ericwood (u/ericwood)

ericwood commented on A Lament for Aperture ikennd.ac/blog/2026/01/ol... · Posted by u/firloop

tempodox · 21 days ago

I miss Aperture dearly, too. It is a monument of a time when Apple still could do Software, instead of just Services that feel restrictive and patronizing. I cannot get myself to use that shitty Photos app and am still constantly on the lookout for something to recreate the Aperture of old.

ericwood · 21 days ago

It is so disappointing; I started getting into photography over the past few years, shooting rolls of film here and there and need some basic library management tools to track my shots and add EXIF data for film stock, camera, etc. Photos.app kind of does what I need, but there's baffling decisions like all photo data being uneditable, even through APIs. You can edit EXIF data on the original image but the app's internal database is completely immutable. I have a handful of photos with inconsistent metadata I'd love to fix and the only option appears to be removing them from the library and re-adding them.

I really don't need many features! I'm not a pro and while I wouldn't mind shelling out a one-time fee for good software I'm not paying a subscription for cloud storage I'm not going to use. The OSS options here are not awesome, either.

ericwood commented on KORG phase8 – Acoustic Synthesizer korg.com/us/products/dj/p... · Posted by u/bpierre

kennywinker · 23 days ago

I was wondering to myself why korg berlin exists. Like i would be shocked if they sell enough of these to pay for the preceding five years of rent much less the salaries. Is it genuinely moonshot r&d, like a bell labs or xerox parc? Is it just to prevent Takahashi from starting a competitor? Something else? Whichever reason, i’m glad it exists… it just feels improbable.

ericwood · 23 days ago

It's honestly incredible they're bringing this to market! This style of incubator tends to work on a lofty goal and the research and ideas explored on the way trickle down into other parts of the company and find their way into more accessible products. Really similar in theory to the over the top concept cars manufacturers build that never see the light of day.

ericwood commented on STFU github.com/Pankajtanwarba... · Posted by u/tanelpoder

potato-peeler · a month ago

Isn’t delayed auditory feedback similar to echo?

ericwood · a month ago

If speaking strictly in terms of audio effects this is a delay, with "echo" usually implying feedback so the delayed signal is attenuated and fed back into the delay line, getting quieter each iteration and fading naturally.

ericwood commented on STFU github.com/Pankajtanwarba... · Posted by u/tanelpoder

ericwood · a month ago

Very similar in theory to Bob Widlar's legendary "hassler" circuit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Widlar#Personality

ericwood commented on Embassy: Modern embedded framework, using Rust and async github.com/embassy-rs/emb... · Posted by u/birdculture

sgt · a month ago

My only question is - is this tinker friendly? C is tinker friendly, it's not all about correctness and so on.

Not that I mind correctness, but I want to play with this and maybe do some minor hobby projects with limited cognitive load.

Otherwise I'd just do FreeRTOS, which is also a good option.

ericwood · a month ago

Yes and no, and the answer will depend a little bit on your background. It's Rust, and the learning curve around that still exists. The HAL does a very good job at papering over some annoying details, e.g. if you're working on STM32s you'll be able to get things working without having to dig into the monstrous clock trees and timer peripherals. I found one of the biggest learning curves to be dealing with shared mutable state; embassy offers lots of primitives and tools for dealing with this that are more approachable than you'd encounter with a vanilla embedded Rust project, but there's a little bit of a time investment to learn them and you'll find yourself reading a lot of example code.

Once you get the basics, though, it's very productive and I've found it surprisingly easy to write building blocks I can reuse across a wide range of hardware projects and MCUs!

ericwood commented on Why is everything so scalable? stavros.io/posts/why-is-e... · Posted by u/kunley

hedora · 4 months ago

People screw up the bcrypt thing all the time. Pick a single threaded server stack (and run on one core, because Kubernetes), then configure bcrypt so brute forcing 8 character passwords is slow on an A100. Configure kubernetes to run on a medium range CPU because you have no load. Finally, leave your cloud provider's HTTP proxy's timeout set to default.

The result is 100% of auth requests timeout once the login queue depth gets above a hundred or so. At that point, the users retry their login attempts, so you need to scale out fast. If you haven't tested scale out, then it's time to implement a bcrypt thread pool, or reimplement your application.

But at least the architecture I described "scales".

ericwood · 4 months ago

Fond memories of a job circa 2013 on a very large Rails app where CI times were sped up by a factor of 10 when someone realized bcrypt was misconfigured when running tests and slowing things down every time a user was created through a factory.

ericwood commented on Thoughts on Mechanical Keyboards and the ZSA Moonlander masteringemacs.org/articl... · Posted by u/TheFreim

bee_rider · 5 months ago

I have a Kinesis Freestyle Pro that I sort of like. Although, I think tenting and split is honestly 99% of the value here, I don’t really get the whole mechanical keyboard click clacky thing. I actually prefer the key pressing experience of something like an Apple Magic Keyboard, nice and crisp and immediate. But, tenting is not optional as far as I’m concerned, it is mandatory.

Eventually the little rubbery feet fell off the tenting attachment. In a moment of frustration I wrapped the tenting attachment in tennis racket overgrip, which actually drastically improves the feeling of the thing IMO, it really keeps the keyboard in place and removes a lot of the creaky noises from the plastic tenting kits.

It looks like Moonlander tenting kits tend to be a bit more aggressive than what you get with Kinesis, though, so maybe it doesn’t apply.

ericwood · 5 months ago

This is exactly how I feel; I'd love a switch that performs like the modern apple keyboards. Anytime I've dipped my toe into mechanical keyboard waters I've lost speed and accuracy, even after weeks of practice. The extra key travel felt like it gave me more fatigue, even with low profile switches. Whenever I've researched alternatives I get the sense I'm in the minority, though, and most mechanical keyboard users are after a very different feel. It's a huge shame, because I'd love to move to something with a split for better shoulder/arm positioning.

ericwood commented on Building AI products in the probabilistic era giansegato.com/essays/pro... · Posted by u/sdan

thorum · 6 months ago

I like this framing, but I don’t think it’s entirely new to LLMs. Humans have been building flexible, multi-purpose tools and using them for things the original inventor or manufacturer didn’t think of since before the invention of the wheel. It’s in our DNA. Our brains have been shaped by a world where that is normal.

The rigidness and near-perfect reliability of computer software is the unusual thing in human history, an outlier we’ve gotten used to.

ericwood · 6 months ago

I've always viewed computers as being an obvious complement. Of course we worked so hard to build machines that are good at the things our brains don't take to as naturally.

ericwood commented on A gigantic jet caught on camera: A spritacular moment for NASA astronaut science.nasa.gov/science-... · Posted by u/acossta

ericwood · 6 months ago

All of this and the only image linked is a collage clocking in at a whopping 512x218px...anyone know where we can see the full resolution? It looks spectacular from the thumbnail!

ericwood commented on I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/08/... · Posted by u/blenderob

sincerely · 6 months ago

>Why dont americans create 16 pound smartwatches?

Because labor is much more expensive in America. This is not a mystery

ericwood · 6 months ago

Labor is a factor but it helps to have the insane manufacturing synergies they have where almost all of the parts are made down the road from you.