Hacker News: tormeh

New comment by tormeh in "Vibe Coder vs. Software Engineer"

tormeh — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:23:16 +0000

In big enough projects this is the job of a civil engineer. The architect vs engineer fight that ensues is widely memed. This is of course mostly an issue in one-off projects with ambitious architects.

New comment by tormeh in "Doing nothing at work"

tormeh — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:04:10 +0000

I learned this early in a conservative org. Preventing things is risky. Just keep the solution ready for when things go wrong because then you'll get approval.

New comment by tormeh in "Who's the smartest corvid?"

tormeh — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:27:16 +0000

I'd say the evil lies in the infliction of suffering, not the killing or eating.

New comment by tormeh in "A crime doesn't make a child an adult"

tormeh — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 06:52:28 +0000

Criminal gangs specifically recruit legal minors because they are able to do things legal adults can't: Repeatedly and with impunity violate the law. Whether it's smuggling or assassinations, using legal minors make it all a lot less risky.

Would it stop stupid kids from doing stupid kid stuff? No. Would it make minors less attractive to organized crime? Yes.

New comment by tormeh in "Claude Desktop spawns 1.8 GB Hyper-V VM on every launch, even for chat-only use"

tormeh — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 23:12:51 +0000

That sounds like a lot, but your music player probably costs that much in RAM anyway.

Seriously, with the current RAM prices we as an industry have to figure out a way to use less of it. Laptops with 4GB of RAM are still common and are going to remain so for the rest of the decade. Spotify using more than 1GB of RAM is obscene.

New comment by tormeh in "Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux"

tormeh — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 16:17:24 +0000

This is when you say "We support Ubuntu", and honestly that's fine.

New comment by tormeh in "Accenture to acquire Ookla"

tormeh — Sun, 31 May 2026 11:15:23 +0000

I've been in an acquisition where code quality was important. But it was probably an edge case since the buyer just wanted to turn the company into a feature, and ease of integration into the buyer was important.

New comment by tormeh in "Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)"

tormeh — Sun, 31 May 2026 11:00:32 +0000

I think in order to call youself a cloud you must offer blob storage, managed Kubernetes, and managed Postgres. That is the absolute minimum to me.

New comment by tormeh in "Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)"

tormeh — Sat, 30 May 2026 18:51:51 +0000

You cannot possibly with a straight face claim that Scaleway is a VPS provider. Hetzner, sure, but Scaleway offers compute and database services in the same way that AWS does - just fewer.

New comment by tormeh in "Naphtha shortages in Japan"

tormeh — Sat, 30 May 2026 13:57:34 +0000

If packaging and marketing stopped mattering so much Coca-cola would go out of business immediately. Sugar water is cheap and simple to make. The off-brands taste just as good if not better in blind testing. The only defense they have is their brand and the amount of money they spend on marketing. Same with Red Bull.

New comment by tormeh in "Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit"

tormeh — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:51:06 +0000

It's a bit strange, but a huge handout from the EU/France and a huge AI lab investment round are different orders of magnitude. The necessary sums are just not politically possible. How do you sell spending the equivalent of ten USS Gerald Fords on a start-up? You don't.

New comment by tormeh in "Volkswagen blocks Home Assistant by requiring client assertion"

tormeh — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:42:57 +0000

It's not like the US has that many either. It's not the kind of winner-takes-all network effects industry that attracts venture capital outside of the Musk reality distortion field.

New comment by tormeh in "Volkswagen blocks Home Assistant by requiring client assertion"

tormeh — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:29:56 +0000

Yeah, this is just the difference between the "cash cow" and "question mark" companies on the BCG growth-share matrix. The Chinese companies will sooner or later turn into stodgy cash cows themselves.

New comment by tormeh in "Valve hikes Steam Deck prices by more than 40%, blaming rising costs"

tormeh — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:49:49 +0000

I have to disagree. The low resolution of the screen is my biggest issue. Many UI elements and such are just genuinely difficult to read. Modern games are designed for 1080p or more. Rendering them at 800p gives quite poor results. I mostly use my Deck hooked up to the TV now.

New comment by tormeh in "Commission fines Temu €200M for breaching the Digital Services Act"

tormeh — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:32:24 +0000

This is a key observation and I also remember those dumb discussions. The top end of the fine scale is more or less theoretical if you demonstrate any willingness to improve. Looks like Temu has engaged in really bad practices, and they still only get what's (to them) a gentle reminder that there are rules.

New comment by tormeh in "Mistral AI acquires Emmi AI"

tormeh — Tue, 19 May 2026 22:32:25 +0000

Mistral is not large, though.

New comment by tormeh in "EU weighs restricting use of US cloud platforms to process government data"

tormeh — Sun, 17 May 2026 19:09:23 +0000

It's the opposite, if anything. The US has the best conditions for running a company. It is only natural that the highest margin sectors of the day (whatever that may be) is located there. Anything else would be evidence of market distortion.

New comment by tormeh in "EU weighs restricting use of US cloud platforms to process government data"

tormeh — Sun, 17 May 2026 19:06:07 +0000

Why would anyone build that when you get curb stomped by the three US providers if you try? There's a reason EU providers don't attack that market directly.

Now, if there was a market that were prohibited from using US cloud providers that would give EU providers an actual way to move upmarket.

New comment by tormeh in "The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)"

tormeh — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:36:23 +0000

The meaning has drifted, appropriately enough. Betäubungsmittel originally meant painkillers, as you can tell from the word. It's just that now every recreational drug is labeled as such.

New comment by tormeh in "The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)"

tormeh — Sat, 16 May 2026 07:31:56 +0000

Not every drug is an opioid. We have prohibition laws designed for opioids blindly applied to any (in the western context) nontraditional drug. The German law on drugs is literally called "the painkiller law", for instance.