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verst

2,039 karma · joined January 24, 2014

hn@bernd.dev

Tech lead at Azure Durable Task Scheduler OSS maintainer of DAPR (Distributed Application Runtime) - a Cloud Native Compute Foundation graduated project

All comments are my personal opinions unless stated otherwise.

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verst··on Show HN: Our space game has a built-in RISC-V emulator that runs Linux
I saw this on the steam page:

> our entirely in-house game engine PasVulkan, which powers SEEDS, as well as our RISC-V emulator PasRISCV, are both Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)

Can you link to PasVulkan and PasRISCV please?

verst··on I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records
And all of that is definitely happening.

That being said, just last night I observed that the identity team is now opening up agent-assisted PRs against individual service team repos to force MISE adoption and upgrade to the latest version and best practices. I think that's a great thing because many individual service teams simply lack the bandwidth or knowledge. Prior to GenAI availability I wasted many cycles on this kind of work. While GenAI made it easier - internal source documentation still does not unambiguously address every use case. So having the identity team drive this now with the help of agent sessions initiated by them is great.

verst··on I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records
There is an internal library at Microsoft that reliably avoids all these JWT problems - Microsoft Identity Service Essentials (MISE). Adopting MISE and upgrading to the latest versions of it have been part of the Secure Future Initiative (SFI) that can be read about in the news of previous years. Unfortunately it sounds like the service team intentionally deferred the compliance alerts they will have received.
verst··on America.gov
Both aim to answer how to access various government services. One of them has clear categories and lists, the other has an obscure LLM chat box.
verst··on Qwen 3.8 Omni Flash
I find Qwen 3.8 better at coding but I also use Gemma 4 31B. I toggle between them in Ollama.
verst··on NATS publishes preliminary report on technical incident of 8 September
And here I was surprised they would use NATS in their implementation to assign squawk codes.
verst··on An interactive tour of the spanning tree protocol
I met her once in the Bay Area on BART as she was going from the airport to Berkeley to give a lecture (I admit I did not know who she was at the time). We had a nice 1 hour conversation. She's incredibly smart and humble.
verst··on No Man's Sky Cosmos
Agreed. And this tech demo was a day 1 purchase for me back in the day. While it has gotten better since then it just doesn't hold my interest. I do like using it whenever every few months I feel inclined to get my PC VR headset out (I'm using an old HO Reverb G2 with the Oasis driver) I think it's a great VR title.
verst··on Jimothy the raccoon has a rare spinal condition. Here's what that means
As a fellow Ballard home owner I have to say that anyone who thinks Ballard is affordable to buy in is out of touch with reality.
verst··on Transcribe.cpp
Unfortunately there are two sub groups of Iu Mien with somewhat different vocabulary as well - and my wife is from the other group. I had found this pdf document previously - thanks for the pointer! I'll see what I can do with it.
verst··on Transcribe.cpp
I would love such a model. My wife's family is Iu Mien which is a sub group of the Dao/Yao Chinese ethnic minority. Mien is its own language but most speakers are essentially illiterate. I'm good with language but there simply isn't a course or any books for learning the language. Not much in writing to begin with given the high illiteracy rate. I would love to build a translation system - project Hail Mary style :)
verst··on Giant Banana Pulled Over: Driver Says Cops Have Stopped Him 100s of Times
I saw this very banana car while I was having brunch Sunday morning in Ballard Seattle!
verst··on Authentication issues related to API requests
Or the GitHub mobile app where I was using a remote copilot session.
verst··on YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
I can easily create a 1 hour track in Ableton and have some minor variations every say 48 measures. It's basically just copy paste with some parameter variation which can be scripted.

So not everything like that is necessarily AI generated!

verst··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
These were expert office hours for API modeling. The company has certain requirements and standards - this team is supposed to live and breathe them. The question wasn't that advanced. Performing a basic AI prompt in the authoritative expert office hours is not the answer.

The right approach would be to say: I do not know. Let me discuss / research with my colleagues and get back to you.

And to be clear: I manually read and studied the official guiding documents without AI. Then I used a separate AI setup to more effectively research a larger array of additional internal sources, wikis, etc. I also reviewed the code from other teams / projects to infer any patterns that could apply to my project, so I came prepared with examples for discussion.

verst··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
They were speechless. Kind of shocked. It was hilarious. They then agreed to reach out to some colleagues / other teams to research and find the answer. After 20 min they followed up with an acceptable answer.
verst··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
Just yesterday I had to attend internal "office hours" of an expert team to get a question answered - I had done extensive research of my own, both manual and using AI leveraging internal resources. What did the "expert" do when they couldn't answer my question right away? They said "let me ask {insert AI tool}". I cut them off stating that this is an insult to my intelligence. I am in the office hours for expert advice not someone else performing the same AI prompts that I already performed.
verst··on Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
They had a working PDP-10 at the Living Computers Museum (since shut down by Paul Allen's estate). Definitely a mainframe. That thing takes up an entire room.
verst··on Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses
Most of us never had the option for work to pay for Claude Code -- some internal orgs did this. That being said I had a personal Claude Code subscription for a bit.

Honestly I find GitHub Copilot CLI (and now also the new GitHub Copilot app) quite decent. I mostly use it with Opus 4.7, or rarely with GPT-5.5. The VSCode extension is ok, but CLI or app are the better experience IMO.

verst··on The IBM-ification of Google?
Who is the best? Just curious.
verst··on The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
Pretty sure the parent comment is sarcastic.
verst··on U.S. Senators Vote to Ban Themselves from Trading on Prediction Markets
I was a GS-15 before (same level most CTOs in government have). Maybe senior executive service roles (SES) might not concern themselves with ethics violations.

In any case the vast majority of government employees are on the general schedule.

verst··on U.S. Senators Vote to Ban Themselves from Trading on Prediction Markets
In theory as a government employee you already fear getting in trouble with OGE (Office of Government Ethics) and in normal times this is truly enough. Nobody wants to have a conflict of interest or fail to disclose investments etc. However nothing is normal under the current administration...
verst··on Google Flow Music
Agreed - I have been checking to verify whether this truly is a Google service or just something that links out to generic Google ToS and Support pages. It looks suspicious.
verst··on Sauna effect on heart rate
Due to lots of long distance running my rest heart rate is below 40. I am highly skeptical I would experience a 3bpm lower heart rate after sauna. Maybe this benefit applies after infrequent activity or less intense activity only.
verst··on GitHub Stacked PRs
But isn't that why you would squash before merging your PR? If you define a rule that PRs must be squashed you would still have the per commit build.
verst··on OpenAI demand sinks on secondary market as Anthropic runs hot
Like Jensen Huang said the job of an engineer is to solve problems not writing code. The code is a means to an end. This is certainly true for me as an engineer and why I'm not worried about AI.
verst··on New iPad Air, powered by M4
Exactly - any USB mouse via the USB-C connector (or lightning camera adapter before that) works. External displays also work via USB-C.
verst··on Claude becomes number one app on the U.S. App Store
I use Opus 4.6 Fast-mode. It produces significantly better results in my work than any Codex 5.3 tier.
verst··on Claude becomes number one app on the U.S. App Store
I am one of the people who uninstalled ChatGPT and closed their account and installed Claude in the last 24 hours. I know plenty of others who did the same. I wonder whether this trend can be sustained.
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