Hacker News: woodrowbarlow

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Okmain: How to pick an OK main colour of an image"

woodrowbarlow — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:09:21 +0000

looks like it's a rust lib with a python wrapper. making a CLI tool should be just a few lines of code.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

woodrowbarlow — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:43:10 +0000

gosh, the scene where he stumbles into the lecture hall, almost late, and then delivers a flawless retro-encapulator-esque pitch... that had me giddy.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system"

woodrowbarlow — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:06:05 +0000

yeah there's some truth here. from what i understand, the radios that give the best "imaging" are also the least resilient for data -- you need basically line-of-sight. and 5G did have some optional ULF "add-ons" that basically never got used because the tradeoffs for speed to signal integrity were poor.

it won't start as a mass deployment -- just focused on stadiums, airports, government buildings, etc.; maybe some authoritarian states will attempt mass deployments, but the cost will be an obstacle. also, my read is that western telcos aren't interested in owning a surveillance tool because they know their governments won't let them keep it.

hopefully 6G won't be the end of physical privacy. but it will prototype the end of physical privacy -- and i think it will end up being just a matter of time from that point on, unfortunately.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system"

woodrowbarlow — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:06:55 +0000

the article is off-base with wifi. the real story is in 6G cellular.

there is a working group at 3gpp, an EU-funded research group (6th sense, Open6GHub), universities (NCSU, Bristol), and many companies working very hard right now on proposals to include "integrated/joint sensing and communication" (ISAC/JCAS) in the 6G spec.

ISAC means adding mmWave to 6G (ostensibly for speed, but also) to build a high-fidelity 3d realtime "digital twin" of the real world that can see through walls, owned and operated by your telecom provider.

> A very exciting innovation that 6G will bring to the table would be its ability to sense the environment. The ubiquitous network becomes a source of situational awareness, collating signals that are bouncing off objects and determining type and shape, relative location, velocity and perhaps even material properties. With adequate 6G solutions for privacy and trust, such a mode of sensing can help create a “mirror” or digital twin of the physical world in combination with other sensing modalities.

https://www.nokia.com/about-us/newsroom/articles/nokias-visi... https://www.bell-labs.com/institute/blog/building-network-si...

there's been a testbed deployment in a German hospital for "non-invasive" monitoring of vitals; which sounds to me like it can literally see a heartbeat.

https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2024/12/17/noki...

truth is, this is the nature of wireless radios. we can't keep improving bandwidth and latency without also turning the radio into a camera. i'm disturbed by the inevitability.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Psychometric Jailbreaks Reveal Internal Conflict in Frontier Models"

woodrowbarlow — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:09:35 +0000

you might appreciate "lena" by qntm: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "IsoCoaster – Theme Park Builder"

woodrowbarlow — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 18:02:12 +0000

well, sure, but RC2 was ten years later.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "IsoCoaster – Theme Park Builder"

woodrowbarlow — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:54:29 +0000

RC2 had "exciting" menus? they looked like Windows 3.1... made me feel like i was using ancient accounting software. which was actually pretty fitting for the genre.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "I made my own Git"

woodrowbarlow — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 17:46:01 +0000

huh, cool. what happens if you use vanilla-git to clone a repo that contains empty folders? and do forges like github display them properly?

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Qwen3-Max-Thinking"

woodrowbarlow — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 17:05:43 +0000

here's an example of how model censorship affects coding tasks: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/72603

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator"

woodrowbarlow — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:57:34 +0000

yikes

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator"

woodrowbarlow — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 16:41:35 +0000

uhhh... you're running generated code on your customers' PCs? what kind of sandboxing do you have?

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "AIsbom – open-source CLI to detect "Pickle Bombs" in PyTorch models"

woodrowbarlow — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:25:55 +0000

> what security researchers call a "Pickle Bomb."

is anyone calling it that? to me, "pickle bomb" would imply abusing compression or serialization for a resource-exhaustion attack, a la zipbombs.

"pickle bomb", the way you're using it, doesn't seem like a useful terminology -- pickles are just (potentially malicious) executables.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Show HN: Local Privacy Firewall-blocks PII and secrets before ChatGPT sees them"

woodrowbarlow — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 14:19:54 +0000

this prevents claude from directly reading certain files, but doesn't prevent claude from running a command that dumps the file on stdout and then reading stdout... claude will just try to "cat" the file if it decides it wants to see it.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Show HN: Local Privacy Firewall-blocks PII and secrets before ChatGPT sees them"

woodrowbarlow — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 20:33:40 +0000

by putting secrets in your environment instead of in your files, and running AI tools in a dedicated environment that has its own set of limited and revocable secrets.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Framework Laptop 13 gets ARM processor with 12 cores via upgrade kit"

woodrowbarlow — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 18:20:48 +0000

the minisforum ms-r1 has the same SoC and supports UEFI

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Framework Laptop 13 gets ARM processor with 12 cores via upgrade kit"

woodrowbarlow — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:26:26 +0000

my impression was the "pro" is the same board but comes with a framework 13 chassis, but yeah the lack of explicit details does not inspire confidence.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Framework Laptop 13 gets ARM processor with 12 cores via upgrade kit"

woodrowbarlow — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:51:12 +0000

here's the actual listing: https://metacomputing.io/products/metacomputing-arm-aipc

i posted the article instead because it has some details that aren't on the listing.

Framework Laptop 13 gets ARM processor with 12 cores via upgrade kit

woodrowbarlow — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:49:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Framework-Laptop-13-gets-ARM-processor-with-12-cores-via-upgrade-kit.1177930.0.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46162872

Points: 325

# Comments: 156

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame"

woodrowbarlow — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 18:28:18 +0000

the "ownership" framing is because bootloader locks allow vendors to unilaterally make decisions about how your device operates after you purchase the device.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "PHP 8.5"

woodrowbarlow — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 13:48:18 +0000

but would you even be considering re-entry if it hadn't improved dramatically?