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iamjackg

818 karma · joined July 9, 2021

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iamjackg··on Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?
How is it RLHF if they don't get a transcript of your session?
iamjackg··on F-Droid 2.0
Wait, it's not 24 hours per app though, is it? Isn't it 24 hours before the "allow installing apps from .apks" setting turns on once and for all?
iamjackg··on People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
Genetic lottery, I think. There are some "addictions" I've been able to give up incredibly easily, and others I still struggle with. Other people have the opposite problem, others still don't have any at all. The older I get, the more I think willpower is a made up concept.
iamjackg··on Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking
Somebody shared this a few days ago: https://github.com/adnanakil/nobuzz
iamjackg··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
It's a very interesting idea. Sometimes I do let my brain go wild imagining crazy things when I'm trying to fall asleep. A couple suggestions:

- the TTS voice sounds way too excited for something meant to be relaxing

- the sudden speaking after 10 seconds of silence is very jarring -- I wonder if something like a reverse-reverb effect would be enough to "warn" the brain that a new sentence is incoming. There's an example of how to do it in Ableton on YouTube[0] but the basic concept is: take a short slice of audio from the beginning of the sentence, reverse it, apply a long reverb, reverse it again, trim the end a little. You get a sort of ghostly aspirated sound that leads perfectly into the original sample.

0: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QuknZMUa7Rs

iamjackg··on I'm being cyberattacked by Tesla, Inc
Isn't this technically a crime, since they're actively attempting to access a computer system they don't own?
iamjackg··on U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
Not sure if things have changed recently, but up until at least 2019 (last time I had to do it iirc) you definitely had to do a "flagpole" (drive through the border and immediately turn back) to change your status in Canada.
iamjackg··on Fixing a bricked Framework laptop
While that's true, I'd still rather replace a single component rather than turn a whole laptop into e-waste.
iamjackg··on Termixer (TUI DJ Mixer)
> assume it hasn't had much thought or care put into it > I'm not really motivated to even try it out

That's a little uncharitable. I get where it's coming from, because I also still feel a tinge of (hypocritical) disappointment when I realize things are built with LLMs, but I truly think we need to start moving past this. It's not a giant corporation trying to scam you out of your hard earned money by passing slop off as a lovingly crafted product: it's somebody's pet project, somebody who clearly had a fun "what if" idea and was able to materialize it over time, with a TBD amount of care/iteration/refinement. I think it's something worth engaging with. Worst case scenario it sucks, like many cheapo projects do -- best case scenario it's awesome and/or it sparks a new interesting idea in somebody else.

iamjackg··on Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6
Holy crap, I was not prepared for how fast it responded. I just wrote "Just wanted to see how fast you are! Can you write me a quick story about a tiger who lives inside a block of cheese the size of a house?"

I pressed Enter, and the response was instant.

> Generated in 0.037s • 14,205 tok/s

This is unbelievable.

iamjackg··on What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
Long time customer! I bought one after your original post on HN. Congrats on the milestone. Honestly, it's such a good product and I'm such a bad and inconsistent piano player that I completely forget it exists for months at a time. Then I remember about it, open the app, and everything is there: my attempt to figure out a song, my kids smashing the keys as hard as they can, my cat walking across the keyboard. It's such a joy.
iamjackg··on How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
I'd love to see that tool.
iamjackg··on OpenPrinter
I realized just a couple weeks ago that I've had my Brother laser printer for 10 years, and I've only changed the toner once -- so long ago that I don't remember when that was.
iamjackg··on Half-Baked Product
You're right. I should have included Google in the list!
iamjackg··on Half-Baked Product
How many of those are "the exact same product, but better" though? Definitely the iPhone, and possibly Slack. Everything else you listed was a drastic change in the way an existing service (taxis, home media, backups) was delivered or priced, to the point where they feel like either an entirely different product (or an unsustainably priced one that wins by virtue of being cheaper at first, see Uber and Airbnb).

I'm not fundamentally disagreeing with you -- but I think there are some things where "everybody has clearly been doing this wrong the whole time" doesn't pass the smell test: ovens have been around for millennia, including through the whole industrial revolution and recent exponential modernization of technology.

iamjackg··on GameBoy Workboy
I take that back! It seems to be happening to multiple people using VPNs. My bad. I should have been more charitable.
iamjackg··on GameBoy Workboy
It's probably a bot account that tried to read the article to come up with a reasonable comment, but TCRF likely serves a "you're a bot, go away" static response page when it's accessed by bots. Pretty funny.
iamjackg··on Zig by Example
"More up-to-date" meaning more sources that are also up to date like the OP, or meaning that the OP is not up to date? Silly English language!
iamjackg··on Webcam head tracking, webcam to control in‑game FOV
It would be cool to use something like this or openfov to control OBS to automatically switch between different cameras/scenes when you turn your head. Either multiple cameras, or switching between screenshare/camera if you look directly into the camera.
iamjackg··on Codex just found a "workaround" of not having sudo on my PC
The same thing happened to me with Opus 4.8 just a few days ago. I was testing a script in a docker container which created a bunch of root-owned files, so Claude couldn't delete them. It tried sudo, but when that didn't work it just spun up an alpine docker container and deleted them through that.
iamjackg··on 1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices
Bots doing what? How would the poster being a bot influence why the post itself makes it to the front page with just 10 points?
iamjackg··on Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
That seems like a false equivalence to me, even if we ignore the fact that only 21% of that revenue came from non-US countries. There are enormous chunks of the world where the local equivalent of $1500 is a life-changing amount of money.
iamjackg··on Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
The C64 sold "between 12.5 and 17 million units" in its lifetime [0], vs. worldwide PC shipments of "71.5 million units in the fourth quarter of 2025." (emphasis mine) [1] It's truly an apples (hehe) to oranges comparison, and in my opinion it only reinforces the point that "normal people" will no longer be able to purchase computers, just like the C64 was not a mainstream product.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160306232450/http://www.pageta... [1] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-1-20...

iamjackg··on Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers
I think the comment's saying that they leave the phone at home, and the watch works by itself as long as it was connected to the phone before leaving the house.
iamjackg··on 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
I know, it looks incredible. It popped up on my YouTube feed and I got super excited, but then I thought "I bet this is going to be at least $800." I was wrong in the worst possible way.
iamjackg··on 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
I actually thought of this (or a previous similar project? The one posted here seems more recent...) just a few days ago while watching the announcement video for this new DJ device, since it seems to use a 5x5 font: https://driftdj.com/dj-hybrid
iamjackg··on The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess
The problem, unfortunately, is the scale. It's always scale. Humans make all the kinds of mistakes that we ascribe to LLMs, but LLMs can make them much faster and at much larger scale.

Models have gotten ridiculously better, they really have, but the scale has increased too, and I don't think we're ready to deal with the onslaught.

iamjackg··on Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
Scott's work is amazing.

Another related project that builds on a similar foundation: https://github.com/ledfx/ledfx

iamjackg··on Teenage Engineering's PO-32 acoustic modem and synth implementation
All it means is that the PO-32 is not a sampler, it's a synthesizer, so it receives a "preset" for the synth rather than an audio sample.
iamjackg··on A Faster Alternative to Jq
You might like https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron
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