Hacker News: zbrozek

New comment by zbrozek in "ChatGPT Images 2.0"

zbrozek — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:33:35 +0000

I do that. My slide decks these days are hand scribbled.

New comment by zbrozek in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

zbrozek — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:08:38 +0000

This sounds great. I would've loved to have set my phone to charge up to only 60% or 80% of its design capacity to reduce wear. I do this on my laptop.

New comment by zbrozek in "Why Japan has such good railways"

zbrozek — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:02:02 +0000

I bet you'd see natural market driven concentration around rail stations in Texas too, if they had a useful rail network.

New comment by zbrozek in "Why Japan has such good railways"

zbrozek — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:00:49 +0000

That's a big part of it. They also do zoning mostly at the federal level, meaning local opposition isn't relevant.

New comment by zbrozek in "Claude Opus 4.7"

zbrozek — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:10:01 +0000

I use them like bookmarks.

New comment by zbrozek in "OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic"

zbrozek — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:14:14 +0000

On a free Google plan the limits are comically low. On any paid One plan, they are high enough that I almost never hit them.

New comment by zbrozek in "I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program"

zbrozek — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:13:00 +0000

I tried the same, got a similar response, and complained to the AG. Nothing.

New comment by zbrozek in "OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic"

zbrozek — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 02:24:41 +0000

I think Antigravity w/Gemini is a great product; it's been super useful on a bunch of my hobby projects. It's especially wonderful when writing firmware and needing to add support for a new chip. I can point it at a PDF datasheet and it'll do a much better job of reading it and parsing out all of the register fields than anything else. Saves me enormous amounts of time.

New comment by zbrozek in "Death to Scroll Fade"

zbrozek — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:38:34 +0000

I absolutely hate it. If you haven't heard a complaint about it, you haven't tried hard enough to get feedback.

There is no context which makes it OK.

New comment by zbrozek in "An Interesting Find: STM32 RDP1 Decryptor"

zbrozek — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:13:51 +0000

Scraping is almost always for obscurity to try and impede cloning. I don't really know why folks bother; it's not effective. Especially with LLMs, it's never been easier to vaguely describe a chip's connections and get plausible part numbers back. Add in traditional decapping / xray / other microscopy and it's really just not that hard to know what you're holding.

New comment by zbrozek in "Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires"

zbrozek — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 16:26:18 +0000

It's been many years since I implemented G.Hn hardware, but if memory serves the chipsets are typically able to split the available bandwidth into 1 or 2 MHz wide bins and choose different symbol densities and FEC levels for each bin. If you have a bin that has horrible reflections, you don't use it at all.

I also recall that the chipsets don't do toning automatically, and so it's up the the management device to decide when to re-probe the channel and reconfigure the bins.

New comment by zbrozek in "Nova Launcher added Facebook and Google Ads tracking"

zbrozek — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 15:00:12 +0000

I want to avoid having a Google Search bar on my desktop, no gestures, no AI mode, no voice mode, etc. Is there a launcher for me?

New comment by zbrozek in "Flock Hardcoded the Password for America's Surveillance Infrastructure 53 Times"

zbrozek — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 05:58:43 +0000

It's coming up at the Los Altos Hills city council meeting next week. I would love to know what I should say to try and let our contract expire.

New comment by zbrozek in "2025 was a disaster for Windows 11"

zbrozek — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 17:09:41 +0000

I'm really hoping that the Linux gaming folks keep making progress on Windows-on-Linux compatibility so that I can transparently and with zero-fussing run any arbitrary Windows application. Unfortunately there's still plenty of professional software that has not been and will never be released for Linux.

New comment by zbrozek in "I'm a laptop weirdo and that's why I like my new Framework 13"

zbrozek — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 03:26:04 +0000

A note to other folks. Don't bother asking customer service about this. They want you to record videos, as if that's a productive use of your time or required to support a product.

As soon as a CSR asks me to record a video, I write off the brand. Maybe Gen Z will tolerate that, but I'm too old for that nonsense.

New comment by zbrozek in "Toll roads are spreading in America"

zbrozek — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 23:08:12 +0000

I dislike them not so much in my home area but everywhere else where I have no idea what I'm doing and worry that I'm going to come home to a ton of envelopes full of enormous fines. This is made worse as cash payment disappears.

New comment by zbrozek in "I'm a laptop weirdo and that's why I like my new Framework 13"

zbrozek — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 23:11:09 +0000

Thanks, I'll do that! I figured I've had the machine for a while and it was unlikely to be covered by warranty, so I didn't consider reaching out to support. Instead I assumed I'd buy a new keyboard if it ever annoyed me too much.

At some point I actually considered poking around the firmware and seeing about fixing up the PD behavior. But it never quite rose in priority above my many other projects.

I absolutely love that the embedded controller firmware and much of the motherboard schematics are available. It makes it possible to do these little projects should I gather the gumption. That, plus easy and reasonably priced replacement parts availability and easy OS compatibility, are why I got the Framework.

New comment by zbrozek in "I'm a laptop weirdo and that's why I like my new Framework 13"

zbrozek — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 22:41:14 +0000

The actual touch part of the FW touchpad, including tap to click, works just fine. I might be a weirdo for liking mechanical click for dragging (and I dislike the Macbook tactile fakery; it does not fool my finger).

New comment by zbrozek in "I'm a laptop weirdo and that's why I like my new Framework 13"

zbrozek — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 14:38:32 +0000

I got a couple of type-A cards for my AMD FW13 and generally keep one loaded in the laptop for connecting to random junk like flash drives, charging cables for all sorts of widgets (like my bike light or head lamp), etc. I get dramatically more use out of the type-C cards. And in the quite-rare cases where I really need all of the type-C ports, I'll just eject the type-A card and plug directly into the chassis without the interposer at all rather than carry an extra type-C with me.

That said, there have been a few things that have been a bit less than deluxe on my FW13:

- The touchpad mechanical click is just not that good. It is too sensitive to exact pressure and touch location and I find holding it down and dragging to be excessively difficult compared to all other touchpads I've ever used.

- The delete key seems to oxidize and needs a bunch of hard mashing to get it to become responsive. No, it's not sticky or dirty.

- The air intake on the bottom is highly prone to getting blocked, mostly by my legs.

- There's no BIOS option to turn down the brightness or disable altogether the charging status LEDs, and I find that when I travel and can't keep the laptop in a separate room that it's bright enough to interrupt sleep. I've taped over them, but the light leakage from other crevices is still sufficient to be at least mildly annoying. The translucent Ethernet adapter card also acts like a lightbulb.

- The laptop ramps its current consumption from type-C very quickly and seems like it overshoots its target a little bit, and so it is the only device I have that trips out the OCP on some of my bricks.

- There's no BIOS option to artificially limit the charging power, and so I often trip the OCP on aircraft if my battery is not fully charged before plugging in. I don't want to carry a secondary small brick just to use on planes.

- The LCD backlight uniformity and color quality are mediocre, but for my use case I just don't really care that much. For me, this is a portable technical productivity machine and not an art studio, so it doesn't matter.

- The LCD backlight intensity curve is pretty bad. I very-frequently want to have a brightness in-between the lowest and second-lowest settings. I would love to get more control at the bottom and less at the top. It feels like it's linear when it should be logarithmic.

- The speakers suck. So does the volume control. I very rarely go above 10% volume and frequently don't have sufficient control resolution at the bottom. Anything above about 14-16% volume causes something to distort and other stuff to rattle. Luckily I mostly don't consume media, so this is rarely a real problem. But it is truly atrocious.

All that said, I'm generally a pretty happy camper. I look forward to continued improvements from the company over the years.

New comment by zbrozek in "PG&E outages in S.F. leave 130k without electricity"

zbrozek — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 16:03:32 +0000

I find it amazing that even with the redistribution subsidy, the resulting electricity is still more expensive than the national average unsubsidized rate. We are just so incredibly good at vaporizing money.