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woodrowbarlow

2,610 karma · joined October 17, 2016

embedded systems developer near raleigh, nc.

email: wbar8417 at gmail

posts i've saved: https://gist.github.com/woodrowbarlow/daa7e7efb86bb1a441a21104f8ab31fe

submissionscomments
woodrowbarlow··on Show HN: Rickub – The Smartest Git in the Universe
yet another gitea/forgejo instance with some extra plumbing, hosted in the EU. this is a github alternative, not a git alternative. rickub's conflation of the two seems deliberate.
woodrowbarlow··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
100% agree, and no OS should be forced to implement this "child-locked" signal. the existence of OSs that do implement it should be enough (if you want to lock your child's device, use a lockable OS).
woodrowbarlow··on GPS glitched across the US by as much as 33 feet
fun fact: the first mass-produced consumer in-car live navigation (1981) was all dead reckoning and gyroscopes. at this point, the GPS network was operational but not available for consumer use until 1988.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_Gyrocator

woodrowbarlow··on We are rebuilding Monica
what? my impression is that it's truer than ever and this is why so many open-source projects are limiting ai contributions. and the reason GitHub can't seem to stay online for more than a day.
woodrowbarlow··on Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS
so, skeuomorphic
woodrowbarlow··on Run Minecraft in a Windows sandbox for computer use agents
for minecraft in particular, there is: https://github.com/mindcraft-bots/mindcraft
woodrowbarlow··on MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID
do you believe this should be mandated by regulation, or voluntarily offered by manufacturers as a value-add feature? ("all" implies the former.)
woodrowbarlow··on Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
"become accessible to anyone that has permission to access it" is a nothing-burger sentence.
woodrowbarlow··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
gitea/forgejo both do an 80% job of covering these needs, ime. they have mostly-GH-compatible APIs.
woodrowbarlow··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
oh hello, thank you for your work on an excellent product! one small difference i ran into last weekend is that foregjo forwards the FORGEJO_TOKEN in the environment to composite actions so that they don't need to have a required "token" input.
woodrowbarlow··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
no; gitea and foregjo both support actions-style CI/CD and both serve mostly GH-compatible APIs and have GH-style apps. it's not 100% compatible (forgejo is a little more compatible than gitea [^1]), but many of your workflows might "just work" without even renaming the .github folder.

^1: in my recent experience, for my particular use cases

woodrowbarlow··on uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
my least favorite part of flying is the part where i'm strapped to a chair during taxi with a screen and speaker inches from my face and they use that moment to force a few ads into my eye socket. it feels very Citizen Kane.

pumping gas is another one that takes advantage of captivity to force ads. i hate it.

woodrowbarlow··on License plate reader searches should require a warrant
the argument is that they should be called traffic surveillance cameras.

for the record: whatever they're called, and in fact even if they just POSTed txt license plate numbers, i'd still be opposed because they're collecting info about people who've done nothing wrong (unlike red light cameras).

woodrowbarlow··on License plate reader searches should require a warrant
i see it more like an argument against increasingly networked solutions. red-light cameras used to just upload when an incident occurred (or maybe required routine physical downloading?). the object itself did one thing. now it's cheap to feed continuous live feeds to a centralized processor... and once it's there, it's cheap to do a lot more.
woodrowbarlow··on A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
letting companies train on books for only the price of a paperback and then forcing them to destroy their scans would truly be the worst of all worlds. (ps: the scanning process typically destroys the book too; they chop off the spines.)
woodrowbarlow··on AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon
also, as this scales, what would this mean for closed-weight hosted models? i imagine it's possible (but difficult) to re-derive model weights by de-lidding and inspecting the die... so will this only ever be used for open-weights models?
woodrowbarlow··on How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026
not OP but yes, i consider the tech sphere's dive into mass surveillance to be war profiteering and have eliminated or minimized several in my life including amazon and spotify.
woodrowbarlow··on Mario Meets Pareto
is this also true when the irrelevant details are (by coincidence) interesting (to you)? it sounds to me like GP is interested in mario kart and you simply aren't, so this is a perfectly natural result.
woodrowbarlow··on Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery
for real. if you want to make the web safer for children, start by holding ad networks to a higher accountability. it's painfully obvious "protect the children" is not the real goal.
woodrowbarlow··on We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars
wrapping text at 55-75 characters per line is often recommended in digital typography by UX. research implies that an optimum length exists to maximize reading speed, and although it depends on many factors 55-75 is often parroted as a universal rule.
woodrowbarlow··on New Framework Desktop Option with AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 and 192GB Memory
as i understand it: that's in-band ECC and if you CPU/mobo support it, you can enable IBECC even on non-ECC RAM. IBECC has overhead, though. ECC RAM has on-die error correction, with corrections taking place before the motherboard ever sees it (and without the performance overhead of IBECC).
woodrowbarlow··on New Framework Desktop Option with AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 and 192GB Memory
the thing about ECC memory is that it doesn't support reporting of ECC errors, so it ends up just hiding the fact that your RAM has started to go bad. this is good if you replace RAM every n years, but not if you intend to use the RAM until it starts degrading.
woodrowbarlow··on Alternative(s) to run CUDA on non-Nvidia hardware
you're right, i misspoke by saying it's a GPU since it doesn't have video output. the just-in-time data pipelining wouldn't work for graphics workloads anyway.
woodrowbarlow··on Alternative(s) to run CUDA on non-Nvidia hardware
i'm also interested in tenstorrent. they're building GPUs with cheap GDDR6 using a fast SRAM cache, and writing their own compiler stack (used instead of CUDA) that pipelines data to the SRAM ahead-of-time so you (in theory) never need to suffer the slow speed of GDDR6 for AI workloads. also they've got built-in SFP cages where the video ports would normally be.
woodrowbarlow··on Show HN: Analog Watch
yeah, i've been using cheap mechanical analog watches and wouldn't trust it to be accurate to-the-minute by the end of the day anyway. i kind of enjoy knowing only the approximate time.
woodrowbarlow··on OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
another happy user here too. having openwrt with all features working and no tinkering out of the box (since it's their reference target) is a dream. this, plus the warm fuzzies of buying open-source, makes it worth it to me even with the 1GBps limitation and outdated WiFi (i use a separate AP anyway, like you). i swapped my ports in software to have 1GB WAN and 2.5GB LAN (which also lets me power the router with PoE, which i have coming in on the LAN port).
woodrowbarlow··on AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
i wish there was a system like strix halo, but with enough lanes for a dedicated PCIe 5.0 x16 slot so you can have the best of both worlds: large sparse models on CPU with unified memory, dense models on GPU with real tensors and higher bandwidth memory.
woodrowbarlow··on Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb
i agree, with a bit more nuance. it's one thing for a government agency staffed by educational professionals (like a public school district) to issue guidance (or even rules) on how libraries should be stocked -- but what's become widespread is legislative bodies bypassing those existing structures and issuing laws without input from educational professionals.
woodrowbarlow··on Adaptive PDFs
why do most of the paragraphs in this post stop mid-sentence? why are there 3 dozen comments and nobody has mentioned this? any humans still here?
woodrowbarlow··on If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know
> it saved and helped countless lives

it has also done the opposite, including affirming a mentally ill person's suicidal ideations.

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