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MarioMan

389 karma · joined December 30, 2019

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MarioMan··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
Maybe I’m missing something. I can’t imagine that paying a chauffeur can be cheaper than umbrella insurance.
MarioMan··on Paramount Caught Using 'Astroturf' Group to Drum Up Fake Support for Merger
Several years ago, Paramount was handing out free monthly trial codes for Paramount Plus every month. Then, some time in 2020, they just ”forgot” to cut off my access after the trial ended. I had free Paramount Plus from then until 2025, when they merged with Skydance. The free subscription expired almost immediately after the merger was announced.

It’s evident to me now that they did this to boost their active subscriber numbers. I’m sure a lot of people didn’t even realize this had happened to their accounts. And those that had weren’t about to complain about it too loudly.

MarioMan··on WebLLM: high-performance in-browser LLM inference engine
I really enjoy this engine. I’ve used it for personal projects, but it hasn’t been updated since Gemma 2. I suggest using Transformers.js instead these days.
MarioMan··on Show HN: Weedout – Safari extension that hides YouTube AI-labeled videos
This is great. Having the option to choose whether or not to see AI content was the first thing I hoped they'd add a filter for when it was first introduced.

Just for kicks, I inverted the filter in a TamperMoneky script that only keeps the AI-generated content: https://gist.github.com/SMarioMan/32c959d79035cb421df1c69c06...

MarioMan··on Don't Wordle
In the same vein, last year I took on a good old fashioned optimization problem for Worlde. Given a guess list and answer list, find all of the “perfectly bad” Worlde games in the shortest time. This means never reusing letters or finding any of the letters in the word. I got it from over 35 hours down to a mere 20 seconds.

Results and code here: https://github.com/SMarioMan/worst-wordle

MarioMan··on Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
I did the same thing with my netbook 4 years ago, but I went with Debian instead to make my life a bit easier. It was, at the time, one of a small number of distros that still officially supported x86 32-bit binaries.

The challenges came from tracking down working Wi-Fi drivers for the proprietary hardware and updating the BIOS, since the stock version has a bug where it emits lid close events that Windows XP ignores but Linux dutifully handles.

MarioMan··on NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook
Google Illuminate does this. I believe it was actually a precursor to Gemini Notebook. It uses a similar podcast generating model but tuned to keep things more technical and detailed.

https://illuminate.google.com/

MarioMan··on My burner email blocklist blocked me
Cloudflare offers this for free as well.
MarioMan··on Half-Baked Product
Reminds me of this monstrosity: https://youtube.com/shorts/YQ-6JTmF-Z4
MarioMan··on GTA 6 will cost $80
And that was only half the planned game until you bought Sonic & Knuckles with Lock-On Technology.
MarioMan··on GameBoy Workboy
There are lightweight YouTube embeds like https://github.com/paulirish/lite-youtube-embed. It’s lauded for faster page loads, but it likely has good privacy implications too since it basically just loads a thumbnail unless you click on it.
MarioMan··on YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
At least for now, YouTube honors the uploader’s label of whether or not the content was AI generated. Only when it’s left unset do they do any automatic labeling. And those labels can be overridden manually by the uploader if they get it wrong.
MarioMan··on Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan
This blog post is a great starting point: https://blog.chrislewis.au/the-unexpected-effectiveness-of-o...
MarioMan··on I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
It looks like copying from EFB to XFB can do an RBG to YUV conversion automatically.
MarioMan··on Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
> I don't want five different fibre lines going to every apartment building

It’s funny that you’d mention this. My apartment fiber has four lines going into my unit, all under AT&T service, apparently for redundancy. I only use one.

https://imgur.com/a/Ss19AKk

MarioMan··on ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state
I know those offer virtual GPUs, but I am unfamiliar with any paravirtual GPU offerings from VMWare or VirtualBox. The virtual GPUs are much more limited in performance and graphics API support.
MarioMan··on ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state
I assume your concern with GPU passthrough is that each VM needs a whole GPU? You can use GPU-PV to split your GPU between VM instances. Then the main bottleneck becomes how thin you split out your VRAM.

More info here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20231107182321/https://mu0.cc/20...

https://youtu.be/XLLcc29EZ_8?t=570

https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV

MarioMan··on Changes to OpenTTD Distribution on Steam
It sounds to me like a product of the ‘90s. CRTs were still common, and they support essentially arbitrary fixed refresh rates. It wouldn’t have been a big deal at the time. It’s like how the original Doom runs at a native 35fps when you don’t use interpolation.
MarioMan··on New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
Last I’d checked, “﷽”is the widest Unicode character.
MarioMan··on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
If you have evidence to the contrary, it would make for a great lawsuit. Apple is very explicit that they cannot read it. This data is end-to-end encrypted, much like the data collected by the Health app. They never have the keys to it.

In comparison, Apple also has plenty of your data “encrypted at rest”, where they have the keys (unless you use advanced data protection). That data is only superficially secured. That’s not what this feature uses.

MarioMan··on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
Not sure where ads for pizza places are coming from, but the suggested maps trips are part of the “Significant Locations” feature. That data is end-to-end encrypted across your devices and is unreadable by Apple. It can be disabled if you don’t want it tracked.
MarioMan··on Porsche sold more electrified cars in Europe in 2025 than pure gas-powered cars
>Car prices have increased well above the rate of inflation over the last decade

This is a fair concern, but also, looking at the rise of average car prices is like looking at the rise of average iPhone prices. That is to say, cars (and iPhones) are providing increasingly premium offerings that didn’t exist decades ago. If you look at the entry levels of both these things, you find that the bottom-line price broadly keeps pace with inflation. And for cars, that’s with the addition of now-standard safety and convenience features. When you match cars feature-for-feature (an unrealistic comparison, as there aren’t really bare-bones cars on offer anymore), you’d see that cars are increasing in price much more slowly than inflation, and in other words, are effectively cheaper. Ultimately, whether car prices are rising or falling depends a lot on how you calculate things.

I’ll also add that EV pricing doesn’t have to mean insane car costs. The US market has the Chevy Bolt and Nissan Leaf each selling for about $30k new and can be readily bought for half that with used inventory.

MarioMan··on The U.S. Government Just Followed Through on Its Ban of DJI Drones
The link you shared details hacker groups exploiting consumer hardware. This is very different than selling compromised, backdoored hardware.
MarioMan··on Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time
It’s still there; it’s just nowhere near as popular. The Classic theme is what you’re looking for.
MarioMan··on Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]
Very interesting to see the workers in yellow presumably cleaning and manually plugging in the cars to charge.
MarioMan··on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
All of the usernames being directly related to the headlines is uncanny.
MarioMan··on iPhone Pocket
Or maybe iPad-sized pockets: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/igotabigasspocket-ipad-jeans-1...
MarioMan··on I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]
A few things that stood out to me:

- One of the key factors in powder over pods in his prior videos was cost. Cheap powder runs about 6.6¢/oz. The brand he’s promoting is $1.11/oz, nearly 17x more expensive than traditional powder. When comparing per-load costs, Cascade pods are about 39.5¢ per load and the promoted powder is 58.5¢ per load, or 48% more costly than pods. The price to performance is terrible and could only be justified if you also consider external factors like their sustainability practices and the donation of all profits to coral reef restoration. Not discussing price seems like a huge gap to me.

- I was disappointed that he only personally compared and tested washing performance against a pod and the promoted powder, rather than also evaluating a traditional powder. Could he have replicated and compared the subpar performance reported by others?

- I would have assumed that, if the pre-rinse is supposed to get hot, the heater would run until it reaches the temperature target. Is it normal for a unit to simply not care? Last I had done reading on this, whether to attach to the hot or cold side is actually a contentious issue, mostly around the gas vs. induction-based heating costs in water heaters, in addition to temperature losses in the pipes. If the pre-wash expects hot water, then that’s an extra point for the hot side backers. I guess one should always check their manual to determine best-practice on the purge and line placement.

MarioMan··on I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]
That’s pretty wild, since the energy needed to get it up to temp would still need to be expended on the water heater side. There are no real energy efficiency gains unless they can somehow engineer an effective cold water cleaning.
MarioMan··on Can “second life” EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage?
Space and weight are serious constraints in the car space, but not such a big deal on the side of a house. That’s how they retain their usefulness.

80% could indeed be plenty of usable life for your EV use cases, but it strongly depends on usage patterns. More degradation means more trips to the charger on a road trip. It means trips that you’d regularly make just charging at home at the end of day now require you to plug in at the destination too. It means more range anxiety as a whole.

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