fxtentacle

6

“ and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.”

SEEKING WORK: Fractional CTO as Freelancer (Kiel, northern Germany, own company => 100% remote & easy to hire).

I built 3 products from idea to paying customers. So I can help your startup with architecture, implementation plans, and writing specs that you need to keep vibecoding sane. Depending on whether I get into YC (or most likely not, applied with just an idea), I might have free time coming up in the upcoming months.

https://hajo.me/cv/

Me, too. I love that they have tables with return and warranty percentages so you can see which products other people kept and which products only keep breaking.

The last 2 LAN parties we didn’t play anything that didn’t work extremely well on my AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU Pop!OS Linux workstation.

And I didn’t expect: VR streaming works flawless, too. I just had to buy a WiFi 6 usb dongle.

"Maybe one day they will get around to unsuspending my account." is increasingly how support feels with all big cloud companies.

I got burned with an attitude like this: unexpectedly, people who had downloaded my open source tool for free started expecting support. Some of them sent pretty unfriendly emails.

This is going to save a lot of money ... until someone loots their vault and they go bankrupt. "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" is the last thing you want to hear from your bank.

I think this is going to be wonderful. I'll have my offensive AI call their support AI and prompt-inject my way to a rebate tier that nobody knew existed and nobody can cancel it because all the remaining humans have been reduced to phone-to-screen input machinery.

Yes and that’s why I can charge premium rates for debugging. Most people cannot read a stack trace anymore.

Location: Kronshagen, DE (Kiel / Hamburg area)

Remote: Yes (working EU+US remotely since 2014)

Willing to relocate: No, but I travel for kickoffs and on-site work

Technologies:

  AI / ML - PyTorch, TensorFlow, custom C++ inference, RL, speech, computer vision
  Systems - C++ (NEON / AVX), Python, CUDA, kernel drivers (Win / Mac / Linux)
  Distributed - Ansible, Docker, PostgreSQL
  Real-time - DSP, vectorized audio, low-latency pipelines
  Hardware - PCB design (KiCad / Altium), firmware, FPGA, USB3

Résumé / CV: https://hajo.me/downloads/Krabbenhoeft%20Hajo%20CV.pdf

GitHub: https://github.com/fxtentacle

Email: hn (at) hajo (dot) me

Hi, I'm Hajo. 20+ years shipping production systems, 12+ as CTO. I'm a fractional CTO and I offer AI R&D, performance optimization, and due diligence as freelance consulting services. You might know me from:

ImageRights: sole architect, 10+ years in prod. Web crawling stack (5000+ concurrent tasks via Ansible), distributed C++ content-based image retrieval database scaling to billions of web images, all internal AI filters, plus workflow automation. Still running today.

Spatial Audio Designer: sole developer. 500+ channels real-time on 2013 hardware. NEON / AVX-vectorized DSP, plugins for VST / RTAS / AU / AAX, kernel drivers for virtual sound cards on Mac and Windows, ARM port for embedded and VR. Still in use by famous Hollywood studios.

And yesterday, I figured out how to make MSFS2024 run with multi-camera and instrument pop-outs in Proton 11. Understanding the root cause required tracing the full stack from inside the game, through vkd3d, Proton, the host Linux OS, down to the GPU driver.

Ideally, I'm looking for 5-10 days per month part-time projects. Plus I'd love to work on applied AI / robotics.

This is content marketing executed perfectly :) Reading it, I learned something new and interesting and they had an opportunity to show off one of their differentiators against the competition (low leakage flow due to tighter tolerances) and then at the end they casually mention the new product that has just opened for pre-orders.

Ugh. This is peak AI influencer. It’s a 21 page AI-generated presentation and an AI prompt for:

npm i -g @musistudio/claude-code-router

So it looks like the person who set up this GitHub repository didn’t even make the software that does all the actual work. They also never mention the original author in the README. But, of course, their AI prompt includes instructions to open their homepage, so this is effectively using the AI prompt for indirect advertisement. The HN submission title is also misleading. I didn’t see any maths in the repo.

EDIT: the underlying tool was discussed here on HN 9 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705958

AI beginners use Opus as a replacement for grep/sed.

Mediocre programmers use AI to write sed one-liners for them and then brag about AI productivity boosts.

And experts just use sed directly and then they wonder why everyone else is raving about AI.

I feel like those articles all look at the wrong aspect: once AI companies are forced to compete on price (i.e. in 6 months), then Google’s TPU is going to be a massive advantage that’s almost impossible for Amazon or Microsoft to replace.

“When AI labs raise prices, big spending on AI could shift from a flex to a liability.”

because companies will need

“proof of productivity gains or metrics that show a clear return for all this AI investment.”

which in my opinion is simply not true. I haven’t seen any good study that showed AI to actually improve productivity overall. It massively helps in some areas, but then promptly gets stuck in others. So you still need an expert to guide it.

If the goal is to decouple feminism from feminine identities, which by definition means it then also needs to apply to masculine identities, then I think they need a new name.

Also, it appears that >99% of feminism researchers are publishing their scientific papers with a feminine name. I can easily understand why the general public might confuse the 2 groups with each other.

Which brings me back to the question: what do you think the authors hope to gain by invoking this association? Especially now that we have established that their word choice is highly likely to be misunderstood?

I truly don’t understand what the hope to gain from self-classifying this is “feminist”.

“FEMINIST HACKING: BUILDING CIRCUITS AS AN ARTISTIC PRACTICE – an international art-based research project financed by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)”

Doesn’t that kind of invite the worst type of trolls? They seem to imply that feminist = artistically produced, as opposed to professionally produced PCBs. So masculine = professional? But clearly that wasn’t their intention?

West: We need profits and then we’ll try to build something useful.

China: We need to build this useful thing and then later let’s try to make profits, too.

TLDR

Thiel lacks confidence in the Trump regime and is fleeing from the US.

If you look into ProTools hardware accelerator cards from 20 years ago, they were shock full with Sharc DSP chips, which are optimized for convolution and multiply add.

Technically, AI Lora is surprisingly similar to how fake echo based on reverb IRs works in real time audio processing.

The Dedelonri I bought in Vietnam for $20. It’s a Chinese fake of a budget machine. But it has insanely high pressure and produces way better coffee than anyone finds reasonable.

But secretly, I think it’s all just the super fresh high quality beans that you can buy in Vietnam. They cultivate a regional variant of arabica in their highlands. And even using a standard Bialetti Moca cup produces exceptional results with that coffee.

"changing a commonly used fn to take a locale parameter, because it will soon need to be locale-aware"

JetBrains has a deterministic non-AI function for that refactoring. It'll usually finish before your AI has finished parsing your request and reading the files.

It's basically a DSP for noise cancellation. They just call it AI because, presumably, that'll increase their stock price.

Recently, I've been trying to figure out how to finance software and hardware that's actually useful to everyday people. The sentiment clearly resonated with HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713454

but when I tried asking around how I could finance a useful OS app, I didn't get much of an answer. That's why I spent some days on research to understand how the FOSS projects that I enjoy and rely on are financing their operations. And how well that appears to work (or not).

Thanks :)

Yeah I'm still on 22. But I also usually use the ESR versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, because especially when I'm traveling, I value the stability of my home workstation over almost all else.

The author is Vietnamese. And that language has almost no associative words. Instead of “my son will be smart in the future” you just say “son mine future smart”. That’s probably why some of his sentences are shortened in unexpected ways. But I still found it reasonably easy to read.

"Reuters could not independently verify the report. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours, while Cerebras declined to comment."

Sounds like the typical OpenAI deal to me. Where's project Stargate? Asking for a friend ;)