Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A desktop made for one

isene.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 281 posts

Re: A desktop made for one

#221

Post by yuye »

theshrike79 wrote: post #188
yuye wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the analogy works. You're focusing on the "how", not the "what". Using a mechanical planer, you still need to dial in numbers yourself. You design your own table, the more modern tools just make it easier to realize your vision. Another example: I enjoy writing with a good pen. But whether I write by pen or on a keyboard, it's still me writing it. However, AI does basically all the real work, only leavi…

Yea, it's not a perfect analogy =) I've been trying to figure out the perfect one, but the one that hits most would need to be done as a comic strip format - and I can't draw for shit and refuse to use AI for it. Maybe one day. It all depends on the view you take on the thing. What real problem are you solving? If the problem is "I need a table for X", both ways solve it. How the problem is solved is secondary. I don…

>I don't need pride in "making it myself", what I get pride in is "I solved this problem"

Except you didn't solve the problem. Yes, the problem was solved, but not by you.

When I was in high school, the school library had a "Where's Waldo" book. Someone has taken a red marker and marked with big red arrows where Waldo was on every page.

The problem was solved, but I found no pleasure in it.

>Printing something out of Thingiverse still solves the problem, as does buying something ready-made.

That's a good point. If my motorcycle has a broken spark plug, I won't create my own. I'll go to the store and buy a new one. I've solved the problem.

I could also take it to the mechanic and get it replaced there. Much like the Where's Waldo book, the problem has been solved for me.

>As for the writing, there are actual studies that writing by hand activates different parts of your brain than typing.

Doesn't matter, the final product is still your own work.

Re: A desktop made for one

#222

Post by utopiah »

MrGilbert wrote: post #214
utopiah wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I called it "software". It's so strange to me that since the 1960s with BASIC then later on dozens of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programmin... including Logo by Feurzeig/Papert/Solomon there is effort to precisely help beginners program software. The effort was not to onboard future professional software developers but rather to make the personal in personal computer, or PC, meaningful. It's YO…

With the current situation on the hardware market, it makes me sad the we discover it only now. If things continue the way they are, there will be no Personal Computer any longer.

Ah well don't despair there are already alternatives e.g. https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform

Re: A desktop made for one

#223

Post by Ygg2 »

utopiah wrote: post #169
Ygg2 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that. I'm pretty sure this exists. It's called OSS or, more ubiquitously, Linux. The problem is, of course, no one wants to publish software for your PC/handmade OS. Which makes it a huge problem. You can't write every piece of your OS, without wasting huge amount of time. Nor do people generally want this.

OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us (or others if you don't contribute). Your software can be made by you, for you. It can be open source/free software if you want. Others can contribute to it, if you want but it can be open source without accepting external contributions also. My point was to highlight that having software made by you for your machine is not new. Arguably the way to do so changed but…

> Your software can be made by you, for you.

Yeah, but it's probably derived from OSS software anyway either via license or LLM. That said, you can customize your Linux/BSD/Haiku/TempleOS as much as you want.

But consider the following: even in the better case of an OS making 1% of OS userbase (vs. 0.0000001%) no one wants to support it.

Want to play Diablo? Better to sit down and waste your time.

Re: A desktop made for one

#224

Post by rep_lodsb »

geir_isene wrote: post #10
cultofmetatron wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seriously.... we already have a constellation of good deterministic tooling for taking a relatively high concept spec to low level assembly. what does an llm offer in generating optimized asm that rust wouldn't??

Less memory footprint. No reliance on libs. Pure first-person control. No wasted CPU cycles is the target here for me. And if you read the post, the asm set is only for the desktop itself. The tools I use are in Rust. Result is: Laptop now runs at between 5-6W (down from ~9W) [XPS14 latest hw] on Ubuntu 26.04 - giving me around 3.5h extra battery life.

I know this comment will get ignored by the true believers, and likely pasted directly into Claude by the author in order to "further improve" the code, but here's some small excerpts from the terminal emulator (glass.asm, 19360 lines, 555 KiB):

    cmp dword [rax], 'XAUT'
    jne .rxa_next
    cmp dword [rax+4], 'HORI'
    jne .rxa_next
    cmp word [rax+8], 'TY'
    jne .rxa_next
    cmp byte [rax+10], '='
    jne .rxa_next
    ; Found XAUTHORITY=path
Okay, this is setup code that only runs once at startup - but that would be a reason to optimize it for size and/or readability! REPE CMPSB exists, and may not be the fastest, but certainly the most compact and idiomatic way to compare strings. Or write a subroutine to do it!

This pattern is used everywhere for copying or comparing strings, this was just one example of it.

There's a state variable that's used to keep track of whether the input is text to be displayed or part of a control sequence. It's a full 64 bits, probably not because we need 18 quintillion states? Here's how it is evaluated:

    ; Dispatch based on state
    mov rcx, [vt_state]
    cmp rcx, VT_ESC
    je .vtp_esc
    cmp rcx, VT_CSI
    je .vtp_csi
    cmp rcx, VT_CSI_PARAM
    ...
In total, there are 7 compares + conditional jumps, one after another. Compilers would generate a jump table for this, and a better option in assembly might be to make vt_state a pointer to the label we want to go to. Branch predictors nowadays can handle indirect jumps, and may actually have more trouble with such tightly clustered conditionals as seen in this code.

This code is on the "slow" path, there's a faster one for 7-bit ASCII outside of control sequences, with a lengthy comment by Claude at the top on how it optimized this. Even this one starts with a bunch of conditionals though:

    cmp qword [vt_state], 0            ; VT_NORMAL == 0
    jne .vtp_loop_slow
    cmp dword [utf8_remaining], 0
    jne .vtp_loop_slow
    cmp byte [pending_wrap], 0
    jne .vtp_loop_slow
These could likely all be condensed into a single test or indirect jump via the state variable, by introducing just a few more states for UTF-8 decoding and wrap. Following this, here's a "useless use of TEST" (the subtraction already set the flags):

    mov rbx, [grid_cols]
    sub rbx, [cursor_col]              ; rbx = cells left on this row
    test rbx, rbx
    jle .vtp_loop_slow                 ; no room (or already past)
This also again shows the compulsive use of 64-bit registers and variables for values that should never be this big. It's not the "natural" data size on x86-64 at all, every such instruction requires an extra prefix byte.

I freely confess that I'm a "Luddite", and was explicitly looking for bad (and obviously so) code, but this took me just a few minutes of scrolling through the nearly 20K lines in this file, so it should be somewhat representative of the whole.

Re: A desktop made for one

#225

Post by utopiah »

Ygg2 wrote: post #223
utopiah wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us (or others if you don't contribute). Your software can be made by you, for you. It can be open source/free software if you want. Others can contribute to it, if you want but it can be open source without accepting external contributions also. My point was to highlight that having software made by you for your machine is not new. Arguably the way to do so changed but…

> Your software can be made by you, for you. Yeah, but it's probably derived from OSS software anyway either via license or LLM. That said, you can customize your Linux/BSD/Haiku/TempleOS as much as you want. But consider the following: even in the better case of an OS making 1% of OS userbase (vs. 0.0000001%) no one wants to support it. Want to play Diablo? Better to sit down and waste your time.

That's the beauty of containers, virtual machines like QEMU or compatibility layers like Wine/Proton. As long as your super esoteric software implements the interfaces those rely on, you are able to run everything else.

Re: A desktop made for one

#226

Post by beepbooptheory »

monooso wrote: post #208
nz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how to tell you this, but people have been writing custom software for personal use for decades. I've been doing it since at least 2009! I find it hard to believe that there is a demographic of people that were yearning to write code, but simply could not because they lacked LLMs. Is it the price? Are people simply too cheap to buy books? Or have they simply "forgotten" how to patiently and thoughtfully…

> I don't know how to tell you this, but people have been writing custom software for personal use for decades. I've been doing it since at least 2009! GP never claimed otherwise. As for the rest of your comment, it's frankly a bit patronising: are people too cheap, are people too lazy to read, are people unable to type...? No, people are busy, a fact which GP made abundantly clear in the very first paragraph. > I wo…

But if people are so busy, when are they planning to use their suite of bespoke software anyway? Like isn't this all about recreation anyway? This blog post certainly seems to be that at least. Is this really all about spending money on AI to write something that you then are using just for job? Because, apparently, you have no time otherwise?

If its not for fun, what's it for? It doesn't really seem like anyone is making stuff they are going to use next month anyway? But, I totally get how its recreational, and can be fun in the "computer, make my program" kind of way.

Otherwise, why not, e.g., just use or fork vim?

Re: A desktop made for one

#227

Post by luqtas »

nine_k wrote: post #17
geir_isene wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on Claude Max, so it didn't cost me anything more than the subscription I already have. Had to use it for Something. As for time - for the full CHasm and Fe2O3 suite of sw, I started the work 2026-03-29 and have probably spent 60h or so of my time. But then again I have a very tailored CC setup that I have fine-tuned since last summer with more than 70 CC projects helping me get it the way I need it to be since t…

So, it's at most $400 in Claude expenses for a fully custom suite of software in 2 months. Even if your time is 300/h, it's less than $2k in your own time (which, I would expect, you enjoyed spending). That's insanely impressive.

> That's insanely impressive.

literally every app they need, except the browser, at least have 10 alternatives that are FOSS, much more mature, better structured and prone to be bug free... or do you really think the OP with months/years of use won't need some other feature and will re-invent the wheel on software that is around for more than a decade with hundreds of bug reports done (i3 wm was released in 2009)

Re: A desktop made for one

#228

Post by kaashif »

nz wrote: post #81
Agingcoder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed I’ve already started writing software for myself using Claude. I would never have done this if it weren’t for AI - I simply don’t have the time otherwise . I now have tailor made apps with all kinds of bells and whistles that commercial products can’t offer easily ( I fall under non commercial usage which opens a lot of doors ), and that free software might offer, but later. I have also learnt a lot technicall…

I don't know how to tell you this, but people have been writing custom software for personal use for decades. I've been doing it since at least 2009! I find it hard to believe that there is a demographic of people that were yearning to write code, but simply could not because they lacked LLMs. Is it the price? Are people simply too cheap to buy books? Or have they simply "forgotten" how to patiently and thoughtfully…

If you are saying that what we had previously was actually as easy as literally writing "make me a web app for arranging seats at a wedding and put it on Vercel" then you are very divorced from reality.

I know how to do all of these things and even find them easy, but it's just much faster now. These are personal one task toy apps, but they are useful.

Re: A desktop made for one

#229

Post by furyofantares »

paweladamczuk wrote: post #132
furyofantares wrote: post #107

I've got a wrapper around tmux for an audience of one. I can operate claude code, codex, opencode, or just a shell, from any of my devices to any of my devices (via tailscale) or more commonly, operate it on my exe.dev server. I often continue a session on my phone, sometimes with voice. I have buttons for viewing files or following links the agent has referenced, extracted from the stream of text, and I have some bu…

Do you have a way to use voice on your smartphone? I use a whisper wrapper (also "built for one") for Windows and connect through SSH but it only works well enough because of the laptop's ARC graphics card. I wish I could do that when connecting to SSH from my smartphone.

Yeah, two ways, lol. I have a big mic button on the bottom that I hold to speak, which uses the browser speech api. edit: I'm reading that that's local in safari but remote in chrome.

But I also type into an input field rather than the terminal and can use the mic on the phone keyboard (iOS).

Re: A desktop made for one

#230

Post by a96 »

po1nt wrote: post #159
voidUpdate wrote: post #158

I sometimes wonder what will happen when people who use rust run out of punny names for their programs that reference the concept of metal rusting...

We still have crab puns. Then we're screwed

They might start looking at other fungi, but maybe that's for bigger projects.
Post reply on HN