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whiddershins

7,009 karma · joined March 28, 2012

Sarth Calhoun. Creator of Burlap. https://www.burlap.app

Data Engineering for Art. https://www.sarth.net

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whiddershins··on Frontier AI on Your Own Hardware
we had this thing called apprenticeship and it is now illegal
whiddershins··on Admin: Terminally Ill Patients Aren't Exempt from Medicaid Work Requirements
They would meet the requirements to not have to work. Having nothing to do with terminally ill status and everything to do with the things you just listed. The article doesn't say anyone is proposing to change that.
whiddershins··on Nano Banana 2 Lite
thanks! i have been trying to articulate why i built this, and in what ways the approach is fundamentally different.
whiddershins··on Nano Banana 2 Lite
for the app or the keys?

for keys we support openai, google, bytedance, and wavespeed which is an aggregator that gives you access to most models.

if you are asking is Windows in the works, not near term. unless enough people ask i suppose.

whiddershins··on Nano Banana 2 Lite
shameless plug burlap will let you just use keys from gemini studio or openai and try stuff out without messing with the web interfaces. that's (one reason) i made it

https://www.burlap.app/download

whiddershins··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
I am under the impression this does not apply to for example o-1 visas. Possibly not for h1-b. Is everyone clear about what they are commenting on here? Is the news coverage clear?
whiddershins··on Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda
You are right, the downvotes people gave this comment are wrong, the replies to you are wrong. Feeding evil in the hopes you will also feed a little good is not only bad morally, but bad practically, bad in a utilitarian calculus, and just dumb.
whiddershins··on Uber Faces Growing Pressure over Sexual Assault Record
vulnerable how?
whiddershins··on Scott Adams has died
I appreciated Scott Adams, and am sad he has passed away. I learned a lot from him and his perspective helped me through difficult times.

The comments here are very unfortunate. When someone dies, it is appropriate to speak of what you appreciated about them.

That's it. That's all you need to say. And you aren't required to say anything at all.

Apologizing for liking him because of x or y or explaining that you liked him despite z is in poor taste and, frankly, cowardly.

I appreciated Scott Adams, and am sad he has passed away.

whiddershins··on JetBlue flight averts mid-air collision with US Air Force jet
congresss did not declare war for any of the post wwii wars.
whiddershins··on Homeschooling hits record numbers
How many conservatives do you socialize with regularly?
whiddershins··on The Death of the Middle-Class Musician
all this was obvious the moment napster became popular. and for more than a decade anyone who explained what was happening was ridiculed, especially in tech circles.

spotify in particular cemented a payment structure that disadvantages any “serious” music versus endless repeat pop songs, while also being completely corrupted by conflict of interest from record labels with an ownership stake. now they manufacture their own muzak and steer your playlist to it, draining the last bits of revenue possibility away from these “middle class musicians.”

youtube streamed music for free for years, paying no artists, and it was one of its core growth engines. completely asymmetrical outcome.

the whole thing denigrated musicians, and music itself. hordes of early online young tech professionals making great money at their office jobs poo pooing the concerns of an entire industry which previously enabled some of the most sophisticated artistic endeavors our culture ever attempted.

just dumb. a complete victory of lowbrow values.

baffling someone is writing this article in 2025. at every fork in the road, the path was taken that would give less revenue to the musicians. and ~no one in tech felt it was a problem.

talking about it like there is a revelation or an emerging phenomenon here mystifies, while rubbing salt in the wound.

whiddershins··on Claude 4
The trend towards opaque is inexorable.

https://noisegroove.substack.com/p/somersaulting-down-the-sl...

whiddershins··on InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that's stronger than steel
I'd be curious about the total carbon emissions, all in, to produce this because it seems like an excellent carbon sink. And especially when compared to steel.
whiddershins··on A Research Preview of Codex
I would like to take this moment to point out that in NY it is ~illegal for me to hire an unpaid intern and train them by for example saying: - this is codex, here is a bunch of tickets - enter each ticket into codex, then review each change and understand what it did. if you think what it did is good, open a PR - twice a day we will meet and i will review all the codex PRs with you and explain what is and isn't working

etc.

This would not save me time. It would be paying it forward. And I cannot do this.

whiddershins··on Show HN: Node.js video tutorials where you can edit and run the code
So can I just sign up and get started using it on my blog, or how does this work?
whiddershins··on AI Horseless Carriages
LLMs in data pipelines enable all sorts of “before impossible” stuff. For example, this creates an event calendar for you based on emails you have received:

https://www.indexself.com/events/molly-pepper

(that’s mine, and is due a bugfix/update this week. message me if you want to try it with your own emails)

I have a couple more LLM-powered apps in the works, like next few weeks, that aren’t chat or code. I wouldn’t call them transformative, but they meet your other criteria, I think.

whiddershins··on How to win an argument with a toddler
"i can't understand my son, he doesn't listen to a thing I say!"

-- Stephen Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

whiddershins··on New urinal designs prevent 265,000 gallons of urine splashing onto the floor
argh, just have the back wall recede away from you as it gets lower. tilt it the other way. you could even use a curve.
whiddershins··on But what if I want a faster horse?
this is such a fantastic comment because it makes a charitable attempt to explain how data driven decisions go off the rails.

and it matters because this seems to be an omnipresent phenomenon.

everything everywhere seems driven by this unless someone with decision making power is executing a specific and conscious strategy that pushes back against it.

whiddershins··on Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit
"known to" !== "known for"
whiddershins··on AI 2027
> A rise in AI-generated propaganda failed to materialize.

hah!

whiddershins··on Overengineered Anchor Links
i've been wanting to implement a design like this for blogs for 5 or 10 years. Great work on the inline detail on mobile. genuinely better than whatever i would have made.

did you consider pushing the word(s) directly following the activation button to below the detail pane, rather than doing it based on line break?

whiddershins··on What, exactly, is an 'AI Agent'? Here's a litmus test
"AI Agent", as of April 2025, is a largely meaningless term that serves as a descriptive abstraction for people who aren't so familiar with coding. Debating its definition is pointless.

AI Agent is whatever you want it to be if it helps you design or explain something.

whiddershins··on Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
Great idea, but (as indicated in the article) there are no stoops pictured. A stoop is a series of steps that go to a second level, which makes for way better hang dynamics. Living on a block with stoops is superior to one without because people are far more likely to hang around outside when they can get some height and survey the whole block.

https://www.brownstoner.com/brooklyn-life/brooklyn-stoop-sit...

whiddershins··on Triforce – a beamformer for Apple Silicon laptops
i don't know the details but airpods pro sound noticeably terrible and bluetooth-y. It's almost shocking.
whiddershins··on Show HN: My iOS app to practice sight reading (10 years in the App Store)
yeah but why isn't C major called A major
whiddershins··on Show HN: My iOS app to practice sight reading (10 years in the App Store)
In my experience, accidentally memorizing what you are reading doesn't really get in the way of what most people think of as sight reading. Internalizing structures and patterns is 99% of what it means ti "learn to read."
whiddershins··on Show HN: Open-source, native audio turn detection model
huh. how is analyzing conversations in the manner you described NOT the way to train such a model?
whiddershins··on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
think about it this way: could any law ever stop any publisher from doing anything and still respect the 1st amendemnt?
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