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cobbzilla

3,330 karma · joined May 10, 2013

all my comments have 0% ai/llm included
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cobbzilla··on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America
Sure the school board parents are politicians too, they care about kids, no disagreement.

If you’d stop straw-manning me for a moment you might notice you still misunderstand my point.

cobbzilla··on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America
> You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?

I just said the opposite. I can imagine many people genuinely caring for a child that isn’t their own.

I am skeptical when a politician who does not know my children claims to care about them.

To borrow an LLMism: It’s not cynicism, it’s the reality of history. We the people have been duped many times over. Caveat Emptor.

cobbzilla··on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America
Yes it’s normal to worry about your kids. It’s normal for family and friends to worry about your kids.

When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!

cobbzilla··on The Valley of Webhooks
The proposed “feed” solution is functionally indistinguishable from incremental reconciliation.

The article presents a good framing and is well-written, but doesn’t really propose anything new.

cobbzilla··on What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?
whatever it is, it will be heavily skewed in favor of whatever there is a lot of examples of. AI could bolt together many cookie-cutter pieces into a very large YOLO system.

The trouble comes when you now want that system to do something unique for your business, and those ripple effects through the entire system you didn’t design become very painful.

cobbzilla··on How to survive boiling water
> but gotta love me some Buddhist pedantry y’all can spar with the best

above comment == Q.E.D.

cobbzilla··on Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up
This “data driven” science approach sure looks like empiricism from a distance. What am I missing?
cobbzilla··on A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
California has codified a water caste system. In 2015 (my last experience with this), citizens were ordered to cut water use 25% while ~400 pre-1914 claimants with magical "senior water rights" took 90% of the water. [1][2]

We conserved, rates still rose, f*ck the poor the most, so that select farmers can use however much water they want. During a drought. As allowed and protected by law.

[1]: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/prog...

[2]: https://archive.gov.ca.gov/archive/gov39/2015/04/01/news1891...

cobbzilla··on How to survive boiling water
it’s a loose usage. necessary but not sufficient type of thing. if all your DNA instantly disintegrated, the process ends quickly, you are not you in many senses of the word. to preserve the artifact of DNA is to ensure (some of) the process continues uninterrupted; at least a few major failure modes of “the end of you” are mitigated. but gotta love me some Buddhist pedantry y’all can spar with the best
cobbzilla··on Superlogical
I use and prefer screen

I use tmux on windows and elsewhere when I must

They both have pluses and minuses, neither is perfect and both (yes even tmux) seem “old” in today’s world

There is definitely room for a next gen terminal multiplexer with all the built-in goodies we all want

I signed up

cobbzilla··on LLM Honeypot
i love this. i wistfully clicked the web ring links and was sad to find they were self-refs. in another universe (or this universe in the near future?) there is a legit web ring of this content.
cobbzilla··on How to survive boiling water
It is in fact how Deinococcus radiodurans works:

    Deinococcus radiodurans has a unique quality in which it can repair both single- and double-stranded DNA. When damage is apparent to the cell, it brings the damaged DNA into a compartmental ring-like structure where the DNA is repaired, and then is able to fuse the nucleoids from the outside of the compartment with the damaged DNA.
cobbzilla··on How to survive boiling water
I want this mutation. You have little nano-crawlers going up and down your DNA strands fixing problems. It’s like ECC RAM for the essence of YOU. And you’re basically immune to cancer.
cobbzilla··on Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace
Yes, what other opex is there? It will have good ventilation, I’m not worried about cooling.
cobbzilla··on Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace
At my house. I have 5Gbps fiber and could pay for 10 or 25 if I need it.
cobbzilla··on Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace
I’ve priced it out: max $135/month to run a dual Xeon 2U server with 3T RAM & 2x 22 core Xeon Gold. It’s the 2x 750W power supplies that ultimately determine opex. My power costs $0.124/kWh, the $135 assumes drawing maximum power continuously, and in that case, I can probably offset my heating bill a little bit in the winter, so maybe effectively a little bit lower.

I don’t know if that’s 100x more than I’d pay (opex-wise) with an nvidia setup, but I can say the one-time capex is a great deal cheaper. Avoiding VRAM and DDR5 (fast DDR4 should be OK) are the biggest cost savers. ECC RAM is worth the extra price. General datacenter-quality hardware has less price sensitivity, and plenty of bang for your buck.

cobbzilla··on The lost joy of music piracy
311 may have said it best ~33 years ago:

    I tell you what's wrong to me
    The industry's ability to manufacture stars
    They churn them out like Iwo Jima makes cars
    But the blame lies not with those suits for trying
    It's the sheep that keep on buying that soulless crap
    Whatever they put in front of ya
    The hysteria of America
cobbzilla··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
If you mean being forced to overpay for no-longer-SOTA closed models, that’s I guess the protectionist motive here: impossible to enforce, enforcement uneven and political, illegality rampant, I suppose all by design too. I’d say it’s brilliant if it weren’t so evil. I have hope saner minds will prevail.
cobbzilla··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
How do you do that without banning the model itself.

It doesn't matter who can or can't run it.

They are trying to ban something that can be represented entirely by a sequence of bytes. An illegal number, like the DeCSS key.

The fact that money is involved does not change the free speech aspects. This isn't CSAM or torture porn. It's data.

cobbzilla··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
The AI rigs cost money, sure. But no one is talking about regulating those. We are talking about regulating models, which do have zero cost of reproduction.

It’s like banning the leaked DeCSS key. Good luck.

cobbzilla··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
The first token on a new AI rig costs $X (full capex cost) then every token after that costs virtually zero. Over time the cost/token trends towards zero (modulo opex). That said, AI does have higher opex than general SaaS so it can’t get as close to zero.

But that’s kind of a different question, the running of some service. The “product”, the model, is a collection of files. The “manufacturing” required to add another customer is “send them the files” and has ~zero marginal cost.

cobbzilla··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
I can understand (not necessarily defend) protectionism for products with nonzero manufacturing cost and some required physical size and such.

I am befuddled when the same policies are applied to products with marginally zero manufacturing cost, no real physical size, and such. Regulating ideas is hard folks.

cobbzilla··on Making
No, the court case you’re thinking of was when someone tried to say the AI itself had the copyright ownership. That’s not allowed (at least in the US), the copyright owner must always be a human. This doesn’t mean that a human cannot copyright AI-directed works.
cobbzilla··on Everyone should know SIMD
If you’re processing N things at a time and your “scalar tail” is N-1 why can’t you put in a dummy value for the last entry, run one last SIMD iteration, and discard the dummy return value?
cobbzilla··on ECC and DDR5
Very good point. It’s nontrivial but not impossible to determine this, I am very curious!

One nightmare scenario is a 3-bit error being detected as a correctable 1-bit error upstream, resulting in data corruption. I agree it’d be really nice to know that could never happen!

cobbzilla··on The Kimi K3 Moment
> they could just use a regex to change Claude to Kimi in their distillation pipeline!

Jean-Kimi Van Damme would like to have a word with you.

cobbzilla··on Thanks HN for 15 years of support and helping me find my life's work
“No surprises” is an effective shorthand for “manage expectations”

Folks who don’t understand that are either not hired or don’t last long. Pedants won’t get past the phone screen.

cobbzilla··on Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners
Yes, if the Cro-Magnons had guns they’d say “wow, hunting meat is WAY easier” and then experience massive-scale death in the future. But that kinda happened anyway in various places, just using much more primitive tools. Humans gonna human.
cobbzilla··on The lost joy of music piracy
+1 good call out. Definitely I love some SomaFM stations!
cobbzilla··on The lost joy of music piracy
yes definitely, don’t even need a VPN. I can stream/listen from anywhere in the world on radio.garden

I’m sorry the UK cripples your streaming. That really sucks.

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