<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: wtallis</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wtallis</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:06:52 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=wtallis" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "Nvidia N1 laptop motherboard picture shows 128GB of LPDDR5x"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's a widespread practice among OEMa that want to use the same board in a 13/14" chassis and a 15/16" chassis. They just need a longer cable to the daughterboard for the larger laptop. That usually means all the high-power and high-speed ports are on the same side of the laptop and on the far side you get USB 3.0 and headphone ports.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:00:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724154</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724154</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724154</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "You can't trust macOS Privacy and Security settings"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not quite. The steps are revoking permission in the UI (which works as expected), then implicitly <i>granting</i> permission in a way that the UI does not reflect but quietly persists.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:30:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720528</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720528</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720528</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "WireGuard makes new Windows release following Microsoft signing resolution"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Microsoft's incompetence is certainly <i>reckless</i> at a minimum, and often manifests in ways that come across as misanthropic toward their users. They don't really fit the pattern of mere bumbling fools.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:25:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720459</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720459</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720459</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Is the "Desktop & Documents Folders" sync option in iCloud on by default? I've never used that feature, and it's a bit buried so it's hard to enable accidentally, but I haven't set up a new Mac from scratch in a long time so I don't know if it is a trap for new users the way OneDrive is.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:10:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710918</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710918</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710918</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In particular, manually editing the hosts file was a mostly-obsolete practice by the time the first version of Windows shipped, and certainly by the time Windows actually had a built-in networking stack. And it was always a red flag for a local app to mess with the hosts file.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:47:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47665129</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47665129</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47665129</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think you failed to correctly apply DeMorgan's laws to the statement you're reacting to.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:41:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47665052</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47665052</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47665052</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a bit insulting to assume that having more than a dozen tabs open must be "disorganized", especially in a context where it is likely that the power user in question is using browser extensions. Something like TreeStyleTab makes it easy to keep hundreds of tabs organized with clear, easily-manipulated structure, and lower friction than manually creating and curating bookmarks.<p>It looks like you're either showing off your own ignorance of tools that enable workflows you can't imagine, or you're assuming that everyone's organization methods must resemble your own habits.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:20:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664794</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664794</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664794</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thunderbolt is its own protocol, electrically incompatible with PCIe. Its purpose is to encapsulate data traffic from multiple other protocols (PCIe, DisplayPort, USB) and multiplex that over the same wires. It cannot function exactly like an external PCIe port because it's solving a bigger, more complicated problem.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:38:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47650498</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47650498</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47650498</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>> NVMe<p>> Using proprietary connectors.<p>Not for the past decade; it's been <i>no</i> connectors for most products, but standard PCIe connectors for the Mac Pro, and NVMe over Thunderbolt works fine.<p>>> XHCI<p>> Not on Lightning.<p>Again, not relevant to any recent products. And I'm pretty sure you're misunderstanding what XHCI <i>is</i> if you think anything with a Lightning connector is relevant here (XHCI is not USB 3.0). You <i>can</i> connect a Thunderbolt dock that includes an XHCI USB host controller and it works out of the box with no further driver or software support. I assume you can do the same with a USB controller card in a Mac Pro.<p>>> AHCI<p>> How exactly would Apple not support AHCI?<p>This might be another case of you not understanding what you're talking about and are lost in an entirely different layer of the protocol stack. Not supporting AHCI would be easy, since they're no longer selling any products that use SATA, and PCIe SSDs that use AHCI instead of NVMe died out a decade ago. But as far as I know, a SATA controller card at the far end of a Thunderbolt link or in a Mac Pro PCIe slot should still work, if the SATA controller uses AHCI instead of something proprietary as is typical for SAS controllers.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:09:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646283</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646283</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646283</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Surely Linux is the subsystem running on Windows?<p>Only in version 2. WSL1 <i>didn't</i> run a Linux kernel, just provided binary compatibility to run Linux userspace programs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:10:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47644840</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47644840</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47644840</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Doesn't Apple support the major <i>standard</i> device categories: NVMe, XHCI, AHCI, and such, like most operating systems do? The challenges are all for hardware that needs a vendor-specific driver instead of conforming to a standard driver interface (which doesn't always exist). Lots of those can be supported with userspace drivers, which <i>can</i> be supplied by third parties instead of needing to be written by Apple.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Apr 2026 19:27:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47642434</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47642434</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47642434</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Disclosing technical guarded and not publicly known technical know-how - I am ok with those.<p>I would love to see NDAs for trade secrets limited in a way that incentivizes companies to rely on patent protection instead, where the system is set up to ensure that knowledge eventually becomes public record and freely usable by anyone. It would be very interesting to see how eg. the tech industry would change if trade secret protection were limited to a meaningfully shorter duration than patents.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:08:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641010</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641010</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641010</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Nobody was trying to <i>equate</i> non-disparagement clauses with slavery. The relevance of slavery here is as an example of the kind of contract terms that everyone should be able to agree are rightly invalid and unenforceable. Any argument in favor of contract enforceability that would apply to a slavery contract just as easily as it applies to a non-disparagement contract is a <i>bad argument</i>, or at least woefully incomplete. Bringing up slavery serves as a necessary reminder that the details and nuance of the contract terms and their effects need to be discussed and argued, and that an unqualified "contracts should be valid" position is untenable and oversimplified.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:59:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47640889</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47640889</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47640889</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "How to turn anything into a router"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's theoretically possible but a bad idea for a <i>managed</i> switch, because they seldom have enough CPU performance or IO between the CPU and switch silicon to provide respectable routing performance. For an <i>unmanaged</i> switch, it's more likely that whatever CPU core is present (if any) doesn't have enough resources to run a real network stack.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:58:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575941</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575941</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575941</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not exactly, but under US copyright law there is a limitation of exclusive rights that grants the owner of a copy the right to make an adaptation provided "that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner". Unfortunately, the law doesn't specify what "adaptation" means, and I'm not sure the concept of an "essential step" stretches to cover modifying your program to run on a new OS decades after its original host platform has gone extinct.<p>Regardless, making such a modification <i>for personal use only</i> would be hard for a copyright owner to win a lawsuit over even <i>if</i> they could find out about it. But publicly distributing your derivative work like this is definitely violating the original's copyrights.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2026 04:56:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47560498</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47560498</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47560498</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "FCC Prohibits New Approval of Foreign-Made Consumer Routers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's missing the aspect where exceptions to the ban can be granted by the DoD or DHS, so in practice the outcome will be that effectively all routers need to appease the national security apparatus before getting FCC approval.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Mar 2026 22:01:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47558506</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47558506</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47558506</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "Make macOS consistently bad unironically"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The spatial Finder was something different: having each folder open a new window, and that particular folder's window always re-opening in the same position on screen, with the same window size and same layout of files inside. Having the position of each folder remain consistent and persistent allows you to remember a file's <i>spatial</i> location much as you would for a printed document on a physical desk (exactly where you left it), rather than having to recall its path in the file system hierarchy.<p>Obviously all of that works better if Finder windows don't usually fill the screen, but it's not a hard requirement.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:25:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47550174</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47550174</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47550174</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "MacBook Neo, the Benchmarks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As a general rule: any SSD benchmark that gives you a result of over 1GB/s is not measuring what's actually most important for day to day interactive use. And anything that's within a factor of two of the SSD's marketing numbers is probably relevant only to copying a single file to or from another SSD.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Mar 2026 23:09:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47549578</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47549578</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47549578</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "Apple discontinues the Mac Pro"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The Apple I was a pretty poor predictor of what mainstream mass-market computing was going to end up looking like. I don't think anybody has yet come up with the Apple II of local LLMs, let alone the VisiCalc or Windows 95.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Mar 2026 07:35:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47539929</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47539929</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47539929</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wtallis in "Apple discontinues the Mac Pro"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Multiple GPUs was <i>tried</i>, by the whole industry including Apple (most notably with the trash can Mac Pro). Despite significant investment, it was ultimately a failure for consumer workloads like gaming, and was relegated to the datacenter and some very high-end workstations depending on the workload.<p>Multi-GPU has recently experienced a resurgence due to the discovery of new workloads with broader appeal (LLMs), but that's too new to have significantly influenced hardware architectures, and LLM inference isn't the most natural thing to scale across many GPUs. Everybody's still competing with more or less the architectures they had on hand when LLMs arrived, with new low-precision matrix math units squeezed in wherever room can be made. It's not at all clear yet what the long-term outcome will be in terms of the balance between local vs cloud compute for inference, whether there will be any local training/fine-tuning at all, and which use cases are ultimately profitable in the long run. All of that influences whether it would be worthwhile for Apple to abandon their current client-first architecture that standardizes on a single integrated GPU and omits/rejects the complexity of multi-GPU setups.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Mar 2026 07:25:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47539890</link><dc:creator>wtallis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47539890</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47539890</guid></item></channel></rss>