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floathub

869 karma · joined May 30, 2016

Cofounder of Modiot Labs & FloatHub | modiot.com | floathub.com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/floathub; my proof: https://keybase.io/floathub/sigs/qGN3TTQyNa8m9BSRQT732uRjNJdv2Y67rjpkx4tXHFI ]

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floathub··on The Next 3x in Inference Won't Come from Faster Kernels
One unique idea for solving the chip shortage: pack more models into each existing GPU by having them share the resources. :-)
floathub··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
He is charged with obstruction, but under domestic terrorism (as defined by a national security presidential memorandum).
floathub··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
According to the article, he was actually using GrapheneOS and gave the border official the Duress PIN. So I guess technically it was the official that erased the data :-)
floathub··on Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain
Depends on what qualifies as a password "manager", but I've been using pass (https://www.passwordstore.org/) for years on multiple desktops, and have recently added iOS app sepass to my setup (https://sepass.modiot.com/).

Quite complicated to get it all setup (definitely not for non-technical users), but both are GPL and I now have all my passwords available with hardware protection (yubikey on desktop, secure enclave on iOS) in all locations.

floathub··on In Emacs, Everything Looks Like a Service
Came across this recently, which I find is a good and short intro to Emacs for people who don't use it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJZDmO5yOxE

floathub··on Show HN: Using the secure enclave in a pass/password-store iOS client
Hi HN. We use YubiKeys on desktops/laptops with pass/password-store, and have been fiddling with various ways to get them to work on our phones and tablets for a long time. Sort of dawned on us that since the Apple secure enclave gives the same sort of "non-extractable" protection as a YubiKey does, we could just use that. Paired with touch/face-id, seems like a pretty good YubiKey alternative for a mobile app. Since we could not find an iOS password-store client that uses the secure enclave, we wrote one.

Bit of a fiddly setup process (see https://github.com/modiotlabs/sepass#using-the-app), but otherwise we're finding it very useful.

Really appreciate any feedback on this, especially potential vulnerabilities or weak approaches we are taking. We are not full-time cryptography/security experts, so would particularly like to see a hearty critique of how we've gone about this from anyone who is.

floathub··on What's so special about Emacs? [video]
Thanks.

Not the original author, but I agree completely with the sentiment that it is good way to get across what's special about Emacs in a relatively short amount of time.

floathub··on 10Gb/s Ethernet: what I did to get it working in my home
It's wild to me Time Machine works on your network. Are you just doing "first backups" over and over again, or have you somehow achieved the very rare state where Time Machine can run for, say, a week at a time without falling over?

Sorry, this is snarky and off topic, but I'm nostalgic for the days when Time Machine "just worked".

floathub··on Emacs-libgterm: Terminal emulator for Emacs using libghostty-vt
And then in vim you can spawn a shell to run ... oh, never mind.
floathub··on Coding agents could make free software matter again
Free software has never mattered more.

All the infrastructure that runs the whole AI-over-the-internet juggernaut is essentially all open source.

Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc., etc., etc. And one can easily see a day where something like a local sort Claude Code talking to Open Weight and Open Source models is the core dev tool.

floathub··on How the world’s first electric grid was built
The power generated from Niagara river stations was traveling on an international "grid" between Canada and the US in the late 1890s.
floathub··on Malus – Clean Room as a Service
Man, how could they not wait 2.5 weeks until April 1 !!!
floathub··on The dead Internet is not a theory anymore
Emacs will solve this too:

https://github.com/tanrax/org-social

:-)

floathub··on Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e
This may help, it has an example pizauth config (scroll down to "Authenticating with pass and pizauth"):

https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html

floathub··on Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e
This another similar resource with some additional stuff about using mu4e-org:

https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html

floathub··on EmacsConf 2025
The "watch" method is so awesome:

    mpv https://live0.emacsconf.org/gen.webm
floathub··on Editing Code in Emacs
I used Emacs for several years before I discovered "project" (it's built in). If you're navigating dired trees or similar to find files or grep for strings in groups of files, this is like magic:

C-x p f (find any file in the current "project", e.g. git repo)

C-x p v (grep the whole project super fast)

It's embarrassing how long it took me to realize it was there all along. :-)

floathub··on The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Thank you, that is greatly appreciated.
floathub··on AI company files for bankruptcy after being exposed as 700 Indian engineers
Apparently Microsoft put half a billion dollars into this.
floathub··on The Gmail app will now create AI summaries
Keep going. Here's the next step after Thunderbird:

https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html

(Hint: Emacs)

:-)

floathub··on The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

  > npx create-expo-app@latest --template blank HelloWorldExpoReact

  > du -h HelloWorldExpoReact/
258M! A quarter of a gigabyte for a HelloWorld example. Sheesh.
floathub··on Starcloud
Canadian north makes sense (very cheap electricity, ridiculously easy heat management).

Space? I really don't get it.

floathub··on Minimum Viable Blog
If you're already using Emacs and/or org mode, then this is a useful guide to setting up a blog/site that is super easy to maintain/push/etc, including free hosting at github with a custom domain name:

https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/how.html

floathub··on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
The answer, as always is Emacs :-)

With mu4e (an Emacs package), you can have lightning fast searching across multiple mail accounts. And with a bit of work (https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html) it will happily interoperate with Microsoft Exchange systems that require the OATH2 dance.

floathub··on Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model
If you enter:

A farmer has a boat that can transfer up to 500 people or animals. He has a chicken, his dog, his wife, a small leprechaun, a large leprechaun, two ham sandwiches, and a copy of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance (the one with the tiled cover). How can he get them all across the river?

You will get a very detailed answer that goes on for several paragraphs that totally misses the point that there is no challenge here.

floathub··on Atuin Desktop: Runbooks That Run
Thanks for making the presentation. I found it very useful when I first started messing around with babel, and I still come back to it from time to time.
floathub··on Atuin Desktop: Runbooks That Run
For anyone emacs-curious, you can do a similar thing with org-babel

You can have a plaintext file which is also the program which is also the documentation/notebook/website/etc. It's extremely powerful, and is a compelling example of literate programming.

A good take on it here: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2019/program/proposa...

floathub··on Tunarr: Create and configure live TV channels from media on your servers
Now if you set up some DVR software to record the channel ...
floathub··on The New Three-Tier Application
To iterate is human.
floathub··on Notebooks as reusable Python programs
One approach to this is org-mode with babel.

You can have a plaintext file which is also the program which is also the documentation/notebook/website/etc. It's extremely powerful, and is a compelling example of literate programming.

Decent overview here: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2022/08/02/org-babel-vs-jupyt...

[edit: better link]

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