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mortenjorckon GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone

Of everything that could be automated, Bartosz Ciechanowski really was the last on my list.

In all seriousness, his lovingly and expertly crafted explainers are still going to age like a handcrafted heirloom clock in a world of plastic-clad quartz movements. But it’s absolutely incredible that we are now in an age where a computer can manufacture a serviceable interactive explainer on whatever niche topic you desire.

mortenjorckon Apple Pass Designer

I didn’t realize the bar code region is already semantically defined. That means all Apple has to do is to support an HDR region in software, since the hardware already supports what you describe.

From another comment in this thread, you can see a proof of concept using the HDR video workaround that works on any recent iPhone (or MacBook Pro): https://dt.in.th/HDRQRCode

mortenjorckon Apple Pass Designer

The one thing I hope Apple has added to the pass framework is the ability to semantically define a barcode area.

This would enable them to finally have Wallet show ONLY that rectangle at a suddenly blinding brightness level (on HDR displays) for the scanner, rather than cranking up the entire screen.

mortenjorckon Spear (10/GUI for Mac) [video]

I’m starting with a limited beta, so it’s too early for a Show HN, but, 17 years after 10/GUI, I finally built it: a window manager for macOS based on my 2009 video. Happy to answer any questions!

mortenjorckon Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard

I have never felt quite so cacklingly nefarious as a designer as I did just now carefully adjusting vertical scale and offset so that the x-height and baseline of Papyrus optically match Comic Sans when mixed together.

I don't yet know who I'll be pranking with the downloaded font, but I look forward to their reaction.

mortenjorckon The contagion of fear

The students in the computer lab had no guarantee that they wouldn't, say, download a copy of Napster infected with the CIH virus later. The fact that they were not under imminent threat from some kind of Hollywood-style network worm did not mean they were immune from more realistic attack vectors.

Likewise, one can quite reasonably say there is no credible existential, Hollywood-style threat from AI in the foreseeable future while recognizing far lower-stakes, yet important risks that need to be addressed.

mortenjorckon No Man's Sky Cosmos

I've bounced off NMS several times, but each time I come back, I reason that they've added so many systems now that the procedural generation must finally feel genuinely deep and interesting.

And maybe it has, but the first 60 minutes of the game still feel like enough of a slog that I have yet to get to any of the good stuff.

mortenjorckon Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux

It looks like the original post was removed, but there are some screenshots going around (unfortunately X doesn't let you view full-size unless you're logged in): https://x.com/ChrisCroy/status/2094867317163540937

mortenjorckon Dimethyl Mercury Exposure Incident at MIT

Plausible scenario from a comment in the science.org post linked in another thread:

> If the MIT student was doing some work with reactive stuff and mercury and got an unknown result well outside expectations out of the output they were expecting i can see them struggling through working out what it could be, coming to the conclusion Dimethylmercury was possibble as an accidental side product of what went wrong, and just pulling all the emergency handles to be safe. Given how nasty that stuff is that is exactly the kind of reaction to such a scenario you'd want someone to have.

mortenjorckon Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

Ha, I was going to describe it the same way. The image is there in the buffer, you have full bit-level access to it; the only difference is that there's a firewall preventing it from being rendered to the primary display. Dreaming allows rendering it to a virtual display which is temporarily considered canonical.

I think the resolution and bit depth of that buffer is the aphantasia spectrum. Some people are working from a 160x120 1-bit image, for some it's 640x480 8-bit, and some can load up an 8K at 32-bit deep color.

mortenjorckon There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

Both can be true.

AI SDLCs simply compress the same incentives that were always there: you could invest in optimizing your architecture and improving your UX, neither of which make for big bullet points that close sales, or you could invest in new features that do.

The investment that was previously measured in months of developer time may now be measured in token spend across days, but the underlying dynamics shaping where it’s directed haven’t changed.

mortenjorckon Kobo can run apps now

My reaction was perhaps not as strongly felt as yours, but I agree that it discourages me from reading further when it's obvious I'm reading slop rather than something a human considered.

"These are photographs of the device, not simulator captures" is the kind of total throwaway verbiage that a human would never even pause to consider writing because it "clarifies" something that in the totality of context is beyond obvious. It makes the writing more fatiguing to read, and creates a terrible first impression for a project.

mortenjorckon Gloomberb

As someone whose trading is mostly based on vibes via Reuters, X, and the Apple Stocks app, this is a fun dip in the deep end. The tiling UI is quite sensible once you get the hang of it.

The one thing I can't figure out is how to set a pane to change its ticker symbol based on the selected one in another pane. The default research panes do this, but I can't figure out how to set a new one to do it.

mortenjorckon Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

As a point of comparison: Samsung has sold smartphone chips and later OLED displays to Apple for over fifteen years.

Deals like this that look awkward from the outside but are mutually beneficial to both participants exist everywhere.

mortenjorckon Itadakimasu: A word you say to the food, not the cook

I had always assumed it was a sort of quasi-religious practice as the same gesture is typically seen at shrines. Not once in 30 years of consuming Japanese culture did I ever think it was directed at the chef!

mortenjorckon Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

Mostly just that it's the platform I'm most familiar with and felt reasonably confident in the TAM.

Partly the challenge, too, though! If I were designing within the constraints of a Gnome WM, the result would probably look totally different from where this project is now. It's kind of fun having, on one hand, a lot of OS restrictions to work around, but on the other, native first-party multi-touch, Core Animation, and a rich history of platform conventions to draw from and adapt.

mortenjorckon Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

I did post a very brief teaser on the original Vimeo account I used in 2009, but it looks like no one has found it yet: https://vimeo.com/1213152954

mortenjorckon Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

For the past four months, I've been building a window manager for MacOS based on my 2009 concept video 10/GUI.

I've overcome about a dozen "there's simply no way to do this in MacOS and I have to abandon the project" challenges so far. MacOS really does not want to let you manage windows in this novel of a way, and I've had to come up with a handful of tricks to maintain the illusion that the WM is accessing the compositor at a lower level than it actually is. But it works, and I'm dogfooding it as I go!

I'm hopefully only a few weeks away now from a full announcement and a beta. If you're curious to try the first beta, feel free to get in touch at clayton at presteign dot com.

mortenjorckon Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

OP or dang should change the link to the DF retraction. While the app’s author has apparently produced some quality products, this puts a big asterisk next to that reputation.

mortenjorckon App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours

Look up "wireless printing" in the App Store sometime. As best I can tell, one or two actors have spammed the entire category with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of subscription-heavy repackagings of CUPS drivers as iOS apps. They all have very similar blue line-art icons of a printer, similar preview images with similar typography, and are all crammed full of subscription options.

They are probably making a killing on people who forgot about or can't figure out how to cancel the $4.99/week subscription on the top 20-30 of these apps.

All this while of course the one app you've been working on for a year will be held up with multiple rounds of rejections weeks apart. For all the good Cook has done in his 15 years at Apple, the App Store will be the one real stain on his legacy, and I hope Ternus is as acutely cognizant of that as the developer community is.

mortenjorckon Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick

In this case it’s actual malice, that the streaming stick is set up for residential proxy and ad fraud straight from the factory. But incompetence can lead to the same place if it’s a poorly engineered, un-maintained device with an old version of Android that will never be patched and is always one no-click exploit away from being commandeered into residential proxy and ad fraud.

mortenjorckon Show HN: SpinWin – A macOS menu bar app to visually rotate or spin any window

Oh, that's pretty clever! Create a dummy display that never actually renders anywhere and use it as the holding area for "temporarily hidden" windows.

Does the dummy display have to live within the desktop geometry (as in the user could accidentally move the cursor off one edge onto it) or can it be totally isolated?

mortenjorckon Anthropeum – Where in the world, and when, does this human artifact belong?

This just became my new favorite daily game. The only thing I’d change is the time resolution: 1750-2000 should probably have the same number of divisions as 1000-3000 BC.

mortenjorckon Show HN: SpinWin – A macOS menu bar app to visually rotate or spin any window

Thanks for the corroboration. Something that apparently might be possible is using the private framework for Spaces to offload windows to a "holding Space"; I haven't tried it because it felt just a little too hacky for something I'm ideally hoping to turn into a commercial product, but it might be worth investigating depending on your use case.

mortenjorckon Show HN: SpinWin – A macOS menu bar app to visually rotate or spin any window

I’ve been building a window manger for macOS that involves hiding windows offscreen, but I’ve found AccessibilityKit clamps position writes at the screen edge, so I’ve had to settle for allowing a 1px-wide sliver (plus shadow) in the corner. Is that what you’re doing too, or did you find an alternative?

mortenjorckon Sony's decision to ditch discs was practically inevitable, data shows

> A graph of those trends shows physical sales peaking in the 12 months ending June 2009

I had no idea physical game sales had peaked so long ago. I would have guessed something like 2018.

mortenjorckon Apple has decided to compete for creativity app users

Sketch lost the market to Figma, and now Figma is losing the market to vibe coding.

I'm not sure what the value proposition of Sketch is these days apart from local, non-cloud editing (although you can even get that with a pretty decent UI these days with Lunacy).

mortenjorckon Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

As bad as this is, it’s worth noting that this is the same incident that was widely reported earlier this month. Sony has only rugpulled hundreds of purchased titles from customers once this year.

So far.

mortenjorckon Codex Micro

This is not really intended as a product you will use today.

This is an intentionally provocative statement on the future of work, where your keyboard is not supplemented by, but rather replaced by a dozen or so buttons for prompting (via voice), reviewing, approving or rejecting.

Codex Micro is a workstation controller for the knowledge worker in sama's 2030 fever dream. I'm not even entirely sure I disagree.

mortenjorckon When A.I. is a member of the family

Given what the mother has been through and how the kids seem to be doing largely all right, I honestly can’t decide whether this is dystopian or utopian.