Hacker News: willwade

New comment by willwade in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

willwade — Wed, 06 May 2026 05:48:01 +0000

take a peek at https://github.com/willwade/app-automate?tab=readme-ov-file#... - its early and needs some work -but this is the idea behind this.. (my use case is not agents but actual real disabled people..who need tooling to provide better access to the desktop)

New comment by willwade in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

willwade — Wed, 06 May 2026 05:26:37 +0000

Interesting! I started something - nowhere near as complete as that and quite different but again using accessibility UI elements. The BIG problem I've found is SOOOO much stuff does really poorly having these elements exposed. Here was my approach https://github.com/willwade/app-automate?tab=readme-ov-file#... - What I do here is build UI templates - either using UIAccess OR using a one pass using a vision model.

Now the argument against this on [reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/openclaw/comments/1s1dzxq/comment/o...)

"my experience is the opposite actually. UIA looks uniform on paper but WPF, WinForms, and Win32 all expose different control patterns and you end up writing per-toolkit handlers anyway. Qt only exposes anything if QAccessible was compiled in and the accessibility plugin is loaded at runtime, which on shipped binaries is basically never. Electron is just as opaque on Windows as on macOS because it's the same chromium underneath drawing into a canvas. the real split isn't OS vs OS, it's native toolkit vs everything else."

New comment by willwade in "I made a programming language with M&Ms"

willwade — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 06:38:54 +0000

It gave me strong vibes too. It’s the writing style. I’ve seen OpenAI write just like this. Doesn’t mean it’s bad. There’s a few other markers. Note “silly” in quotes and over use if that word. Once would be enough. But also this is very very typical. The bolting and short quite direct and a bit repetitive statements “it absolutely does not solve “dumped a bag of candy on a messy kitchen table and took a dramatic iPhone shot.”

Real example programs are where the joke becomes a language I didn’t want this to stop at “hello world with candy colors.”” The over use of quoting. The bold. It’s not like a human wouldn’t write this. But it’s unusual for a human to do this imho. All the same - it feels novel. And at the end of the day it’s a neat idea. It’s just we enter this new brave world where things written like this give you the ick. “Where do the ai learn this from?” Well I wouldn’t mind betting the author asked it to be written in a hn style post.

New comment by willwade in "Show HN: Timberlogs – Drop-in structured logging for TypeScript"

willwade — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 19:42:18 +0000

how did you redact the sensitive data? did you use a library for that?

New comment by willwade in "Show HN: Timberlogs – Drop-in structured logging for TypeScript"

willwade — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 19:40:37 +0000

this is so cool. I think so much of the logging Saas products are bloated. This looks much simpler. I'd like a python interface.. I've used papertrail and datadog for some of this in the past but dropped it due to cost (and bloat). Nice one.

New comment by willwade in "The mineral riches hiding under Greenland's ice"

willwade — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 10:51:55 +0000

.. and fentanyl for sure right? surely its the largest producer of fentanyl.. or is it cocaine? hold on whats that drug ICE? ah thats it..

New comment by willwade in "Show HN: Local Privacy Firewall-blocks PII and secrets before ChatGPT sees them"

willwade — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 22:04:23 +0000

sorry.. global gitignore.. what have i been doing..

New comment by willwade in "iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]"

willwade — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:24:32 +0000

that to me looks like a error in whatever logic is behind the positional error code. You'd think they would have transformer models based on different layouts but maybe some weighting issues going on.. ie I would have thought its a model that is altering based on likelihood weights and maybe something up with that..

New comment by willwade in "Show HN: Local Privacy Firewall-blocks PII and secrets before ChatGPT sees them"

willwade — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 13:55:53 +0000

I wonder if this would have been useful https://github.com/microsoft/presidio - its heavy but looks really good. There is a lite version..

New comment by willwade in "Show HN: Local Privacy Firewall-blocks PII and secrets before ChatGPT sees them"

willwade — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 13:54:51 +0000

can i have this between my machine and git please.. Like its twice now I've commmited .env* and totally passed me by (usually because its to a private repo..) then later on we/someone clears down the files.. and forgets to rewrite git history before pushing live.. it should never have got there in the first place.. (I wish github did a scan before making a repo public..)

New comment by willwade in "Omnilingual ASR: Advancing automatic speech recognition for 1600 languages"

willwade — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 23:21:20 +0000

Meta cheated with the mms models. That is they didn’t use a phonemeizsr step. This means they just won’t work or sound very strange. ASR data is usually not quite right for tts. But anyhow - not really answering your question but many of these languages already done in mms. Try them https://huggingface.co/spaces/willwade/sherpa-onnx-tts

New comment by willwade in "Word, Character prediction in any language in the browser (ppmpredictor)"

willwade — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 09:42:14 +0000

We built this for our use case (we create solutions to help people speak who have a disability). This is a prediction model you can run in node or the browser. Next word, next character, word completion.. PPM is old - but still rocks

Word, Character prediction in any language in the browser (ppmpredictor)

willwade — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 09:42:14 +0000

Article URL: https://willwade.github.io/ppmpredictor/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45874261

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by willwade in "Blossom – Heroku-like deploys on your servers; cheaper, no lock-in"

willwade — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 10:16:29 +0000

I’m interested to see how this compares with other heroku clones. The compassion stuff is interesting. I’m using apps on digitalocean. Can we get a comparaison of using app with droplet+blossom?

I’m with the other person too. Drop the emojis and your confidence goes up. We all know coding agents JUST LOVE filling up a document with emojis. It makes you wonder if it’s imagined the benefits too

New comment by willwade in "Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally"

willwade — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 21:31:15 +0000

Yeah I totally want this. How much data are we talking about on average?

New comment by willwade in "Vibe composing with a MIDI MCP [video]"

willwade — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 05:26:39 +0000

Vibe composing with a MIDI MCP [video]

willwade — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 05:26:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sbbf874YWQ

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45164881

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by willwade in "Show HN: Grammit – Local-only AI grammar checker (Chrome extension)"

willwade — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 18:48:50 +0000

I’ve developed a couple of fine tuned t5 grammar correction models. Is the model or training open?

New comment by willwade in "I hacked Monster Energy"

willwade — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 18:07:38 +0000

oops. my bad. I take it back :)

New comment by willwade in "I hacked Monster Energy"

willwade — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 17:51:23 +0000

Their opentext API is actually largely marketing - infact so much it worked - Im going to make some Monster cakes https://opentextapi.monsterenergy.com/opentext/images/ecde50... - https://opentextapi.monsterenergy.com/opentext/images/a1e8b8... Yum! Thanks! Count this the first time in history has sold me something