Hacker News: wvh

New comment by wvh in "US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search"

wvh — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:01:53 +0000

This. If any country won't treat you like a guest, avoid travelling to it.

If it's your own, that's harder to do – time to fight and change the system before it gets worse and will swallow you whole.

New comment by wvh in "CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026"

wvh — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:36:26 +0000

I've been digitising my music collection since 2000 and still buy CDs or, if available, lossless FLACs. I really wonder how many people still bother "owning" the music they like instead of "renting" it. It might be irrational, but buying it and owning it feels very different than getting it over the radio or some streaming service.

New comment by wvh in "$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol"

wvh — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:26:38 +0000

This. I generally much rather watch a live video of the band performing the song interspersed with some behind the scene footage than some random badly acted (non-AI) slop video on top of the song.

If you like the music, you probably want to feel some connection to the people making that music.

New comment by wvh in "$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol"

wvh — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:08:53 +0000

A lot of iconic scenes were at the discretion of the actors in those scenes. One wonders how much personality and complexity you can really get without the skills and idiosyncrasies of everybody in front of and behind the cameras on a real movie set.

My point being there's a lot more complexity in not producing slop than it seems.

New comment by wvh in "Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made"

wvh — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:08:37 +0000

Because the software industry doesn't pay anymore for constraints or doing things "the hard way". Everything is high-level language and by tomorrow. The day after it doesn't exist anymore anyway.

I'd wish to get a project that's low-level, multi-year and high quality of engineering and longevity. Make the best you can – something to be proud of.

New comment by wvh in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

wvh — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 12:13:04 +0000

If the US would truly try to raze Iran, they would do so at immense cost, both financially and reputationally.

I have to wonder what your definition of "winning" is.

New comment by wvh in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

wvh — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 11:52:38 +0000

> In this situation I just don’t understand what people expect Russia to do??

To stay within its borders. And that counts for the others on this planet, too.

New comment by wvh in "Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass"

wvh — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:43:24 +0000

Perhaps darker than the initial mild optimism of the early internet.

New comment by wvh in "Google loses fight over record $4.7B EU antitrust fine"

wvh — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:23:22 +0000

It would hurt, for a while. Then people would wake up and slowly better solutions would appear. Not unlike post-Trump NATO. But the US would have lost its leader position and a large market.

I think the EU needs a kick under the ass to stop its comfortable inertia.

New comment by wvh in "Identity verification on Claude"

wvh — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 10:07:46 +0000

That's not how democracy works. You have responsibility and accountability. These people can and do real harm.

New comment by wvh in "Software is made between commits"

wvh — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:44:31 +0000

But do these intermediary commits run? I wouldn't mind making smaller commits, but usually wait until the changes result in a bunch of code that compiles and does what it should. It sounds as if you do checkpoints that don't necessarily result in working code or pass tests. Not that that is wrong, but it is a very different philosophy. I usually expect what I check out to compile and sort of work. I can't really pick up somebody else's train of thought midway.

New comment by wvh in "Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails"

wvh — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:08:46 +0000

PGP had the right idea, but the system is too hard for the average person.

With "system" I refer to building a web (or multiple!) of trust, based on parameters that you decide upon.

New comment by wvh in "Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones"

wvh — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 09:50:47 +0000

It is a slippery slope. I'm just hoping that a more surgical drone strike against a weapons factory will create less victims than the blunt force of a ballistic missile aimed "in the general direction of".

In a way, technology could enable one party to "outwit" their opponent by taking away the means to wage war without causing random loss of life.

New comment by wvh in "Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones"

wvh — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:21:50 +0000

The moral question is if you've unknowingly contributed to war, death and destruction, or if you are actually helping drones to accurately find real targets – which hopefully are not innocent civilians but legitimate military targets.

New comment by wvh in "Building from zero after addiction, prison, and a felony"

wvh — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:34:54 +0000

I guess one can only optimise the system for the majority following the beaten path. Some folks just have to find a way both through the world and through their own head.

New comment by wvh in "Dopamine Fracking"

wvh — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:22:22 +0000

I'd say there's at least a third reason: intellectual (or rather technical) curiosity of photography itself. Often, when I take a picture, it is just to see how a particular shot turns out, much less so for any sentimental value to myself or anybody consuming those images later on.

I'd also say that's most likely a healthy kind of dopamine usage, as it's leading one into a life of exploration, learning and wonder.

But you're right, taking a true in-the-moment picture is a skill.

New comment by wvh in "GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension"

wvh — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:19:59 +0000

I've been telling less computer literate folks not to install random stuff since the nineties, and I can't understand how many devs are doing just that these days.

I used to work in security auditing, and it makes me feel pretty jaded to think of the gigabytes upon gigabytes of random stuff that just gets pulled in from everywhere in IDEs, package managers, build pipelines and container images.

At least back then there was still a chance to read a significant part of the code and find problems before they found you.

New comment by wvh in "Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism"

wvh — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:28:29 +0000

I've been playing guitar since I was a little kid. I wonder how learning "two-handed" skills such as playing music impacts how "handy" or "polydextrous" one is.

There are left-handed guitar players that play right-handed, such as Nick Johnston, who claim the gaps in their technique or preference for certain left-hand-only techniques are informed by being left-handed; so it seems that a life-long of an insane amount of practice does not necessary change how comfortable one is using either hand for a given task.

New comment by wvh in "Hindenburg’s Smoking Room"

wvh — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:27:48 +0000

The alternative is/was of course to be stuck in a small space for several days with smokers showing withdrawal symptoms. Not sure I'd want to experience that in something like a submarine...

New comment by wvh in "MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble"

wvh — Thu, 14 May 2026 10:58:14 +0000

I've never owned anything from Apple, but this model has me interested in having something that can run commercial software (I'm a long-time Linux user). But I really think 8GB is going to be a major limit for running a DAW or anything related to live music production.

I understand these are the limitations of this option, but can you really do more than just run a simple word editor? Even my Firefox session here uses over 16GB of RAM.