Hacker News: jclulow

New comment by jclulow in "I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job"

jclulow — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:57:22 +0000

I had some serious struggles with the delinquent landlord and property owners, and the dangerously incompetent builders that plagued our building in Alameda for years. While they were not always legally empowered to come and stop the skulduggery, the Alameda city council offices of planning and compliance were the only people who consistently and professionally responded to phone calls and emails and were available if you went to their offices. People complain about public servants, but at least in Alameda they were really good people doing their best.

New comment by jclulow in "Nearby Glasses"

jclulow — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:39:48 +0000

You can absolutely start regulating behaviour after the fact. Australia famously bought a bunch of guns back from people who had previously legally bought and owned them, and melted them down. There's no reason you couldn't offer people money in exchange for the surrender of their previously legally purchased surveillance racket goods. You can also frankly just regulate the central service/company out of existence in the case of, say, Ring.

New comment by jclulow in "I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard"

jclulow — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 02:36:31 +0000

Yeah, it really sucks when people have hobbies!

New comment by jclulow in "Gamedate – A site to revive dead multiplayer games"

jclulow — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:36:47 +0000

This is not an accurate assessment in the StarCraft II case. It was released in 2010, and LAN play was definitely still popular. I remember because I was part of a University club/society that was running ~200 person ~3 day LAN parties at the time, and I recall the intense loathing we had for how incredibly difficult Blizzard had decided to make it to actually play the game you had paid for, on your own network.

If anything, LAN play became less popular because it was intentionally hampered by Blizzard and other companies.

New comment by jclulow in "A beginner's guide to split keyboards"

jclulow — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 22:34:39 +0000

One thing I internalised when speaking with a physiotherapist is that part of avoiding serious issues is making sure you don't stay in the _same_ position for too long. One good ergonomic position is an excellent start, but changing your position several times throughout the work day is even better. This apparently helps avoid building up strain and inflammation in pinch points, balancing out the fatiguing action more.

I have found that my Ergodox allows me to juggle my keyboard halves around the desk at different angles and spaced apart at different widths, and I can put my trackball either to the right of everything or between the halves. It's a single anecdote, obviously, but I have been able to make my ulnar and carpal entrapment issues mostly go away by finding better positions while working and by not staying stuck in one posture or position for too long at a time.

New comment by jclulow in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

jclulow — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:38:46 +0000

It does actually wrap up well enough I reckon. It's not really a cliffhanger or whatever.

New comment by jclulow in "Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney"

jclulow — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 06:05:48 +0000

> I don't want to have to ask AI to rewrite my train handling config files just to get some little motor to spin.

I reckon you could probably still figure out how to just edit the text file. And if it's not fun to do that, then, surely it's just not the right hobby?

New comment by jclulow in "High-Performance DBMSs with io_uring: When and How to use it"

jclulow — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 04:55:56 +0000

Yeah that's just flat out not correct. If you're writing through a file system or the buffer cache and you don't fsync, there is no guarantee your data will still be there after, say, a power loss or a system panic. There's no guarantee it's even been passed to the device at all when an asynchronous write returns.

New comment by jclulow in "Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts"

jclulow — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 08:15:23 +0000

This is what I do! The API itself is not particularly amazing (the way it handles batch requests as a MIME multipart formatted POST body where each part is itself a HTTP request is particularly obscene).

The underlying data model is kind of OK though: messages are immutable, they get a long lived unique ID that survives changes to labels, etc. There is a history of changes you can grab incrementally. You can download the full message body that you can then parse as mail, and I save each one into a separate file and then index them in SQLite.

New comment by jclulow in "The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago"

jclulow — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 02:15:25 +0000

> Car usage is going to 2-10x.

What a bleak vision of the future.

New comment by jclulow in "Claude in Chrome"

jclulow — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:12:51 +0000

Actually, you don't need to do anything of the sort! Nobody is owed an easy ride to other people's stuff.

Plus, if the magic technology is indeed so incredible, why would we need to do anything differently? Surely it will just be able to consume whatever a human could use themselves without issues.

New comment by jclulow in "Vm.overcommit_memory=2 is the right setting for servers"

jclulow — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 05:45:21 +0000

> No non-embedded libc will actually return NULL

This is just a Linux ecosystem thing. Other full size operating systems do memory accounting differently, and are able to correctly communicate when more memory is not available.

New comment by jclulow in "Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop"

jclulow — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 07:14:48 +0000

I recently replaced my aging X1C7 with a T14s AMD and it has been quite nice!

New comment by jclulow in "The Fatal Trap UBI Boosters Keep Falling Into"

jclulow — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 01:09:33 +0000

As opposed to all the regular kinds of shitty behaviour landlords inflict on their tenants already? I feel like "because the money people will continue to misbehave" is absolutely not a reason to avoid doing something.

New comment by jclulow in "A Commentary on the Sixth Edition Unix Operating System (1977)"

jclulow — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 10:16:54 +0000

FWIW, some of us still do this in C programs today. Having a relatively unique prefix for struct members makes it extremely easy to find uses of those members with relatively simple tools like cscope.

New comment by jclulow in "How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters"

jclulow — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 05:01:27 +0000

If we assume this model is accurate, I sound to Americans like I'm South African!

New comment by jclulow in "Structured Procrastination (1995)"

jclulow — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 06:55:10 +0000

I think basically everyone with ADHD discovers this eventually; e.g.,

> Sympathetic Procrastination Rotor: a technique for Time and Task Management.

> To aid in the fight against procrastination, arrange all of your tasks in a cycle, such that the natural opportunity for procrastination is always another task on the roadmap. In this essay I will

https://x.com/jmclulow/status/1390544792946237442

New comment by jclulow in "My Own DNS Server at Home – Part 1: IPv4"

jclulow — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 04:09:47 +0000

DNS & DHCP are generally short lived transactions that are very easy to restart and retry, so as long as it restarts very quickly that seems like a reasonable trade off in implementation complexity to be honest.

New comment by jclulow in "AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study"

jclulow — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:25:30 +0000

How is firing a bunch of people because you made a machine that you believe can do their jobs not textbook corporate greed? It seems like the worst impulses of Taylorism made manifest?

New comment by jclulow in "I Am An AI Hater"

jclulow — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 20:38:53 +0000

Where can I sign up for the post scarcity society? Asking for my artist friends.