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.