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

The premise is essentially:

1) Accept money from angry customers asking us to prompt-hole tokens from targetedCompany chatbots

2) Approach targetedCompanies to offer the "real" (secret) service. For a monthly subscription fee, we won't prompt-hole their LLM tooling.

3) The real, real service is to setup some google alerts for targetedCompany release notes & forum posts. Whenever threshold exceeds some predetermined threshold, initiate Turbo Mode: the higher the hatred-per-customer, the greater the discount the service will be for them. Spit out newsletters as needed, regardless of whether or not they subscribed.

Meanwhile, initiate "surge pricing" for targetedCompany on a per-hour, per-payment basis. The more customers that pay, the higher the "one-time fee" is to targetedCompany.

Staffing is almost entirely made up of interns, a few roles are filled by underpaid contractors with unattainable goals; keep them both working there with the promise of full time employment "after things calm down."

If all goes well, everyone pays us money to do absolutely nothing with minimal outflow of revenue.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953158

First up, the "AskHN for help project in progress": I'm working on some pages for my websites and want to capture + embed some interactive gaussian splats. I haven't yet found a good, embedded-able option that doesn't assume a huge dynamic website instead of my simple Hugo based static site. Any good options?

Otherwise,

I just got a vintage horn-speaker. The actual Atwater Kent driver was long since dead, but I ordered a compression driver to feed it after testing it with a talkbox and finding it sounds amazingly honky!

I have a piano's soundboard and 24 solenoids, all the drivers, etc I need to wire up to make a self playing piano (ish, I mean, it won't be hitting hammers - directly solenoid to string)

I got tired of Alexa's slow degradation into a central advertising point and weird LLM-y-ness, so just got some Home Assistant Voice Preview Editions to replace it. Performance is so far worse, so I'll be doing some tuning on that. It also means, unfortunately, replacing a lot of my lights/switches and moving to Zigbee. Total cost, with the two voice/speaker boxes + lights + switches + Zigbee hub I think I'll be about $300 deep. Not too bad.

I have a Dactyl Manuform mechanical keyboard that's 3D printed, has the keys put in, but needs soldered up, hopefully able to knock that out soon too.

Old eleksmaker pen plotter / laser engraver sitting around had it's controller die a while ago, finally got a new one, but will have to actually learn how to setup GRBL and find some open source software for driving - Which, sounds less than fun. Last time I tried, I found all the software to be expensive, hard to use, and generally frustrating.

On top of all of that,

* I have a Hurdy Gurdy sitting at about 3/4 finished, shouldn't need more than another 8 or so hours of work to get playable.

* I want to make some Nuclear Instrumentation Module inspired modules for VCV rack

* I have an AudioMoth on the way, I'm looking forward to learning how to setup so I can learn about bats in my area!

* I'm still about 75% done switching back to linux, now that I feel it's finally ready to be used for music stuff since the transition to Pipewire seems over with and It's no longer a total mess of ALSA+JACK+Pulse+PipeWire. That transition hell mad me switch back to windows for few years, and it's nice to be back

Also, since the last thread I've managed to fully rebuild my studio setup, setting up multiple 3-tier stands for synths + the Wall-o-pedals. It came out really well! Was nice to brush up on at least basic wood working skills for it too. During that project I also discovered 3M dual lock is magic and will be over-using it on everything from now on.

retcon flips the model. The tool is named for the verb recontextualize: introducing new information that reshapes how the past is understood. Instead of you typing a /rewind command, the AI retcons its own past. You just tell it what you want.

(Even if you're hand writing people are going to assume or suspect it's LLM gen.)