Hacker News: pridkett

New comment by pridkett in "AWS Bedrock to require sharing data with Anthropic for Mythos and future models"

pridkett — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:52:38 +0000

There’s a few things mixed up in this comment. But the 10-20x cheaper, I’m assuming comes from the difference between the number of tokens you can use on a $200 Claude Max subscription and the cost of those via the API. That’s neither here nor there for this topic around data retention as Fable has that on all providers.

And for the cost, if you’re an enterprise with more than 150 people, you’re on the token plan.

New comment by pridkett in "OpenFOV – Webcam head tracking for iRacing"

pridkett — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:12:42 +0000

Just wanted to say thanks! The first time played Flight Simulator 2020 with SmoothTrack I was blown away. I still am blown away each time too. Great experience that’s been nearly flawless for me and really turned up the realism. I can move my head closer to gauges and see what they’re saying, look around stuff, get a better view out the window. Wonderful.

New comment by pridkett in "IrDA"

pridkett — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 23:56:18 +0000

I still use an IrDA device on a regular (3-4x yearly) basis - ScubaPro Galileo Luna dive computers. What’s more - somehow this works on an M-series Mac using no additional paid software. UTM with an older Linux distribution and some tools I hacked together a decade ago to spit out UDDF and it’s just a matter of very precisely aiming the IrDA dongle and hoping I remembered all the other small things.

Part of me is horrified that I need to do this to get my dive profiles. Part of me also says that my dive computer has worked and helped to keep me alive for weeks underwater so far, not much reason to change it.

New comment by pridkett in "Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan"

pridkett — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 02:40:17 +0000

Java is the original version from Mojang/Notch. There’s always been enough of a community that killing it off to move away from Java would break so many extensions and servers would see an active revolt.

There is the non-Java version (Bedrock), but that’s not nearly as extensible.

New comment by pridkett in "I didn't realize my LG TV was spying on me until I turned off Live Plus"

pridkett — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 10:41:37 +0000

Geotargeting. I live in a semi rural area. My town has 1.1% of kids who are classified as ESL. There’s a much larger town near us that has 32% ESL and 70+% of Hispanic descent.

We get podcast and very infrequent YouTube ads in Spanish. So does everyone else we’ve talked to. When you use IP address databases it almost always says our IP addresses are in the other town.

New comment by pridkett in "A collection of links that existed about Anguilla as of 2003"

pridkett — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 12:02:08 +0000

During the old days lots of things were easier to get.

Semi related to this - Ian Goldberg famously had the email address n@ai (Ian backwards if you missed it) - which caused problems for many mail clients and validators. I’d imagine cypherpunks.ca is easier to use. I saw similar things with one of the Balkans in 1998 - I think it was Croatia, where some government officials had name@hr email addresses.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2002-January/...

New comment by pridkett in "Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade"

pridkett — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 21:26:37 +0000

Simple for simple cases - but you update a dependency and that updates a dependency that has a window range of dependencies because one version had a security issue which causes you to downgrade three other packages.

It can get complicated. The resolver in uv is part of its magic.

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/reference/internals/resolver/

New comment by pridkett in "Nine things I learned in ninety years"

pridkett — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 15:55:11 +0000

I was pleased that at my local toy store (yes, we still have one, The Time Machine in Manchester, CT) they carry Choose Your Own Adventure books. What’s more, last week we picked up a copy of “The Cave of Time”. So many memories of that book growing up.

New comment by pridkett in "FidoNet Global HyperText Interface"

pridkett — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 18:30:57 +0000

All the authors up front have fidonet node numbers associated with them.

New comment by pridkett in "AccuWeather to discontinue free access to Core Weather API"

pridkett — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 01:09:07 +0000

You’ve just described Ambient Weather. What I find kinda funny about that is they still try to upsell you to get more than 1 year of data retention.

Luckily, they allow you to configure additional arbitrary locations to pump data to. I wrote a little program to drop that data into an InfluxDB database (along with PurpleAir, AirGradient, AirThings, Solar Data, and Iotawatt). The only practical use I’ve found is to look and see “When was the last time we head three days in a row that were so windy?” I suppose I could do fun stuff with Home Assistant too.

New comment by pridkett in "Walmart plans EV Charging network which will blanket the US within a few years"

pridkett — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:39:38 +0000

The State of Charge YouTube video that covered the announcement and visited a site in McKinney, TX indicated it did need the Walmart app[0].

Sigh. Plug and pay charging is so much better. It’s not like this is a Tesla only feature. Ford has thousands of chargers beyond SuperChargers that just work for plug and pay.

[0]: https://youtu.be/_UIVp8Upvj8?si=eX9EMWKi6sho4DnT

New comment by pridkett in "U.S. autism data project sparks uproar over ethics, privacy and intent"

pridkett — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 11:30:22 +0000

And let’s not forget that until the DSM-V, a child could not be diagnosed with both autism and ADHD (see section E at the bottom of this table [0] showing changes from the DSM-IV to DSM-V):

> The symptoms do not occur exclusively during the course of a pervasive developmental disorder, schizophrenia, or other psychotic disorders and is not better accounted for by another mental disorder (e.g., mood disorder, anxiety disorder, dissociative disorder, or a personality disorder).

The DSM-V states that they can exist together. In fact something like 28-44% of people with Autism exhibit some form of ADHD. [1]

It just goes to show that we’re still evolving in how we understand things. And then we can get into things like twice exceptionality and Asperger’s…and yeah. Lots to learn.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t3/

[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

New comment by pridkett in "Easily setup new MacBooks"

pridkett — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 16:15:13 +0000

I moved all my setup to Ansible about five years ago. It’s been awesome, especially as it makes it trivial to replicate changes to new machines. Installed a new package? Run the playbook again. Changed a script? Run the playbook again.

Sure, there are edge cases I hit because I have some older machines, but for the most part, it’s awesome. I’m up and running on new Macs within a coffee break of getting terminal access.

New comment by pridkett in "USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID Under OS X (2004)"

pridkett — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 01:00:39 +0000

This is, quite possibly, one of the best nerd sniping comments I’ve seen.

Two thoughts come to mind, one not serious, one serious.

1. I can’t imagine having to align the counters on all those tapes.

2. I’m guessing this would really only work for sequential reading and writing. In some ways that makes it more fun as the latency would be that much worse.

New comment by pridkett in "Docker Model Runner"

pridkett — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:36:42 +0000

Because the ones running Docker in production aren’t paying the license fees they make you pay to use Docker Desktop.

New comment by pridkett in "BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of"

pridkett — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:58:59 +0000

I’ve had a couple of the original, the prime, extend, and now the Flex 4K. They’ve all been terrific devices. The extend was a little wonky because transcoding goes wonky on bad signals, but generally great.

They’re all a huge improvement over older cards like the pcHDTV or the really old Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 that I fought with for Freevo and MythTV so long ago. The switch to Channels was a huge quality of life improvement too.

New comment by pridkett in "BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of"

pridkett — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:51:59 +0000

Radio can work, but again, I’m on the edge of reception areas and the hills make picking up FM and AM inconsistent.

In the event of a truly severe weather event (the ones where they hit the alert to make every cell phone go off), the visuals provided by television are hugely helpful.

New comment by pridkett in "I ditched my laptop for a pocketable mini PC and a pair of AR glasses"

pridkett — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:49:34 +0000

Newer iPhones and the XReal One glasses are just fine and in part with the admittedly mediocre experience of Android devices.

Let’s not pretend that Nebula on Android is good. I’ve got a Beam Pro. It also is not great.

SteamDeck is really the best experience I’ve found.

New comment by pridkett in "I ditched my laptop for a pocketable mini PC and a pair of AR glasses"

pridkett — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 12:04:13 +0000

Ditto. I bought them because I travel a lot for work and TVs at hotels are always a mess when it comes to HDMI in. I use them on maybe 1 of 4 flights I’m on (usually on SteamDeck with XR plug-in in Decky), and rarely at the hotels.

The only time they were really helpful for me was one flight when I had to work on some sensitive content and the person next to me was obviously trying to shoulder surf me.

Maybe it would be more productive if I had a newer iPhone with USB -C or the XReal One glasses. But having to use all the dongles to get to go from iPhone to lightning/HDMI adapter to HDMI to USB-C cable to original XReal Beam (which is way underpowered), to USB-C to glasses, that’s a ton of cables. And some forget, you’ve now got to pair your AirPods with the Beam! Ughh. It’s a little better with the Beam Pro. It’s faster and generally a good experience, but it’s still another device and still doesn’t have a good way to stream 3D content from Plex/NAS. Ugh.

That being said, when I put in the effort, the picture is very nice.

New comment by pridkett in "BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of"

pridkett — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 11:54:47 +0000

Or, the manufacturers will lose patience with slow adoption, the mess that is widevine DRM (what? Your TV isn’t based on Android? No, you can’t have DRM!), and customers really not caring because basically none of the broadcasts make the visual picture substantially better right now, so there is no incentive to move.

That’s what happened to LG [0]. They dropped ATSC 3.0 tuners. I’m sure this cost them precisely 0 sales as the industry incompetence destroys the broadcast industry.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/30/23897460/lg-drops-atsc-3-...