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pjjpo

123 karma · joined August 3, 2025

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pjjpo··on The Corporate Creep of Plex: Why it may be time to move to Jellyfin
I think anyone grandfathered in to a lifetime license is getting a pretty good deal on this. Mine was $119 in 2017. The only other lifetime license I have bought is Adguard, also excellent. Software that gets unlimited updates for a low price is _very rare_ right? If there are other good examples, happy to hear them!

I get that things are changing with Plex, naturally given it was a steal. But somehow it feels in bad faith when the author got that great deal but puts out this hit piece.

pjjpo··on Buz – A fork of Bun using modern Zig, with sub-1s incremental builds
I maybe am reading too much into this, but it's weird to me that a zig lead would be posting about an AI-only project despite zig's stance on AI. Maybe zig's official stance isn't that well supported in their own community.
pjjpo··on SPCX is now Wall Street's most shorted new stock
I think I follow this and most people probably also understand what it is that causes a bank default (i.e. everyone withdraws their money simultaneously). Still trying to dig at the mapping.

IIUC the main difference with stock is the market prices the items by demand unlike where the treasury effectively prices the items by supply and banks work under that. So the stocks are expected to always be liquid potentially at a lower price while banks have to be bailed out by the government for liquidity if a bank run. This definitely feels different, though I guess the extreme case gets closer, if every single bank needs to be bailed out at once, the currency price will go down like stocks do.

pjjpo··on Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?
While I don't want to ruin this thread with coming out, I can't find a better place - sorry.

While I have a guess on what elephant everyone is thinking about, I wonder if it's just the stock market - at a higher level capitalism itself. I have felt Android get less stable with pretty much every release for many years now, well before the current boom. I think this is all a long term trend devaluing craftsmanship, with a root cause of why care if you can still make tons of money anyways.

pjjpo··on Java 27: What's New?
Wait, what's Java 11?
pjjpo··on Apple to increase spend with Broadcom to produce billions more U.S. chips
If Broadcom could filter out FBAR for me would happily buy some stock.

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

pjjpo··on Rewriting Bun in Rust
I have found LLMs struggle with Rust's constraints - they are optimized to produce code that passes the tests, not necessarily good code. So instead of working out lifetimes and borrowing, it will be happy to copy a buffer many times without thought. This means I have to still go through line by line to review and often rewrite either by hand or with another LLM iteration.

There may be some prompting that can help with this but I suspect there is a fundamental tension between writing working code vs good code in LLMs. Go is popular for being simple, making it easy to jump in and write something fast and stable - minimizing the gap between working and good code probably helps out the LLMs a lot.

pjjpo··on The Reports of Jim Carrey's Death Are a Failure Mode
I notice Gemini is essentially a frontend to Reddit at this point. I'm guessing that was on TikTok and also Reddit, while the malicious Wikipedia edit doesn't make it through a subreddit.

Too much muscle memory to change yet but I continue to want to at least try changing my default search engine to Reddit Answers for a trial to see how it compares to Google, probably at least as good.

pjjpo··on Bun has an open PR adding shared-memory threads to JavaScriptCore
I think this is precisely why I don't mind it that much. I can't audit a huge codebase like a JavaScript runtime, whether the code is by a human from scratch or not. I just have to trust it as a black box.

I've seen LLMs produce terrible code indeed, but I have also seen humans produce terrible code. I haven't dug in to JS runtimes specifically but have read plenty of code in openjdk and cpython - there are many points that could be done better, but there's also no point since it's working, and keeping working code unchanged tends to be a smart decision in software engineering.

So of course the last point brings up whether it was a good idea to rewrite bun if it was working. Apparently the bun team thought the difficulty in getting changes in zig upstream meant it is. I don't intend to hold LLM code to a higher bar than human code - notably if the runtime continues to work, that is as good as I can expect from what is otherwise a huge black box of extreme programming (not that agile kind).

pjjpo··on Tesla allegedly in autopilot mode crashes into Texas house, woman killed
I agree with the sentiment and don't like Elon at all. But I think there is a case to say the Full refers to features, so not only lane change / parking, but actual driving fully. If it said Perfect FSD or even High Quality FSD, that's definitely worse, but we have to acknowledge FSD can fully drive in many cases, not enough for me to be comfortable enough maybe, but comparing to rat poison seems like a stretch.
pjjpo··on Iran Delays U.S. Peace Talks over Israeli Attacks in Lebanon
If the latter is no, I do hope the US finally ends military aid to Israel. I really doubt it will happen, but if the record says it should be ok, then that would be really great.
pjjpo··on Why stdx is not on crates.io
I don't know of anyone accessing a database like Postgres with just the stdlib in real apps. Or maybe the API is just serving data out of a JSON file checked in the repo?

I agree the stdlib is great but the reality is production apps cannot be built using only it.

Most codebases have dependencies. Most accept dependency updates from renovate etc without much thought. Go can remain secure if goproxy has thorough security scans (I think they do but am not sure if it's unbeatable) and if the fact that any attack will be in OSS code itself, rather than packaged just-in-time in a workflow, makes it visible before significant damage. I have no idea if the latter is true but it might be. Of course NPM packages are just as visible as long as someone is scanning them so maybe not.

pjjpo··on Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension
Completely irrelevant news - switched to Zen Browser last year and never looking back.

(Cheeky phrasing, of course this is an anecdote. But for anyone the news is relevant to, definitely recommend a try!)

pjjpo··on Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
Gotten so used to brew, tap, etc never even thought how unintuitive that might be for newcomers.
pjjpo··on Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
At this point I assume anyone with more than five years at Google is morally bankrupt to at least some degree. I don't want to paint them as bad people or anything but can't find better words for it - it's so obvious that if you stick around, you are accepting it and likely contributing to some degree. People I still talk to are generally honest about accepting it. I wonder if they will all reneg with this sort of quitting post when the time comes.
pjjpo··on Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them
Can you clarify what you are saying here?
pjjpo··on A CGo-free port of SQLite/SQLite3
This project seems to get shared every month or so. It's really sad that HN's signal to noise has fallen this hard... While I continue to have it in my feed, I'm more and more opening up Reddit since it just feels more robust now adays.
pjjpo··on SDSU Wired Its Dorms with 1,300 AI Cameras Without Telling Students
I had my PS2 stolen from a dorm at the other SD university. More security cameras would have been a great thing at the time.
pjjpo··on What happens if Japan takes in zero immigrants?
> A crumbling pension system

AFAIK the pension system is quite well invested and can continue for many decades even with current trends. Where do you get that it is crumbling? There is a silly law forcing recalculation of pension payments vs inflation to happen too infrequently causing issues right now but that is probably a different issue.

pjjpo··on Sakana AI's Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) Lab
I've never considered them a hypebeast, just a scam to get investor money as easily as possible. They seem to be quite successful really.
pjjpo··on Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs
Isn't the big drawback not having a swappable GPU? Perhaps that's not as important anymore but I'm not sure we've confirmed the market demand for that.
pjjpo··on They are looting your life savings
Yeah, while the world is mostly clickbait at this point, "magically makes them eligible for inclusion in the S&P500" is probably some of the best (i.e. worst).
pjjpo··on The SpaceX IPO will be the theft of the century
I want to buy an index with generally fixed rules. I don't know enough of the topic to know how bad it is but if Nasdaq is literally manually tweaking SpaceX's weight, just because? Then it's not buying the market.
pjjpo··on 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building
Can see moving parts into a new case as being just a transition, and then replacements from there continuing the treadmill.

But it would have been much cooler if you were still on the 486 era case :D

pjjpo··on Show HN: Context-aware Japanese furigana using Sudachi and ModernBERT
20 years now but rikaikun / chan were great at the time and I suspect still are for learning. Hover over the words you can't read, no corner cases really since it shows all the possible readings and meanings, not just one. I would say that extra context is useful for learning the word completely, not just being able to read some content (can just fully translate an article for that).

The best part is the feeling of hovering less over time until finally removing the extension.

pjjpo··on Show HN: Context-aware Japanese furigana using Sudachi and ModernBERT
Don't want to discourage or anything but is this mostly pattern matching? Most of the comments here seem to be about corner cases "added to the model", which doesn't feel that novel. Naturally, context-aware is all about the corner cases.

今日asこんにちはbeing denylisted was the biggest point of concern here.

pjjpo··on Naphtha shortages in Japan
I can think of one - Calbee is taking advantage of the situation to get massive, free TV time. On top of that, their product will be cheaper to make. In terms of a marketing coup, this is probably one of the greatest examples. No other package manufacturer has announced a similar ink shortage, so...

In half a year, maybe, but I and many I talk to are skeptical their huge scale supply chain is running out of printing material in such a short amount of time. I'm voting with my yen by not buying Calbee products for now.

pjjpo··on MCP is dead?
Yeah it was quite weird seeing "Many of these companies don't even have an external API!" given MCP is literally a protocol for an external API. Not a good one in my opinion but it indeed has mindshare.
pjjpo··on Is AI Profitable Yet?
This doesn't sound like Claude at all to me. Which is a good thing but wonder where that came from.
pjjpo··on Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
No tricks I'm sure. Commencement speeches, like most, are scripted. There was already a point prepared about pushing towards less populism (my take, I haven't seen the script of course), the interesting adlib here is having to get to the main pushes from the script to an audience not listening.
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