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JeremyHerrman

687 karma · joined November 4, 2009

Co-founder/CTO of Hero Stuff (herostuff.com)

Former co-founder of Volition (govolition.com, acq by Siemens) and Plethora (software defined CNC factories).

I'm into retro computers and homebrew pinball machines.

San Francisco by way of Pittsburgh, PA

twitter.com/jherrm

jherrman.com

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JeremyHerrman··on Apple's Dimensional Drawings
Seems like this URL has only been live (at least first archived [0]) around May 2026, originally with only 13 products. Great to see them add more since then, now close to 90.

0: https://web.archive.org/web/20260512182718/https://developer...

JeremyHerrman··on Feeling Sad about AI
AI can be a tool for the software craftsman too!

Just keep a high bar for quality at whatever abstraction level you're working at - whether that's machine code, assembly, low or high level languages, or even wrangling agents.

I've been coding for 25 years and I've never been more excited and less sad to build projects I've been dreaming of but haven't had enough time to do.

JeremyHerrman··on GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?
> "GitHub has had 1125 incidents since February 2016, implying a monthly incident rate of 24"

1125 incidents / 126 months ≈ 8.9 incidents per month, not 24

still terrible, but why such an obvious error in the first sentence...

JeremyHerrman··on Suzanne: AI tool for designing and manufacturing physical products
having worked at the intersection of CAD/CAM automation & actual factories, I'm disappointed with the lack of real information on what their product actually does.

Going from bits to atoms is _hard_ for a ton of reasons, and their example prompt "Prepare this for manufacturing" is a huge red flag IMO. That said, I wish them luck, we need fresh blood in this slow moving industry.

JeremyHerrman··on Turn And Face The Strange
love his writing style. pure opposite of slop, oozing with humanity
JeremyHerrman··on Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber
Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite has been my go to for cheap document processing at scale (especially with 50% off batch mode), but they are really boiling the frog with pricing increases with each version:

gemini-2.5-flash-lite: $0.10 input / $0.40 output

gemini-3.1-flash-lite: $0.25 input / $1.50 output

gemini-3.5-flash-lite: $0.30 input / $2.50 output (a 6.25x increase over 2.5!)

Now watch them deprecate Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite in the coming months...

JeremyHerrman··on Transcribe.cpp
Another happy user of Handy here!

After seeing so many *subscription based* transcription apps all wrapping *open source models*, finding Handy was a real delight and I'm happy to see the author keep on building!

JeremyHerrman··on Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source
Haha, yes flex apps definitely had a feel to them!

It's easy to criticize but remember, this was back in the days of supporting IE6 and XHR was still relatively new!

Flex's standard UI library was filled with bluish-gray gradients and verdana :)

Here's an article which has a screenshot with a bunch of controls: https://daverupert.com/2023/02/the-case-for-flex-application...

JeremyHerrman··on Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source
Comic Chat has a special place in my heart because it inspired my first startup back in 2008, a comic creation web app called Chogger. The site grew to 30K monthly users, mostly K-12 educators who wanted to give their students a fun way to write stories.

The comic creator app itself was adobe flex (flash), actionscript 3.0 (like a typed version of javascript), and I remember spending so many hours getting the balloon tail dragging behavior just right...

one of the teachers made a video overview of how it worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKT70TBw1vw

JeremyHerrman··on Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
> This machine specs reminds me of how awful '90s laptop screens, based on a passive matrix, were. Definitely something I don't miss from that era.

While the 1991 Apple PowerBook 100 did have a passive matrix display, the machine it was based on, the Macintosh Portable from 1989, had a crisp active matrix running at 640×400 (even higher resolution than the compact Macintosh desktops with 512×342).

Interestingly Apple tasked Sony with designing the PowerBook 100 by taking the Macintosh Portable and slimming it down as much as possible. They shaved over 10lbs by moving away from the lead acid battery, dropping the floppy drive, and moving to a passive matrix display.

JeremyHerrman··on You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand
it's tough for people here to admit, but AI is good at summarizing and that includes commit messages and PR fields

but that does NOT mean you get to skip understanding the code & whipping the AI in line during implementation

my preferred workflow:

- think hard about the problem before touching the keyboard

- back and forth with the AI, swatting down bad implementation ideas and poking holes

- settle on a detailed implementation plan

- let the AI go for however long it needs to (usually minutes, sometimes hours)

- review, iterate, test

- "this looks good, commit in focused chunks and create a PR"

- review commits & PR summary, hand edit for clarity

JeremyHerrman··on The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
> In large-scale combat operations, victory will depend less on which force fields the most advanced weapons and more on which can sustain combat power under persistent attack.

"force fields" had me reading that sentence entirely wrong

JeremyHerrman··on Hy3
I think it's just their version of "Designed by Apple in California"
JeremyHerrman··on GPT-5.6
people are saying this is benchmark is saturated but all of these have occlusion issues, even sol max.

A skilled human artist wouldn't have both legs in front of the bike, or a single straight line representing both leg's crank arms.

JeremyHerrman··on Show HN: FableCut – A browser video editor AI agents can drive (zero deps)
yes, microsoft does hold a trademark for notepad. As litigious as MS is I'm pleasantly surprised they've left notepad++ alone.

Unfortunately anthropic is actively eroding community goodwill in regards to potential IP conflicts:

https://abnormal.ai/blog/abnormal-response-to-anthropic-laws...

https://x.com/steipete/status/2016068265391354181

JeremyHerrman··on Show HN: FableCut – A browser video editor AI agents can drive (zero deps)
PSA stop putting bigco IP in your project names!

has clawdbot taught us nothing?

JeremyHerrman··on Nano Banana 2 Lite
I was surprised with how well grok imagine performed when reviewing fast image generation. It balances quality, speed and cost really well with under $0.02 per 1K image within a few seconds.
JeremyHerrman··on OS9Map
My OS 9 battlestation is a G4 tower (Digital Audio) with a Sonnet dual 1.6GHz upgrade, 1.5GB RAM and a nvidia GeForce4 Ti which is one of the best OS 9 graphics cards available.
JeremyHerrman··on Show HN: FablePool – pool money behind a prompt, and Fable builds it in public
I'm not sure why folks continue to build services with trademarked names they don't own.

If Anthropic had a problem with Clawdbot they are certainly going to take issue with FablePool.

JeremyHerrman··on Show HN: I Derived a Pancake
when I saw those pics I thought: all this effort in the ingredients just to burn them

light blonde pancakes taste the best IMO, but char being carcinogenic seems compelling enough on its own to warrant turning down the heat

JeremyHerrman··on What I've learned about the trombone
I was thinking the same thing. The tuning slide is not what you use while playing, it's the separate slide on the bell side of the trombone for fine adjustment to ensure you're in tune with the rest of the band.
JeremyHerrman··on Stop Advertising in Your Commits
Is AI responsible for the committed code? Should AI be blamed when services go down due to the change?

The answer is absolutely not - the developer is responsible whether the code was AI assisted or not, and the dev's name should be attached to it just like any change.

The OP is right: these are ads, plain and simple, and it's a dark pattern for these companies to have attribution enabled by default

JeremyHerrman··on Ask HN: Is anyone working at least 4 hours daily on an Apple Vision Pro?
I think of the AVP like Steve Jobs once described: headphones for video [0]

I use it a few hours a day, a few times a week exclusively as a virtual display for my macbook.

Being able to put a huge virtual monitor anywhere is the killer feature and I don't tend to use it for anything else. It's indispensable on flights where laptop lids can't even fully open.

Apple got the interactions just about perfect for AR window management, etc.

Of course the main drawbacks are the weight, size, and overall embarrassment from having a giant face computer strapped to your head.

I don't find it very comfortable for more than a couple hours at time, at least with the solo knit band + the belkin head strap. I'd like to get a dual knit band at some point.

But when this sort of hardware gets miniaturized I think many people will prefer it to hunching over a laptop screen. Just like headphones, wearing glasses while typing at a black screen could signal "Do not disturb, I'm working here"

[0] Steve Jobs on Virtual Reality (D3, 2005) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQECSInWVPY

JeremyHerrman··on Apple unveils new accessibility features
You're underestimating Apple's meticulous planning, which has only become more intense in the Cook era. Bad feature/UX or not, each one of those decisions was calculated.

Read this ars quote from 2010 [0]:

>Apple used the small part—one that is not integral to the device’s functionality—to see if the company was capable or producing a custom design to Apple’s specifications. Typically, manufacturers prefer to have at least two sources for parts, so that a supply problem from one supplier won’t halt manufacturing. Since Liquidmetal is only available from one source, Apple needed to make sure the company could deliver.

For Apple Silicon, there was no way they'd make the switch in one go, so they had to figure out a way to hedge that bet. That's what the TouchBar really was, with all its warts and solutions for problems nobody had.

And as someone else in this thread pointed out, the first custom cellular chip wasn't released with a flagship model - they exclusively paired it with the budget iPhone 16e.

Apple is always calculating and hedging.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/08/apple-tested-liquidm...

JeremyHerrman··on Apple unveils new accessibility features
Apple loves to stealth test new tech in full public view by sneaking it into relatively mundane places, so debuting agentic AI via accessibility is very on brand.

A few other examples:

- The Touch Bar was much more than an OLED strip, it was Apple’s first move in the transition to Apple Silicon on macs. The Apple T1 chip in the 2016 Touch Bar MacBooks was the first solely Apple-designed processor to appear in a Mac and took over several responsibilities away from intel chipsets like power management, fans, sleep/wake, access to the camera & mic, and the secure enclave powering touch ID. Then the T2 added encryption of the SSD, audio management, image processing for the camera, and prevented tampering with the boot process

- The iPhone 3G shipped with a Liquidmetal SIM eject tool, which is made from a strong custom metal alloy which is "practically unbendable by hand unless you want to hurt or cut your fingers." Although Apple hasn’t released anything with the alloy since then, now nearly 20 years later Apple is rumored to be using liquid metal in their upcoming foldable iPhone.

- RealityKit had 3D scanning and a lot of other cool AR capabilities for years which didn’t make sense until the Apple Vision Pro was released.

JeremyHerrman··on The PSP feels surprisingly present right now
I bought one of these in 2004 and it really was a slice of the future. The screen was way bigger and higher res than anything I had owned prior, and the ability to jailbreak and run emulators gave it a lot more use than just UMD games.

I still have my original PSP 1000 which worked well until my daughter dropped it a couple weeks ago...

JeremyHerrman··on Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
it would be funny if this was meant as a goodwill gesture from anthropic to counter all the recent bad press, only for it to cause even more drama
JeremyHerrman··on John Ternus to become Apple CEO
re: US Politics, I view Apple's gift of the gold & glass trophy to Trump more as a humiliation ritual Cook had to endure so that they can continue to uphold their principles, but with a less adversarial government.

Sure it's gross but it does not necessarily signal an abandonment of values from Apple.

JeremyHerrman··on The Cognitive Dark Forest
I reject pretty much every point of this article, and I worry that it will lead readers down two dark roads: apathy and secrecy

do you really think bigco is going to steal your vibecoded app just because you used their API? ridiculous. They could already do this before AI with their army of devs.

should you hide all of your ideas until they're perfect and ready for millions of users? we all know this goes against a core tenet of startups which is still true today: launch early and often.

promptfoo/openclaw weren't cloned by openai when they got poplular, they were bought for real $$$

also, regarding this:

> 2009, I bought a refurbished ThinkPad, installed Xubuntu, and started coding.

you can still do this, even with that same 2009 thinkpad. the hard work is in getting your app out there in front of people, coding is just a small piece of a successful business

JeremyHerrman··on Apple Just Lost Me
totally valid to call out apple for issues, but for most folks already accustomed to apple's walled garden, the grass is not greener on the other side

For instance, I've had a ton of issues with Airpods Max so I moved over to the Sony WH-1000XM6, and they do a much worse job sharing connections between multiple devices to the point where I have to reset them constantly to get sound to reliably play from both my phone & computer.

Same for moving to macOS to linux - the issues on add up to the point where the papercuts from macOS are still worth it.

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