Hacker News: tomduncalf

New comment by tomduncalf in "The lost joy of music piracy"

tomduncalf — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:10:15 +0000

Audiogalaxy was awesome. I loved how you could browse every file that had ever been online, rather than just what was online now, and queue them up for when they came online again. I’d just leave it running on our dial up connection when everyone went out of the house (no dedicated line so you’d clog up the phone, the good old days haha) and then come back to some exciting downloads I’d totally forgotten that I ever queued

New comment by tomduncalf in "The lost joy of music piracy"

tomduncalf — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:08:45 +0000

Don’t tell anyone! Haha

New comment by tomduncalf in "Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail"

tomduncalf — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 06:48:26 +0000

Yeah this reminded me of “the good old days” of the internet when every site felt like this :)

New comment by tomduncalf in "Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE"

tomduncalf — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:11:26 +0000

Hey Jules! This looks awesome, excited to check it out :) Hope you're doing well! Tom

New comment by tomduncalf in "Apple WWDC 2026"

tomduncalf — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:37:10 +0000

Yeah I’m surprised by what a design misstep it was. The shiny corners of icons on iOS look so tacky and on macOS the corner radius mismatch is crazy. Also not a fan of the “bulbous” shapes of things with excessive rounded corners.

Whenever I use my personal Mac or iPad, still on the old OS, I wonder what they were thinking - I would guess it was rushed to hit the annual release, as it does have potential in parts.

That said, it looks from the few screenshots in this like you’re able to pare it back to something much closer to how it used to look, which is great and I’m glad they’re taking feedback on board.

New comment by tomduncalf in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

tomduncalf — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 10:59:07 +0000

Schwung is great. See also the recent new firmware for the Elektron Monomachine (old unsupported hardware) created using LLMs

New comment by tomduncalf in "Ableton Extensions SDK"

tomduncalf — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:55:04 +0000

FWIW you can bypass quite a lot of the Max visual stuff by using the JS support, which now finally supports modern JS (the v8 object). A lot of the LOM (Live API) is exposed there though you will no doubt need to use Max objects for some stuff. They also have web UI support with jweb.

I get the frustration coming to Max as a regular developer, but actually when I bothered to learn it was one of the most rewarding uses of time and I find it really quite fun to work in (and frustrating sometimes of course! But the JS support helps). You just need to forget everything you know about programming lol

New comment by tomduncalf in "Ableton Extensions SDK"

tomduncalf — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:51:23 +0000

Ha yeah I have considered the same. There’s not enough info exposed via the Python or Max APIs (or indeed this one) to sync all the state you’d care about so I think the only option would be syncing the actual als files (which are zipped XML) which means you’d only be able to sync at save points

Ableton Extensions SDK

tomduncalf — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:53:57 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ableton.com/en/live/extensions/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48370296

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

New comment by tomduncalf in "PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes"

tomduncalf — Sat, 09 May 2026 16:47:36 +0000

The screenshots of RISC OS bring back fond memories of playing with it in our school computer room (which was mostly BBC Micros but had a few RISC) - mostly playing Lemmings as I recall! It felt pretty cool at the time though

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

tomduncalf — Sun, 03 May 2026 09:10:55 +0000

I have been using the app for years but literally just because I like the step counter widget. I had no idea it did all this! Will try it for sure. Cool read.

New comment by tomduncalf in "Claude for Creative Work"

tomduncalf — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 06:05:09 +0000

I hooked Claude up to Ableton’s Python API last year and it seemed pretty promising https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2WxSB75U6vg and more recently I created a skill for Claude to manipulate Ableton arrangements (which aren’t exposed via the API so you need to manipulate the file, which is zipped xml, instead).

Both seemed pretty promising and fitted with how I’d like AI to assist rather than replace me for creative tasks.

This reminds me I should open source them as I’ve had no time to do more work on them!

New comment by tomduncalf in "Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design"

tomduncalf — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 17:59:37 +0000

Yeah +1, at the start of my career (mid 2000s) all the web designs were done in Photoshop. I think this was true until 2010/11 at least, when I first encountered Axure being used for some design stuff. I’ve never used Fireworks and never saw it in the wild (UK, in case it was a regional thing)

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