Hacker News: tom_alexander

New comment by tom_alexander in "The AV2 Video Standard Has Released (Final v1.0 Specification)"

tom_alexander — Sun, 31 May 2026 04:02:56 +0000

It's at the end on the conclusion slide @24:40:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se8E_SUlU3w&t=1480

New comment by tom_alexander in "Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs"

tom_alexander — Mon, 25 May 2026 13:17:48 +0000

My area has a net-metering plan available, so you can send any surplus out to the grid to offset energy pulled from the grid, essentially treating the grid like a large battery. That can extend the 8 hours into full 24-hour coverage with enough panels.

New comment by tom_alexander in "Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs"

tom_alexander — Mon, 25 May 2026 01:19:21 +0000

With enough solar panels it is!

New comment by tom_alexander in "Was my $48K GPU server worth it?"

tom_alexander — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:18:44 +0000

Not necessarily. I was spending ~$150/month on vultr's kubernetes hosting. I spent $5k building out a pretty awesome 1U server and I put it in a colo that costs me $50/month. Next year I will break even financially and everything after that is saving money. I also am getting so much more out of this server than I was getting on vultr because I over-spec'd the machine. In addition to running more on my cluster, I spin up large virtual machines for development, experiments, and for offloading distributed builds. No shade to vultr, but owning my hardware instead of renting was absolutely the way to go. Unfortunately today the ram alone would cost over $5k, so the math has changed.

New comment by tom_alexander in "Valve removes free game from Steam after players discover it contains malware"

tom_alexander — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:32:33 +0000

It has. For example, PirateFi back in 2025: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/pirate...

The FBI were seeking victims for ~8 "games" earlier this year: https://forms.fbi.gov/victims/Steam_Malware/view

New comment by tom_alexander in "Googlebook"

tom_alexander — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:37:06 +0000

FWIW I'm one of those people. I have an old rotting pixelbook that I installed Linux on back-in-the-day thanks to Mr. Chromebox. It was a huge improvement over chromeos but I'd never buy a chromebook to install Linux on it again because there was too many small annoyances like needing to fix the keymap every time I did a clean install (the caps lock key was bound to super and I vaguely recall some craziness around the higher function keys), and sound didn't work.

New comment by tom_alexander in "A Caddy Cert Expired Because Systemd-Resolved Was Selectively Broken"

tom_alexander — Tue, 12 May 2026 11:50:25 +0000

Was there? I see 14 comments, of which only 3 have any value at all which are: fanf finding an irrelevant bug, oliverpool explaining the use of LetsEncrypt staging, and hexadecimal suggesting setting up expiration alerts.

The rest is:

  - People bitching about systemd and replies to their bitching totaling 7 posts (literally half the comments) 
  - conversational detritus like "well written blog post" and the whiteboard comment

New comment by tom_alexander in "Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit"

tom_alexander — Sun, 10 May 2026 07:22:38 +0000

Do you honestly think stackghost doesn't know what the "D" stood for? They were making a point, not seeking information. My answer directly responded to the point they were making.

New comment by tom_alexander in "Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit"

tom_alexander — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:48:34 +0000

That's more of a historical artifact. The BSDs started as just "BSD": a set of patches for AT&T Unix that were _distributed_ by Berkeley. Eventually the patches became complete enough to be an entire operating system. _Then_ the various BSDs that we know today (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD) all forked and became completely independent operating systems. For decades, FreeBSD's kernel and userland has been developed independently from the OpenBSD kernel and userland which is developed independently from NetBSD's kernel and userland, etc. You could not take an OpenBSD program and run it on FreeBSD. Even recompilation from source isn't necessarily enough since the BSDs support different syscalls.

They are completely independent operating systems with a distant shared history.

Whereas on Linux, the distros are taking a common Linux kernel source, and combining it with their choice of common userlands like GNU. Debian has the same kernel and GNU userland that Arch and Fedora use. You could take a program compiled for Debian and run it on Arch, which is common these days due to Docker where you're pulling another distro's userland and running it on your distro's kernel. That is how Linux distros are "distros" whereas the BSDs are independent operating systems.

New comment by tom_alexander in "Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit"

tom_alexander — Fri, 08 May 2026 01:37:02 +0000

I think the author was suggesting "wait a week" as a one-time wait for fixes to be written and patches distributed for these specific prematurely-disclosed vulnerabilities, not an on-going suggestion for delaying all updates. But otherwise I agree with you.

New comment by tom_alexander in "SFO Gate Explorer"

tom_alexander — Sat, 02 May 2026 15:29:57 +0000

"I really wish I was eating in an airport" - literally no one ever.

Airports are expensive, loud, and uncomfortable.

New comment by tom_alexander in "Your Terminal Is Burning Battery Like It's Mining Bitcoin"

tom_alexander — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:04 +0000

In that situation, the multiplexing wouldn't be handled in the terminal. You'd use something like tmux or screen. Seems irrelevant to the discussion about terminals.

New comment by tom_alexander in "Your Terminal Is Burning Battery Like It's Mining Bitcoin"

tom_alexander — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:48:39 +0000

> tab-complete, history

Those would be handled by your shell, not your terminal, right?

> multiplexing

If you have a good window manager, then there is no reason to have a bespoke multiplexing implementation in your terminal. I can stack my terminals and _any other window I want_ with tabs and switch between them using the same hotkeys/interface that I use for my whole system, rather than each app implementing their own tabs.

New comment by tom_alexander in "A web-based RDP client built with Go WebAssembly and grdp"

tom_alexander — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 17:01:28 +0000

Perhaps as a web client for the remote desktop on the BMC chips?

New comment by tom_alexander in "jj – the CLI for Jujutsu"

tom_alexander — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:05:45 +0000

I was able to reproduce it using that script in my PS1 when `GIT_PS1_SHOWUNTRACKEDFILES=1` which triggers a call to `git ls-files`. Without that, it seems to be just calling `git rev-parse` which does not execute fsmonitor.

I was also able to reproduce it with `GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE=1` which invokes `git diff`.

As far as I am aware, this has been brought to the attention of the git maintainers years ago: https://github.com/justinsteven/advisories/blob/main/2022_gi...

New comment by tom_alexander in "jj – the CLI for Jujutsu"

tom_alexander — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:22:41 +0000

> any competently set up shell PS1 will tell you that

I certainly hope your shell is not running `git` commands automatically for you. If so, that is a RCE vulnerability since you could extract a tarball/zip that you don't expect to be a git repository but it contains a `.git` folder with a `fsmonitor` configured to execute a malicious script: https://github.com/califio/publications/blob/main/MADBugs/vi...

New comment by tom_alexander in "jj – the CLI for Jujutsu"

tom_alexander — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:06:59 +0000

Oh neat, thanks! I (clearly) did not know that command.

New comment by tom_alexander in "jj – the CLI for Jujutsu"

tom_alexander — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:46:15 +0000

If you don't run checkout on file paths, how do you undo changes to specific files that you haven't committed yet? Like you've edited but not committed , , and . You realize your edits to are a mistake. I'd just run `git checkout ` to revert those changes, what do you do?

It is also really useful when you realize you want to be the version from a commit two weeks ago. I guess you could always switch to the branch 2 weeks ago, copy the file to /tmp/, switch back, and copy the file into place, but `git checkout c23a99b -- ` is so quick and easy. Or does this example not fall under the "dont run checkout on a path" since it is taking a treeish first before the path?

New comment by tom_alexander in "jj – the CLI for Jujutsu"

tom_alexander — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:43:41 +0000

< glances around at all the people telling me to never use `jj edit` >

New comment by tom_alexander in "jj – the CLI for Jujutsu"

tom_alexander — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:16:55 +0000

ooo that will be a nice improvement. So many times I've run `jj status`, then saw a file I wanted gitignored, so I'll edit my gitignore, but the file has already been added to the repo so I have to `mv /tmp/ && jj status && mv /tmp/ .` to get the file out of the repo.