Hacker News: tomaskafka

New comment by tomaskafka in "Deus Ex"

tomaskafka — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 18:39:04 +0000

That’s what Unreal engine had built in from start, these transitions were amazing even in first OG Unreal (leaving the ship for the first time into the planets jungle and waterfalls, oooh!)

New comment by tomaskafka in "Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative"

tomaskafka — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 11:48:31 +0000

For agents, M1s are the ancient machines, made long before they were born, and, the horror, barely enough to provide enough nutrients to even a small LLM.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?"

tomaskafka — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 09:04:23 +0000

Thanks, I didn't know much about the state of ethernet over HDMI - and am glad we can still have a way to send picture without giving the recipient network access.

And same, prev gen is perfectly fine for decade to come.

New comment by tomaskafka in "An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted them"

tomaskafka — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 09:02:58 +0000

I completely understand that, but I also trust Monsanto to fully intentionally destroy crops that could save us in order to improve next year's margins.

New comment by tomaskafka in "sshole"

tomaskafka — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 14:55:46 +0000

Yes, "this looks like an underhanded c challenge" was my first thought when reading this. See one mistake by one project, inject the matching intentional mistake into another project (that also conveniently fixes some known bug), and boom - plausibly deniable backdoor.

If I had a free afternoon, I'd ask a bunch of agents to track the people responsible and their other contributions (but usually the scheme is "contribute valuable patches to build reputation, and only inject an exploit when safe to do so").

New comment by tomaskafka in "sshole"

tomaskafka — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 13:54:13 +0000

At this point it feels to me we aren’t discovering security bugs but a decade of planted backdoors.

New comment by tomaskafka in "HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN"

tomaskafka — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 11:38:04 +0000

The issue is that by now the Reddit is also being taken over by the marketers, masquerading as people asking for help and people helpfully responding with product recommendations.

New comment by tomaskafka in "An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted them"

tomaskafka — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 10:14:18 +0000

If Monsanto knows what they're doing, they will corporate buyout this guy and destroy his competing wheat never to be seen again - that's the optimal market solution for maximal profits.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?"

tomaskafka — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 08:50:21 +0000

I was going to write buy Apple TV and never ever connect the actual TV to the internet, but:

- I am unsure whether modern TVs utilize ethernet over HDMI to connect to internet through Apple TV (I have no idea why Apple TV should allow this, but I don't trust Apple to not accidentally enable this)?

- I can only imagine nefarious five eyes reasons for why Apple released Apple TV that plays 4k60 exactly like the previous models, but now has 8 GB RAM, powerful machine learning CPU, and built-in microphones that are impossible to disable

So, apart from getting used prev gen Apple TV (and still having to trust company whose leader has to accept Trumps's lunch invite), I have no good advice.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it"

tomaskafka — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 07:43:19 +0000

It sounds like Maths Co. will be only hiring forward deployed mathematicians from now on.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Infinite Mac: BeOS"

tomaskafka — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 18:54:57 +0000

Damn, I spent some time getting Opus 5 to do this for Mac, being proud of discovering a new UI metaphor - bringing a set of workflow related windows into one “tabbed meta-window”.

Good work everyone who made this for Haiku.

New comment by tomaskafka in "US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans"

tomaskafka — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:55:22 +0000

It gets rather simple once you start thinking of the US as the richest third world country.

Inequality, price and state of healthcare system, huge polluters getting away, it all checks out.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Opus 5.5 causing an identity crisis is real"

tomaskafka — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 12:41:49 +0000

Also it took 80 years of events with “massacre” in name to estabilish basic limitations on capital class, like not exploiting children or allowing people to work less than 6x12 hours per week.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Code-execution flaw in UEFI firmware threatens most servers on planet Earth"

tomaskafka — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 12:38:13 +0000

At this moment I am not sure whether we are discovering bugs or planted backdoors.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Ghostty 1.4"

tomaskafka — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 12:26:17 +0000

I would love a mashup of iTerm2 (for tabbed quake terminal and configurability) with libghossty, would anyone want to tell Claude to marry them (and maintain it)?

Or, just please finally enable tabs in the quick window, people are shouting about this for years, making forks, ready made PRs … This functionality is a table stakes in 2026.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Git for the US Code"

tomaskafka — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 12:21:08 +0000

As long as there are people who allocate billions with a sign of the pen, with zero personal responsibility and skin in the game, there will be whole industries dedicated to swaying their hand.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Wikipedia's Cleanup of AI-Generated Content"

tomaskafka — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:30:47 +0000

Funny, I wanted to mention grokipedia as an example of why a pile of slop that’s subtly wrong about many details is a bad idea.

New comment by tomaskafka in "Wikipedia's Cleanup of AI-Generated Content"

tomaskafka — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:28:16 +0000

Same feeling here - not sure if it’s AI, or zealous wikipedians + incentives that make addition easy but editing and pruning means stepping on many other writers turf, but I used to enjoy reading articles, while now many are more useful as “information fodder” for LLM to summarize and interpret.

New comment by tomaskafka in "The Decoherence Trap"

tomaskafka — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:25:07 +0000

Thanks! I think you’re right, that’s a valuable observation I missed.

Analogous to how we create “bottleneck layers” for image generation/recognition, forcing the models to create semantic representations instead of memorizing.

I feel that doing this for LLMs at runtime is severely underexplored.

New comment by tomaskafka in "The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf]"

tomaskafka — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:49:33 +0000

It is, but it is also how the Manhattan project became "visible" to intelligence community - scientists related to nuclear research stopped publishing papers.