Yet another Hacker News

Felix Rieseberg Homepage

285 points rglover 3 days ago 108 comments

sans_souse 3 days ago | parent

I found myself inside a simulation simulating simulations of a simulation.

And it was good.

c7b 3 days ago | parent

Fyi, autoplays sound. Generally an unacceptable UI decision imho.

__m 3 days ago | parent

There is a button ”Enter muted” right below enter

c7b 3 days ago | parent

I didn't click anything, the sound just started playing while there was a loading animation

Benjamin_Dobell 3 days ago | parent

What browser are you using? IE6?

Just kidding. But you must have clicked somewhere. Audio autoplay hasn't been a thing on the web for years (thankfully).

bowsamic 3 days ago | parent

It auto played for me in iOS Safari with no interaction

pletnes 3 days ago | parent

Not for me. So there’s that. But tapping anywhere on screen does start the sound.

radiospiel 3 days ago | parent

When you tap the screen on ipad while the page still loads (and doesnt show anything), it plays sound before you click enter

flohofwoe 3 days ago | parent

Hmm, here (macOS + Chrome) it starts with 'Sound off', says even so in the bottom right corner.

tower-shield 3 days ago | parent

[flagged]

codetiger 3 days ago | parent

Electron was too good when I first saw it, and gave the "Javascript everywhere" for the desktop apps. Then quickly felt like a bloatware.

nxpnsv 3 days ago | parent

Like it or not, it was a significant achievement

arjie 3 days ago | parent

It is a marvelous thing. A beautiful app platform. Suddenly, one day, I was no longer Linux user without app. Linux app was standard. Everybody has Linux app. I had dual-boot Linux computer to play Valorant on Windows and to live normal life on Linux. And I use Mac at work. And it is all glorious because I no longer think about which is which. And there are people who are saying it is not amazing, but it is. I can hit Ctrl-R and the application refreshes. What an astounding tool.

For me the great app platforms:

* the terminal

* the iPhone/Android

* the web

And suddenly, the web is brought to the desktop and it is cross-platform. Everything is here on my Linux. It is the Year of the Linux Desktop and everyone is complaining about web platform. But it is web platform that has brought it here. Praise be the forces that made this happen. This man has a great website, and if he has made Electron then he is always welcome to me.

zelphirkalt 3 days ago | parent

Now we got desktop (electron) apps blocking our VPNs via friggin cloudflare. I have come to absolutely loath cloudflare's BS.

this_self 3 days ago | parent

I can’t find anything better than Electron/Tauri for building cross-platform desktop apps. The browser engine is quite efficient and performant for building complex interfaces

zzzoom 3 days ago | parent

You have an interesting definition of "efficient and performant".

flohofwoe 3 days ago | parent

Native apps are not automatically more responsive or less bloated. Look at Xcode or Visual Studio vs VSCode. Performance is mainly the result of how much effort you want to put into optimization.

vovavili 3 days ago | parent

The core of Electron can be made quite efficient and performant. It's just that commercial app developers have few incentives to dedicate significant time and effort towards optimization when modern PCs are this powerful:

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2025-electronAintBad

jeroenhd 3 days ago | parent

You're missing the "for building complex interfaces" part. I would extend that to "for building complex interfaces with even basic accessibility features" though.

And for what it's worth, Tauri and to a lesser extent Electron is actually quite efficient. It looks bloated as hell because it allocates all kinds of RAM pages it doesn't really use in case it needs to JIT extensively (which usually get compressed or swapped out anyway), but by default it's a decent UI framework.

Tauri takes what, maybe 50MiB of RAM? It's not the most efficient way, but it's as efficient as a usable cross-platform framework gets these days. Electron is four times that, which is still better than the alternative on Linux (which was running the Windows application on Wine before Electron came along).

Telegram is written in native Qt and takes about 1750MiB of RAM on my machine to show me a chat screen. The framework isn't the issue here.

gumby 3 days ago | parent

Certainly the user does not feel the same.

luis_cho 3 days ago | parent

Electron might be a good example of worse is better.

bronlund 3 days ago | parent

To be fair; Node is involved in this too.

rbbydotdev 3 days ago | parent

if (when) a better solution arises it will be the dominant solution. long live electron

tomhow 3 days ago | parent

Please post generic snarky swipes like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

joker99 3 days ago | parent

Ah, the “good“ old times of interactive flash websites.

est 3 days ago | parent

In retrospective

https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...

> In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices

H5 animations performs much worse on all devices.

Flash animations like Felix's can run well on a Pentium III processor with 64MB memory.

jeroenhd 3 days ago | parent

I disagree, Flash was a real battery sucker on Android. Native CSS animations were usually smooth in Chrome; Firefox still hasn't caught up entirely on that front I feel.

Feeding animation frames through JS rather than letting the browser do its job does take a toll, but Flash freezing the entire tab while the browser plugin initialized is something I've resented the moment HTML5 came along.

In the age of the Pentium III, Flash was state of the art, but it's been a couple of decades since then.

est 3 days ago | parent

> Flash was a real battery sucker on Android

> Flash freezing the entire tab

It's a runtime issue. .swf format is highly optimized, but it was poorly ported to iOS at that time. Adobe didn't even try.

Also the observation is kinda biased. Reimplement the same kind of animation with h5, you'd drain your battery quickly and eat your cpu0 as well. Webkit made lots of optimizations during the years.

jeroenhd 3 days ago | parent

I don't know if it was ever really ported to iOS, I've only used it on Android as a mobile platform.

Native plugins were universally bad. Flash was the best of the bunch, but it was still a major issue. Great potential ruined by problematic implementation.

.swf is a fine format, but the software required to display it in a browser was awful. I'm glad it's dead even though I'm sad we lose so much of the old internet now that it's buried.

Ruffle has been doing great for most games and animations, though. It has a similar startup + init + load time Flash player used to have, but without the myriad security vulnerabilities that plagued the web back when native plugins were still a thing.

Of course, Steve Jobs didn't get upset about Flash for any real technical reason. Adobe's CEO didn't entertain his bullshit so Steve threw a hissyfit and kicked Flash off Apple's platform. No technical merits can stand up the arbitrary whims of a billionaire CEO.

grebc 3 days ago | parent

I don’t know about a III but Flash was good in the early/mid 2000’s while I was attending university.

Certainly was 10x better than what HTML was providing at the time, HTML really only jumped forward in this department when Steve banned it on iOS.

I don’t miss it, however my friend at uni made some wicked animations in the adobe Flash editor, whatever it was called. He should’ve went onto animation etc but stuck to programming.

patrick_rtk 3 days ago | parent

super nice website bringing to old time

fuddle 3 days ago | parent

That's pretty neat.

moecables 3 days ago | parent

i like it

2845486124 3 days ago | parent

I like this, is open source?

transitivebs 3 days ago | parent

guide to how it was created: https://felixrieseberg.com/made-by-mechanical-means/

nredd 3 days ago | parent

that's slick as hell

dieter37 3 days ago | parent

Excellent work, Claude.

startakovsky1 3 days ago | parent

Can we reverse engineer the prompt? Can we reverse engineer the meta prompt? Can we reverse engineer the meta^n prompt?

lioeters 3 days ago | parent

Better yet, can we reverse engineer the engineer?

transitivebs 3 days ago | parent

he wrote in-depth about how it was created https://felixrieseberg.com/made-by-mechanical-means/

lifeisloving 3 days ago | parent

Im going to port it to Rust

bigcheese1144 3 days ago | parent

W.o.W.!

the scary thing is that I love this slightly reactionary nostalgic design - mattering the content.

It probably does tell more about me than any technology or approach discussed here.

grrr...

einrealist 3 days ago | parent

Is he even happy? The website mood is so sad.

ge96 3 days ago | parent

Well he did use the penguin that walks off into oblivion

gilgoomesh 3 days ago | parent

It feels like it's trying to evoke Bioshock vibes or a similar retro-punk dystopia.

kmoser 3 days ago | parent

The stark landscape and accented voiceover seem to be inspired by the documentary Happy People: A Year in the Taiga by Werner Herzog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psnY17CImaQ

swiftcoder 3 days ago | parent

It's just themed on a Werner Herzog documentary (which are inherently pretty gloomy). But also, who can say for sure

flohofwoe 3 days ago | parent

Interesting, I find the 'mood' very cozy and welcoming. There's nothing nicer than a warm, dimly lit room with a computer (or in this case VCR) when it's cold and rainy outside :)

Aldipower 3 days ago | parent

You are the prototype of the jealous HN commenter.

kaeruct 3 days ago | parent

Feels so strange to recognize what's out the window. I hope this cannot be used to find where they live!

jabron 3 days ago | parent

It's the view off the Warschauer Bridge in Berlin, nobody actually lives there.

shafyy 3 days ago | parent

I live around the corner :D

jabron 3 days ago | parent

Sure, but you don't live on it

shafyy 2 days ago | parent

Almost nobody lives on it

slimebot80 2 days ago | parent

Do you live in the Berghain? :)

nforgerit 3 days ago | parent

I used to live in this area in Berlin and immediately recognized it. It's weird, broken, dirty, rough and somehow exciting. And I'm gonna join the good tradition of people saying that it used to be better in the past because big money(tm) took over and changed things for the worse.

shafyy 3 days ago | parent

You mean before they built the ugly Amazon tower next to it? Agree haha

nforgerit 3 days ago | parent

There were "the wrong Amazon is burning" tags everywhere in this area at that time which always made me smirk passing by.

rawmaterial 3 days ago | parent

It's from the public domain

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berin_Skyline_(39941...

transitivebs 3 days ago | parent

an in-depth post about how he made it: https://felixrieseberg.com/made-by-mechanical-means/

extremely fascinating details in here

rustystump 3 days ago | parent

As someone who knows something in the space he brags about, it is fascinating to see the dunning kruger effect in realtime here. Even with all those claudes in “adversarial review”.

Realtime soft lighting is possible on mobile but if he had known that, i bet claude woulda been able to do it but he didnt.

If there was even the speckle of curiosity, he would have asked beyond “dont make mistakes” but i guess he was too busy riding his bike while burning 50k to make a blog.

karussell 3 days ago | parent

I agree about what you mean with the dunning kruger effect. A similar effect is when I work with AI in a field where I don't know as much, and I would think that the AI works much better there or even has more than expert knowledge. So I do not (necessarily) overestimate myself, but the AI's capabilities, which can be as dangerous for society.

(Note that latest research shows that the dunning kruger effect might only be a statistical artefact.)

arecsu 3 days ago | parent

Realtime soft lighting is possible but at what cost, for such static scene? I think the light bake technique he used is, in fact, the appropriate way to get beautiful visual results with the upside of good performance in any hardware. It's curious to say Dunning Kruger effect when I do believe the decision reached is possibly conscious about the performance shortcomings of bouncing light in real time

alfirous 2 days ago | parent

Most studio or developer I know that works with 3D in web always use baked lighting. Realtime always cost more especially on mobile.

suncemoje 3 days ago | parent

Personally, I am stunned at how fast - and autonomously - you can get to a very decent 80/20 result with AI these days. And since Opus 5.5 was released I really think it hit another level.

As an example, this was a "silly" one-shot prompt/result I created/received, which goes into a similar direction of what Felix created in terms of UX and aesthetics:

https://poster-pillar.sidequests.p-john.com/

Sure it lacks the finish and attention to detail. But this was one prompt (vs. 60 threads).

Thoughts: I find this both exciting and a bit unsettling. Idea-to-product time in tech just keeps shrinking and shrinking. I feel limited by my own ideas now (1), and by the fact that everything still remains "digital" - ChatGPT still can't build me a house or fix my broken knee (2).

rustystump 3 days ago | parent

Unlike others, the issue I have is not using AI to have fun and be creative, I do it all the time like a one off table top character sheet tool.

It is the claim that the 60 agents produced competent optimized code when the response here clearly shows that is not the case. But I can excuse ignorance when someone is learning but there was no learning here. There was no interest in learning anything more than “i like that, no not that, make it run better”.

Then this bold claim about how creativity has somehow fundamentally changed because they found a new kind of ink for their printer. Sure kid.

suncemoje 1 day ago | parent

Sure, I guess it was "just" a case study in how excessively far you can take your idea (or "taste") by supplementing and supercharging it with agents.

IMO the interesting part with this capability now (undoubtedly?) is to find the right applications/problems to solve... and yeah, why not every now and then have some fun and go full overkill with your personal website :-)

illwrks 3 days ago | parent

I've seen a several AI-coded WebGL examples... I wonder if AI will mean the return of the Flash-style interactive websites.

sudo-bendg 3 days ago | parent

So good man

jansan 3 days ago | parent

The view from his window is from Warschauer Brücke in Berlin Friedrichshain or nearby. I have fond memories living in that area and working on my software day and night.

I love the website, but one thing scares me in his list of projects:

    08 Clippy   2025-now

spacelatte 3 days ago | parent

I also lived in Friedrichshain, Berlin during Covid. In fact, at the corner of Warschauer str. & Boxhagener Str. The first thing I noticed was the Mercedes Arena and the (Ost-)Bahnhof.

The remains of the wall, (Mauer) is not much visible from that point, but definitely gives certain hacker-vibes...

teepo 3 days ago | parent

Clippy is a great little project he did in electron: https://felixrieseberg.github.io/clippy/

KubaFYI 3 days ago | parent

I wonder how many millions of tokens it took.

kubb 3 days ago | parent

I should be career hopping some more.

rustystump 3 days ago | parent

This is both creative and soulless at the same time. It runs like puke and reading the creating of, it is obvious why.

AI still cannot solve ignorance and all these examples from and of people/anthropic really showcase this. It is like watching a monkey shake a box of crayons until something interesting comes out.

Anthropic 30k mrs a day, custom version control to handle the churn vs some dude and an email list.

YeGoblynQueenne 3 days ago | parent

Everything that ever had value went the same way: food, art, motorcycles, tourism... you visit somewhere or buy something that looks exciting and 9 times out of 10 it's soulless, industrially produced, mass-targeted and ends up worth less than the money you spent on it.

It's surprising to feel that way about code projects. For most people computers always were soulless machines without anything creative associated with them. Now we're in a strange inversion of history where people who never had any idea what to do with a computer suddenly feel very creative talking to the cloud to ask it to rain down some weird and wonderful thing on them that they feel proud to post about on their social media.

Weird times. Anyway just wanted to say you're not alone.

maximilianfeix 3 days ago | parent

Which tech stack did you use for this or is all Claude Code =)

jansan 3 days ago | parent

He is a technical manager at Anthropic, so what do you expect?

kaishin 3 days ago | parent

Nice concept but I find the accessibility aspects really lacking. I suppose that was a non-goal.

nikcub 3 days ago | parent

it loads as a plain text site in Brave with WebGL disabled - I had to re-open it in Chrome to see the actual fancy thing only after seeing the comments here

Topology1 3 days ago | parent

what did it look like? always wanted to do something ambitious like this, but feel it's an accessibility/compatibility nightmare.

ashkankiani 3 days ago | parent

Given their current role, it finally explains a lot of things about why I don't like Anthropic's UIs.

thm 3 days ago | parent

For a moment I felt like Flash and Director are back but I guess you call this UI-maxxing nowadays.

MarceColl 3 days ago | parent

Reminds me a bit (although less interesting) of the 2000s JK Rowling website.

zombot 3 days ago | parent

Unusable, my whole browser is hanging with that tab open.

lgleim 3 days ago | parent

A Claude supervising a fleet of Claudes on a fleet of Cloud VMs with intricate knowledge of all flights of white collar work (cf https://felixrieseberg.com/made-by-mechanical-means/).

Traditional software engineering is so dead for the 99% of use cases...

amelius 3 days ago | parent

Yes, and so is this guy's website. Because who is going to interact with a computer-screen when we can just literally talk (as in: speak) to an AI?

lgleim 3 days ago | parent

so true. gui might be just a niche eventually. let alone sitting in front of a screen 8h/day. Or as Felix wrote - he did most of this from his phone, in part while riding a bike

legulere 1 day ago | parent

Our visual perception has a higher bandwidth than listening. With text alone we can read faster than typical speaking speed and then a picture is worth a thousand words.

mightyalex 3 days ago | parent

Not concerned at all ^^; "he built the website in 24 hours" is great marketing for Claude. Now everyone wants to try building their own website the same way and burn tokens.

xtiansimon 3 days ago | parent

Feeling like a Gabocorp moment?

https://youtu.be/zs34g9jBUhg

virtualritz 3 days ago | parent

It froze my laptop after I clicked once.

Couldn't even SSH into it any more even though Tailscale showed it as alife. Had to reboot.

So this website definitely left an impression.

hobo123 3 days ago | parent

What laptops are yall using? My Samsung phone with Firefox got very slightly warm while I spent a minute there, but that's it.

felixgallo 3 days ago | parent

I think the only controversial thing about this cute little homemade website is that he frames Electron as being a rebellion against the chaos of modern software, which, well.

Revanche1367 3 days ago | parent

Almost burned up my laptop within seconds of visiting the site. I thought at first it was something like that quite interesting windows 95 on the web demo (which may have been AI-generated too afaik), alas it was just some pretentious AI-generated art piece with little technical value (IMO). Still would have been a nice art piece even with the performance issues if it was (mostly) handwritten, but token-churned art just doesn't have the same feel, especially when it also tries to destroy your computer.

goodmythical 3 days ago | parent

No problem on an i3-1215U running kernel 7.2.9 and Firefox 157.0.1...

Kinda weird so many people are having issues with it

jdb9001 3 days ago | parent

This? https://98.js.org/ that ones older than vibe coding afaiw

Revanche1367 2 days ago | parent

No, it was this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112892. Last posted on HN 8 months ago, that's when I saw it. I misremembered the Windows version, it was 3.11. But, the site looks to be significantly different now and has different Windows versions, XP being the default emulation.

kogasa240p 2 days ago | parent

Disable javascript and you'll be redirected to the static version.

Topology1 3 days ago | parent

+1 for supporting Vim movements on the virtual computer

stefangordon 3 days ago | parent

Fantastic.

dsunds 3 days ago | parent

"I have no idea how to use Blender"

Right now we are using AI to automate the tools we've built for ourselves. I've been wondering, who builds tools now if AI are the primary users? Will AI agents build and publish tools for the greater good? Or will vendors hold back AI generated composable modules as a competitive advantage.

Similarly for languages, I wonder if or when AI generates machine code and skips all our higher order languages we've built for human needs.

TeMPOraL 3 days ago | parent

> I've been wondering, who builds tools now if AI are the primary users?

AI already builds tools for itself as part of solving a problem. I expect these to get more sophisticated with time.

> Will AI agents build and publish tools for the greater good? Or will vendors hold back AI generated composable modules as a competitive advantage.

Oh they definitely will - it'll be their last ditch attempt at staying relevant, after they get over denial phase and realize that products are already being subsumed by general AI systems, and reduced to bag of tools agents can use.

But then, for any given bag of tools, how hard will it be for an agent to build a clean-room version of it, instead of paying the vendor? This is the end of software companies as we know them.

> Similarly for languages, I wonder if or when AI generates machine code and skips all our higher order languages we've built for human needs.

That's currently too big a target to hit - the weight of all pretraining, and existing infrastructure, will keep programming languages alive for a while (human languages, that's another topic - there's not as much baggage for agent-to-agent communication).

It will take time. We've only started the co-evolution process very recently: we built agent-optimized wrappers around CLI tools and APIs, and around now that should've percolated into training data for the current or next generation of models. I imagine over time, the tools and agent preferences will co-evolve towards an equilibrium.

basilikum 3 days ago | parent

=== Start of Comment ===

I don't like this.

I don't really know how to describe this any better. I have JavaScript disabled by default and got a decent lightweight blog index. The comments here on HN didn't make much sense so I enabled JS and WebGL. An image starts to load before I get this screen: "This scene needs WebGL, which isn't available in this browser." Cool. So I try a different browser and it works, but is very laggy.

I dunno. I guess it's an impressive tech demo. I mean 3D rendering in the browser is not new, but it's impressive that AIs can do something like this. It doesn't look like total crap. I guess it looks kinda neat.

But it's a terrible user interface. It would be cool if it was some handcrafted art. Not useful but human expression through sweat and dedication.

But this is an autogenerated remix of other people's art as it looks from the credits. Arranged in a 3D scene. So it's an extremely impractical user interface for what? Looking pretty? Making me go "wow"? I mean fair, that's subjective and if people feel that way that's fair.

I don't. I don't like it. I appreciate that there is a JS free version. I like it much more.

=== End of Comment ===

=== Start of Rambling ===

Now some unfair nitpick.

When I was on the JS free version and did not know why this site is even submitted here I clicked on the post about Electron. The decent blog index made place to some dreaded slop blog page. This quote struck out to me:

> But: You might be surprised to hear that performance is not the primary reason why many Electron developers prefer a bundled engine.

I am in fact not surprised at all.

I just feel that this is descriptive.

=== End of Rambling ===

Hitton 3 days ago | parent

The snake game in the terminal has an off-by-one error with top line.

But overall very cool and impressive.

mlsu 3 days ago | parent

It's pretty bleak that this guy chose to display rainy/dark/VHS/analogue/nihilistic penguin as the central motif here. There's certainly a lot to unpack.

Oh well, at least the site itself is technically excellent.

wvbdmp 2 days ago | parent

Clean site! (With noscript on)

slimebot80 2 days ago | parent

Real questions:

- How much did it cost?

- It's great, and you had lots of input, yet the output is still vague and non specific? These 'tools' seem to excel at one-shot stylizations, but being more specific is hard and takes many iterations at which point it's more pleasant to hire a designer and a dev? And maybe even cheaper, I'm guessing, given there is no mention of cost.