Hacker News: infofarmer

New comment by infofarmer in "ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine"

infofarmer — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:30:33 +0000

Incidentally, just replaced batteries in my Apple Watch S6, MBP M1 2020, and iPhone 12 Pro Max during a one-day visit to Shenzhen. A dude in Huaqiangbei did everything in two hours for a small fraction of what Apple would charge.

ECG stopped working reliably after the battery replacement, but otherwise the watch should be good for another few years (stuck on watchOS 26.x)

New comment by infofarmer in "Predictable RNG Fallback and 32-Bit Reseed in Coldcard Firmware"

infofarmer — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:41:53 +0000

They don't need to know that. Your low-entropy seed / private key will be compromised in the brute force enumeration.

New comment by infofarmer in "Xiaomi-Robotics-1"

infofarmer — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 07:36:44 +0000

A lot of smaller chores look trivial when considered in isolation, but have disproportionate time and mental cost because of how they fit in the flow of life. Sometimes the effect is similar to interrupting an engineer for a couple of minutes.

New comment by infofarmer in "The bottleneck might be the air in the room"

infofarmer — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 07:55:21 +0000

Yeah, I measured over 5000ppm in a taxi with two passengers. Showed the driver how to enable air intake (he didn’t know about the feature) and tried to explain this is deadly. Pretty sure this is commonplace globally.

Generally it’s a miracle to me so many people survive traffic on public roads, statistically.

New comment by infofarmer in "Ice water drowning survival of young patient (2025)"

infofarmer — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 06:06:35 +0000

Exacerbated by astonishing overuse for anything from a 2-minute endoscopy to a 15-minute hand surgery. The pursuit of “comfort” at the cost of fractional lobotomy.

New comment by infofarmer in "I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer"

infofarmer — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 07:30:35 +0000

Obviously an LLM and sad Carmack engages with slop to normalize it.

New comment by infofarmer in "My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4"

infofarmer — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 10:12:43 +0000

to be pedantic, a maxed out MBP is 90200 BRL in Brazil now before AC+ and software, around 16777 USD

New comment by infofarmer in "Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version"

infofarmer — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 04:54:08 +0000

Holding Fallout 1/2 as the best gaming experiences of my life for a long time, just recently discovered Fallout Nevada and Sonora that some kind talent also ported to WASM/Web — and it finally hit the spot for me after ~25 years.

New comment by infofarmer in "Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player"

infofarmer — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 06:37:23 +0000

decoding state can be bulkier than a key frame and opaque to the CPU if hardware acceleration is used

I wonder if caching semi-compressed frames would be more efficient in either case (CPU or GPU)

New comment by infofarmer in "Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player"

infofarmer — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 03:09:49 +0000

you'd have to "rebase" all the other frames to be derived from those

New comment by infofarmer in "Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player"

infofarmer — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 03:06:26 +0000

search engines and wikipedia point to actively maintained versions

New comment by infofarmer in "Linux Crisis Tools"

infofarmer — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 09:09:45 +0000

somewhat related: /rescue/* on every FreeBSD system since 5.2 (2004) — a single statically linked ~17MB binary combining ~150 critical tools, hardlinked under their usual names

https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?rescue https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/rescue/resc...

New comment by infofarmer in "Freenginx: Core Nginx Developer Announces Fork of Popular Web Server"

infofarmer — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 09:20:21 +0000

once you actually need to configure Caddy, it is an abomination beyond imagination — the docs, Caddyfile, JSON config — all of them lack coherence or sensible design

never touching it again

good defaults matter; nginx configs were very concise and readable in 2005-2015 when I was using it heavily; http/3, ws, acme — perhaps new tech is yet to be incorporated properly (and maybe it never will)

New comment by infofarmer in "Lithium “shortage” bubble implodes again"

infofarmer — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 14:53:21 +0000

Lithium is <10% cost of a battery. Presumably much less now. Doesn't affect the price of EVs that much yet.

New comment by infofarmer in "IBM Launches Quantum System Two and a Roadmap to Quantum Advantage"

infofarmer — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 03:59:20 +0000

discussed here a year ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34424150

New comment by infofarmer in "OpenBSD PF versus FreeBSD PF"

infofarmer — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 12:34:11 +0000

oh, interesting; it was ipfilter for ages, and suddenly pf-only now

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37838_01/html/E60993/pfovw-compa...

New comment by infofarmer in "OpenBSD/ARM64 on Hetzner Cloud"

infofarmer — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 08:39:37 +0000

Happily running FreeBSD 13 on Hetzner CAX11 since April [1] [2]

Great to see OpenBSD is now available as well!

[1] https://twitter.com/pandrewhk/status/1649020655558336514

[2] https://gist.github.com/pandrewhk/2d62664bfb74a504b7f4a894fc...

New comment by infofarmer in "We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure"

infofarmer — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 08:35:52 +0000

Any of the three major branches are the first choice for lean, bespoke network appliances. For Mullvad in particular OpenBSD or FreeBSD would be the obvious choice.

New comment by infofarmer in "We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure"

infofarmer — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 08:33:38 +0000

Not sure the actual authors of the various overlapping Linux network subsystems even know the comprehensive picture "inside and out" for chronic lack of consistent documentation.

Last time I managed a small «supercomputer», 50x IBM blades running Suse, it wouldn't support PXE/NFS without kernel customization, but that would void support contracts and finicky third-party software. Made a switch to FreeBSD, where everything worked out of the box one hour later. That was over 15 years ago, I have no idea how much the situation changed.

New comment by infofarmer in "We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure"

infofarmer — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 16:34:38 +0000

Not to provoke predictable responses, but I find it interesting that the tech-talented VPN providers are not using BSD in favor of Linux, especially with requirements like diskless operation, kernel customization, and tighter security.