Hacker News: tomaskafka

New comment by tomaskafka in "This Month in Ladybird – April 2026"

tomaskafka — Wed, 13 May 2026 10:37:41 +0000

Thanks! Looking forward!

New comment by tomaskafka in "The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)"

tomaskafka — Wed, 13 May 2026 10:29:47 +0000

So that's where the Control game art direction got inspired :).

I love the lore, thanks!

New comment by tomaskafka in "Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model"

tomaskafka — Tue, 12 May 2026 22:22:22 +0000

Awesome! I just tried to set an alarm and add some groceries to the shopping list, and it outperformed Siri.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Batteries Not Included, or Required, for These Smart Home Sensors"

tomaskafka — Wed, 06 May 2026 19:51:21 +0000

I think we already established "eff anyone sharing the planet with us that's not us" the moment we made acoustic underwater sonars that make life hell for any whale or dolphin in 100 km range, so this is keeping that approach ...

New comment by tomaskafka in "Batteries Not Included, or Required, for These Smart Home Sensors"

tomaskafka — Wed, 06 May 2026 19:49:10 +0000

Finally, we are making the smart surveillance dust from the famous "Don't Make Smart Surveillance Dust" novel!

New comment by tomaskafka in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

tomaskafka — Sun, 03 May 2026 12:01:46 +0000

"Well, they turned the entire OS into a tracking, sales and ad/propaganda delivery service, but they managed to make a single feature non-dumb, so guess we're even."

(propaganda - Windows 11 default widgets are "offering" a lot of russian-biased media, because Microsoft is too dumb to recognize that and they take any news source - and russian connected outlets are happy to use this delivery vector that most gullible people leave turned on)

New comment by tomaskafka in "This Month in Ladybird – April 2026"

tomaskafka — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:53:29 +0000

I thinkk it's about time Ladybird got some official prebuilt binaries - I'd love to try it, but I'm not going to install its whole dev environment and build it from source.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Six Years Perfecting Maps on WatchOS"

tomaskafka — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:50:02 +0000

That might be right - Garmin is doing the best they can with vector maps, but in Apple land, 3 fps rendering wouldn't fly.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Six years perfecting maps on watchOS"

tomaskafka — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:48:02 +0000

I think it is long overdue for rebrand, as right now the marketing is "it's a simple utility to show the daily step counts Apple is already collecting anyway, oh and by the way it has awesome offline maps almost no other apps offer", which is a bit of a weird sell.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Six years perfecting maps on watchOS"

tomaskafka — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:43:58 +0000

This is Apple's work - they show all enabled purchases/subscriptions author have enabled for price testing. And once you add one, removing it would mean the user's subscriptions auto-renew would get canceled, so they stay and accumulate.

And there is no way for the app to mark "this is the current pricing".

New comment by tomaskafka in "Networking changes coming in macOS 27"

tomaskafka — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:50:59 +0000

My app launcher loads fine as well, but sometimes (a few times a week) it just doesn't find any apps at all. Or only some of them.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Networking changes coming in macOS 27"

tomaskafka — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:48:56 +0000

Apple hardware team looking at Apple software team: You guys, everything OK over there?

New comment by tomaskafka in "GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing"

tomaskafka — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:54:29 +0000

Well, the free launch for somebody else's money is over.

New comment by tomaskafka in "MacBook Neo and how the iPad should be"

tomaskafka — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 07:35:44 +0000

I don't want to see it either, but as I run my app business, I much prefer being able to fix the issue if it happens, without taking my $2000+ MBP for a two week road trip full of sand and dirt.

New comment by tomaskafka in "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports"

tomaskafka — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 07:34:08 +0000

While I hate all the gaslighting Anthropic seems to do recently (and the fact that their harness broke the code quality, while they forbid use of third party harnesses), making decisions for users is what UX is.

See also the difference between eg. MacOS (with large M, the older good versions) and waiting for "Year of linux on desktop".

I don't think the issue is making decisions for users, but trying to switch off the soup tap in the all-you-can-eat soup bar. Or, wrong business model setting wrong incentives to both sides.

New comment by tomaskafka in "MacBook Neo and how the iPad should be"

tomaskafka — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:11:05 +0000

Neither I, nor Craig has any issue with that :).

New comment by tomaskafka in "MacBook Neo and how the iPad should be"

tomaskafka — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:10:32 +0000

Yes, but what I meant was to have an IDE, where I could run and debug the stack, and deploy when happy.

Technically totally doable, just give me a VS Code + local Linux container (Apple Silicon is great at virtualization) to which it can tunnel.

In practice, impossible with Apple's limitations.

New comment by tomaskafka in "MacBook Neo and how the iPad should be"

tomaskafka — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:04:29 +0000

I sign this essay. Apple has apparently multiple opposing goals for the iPadOS:

1. Make it powerful enough so that it can be sold as equivalent to macOS

2. Keep it locked like iOS, to be sold as secure alternative to computer for your parents and kids (which rules out all the workflow customization pros need)

3. Don’t make it powerful enough for people to stop buying Macs (Tim Cook’s biggest fear is of you not buying another slab of glass - no multiprofile for you, ever)

The intersection of these is an empty set.

I use my 2018 Pro as a great browser and YouTube machine, with zero intent to upgrade until the above situation changes. It’s useless for anything else, and even if I got M4 powerhouse, I wouldn’t be able to take it as a single machine for holiday for emergency Weathergraph hotfix or server debugging.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Website streamed live directly from a model"

tomaskafka — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:29:39 +0000

I applaud the idea and the technological part of that, but of course, as with all AI models, it produces utter slop once you go even a tiny bit outside of the learning data.

For example, here I asked for a mechanism of converting the circular motion to wing flapping, and it has no idea what to do at all.

https://flipbook.page/n/21f96ba33aa94852bc1f567bc5cd23bf

The core problem with using AI to learn is that if you don't know about the specific area (which you don't, that's why you are learning it), it can (and absolutely will) fake knowledge without you ever noticing it, and be utterly wrong, disseminating false info, and teaching you (or your kids) wrong world models.

New comment by tomaskafka in "The RAM shortage could last years"

tomaskafka — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 11:59:38 +0000

They are not happy to invest tens of billions for new capacities for Sam Altman’s “I will surely buy once I have money, pinky promise”.