Hacker News: wlesieutre

New comment by wlesieutre in "OpenLogi"

wlesieutre — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 03:12:33 +0000

It's not open source but I have to shout out Steermouse which has been replacing Logitech's awful Mac software for ~25 years

https://www.plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/download.php

New comment by wlesieutre in "The Amazon tax"

wlesieutre — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:33:24 +0000

Just going off the "TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION" license plates, I'd guess not. Federal tax dollars are spent according to the whims of literally everyone else in the country except them.

New comment by wlesieutre in "Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months"

wlesieutre — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:27:36 +0000

> To take advantage they'd have to do some form of price fixing which in most places is a very big footgun.

When parent commenter says "They have done this in the past after all" that's exactly what they're talking about. Micron, Samsung, Hyinx (prior to SK Group acquisition), and others all participated in RAM price fixing in the early 2000's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

New comment by wlesieutre in "The Color of White Light"

wlesieutre — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:34:10 +0000

Goodhart's law in action

New comment by wlesieutre in "The Color of White Light"

wlesieutre — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:58:58 +0000

Yes, ultimately a limitation of trying to boil a huge space down to a single value, it can’t represent everything. But I think they had to do Rf anyway, it’s not perfect but it’s better than CRI by miles.

The color vector graphics are a great feature for understanding the details better, but it would be hard to write one of those into a specification.

New comment by wlesieutre in "The Color of White Light"

wlesieutre — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 15:56:01 +0000

Continuing on CRI’s limitations, since 2015 the new and improved metric is TM-30’s “fidelity index” (Rf) which is calculated based on 99 samples, among many other improvements.

The larger number of samples makes it harder for an LED manufacturer to “cheat” by optimizing for the specific reflectance spectrums used to score CRI, getting a higher score while not actually rendering colors of most real world materials that well.

https://www.energystar.gov/sites/default/files/asset/documen...

Unfortnately it’s still much less popular than CRI.

New comment by wlesieutre in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"

wlesieutre — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:37:08 +0000

"We value your privacy! We and our 892 legitimate business partners use cookies to improve your experience."

New comment by wlesieutre in "Dear people who work at the airport"

wlesieutre — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:04:52 +0000

I had a small local airport act like I was an idiot for not knowing they wanted all food items removed from carryon for scanning.

Literally never heard of that.

New comment by wlesieutre in "Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data"

wlesieutre — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 23:00:57 +0000

The rule I always remember hearing is “however many backups you think you have, you have one less”

Which is not as thorough, but still makes the point that you should do more than one backup

New comment by wlesieutre in "Pixel Watch 5"

wlesieutre — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:06:50 +0000

Messages and weather are basically the only things I allow to ping/vibrate, anything else only appears on the phone and I get it when I look at notifications. Email is pull only, have to open the Mail app to get messages.

The annoying apps are the ones I have to toggle permissions on and off for like eBay and Uber because occasionally they have time sensitive important info, but 99% of the time are bombarding me with useless spam.

New comment by wlesieutre in "Pixel Watch 5"

wlesieutre — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:46:46 +0000

I found it was even better to turn off all the notifications entirely, then you don’t get distracted by the watch interrupting you either. There are very few things I actually need to know about right now.

New comment by wlesieutre in "I made tinnitus my friend, then it disappeared [video]"

wlesieutre — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:14:37 +0000

Apparently the subject of some small studies, could do with some replication

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-and-nutrition/pinea...

New comment by wlesieutre in "Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country"

wlesieutre — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 22:07:34 +0000

Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for sharebolders

New comment by wlesieutre in "Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo"

wlesieutre — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 03:22:39 +0000

Having a closed coolant loop and using evaporative cooling which expends water aren't mutually exclusive. It's possible for a datacenter to manage heat rejection by blowing air over a radiator like a car does, but it's much easier and cheaper to cool by evaporating water.

This can be set up using a closed coolant loop that takes heat out of the servers, then cools back down the coolant by exchanging that heat into a second separate coolant stream. That way you don't need to care as much about the purity of the water you're drawing and evaporating for evaporative cooling, only the first sealed loop gets pumped though your server racks.

This is the type of setup they're talking about with the much discussed xAI datacenter in Memphis, where xAI pinky swears they are definitely going to resume construction on their wastewater treatment plant [1] and use that for cooling instead. It definitely is designed to consume water and evaporate it, not a closed system like a car radiator that puts its waste heat into ≠the air with no evaporation.

[1] https://wreg.com/news/local/xai-to-resume-construction-on-wa...

New comment by wlesieutre in "Why some people mow a lawn better than others"

wlesieutre — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:49:36 +0000

Niceness of lawn mowing is very climate dependent. Around 70 degrees I don’t mind it. Different story when it’s 98.

Unenjoyable, and my electric motor’s batteries die twice as fast in the heat, so I have to do it two days in a row instead of being able to get it over with. But I don’t hate it quite enough to blow hundreds of dollars on extra batteries or to pay someone else to do it.

New comment by wlesieutre in "Elevators"

wlesieutre — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:47:24 +0000

A fun tidbit about Sim Tower:

> After my lecture, a Maxis employee who shall remain nameless buttonholed me. "You guessed right," she said. "Sim Tower was built around a real elevator simulation program we bought from a Japanese guy."

https://web.archive.org/web/20090916193335/http://www.gamasu...

New comment by wlesieutre in "'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling"

wlesieutre — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:05:23 +0000

Is this StackOverflow now, where it's forbidden to discuss something if someone else had a similar discussion before?

New comment by wlesieutre in "The coolest use for the Vision Pro"

wlesieutre — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 03:36:59 +0000

Revit is parametric, but something like Rhino (going off reputation, never used it myself) gives you more free-form modeling control.

It’s like starting with a pencil sketch instead of going straight to SolidWorks, once you start building that more nailed down drawing with its explicit flow of sketches and operations in relationship to each other, it becomes much harder to make large structural changes.

https://help.autodesk.com/view/RVT/2023/ENU/?guid=GUID-71F2C...

New comment by wlesieutre in "Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice"

wlesieutre — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:46:38 +0000

If you're not aware, you can remap modifier keys in System Settings on macOS. It doesn't have individual settings for left/right versions of a modifier key, so keep it in whichever mode has the modifiers on left/right paired with each other correctly, and then swap their functions to the right ones.

https://i.imgur.com/FXkmZRV.png

Settings are per keyboard so fixing your external keyboard won't mix up any other keyboards you use (particularly for laptops).

New comment by wlesieutre in "GM Backs Sodium Ion Batteries for U.S. Grid Storage"

wlesieutre — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 22:50:43 +0000

Not an expert, but from what I read the expectation is for sodium ion batteries to get substantially cheaper than lithium, mainly due to material cost.

Lithium makes up 0.002% of the Earth's crust, meanwhile sodium is 2.36%, and there's quite a lot of it in the ocean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

The main downside is power density, which for grid storage is not as big a deal as it is for vehicles. But it will still be some years of research on sodium batteries for the cost advantage and manufacturing scale to materialize.