Hacker News: xmodem

New comment by xmodem in "Bun support is now limited and deprecated"

xmodem — Fri, 22 May 2026 19:48:22 +0000

I see a lot of commentators in this thread who are aggressively critical of volunteer maintainers for making a decision about how to maximize the value of the free labor they donate to the world.

And yet none have offered to volunteer their time to maintain a downstream fork or otherwise rectify the perceived problem.

Strange.

New comment by xmodem in "Bun support is now limited and deprecated"

xmodem — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:53:58 +0000

Rather than have complexity centralised and managed, let's generate the same vulnerable code across millions of apps. Great plan.

New comment by xmodem in "Why TUIs are back"

xmodem — Sun, 03 May 2026 22:02:51 +0000

TUIs suck and the only reason they are seeing a re-surgency of relevance is because everything else sucks more along one or more critical metrics. Given the truly incomprehensible amount of CPU and GPU power we have available, this is truly a blight on our industry.

New comment by xmodem in "If I could make my own GitHub"

xmodem — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:21:07 +0000

I just want a button that says "approve and merge these 3 commits now but these two need re-work"

New comment by xmodem in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

xmodem — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:23:14 +0000

Don't anthropomorphize the language model. If you stick your hand in there, it'll chop it off. It doesn't care about your feelings. It can't care about your feelings.

New comment by xmodem in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

xmodem — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:19:28 +0000

So it's only wrong in a technical and pedantic sense. A better phrasing might have been along the lines of "There are many sequences of tokens that will destroy your production database that are within the set of possible outputs"

New comment by xmodem in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

xmodem — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:08:08 +0000

It's an objection to adding a new dependency, not an attempt to remove an existing one. If we can't stop adding new dependencies, we are certain to be stuck with the status quo forever.

New comment by xmodem in "Treasure hunter freed from jail after refusing to turn over shipwreck gold"

xmodem — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:56:33 +0000

It's almost as if comments on a website called "hacker news" are written by individuals with differing and varying opinions, and not by some nebulous hive-mind that purports to be internally consistent.

New comment by xmodem in "Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy"

xmodem — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:44:32 +0000

The problem is that the well you are drinking from has in fact been poisoned. Maybe you think you can tolerate it but some projects are taking a policy decision that any exposure is too dangerous and that is IMO perfectly reasonable.

New comment by xmodem in "Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command"

xmodem — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:14:25 +0000

The fact that the AI agent will just go and attempt to do whatever insane shit I can dream up is both the most fun thing about playing with it, and also terrifying enough to make me review its output carefully before it goes anywhere near production.

(Hot take: If you're not using --dangerously-skip-permissions, you don't have enough confidence in your sandbox and you probably shouldn't be using a coding agent in that environment)

New comment by xmodem in "Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command"

xmodem — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:41:08 +0000

An engineer recklessly ran untrusted code directly in a production environment. And then told on himself on Twitter.

New comment by xmodem in "MacBook Neo"

xmodem — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:37:24 +0000

The A-series has supported virtualization since long before the M-series existed. iOS disables it in early boot, though.

On the other hand, how much virtualization are you really going to be doing with 8GB of RAM?

New comment by xmodem in "Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet"

xmodem — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 17:09:59 +0000

> Unless your strategy is to create a photo-lab-like screen in pure black and red, or wear deep-red-tinted glasses, it’s unlikely that a pure colorshift strategy will cut out that big of a chunk of the spectrum.

The writer is dismissing this out of hand but to me this sounds like a great idea.

New comment by xmodem in "Apple's MacBook Pro DFU port documentation is wrong"

xmodem — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 18:17:38 +0000

> And I'm guessing that the reason macOS doesn't give more details is because macOS is likely not involved in the step that fails

And I guess because of the wide variety of third-party hardware macOS has to support, it's not practical to write a pre-flight check into the update process either.

New comment by xmodem in "Can you slim macOS down?"

xmodem — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 13:47:27 +0000

I've never tried it myself, but it's oft-repeated folk wisdom in Apple circles that enabling filesystem case-sensitivity breaks all manner of third-party software that has only ever been tested on the case-insensitive default.

New comment by xmodem in "Fire Shuts GTA 6 Developer Rockstar North, Following Report of Explosion"

xmodem — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 15:33:33 +0000

No.

A lot of devs delayed their launches:

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/silksong-release-date-has-...

Those that didn't or couldn't think it hurt them pretty badly:

https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/hell-is-us-boss-slams-silkson...

In general I think you are probably right. But there are definitely exceptions and this is one of them.

New comment by xmodem in "Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss"

xmodem — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 15:09:06 +0000

Are you hosted on cloud platforms that are SOC2 compliant? Or have you achieved and been audited for SOC2 compliance yourself? I'm going to have to assume it's the former because if it was the latter you would directly say so. To me that type of sleight-of-hand inspires distrust, which is fatal to any prospect of me evaluating the product.

Beyond that, a key risk that has been brought into focus more and more lately is data portability and vendor lock-in. At this point I do not deploy a new vendor without documenting the exit strategy.

The best exit strategy you can offer is an open source, self-hostable version of the product with a simple migration plan. Some of the other existing competitors in the enterprise chat space already offer this. Even if no-one uses it, by offering it you keep your priorities aligned with your customers.

New comment by xmodem in "Fire Shuts GTA 6 Developer Rockstar North, Following Report of Explosion"

xmodem — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 14:54:14 +0000

The point is that no indie dev was able to plan around the surprise release of Silksong, precisely because it was a surprise.

New comment by xmodem in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

xmodem — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 11:49:23 +0000

I have not been as aggressive as GP in trying new AI tools. But the last few months I have been trying more and more and I'm just not seeing it.

One project I tried out recently I took a test-driven approach. I built out the test suite while asking the AI to do the actual implementation. This was one of my more successful attempts, and may have saved me 20-30% time overall - but I still had to throw out 80% of what it built because the agent just refused to implement the architecture I was describing.

It's at its most useful if I'm trying to bootstrap something new on a stack I barely know, OR if I decide I just don't care about the quality of the output.

I have tried different CLI tools, IDE tools. Overall I've had the best success with Claude Code but I'm open to trying new things.

Do you have any good resources you would recommend for getting LLM's to perform better, or staying up-to-date on the field in general?

New comment by xmodem in "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work"

xmodem — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 20:43:05 +0000

Your post sent me down a rabbit hole reading about the history of computers playing chess. Notable to me is that AI advocates were claiming that a computer would be able to beat the best human chess players within 10 years as far back as the 1950s. It was so long ago they had to clarify they were talking about digital computers.

Today I learned that AI advocates being overly optimistic about its trajectory is actually not a new phenomenon - it's been happening for more than twice my lifetime.