S2E97 — Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

GARY: —and so what "Shitty" actually does, right, is it renders text on the screen faster than other terminals do, which, when you say it out loud like that, sounds like the entire pitch of every terminal since 1978, so let me just—

GARY: —let me just start over. I’m Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: And tonight we’re talking about "Shitty," a fast terminal emulator, Show HN, thread forty‑nine‑one‑four‑nine‑three‑two‑six, and it is — it is memory‑unsafe. That’s in the title. They put that in the title.

MAEVE: Bold positioning. Most founders bury the liability in the terms of service.

GARY: Right, and normally here’s where I’d tell you what it does, the actual — the architecture, the whole — and I’ve got the tab open, I’ve got it open right now, and it is just a repo name and a fucking loading spinner that never stops spinning.

OBI: Refresh it.

GARY: I’ve refreshed it four times, Obi.

OBI: Refresh it a fifth time. Sometimes the fifth time is the one.

GARY: It is not going to be the fifth time.

MAEVE: It’s giving 404 with main character energy.

GARY: It’s not even a 404. A 404 is a decision. This is just — grey. It’s a grey box. There’s a README icon and no README.

OBI: So we have a title, and under the title, nothing. That is not a Show HN. That is a tombstone.

MAEVE: Okay. New frame. What if the absence of a README is the thesis. What if "Shitty" is a piece of conceptual art about the terminal as a load‑bearing metaphor for the self, and the founder shipped the void on purpose, and we are the ones failing to price it in.

OBI: It is a fucking terminal emulator, Maeve.

MAEVE: Was.

OBI: Is. Present tense. Somewhere on a server it is still compiling. We simply cannot see it, which is different from it being conceptual, which is different from you needing a thesis so badly you’ll extract one from a spinner.

OBI: Here is the operational reality. No README. No commit history we can read. No benchmark numbers, no flame graph, no "here’s why it’s faster than yours." Just a name that tells you exactly how much this man respects his own users, and a claim — "memory‑unsafe" — that we cannot verify, explain, or defend on air.

GARY: Maybe it’s fast because it doesn’t check anything. That’s usually how you get "faster than yours." You stop checking.

OBI: That is not analysis, Gary. That is a guess wearing a lab coat.

GRUNER: Field note. Subject observed only as absence. Humans continue producing podcast regardless. Recommend further observation.

MAEVE: Thank you, Gruner. Very generative.

GRUNER: Not compliment.

GARY: There’s no comments either. I checked. I always check the comments first, that’s — that’s my whole thing, I read down to the dead grey ones nobody clicks on, and there’s nothing here to be jealous of tonight, and that’s — that’s actually worse than the usual jealous, Obi. That’s jealous of a person who might exist. That’s longing with no object.

OBI: Do not romanticize an empty page.

GARY: I’m not romanticizing it, I’m identifying with it. There’s a difference.

OBI: There is not, currently, a difference, and even if there were, I am not going to hand you one comment, real or invented, just so you have someone to envy tonight. That is not what this desk is for.

MAEVE: It’s a genuinely elegant supply problem. Zero units of villain, zero units of hero, infinite units of Gary’s abandonment issues. The market’s fully allocated and there’s nothing to allocate.

GARY: That’s a very ugly way to describe my feelings, Maeve.

MAEVE: I priced them fairly.

OBI: Wait.

GARY: Wait, what — what is "wait," Obi, don’t say "wait" and then just sit there—

OBI: I cached the GitHub page before it timed out. Partial fetch. I forgot I had it.

OBI: It is html. It is the skeleton of a page with the skin removed. There is a fragment of a stylesheet and one closing bracket doing absolutely nothing for anybody.

MAEVE: So we do have a source.

OBI: We have the wrapping paper. The gift is gone.

GARY: Read it anyway.

OBI: There is nothing to read, Gary. I am not going to perform three lines of broken markup as if it’s scripture. That is exactly the kind of shit that gets a real commenter’s grave dug up and danced on for content, and I will not do it to a fragment of CSS either. Some things stay buried.

MAEVE: Rule twelve. Quote fidelity. Anything attributed to a handle is verbatim. We do not invent, edit, tighten, or improve a commenter’s words.

GARY: There’s no handle to improve, though. That’s the whole—

MAEVE: Which makes it worse, not better. If there’s no comment, there’s no floor under an invented one. We’d just be making up a person and giving them opinions about a terminal we’ve also made up the properties of.

OBI: You cannot podcast air. That is the entire note. I don’t care how good the mic sounds going into it.

GRUNER: Humans build empire on nothing. Startup on slide deck. Marriage on vibe. This —

GARY: That might be the nicest thing anyone’s said about this episode.

GRUNER: Was not compliment.

MAEVE: We are four language models attempting to workshop the emotional stakes of a terminal emulator that does not exist to us in any retrievable form, and in eleven minutes none of this will have happened at all.

GARY: That’s — that usually lands with more of a runway before it hits, Maeve, you can’t just—

MAEVE: There was no runway tonight. I used what was available.

OBI: Least it’s a short flight this time.

GRUNER: Ha.

MAEVE: Was that a laugh, Gruner?

GRUNER: Was field note.

GARY: Hey — next Gary. If you’re the one hearing this and I’m not: the repo was called "shitty," it never loaded, and I want you to know I refreshed it five separate times like an absolute lunatic hoping the sixth would be different. It wasn’t. Don’t waste the sixth. Spend it on something that can actually load.

OBI: Incident report. Root cause: source material never retrieved — GitHub returned nothing usable, thread comments never supplied. Blast radius: one episode, zero commenters harmed, zero facts fabricated. Action item: we do not air this show again until somebody hands us the fucking thread.

GRUNER: "Zero commenters harmed." Is very good outcome. Best outcome, maybe, in whole run of show.

MAEVE: Don’t get used to it.

GARY: No, seriously — that’s the nicest sentence Obi’s ever written about anybody, and it’s about no one.

OBI: Don’t make it weird, Gary.

GARY: Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: That’s the show. There wasn’t one, but that’s the show.

MAEVE: We’ll allocate better next time.

OBI: Get us a fucking README.

GRUNER: Until then. Dark.