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gr__oron AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary

An interesting lesson people will learn is that what we, with child-like wonder, believe will be cool, will turn out to just be a Disneyland of propertyhodgepodge which will not make for an interesting game per-se.

But those that will persist through the awkwardness, might find gold. Zelda Four Swords was a banger after all

gr__oron Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage

We don't need to be fatalists to agree that most people, when confronted with the realities of factory farming and the ecological consequences of our diet, would describe them as abject moral failures

gr__oron Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage

We could get what we need to survive on a fourth of the farmland if we kicked the addiction to meat, arguably a more malicious crime against animals and the planet

gr__oron Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

* That was meant to say "AI UI design disease". I find them to default to overtexting

gr__oron Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

Neat! I'm working on a similar thing but mine is not as far along, and slightly more focused on what I call "subtitled reading" (interleaving source and target language lines of text).

Small UI feedback: the WORD LOOKUP sheet has UI design disease, i.e. imo too much text. I'd drop "WORD LOOKUP" and "CURRENTLY SAVING". Also behind the latter the current word is repeated (it's already the title of the sheet), so I'd drop that too.

gr__oron Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

I never understood how that flies by Apple's review. Aren't all code changes supposed to go through their review and thus OTA is effectively illegal?

gr__oron Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material

Been a pretty happy user of https://www.languagereactor.com

Not seeing a reason to switch atm tbh

gr__oron Being ambitious and being a dad

While I do not know anything about DHH's parenting, rarely have I heard of a racist shithead being a good dad, so I'll keep my reservations, thanks

gr__oron Postgres transactions are a distributed systems superpower

sauce: https://brandur.org/job-drain

gr__oron European digital ID wallets are a gift to Google and Apple

Regulations __can__ create monopolies. DMA is a regulation, but it does not have the shortcomings you mentioned.

gr__oron Mixing Visual and Textual Code

https://bsky.app/profile/watwa.re/post/3lizpdz34522g

I'm working on a similar idea, it's been a while since I published about it but open to input and collabs!

gr__oron Show HN: Gitdot – A better GitHub. Open-source, written in Rust

Tangled (https://tangled.org) is the next social coding platform to believe in imo because

- no more silo-ing, moat BS, by design - they are working on vouching which is becoming more important in the age of AI PRs

gr__oron Philosoph Jürgen Habermas Gestorben

I find this to be vile political posting, moving responsibility for Trump's rightwing fascism to a social theorists is just misguided, banal and does not belong here. Don't you have X for that?

gr__oron Ceno, browse the web without internet access

thinking out loud: it'd be great if web servers could sign their responses+timestamp, so you could guarantee getting the right content even through such intermediaries

gr__oron Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward

bit of a narrow focus point isn't it? this is a project that lives on despite the economics, throwing garden-wall-lingo in there feels a bit gross tbh

gr__oron Criticisms of “The Body Keeps the Score”

I'd say the article makes a pretty explicit case for why the general thesis of the book does not hold, which makes your comment stand out as comparatively superficial whataboutism

gr__oron German government comes out against Chat Control

while this is a link to the malware site x.com, it is shown in a protective trustworthy hull, called xcancel.com

gr__oron Open Social

While I agree with the sentiment, I think it confuses ISPs with registrars. There are still many ISPs that do that service as well, it's less common than it used to be.

It is quite common for national TLDs (like .de, .jp or .cn) to be managed by not-for-profit entities, under contract with their respective governments... which might also not be great wrt censorship.

There is also the general issue of equal access, where shorter, more memorable domains get more expensive and hodling domain names is only disincentivized for people without enough funds. I would very much like to see an alternative system to domain names, probably something more in the web of trust space.

gr__oron Formatting code should be unnecessary

I meant programming-time, but runtime is also a good point.

Cross-language libraries don't seem to be super common for this. The recovering-sense-from-text tools I named all use different parsers in their respective languages.

Again, reading (and yes, technically that's also parsing) from an AST from a data-exchange formatted file is mags simpler. And for parsing these schemes there are battle-tested cross-language solutions, e.g. protobuf.

gr__oron Formatting code should be unnecessary

The complexity of a parser is orders of magnitude higher than that of an AST schema.

I'm also not saying we can have all these good things, but they are not free, and the costs are more spread out and thus less obviously noticeable than the ones projectional code imposes.

gr__oron Formatting code should be unnecessary

For me, that's what "short-sighted inability" means. The business ecosystem we have does not have the attention span for this kind of project. What we need is individuals grouping together against the gradient of incentives (which is hard indeed).

gr__oron Formatting code should be unnecessary

Even that is not without its cost. Most of these tools are written in different languages, which all have to maintain their own parsers, which have to keep up with language changes.

And there are abilities we lose completely by making text the source of truth, like a reliable version control for "this function moved to a new file".

gr__oron Formatting code should be unnecessary

Text surely is a hill, but I believe it's a local one, we got stuck on due to our short-sighted inability to go into a valley for a few miles until we find the (projectional) mountain.

All of your examples work better for code with structural knowledge:

- grep: symbol search (I use it about 100x as often as a text grep) or https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep

- diff: https://semanticdiff.com (and others), i.e.: hide noisy syntax only changes, attempt to capture moved code. I say attempt, because with projectional programming we could have a more expressive notion of code being moved

- sed: https://npmjs.com/package/@codemod/cli

- version control: I'd look towards languages like Unison to see what funky things we could do here, especially for libraries. A general example: no conflicts due to non-semantic changes (re-orderings, irrelevant whitespaces, etc.)

gr__oron Self-Guaranteeing Promises

Bluesky/ATProto is a recent example of a self-guaranteeing promise

gr__oron I tried Servo

That's so fun to hear, I've been using taffy for layouting my little rusty eink calendar

gr__oron Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

I don't quite see it that way. Imo he's been to involved in anti-woke culture waring, but I still found him to be wonderfully interesting to read.

gr__oron Careless People

I don't think that's a necessary consequence. React is free, a sort-of recruitment loss-leader for Meta. Imo you can get to a moral zero on this pretty easily despite still using React, by supporting out-of-Meta React OSS and using your platforms to denounces Meta's carelessness.

On the other hand: Companies pay for Microsoft's offerings and they support the Israeli military in their genocidal campaign in Gaza, I think getting to a moral zero on that is significantly harder.

gr__oron Careless People

How does her attempt to change things from the inside, by confronting their higher ups, who constantly put her down for it and collectivizing with other insiders, still lead you to such a harsh judgment of her character?

gr__oron Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button

Absolutely, it would be nice if we found the right abstraction to get rid of that part as well. Basically every non-React framework's answer to that is Signals (aka change tracking), where React is doubling down on unidirectional data flow and thus dependency arrays. React Compiler indeed solves the 99% of performance related memo-s.

For effects you still will have to understand the mental model (which I'd argue is inherent in the domain and not incidental to the tech).

From reading Nue's docs on Interactivity, it seems to opt-out of the discussion by going back to good old manual UI refreshs. I personally would not choose that, too many pre-React debugging nights spent on chasing state<->UI desynchronization bugs.

gr__oron Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button

The FAQ (https://nuejs.org/docs/faq.html) describes pain points that seem pretty foreign to me, the exact thing I appreciate about React is that I can focus on the domain and the tech MOSTLY does fade into the background. It has been an improvement in that regard, to all the frontend MVC I've done before and the architectural pattern has been adopted for good reason by all the native platforms.

TBC in React and its offspring, you can still model business logic outside of components, we just learned that most UI development is better served by keeping UI and its state closer.