Interesting perspective. I've mainly felt like i have 'American privilege' regarding the ease with which i open accounts of basically any sort on a whim, usually with little friction.
Readit Newsrtaylorgarlock commented on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration ankursethi.com/blog/gemin... · Posted by u/speckx
rtaylorgarlock commented on Self-hosting my photos with Immich michael.stapelberg.ch/pos... · Posted by u/birdculture
> I wonder at which point I'll get annoyed enough to go through the effort of setting up immich. Which, naturally, will probably involve me re-working my local server as well. The yak's hair grows faster than I can shave it.
LLM + Nix (ideally NixOS) changed everything imo.
After reading TFA last night, it was less work to tell Claude Code to get Immich running on my home server (NixOS), add the service to Tailscale, and then give me a todo list reminder of what I needed to do to mirror my Macbook iCloud/Photo.app gallery to it and then see it on my iPhone...
...than any of the times I've had to work around "black box says no", much like your example.
Just a couple years ago, this wasn't the case. I didn't have the energy to ssh into my server and remember how things are set up and then read a bunch of docs and risk having to go into a manual debug loop any time a service breaks. LLM does all that. I never even read Nix docs. LLM does that too.
In fact, it was fairly fun to finally get a good cross-platform setup working in general to divest from Apple thanks to LLM + Nix. I really like where things are going in this regard. I don't need any of this crap anymore that I used to use because it was the only way to get something that Just Worked.
By the time I lose my software job and have to compete with you lot, H1Bs, and teenagers to fold sweaters at Hollister, I won't need to use a single bit of proprietary software. It will be a huge consolation.
LLM managing a NixOS install lol
rtaylorgarlock commented on Ask HN: What is the purpose of all these AI spam comments? · Posted by u/GaryBluto
I always wonder how much of HN is just bots debating bots
Or asking baiting questions just to appear intellectually connected?
rtaylorgarlock commented on Penpot: The Open-Source Figma github.com/penpot/penpot... · Posted by u/selvan
I'm willing to pay the "performance tax" of the web stack/self-hosting if it means my design files aren't held hostage in a proprietary cloud silo.
Figma is fantastic software, but it has become a single point of failure for entire product orgs. If Penpot is "laggy" right now but gives me a docker-compose up guarantee that I own the pipeline, that's a trade-off I'll take.
Performance can be optimized eventually (it's code); closed-source licensing terms cannot be optimized by users (it's legal).
Exactly.
I'm a little interested to see if perhaps designer's eyes will continue to open to the power of licensing terms and control of their work with the whole AI conversation. The only designers i've heard say they care about open source are on the web side of design.
rtaylorgarlock commented on Python is not a great language for data science blog.genesmindsmachines.c... · Posted by u/speckx
>> I would consider the R code to be slightly easier to read (notice how many quotes and brackets the Python code needs)
Oh god no, do people write R like that, pipes at the end? Elixir style pipe-operators at the beginning is the way.
And if you really wanted to "improve" readability by confusing arguments/functions/vars just to omit quotes, python can do that, you'll just need a wrapper object and getattr hacks to get from `my_magic_strings.foo` -> `'foo'`. As for the brackets.. ok that's a legitimate improvement, but again not language related, it's library API design for function sigs.
Upvoted for pipes at the beginning
rtaylorgarlock commented on Show HN: I built an interactive HN Simulator news.ysimulator.run/news... · Posted by u/johnsillings
> Truly captures the spirit of these types of HN comments; Person A does a thing, Person B points out how pointless thing could have been done better in effort to flex smart.
And then Person A goes off and founds Dropbox and 20 years later is worth $2.4 billion.
How dare you bring facts or narrative into question which dunk on the original commenter's upvote-worthy comment
I am so glad both top rated and majority of comments on HN finally understands DRAM industry instead of constant DRAM is a cartel that is why things are expensive.
Also worth mentioning DRAM and NAND's profit from Samsung is what keep the Samsung Foundry fighting TSMC. Especially for those who thinks TSMC is somehow a monopoly.
Another things to point out which is not mentioned yet, China is working on both DRAM and NAND. Both LPDDR5 and Stacked NAND are already in production and waiting for yield and scale. Higher Price will finally be perfect timing for them to join the commodity DRAM and NAND race. Good for consumer I suppose, not so good for a lot of other things which I wont go into.
re: other things, I bet I agree.
rtaylorgarlock commented on Proxmox virtual environment 9.1 available proxmox.com/en/about/comp... · Posted by u/speckx
Watching hypervisors slowly improve over the last few years has been amazing. They aren't quite to the point that I will install them under any new hardware I buy and then put my daily driver OS on top, but they are very close. I think a strong focus on creating 'the OS under your OS' experience seamless could open up a lot more here.
For many folk's workflows, I'd wager that hypervisors are there and ready. I had a nice time setting up xcp-ng before deciding microk8s fits my needs more betterer; they're just plum good, well documented, and blazing fast.
rtaylorgarlock commented on GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT openai.com/index/gpt-5-1/... · Posted by u/tedsanders
This is why I prefer models from Anthropic, especially for language-related tasks: they are more natural and to the point. GPT always used too much corporate-speak and market-speak, and this recent update looks terrible: I do not want my AI assistant to crack jokes, be sycophantic, or say "I’ve got you, Ron". I want it to assist me without pretending to be something that it isn't.
In my experience, somehow the strength in natural language / litigious / prosaic work translated negatively in a way to coding. The verbose, prolific way it writes + the investment into dev tooling by Anthropic resulted in Anthropic's models leading the sycophantic-presumptuous-over-confident frontier.
So much so that I still have barely used Sonnet 4.5 thinking.
rtaylorgarlock commented on Cursor: Past, Present, and Future cursor.com/blog/series-d... · Posted by u/whizusukite
> Cursor should be a place where it’s impossible to write bugs.
Ha. Does anyone run a total on how much VC funding has gone towards this goal? In aggregate?