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mfro

602 karma · joined November 17, 2019

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mfro··on Creatine raise brain energy levels and slow Alzheimer's cognitive decline by 30%
I had a lot of issues with stomach when taking creatine until I tried the micronised version. Bucked up makes a good product you can find at Walmart.
mfro··on Warm up your MacBook (2019)
It was a truly ridiculous idea to put an i9 in any laptop. That generation of i9 is difficult to cool even with liquid cooler systems in big ATX cases.
mfro··on GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension
FWIW VScode can be used in a docker container or remote server from the local client. See devcontainers and VSCode over ssh.
mfro··on Security researcher says Microsoft built a Bitlocker backdoor, releases exploit
Please let me know when finding a job in software engineering in 2026 is feasible for everyone with ‘computer skills’.
mfro··on Bitwarden scrubs 'Always free' and 'Inclusion' values from its site
Great heads up! I will work on self-hosting this month.
mfro··on Claude Platform on AWS
Builder credits apply to every AWS service I've tried.
mfro··on Obsidian plugin was abused to deploy a remote access trojan
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/applicati...
mfro··on Let's talk about LLMs
As much as that’s true it’s clear a huge amount of people have accepted the current state and are working around it, successfully(in terms of ticking an executive’s checkbox) in a lot of cases. And it’s worth considering we’re seeing strong strides outside of model quality in the tooling and integration
mfro··on Let's talk about LLMs
While I think the author is entirely right about 'natural language programming' in the current day, if LLMs (or some other AI architecture) continue to improve, it is easy to believe touching code could become unnecessary for even large projects. Consider that this is what software co. executives do all the time: outline a high level goal (software product) to their engineering director, who largely handles the details. We just don't yet know if LLMs will ever manage a level of intelligence and independence in open-ended tasks like this. And, to expand on that, I don't know that intelligence is necessarily the bottleneck for this goal. They can clearly tackle even large engineering tasks, but often complaints are that they miss on important architectural context or choose a suboptimal solution. Maybe with better training, context handling, documentation, these things will cease to be problems.
mfro··on Let's talk about LLMs
I think you're misunderstanding the paradigm shift completely -- AI does not just generate code N(x) more quickly. It thinks N(x) faster, it researches N(x) faster, it tests N(x) faster. There are hundreds of tasks that you'll find engineers are offloading to AI every day. The major hurdle right now is actually pivoting LLMs from just generating code: integrating those tasks into workflows. This is why tool-use and agentic workflows have taken engineering by storm.
mfro··on Microsoft Edge stores all passwords in memory in clear text, even when unused
When someone says passwords are ‘stored’, the assumption will always be ‘stored on disk’. ‘stores in memory’ is not an accurate representation because memory is inherently volatile and they are loaded there temporarily. Plaintext on disk is egregious, plaintext in memory is considerably less so.
mfro··on Microsoft Edge stores all passwords in memory in clear text, even when unused
To be fair, 'loads into memory' and 'stores' are not the same thing.
mfro··on Brave Origin
I have found literally 0 incentive to switch from firefox to anything else.
mfro··on Show HN: MacMind – A transformer neural network in HyperCard on a 1989 Macintosh
I think they're going for more of a 'monkeys will eventually produce shakespeare' thing here. Which you can apply the same argument to - monkeys do not know english, don't know what they're typing, and theoretically english could devolve to a state where every sentence could be qualified as shakespeare, right? Your argument just seems unnecessarily pedantic.
mfro··on Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs
Not sure why all the other commentors are failing to mention you can spend considerably less money on an apple silicon machine to run decent local models.

Fun fact: AWS offers apple silicon EC2 instances you can spin up to test.

mfro··on Claude Opus 4.7 costs 20–30% more per session
yeah it seems like sonnet 4.6 burns thru tokens crazy fast. I did one prompt, sonnet misunderstood it as 'generate an image of this' and used all of my free tokens.
mfro··on Do you even need a database?
Neat, what happened to the original system? Last I checked multiplayer was working in DR2.
mfro··on Backpacks got worse on purpose
Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
mfro··on Google Gemma 4 Runs Natively on iPhone with Full Offline AI Inference
Strangely, it is super fast on my 16 Plus, but with longer messages it can slow down a LOT, and not because of thermal throttling. I wish I could see some diagnostic data.
mfro··on The best seat in town
You're reading way too far into it. Private spaces are simply easier targets.
mfro··on LittleSnitch for Linux
It just depends on the UI frameworks available to developers and their interest in building something good-looking. Different UI frameworks are available for different platforms, and there are only a few good ones that are cross-platform. Qt and GTK are pretty common for linux apps and typically don't look great.
mfro··on Show HN: A cartographer's attempt to realistically map Tolkien's world
Funny, I found this last night: https://www.ardacraft.me/
mfro··on More Americans Are Breaking into the Upper Middle Class
I don't know a single young person who has entertained any hope of owning a decent house at any point in the next 20 years.
mfro··on Usenet Archives
Does anyone know if this is still the most comprehensive archive? I'd like to know if the owner found any of the missing 91-01 datasets or if they are available anywhere.
mfro··on Usenet Archives
Where are you seeing full-text search for groups? I can filter the post titles on the current page of listings, but this is completely useles...
mfro··on Show HN: I built an OS that is pure AI
You’re definitely right there should be distinction. I think “baremetal OS” is the term some people would use.
mfro··on Show HN: I built an OS that is pure AI
Some might claim a browser is an OS. Some do claim emacs is an OS. Tlon claims urbit is an OS. It’s a fairly fluid term nowadays.
mfro··on What came after the 486?
I think the problem is the distinction here between chips and boards. The entire GPU assembly can absolutely be worn down from continuous use, thermal pads, paste, VRMs, fans do degrade. The chip itself may be fine but it's very rare to find anyone willing to transplant a GPU from one board to another.
mfro··on Our commitment to Windows quality
Windows is still a solid 'gets out of the way' operating system (with numerous tweaks, customizations, and stripping) when it works. If they focus on fixing UX issues and improving stability and performance, it may be enough to slow the rise of desktop Linux.

Better support for F#, or really any language other than C# is a longshot though. Those resources were likely 'reallocated' to AI R&D indefinitely.

mfro··on First MacBook Neo Benchmarks Are In
Just get an M1 macbook air. Way cheaper, and you get can 16GB of memory.
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