Hacker News: trailbits

New comment by trailbits in "Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM"

trailbits — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:03:13 +0000

Only if you live near a store with it in stock. They aren't shipping that item.

New comment by trailbits in "We've made the world too complicated"

trailbits — Sun, 17 May 2026 00:16:28 +0000

Physicists are Atoms way of understanding themselves

New comment by trailbits in "S-100 Virtual Workbench"

trailbits — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:58:47 +0000

Fantastic! Load the Altair Z80. At the CP/M prompt type: 'DIR' to see your files. Try out: 'MBASIC STARTREK' - be patient while it loads and then go save the galaxy! Just like old times :)

New comment by trailbits in "PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon"

trailbits — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:52:29 +0000

Hey, moving from cassette tape to floppy was also pretty awesome - random access speed demon!

New comment by trailbits in "The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal"

trailbits — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 05:38:03 +0000

WA state it is an extra $56 every time you renew for Real ID

New comment by trailbits in "Dell UltraSharp 52 Thunderbolt Hub Monitor"

trailbits — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 08:57:21 +0000

The LG only has 60Hz refresh - this Dell has 120Hz and so seems to actually take advantage of the extra thunderbolt bandwidth.

New comment by trailbits in "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"

trailbits — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 22:47:48 +0000

The default context window using ollama or lmstudio is small, but you can easily quadruple the default size while running gpt-oss-20b on a 24GB Mac.

New comment by trailbits in "Boring is what we wanted"

trailbits — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 02:34:28 +0000

As someone who purchased their first M-series Mac this year (M4 pro), I've been thrilled to discover how well it does with local genAI tasks to produce text, code and images. For example openai/gpt-oss-20b runs locally quite well with 24GB memory. If I knew beforehand how performant the Mac would be for these kinds of tasks, I probably would have purchased more RAM in order to load larger models. Performance for genAI is a function of GPU, # of GPU cores, and memory bandwidth. I think your biggest gains are going from a base chip to a pro/max/ultra version with the greater gpu cores and greater bandwidth.

New comment by trailbits in "Forgejo v13.0 Is Available"

trailbits — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 21:47:33 +0000

I just create new orgs to group related repositories together. Works well for a small team.

New comment by trailbits in "Smallest particulate matter air quality sensor for ultra-compact IoT devices"

trailbits — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 08:11:51 +0000

That's pretty much how all laser particle counters work... except the good ones use a fan and a chamber. Guess we'll have to wait and see how this compares to the reference sensors.

New comment by trailbits in "Smallest particulate matter air quality sensor for ultra-compact IoT devices"

trailbits — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 07:21:13 +0000

Also wonder how the sensor can stay clean without a fan. I suppose mounting upside down would help. Other fanless designs require periodic cleaning.

New comment by trailbits in "The UK’s new age-gating rules are easy to bypass"

trailbits — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 02:26:40 +0000

A website in the US doesn't deliver anything to the UK, it hands off some packets to a router in the US. Why is the website responsible for what all the interconnecting routers do? If a person from the UK were to visit an adult bookstore in the US, the bookstore owner isn't at fault if the customer decides to move certain material across national boundaries.

New comment by trailbits in "The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State"

trailbits — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 22:52:52 +0000

It does remove any incentive for a thief to steal a Macbook. They can't strip it for parts and sell those parts if they won't work.

New comment by trailbits in "The Many Lives of Null Island"

trailbits — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 01:33:57 +0000

Even non-physical numbers are problematic to signal 'invalid'. I had a customer use -999 as a placeholder for 'invalid' data. Years later somebody made a higher level data product that averaged and combined that data with other products, without knowing to first remove those 'invalid' values. The resulting values were all now within physical limits, but very very wrong. The best solution is to use IEEE NaN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaN so that your code blows up if you don't explicitly check for it.

New comment by trailbits in "Mouth-based touchpad enables people living with paralysis to use computers"

trailbits — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 02:01:47 +0000

Yes, push to toggle microphone is another great use for these! I was using the Kinesis Programmable Foot Switch 26 years ago with ps/2 connectors (later they switched to USB). You would get 3 foot switches in each unit and chain them together along with your keyboard so they only used one host port. The most similar thing I see now would be https://www.amazon.com/X-keys-Foot-Pedal-Playback-Control/dp... It's frustrating that I can't reprogram my old foot switches since the manufacturer stopped supporting them. If buying today, I'd look for something based on open source QMK firmware like my keyboard uses. This project looks cool: https://github.com/christrotter/qmk_firmware/tree/arcboard-s...

New comment by trailbits in "Mouth-based touchpad enables people living with paralysis to use computers"

trailbits — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 23:02:43 +0000

I did experiment with using a trackball taped to the floor. It's hard to get precise positioning moving your foot. I think using the tongue along the roof of your mouth would be more precise and less fatiguing. What was more useful was a set of 9 foot switches that could be programmed to send arbitrary keystrokes. I could off load from my hands the most common keypresses I do all day, for example: pageup, pagedown, tab, enter, backspace, mouse click, passwords... along with speech recognition software you can get at least non-coding tasks done without using your hands too much.

New comment by trailbits in "Mouth-based touchpad enables people living with paralysis to use computers"

trailbits — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 21:39:14 +0000

I can imagine this helping anyone that has struggled with computer-related overuse injuries. I had a bad case of tendinitis that made using a mouse or trackpad very painful. I would have loved to have this kind of device as another option.

New comment by trailbits in "USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update"

trailbits — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 22:02:48 +0000

It was magical when apple released the LaserWriter printer in 1985 that took postscript files. No need for custom drivers. You would think these days all printers would be driverless.

New comment by trailbits in "M3 CPU cores have become more versatile"

trailbits — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:14:09 +0000

Apple M1 does not support hardware assisted nested virtualization. If someone was trying to run WSL from Windows, that would be horribly inefficient on M1 vs M3.

New comment by trailbits in "Can a pill prevent deaths from venomous snakebites?"

trailbits — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 06:41:55 +0000

If this pill can stop or slow the damage from the highly toxic protein that is present in snake venoms, then I can see it being useful everywhere, including the US. You are only considering fatalities, but approximately 400,000 snakebites each year cause permanent deformities or amputation. Even more people are out of commission for months while healing. Having your tissue chemically digested by snake venom is no fun.