Hacker News: tomduncalf

New comment by tomduncalf in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

tomduncalf — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 09:32:33 +0000

For you maybe but seems a reasonable compromise to hit the price point and I bet you’d miss it less than you think

New comment by tomduncalf in "Hammerspoon"

tomduncalf — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 21:18:46 +0000

As chance would have it, I just tried this for the first time as I wanted to bind a keyboard shortcut to an option from a menu bar app which doesn’t support keybinding. ChatGPT wrote a script which uses AppleScript to do it. Really anwesome, and excited to find more cool things to do with it!

New comment by tomduncalf in "MacBook Neo"

tomduncalf — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 15:06:28 +0000

This is going to be a huge success and to me makes so much sense as a product. I’m always amazed at the range of opinions people have on these topics. Might even pick one up for myself to use on the go, I had been thinking about an Air but I don’t need much by the way of power in all honesty

New comment by tomduncalf in "Claude Composer"

tomduncalf — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 23:31:02 +0000

I’ll take this opportunity to plug a couple of experiments I’ve not progressed any further but thought were fun:

- Using Claude as a “pair producer” in Ableton by giving it access to the Ableton remote script API so it can create patterns - this was 1 year ago so I’d be interested to see how newer models can do https://youtu.be/2WxSB75U6vg

- A Claude Code skill which teaches it how to arrange Ableton loops into songs (by modifying the XML as there isn’t an API for this): https://youtu.be/P6Zw6f6CEbI and https://youtu.be/tVZigxFceUE

Ace-Step 1.5: Pushing the Boundaries of Open-Source Music Generation

tomduncalf — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 10:10:32 +0000

Article URL: https://ace-step.github.io/ace-step-v1.5.github.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911058

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by tomduncalf in "Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work?"

tomduncalf — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:12:04 +0000

But the model doesn't need to read the node_modules to write a React app, it just needs to write the React code (which it is heavily post-trained to be able to use). So the fair counter example is like:

function Hello() { return

New comment by tomduncalf in "Notes on Apple's Nano Texture (2025)"

tomduncalf — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 07:45:21 +0000

Tangent but the screen scratches mentioned from the keyboard are annoying. Every generation of MacBook has suffered from them and everyone’s seems to have it after a while, I guess it’s just physics when it gets stuffed in a bag etc, but any good tips to avoid it? I’ve heard mixed things about keeping a cloth in there

How Photography Became an Art Form (Can Computers Create Art? Part 1)

tomduncalf — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 17:31:01 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an-art-form-7b74da777c63

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46422998

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by tomduncalf in "From Silicon to Darude Sand-storm: breaking famous synthesizer DSPs [video]"

tomduncalf — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:21:27 +0000

I thought this was an absolutely fascinating look into reverse engineering hardware. If you’re a musician, check out the plugins at https://dsp56300.wordpress.com/ - you can bit perfect emulate famous 90s synths including Access Virus, Waldorf MicroQ and XT, Nord Lead and now Roland JP8000

From Silicon to Darude Sand-storm: breaking famous synthesizer DSPs [video]

tomduncalf — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:19:48 +0000

Article URL: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-from-silicon-to-darude-sand-storm-breaking-famous-synthesizer-dsps

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46420424

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by tomduncalf in "Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB"

tomduncalf — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:12:46 +0000

This was my first thought too haha. That would be mind blowing

New comment by tomduncalf in "Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]"

tomduncalf — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 09:44:11 +0000

It has a similar feel to Vletrmx21 by Autechre if you dig the spooky ambient feel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-fhfYhqBr4

New comment by tomduncalf in "Waymo robotaxis are now giving rides on freeways in LA, SF and Phoenix"

tomduncalf — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:34:21 +0000

Yeah I’ve almost never got in an Uber that was notably unclean or damaged in some way in London. Most of the times I’ve got one in SF, it’s been an unpleasant experience and so I now Waymo when I can there.

New comment by tomduncalf in "Waymo has received our pilot permit allowing for commercial operations at SFO"

tomduncalf — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 06:17:33 +0000

I’ve never had to wait more than 5 minutes at SFO I don’t think and the system seems ok to me

New comment by tomduncalf in "iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max"

tomduncalf — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 06:10:41 +0000

It is, but I don’t think this a bad offering - up until recently all iPhone cameras were 12mp, so you still get “good enough to print” quality. I guess it’s a bit of marketing speak but I don’t mind - to me it seems they made good choices on the lenses this year. 5x always seemed a bit too much without something in between but hopefully 4x is a decent compromise while still enabling “8x” (which I suspect is important for marketing and honestly will be quite fun)

New comment by tomduncalf in "Bitwig Studio 6 details revealed, and editing gets a big boost"

tomduncalf — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 16:20:59 +0000

This made me google Buzz and it turns out it was recoded by the author and there was an update in 2022. Not sure if it’s still developed. I’m not on a Windows machine so won’t be able to try it easily unfortunately, wish it was open source so it could be ported to Mac

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=590922

New comment by tomduncalf in "Bitwig Studio 6 details revealed, and editing gets a big boost"

tomduncalf — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 16:16:42 +0000

Buzz was so great. I came across it when I learned James Holden produced his early stuff on it and was hooked. It had a good community with hundreds of synths and effects you could download from Buzzmachines. It was such a shame they lost the source code, I’d have loved to see how it developed.

New comment by tomduncalf in "GPTs and Feeling Left Behind"

tomduncalf — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 08:59:00 +0000

If you work for a large org you’ll have some kind of enterprise agreement in place guaranteeing this. I can’t imagine they’d risk violating it regardless, the outcry could ruin them

New comment by tomduncalf in "The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers"

tomduncalf — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 07:12:21 +0000

I enjoyed watching O3 do web searches etc. Seems that with GPT-5 you only get little summaries and it’s also way less web search happy which is a shame, O3 was so good for research

New comment by tomduncalf in "XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web"

tomduncalf — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 06:36:03 +0000

Ha! I was at Orange. I suspect all the carriers had similar setups. Yeah I don’t miss working with that lol