twitter, and so on. But because you, by design, don't really see what PDS people use, it's more fluid.

I personally think that this actually leads to healthier communities but that may be a matter of taste!

New comment by tao_oat in "There are no instances in ATProto"

tao_oat — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:02:37 +0000

Most decentralized systems I can think of tend to follow a power law distribution (roughly) where one or a few platforms dominate. In the fediverse that's mastodon.social (or maybe Threads), in email that's Gmail, in AP that's Bluesky. I'm not sure this is unique to the AT protocol?

New comment by tao_oat in "There are no instances in ATProto"

tao_oat — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:59:31 +0000

I'm not sure there is such a thing as "true" decentralization :) In my mind it's more of a buffet of tradeoffs rather than a single sliding scale.

FWIW, in the AP world there are several individuals and small teams running relays/mirrors/caches/AppViews and so on -- but you're right that this could get more expensive as things grow.

New comment by tao_oat in "The forge we deserve"

tao_oat — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 15:25:31 +0000

I am indeed aware of them! To the best of my knowledge (please correct me if I am wrong) it's not actually usable functionality today and has been WIP for a long time, so it seems somewhat hypothetical. Their Mastodon account hasn't posted in over a year.

New comment by tao_oat in "The forge we deserve"

tao_oat — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 15:13:57 +0000

(OP here) I'd love to see more decentralized alternatives out there!

AFAICT there is no actually-existing ForgeFed instances that I could use today, but I'm keeping an eye on it - let a thousand flowers bloom :)

New comment by tao_oat in "W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty"

tao_oat — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:43:44 +0000

This would make sense but seems unlikely to me, because the people involved come across as incredibly offline.

New comment by tao_oat in "W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty"

tao_oat — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:38:10 +0000

If you use bsky.app, you still see posts from other servers (Blacksky, Eurosky, W Social, and so on). But yes, by the protocol's design you're primarily interacting with one central aggregator of everything (Bluesky's AppView).

New comment by tao_oat in "W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty"

tao_oat — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:21:49 +0000

I thought this was a good post on the topic: [W Social is TruthSocial with a European accent.][1]

[^1]: https://wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub/3mokohkfb4224

New comment by tao_oat in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On?"

tao_oat — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:40:31 +0000

I've been working on https://favs.blue/ -- lets you see the top posts from any Bluesky user.

I missed favstar.fm so I tried making something similar on an open social network!

New comment by tao_oat in "There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing"

tao_oat — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:01:25 +0000

I agree with the point, but I think it's fair to acknowledge that the current US government is not a "normal" one in any sense.