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gruturo

3,597 karma · joined September 23, 2011

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gruturo··on How do traffic signals work? (2019)
I wouldn't know where to start from.

Most intersections are atrociously designed. Protected left turns everywhere, with their own lane and their own traffic light causing slowdowns and triggering also when nobody needs them.

Many pedestrian crossings could be moved 10m further from an intersection, allowing up to a couple of cars (wishing to turn right) to wait on the pedestrians without blocking all the people who were just going to proceed straight ahead. On the other hand, this problem would often not even occur if we hadn't wasted a lane for a protected left - there now would be a dedicated lane for those going right.

Right-on-red is legally permitted (there's a dedicated street sign for it) but almost never implemented. It's so frustrating.

An overwhelming majority of the traffic lights I encounter is completely non-adaptive. I wait an average of 40 seconds every morning at a specific one which is, in aggregate, causing entire human lifetimes of wasted time on a monthly if not weekly basis.

Zebra crossings are often outfitted with a pedestrian traffic light which is red (rather than off) by default. If the road is completely clear, you could just cross, but no, you must press, wait up to half a minute, and finally it turns to green for you. Now you also stopped a car or 2 which need to wait for your green to finish. If it defaulted to OFF, you could have crossed 20 seconds ago without interrupting anybody's life, and the traffic light would still still be available for elderly or disabled (or whomever wishes to press and wait, while not having it as a default).

...I could continue.

gruturo··on How do traffic signals work? (2019)
Better not, it would just get me even more pissed off at how crude and incompetent German traffic engineering is. Pretty sure some frustrated worker is making it worse on purpose - you don't reach certain peaks of crappiness accidentally, it takes _work_.
gruturo··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
I have an English/Italian bilingual keyboard set up as my default.

Every single f**n time I begin a sentence with "È" (Italian for "she/he/it is") - which is an extremely deliberate gesture - you have to keep the E tapped until the accents pop up - it will immediately correct it back to an unaccented "E". It's nuts.

There is a metric ton of intent behind my selecting, keeping tapped, waiting for the accents, picking one - it's so obviously NOT accidental, and this utterly cretinous piece of junk changes it .

gruturo··on Apple Watch Ultra 4
> You seem to be a little confused about how oxygen toxicity works

Thanks for the condescending tone. Am I?

At 1.4 bar of O2 partial pressure (therefore, with a 21% breathing gas mixture, at around 66m depth), oxygen toxicity causes convulsions and unconsciousness. If someone doesn't grab you and take you up, this likely results in death.

Btw I had to google the precise values and depths to be accurate, but I'm not talking out my ass. I'm a certified CMAS and AOW diver with 80ish logged dives. Hardly a veteran but this was in my certification course and it's a very real thing - enlighten my confused state with your better knowledge please.

gruturo··on Show HN: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
The raise is even worse if you look further back than 2021. Netflix was 7.99 for ages, while the "floor" in 2021 is 13.99. Against the original baseline, the new 19.99 price is not a +43% but a +150%.

Most importantly 13.99 already in 2021 bought LESS than 7.99 or 8.99 bought until a while before. Thanks to the fragmentation, the catalogue was way larger before, and as of 2022 ads were introduced to further insult the customer.

High seas it is.

gruturo··on Apple Watch Ultra 4
A weekend? How about a full week at the absolute bare minimum, if not more.

3 days is a complete joke. Competitors have battery lives measured in weeks rather than days (a famous, and still 100% appropriate, quote by Garmin. Now 5 years old and counting, and the situation is still as ridiculously bad).

Seriously what is it even doing to justify going through the battery so fast? Are they just bad at programming?

gruturo··on Apple Watch Ultra 4
You go significantly deeper? You're aware that shortly past 50mt the partial pressure of oxygen causes neurotoxicity, leading to convulsions and death? Anything happening past those depths involves extremely expensive hardware, custom trimix breathing gases and most importantly a hell of a good reason to even bother doing it - that is NOT the environment for an Apple Watch.
gruturo··on The car industry A/B tested selling a car with and without CarPlay
> Or licensing costs.

Which don't exist. BMW famously tried to blame Apple for trying to charge buyers an annual fee for Carplay and Apple _publicly_ called their shit out. They confirmed they don't charge anything - neither one-off nor recurring. Manufacturers may incur certification costs, there's nothing after that.

Just did a couple quick searches and nothing's changed since then AFAIK

gruturo··on You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It
Shaka, when the walls fell.

I hate the banners and the ugliness too but they are designed precisely to do that, and adtech maneuvers to ensure the hate is directed at the wrong source - the lawmakers instead of the people doing all the spying.

GDPR 1.1 should address all that - no legitimate interest exclusion of any kind, ONE SINGLE CLICK to reject all, no witholding service at ANY degree unless consent is granted, a 3rd option (I offer to pay to not be tracked), and a mandatory disclaimer on the cookie banner saying in clear terms: "Tracking is spying. If we were not tracking you and invading your privacy, this banner would not be necessary at all". Maybe even revive the "do not track" header by mandating that websites react to it accordingly, obey it 100%, not even show a banner if the header already tells them what to do, and ask users if they want this set or not, without a default value which would give an excuse for complaint from the people spying on you.

gruturo··on CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
This is a fantastic idea and I'd like to add my voice to the choir asking you for more information :) Don't let us rebuild everything from scratch if we don't have to
gruturo··on Chinese robot runs 100M sprint quicker than Usain Bolt's world record
> What's next?

Killer robots which can't be outrun and which can give chase through urban landscapes

> What a time to be alive

Indeed.

gruturo··on Unsloth Dynamic 3.0 GGUFs
Yes, and if you have the PCIe lanes (say, an x16 lane - actually delivering 16 lanes! - to each GPU) it's also quite performant - it's called a tensor split in llama-server.

If your motherboard/cpu doesn't actually have those (few do outside some xeons, epycs and threadrippers) you can still do it - it's called a layer split and will work even with 1 lane per GPU. Each GPU will work at its maximum speed, but only 1 will be active at any given instant - imagine a relay race.

(Didn't mention which PCIe generation - obviously the higher the better. At v4 and up, even 8 lanes per GPU would be enough for a performant tensor 4-way split)

Edit: If you have more than 1 user at a time, the GPU can actually all be working all the time, if there are enough parallel requests to serve. But you need enough KV cache for all the sessions you're running in parallel.

gruturo··on Unsloth Dynamic 3.0 GGUFs
The reason for running those insanely low quants is to fit in extremely limited memory budgets. The first thing you sacrifice is speed, then context and accuracy (up to you in which order). IQ2_XXS and below is desperate/proof of concept territory. If you have a spare half gig for the MTP drafter, run a larger quant instead, it will be less incoherent, and damn the speed, it won't be garbage at least. Only around Q4 I'd allocate the comparative luxury of more memory for a speed increase. At least on a dense model. MTP makes a lot more sense (but helps statistically a bit less) on an MoE.

Qwaiting for that 3.8-35B-A3B

gruturo··on Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast
Let's try a thought experiment. It's not subsidized. It's not "worth" the tens of times it costs if accessed through API. Let's drop the subsidy word, they're selling you a product, and they're trying to sell other people a similar product at 30x the price with some excuses. If either (or both) turns out to be unsustainable, they haven't been subsidizing you, they just had a crap business model (or a perfectly good one, if the goal was an inflated valuation, an IPO and then a crash once the losses are socialized).
gruturo··on Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast
> 200usd/mo for Claude gives me tens of thousands of dollars of value.

That may well be true, but the same tens of thousands of dollars of value can be purchased for a fraction of the 200usd Anthropic asks.... therefore why not?

And even beyond pure monetary considerations, it often refuses to help as soon as its trigger happy safeguards kick in, can't debug a lot of code before it decides to stop helping IME.

gruturo··on Asus Bike Booster
You mean ebikes in general? I use one to commute to work in good weather. It's 8km and I'd be quite sweaty and impresentable for my work day without electric assist. In the evening I'm happy to ride back home with minimal or zero assist as my shower's waiting for me once I arrive.
gruturo··on Europe's scorched landscapes seen from space after summer heatwaves
Much of what you suggest is a drop in the ocean and requires people's habits to change in ways people are not happy to listen to - and - again - it's a drop in the ocean. Go vegetarian, it helps the environment - but don't expect anyone to follow, and don't expect it to mean anything.

Massive electrification - production (solar+wind+storage) and usage (EVs, as people won't stop driving no matter what, and heat pump heating and cooling) can be successfully driven with incentives and would have meaningful impact. People love to save money without losing comfort, incentives are ultimately budget neutral on a timescale, and for Europe this also ties into strategic energy sovereignty which is a nice added driver. Vote out and call out politicians not prioritizing this.

Bonus, you get to call them unpatriotic as they reinforce dependence on people who we're no longer on friendly terms with (no matter whether you look west or east)

gruturo··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
They do slow down the metabolism, yes.

They seem to also act on some reward mechanism - making some stuff (not just food. Alcohol, gambling, porn, smoking, other drugs have anecdotally been reported to feel less attractive / addictive) have a reduced pull on one's will. They also measurably delay gastric emptying - to the point that some medicines, meant to be taken on an empty stomach, are not safe to take within up to 3 hours from the last meal, compared to one hour or so for other people.

gruturo··on Heart aerospace completes first flight of largest electric aircraft
I'm guessing a 1km long catapult - if not 2km - would be really really tricky. Maybe a long winch with a super super super safe way to detach it as soon as the nose is pointing up?

But, regardless, it's actually shorter than I thought! Although 1G forward acceleration is still quite a bit. Imagine elderly passengers with osteoporosis... and the lawsuits.

gruturo··on Heart aerospace completes first flight of largest electric aircraft
Pretty sure passengers will object to being catapulted. Kids may love it though.

But realistically you're either imparting 2G and hurting 10% of the passengers, or you may as well not bother with one. The "JATO-like" solution of a modular prop+battery unit giving you a takeoff+climb boost for 10 minutes and then heading back to the airport seems less objectionable.

gruturo··on GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities
Yes experienced investors will profit from it and leave the general public holding the bag, that's the plan I'm afraid.
gruturo··on GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities
This. People WANT to work on this stuff. And having skilled workers is a precious advantage.
gruturo··on GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities
No time like the present to pull out and reduce your exposure. I brought this up in my employer's forums 4 months ago and honestly it's been clear even before then. In particular, the upcoming IPOs of both oAI and Anthropic will likely be disastrous for the public - the floor is falling from under them and I don't know if they can be scrappy and work with fewer resources - their internal culture may not support this. We all knew in our hearts they're a commodity - just see how easily you can switch between the 2 of them - and now there are 10 more options costing a fraction.

When Xi Jinping did the announcement of their open weights push, they might as well cancelled their IPOs....

gruturo··on Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
Absolutely valid point! I am equally horrified by the Mac app being also this level of bloated. Apple does not get a free pass for this shit, especially as they market an 8GB laptop in 2026 insisting this is enough - least they could do is release a GB or 2 by paring down the most wasteful apps.
gruturo··on Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
Assuming the app even works - since we're talking weather, allow me to offer an XKCD

https://xkcd.com/937/

gruturo··on Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
You're off by 2 orders of magnitude if you think that a not completely incompetently coded weather app genuinely needs that kind of resources - even allowing for aesthetic choices and modern UX patterns.
gruturo··on Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
That doesn't take away at all from the complete absurdity of this level of bloat. How is it not 450kB? Fine, a few high res icons and multi language support, let's make it 4MB, because to do it in 1 would take skilled coders.
gruturo··on Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
In the era of coding with frontier LLMs, it should take Microsoft 20 junior engineers, a couple seniors, a token budget and a month or two to fix most of this shit by building lean, native apps. Given that they can obviously spare this kind of resourcing, I truly wonder why they won't. Not that I give a crap - removed the last windows machine from my home ages ago at this point.
gruturo··on Reviving a four year old reMarkable 2
> Maybe other tablets are like that too, to be honest I'm too poor to swing the 700-1000$ for what I can cover with an paper note pad (with the bonus of being able to comfortably sit my coffee cup on it, use any pen or pencil, rip pages out, drop it, forget it somewhere, etc etc) to buy one but at least it seems like a product I would support.

I have good news: they (RM2s) are often available on ebay for much less. People buy them thinking they're getting something like an android tablet, but they do nothing out of the box apart from showing docs and taking notes. Sometimes they're returned immediately for a full refund, but often they sit in a drawer, untouched, till they get offloaded on ebay for - comparatively - peanuts, letting us scoop them up and breathe new life into them (koreader rocks, to start with).

gruturo··on SAP stops most travel and hiring because of AI's soaring cost
Would a technology famous for hallucinating data often enough, and in many context unable to guarantee it won't assume and hallucinate when it feels "confident enough" despite a robust system prompt, be really considered for a "system of record for procurement/production" usage?

(yes yes RAG exists)

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