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julianlam

3,062 karma · joined December 1, 2012

Co-Founder of NodeBB Inc., modern forum software for the modern web.
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julianlam··on Book Corners: Community map of neighborhood book exchange spots
The ones in Canada usually have sloped roofs to block rain. It's enough.

Indoor ones obviously don't need it.

julianlam··on Gleam Is Now on Tangled
Why Tangled instead of something more established like Codeberg, or if f/loss, Forgejo or Gitea?

Just because ATProto vibes?

julianlam··on The family keeping watch over a 52-year-old pot of soup
Forever soup isn't new, of course.

Poor families do it to cheaply make long lasting meals.

My late maternal grandmother used to have a pot of forever soup on the stove, and she would put whatever she had on hand in.

Spare ribs, check. Leftover veg, check. McDonalds fries, gross, but check.

julianlam··on Study: ultra-black coating could reduce satellite light pollution
The floating ring of space debris around Earth would like to have a word with you.
julianlam··on Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline
Every time this sort of news pops up, I think "why aren't they incentivising and subsidizing fertility treatment"?

You want to raise the fertility rate, yes?

You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure).

Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fertility treatment, they're already decently well off, too.

To me it seems like a very obvious, targeted solution!

julianlam··on Fly for Less
Yeah Hopper didn't start off as a booking site. Just a private group not affiliated with any airline group.

:)

julianlam··on Fly for Less
Sounds like Hopper, but AI. Why not just use Hopper?
julianlam··on Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says
You wouldn't distill a car.
julianlam··on Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says
[citation needed]
julianlam··on Protect your right to run local AI
What do you need a frontier model for, really.
julianlam··on Protect your right to run local AI
I think the bogeyman would be making possession of a local AI a felony.
julianlam··on Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions
A small 4-9B model would be able to run cheaply for this sort of work.
julianlam··on Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions
Then we'll amend the policy to instruct LLMs to author PRs as Fred Flintstone, yabba dabba doo!
julianlam··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
Very surprised an Apple device can have some atrocious ventilation design.

I'm running this model on a Framework 13 and the chassis barely heats up at all while running full tilt.

julianlam··on FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model
As a FUTO keyboard user for about a year I'm quite excited for this!

Their local voice transcription is top notch and proper swipe gestures would be icing on the cake.

Now to fix that issue there tapping "Tuesd" sometimes suggests "Thursday"

julianlam··on There is minimal downside to switching to open models
I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models.

I know LLMs move at the speed of light (especially these past few quarters), but if Opus and GPT "a few months ago" were really like open weight models, then there's really no reason to not switch, especially for those who were using these models a few months ago.

Your codebase didn't change, so use the open weight model. Don't move the goalposts.

julianlam··on When I reject AI code even if it works
I think a particular failing with developers embracing AI is fighting the sunk cost fallacy. While you might not have spent as much time putting together a non-working solution, you still did spend time working with the agent to slap together a non-working solution.

Being able to step back and say "this was a failure and we need to discard the day's work and start over" is still hard with LLMs.

julianlam··on Dutch Railways offers unlimited off-peak train travel nationwide for €49/month
That is a cute sentiment, because I imagine it pales in comparison to the loathing these groups feel towards each other in North America.
julianlam··on Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
Of course.

Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B on a Framework 13 with 32GB of memory.

Running llama.cpp, 15 tokens per second. Outputs code and text faster than I can parse.

julianlam··on Why Your CPU Is Fast but Your Program Is Slow: Understanding the Memory Wall
"Memory Wall"? My LLM tells me about those all the time!
julianlam··on Codex for open source
6 months is a joke.

Companies a thousandth their size are giving free or at-cost access for OSS projects.

julianlam··on The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)
s/JS/PHP
julianlam··on Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?
Watch the Last Week Tonight segment.

Basically, Ticketmaster owns all the concert halls too.

julianlam··on Three of our worst VC stories
> enough to make it work via profit reinvested from sales.

Yes, this is just called running a business.

julianlam··on Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
Are you sure? Prior to today the sub seems to be pretty partial to Qwen.
julianlam··on Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
Last time I tried Gemma 4 (26B-A4B) its memory usage would balloon and consume all of my swap until my machine died.

Qwen 3.6 on the other hand barely uses any memory at all for its KV cache.

julianlam··on Expanding Project Glasswing
Respectfully, as an OSS maintainer (not to the scale of nginx or valkey, of course)... if a third-party used an AI agent to rewrite my software in a different language, that gives me absolutely no reason to support that new project.

It is in all respects foreign code in a language I may or may not be familiar with, and worse yet, if I were to take over, I'd be responsible for maintaining the whole black box forever more?

Thank you but no thanks.

julianlam··on Apple rejected my dictation app for using the accessibility API
Model-in-the-middle LLC

Checks out, what's the problem? /s

julianlam··on Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai
This type of laziness isn't novel.

Check out left pad or the two dozen other "utility" packages that could be done in a single line of code.

julianlam··on IXI's autofocusing lenses are almost ready to replace multifocal glasses
Does this mean a single pair can be adjusted over time to adapt to a changing prescription?

Buying lenses is often the most expensive part, especially for those with astigmatism, second only to the frames themselves, which is another racket altogether.

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