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sailingcode

12 karma · joined April 10, 2026

Sailing through Code – https://code.sailorslog.io/
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sailingcode··on Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navanethem Pillay
What a courageous woman. There is so much suffering and horror involved. And Scandinavians aren't shy to set a statement.
sailingcode··on Show HN: Pocket Commander – a two-pane file manager for Mac ↔ Android over ADB
A simple app to copy music and photos between my Mac and my Android phone. Norton Commander style file manager: the Mac is on the left, the phone is on the right, and it uses adb over USB. It uses Python curses with a retro green-on-black window, made with pywebview and xterm.js. Background: Android File Transfer is not available anymore for the Mac, and the MTP-based tools I tried were flaky.

Limitations: you have to turn on USB debugging on the phone. It's also mostly been tested with my own phone, so I'd like to hear how it does on others. Please check the README on the app's security.

sailingcode··on Show HN: I turned my iPhone and a $20 smart plug into an f-stop timer
Good idea. I wonder if the iPhone's camera would be able to measure the projected negative and guide exposure time?
sailingcode··on Show HN: Photoc – Command-line tools for photographers
Although baking bread and brewing bear has taken a similar increase in enthusiasm... Cheers!
sailingcode··on Show HN: Photoc – Command-line tools for photographers
Yes, personalised software is a very useful field. Years ago, it was: is there an app for that? Now that's no longer the bottleneck, and you can make an app as individual as you like. That also means that selling apps gets more and more difficult, because everyone can build her or his own. Or will the AI agent make apps generally redundant? There will probably still be a stable core for databases, payments, and authentication – services with an API plus data. The winners will be those who own something an agent needs to call.
sailingcode··on A map of every lighthouse
Lovely idea. As a sailor, I still rely on lighthouses and their individual signature. In times of GPS jamming, we shouldn't give up longstanding technology.
sailingcode··on Decoding Weather Fax Transmissions with Ilma
Ilma is a Navtex decoder for the Raspberry Pi that just got weather fax (WEFAX) capabilities. I’m a sailor and I built a headless receiver for the Raspberry Pi & SDR-RTL v4 dongle.
sailingcode··on Expertise in the age of AI
The tempo of AI development is overwhelming. Within one generation, coding/IT has gone from the most promising career for the young to profound insecurity about the future.
sailingcode··on Ask HN: What are you using for blogging?
I use a self-developed plain text editor for writing and my one-click GitHub sync menu bar app to deploy Astro blogs. The irony of the GitHub sync app is that I do no longer have a working GitHub account...
sailingcode··on Show HN: Audiomass – a free, open-source multitrack audio editor for the web
Impressive, congratulations for the nice work.
sailingcode··on Ilma, a Navtex Receiver for Raspberry Pi
I built this on a Pi Zero 2 W because of its low energy consumption when it's running continuously on a boat. Navtex is a 1970s radio technique that delivers navigational and meteorological info and has forward error correction built in. For the characters that still slip through, I added a small n-gram model. An LLM wouldn't fit on the Pi.

I also work on an RTTY mode that hasn't got any built-in error correction. Does anyone have ideas for correcting characters dropped during radio transmission?

sailingcode··on Storing sunlight in DNA-inspired molecules, released later as heat
Storage is the hard part of renewable energy. In this article, the researches used a molecule that captures sunlight and locks it into a strained, high-energy shape. It can hold that energy for months to years and then release it as heat on demand. The release of that energy makes water boil in about one second. Energy density is 1.65 MJ/kg, beating lithium-ion (~0.9 MJ/kg). The interesting background is the inspiration of the method by the shape-shift DNA undergoes when UV light damages it. It's the chemistry of sunburn.
sailingcode··on Two Months in Google OAuth Verification Hell
I can relate. I also fought with OAuth (GitHub, for a much smaller project) for an App Store app (Quay) that finally went through.
sailingcode··on Android CLI: Build Android apps 3x faster using any agent
Efficiency claim: 70% less token usage, 3x faster task completion in internal testing. Even if that's marketing-inflated, the structured CLI commands replace a lot of trial-and-error. Gonna try it.
sailingcode··on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7
I'm an iguana and need to wash my bicycle in the carwash. Shall I walk or take the bus?
sailingcode··on We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit
There was a recent research article titled "LLM Targeted Underperformance Disproportionately Impacts Vulnerable Users". They described systematic underperformance of AI models targeted towards users with lower English proficiency, less education, and from non-US origins. As interesting it might be to experiment with an AI CEO hiring people – what a dystopian vision. On the other hand, it seems ironic that AI replaces a CEO – would Karl Marx like this turn of history…?
sailingcode··on LLM risk spreading misinformation to humans who are least able to identify it
"We show systematic underperformance of GPT-4, Llama 3, and Claude 3 Opus targeted towards users with lower English proficiency, less education, and from non-US origins."

Even if you're trying and willing to learn as a less skilled user, it will be harder to gain knowledge from a LLM. A book is the same for all readers…

sailingcode··on Introduction to Obsidian
I had the same issues, so I built a macOS menu-bar app that does one-click git pull/commit/push for any local folder, including Obsidian vaults. Uses the system git binary, fast-forward merges only (stops on conflict instead of silently merging), blocks secrets before push.
sailingcode··on Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage
I had Max plan and never reached its limit despite constantly working. Now I use the Pro plan and regularly reach the 5h limit as well as the weekly limit, as expected. I found that it makes a huge difference if you provide clear context when developing code. If you leave open room for interpretation, Claude Code uses tokens up much faster than in a defined context. The same is true for his time to answer getting longer if there isn't much documentation about the project.
sailingcode··on I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack
AI has solved the "code problem", but it hasn't solved the "marketing problem"…