I love being told I’m n idiot for building something because… someone else built a similar (and not very good) thing previously. What is wrong with their brains?
Alan Bradburne retweeted
September 2026 Hacker News Hiring Index:
539 job postings in September. That's 25% more than August (430) and 25% fewer than September last year (722). The 12-month average is 700.
Median pay went up to $195k. (1/6)
So, yeah, we didn't stop there. Built a custom build of Arch with custom gfx drivers and whatnot. Got it down to sub 5 seconds.
Another one to file under "just tell it to make it faster"
Got an Anbernic RG DS+, a Nintendo DS clone running linux and their DS emulator. It's fantastic, but the stock OS takes 21secs to boot. There are are some alt OS's but I don't need that, just this without the slow boot.
So, Claude, make it boot faster. Got it to 15secs.
Bro, you can do better. 13 secs.
Not good enough. So 'we' wrote a new (and _significantly_ better) rom launcher in rust.
Down to 11.5secs.
My dude is like, that's it, I've got nothing else. And I guess I'll give him a break. I think that's acceptable. For now.
Alan Bradburne retweeted
OK I finally put the core part of my physically modelled piano synthesizer on GitHub for anyone who's interested or can make use of it somehow: github.com/peterc/coopiano
Gutted to have to cancel attending Kaigi on Rails today. Wife is sick and hospitalised for a few days 😞 One thing that made it less painful was telling Instinct to simply "cancel all plans for the trip" and it dealing with all the Japanese website forms and getting as many refunds as possible.
Another one to file under "just tell it to make it faster"
Got an Anbernic RG DS+, a Nintendo DS clone running linux and their DS emulator. It's fantastic, but the stock OS takes 21secs to boot. There are are some alt OS's but I don't need that, just this without the slow boot.
So, Claude, make it boot faster. Got it to 15secs.
Bro, you can do better. 13 secs.
Not good enough. So 'we' wrote a new (and _significantly_ better) rom launcher in rust.
Down to 11.5secs.
My dude is like, that's it, I've got nothing else. And I guess I'll give him a break. I think that's acceptable. For now.
For those interested github.com/abradburne/dsboot and github.com/abradburne/dslot
Big part of the speed gains were changing boot order, compressing the kernel (faster to load small file and decompress than load large file) and a neat readahead that fetches the OS files before needed.
Added a little buddy (he has lots of hobbies, will entertain hisself all day), and weather pages
@wesbos started me down a rabbit hole
Thanks to @wesbos for the inspiration - I honestly had no idea digital photo frames were so cheap or they were android devices!
Rather than the browser-based dashboard (and I have no need for a calendar display), I have a client/server based system. A lightweight native Android app and a rust hub server that you can run on any local machine (homelab works well). That has an MCP server and API, so anything can push updates and notifications. Also for Mac there's a small helper to watch for any playing music and show the currently playing album artwork.
Since these things only have small amount of RAM and ancient vers of Android, didn't want to have to run Tailscale and the server on there. Plus the hub can do much more interesting things, proactively do stuff, generate stuff, etc. This keeps the frame super responsive.
So I have the hub on the home server, anything on my Tailnet can then talk to it that.
Again, thanks for the kicking it all off Wes! xitter.cf/wesbos/status/21085504…
I have discovered $50 amazon photo frames to be the PERFECT home display screen
They can be rooted, updated to run a modern browser, have WiFi and can be powered from USB
1280×800 resolution with a nice touch screen
I detailed how to hack these yourself in my latest video
wesbos.com/hacking-smart-pho…
As clean as fresh snow. Cheapest one on Amazon Japan as of Saturday. Comes rooted already but their captive app hides the accept debug dialog. So just went in via loader to enable. Boom.
A new music model - YuE2 - was released. It's on-par with Suno models. It's good.
One of its capabilities is being able to make covers of songs in different styles. So put together a quick app that takes an audio file, finds lyrics, transcribes the audio, lets you define a new style, and boom.
github.com/abradburne/moonsh…
