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LASR

2,507 karma · joined January 9, 2015

hn@sidbala.com
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LASR··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
Changing the results just when you are going to action on them is a fundamental UX sin.
LASR··on Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast
Its token usage has earned its keep.
LASR··on I'd not buy a LG monitor
Aah yes Temufication.
LASR··on MiMo-v2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed: 1T model with 1000 tokens per second
Oh you wait until LLMs come up with frameworks that allow multiple LLMs to collaborate effectively. Then you’ll have new frameworks every 3 days.
LASR··on S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic
Ridiculous in the first place.
LASR··on Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
Forget all the AI stuff. Please make the subject editable by default. Come on Google.
LASR··on SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
Incredible. Since you’re the dev, please please please isometric camera.
LASR··on Filing the corners off my MacBooks
It worked. Most people under 30 don't know Apple existed before the iPod / iPhone. ie: Before Jobs.
LASR··on Our commitment to Windows quality
Just get rid of cheapstake garbage all around the OS and you’re golden.
LASR··on What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
Yes this is pretty common in large enterprise-ey tech companies that are successful. There are usually a small group of vocal members that have a strong conviction and drive to make a vision a reality. This is contrary to popular belief that large companies design by committee.

Of course it works exceptionally well when the instinct turns out to be right. But can end companies if it isn’t.

LASR··on Changes to OpenTTD Distribution on Steam
Yep. There is no being nice in the business of copyright. But to be fair, they’ve owned the original base game assets.

Not to mention it’s a reverse engineered version of the base game.

LASR··on Consistency diffusion language models: Up to 14x faster, no quality loss
Just tried this. Holy fuck.

I'd take an army of high-school graduate LLMs to build my agentic applications over a couple of genius LLMs any day.

This is a whole new paradigm of AI.

LASR··on Flow5 released to open source
With so many things being called Flow these days, this one is probably the most fitting.
LASR··on Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
I’ve been following share prices for Micron, Seagate, Western Digital and Sandisk.

They’ve all pretty much 5x’ed YTD. That’s completely wild.

LASR··on Oracle is underwater on its $300B OpenAI deal
As someone paying some vague attention to market movements, this was predictable.

News of a deal and hype was largely responsible for the rise. Now that the sentiment is cooling off, it’s dropping back to a more reasonable level.

LASR··on Show HN: Continuous Claude – run Claude Code in a loop
There is no free lunch. The amount of prompt writing to give the LLM enough context about your codebase etc is comparable to writing the tests yourself.

Code assistance tools might speed up your workflow by maybe 50% or even 100%, but it's not the geometric scaling that is commonly touted as the benefits of autonomous agentic AI.

And this is not a model capability issue that goes away with newer generations. But it's a human input problem.

LASR··on ProofOfThought: LLM-based reasoning using Z3 theorem proving
This is an interesting approach.

My team has been prototyping something very similar with encoding business operations policies with LEAN. We have some internal knowledge bases (google docs / wiki pages) that we first convert to LEAN using LLMs.

Then we run the solver to verify consistency.

When a wiki page is changed, the process is run again and it's essentially a linter for process.

Can't say it moved beyond the prototyping stage though, since the LEAN conversion does require some engineers to look through it at least.

But a promising approach indeed, especially when you have a domain that requires tight legal / financial compliance.

LASR··on GMP damaging Zen 5 CPUs?
Zen5?
LASR··on The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
Ability for normal people to set up reasoning chains.
LASR··on The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
Honestly, GPT-4o is all we ever needed to build a complete human-like reasoning system.

I am leading a small team working on a couple of “hard” problems to put the limits of LLMs to the test.

One is an options trader. Not algo / HFT, but simply doing due diligence, monitoring the news and making safe long-term bets.

Another is an online research and purchasing experience for residential real-estate.

Both these tasks, we’ve realized, you don’t even need a reasoning model. In fact, reasoning models are harder to get consistent results from.

What you need is a knowledge base infrastructure and pub-sub for updates. Amortize the learned knowledge across users and you have collaborative self-learning system that exhibits intelligence beyond any one particular user and is agnostic to the level of prompting skills they have.

Stay tuned for a limited alpha in this space. And DM if you’re interested.

LASR··on $3 Trader Joe's tote bags resell for more than $1,500
I am genuinely curious how demand for such things spike up. Is it social media? Influenced by someone etc?

I am not on SM, and I really cannot even imagine the peer?-pressure that drives normal, sane and reasonable people living in modern society to go after something so silly and be willing to part so much money for it.

I understand how it works with designer bags and watches etc where it's a signal for social status. But this bag? Come on.

Anyone know why? Or is it just that there is a positive feedback loop here of people wanting to buy this bag only to resell it for a huge return, and that causes the prices to shoot up. When really nobody actually wants to buy this bag to use? Sounds like a group-think ponzi scheme.

LASR··on Convert Linux to Windows
TLDR: I’ve got stuff to do.

I feel exactly the same way. I recently bought my father-in-law an M4 iMac which he thought was a disproportionately nice gift for no apparent reason.

Oh there are some very compelling reasons for it. My tech support load went way down and he’s super happy. Win-win.

LASR··on My TV started playing a video in full screen by itself. What happened?
They keep pushing. We keep tolerating.

Every Tv in my home is paired with an Apple TV. I leave the display unconnected to the internet.

The day when TVs require an internet connection to show external inputs - that will be a sad day.

Or when they come with cellular modems.

LASR··on Why Apple's Severance gets edited over remote desktop software
Oh how far we've come.

My home internet is a fiber gigabit 3g/3g up/down. Tucked away under the staircase is where my fiber ONT terminates and it is my server room. I have half a dozen boxes running various things. 4 symmetric 2012 i7 mac minis running linux KVM, and hosting various critical services - pihole, home automation, Homekit Secure Video etc.

Then there a giant former gaming PC with 7 HDD bays running the entire storage backend for a whole load of GoPro/Osmo/Insta360 videos I capture. Rclone to Google Photos for back-up. I don't edit any videos. Just there to capture memories so I can at some point when AI tools get good enough just have it generate clips. Same box runs my plex server with HW transcoding.

Then there is the actual gaming PC, a mini-ITX running steam remote play. Has power, a network cable and a fake HDMI dongle that emulates a monitor to trick the GPU into thinking something is actually plugged in.

Basically everything I do with desktop PCs at home is via some sort of remote interface.

Remote gaming is probably the most demanding of all of these. Low-latency HW-accelerated solutions eg: Parsec / steam-link are incredible technologies.

I carry an AppleTV + PS5 controllers to friends' houses and play the latest games across the internet.

LASR··on Diagrams AI can, and cannot, generate
We use mermaidjs as a supercharged version of chain-of-thought for generating some sophisticated decompositions of the intent.

Then we injected the generated mermaid diagrams back into subsequent requests. Reasoning performance improves for a whole variety of applications.

LASR··on Show HN: I made a site to tell the time in corporate
When will this tool have SOC compliance and SSO support?

The devs on this must be sleeping. F for not paying attention to your users’ needs.

LASR··on Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
This concept blew my mind when I internalized it.

Same reason why honest signals exist. A peacock with very rich feathers is a fitness disadvantage. But they find mates more successfully. These traits persist in the gene pool.

It’s so much easier to just evolve a cheating trait that does the job of finding a mate even without the required fitness.

But the signals stay honest for the most part.

Why?

It’s because ultimately the species survives, not the individuals.

In a lot of cases, something that makes the individual more fit also makes the species more fit. But in some cases, they are inversely proportional.

Hence you end up with suicidal genes that favor the death of the individuals for the greater good of the species.

Now extrapolating to human society, most nations have landed on a system where taxes are paid to the government. Every individual might complain and try to get out of paying. But we do. Why? Maybe because societies where that wasn’t a thing were less fit and didn’t last long enough to still be around.

LASR··on GPT-5 is behind schedule
So the team I lead does a lot of research around all the “plumbing” around LLMs. Both technical and from a product-market perspectives.

What I’ve learned is that for the most part that AI revolution is not going to be because of PHD-level LLMs. It will be because people are better equipped to use the high-schooler level LLMs to do their work more efficiently.

We have some knowledge graph experiments where LLMs continuously monitor user actions on Slack, GitHub etc and build up an expertise store. It learns about your work, your workflows and then you can RAG them.

In user testing, people most closely associated this experience to having someone just being able to read their minds and essentially auto-suggest their work outputs. Basically it’s like another team member.

Since these are just nodes in a knowledge graph, you can mix and match expertise bases that span several skills too. Eg: A Pm who understands the nuances of technical feasibility.

And it didn’t require user training or prompting LLMs.

So while GPT-5 may be delayed, I don’t think that’s stopping or slowing down a revolution in knowledge-worker productivity.

LASR··on Sora is here
What you are saying is totally correct.

And this applies to language / code outputs as well.

The number of times I’ve had engineers at my company type out 5 sentences and then expect a complete react webapp.

But what I’ve found in practice is using LLMs to generate the prompt with low-effort human input (eg: thumbs up/down, multiple-choice etc) is quite useful. It generates walls of text, but with metaprompting, that’s kind of the point. With this, I’ve definitely been able to get high ROI out of LLMs. I suspect the same would work for vision output.

LASR··on Show HN: FastGraphRAG – Better RAG using good old PageRank
It's slow. So we use hypothetical mostly for async experiences.

For live experiences like chat, we solved it with UX. As soon as you start typing the words of a question into the chat box, it does the FTS search and retrieves a set of documents that have word-matches, scored just using ES heuristics (eg: counting matching words etc)

These are presented as cards that expand when clicked. The user can see it's doing something.

While that's happening, also issue a full hyde flow in the background with a placeholder loading shimmer that loads in the full answer.

So there is some dead-time of about 10 seconds or so while it generates the hypothetical answers. After that, a short ~1 sec interval to load up the knowledge nodes, and then it starts streaming the answer.

This approach tested well with UXR participants and maintains acceptable accuracy.

A lot of the times, when looking for specific facts from a knowledge base, just the card UX gets an answer immediately. Eg: "What's the email for product support?"

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