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borisk

586 karma · joined April 16, 2010

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borisk··on Nvidia on NixOS WSL – Ollama up 24/7 on your gaming PC
Do you have any numbers to back that statement up?

E.g. I have solar panels and a home battery and pay less than a $100 a year for electricity.

borisk··on Nvidia on NixOS WSL – Ollama up 24/7 on your gaming PC
How is it a waste of money if a lot of people, including the author of the article, already have an nVidia GPU in their PC?

Running locally has a lot of advantages - privacy, getting to learn how to run LLMs, not having to deal with quotas, logins, outages.

borisk··on How new US tariffs are forcing Europe to rethink its entire tech stack
EU, UK, Switzerland, Norway have huge government innovation funds. Unfortunately they are mostly given to manage to politicians who are loyal, but not very bright, and possibly corrupt.

Now would be a perfect time to take advantage of the stupidity of Trump and channel these government investments into building European infrastructure providers (cloud and AI), but I very much doubt this will happen.

Without goverment support there is just no way in Europe to raise the capital that is required to compete with the American big tech.

EU assigned as commisioner of Startups, Research and Innovation a bulgarian politician called Ekaterina Zaharieva. Bulgaria is the poorest member of EU - shows you how much EU values startups, research and innovation.

On top of that Zaharieva is a member of the political party Gerb, well known for corruption. A few years ago somebody took pictures of their leader sleeping in his bedroom, surrounded with gold bars and stacks of euros. An ex-financial minister from Gerb is sanctioned for corruption under the Magnitsky Act.

borisk··on Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
My guess is the battery will come with some sort of remotely controlled switch that disconnects the house from the grid, before the battery starts supplying power.
borisk··on Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
This is an interesting idea and I wish you a good luck building a profitable business around it.

Before starting to apply voltage to a home electric gird, I guess you need to disconnect it from the central grid - how do you do that? Or do you detect when the grid goes down and comes back up?

borisk··on Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)
What do you think will happen with humans when there are a trillion agents with "god like AI" out there?
borisk··on You're Worrying About the Wrong EV Batteries
The big, expensive batteries are dead reliable. It's the puny 12-volts that are causing problems.
borisk··on Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)
"Change is inevitable. You can’t stop the railroad as they used to say. It’s going to kill some jobs but not all of them."

I personally don't worry about jobs. AI is progressing very fast (there are a lof of smart folks working on it, there are a ton of money invested and there's a lot of demand from businesses, governments and individuals). Human inteligence stays the same. I think it's likely that sometime soon AI models will become more inteligent than an average human. And then more inteligent than the smartest human. And then more inteligent than the whole human race combined.

Let's say some worms 600 million years ago could think. And they consider should they kill all mutants and stay forever the pinnacle of evolution as they are or allow some of them to evolve into fish, and then mammals and eventually inteligent humans. I think we are in a position like this - we are currently the pinacle of "creation" in the known universe - do we want to stay this way - by blocking AGI progress, or do we want to allow minds far greater than us to evolve from current LLMs at the cost of probable human extinction eventually.

borisk··on NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon
Boeing has been very slow at raising salaries and contract rates in the last 15 years or so. That lead to a lot of the best engineers, managers and technicians leaving.
borisk··on Ask HN: Has anyone been able to contact Cloudflare Support in the last 5 days?
Apparently a few CF customers got emails last week saying that CF is investigating a customer data leak. Wonder if it has something to do with the lack of response from support.
borisk··on Intel's lunar lake laptops won't let you upgrade your RAM. Here's why thats fine
DDR5 has a bit of ECC built in, but yeah - one of the major problems that Intel created is using ECC RAM support as a feature to sell their Xeon line of processors and so living 99% of the desktop users without ECC.
borisk··on Intel's lunar lake laptops won't let you upgrade your RAM. Here's why thats fine
SoC RAM let's the vendor abuse the user. The 8GB needed to go from 8GB to 16GB on a MacBook Air cost Apple less than $10, but it charges the customer extra $200 for it.

Don't see how Apple makes more money is a good thing - it means millions of their clients have less money left.

borisk··on Construction of the 4th Chinese aircraft carrier has reportedly started
So if China tries to take Taiwan by military force, how do you think it will end?
borisk··on Intel's lunar lake laptops won't let you upgrade your RAM. Here's why thats fine
I need 64GB, this Intel new generation will be useless to me. I think Dell XPS is the only laptop with Qualcomm Snapdragon X that offers 64GB currently.

I see upgradable RAM as on of the big advantages of x64 laptops over Apple and Qualcomm. Not sure Intel's current strategy to emulate their competitors, rather than play to it's own strong points is a good one.

borisk··on Ask HN: Does ChatGPT/AI enable anyone to code?
Give it a try :)

I think it's early days and whyle AI can write code to deliver features it's not perfect. So someone who knows how to write code, deploy software has a basic understanding of software architecture and cyber security will have a lot more luck than someone who has to run everything through the AI.

It's similar to how computers in chess worked. At one point (around the 90s and 00s) computers could play very good chess, but they had weak spots. So the best chess player in the world was a team of humans and computers. But eventually computers got better and no longer needed any human help. I think a similar scenario may play with software development, and we're still not at the place where an AI can everything without technical input from a human.

borisk··on Construction of the 4th Chinese aircraft carrier has reportedly started
Very interesting. Wonder what does building an aircraft carrier fleet say about China's military priorities. Are they more focused on occupying Taiwan, or on keeping the Malacca Straight open for commerce, or on power projection across the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
borisk··on Meta has suspended my Facebook account
Upvoted your post - hopefully someone working for Meta sees it and decides to help you.

Other than that, you can just stop using FB :)

borisk··on Fresh water on Earth emerged 500M years earlier than previously thought
Did some of the last Norse join the Inuit?
borisk··on Two lifeforms merge in once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event
The first symbiotic event was a million times harder than the 2nd or the 3rd. The first time the host had the extremely hard task of dealing with any DNA and RNA produced by the guest during it's life and death. The host had to evolve stuff like a cell nucleaus and sex to live through it and alternative splicing to deal with the fact that all it's genes were damaged by selfish genetic elements that came from the guest. Integrating any later symbionts is still hard, but not nearly as hard.

It's possible that the first symbiosis that let to the origin of the eukaryotes is not a one in a billion years event, but one in a trillion or one in 10^20 years or ever rarer. That is it may be that in a billion planets with simple life forms only one "creates" complex life like animals. It can be the great filter that leads to the Fermi paradox.

borisk··on Anandtech's Detailed WP7 Review
Without license one also loses the name 'Android', the good deal on Google Ads and access to the store. All telecoms and big phone companies do pay the fee.
borisk··on Anandtech's Detailed WP7 Review
>> 4. I don't think the browser on WP7 is based on IE7 just for numbers to match. And this give me little hope there will be quick improvement in that area.

It is based on code from deskotop IE6 and 7: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10452710-56.html

borisk··on Anandtech's Detailed WP7 Review
>> 3. Consider a different revenue model. Charging $15 a copy to OEMs is a tall order, particularly when the competition is free (Android).

Android licence is around $10 per phone: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20101014PD213.html

borisk··on Taiwan vendors to offer dual-platform tablet PCs due to Wintel market status
There are quite a few ARM/Windows CE netbooks designed in China. Ubuntu clones are available for most of them.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.42015

http://www.dealextreme.com/search.dx/search.netbook

borisk··on Xerox Alto for sale on eBay
Xerox suits decided it won't sell.
borisk··on Why don't we use functional programming languages more? (2004)
"Started as Caml.NET, with a first preview release of F# compiler in 2002/2003."

http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/apl/2009-2010/slide...

borisk··on Why don't we use functional programming languages more? (2004)
F# was first released in 2002.
borisk··on World's Richest Man: 'Charity Doesn't Solve Anything'
Right, Bill Gates - the inventor of the PC, word processing, electronic spreadsheets and more ...
borisk··on [dead]
Give a presentation at a Ruby conference, put photoshoped images of Matt Aimonetti and DHH as pr0n stars on each of your slides, problem solved ;-)
borisk··on REST in peace, SOAP
SOAP has 50x the features of REST. Even most REST advocates will accept that there are scenarios, where it's better to use SOAP. If you need complex security, reliability, addressing, etc. why not let Microsoft/IBM/Oracle do the dirty work?
borisk··on Large study shows females are equal to males in math skills
Looking at the winners of this year Indian National Mathematical Olympiad ( http://www.isical.ac.in/~rmo/inmo10_list.pdf ) there are 2 girls and 33 boys.
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