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isomorphic

1,413 karma · joined November 12, 2011

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isomorphic··on Show HN: Strata – an expressive semantic layer that can say no to your LLM
Go up a level in the URL, or click on the logo in the upper-left on the "try" page the post links to.

https://strata.do/

isomorphic··on T. Rex Had a Body Temperature of 97°F
https://archive.is/20260916181240/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

(Even the NY Times gift link requires a login.)

isomorphic··on Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes
I think GP and TFA mean that some of the states are afraid of public-key disclosure.
isomorphic··on The Painful Truth: The RAM Crisis Is Only Just the Beginning
Well, you know what they say. The best time to blow tens of billions you might never get back on a risky memory fab in your home country is ten years ago. The second best time is today!
isomorphic··on The ColorChecker, photography's most important 24 squares, turns 50
The colors may also fade/drift upon exposure to air and humidity, not just light.
isomorphic··on The ColorChecker, photography's most important 24 squares, turns 50
That lander had all sorts of fiddly protrusions on it, so the multiple charts could have been to avoid self-shadowing all of them. Or they were worried about chart stability after shipping it across interplanetary space. Or the test targets were for angles for multiple cameras?
isomorphic··on Whistle Synth Mac App
Laurie Anderson, with some of her bespoke live MIDI instruments (no actual cutlery AFAIK), got pretty close.
isomorphic··on The ColorChecker, photography's most important 24 squares, turns 50
These are great, even for manually-adjusted color workflows.

Fun fact, though: You have to replace them every couple of years (or sooner) because no pigment/dye is stable, especially if exposed to bright light.

Having a test shot with one of these in it saves you untold amounts of pain later.

isomorphic··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
We're still doing it! You've just described the AI labs: They'll trade safety / alignment for +1~2% of any positive metric, any day of the week.

The "ethical" employees will think they'll solve the problem later. The unethical ones won't be encumbered by such thoughts in the first place.

isomorphic··on Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle
I've heard this referred to as a "dark sector", or "hidden sector":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_sector

The scary thought is that, were it true that there is voluminous richly-interacting dark matter, we would be the actual dark sector.

isomorphic··on CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
Sigh. I want my damn em dash back. I had the Mac key combo memorized back when the phrase "AI winter" was coined. Now everyone thinks it's AI slop.
isomorphic··on Qwen 3.8 27B
No agentic harness; I just prompted literally "svg owl" into LM Studio 0.4.21+2. macOS Tahoe 26.6.1, Mac mini M4 Pro (14 core, 20 graphics cores) 64GB RAM. (I put the machine config so the 17m12s of thinking has some context.) It got about 12.75 tok/s and used 21,769 tokens.

For comparison's sake, Qwen 3.6 35B A3B MLX, same prompt, same machine, thought for 1.59 seconds, used 2,398 tokens, and hit 80.83 tok/s. It actually output just a straight SVG file of an owl (not a bad owl either!), whereas Qwen 3.8 27B spent a zillion times longer gold-plating everything and output HTML+JS+SVG with interactive animation, sound, etc., etc.

isomorphic··on Qwen 3.8 27B
"inclined to overthinking," holy cats you're not kidding! On a Mac mini M4 Pro 64GB I prompted it with "svg owl" and it thought for 17m12s, outputting 36.3KiB of thinking chatter. It did end up producing a 20.2KiB HTML+JS+SVG file with a very nice owl, including cursor-tracking animation, but it ran for more than a half hour!

The MoE models are stupendously faster.

isomorphic··on Measured LLM inference speeds on Apple Silicon, with raw data (CC BY 4.0)
Agreed. Here's a start for posterity. Using their prompt, "Write a 300-word explanation of how attention works in transformer models, aimed at a junior developer. Use one concrete analogy.":

Note that my mini is the bigger Pro model, so it will be faster than the mini quoted in the article.

Mac mini M4 Pro (cores: 10P/4E/20G) 64GB Tahoe 26.6 LM Studio 0.4.20+1

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit: 78.81 tok/s, TTFT 0.93s (but note Qwen 35B is really chattery and outputs 3,451 words of thinking for 65s first)

Qwen3.6-27B-MLX-4bit: 14.65 tok/s, TTFT 0.76s (Qwen 27B output 3,027 words of thinking for 361s first, spinning up the fans)

gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-QAT-MLX-4bit: 64.93 tok/s, TTFT 0.44s (Gemma 26B is much more on-task, thinking with 591 words for 15.62s first)

gemma-4-31B-it-QAT-GGUF Q4_0: 12.25 tok/s, TTFT 1.65s (Gemma 31B thought with 404 words for 51.55s)

isomorphic··on I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated
Floridian here. WWVB has never worked for me indoors (never tried outdoors). I've tried multiple vendors' clocks in multiple houses (wood frame and concrete). I assume the coverage is fine outdoors or with a sufficiently large antenna, but none of the clocks I've seen even have a mechanism to connect such an antenna. I could hack one, but then it would probably stop being cheap and reliable.

I'd love to buy an off-the-shelf WiFi+NTP clock, but everything I've seen is very expensive, intended for commercial timing applications or synchronizing clocks across a campus.

isomorphic··on Nativ: Run frontier open models locally on your Mac
This looks like the Prism folks, who are making binary/ternary versions of popular edge models, so that those models will fit on constrained devices like phones. E.g., their Bonsai model derived from Qwen:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48910545

Perhaps they got tired of LM Studio, etc., not being able to run their models properly.

isomorphic··on TLS certificates for internal services done right
Thank you, I was unaware of that. It looks like it's already support in the acme.sh client, but there is a Let's Encrypt discussion saying it's still pending at LE:

https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/dns-persist-01-deploymen...

I wonder if the interim version has been rolled out to some CAs.

isomorphic··on TLS certificates for internal services done right
I do this exactly, using ACME DNS:

https://github.com/acme-dns/acme-dns

CAUTION, though, the last time I downloaded a binary release, ClamAV triggered on it, so I kept my old version which worked. I was using the 1.0 series (without any problems!), and now it seems the project has picked up development again with a 2.0 series.

isomorphic··on Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
I'm speculating that it's not the selfie; it's where that selfie ends up (or with whom).
isomorphic··on Apple to increase spend with Broadcom to produce billions more U.S. chips
Television resolutions appear to be on the same naming path.
isomorphic··on Slow breathing modulates brain function and risk behavior
"Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear." (George Addair)
isomorphic··on How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of Our Time
> Liminalism (if we can christen this as a movement, and we should) is a form dedicated to the discovery of digital found art. It is important not just because of its content, but because it signals the migration of critical terminology and thinking into popular discourse in a truly democratic sense, independent of the traditional confines of the art industry as expressed in exhibitions, galleries, and museums.

This is not the language of an elitist.

If anything, it sounds like someone defending Liminalism's inclusion in the contemporary canon from arrogant elitists.

isomorphic··on Warm up your MacBook (2019)
Floridian. I thought "frozen lake" was some sort of Intel CPU reference.
isomorphic··on CVE-2026-28952: Apple macOS 26.5 Kernel Vuln found by Claude
The heavily ironic implication is that they're under NDA, so they can't attest to it, while more or less attesting it. Senator, I cannot confirm or deny that we definitely do this.

This could also be an unofficial-official way for Apple to "leak" that yes, they do this--which is on brand for how Apple handles "rumors" etc.

isomorphic··on Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
This is just Terminator with extra steps.

They cannot envision the scenario where their AI-powered robots turn on them, or at the very least are used against them (and then inevitably turn on everyone).

isomorphic··on Think Linear Algebra (2023)
I think GP is both referring to and suggesting:

https://linear.axler.net/

isomorphic··on Running local models on an M4 with 24GB memory
M4 Pro 64GB (14 CPU / 20 GPU), Gemma 4 31B Q4_K_M GGUF, LM Studio: time to first token 0.92s, 11.56 tokens/s.

Edit: For comparison with the other poster, same setup as above, but with Gemma 4 31B Instruct 8bit MLX (not sure if exactly the same model): time to first token 4.62s, 7.20 tokens/s; with a different prompt, 1.17s and 7.24 tokens/s.

isomorphic··on Ted Turner has died
All restoration choices are at least a little bit subjective.

That said, I agree with you!

isomorphic··on AirSnitch: Demystifying and breaking client isolation in Wi-Fi networks [pdf]
My interpretation:

First, they can't attack a WiFi access point for which they do not know any password(s). Thus your multi-SSID access point with multiple passwords is "safe" from this particular attack.

However, second, they can attack an access point for which they know any password, gaining access to clients on the other SSIDs. This means your security is now effectively only the security of your worst SSID's password. It also may defeat your purpose in having multiple SSIDs/passwords in the first place.

isomorphic··on Project SkyWatch (a.k.a. Wescam at Home)
The "We" is short for Westinghouse, or at least it was: Westinghouse Steered Stabilized Camera Mount, thus WESSCAM. Then they dropped an "S".

Granted pronouncing the name is ambiguous, Wes-cam or We-scam. But they're known well enough in the industry at this point that it's not a problem for them.

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