Hacker News: jerrysievert

New comment by jerrysievert in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

jerrysievert — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:59:36 +0000

another eurorack rabbit hole is patch.init() - prototyping module. I have 4 and have built:

- an amazing crazy chorus module based on one I built for vcvrack

- a pad synth using the PADSynth algorithm

- a pulsar module

- a fun pitch shifting heavy reverb

endless hours of fun!

New comment by jerrysievert in "No right to relicense this project"

jerrysievert — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:16:45 +0000

actually, the US Copyright Act does in fact allow restrictions on photographs of architectural works that are visible from public spaces:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portlandia_(statue)

the Portlandia statue is one such architectural work - and its creator is fairly litigious.

New comment by jerrysievert in "Mysterious Victorian-era shoes are washing up on a beach in Wales"

jerrysievert — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 17:03:09 +0000

still mad that when discovery took over hbo, they axed that amazing show.

New comment by jerrysievert in "Lego announces Smart Brick, the 'most significant evolution' in 50 years, no AI"

jerrysievert — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 16:58:47 +0000

and all of the motor standards that keep coming and going. I have 4 different power and motor systems from lego, but still wasn't able to power my new lego Christmas train this year because the latest "Powered Up" seem to be discontinued (or at least have been "temporarily out of stock" for a year now.

not to mention that if you visit lego's site in safari desktop, it defaults to the mobile version, and checkouts are broken!

I'm not sure I trust lego with technology.

New comment by jerrysievert in "Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoing hardware shortage"

jerrysievert — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 01:35:54 +0000

I remember being flabbergasted when I worked at the open source development lab and we got our first itanium system in, a multi-core, multi-rack nec system, with its own windows pc to boot up in order to get to linux.

New comment by jerrysievert in "Play Aardwolf MUD"

jerrysievert — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 03:04:00 +0000

if you're into MUD history, I ported the latest source I could find from SillyMUD to work on modern systems: https://github.com/jerrysievert/sillymud

it was quite a bit of fun, and the 3rd or 4th MUD I worked on.

New comment by jerrysievert in "Disney Imagineering Debuts Next-Generation Robotic Character, Olaf"

jerrysievert — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 03:01:39 +0000

while I haven't seen them at parks (I just don't make it to any), I have seen them at Star Wars events at my local MiLB team - BB-8 in the size of your video, somewhat interactive and autonomous, same with R2D2. there's usually a human nearby to monitor it, but they're definitely around.

New comment by jerrysievert in "Tested: 1981 Datsun 280ZX Turbo (1981)"

jerrysievert — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:52:05 +0000

that was one of the unfortunate rebrandings. datsun was an amazing brand, and I understand in hindsight the focus on Nissan, but they had such opportunity!

New comment by jerrysievert in "Tested: 1981 Datsun 280ZX Turbo (1981)"

jerrysievert — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:48:42 +0000

datsun had 5 speed manual transmissions in 70-71.

New comment by jerrysievert in "Tested: 1981 Datsun 280ZX Turbo (1981)"

jerrysievert — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 03:40:36 +0000

heck ya!

I often have electric minivans come up next to me that have the "nod".

I typically snort back and let them take off the line - they're a ton faster than me, but I'm the one enjoying the drive!

New comment by jerrysievert in "Tested: 1981 Datsun 280ZX Turbo (1981)"

jerrysievert — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 02:57:35 +0000

when I became old enough to drive, my parents decided (in the family tradition) to purchase me a car. apparently, the options that my father chose from were a 1982 Honda, or a 1978 datsun f10. he settled on the less reliable f10. it was a wonder-car, it was a 5 speed that started at reverse:

  R 2 4
  1 3 5

its clutch was so loose that when I was driving with my friends, I'd yell "punch it chewy!" to switch from 2nd to 3rd in one swift pull without touching the clutch.

it was a hell car, but I'm still nostalgic for it, likely more than I would have been for the honda that would probably have been much more reliable.

I still have an affinity for Japanese small cars, and am glad it was in my life.

datsun, I miss you.

New comment by jerrysievert in "An MVCC-like columnar table on S3 with constant-time deletes"

jerrysievert — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 01:10:02 +0000

given that it’s parquet, deletes are nice, but what about inserts?

New comment by jerrysievert in "I turned the Lego Game Boy into a working Game Boy"

jerrysievert — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 02:25:22 +0000

beyond the other explanations that some have given, lego direct order releases ship from more than one warehouse, even in the US - my bricklink western train set shipped from Vegas, and others I had chatted with either got them 3-4 days earlier than me or 3-4 days later, depending on how close they were to the warehouse and the order of the orders going out.

just logistics, or luck as some of us call it?

New comment by jerrysievert in "Qwen3 30B A3B Hits 13 token/s on 4xRaspberry Pi 5"

jerrysievert — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 02:24:42 +0000

> a random orange pi board with Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B at Q3_K_XL (~12.9GB)

fantastic! what are you using to run it, llama.cpp? I have a few extra opi5's sitting around that would love some extra usage

New comment by jerrysievert in "How well does the money laundering control system work?"

jerrysievert — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 03:52:08 +0000

I've always wondered if Baskin Robbins is a front, I used to see them everywhere in Oregon, where they were always empty even during the summer made me wonder how they stayed in business. as a kid I always thought it was a mob front.

New comment by jerrysievert in "The End of Handwriting"

jerrysievert — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 05:01:59 +0000

for me, the end of handwriting wasn't where/when I learned it, I learned cursive in kindergarten, and continued it for many years. it wasn't until I ran into teachers who valued time over accuracy that I faulted (it's not defaulted) and started writing scratch (which I can't even read!), and then typing.

now, while I have decent typing skills, I can't write a sentence in cursive, let alone in non-cursive - my goto is "please excuse my handwriting, I can't read it either".

New comment by jerrysievert in "Battery charge limiter for Apple Silicon MacBook devices"

jerrysievert — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 03:42:59 +0000

I have it turned off on my MacBook Pro, but on for my phone and iPad. my 4 year old macbook pro's battery is doing great, my iPad is still holding on (but it spends a lot of time unplugged or powered down), but my poor phone is hurting badly (4-6 hours of charge per day, claiming it's at 80% battery life).

my MacBook Pro still thinks its battery is awesome, even plugged in all the time.

New comment by jerrysievert in "Battery charge limiter for Apple Silicon MacBook devices"

jerrysievert — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 02:38:05 +0000

system settings -> battery -> battery health (i)

choose "Optimized Battery Charging". seems to be exactly what you're looking for

New comment by jerrysievert in "Battery charge limiter for Apple Silicon MacBook devices"

jerrysievert — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 02:35:03 +0000

> iPad OS on recent iPads has a dead simple "limit charge to 80%" option in system settings. MacOS should just have the same feature.

is the optimized battery charging option in settings that tells you that it will charge to 80% and learn when it needs to charge to 100% not that? it seems to be exactly what you're looking for? it's pretty consistent across all 4 platforms: macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS, they all offer the same feature

New comment by jerrysievert in "JOVE – Jonathan’s Own Version of Emacs"

jerrysievert — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:24:01 +0000

most of the 80's and 90's?

around 1998, I was working at a regional ISP, my main workstation was a sparc 5, but I had picked up a conversion box from ps-2 to sparc so I could use a Microsoft natural keyboard. emacs was still considered "eight megs and constantly swapping", but I had 96mb of memory in my sparc, and was able to run it.

Microsoft paid a visit to our isp, trying to make a deal, saw no windows anywhere but were excited to see my Microsoft keyboard. they asked about my computer, I told them I was running solaris on a sparc, and they were excited to ask me if I had run internet explorer, that they had just released for solaris. I looked at them horrified, and said, "I only have 96mb of ram in this, I can't run internet explorer!" - but I was able to run multiple windows of emacs, many terminals, a window manager, and netscape (just not the web server, because we ran apache)