Hacker News Reader

Comment by Insanity | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the good thing to come out of the RAM crisis is that engineers will care about memory usage again lol.

The bad thing here is that modding discord will become significantly harder and might have been their original intention here.

Some vibekiddie will reengineer this, and mod it.

>vibekiddie

love this term, knew instantly what it means

depends if they decide to use any kind of obfuscation here to protect "IP"

How? Anthropic hard coded anti-reverse engineering instructions into Claude.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

...so just don't use Claude?

I thought Claude was the tool for the AI script kiddies?

Open models have no guardrails.

This isn't universally true, and there's a lot of pressure to bake guardrails and moderation in: Mistral for instance went from one of the most unhinged to incredibly restrictive models with Mistral 4 Large release.

Several others have done similar to greater or lesser degrees in calendar 2026, but the pressure is there across the board to limit what the open models can do without modifications that could largely only be found locally and not from online providers.

Hopefully they don't stop it from doing malware analysis. I've been using it to report malware C2s and it's a godsend for pulling apart the layers of crap they use.

Edit: A couple queries with it indicate it will still assist with malware analysis and considers it beneficial. Hopefully it stays that way.

Can’t see it on my end, the clanker still finesses IDAPython just fine.

Anti video-game-reverse-engineering, to be specific. It’ll refuse to decompile or reverse engineer any video game.

Just tossed the clanker at some stuff in Cyberpunk 2077, seems to be reversing it fine. Mind you I’m using my Claude sub in OMP so maybe I’m getting a less shitty system prompt (also I have the defensive CVP which presumably allows a lil more rev work than normal, though it’s still not enough for interesting things on Opus 5.5)

It’d probably be trickier with multiplayer games given the slopmachine would probably assume you wanna cheat in it

It may shock you to hear that there are other coding agents than Claude.

Wait until they find out about Abliteration models

Local AI for starters, stop relying on a single timesharing AI vendor.

DeepSeek + DSH can do it with a fraction of the cost

As well as literally any other Chinese / open model.

I'm not surprised Anthropic and OpenAI are trying their best to ban / severely handicap competition and crack down on opensource. It's a major threat to their existence.

They did not. Everyone has misinterpreted what Anthropic actually did and say. This attention economy is exhausting...

This is what an Anthropic dev said:

>"to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game"

This just means exact clones, not reverse-engineering. The article is blatantly lying. And easy to disprove by... trying it yourself.

From the article itself, "Regarding the blocking of reverse engineering, we have received direct confirmations. The first comes from our own alumnus Jarred Walton, who was trying to run checks on the software he's developing. He notes that such work had been performed with no issue until yesterday, October 31, and that switching to Opus 4.8 let him continue his work."

They can just repackage the web app and mod that if all else fails.

They’re showing how easy it is to vibe code a port of the app. A motivated developer outside Discord could do the same and release OpenDiscord or whatever if they cared enough to want to mod the app that way.

This is the way, LLMs are an enabler and force multiplier to help you build whatever interface you want on whatever protocol you have to reverse engineer.

Provide it the official client and point it at public api endpoints (or an LLM operated mitm proxy), set it to work to reimplement.

Ahem there is also the option to check out competitors ;)

Discord says using modified or alternative clients is against their terms of service, and they have banned people for it in the past (if they do something detectable, like enabling A/B testing feature flags that their account ID doesn't match :/)

They're not exactly friendly to that sort of thing, I wouldn't be surprised if they add some traps to catch people making their own client.

So I'd +1 the sibling comment's suggestion to consider alternatives to Discord, if you're setting up your own community

So then hide your client better? Just because a company has a policy does not mean you need to follow it.

> So then hide your client better? Just because a company has a policy does not mean you need to follow it.

How, it sounds like they're trying to catch you, e.g. I took...

> and they have banned people for it in the past (if they do something detectable, like enabling A/B testing feature flags that their account ID doesn't match :/)

...to mean they push out changes just to detect the clients who don't conform. I'm sure they could be very sneaky about it in a way that would be hard to "just do better" For instance: have some client behavior change that's hidden behind a feature flag or even calendar date, wait a long time until all official clients are updated, then trigger it and ban the laggards who can be assumed to be using an unofficial client.

Since discord announced that they would be scanning ID a lot of alternatives have sprung up, chatto and Armada are both looking promising as alternatives, plus the chatto vibed marketing materials on their Dev chat gave me a laugh the other week!

I can recommend both Matrix and Discourse forum as excellent open source selfhostable alternatives.

I like matrix, its like the new IRC for almost real time developer chat, I also do this via Discord but I'd prefer an open alternative. If you have experience running a matrix server do you find the data storage an issue? It sounded like if you federate and join the bigger channels you can balloon your storage pretty fast.

I mostly host for myself and a couple friends, so data storage hasn't been an issue. I'm sure at some point I may need to prune the attachment store, but I put it on a spinning HDD so capacity isn't an issue. (You can rent a storage VPS and those tend to have oodles of disk space.)

Take a look at Chatto. https://chatto.run/

FLOSS, easy to self host, and works nicely.

There are literally dozens of open-source Discord clients already, both vibe-coded and not; and have been for many years. Nobody needed to prove this was possible, least of all Discord.

I don't see any reason to think the web client is going away.

Hey, I work at Discord, specifically on this effort. Our entire focus here has been about improving performance and making the client really feel great.

It's difficult to believe Discord's intent is to make the client great when the recent updates have been to shove Best Buy ads into it. Even to the point of surfacing ads as friend dm notifications! In fairness, I'm jaded since I lost my account due to a sudden ultimatum to share my phone number -- extortion for my PII. So it is impossible for me to believe Discord operates in good faith.

In fairness these are probably distinct teams at discord. A team of engineers focused on performance probably _genuinely_ cares about that.

But there’s other teams and forces at play as well. So I agree with your overall sentiment but the SDEs who worked on this are perhaps not the ones shovelling adware into our faces.

This is a fair point, but it's basically being proud of making the monstrous privacy-destroying ad machine go 10% faster. With how they pressure people to doxx themselves to them (phone number verification) or be completely locked out of their accounts, there is enough predatory tactics in that company that no one should feel proud of working there.

Yeah look Discord is more than one person. A lot of us really care about making the most performant client and that's why we did this.

I don't work at Discord, but I know of very few companies that don't have "malicious" tactics in one sense or another. Ultimately they are trying to improve their own bottom line and that _rarely_ aligns with what's best for people.

Please drop a stripped .pdb right next to the binary or at least make it downloadable :)!

I mean, why would you want to mod the desktop client of discord instead of the web client?

The good thing is AI enabling web developers to write native apps.

Is the average web developer benefitting from vibing languages they are not at all fluent with?

A bit like a translator who doesnt speak the language but has Google translate and a few beers in them right?

For example, is there still a massive .clone() problem in LLM generated Rust?

I re-wrote one of my apps in Swift. I don't know Swift. It's been fun. When it gets stuck I look at the code; I have it teach me via analogy to the e.g. mobx/react concepts I do know. In some cases I've improved the LLMs code after learning how something works. In others I work it more like an informed PM - ok the sidebar opening is slow but... its about 10x faster in my electron version. How is the sidebar "mounted" or rendered? I dump tricks I know from web dev and ask how analogues; sometimes that breaks its anti-patterns. Other times I throw constraints I don't know much about - "This is a native version, can we aim to make it 3x faster to start-up? How".

Personally I was surprised how quickly I surpassed my original code, feature wise. Will it stand the test of time? Too early to tell - need to see if I'm still using the native version of the app in a year. But its been more fun and informative - and fast - than I'd expected.

This is the way. I don't know why it's hard for other people to figure out this process.

Right fun is great but I'm speaking from a professional context. Examples should be production code at legitimate businesses.

For what it's worth I wholly agree with your point and that mirrors the personal project I have. But making personal projects a bit more fun and fluent is not the $10T proposition being championed at the professional level.

Web devs already barely understood their tools. CSS was the closest thing to vibecoding before AI could write code.

You're painting with a very wide brush.

I mean, they were always able to. They just were too lazy to do it and didn't care about doing a good job enough to overcome that laziness.

You know what they meant. This is the same argument that artists used when AI image generation came out, it's not very helpful. Being able to do something and actually doing it are different and we all benefit when web app makers rewrite their apps into native languages.

Some of us are long enough in the business, to know that having Web development skills doesn't preclude having native development skills.

Maybe that was true in the past but it has definitely not been the case for the past 15 or 20 years for web developers who actually don't know anything about native development.

Well if you put it that way, some of them don't even know anything about the browser technology that powers their JavaScript framework used to generate static content.

That is correct.

Your use of "lazy" here really comes off as "ableist".

"I can do it, and you didn't do it, therefore you must be lazy, because I certainly am not lazy"

What's lazy is not diving into the reasons that people may or may not do things.

So, you're saying that the person you're responding to is really saying, "Developers are too disabled to write native applications"? No, that's nonsense. "Laziness" is not the reason for Electron applications, but neither does it implicate disability in this context.

Incidentally, I think it's kind of ableist to toss around the concept of ableism this lightly. Disability is a set of concrete barriers which go unacknowledged and a set of real accommodations which go unimplemented. Disability activism entails acknowledging those barriers and implementing those accommodations; it does not entail the idea that everyone is always trying their best and nobody is ever negligent.

Most electron projects exist because engineering organizations couldn't afford to hire platform specialists for every platform they want to run on.

There were cross-platform C/C++ libraries in the late 80's to early 90's like Visix Galaxy. However, it was not free - far from it.

We developed on Windows NT and deployed onto HP/UX and Solaris.

Uh Qt is still around. Licensing might be as bad as this Visix Galaxy though these days.

certainly not valid for the most used electron projects

Also most native UI frameworks don't provide the primitives for modern UI. It's mostly just standard UI elements, sometimes with the possibility to theme them.

But most frameworks don't come even close to CSS and all the possibilities to create custom controls. It often requires to build everything from scratch in code, which is really hard for more complex layouts.

One could reply that it's a feature, since native UIs are more uniform and with less surprises you can concentrate on whatever the fuck you're doing instead of wondering what this app's designer was smoking.

Depends on the UI framework. Most frameworks don't have enough features to make the UI actually good. It's not even about looks, much more about layout. CSS is really good with conditional layout: hide something and everything reflows around it, responsive layout (not just mobile, but also when making app windows smaller/larger). Typography is another issue with a lot of native UI frameworks. Even adaptive DPI support is not yet easy with most native frameworks.

Also things like accessibility. It's quite easy to make web ui accessible, much harder to do it with custom native control.

Maybe they should take the hint and not make a modern UI, given where UIs like that have taken us.

Create a problem (RAM shortage), sell a solution (AI tools to migrate). Awesome

I always cared with ZRAM under GNU/Linux (I own an n270 netbook with 1GB of RAM and a NUC with 8GB but a Pentium Silver CPU, nothing fancy). Thus, Waterfox with their new Rust based ad blocking engine was a beast, even more with WebGPU enabled and NoScript, just enabling JS for the essential, if any. On top of that, the tab suspending extension. As I program in Rust I need every bit of RAM, even if I disable most debugging options at ~/.config/cargo.toml and I set the build jobs to 1 with "-j1 ".

On the netbook, well.. CWM, UXterm, Dillo, CLI/TUI mail, usenet, IRC and so on clients, groff, nsxiv, mpv, MuPDF... it runs snappier than the NUC for what it does. Programming? Golang for networking stuff -security, not like Rust, but far better than C-, simple C99 for small software, or S9/JimTCL. Otter Browser for emergencies (JS pages from public institutions/govts in my country).

About time, I'm tired of fighting. Free the RAM!

Also even without the RAM crisis, the main limitations (time) to optimizing software are gone. If you want to do something impactful, but don't have any good ideas: Take an existing website or application and build an optimized version of it. If you aren't sure where to start, build an isolated workflow out of an existing app or site you like, have the LLM benchmark it, then ask it to make it use 10x less ram / run 10x faster. Ask about what tools it can use to measure, what benchmarks it can come up with to repeatedly test it, how it can automate workflows in a measurable way. Then turn those into tools or specs you can share along with your work.

With PCs, it was never about having a lot of RAM, it was about not having less RAM than others. So it's fine if everyone gets less RAM.

Sounds kind of socialist :-)

"No one gets TWO sticks of RAM until everyone has at least ONE stick of RAM!"

Luckily one person with monster RAM doesn't ruin it for everyone else, but there's RAMflation if everyone gets it

They’ll never give up bloated javascript frontends and call you poor for wanting anything else while sipping on their overpriced lattes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com