Hacker News Reader

patrickkon America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?

Not only is Valheim remarkable for the fact that’s it’s largely a one man show, it’s also a labour of love that couldn’t come out of the AAA gaming world, which is creatively bankrupt. They’re busy trashing beloved gaming series left and right and shuttering once beloved studios.

We’re now entering a new era where projects like Halo Reclaimer[1] are more creative and more popular than some of the slop put out by the AAA world with massive marketing budgets. There’s no slop, no micro transactions, just Halo Forge turbocharged by virtually anyone who loves Halo and has a Claude subscription.

[1] https://fangamesdb.com/games/project-reclaimer-halo-3.html

patrickkon Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines

You can make your own to save money, I made this project for example. I paired it with an Air-1 sensor and home assistant to ramp up and down the downs in real time according to the live air quality readings.

https://makerworld.com/en/models/2470181-nukit-tempest-euro-...

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

AAA game studios seem largely creatively bankrupt for some time now, it’s a glorious era for AA and indie. Long may that continue

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

Abliteration is a thing. Highly capable Chinese models only months behind their American counterparts, trained on their outputs, is a thing, hosted on Openrouter and co. There’s no effective barrier anymore.

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

There’s an absolutely massive amount of fan made Pokémon games out there. Some are years old at this point.

Some fans are tired at the lack of innovation from the IP holders and are taking fan games in interesting directions. Look at this for example:

https://undreamedpanic.itch.io/gamma-emerald-ea

Loads more here:

https://fangamesdb.com/series/pokemon.html

patrickkon Show HN: PS2 games statically recompiled to WebAssembly

Here's a guy who put together this recomp of NFS the Xbox 360 version, running on the Steam Deck:

https://old.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/1x0vzyb/speedbre...

Forza Horizon recomp: https://github.com/arcanite24/pinyon-shift

More Xbox 360 projects here:

https://fangamesdb.com/consoles/xbox-360.html

patrickkon Show HN: BetterWispr – Free, open-source dictation for Mac

Great ideas here thanks! I’m going to see if I can whip up a Windows equivalent, using Autohokey instead of Karabiner.

patrickkon Show HN: BetterWispr – Free, open-source dictation for Mac

Can you link to the exact website? Multiple similarly named projects show up.

patrickkon 500B tokens later: Letting AI agents decompile a first-person shooter

Eventually Fable-level models will be abliterated and hosted on Openrouter too, like so many others have been. Remember Chinese models are only a few months behind American ones at this point and are trained on their outputs, and can be abliterated after release.

Someone has vibe coded the entire Adobe suite btw: https://getartcraft.com/apps

https://abliteration.ai/

patrickkon REA Reverse – Engineer Anything

The sheer irony of this would be a thing to behold

patrickkon REA Reverse – Engineer Anything

It’s more likely that the higher quality version will rise to the top, and the slop versions will be buried in obscurity.

patrickkon REA Reverse – Engineer Anything

Yep, totally agree with this sentiment.

Fan efforts are breathing new life into older games, some of them locked away on older consoles or due to cloud tied services that the game developer has no interest in supporting any more.

Efforts like OldUnreal and the Peacock Project are just amazing. Recently, Halo fans have unlocked 128 player multiplayer modes using assets from Halo MCC and unlocked 16 player coop campaign mode. Microsoft has no interest in this cutting into their microtracsaction-strewn free to play game which isn’t as fun as older Halo.

Incidentally Ive started tracking really cool fan game projects here, including a disclaimer where possible if the project is AI assisted or not:

https://fangamesdb.com

patrickkon Iranian campaign planted fake articles in real U.S. publications using ChatGPT

One can only imagine how much of the news is just dictated by US intelligence. Social media too- remember the Elgin AirForce base being revealed as the top most Reddit addicted city?

patrickkon AnyPS5: Port PS5 binaries to PC without emulation (87% system libraries mapped)

https://fangamesdb.com

Asmongold also did a stream recently where he showed a bunch of insane mashups of AAA games that people are doing, like Mario in Elden Ring or Spiderman in the Arkum Asylum Batman map. You can find it on Youtube.

If this trajectory continues, the AAA games industry will be in trouble. It will be a golden age for game restoration and game modding.

patrickkon Global Solar Atlas: summary of solar power potential globally

There was a proposed project to build a massive solar wind and battery installation in Morocco, and link it to the UK via undersea cable. I believe it collapsed due to the lack of companies able to supply that much cable and the current government also didn’t support it. Also geopolitics still matters, any government is going to be very wary about getting a significant portion of electricity from a region that might become hostile in the future. Your comment ignores that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...

patrickkon Jellyfin 12.0

The default jellyfin client works great also on my NVIDIA shield.

Young children and non technical adults can use it as easily as any streaming app. I guess you can tweak and theme it endlessly to look like your favourite streaming app but I haven’t felt the need to so far.

Self-hosting always involves a bit of jankiness, if you can’t handle that then back to overpriced subscriptions and spyware you go.

patrickkon 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

Yes tv makers were caught doing HDMI fingerprinting. There was a story some years ago about how basically all smart tv makers were sending data to an ad network based in China.

Samsung were openly bragging about this on their website some years ago (for the benefit of their advertising partners) but have recently muddied the waters when I check their site again, couching it in language mentioning privacy and other evasive language:

https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS10010616/

patrickkon Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

> On AI assist...I'm still pausing a lot when t comes to home projects that will be constantly talking to the outside and hold the stuff that is the most private to me and my whole family and friends.

Totally understand this part. I didn’t mean to give Claude code full access to locally hosted environments but rather copy back and forth in your local shell with help from Claude (error messages, helping to plan out the installation etc.)

patrickkon Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

> Building the equivalent of Google Photos locally wasn't that hard 10 years ago, given enough tolerance for speed and indexing lag issues.

You could argue it’s much easier on the software side, because self hosting Immich is much easier thanks for AI assistance with setting it up. If you can live without the built in facial recognition feature you don’t need particularly beefy hardware.

I find myself taking on far more ambitious self hosted projects thanks to Claude. Extending home assistant in various ways, deploying a “self hosted Spotify”, making sure everything is fully accessible via Tailscale out of the range of the wifi and so on. Of course the general population isn’t really aware or interested in most of this.

patrickkon Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal

In Germany, it’s not uncommon for people to not have a credit card. For online purchases, it’s therefore easier to use PayPal at checkout because a direct IBAN transfer or debit card might not be accepted by the merchant. Also for splitting smaller amounts among friends and family (less of a moat because this could be done in principal by a SEPA transfer).

In other countries Revolut is popular for the friends and family bill splitting, in places like Sweden they have a PayPal-like solution offered by local banks. There’s an upcoming initiative by Brussels to bring all these national initiatives under one umbrella, which would definitely hurt PayPal’s German revenue in future.

patrickkon Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

> In this same vein, why isn't ASML raising thousands of billions for building their own (subsidiary) chip foundries, while raising prices and starving the market (a little) for their machines.

You're looking this purely through an economic lens, while in reality geopolitical factors play a huge role in what ASML can and cannot do. The US government would likely take an extremely dim view of any new external competitor popping up for their chip foundry industry (especially with all the new US plants being built or planned) and would lean heavily on their vassal/ally the Netherlands to prevent this. Unlike with China, the US has more leverage over the Netherlands[1]

The US security state and US tech giants are joined at the hip, as they have been since the beginning of Silicon Valley[1], right through the Snowden revelations through to the present day[2].

[1] https://nltimes.nl/2026/08/20/us-preparing-force-netherlands...

[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/sect...

patrickkon Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone

DIY folks are not a commercial outfit with access to testing equipment.

Having said that, there are reviews of some DIY models reviewing CADR[1], and it's bizarre to complain about testing decibles since Arctic P14 fans, the most commonly recommended fans, are a thouroughly tested product. Running them at around 25% based on lower PM2.5 readings is almost inaudible from experience.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjGJN57DgA8

patrickkon Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone

It also makes sense if you're worried that a proprietary filter will be yanked off the market, leaving you with an unusable item. Also, for the money, you cannot get that kind of smart functionality from my research.

patrickkon Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone

If you’re so inclined, you can build your own air purifier with laser cut panels or 3d printed panels and use a cheap ikea air filter and standard PC fans. All the parts are readily available, and user repairable.

If you pair if with an Apollo AIR-1 you can have home assistant ramp up and down the fans with a PC fan controller based on live readings of PM2.5 in your home. I did this with the help of Claude code.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6826527

https://makerworld.com/en/models/2470181-nukit-tempest-euro-...

patrickkon OpenLogi

Before clicking, I thought this might be a reverse engineering attempt of the Logitech Harmony series of universal remotes, which have been discontinued but do still work, albeit cloud tethered for updates. There’s still a strong demand for this in the home automation space, if you read forums on the topic. Oh well, hopefully there’s a few more years in my Harmony Hub and Elite.

patrickkon SearXNG in Rust

Is Hister able to index Paperless-NGX documents? I’m guessing it works on an Obsidian vault since it can search markdown docs?

patrickkon Una GPS smart watch – Repairable, USB-C charging, developer-friendly

Incredible thank you!

I’ve had Claude work on a body battery type solution, which I’ll fully deploy over the coming days. It’s to manage and track brain fog/long COVID type symptoms and see if there’s correlation between foods eaten the day prior, resting heart rate etc and perceived brain fog. I’ll see if it’s possible to incorporate some of your work into my solution too.

patrickkon Una GPS smart watch – Repairable, USB-C charging, developer-friendly

Do you have a particular hardware sensor requirement needed to clone the body battery function? I’m interested in developing this too but always resisted getting a smartwatch due to privacy concerns. If there’s something available that’s Gadgetbridge compatible I’d be very interested.

patrickkon Tweak self-hosted SearXNG with Kagi domains (2025)

Here are my settings:

  hostnames:
    # Kagi "Raised" (k=1) + "Pinned" (k=2)  -> boost
    high_priority:
      - '(.*\.)?reddit\.com$'
      - '(.*\.)?wikipedia\.org$'
      - '(.*\.)?github\.com$'
      - '(.*\.)?stackoverflow\.com$'
      - '(.*\.)?news\.ycombinator\.com$'
      - '(.*\.)?arstechnica\.com$'
      - '(.*\.)?developer\.mozilla\.org$'
      - '(.*\.)?arxiv\.org$'
      - '(.*\.)?imdb\.com$'
      - '(.*\.)?gitlab\.com$' 
      - '(.*\.)?rtings\.com$'
      - '(.*\.)?store\.steampowered\.com$'
      - '(.*\.)?serverfault\.com$'
      - '(.*\.)?archive\.org$'
      - '(.*\.)?archive\.is$'
      - '(.*\.)?rottentomatoes\.com$'
      - '(.*\.)?genius\.com$'
      - '(.*\.)?bogleheads\.org$'
      - '(.*\.)?stackexchange\.com$'
      - '(.*\.)?rottentomatoes\.com$'
      - '(.*\.)?openstreetmap\.org$'
      - '(.*\.)?wikitionary\.org$'
      - '(.*\.)?goodreads\.com$'
      - '(.*\.)?alternativeto\.net$' #great for de-goolging
      - '(.*\.)?investopedia\.com$'

patrickkon Why is there smoke from the boiler room? – Botanical Garden using Home Assistant

Those whole article is very interesting, but it’s AI-slop writing. It’s very off putting, like reading LinkedIn self promoting wankery.