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matt_heimer

1,224 karma · joined December 15, 2012

My day-to-day job deals with Java (which I actually like) and AI development. I run an Operating System Development website (osdev.org) as a side project.
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matt_heimer··on Utah to let AI examine patients and prescribe medication without human oversight
People can be uneducated about medication, acetaminophen overdose is a leading cause of acute liver failure in the United States. A little bit of a barrier and forced information about the concern might not be a bad thing but it doesn't require a doctor. A lot of medication probably falls in the same category but is on the other side of the prescription fence.

And doctors aren't infallible, AI (and rule based systems) can act as an extra safeguard for them as long as they don't blindly trust it.

matt_heimer··on 'Neanderthals Among Us' review
If the question is in response to the article's implication that 23andMe doesn't offer this anymore, that's not the case. They were bought by their original founder and continue to offer tests including a Neanderthal Ancestry Report.
matt_heimer··on 'Neanderthals Among Us' review
23andMe states the maximum Neanderthal variant copies they've seen in https://permalinks.23andme.com/pdf/23-05_neanderthal_ancestr...
matt_heimer··on Power approval set to delay Oracle's Wisconsin AI datacenter
I don't think we read the same HN. The home page is 25% devoted to AI most of the time and not in a negative way.
matt_heimer··on You said no MCP
One of the nice things about MCP is that the tools have descriptions that provide guidance to the LLM. You can provide documentation in other formats like OpenAPI but its nice that the documentation is so closely coupled with MCP servers.
matt_heimer··on NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart
"Make America Great Again" leans a lot into restorative nostalgia so it's unsurprising that ideas from the past are going to be presented as an idealized goal.
matt_heimer··on ChatGPT Pro 500
That's what I was doing with my Pro 200 plan, except sometimes life gets in the way and I had couple weeks where I couldn't.

OpenAI must have statistics on what percentage of people with Pro accounts don't maximize the usage in a given. Even if it a very small percentage that is still income for providing nothing.

When you think about it, it's kind of ridiculous that the usage credit is use-it-or-lose it. It really should roll over.

matt_heimer··on ChatGPT Pro 500
We have to assume that OpenAI knows how to math. Given that the plans all scale usage equally now the benefit of the 500 plan is only for OpenAI. Enough of a percentage of users don't squeeze everything of plans every single month that this profits them more.
matt_heimer··on ChatGPT Pro 500
They still used multipliers in the email. The relevant passage was:

Starting October 30, 2026, your included usage in ChatGPT Work and Codex will decrease from 20 times to 10 times the ChatGPT Plus allowance. Your GPT-6 Pro limit in Chat will decrease from 200 to 100 messages per week. Your price remains unchanged and you’ll keep your current limits through October 29, 2026.

And:

For those who want even more usage and speed, the new Pro 500 tier offers our highest usage allowance, with 25 times the usage of Plus. It also includes access to Ultrafast, with up to 8 times faster token generation.

matt_heimer··on ChatGPT Pro 500
I stayed with the 200 plan because of how good a deal it was and because it didn't scale equally.

Now it makes more sense to get 100 plans from both Claude and ChatGPT plan to get diverse models.

It's like OpenAI wants me to give them less money or they are constrained on compute and need to shed load.

matt_heimer··on GPT-6 Astra has gained the ability to drive a car
From this year https://www.autoweek.com/news/a70794762/nhtsa-escalates-prob...
matt_heimer··on GPT-6 Astra has gained the ability to drive a car
The same Tesla that pulled radar to go vision only and a person was killed because the vision model didn't recognize a truck? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36680043

Not sure that counts as phenomenally well.

matt_heimer··on AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up
The OS one is funny to me, it's been hard to keep osdev.org online due to the insane amount AI bot traffic.
matt_heimer··on What Sun got wrong
Sun was just never really setup to sell lots of small servers. You have different pipeline when your goal is to sell million dollar E10K servers.

I got to see a server installed via crane because they couldn't go up in that building's elevator.

matt_heimer··on An Update on Wayback Machine Access
I wonder if the entire internet is going to slowly move behind logins and allow lists for specific trusted crawlers at some point.

Open access doesn't seem sustainable.

But I might just grumpy about spending another hour this week adjusting rules to prevent bots.

matt_heimer··on GPT-6 Astra
It's subjective but I think only gpt-5.6-sol XHIGH is comparable to gpt-6-astra LOW in quality. And it's 24.11 cents vs 9.55 for astra low.
matt_heimer··on Google Maps changed to show Lake Ontario as Lake America
It was a very reasonable decision when it was made around 2008.

Do you really expect a US based company to go to legal war with the US government over something like this? Because there would 100% be repercussions it they did.

matt_heimer··on Google Maps changed to show Lake Ontario as Lake America
See https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names/what-geogr...
matt_heimer··on Google Maps changed to show Lake Ontario as Lake America
This isn't really on Google. Countries disagree on how things should be named. Google sources the US centric view from the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).

Blame the person causing the GNIS updates.

matt_heimer··on Two German airport workers die of malaria after 'mosquito arrives on plane'
It's wildly inconsistent. Surgeries, hospitalizations and specialists are mostly ridiculous. You can find affordable general/nurse practitioners if you know where to look and what to ask for.

Call around and ask "What is your self cash pay cost?".

Most people don't know to ask that and if you don't speak the magic phrase then you get billed at the rate the office would normally charge insurance. Not all places have self pay discounts.

Some states have special programs for hospitals but they vary wildly by state and you have to know how to navigate that particular program and be very patient. Some are need based so if you are above a pretty low income threshold you won't qualify.

matt_heimer··on The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment
Ozempic == GLP-1 which the first visible paragraph is discussing.
matt_heimer··on Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
Not exactly the same but I'm building a NAS box with old parts. Most of my spare RAM sticks are laptop DDR4 SODIMMs. There are SODIMM -> desktop DIMM adapters... it did not go well. The system would boot 1 out of 5 times. No adjustment of memory speed settings would make the system stable.
matt_heimer··on AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
I'd have a better portfolio right now if I invested in RAM instead of equities.
matt_heimer··on Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL
That's the traffic after rate limiting controls and bot fight mode. It's 3-4 million requests per day without bot fight mode and just rate limits. And as I said it's not a smooth distribution. Plus the requests are almost never for pages in cache. It's always stuff like loading all the message threads from the year 2000 or loading up the details of every page edit ever made to a wiki page.

If it was more static content it'd be easier, it's really the db being a bottle neck in a dynamic site.

Yes, the software could be better optimized but then I'd have to own the development of it. There is no reason a niche website should be getting millions of requests per day.

matt_heimer··on Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL
It might depend on the tech stack. I run a small niche website but it has PHP and a database (MediaWiki/PHPBB) and without Cloudflare I'd estimate I'd need to spend several hundred dollars a month to handle the traffic. Traffic used to be tens of thousands of requests a day. AI has increased that to between 400k and 3M requests per day but it's not a smooth distribution. This is with bot fight mode on that greatly reduces traffic.

I adopted Cloudflare because it was getting DDoSed by the AI crawlers. I'm pretty sure all of them are vibe coding their crawlers and don't bother adding rate limiting as a requirement.

matt_heimer··on AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
Sure, depends on how accessibly to people you want it to be.

Most legit search engines are going to honor robots.txt and you can disallow access.

Next level would be using something like rate limiting controls and/or Cloudflare's bot fight mode to start blocking the bad bots. You start to annoy some people here.

Next would be putting the content behind some form of auth.

matt_heimer··on Library for fast mapping of Java records to native memory
What is the positioning for this and how does it work? A comparison to SBE might be nice.

I understand the issue about using Layout and MemorySegment being verbose but the reason I'm using those things it to develop high performance software that uses off-help memory and bypasses object allocation.

What does "map Java record types onto native memory" actually mean? Did you somehow turn a Java record into a flyweight or is `Point point = points.get(0);` just instantiating a record instance using data read from off-help memory? If it's a dynamic mapping library using reflection, that's cool but doesn't it kill the performance goals for most Java off heap usage?

Is this more of a off-heap to heap bridge for pulling data into the normal Java space when performance isn't critical?

matt_heimer··on Website streamed live directly from a model
It's perfect for toddlers (I mean that in a good way), it's the infinite answer to the infinite "What's that?" series of questions they can generate. Make everything a hyperlink and it's almost like a LLM mind map of knowledge.
matt_heimer··on Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message
I guess that's true but I find Google's models better than their public tooling. The Pro subscription includes "Gemini Code Assist and Gemini CLI" but the Gemini Code Assist plugin for IntelliJ which is my daily driver is broken most of the time to the degree that it's completely unusable. Sometimes you can't even type in the input box.

The only way I can do serious development with Gemini models is with other tooling (Cline, etc) that requires API based access which isn't available as part of the subscription.

matt_heimer··on My Google Workspace account suspension
I was a bit worried when I saw the title of the article because I have one of these accounts but geez he made some bad choices. Deleting all phone numbers and the recovery and swapping to a new authentication method and then accessing from a different country??? No wonder it got flagged.

I probably wouldn't believe him either. Google should have an option to revert to the last trusted config after some verification method. Google support is bad, I'll give him that.

All this to avoid roaming charges? And then refusing to share a personal email in this scenario and missing meetings because of that.

I'd argue that changing the MX to fastmail or Microsoft would be much faster than a postfix+dovecot solution on a VPS but I think he's just refusing any solution based on his principals.

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