some-guy

I recently got my first refusal, which was to patch a license check for very old 3D software I had that was compiled with Visual C++ 6.0 directly in the .exe (my product key / box was missing but I had found the disc)

I got around this by starting a new session, having it run Ghidra, then look for the string directly in the window code, then asking it to block any popup windows of that function, then it obliged.

I set up an old Mac Mini G4 with a patched version of Mac OS 9 with the sole purpose of allowing my 3 year old son to play point and click games, Kid Pix being one of them.

Very Large Enterprise is very hard to change, or rewrite, especially old systems. Our company mostly sells contracts to large corporations / government institutions (1500+ employees), with an insane amount of transactions, functionality, etc. Even with the latest models you cannot automate everything, the world is far too complex, and there is quite a bit of pushback when anything changes.

In order to keep some of these extremely large contracts (using Samsung as an example here) for example, we had to revert certain changes that were global but now we have a "Samsung version" because we want to maintain a large presence in Asia and Samsung leaving would be a huge blow.

At this scale, code isn't even the bottleneck, it's customer wants, politics, etc.

I think it highly depends on what field you're in. Personal projects that I find useful in my everyday life? Churning them out like crazy. Enterprise software? It has slowed our productivity down to a halt--part of this is due to people not knowing how to use these tools, and the other part of it is the collective AI psychosis of our leadership (I work at a Fortune 500 software company).

I have one of these Machinist boards sitting in my closet, which I haven’t set up mostly out of laziness. What I really want is a PCI-E card that can take DDR3 RAM to be used as a RAM disk for containers that do a heavy amount of heavy I/O.

Sonnet 5.5 on low is leagues ahead of deepseek v4.1 flash in price per _result_ in my testing. I say this as someone who has the same attitude as you and really wants open weight models to be competitive and succeed.

I played the Half Life Uplink demo on a Pentium II 450Mhz Gateway (with no 3D acceleration) and remember seeing Half-Life for the first time on the Voodoo 3 after it, thinking it looked "worse". There was something about the colors of the software rendering that were different and felt "warmer". That being said, the framerate of the Voodoo 3 did blow me away.

> Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?

Having had issues with KDE I decided to give GNOME a try recently. The decision made to remove these buttons absolutely perplexed me beyond belief.

It’s far from perfect but old 500gb to 1tb drive lots from ebay are the cold storage” part of my backup plan.

I couldn’t find a board under $120, but this would be a compelling target performance wise, even with 4GB shared memory

If one were to actually build and design a SoC, ARM $60 game “console” that plugs into your TV in 2026 and sell it at a decent volume, what would the equivalent game console be potential-wise?

I’ve been doing 3D game development for retro consoles for fun and it’s actually quite impressive what you can actually achieve with little hardware.

It’s not exactly determinism, it’s authenticity. If we rewind time, of course the words would be different. It’s not relevant to my argument.

There’s a reason why the top comments of HN blog posts whine about articles that are clearly written by AI. I use AI constantly as a coding agent, but I care deeply about the authenticity of the words I write intended for other human beings to be my own.

I use AI all the time for coding, but a tool that non-deterministically reaches potentially a different output than I would have produced myself is not analogous to typewriters.

Each original iMac color came with an associated default OS9 background that matched it.

Tangentially related, there are now "officially allowed" Apple Silicon builds of Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2004 available [0]

[0]: https://github.com/OldUnreal/FullGameInstallers/releases/tag...

I’m not against piracy but the initial pitch made it seem like it’s more purely for trying to cast streams embedded in websites that you already are visiting and/or have access to, of which do not “allow” you to cast, or for whatever reason only work on a laptop and not on something like AirPlay. But the LLM-slop description of “random websites” in addition to the option for a TVDB API key confuse me as to what the actual focus is here.

I remember going from Java in IntelliJ straight to TypeScript at work for another project, and I recall how _slow_ everything was in the editor(s). I have been using TypeScript 7 RC and most of my complaints have gone away with regards to speed.

I have been eyeing what Taalas is doing [1] by making pure hardware models. The speed is absurd.

[1] https://taalas.com/products/

At $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_COMPANY, I've found that if you have:

1) A designer that uses Figma correctly (using well defined components / design systems) 2) A front-end framework as close to HTML / CSS as possible for the visuals (I have success with Web Components / Lit) with Figma MCP

The front-end is usually one-shot using frontier models. However in my experience, designers are all over the place with using Figma correctly.

Both NEM 2.0 and 3.0 have serious issues, but for different reasons. NEM 2.0 was basically a early adopter's rich person's subsidy that heavily distorted the market, and NEM 3.0 does not have nearly enough subsidies to justify the cost unless you pay cash up front for a large system. (For the record, I am on NEM 3.0 and got such a system).

At the end of the day, the best case scenario is large scale renewable / battery storage to bring costs down as much as possible, and for those of us who want battery backup / solar can choose to invest in it, but it shouldn't be "the" solution.

I don’t disagree that the expectations are higher, but token output hardly correlates to code output worthy of merging.

Ironically Trump may end up being the most pro green energy president at the end of all of this.

I'm currently in repos where the context window required is so large that the output is almost always "wrong" for the problem at hand. Quite a few people at my company burn through tokens this way, and it certainly isn't providing value to the company.

I'm in a large enterprise context--you have to use human reviewers if you don't want to end up like Github's status page. So much context exists outside of the code that the bots are either not provided or are far too large of contexts for current windows.

I disagree. The amount of slop I need to code review has only increased, and the quality of the models doesn’t seem to be helping.

It still takes a good engineer to filter out what is slop and what isn’t. Ultimately that human problem will still require somebody to say no.

This was definitely true for me, which is why I write everything acoustically and ensure the song is "good" before going in my later age. If I want a specific effect, I then google what pedals were used in a particular song or artist, then I try to recreate the chain, and then tinker with that on top.

Ultimately I spent so much of my time worrying about "what crazy expensive equipment should I buy" when I was younger and more into this stuff, and I should have simply just played my shitty instruments and recorded on my shitty equipment. That's on me, but I also find it empowering as an artist that I can clean up my recording in the way that replaces my need for expensive equipment while maintaining (in my humble opinion) a sense of authenticity of my performance. I agree there may be too many knobs, but finding the knobs that I want has never been easier and I would rather live in the now than in the past.

A lot of people thought the same thing with everything going from analog -> digital. Or heck, even learning an instrument when MIDI was first introduced.

Even before generative AI, there is a long-going debate in audio circles around simulated guitar amplifiers. The truth is, the simulations of them have gotten so insanely good that now one could simply purchase an all-in-one pedalboard and have basically all of guitar history at your toes.

My rule-of-thumb is this: "does this tool I'm using in particular take away from the authenticity of my performance or songwriting?" Example: I am very keen on performing vocals and guitar at the same time, and I don't have an expensive studio setup, and my office has background noise. I use these tools, and yes even some open source AI ones, 1) remove background noise of the individual tracks and 2) do a final master against a recording I want to target (using something like Matchering or similar [0]). It still sounds like me, my voice isn't perfect, my beat isn't consistent, but it sounds like I rented some studio space. So for me it was a cost-saving measure.

[0] https://github.com/sergree/matchering

Not to be "that guy that just says to use LLMs", but writing out how you want these things to work on your computer to something like Claude, or heck even Google AI mode without logging in with an account, allows you to describe your ideal "home server as a docker-compose.yml file" and for me it did a damn fine job doing it. I had done this all with a previous server manually, and with a new server I simply had provided that I was a Fedora Linux box, with these hard drives, with these containers, and these are the locations of the files, etc. It worked the first try.

This wasn't something that I didn't want to learn myself, but I have so little time with children and gardening on top of my super busy work at this point that I didn't have time to simply google everything. I did know enough about it beforehand to provide a general idea of what I want, so YMMV.

This is how I use my Canon t3i. Once in awhile everything will align perfectly, require very little editing and I feel a huge sense of accomplishment.

I'm at a large enterprise outfit, and "shoving things in your face" has been a problem with large software suites for a long time, long before the AI craze. I keep telling my skip level leadership that we need more User-Experience "mob goons" that have authority across product domains to (metaphorically) beat the living daylight out of bad "PM-brained" ideas.