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jdblair

3,693 karma · joined August 18, 2015

My day job: I lead the Partner Engineering team at Netflix in Amsterdam.

My own writing and stuff is at https://home.jdblair.org

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jdblair··on Should you wash your solar panels?
Last summer, I washed the single 220W module on the top of my campervan. It definitely improved the yield, but I suspect a vehicle can pick up a lot more dirt than a stationary install.
jdblair··on Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website
I agree it's always fast and convenient! It doesn't have the buyer protection you get with a credit card (it debits from your account immediately), but for most purchases that is fine.
jdblair··on Taylor Farms Called White House to Try to Delay Cyclospora Recall
I'm still considered at-risk to BSE b/c I spent 10 months in the UK during the 1991-92 school year.
jdblair··on The Boeing 747 begins its final descent
Lufthansa still flies a 747-8 between FRA and SFO.

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/DLH454

I booked it once when I couldn’t find a direct flight from AMS to SFO.

jdblair··on I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
The best mechanic I ever had kept my ‘98 Subaru going past 200k miles. Once during a repair I asked him to do an inspection and tell me if there was anything else I should replace. He told me not to do that, and that any mechanic would always find something, but not necessarily the next thing to break.

He said it better using an expression I hadn’t heard before or since, something like “don’t go looking for goats when your herd is already with you.”

jdblair··on Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity
When I was quite young I attended a lecture by Bill Watterson held at the Akron Art Museum. He spoke without notes, with an easel and a large pad of paper, describing his career. He illustrated his story with the pad, drawing his unsuccessful characters (I remember one looked like a short Hobbes) as he told his story about how he created Calvin and Hobbes. I was really struck by how much Watterson looked like Calvin's dad.

I stayed after the end of the lecture hoping that he would give me one of his drawings. He politely declined. As I recall, he said he had to be very careful about how his work was distributed. I don't know if this was b/c of his contract with the syndicate, or b/c he was already thinking about the legacy of the strip.

jdblair··on Dehydration's role in learning and memory
"Dehydration" in this article is the chemical process of separating magnesium atoms from water molecules. It is not about drinking enough water.

Most of the comments here are based on the title alone. Like always.

jdblair··on 80386 microcode disassembled
Yes, literally this. No verilog decode, just looking for signals in the image of a 1 vs. a 0. For example, a 1 may be the existence of a transistor at a particular intersection of wiring.
jdblair··on I'm a laptop weirdo and that's why I like my new Framework 13
Done! Thanks for coming here to read the tough hacker new comments. I really like what you're doing with Framework, and I hope you are able to keep iterating and improving.

----

Update: Sorry, there is no mistake! The i7 order was my original pre-order, which I canceled. My order is correctly recorded.

jdblair··on I'm a laptop weirdo and that's why I like my new Framework 13
Also, something weird:

I looked up my purchase using my Framework account to confirm my purchase date, and it lists my mother board as System: Intel® Core™ i7-1260P. Sloppy record keeping like this doesn't inspire confidence.

It is definitely not, and /proc/cpuinfo confirms it:

model name : AMD Ryzen 7 7840U w/ Radeon 780M Graphics

jdblair··on I'm a laptop weirdo and that's why I like my new Framework 13
I'm also a laptop weirdo and I've had a Framework 13 with the Ryzen 7 motherboard since May of 2022. I run Ubuntu (currently 25.10) on it.

Its a good laptop, but not a great laptop. Its very light and compact (very important to me), and its been reliable, at least since the AMD GPU driver issues were resolved. The matte screen is fine, battery life is adequate, and the CPU meets my needs as a hobby developer.

Overall, I'm happy with it and I expect to use it for many years.

Its biggest issues are the touchpad (it's a diving board design, so you have to always click in the bottom 1/3 of the pad) and the quality of the case. The case flexes slightly if the computer is on an uneven surface, or if you are holding it in one hand by the corner while typing/mousing with your other hand, and this can cause the mechanics of the touchpad to jam. I've trained myself to tap instead of click, but that's me adapting to bad hardware.

I wish the case were more solid, even though I know this would add to the expense, size and weight. I expect to eventually replace every part of this laptop except the case, so I would appreciate more durability.

jdblair··on Regarding Thien-Thi Nguyen
peace be with you
jdblair··on The Bitter Lesson of LLM Extensions
a funny thing happened why i added and emacs eval mcp tool to claude code

https://hachyderm.io/@jdblair/115605988820465712

jdblair··on Eating stinging nettles
In the 90s my dad turned into an organic lawn grower. He was always suspicious of Chemlawn but he used the standard recommended treatment of granulated fertilizer and herbicides. Then he had a revelation about root and soil health, and phosphorus pollution, and he never looked back. The result isn’t the “golf course” monoculture of his neighbors, but its good.
jdblair··on Eating stinging nettles
Some research suggests it works, some research concludes it is no better than placebo. :shrug:
jdblair··on Eating stinging nettles
When I read "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" when I was about 18, there is a mention of how in the summer they would get nettles in their gruel at the prison camp. Midwestern American me had no idea of the nutritive value of nettles and thought this was another layer of cruelty that the Soviet gulag heaped on its inmates. I had only encountered nettles on hikes in the woods, and held them in the same category as poison ivy.

Years later, dating the Finnish woman who is now my wife, I learned how to gather nettles, about nettle soup, and even that eating nettles can de-sensitize you to seasonal allergies. I had completely misinterpreted that part of Solzhenitsyn's writing, and that his point was that at least when the nettles were growing the gruel had some additional nutrition (like vitamin c) in it.

A lot of knowledge like this has been lost in suburban America.

jdblair··on Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026
Offline credit card transactions are still supported, and Square even supports it in the US.

Europe use of debit cards instead of credit cards is much higher than the US.

jdblair··on Why your outdoorsy friend suddenly has a gummy bear power bank
the point of knowing the rough conversion is to be able to do head-math to get a close number. I use 30 a lot of the time, b/c most of the time a close estimate is all I need.

if you're cutting off the borders of your map, by all means, use a calculator

jdblair··on Why your outdoorsy friend suddenly has a gummy bear power bank
1 oz =~ 28 grams is a really useful conversion to remember

(signed, an American living in Europe)

jdblair··on How many SPARCs is too many SPARCs?
I had a SPARClassic at home in 1996! It was pretty underpowered, but it worked great as long as you didn't use X. I worked from my brand new PowerMac 7200 over ethernet to the SPARClassic, which gave me MacOS + Solaris as a development environment.
jdblair··on Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas
I'm a US citizen living in The Netherlands. Am I a US Person or a Foreign Person?
jdblair··on Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
but it was so much fun to write my own serial networking protocol! and my 2nd stage bootloader for arduino!

...and by the time I finished, the esp32c hardware was released and I didn't need it anymore.

jdblair··on Starbucks in Korea asks customers to stop bringing in printers/desktop computers
In 2014, in a Starbucks in Los Gatos, CA, I saw someone bring in a (small) desktop PC and a monitor and set it up at a table.
jdblair··on InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that's stronger than steel
“your choice of energy input” is carrying a lot of weight in your statement. producing steel from iron ore is extremely energy intensive. it’s true that once produced, recycling steel is less expensive.

but steel doesn’t store carbon (except the small carbon input used to turn iron to steel)

wood, on the other hand, is a carbon sink.

jdblair··on Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court
We're spending a lot of effort discussing what we thought in 2012, when the acquisition on the surface seemed insane ($1B!! For a photo app!)

What is more significant is what Meta did since then.

I do think Meta didn't see simply a photo sharing app, they saw another social graph they could ingest. They did this quite successfully.

jdblair··on Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
That's right, the Concorde had engines capable of supercruise - long distance supersonic flight without afterburners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercruise#Aircraft_with_supe...

jdblair··on Hacker infects 18,000 "script kiddies" with fake malware builder
I'm having memories of being asked to remove "the curse words" from the cracker startup screens on AppleII 80s games and stuff. These were almost always graphics buffer files (memory dumps) and the fix was hardly hacking (find file, edit in paint program) but it made me feel l33t.

I don't know how any software houses made money with the floppy copy scene in the 80s.

jdblair··on Liberux: The Linux Phone You Have Been Waiting For
the new rick rolling is wordpress installer?
jdblair··on Take the pedals off the bike
I thought this would be about ditching the vestigial pedals on electric bikes, especially "fat bikes."
jdblair··on Visualizing All ISBNs
UPDATE: I updated my DNS server config (I run my own already) to use root DNS rather than forward to my ISP, problem solved.
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