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boomskats

2,577 karma · joined August 1, 2014

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boomskats··on US announces new sanctions on top ICC figures
I'm really sorry but I've read this comment 3 times now and I still can't make sense of it
boomskats··on US announces new sanctions on top ICC figures
> The US withdrew its signature all the way back in 2002.

Yeah, I guess international law was rather incompatible with their ambitions at the time. Fair play to them though, they certainly made the most of it.

boomskats··on Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)
I expect the majority of Oxide's customers are actively trying to escape Broadcom's VMWare hell. Can't see how something like that would make sense.
boomskats··on Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era
This needs a side-by-side config comparison with something like echarts config schema format. I really don't see the point.

I'm 99% sure the verbosity required in the system prompt to teach non-M$ models this new ever-so-slightly-different-but-not-obviously-necessary chart def abstraction format, and the iterations required to get it right, will outweigh any supposed efficiency gains resulting from using it.

Just stating the obvious.

boomskats··on Self-hosting Kimi K3: 20% more hardware cost, 20% better task resolution
Right, so the 1.4 TB weight footprint straight away makes me wonder how much more important load/unload time becomes in terms of the neocloud product here. With 1.4TB of weights, a fast-enough cold start would basically be _the_ product; fast enough weight-swapping that can make K3 into something you could usefully rent by the hour/workday.

Interesting because again, the license Kimi shipped under [0] defines "Model as a Service" as

> giving a third party access to language model inference or fine-tuning (e.g., via API) in a manner that allows such third party to exercise meaningful control over the inputs, parameters, or training data

and then they have that clause around if you operate such a business above $20M aggregate revenue you need a separate agreement with Moonshot before commercial use, which presumably captures the majority of the larger neoclouds best placed to optimise this.

But where's the line? Say you offer infra optimised for GPU inference, warm pools, isolation per customer, exposed control plane, billed per GPU-hour rather than token, the invoice says compute rather than calls. The customer arguably 'self-hosts', you're probably fine? And if you as a provider run the serving stack and hand your customer an inference API, you're inside the definition regardless of whether you charge by the second or by the token. But what about if you give them direct hardware access, but have the weights cached on NVMe / ramdisk hyperlocal to the infra they're renting so that their hf cli pull only takes a few seconds? Sure, a managed warm pool of GPUs with K3 pre-loaded probably isn't ok, but a local hugging face lru cache holding 'whatever your customers pull down most often', superoptimised for fast weight swaps that the customer controls... is? Is it?

Again, where's the line? Is it materially different from a local docker registry mirror? What about safetensors checkpoints pre-sharded for the specific hardware topology you're offering? Does it matter whether you perform the checkpoint optimisation yourself and make it available, or merely cache one published on HF that happens to target exactly the hardware you rent out? What if you published that checkpoint yourself?

I'm definitely overthinking this, and I'm sure there's been conversation here about this already, but the other kimi threads[1] are enormous. And I am curious.

I'm also curious to know whether Moonshot would actually be against a setup like this. Guessing they would if it was AWS (not quite elastic but not that dissimilar), but what about others? Realistically I guess it'd be easier to just talk to them, especially if you were doing it in a way that targets a slice of the pie they never would have gotten anyway due to data residency requirements etc..

[0]: https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3/blob/main/LICENSE [1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49065752

boomskats··on Kimi K3 Architecture Overview and Notes
Or against all those old books that they ingested and then literally destroyed
boomskats··on Kimi K3 Architecture Overview and Notes
No! It's just not fair!! What about our financial bubble!
boomskats··on Kimi-K3 Technical Report [pdf]
An act of G̶o̶d̶ Congress?
boomskats··on GC and Exceptions in Wasmtime
It's lightweight, capability-secured, services start up way faster, smaller overhead than VMs, better isolation than containers, faster replication, etc.

The original Wasmtime 1.0 blog post explains it all really well: https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/wasmtime-1-0-fast-safe...

boomskats··on GC and Exceptions in Wasmtime
Thanks for that link! There goes my Saturday morning.

After a bunch of middle clicking I landed here [0]. So if I understand correctly, the current stack switching proposal depended on exception handling to be implemented first for resume.throw, so that bit was blocked until now.

But it's also further along than you might assume [1], i.e. you can already invoke Wasmtime with `-W stack-switching` and hit the boundaries where the experimental implementation breaks.

Sadly though, like many ambitious Wasm things that don't have revenue directly attached to them, it now seems partly a case of finding someone willing to sponsor or finish the remaining work [2].

I also found the list of open stack-switching issues[3] useful.

(also, minor nit - Wasm != Wasmtime)

[0]: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/issues/10248

[1]: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/issues/12941

[2]: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/issues/12941#is...

[3]: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/issues?q=state%...

boomskats··on GC and Exceptions in Wasmtime
I would suggest you look at it a little more often than that - to improve the quality of discussion here, if for nothing else.
boomskats··on GC and Exceptions in Wasmtime
Ready for what?

WASM is already running in production at a whole bunch of financial services orgs and government infra.

The thing is, it's not running anywhere near HTML, CSS or JavaScript. It's running serverside, mostly on Wasmtime - which, as it happens, is what this post is all about.

boomskats··on Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story
Right, Pravda. Four year old Hacker News account and this is the first comment?

The Guardian is only 'left leaning' in that it provides mildly controversial but reassuringly inconsequential opinions and sound bytes for people to regurgitate so they can convince themselves they've done something about that uncomfortable feeling they're carrying around. It's like a sports team. Sponsors and all.

Hah I guess in that way it is just like Pravda.

boomskats··on I got into YC Startup School by hacking it
Maybe this is another one of Garry's 30k LOC/day vibecode specials that he's so proud of
boomskats··on LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps
Some of you might want to check out throwaway96/dejavuln-autoroot or the older throwaway96/faultmanager-autoroot, www.webosbrew.org/rooting and cani.rootmy.tv. Looks like it's patchy for the very latest models, but you might find the literature useful anyway.
boomskats··on "Drawing" the Mona Lisa with GPT-5.6, Claude, Gemini, and Grok
And image tokenisation.
boomskats··on Transcribe.cpp
I have a personal fork of hyprvoice[0] which I use almost everywhere now (w/ the big cohere-transcribe running on a local vLLM instance). It does a similar thing, but that's not why I'm mentioning it; I think it's worth looking at because it's a clean reference for the few elegant ways you can implement text injection in modern Linux (wayland).

It supports ydotool[1], wtype[2] and "clipboard fallback with clipboard restore". The first two you can probably think of as AHK equivalents - they wire in at the input layer and inject keystrokes when injecting text. wtype is wayland-only and a bit less invasive, ydotool supports non-wayland also apparently, but I haven't tried it. Neither approach provides 'instant text' - you have to watch the text get typed out, and you don't touch your keyboard while it's happening; the clipboard implementation is fallback for a reason as it's the least reliable. The first two work 'well enough' though, and are fairly tunable.

The other thing hyprvoice does in probably the most linux-friendly and universal way is the 'hotkey handling'. The server creates a socket in /tmp that the cli can then ping when the user triggers the start/stop/cancel, and they do this by binding whatever their DE's keyboard shortcut mapping mechanism is to trigger `hyprvoice toggle` as a background shell command. This works extremely well and is much cheaper than you'd intuitively think coming from Windows. This way you don't have to interface with DE-specific global keyboard listeners etc, but leave that to the WM (that's not to say that your installer couldn't prompt the user to configure the keyboard shortcut for them with their detected WM, you just wouldn't do it in the software itself).

I haven't actually looked at your project in too much depth yet as I have a solution for this already, so apologies if none of the above is news to you. Hope it helps though - happy to poke around and contribute something if the gap's still there.

[0]: https://github.com/leonardotrapani/hyprvoice [1]: https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool [2]: https://github.com/atx/wtype

boomskats··on LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent
Not great, but also not at all surprising.

Not sure about other solutions, but one suggested workaround here would be to silently uninstall Windows without consent.

boomskats··on Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
That's what I mean though.

I've not used gnome for years, but I have a vague memory of gnome/mutter running on a single main thread which used to lock up quite a lot (javascript etc). And because in X it was X that used to manage things like rendering the mouse pointer every frame, whereas in Wayland it flipped to mutter having to do it directly, the stalls were way more obvious in wayland than X, which is where I think a lot of this perception came from.

Again, not sure how much of this is accurate, but that's the point I was trying to make.

boomskats··on Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
A lot of people conflate Wayland being worse than X11 with Gnome on Wayland being worse than Gnome on X11.

Wayland has been great for me for a few years now. I don't use Gnome or nvidia though.

boomskats··on Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
This is great! Those analytical workloads numbers are mad - I'd love to see the benches, and I'm happy to contribute to some of the profiling.

How does your thread-per-connection model compare to Heikki's proposal[0][1] from back in 2023?

[0]: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/31cc6df9-53fe-3cd9-af5... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLLakMmVtbY

boomskats··on A global workspace in language models
The science might be legit here, but I'm getting really, really tired of the way every single piece of writing to come out of Anthropic is written in some kind of self-aggrandising, wooey wonderous 'our model has developed a genetic mutation that makes it have feelings' bs style. Regardless of what they're trying to communicate, those undertones are always there. It's annoying and disingenuous. Homeopathy 'this-water-has-feelings' level annoying. None of the other labs write like that.

They might as well change their name to Anthropomorphic at this point.

boomskats··on The Vespa at 80
I agree with all of those points, and none of them are relevant to what I was talking about.
boomskats··on The Vespa at 80
It's not a great solution but it's the best one I've got, and it's still more ecological than driving the (electric) car for the same one-person trip. And audible != loud.

Anyway, don't most places legally require nearly silent electric vehicles to emit some kind of artificial noise?

boomskats··on The Vespa at 80: Why the Italian scooter remains the coolest thing on 2 wheels
That og elettrica has been all but cancelled in most markets. It was grossly underpowered and overpriced, which is a shame. IIRC they relaunched it as the primavera elettrica, without all the green/yellow bits, but it's still the same bike.
boomskats··on The Vespa at 80
I have a couple of Vespas - a '98 T5 and a 2011 PX Unità d'Italia - and honestly my favourite safety feature is the noise they _can_ make. Modern Vespas don’t sound like the old ones from the factory anymore, but the retro scene is strong, so a lot of tuning kits bring back that classic buzz.

In town, filtering, weaving through traffic, getting to the front at lights etc., being able to make a sound which is so ubiquitously embedded in culture that it's instantly recognisable, and so easily localised, really makes a difference. It might be audible, but it's still quieter than many bigger bikes that people ride around town on, and less obnoxious. I guess I'm not the only one who feels that way, as I get a ton of smiles and so many people make an effort to move out of my way - much more so than other bikes I see on the road.

I've been super excited for electric motorbikes for years. I nearly bought a Zero FXS/FXE during covid, and then for the last year or two i've been looking hard at a BMW CE04. But they’d change how I ride, and I’d be more hesitant using them around town simply because being almost inaudible makes me nervous in UK traffic. In saying that, I'd be a lot more comfortable riding around places with a decent cycling culture like Cambridge, where people are used to looking around for smaller quieter vehicles, so I guess this too will change over time. E-bikes are great, but there the problem isn't the ride, it's the theft/security/insurance aspects.

So yeah, I guess until a few of these things change, my buzzy Vespa, with its awesome clutch and gears and crappy little drum brake on the front, will continue to be my go-to.

boomskats··on Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
I'm amazed it's not more popular with a name like that!
boomskats··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
Can you run Qwen 3.6 27B on antirez/ds4 now? I thought it was all about the DeepSeek models.
boomskats··on Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
I'm honestly amazed that people are only just figuring this out.

I know that reads like I'm being snarky, but I'm not trying to be. Within the last decade in the UK we have had (among others):

- the 2016 Snoopers' Charter

- the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act

- the 2023 Public Order Act

- the 2023 Online Safety Act

- the 2024 Addendum to the 2016 Snoopers' Charter

Couple that with the whole push to repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, and the fact we've started imprisoning pensioners for holding up signs, and it's really difficult to _not_ see exactly where this leaves us.

I wish I could look away and get on with my life, but I can't - and I'm starting to realise that that is also part of the design. The increasing reluctance to express controversial opinion online isn't an accidental side effect of all of this legislation. It is intended behaviour, the desired outcome.

boomskats··on Local Qwen isn't a worse Opus, it's a different tool
I agree 100%. All of the models do it to some extent after the context gets tired, but opus is the worst and the sneakiest. And even when you do coerce it into doing what you want it feels like something out of r/maliciouscompliance. Much more so than most non-anthropic models. Way more so than codex/gpt or even gemini.

also thanks for my l10spuh :)

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