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twh270

761 karma · joined August 5, 2017

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twh270··on Five monitors on a Commodore 128 [video]
Back in the VGA days, I worked for a video card maker, and one of them supported a multi-head configuration. You could stick as many as 16 into one machine, if it had enough slots. Thus driving 16 monitors at once. I was responsible for taking the stock Windows 3.1 display driver for the chipset and modifying it for multi-head support. That was a really fun and challenging project, and ultimately very satisfying. I am pretty sure there were a few customers who needed the full 16-card setup.

BTW this was done in the day when drawing pixels on a screen was all done via the CPU telling the card "draw /this/ pixel with /this/ color". Good times!

twh270··on De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)
It does exist, and it has been independent, and consequently global markets have priced that in. If that changes, markets will respond accordingly.
twh270··on GPT-5
Someone tried this, I saw it one of the Reddit AI subs. They were training a local model on whatever they could find that was written before $cutoffDate.

Found the GitHub: https://github.com/haykgrigo3/TimeCapsuleLLM

twh270··on I watched Gemini CLI hallucinate and delete my files
Agreed, I get better design and arch solutions from it. And part of my system prompt tells it to be an "aggressive critic" of everything, which is great -- sometimes its "critic's corner" piece of the response is more helpful/valuable than the 'normal' part of the response!
twh270··on Serving a half billion requests per day with Rust and CGI
OP posited SQLite database contention. I don't know enough about this space to agree or disagree. It would be interesting, and perhaps illuminating, to perform a similar experiment with Postgres.
twh270··on The Aging Programmer
Yes, 100%. Being immobile is bad, whether you're standing, sitting, or lying down. (Too much strain from movement is bad too, hence RSI for many of us.)

I really enjoy having the flexibility/option of standing or sitting, and IMO a standing desk is one of those purchases that has a 10x payback.

twh270··on iTerm2 critical security release
Another comment mentioned using a linter to prevent 'console.log' from being mergeable in a PR, and this is exactly the kind of approach I'd take. Preventing an invalid state from existing is a pretty useful principle.
twh270··on OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB
Reskill to what? When AI can do software development, it will also be able to do pretty much any other job that requires some learning.
twh270··on The feds are coming for John Deere over the right to repair
I don't know the first thing about such things, but I'll bet if companies were pushed on this they'd suddenly start asserting that it's a lease, which I think is typically taxed similarly to a sale.

I hate the "everything's a subscription" business model that's taking over everything. We'll achieve peak serfdom when the air we breathe, water we drink, and food we eat is bought on a subscription model.

twh270··on Laziness Death Spirals
My fear/anxiety causes me to avoid action. Fear of mistakes, failure, reproach/criticism from others, that it's going to take a lot of time/money, that I'll waste a lot of time/money, etc.

Then, once I've procrastinated, my fear/anxiousness of the consequences of NOT doing the thing kicks in and I rush to complete it.

It's great! /s

The best solution I've found is to slow down, introspect into and address my fear/anxiety, and reassure myself that most of the time my fears are entirely or mostly unfounded, and that even if something "bad" happens it won't be catastrophic.

I don't practice that enough, and that's the hill I'm climbing now. I'm also trying to learn to lean more into the feeling of accomplishment ahead of time. In a "it will feel so good to get this done, even if it's not great" way.

twh270··on John Carmack on inlined code (2014)
I think the only way this gets better is with software development tools that make it impossible to create invalid states.

In the physical world, when we build something complex like a car engine, a microprocessor, or bookcase, the laws of physics guide us and help prevent invalid states. Not all of them -- an upside down bookcase still works -- but a lot of them.

Of course, part of the problem is that when we build the software equivalent of an upside down bookcase, we 'patch' it by creating trim and shims to make it look better and more structurally sound instead of tossing it and making another one the right way.

But mostly, we write software in a way that allows for a ton of incorrect states. As a trivial example, expressing a person's age as an 'int', allowing for negative numbers. As a more complicated example, allowing for setting a coupon's redemption date when it has not yet been clipped.

twh270··on Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops
Oh awesome, thank you! I will check back in December.
twh270··on Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops
I'm interested, but I can't find any documentation for it. Can I give it local content (documents, spreadsheets, code, etc.) and ask questions?
twh270··on Watch live as SpaceX crew carry out first-ever commercial spacewalk
Wow. If you think capitalism produces inequalities, you should check out some of the other systems that have been tried!
twh270··on Microsoft confirms that Windows 11 Recall AI is not optional
Every complex piece of software "breaks in weird ways", that doesn't make it terrible. It will also break if you're trying to do 'weird' things it's not really designed for.
twh270··on Vulnerable transistors threaten to upend Europa Clipper mission
From the article: "Infineon did not report the flaw to NASA because the company did not know what the transistors would be used for, Fitzpatrick said."

They might not have "known", but come on, you're selling radiation-hardened chips to NASA. You can sure make an educated guess that they might be used for a probe.

I'm guessing there's a clause missing in the contract that says Infineon must disclose all known problems to NASA regardless of how the chips will be used.

Regardless, there are some people at NASA to whom 'Infineon' is now a curse word.

twh270··on Using short lived Postgres servers for testing
If you work in the JVM ecosystem, I can recommend (Java/Kotlin) + Quarkus + JDBI with Postgres. Quarkus supports testcontainers out of the box for tests, and it just plain works.

I don't have experience with it, but some people also recommend jooq.

twh270··on Software Friction
Once you're familiar with friction, you start seeing it everywhere. And then you hate how much of it there is. I'm sure there's a philosophical lesson in there somewhere.

As far as battling it goes, my experience is that you can get a lot of mileage by just spending an extra minute or three making something a little cleaner, more readable, less prone to failure, etc.

twh270··on Show HN: Unforget, the note-taking app I always wanted: offline first, encrypted
Fair enough on the CSS, and I didn't realize autosave is already done, thanks!

I did see the '---' collapsible and that helps but only if you have one section you want to collapse. I'm perhaps more visually-oriented than most, and being able to hide extraneous material helps me focus.

twh270··on Show HN: Unforget, the note-taking app I always wanted: offline first, encrypted
Experimented a few more minutes, and I have a few suggestions I think I'd like to see implemented:

-- Allow regular expression search. -- Click outside the note to save. (Autosave every N seconds would be nice as well.) -- Customizable CSS. (Yes, I can do this with a local build.) -- Collapse/expand (sub)headings.

I'll give it more of a test drive over the next few days.

twh270··on Show HN: Unforget, the note-taking app I always wanted: offline first, encrypted
Uh... maybe not? I've been living with just a few folders in Outlook for some time now (Inbox[0], Archive, and Important) and can almost always find what I'm looking for. Usually with a search word/phrase, sometimes by another field.

Tags could cover most of my need for taxonomy/organization. (I'm hesitant to say 'all'.)

FYI I noticed a typo, "Github falvored markdown".

[0] I try for 'inbox zero' but am okay with leaving things in my inbox for a few days if I'm expecting to need them soon. Sometimes I flag for followup or color-categorize.

twh270··on Show HN: Unforget, the note-taking app I always wanted: offline first, encrypted
Looks clean, but how are you organizing the "thousands of notes I had on Google Keep"? It looks like a single page of notes.
twh270··on The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing
The lawsuit was settled out of court (https://www.wsbradio.com/news/national/documents-detail/VUTB...). Reading between the lines, I'm guessing OceanGate (a company with substantial financial resources) would have buried Lochbridge (an individual with substantially fewer financial resources) in lawsuits if he had not settled. (Not to mention the stress, hardship, and real-or-perceived threat of jail time for Lochbridge, should the court find him to be guilty.)

If you're implying that the judge was somehow complicit in helping OceanGate ('oversaw', meaning presided over and made decisions concerning), then please provide evidence of that?

twh270··on Welcome to the Era of Garbage Film and Television Streaming
We dropped Amazon Prime earlier this year, in part because of the introduction of ads, and we haven't missed it. We're now talking about moving to the model where you stream one or two providers at a time, then switch. Between the ads and garbage content, it's just increasingly hard to justify subscribing to a half dozen services just to have options.

I should add we're not doing this because we need to cut costs.

twh270··on Tetris Is Forty Years Old
That was super interesting and well worth the 16 minutes, thanks for the link!
twh270··on The Lunacy of Artemis
Correction -- at least for Challenger, engineers did not think there was margin, and argued against the launch.

At the technical level, both tragedies were caused by design flaws. Organizationally and culturally, multiple factors contributed, but an attitude of "nothing has happened yet, so this is fine" (normalizing risk) was a major one.

twh270··on 'Eat the future, pay with your face': my dystopian trip to an AI burger joint
> fetishize human workers and read more like activist pieces arguing against tech.

Agreed. The writing style, including adjective/adverb use, is clearly intended to convey an emotional tone of disgust and displeasure.

I'd love to give these people a chance to review a car from the 1900s or 1910s. They'd undoubtedly walk away convinced that the newfangled 'automobile' was a heap of rubbish destined for the dump.

(Of course the successes we have today are built on top of endless heaps of rubbish and a few good ideas.)

twh270··on Uber and Lyft leave Minneapolis over $15 minimum wage
Naive thought since I'm not familiar with the situation, but since Uber/Lyft could simply raise rates it seems to me this is political posturing on their part to see if they can force the city to back down.

What am I missing here?

twh270··on Starship's Third Flight Test [video]
Yeah, it's pretty awesome to watch "the first" of something! I wasn't born early enough to watch the moon landing, but I did watch the livestream of the first successful landing of a Falcon 9. Watching that bit of science fiction turn into reality was one of the more memorable moments of my life.
twh270··on Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0
100% control/ownership was "the Microsoft way", but perhaps there's an alternate universe where they did jointly launch OS/2 due to business needs, with Microsoft intending to claw back control. Would have been interesting to see them fight over ownership!

I ran OS/2 Warp for a couple years as my daily driver and agree, it was a fantastic OS. Stable as heck, preemptive multitasking, just a solid workhorse. I would say Windows got "good enough" with Windows 2000, and pretty decent with the release of XPSP3. Many years later....

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