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Experimenting with Local LLMs on macOS
A developer's guide to downloading and running LLMs on macOS, for experimentation and privacy.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
1412
De-Clouding: Music
I’m going through a phase of figuring out what I can get out of the cloud and “own”. Particularly with regard to streaming services. I’ve never paid for Spotify. But I’ve had iTunes Match so that I can take all of the weird, not-on-streaming music that I have (I wrote about this back in 2013!!!!), […]
1413
ICEBlock handled my vulnerability report in the worst possible way
Last week, I wrote about how Joshua Aaron's ICEBlock app, which allows people to anonymously report ICE sightings within a 5-mile radius, is – unfortunately, and despite apparent good intentions – activism theater. This was based on Joshua's talk at HOPE where he made it clear that he isn'
1414
Writing code is easy, reading it isn't
Writing code is easy. Once you have a solution in mind, and have mastered the syntax of your favorite programming language, writing code is easy. Having an LLM write entire functions for you? Even eas
1415
A critique of package managers
n.b. This is a written version of a dialogue from a YouTube video: 2 Language Creators vs 2 Idiots | The StandupPackage managers (for programming languages) are evil.11 The term “evil” is being used partially hyperbolic to make a point.To start, I need to make a few distinctions between concepts a lot of programmers…
1416
How RSS beat Microsoft
Microsoft tried to own content syndication with ICE. How open RSS beat it, and what that war teaches us about open formats like email.
1417
The Helix Text Editor (2024)
I’ve come to accept that I’m just a sucker for shiny nerd things. I use Rust, despite never having had a professional reason to use it in my life. I switched to Linux in my student years and I’ve never looked back since, even though it constantly breaks and I can’t get my Bluetooth headphones to connect. I have a…
1418
Hashed sorting is typically faster than hash tables
Benchmarks and theoretical explanation of why and when hashed radix sort beats hash tables.
1419
Building my childhood dream PC
In 1993, I was 14 and already passionate about computers [1] . That year my mother managed to buy a PC for the household. That was quite an effort for a single mother. My brother Aurelien and I spent every waking hour on this machine, staying up all night on weekends.
1420
Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver
As a bit of background, one of my hobbies is helping people recover data from old tape cartridges, such as QIC-80 tapes, which were a rather popular backup medium in the 1990s among individuals, small businesses, BBS operators, and the like. I have a soft spot for tape media; there’s something about the tactile…
1421
Formatting code should be unnecessary
and we knew this back in the 80s
1422
The demo scene is dying, but that's alright
The demo scene was recently proclaimed a UNESCO Living Cultural Heritage in Sweden, following several other European nations. As a scener, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. It's amusing on some level, there's maybe even a bit of pride involved, but also fear that it might bring unwanted attention to a Good…
1423
Creative Technology: The Sound Blaster
The Sound Blaster
1424
Keeping secrets out of logs (2024)
There's no silver bullet, but if we put some "lead" bullets in the right places, we have a good shot at keeping sensitive data out of logs.
1425
Google's new AI mode is good, actually
When I wrote about how good ChatGPT with GPT-5 is at search yesterday I nearly added a note about how comparatively disappointing Google's efforts around this are. I'm glad I …
1426
Some thoughts on personal Git hosting
As part of my ongoing (and somewhat futile) efforts to ReDeCentralise, I'm looking at moving my personal projects away from GitHub. I already have accounts with GitLab and CodeBerg - but both of those sites are run by someone else. While they're lovely now, there's nothing stopping them becoming as slow or AI-infested…
1427
Things you can do with a debugger but not with print debugging
People do or do not use debuggers for a variety of reasons. For one thing, they are hard to setup in many codebases. Second, you can’t use them when your application is running on remote environments (such as kuberenetes). So, anecdotally, I have seen way more people using Print/ log.Debug compared to a debugger.
1428
I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D
The Intel 285K CPU in my high-end 2025 Linux PC died again! 😡 Notably, this was the replacement CPU for the original 285K that died in March, and after reading through the reviews of Intel CPUs on my electronics store of choice, many of which (!) mention CPU replacements, I am getting the impression that Intel’s…
1429
The Expression Problem and its solutions (2016)
The craft of programming is almost universally concerned with different types of data and operations/algorithms that act on this data [1] . Therefore, it's hardly surprising that designing abstractions for data types and operations has been on the mind of software engineers and programming-language designers since…
1430
The Claude Code Framework Wars
How developers are experimenting with structure, orchestration, and standards to get more out of AI coding.
1431
Knowledge and memory
The what is connected to the when.
1432
A Navajo weaving of an integrated circuit: the 555 timer
The noted Diné (Navajo) weaver Marilou Schultz recently completed an intricate weaving composed of thick white lines on a black background, ...
1433
Shipping textures as PNGs is suboptimal
Are you shipping textures to players as PNGs? The goal of this post is to convince you that this is suboptimal, and walk you through a better approach.
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1435
Being good isn't enough
Giving good career advice is hard. Maybe it’s because careers can look more alike than they really are. Two people can have the same title but what helps one...
1436
GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (a.k.a. Research Goblin) is good at search
“Don’t use chatbots as search engines” was great advice for several years... until it wasn’t. I wrote about how good OpenAI’s o3 was at using its Bing-backed search tool back …
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Using Claude Code SDK to reduce E2E test time
Best of both worlds: Building an AI gatekeeper that knows exactly which tests to run for your code changes
1439
Oldest recorded transaction
The oldest recorded transaction was in 3100 BC
1440
AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time
All the same privacy harms with online tracking are also present with AI, but worse.