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smoyer

9,141 karma · joined September 24, 2010

I'm a happily-married father of four who also happens to love computers, software and programming. I do that for a living but it doesn't really feel like work most of the time.

smoyer1@selesy.com https://github.com/smoyer64

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/smoyer; my proof: https://keybase.io/smoyer/sigs/6bdWaJcxMgCzuRwr6BNSOt6vrrWRMvXMkNpzkk-vjLY ]

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smoyer··on A Health Update
I pronounced it with a "z" sound like xylophone and got "zits" :D
smoyer··on Focused Company Operating Principles
It's especially funny when a two or three person company writes something like this ... But it's perfect if you want to be a consultant to a major university.
smoyer··on Amazon's "digital pacifier" for toddlers
Inspired by "Toy Story 5" ... It's amazing how catatonic my 7 year-old can become in a phone or tablet.
smoyer··on Its not just the f*cking sandbox
> I literally missed my sister’s wedding a few weeks ago to help clean up after some of the recent incidents.

A security researcher at OpenAI that clearly doesn't have limits.

smoyer··on 3D necroprinting: Leveraging biotic material as the nozzle for 3D printing
Unfortunately, it's my life's mission to eliminate all female mosquitos (and the proboscis)
smoyer··on John C. Dvorak has died
He would make a great AI!
smoyer··on Agent swarms and the new model economics
Agreed ... I'm not talking about the implementation but rather the idea that this research is novel.
smoyer··on Agent swarms and the new model economics
This is almost a year behind Steve Yegge's first post on beads. Gas Town and Gas City provide orchestration for the swarm. So far I haven't seen a perfect implementation but this idea isn't new.
smoyer··on Google changes its search box
I think I've had this on duckduckgo for several months
smoyer··on Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident
You make this corner of the world better dang!
smoyer··on Music for Programming
For real concentration I can't have lyrics but that's a great idea for other flow states. Mozart and Brahms are good for me ... Not slow enough to put me to sleep not fast enough or unusual to make me pay attention to the music.
smoyer··on European alternatives to Google, Apple, Dropbox and 120 US apps
If this site actually provided privacy-preserving recommendations, there are many of us in the U.S. who would (or should?) also be interested in these services. Sadly, this is SPAM.
smoyer··on Oracle slashes 30k jobs
"At the time, MySQL existed ..."

You had to be careful with MySQL back then as constraints were syntactic sugar but not enforced. PostgreSQL was indeed much tougher to manage but more full-featured.

smoyer··on ARM to make processors for first time in their history
Too late ...
smoyer··on Tinybox- offline AI device 120B parameters
That is very close to a half-length shipping container.
smoyer··on SSH Secret Menu
HN as a tabloid ... After all enquiring minds want to know!
smoyer··on Thank HN: You helped save 33k lives
I was part of Omaze and can definitely empathize with the amount of work charitable fund raising takes and the amount of heartache that come from seeing under needs. Thanks for your hard work!
smoyer··on STM32G431 Analogue TV Transmitter
Great article and it really takes me back to my past! I was fortunate enough to always have a VM700 or equivalent to assess the quality of my modulators but one low channel isn't it of reach. One quibble with:

> After realizing that broadcast television uses negative modulation ...

NTSC is actually vestigial side-band so while it's easy to notice the modulation below the carrier, the low frequencies which include the sync information are also present above the carrier with the effect of having twice the modulated power.

smoyer··on Markdown CLI viewer with VI keybindings
Here's the one I use a lot ... And the underlying `glamour` library is great for programmatic markdown display: https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow.
smoyer··on Vouch
Look at ERC-8004
smoyer··on Prek: A better, faster, drop-in pre-commit replacement, engineered in Rust
My agents gave to run pre-commit before calling a coding tag done. In this case, it's just a robust set of checks.
smoyer··on Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
I designed a security dongle a long time ago ... Used properly, it did rotations and XORs like a CRC. You could definitely make it hard to defeat but it was still ultimately deterministic.
smoyer··on Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI
When I was in high school, we were not allowed to use calculator for most science classes ... And certainly not for math class. I'm ten years, will you want to hire a student who is coming out of college without considerable experience and practice with AI?
smoyer··on Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes
This is a pretty clear emergent pattern. An OSS alternative is https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/mcp_agent_mail.
smoyer··on I'll pass on your zoom call
You can also install and run Zoom in FlatPak which secures your computer by running the executable in BubbleWrap. If you know what you're doing, you can also sandbox it directly.
smoyer··on I'll pass on your zoom call
When Zoom took the world by storm due to the pandemic, they're security was known to be horrible. They aquihired the keybase team who are crypto experts and this presumably had some measure of positive effect.
smoyer··on Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients
I agree that this probably isn't in their own interests but "because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted" should be heavily qualified. My power company is taking advantage of me but so far I haven't had the nerve to fire them.
smoyer··on Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak
I wish a couple of those paragraphs were on the home page!
smoyer··on Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak
Why would I move to GhosTTY versus the terminal emulator that comes with my OS as it's not clear to me from the documentation?
smoyer··on KDE onboarding is good now
I didn't realize that KDE was now considered to be "lightweight". I left after installing KDE 4 as my relatively new computer slowed to a crawl. This was a bit sad because I like the Qt widget system and was writing apps for my Sharp Zaurus.
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