Hacker News Reader

mrfinnon Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead

The "right to copy" is a made up concept. Just sayin'...

mrfinnon What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours

we would be elephants or whales? (sorry couldn't resist)

Loyalty is one of the strongest qualities of Spaniards. Or curses. Depends on the occasion I guess. But the saying "ser más papista que el papa" (to be more pro-pope than the pope himself) is not said by chance in Spain.

mrfinnon CSS Zen Garden

In the age of spaghetti-mixed Web Components, remember kids you can still be good with yourselves and properly split your Web Apps into individual CSS, JS, and HTML templates files, even going framework-less.

Keep the Zen Torch on.

mrfinnon Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoid being eaten

If? never been married, right? PS. You may think of your credit card as your "venom", so you won't get eat alive in a divorce process lol

mrfinnon AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU

Hope this law doesn't become into a peasant-trap. But my gut is telling me that... that's exactly what it is. ("This and that is forbidden EXCEPT to us because blah blah blah")

mrfinnon The smallest Hello World program

Great example, a two bytes reboot utility. From the times when we could turn off the computer with a push of a button without fearing a global catastrophe...

mrfinnon The smallest Hello World program

INT 13h... uff chills

mrfinnon The smallest Hello World program

These challenges are funny - they remind me of the old days. Back in the DOS/Windows days, we used to have the .com format, which was perfect for tiny programs. One could even write a program of less than 10 bytes that could actually do something!

We've come a long way since then, and is like, at some point, nobody cared about optimizing executable size anymore

mrfinnon We fine-tuned Llama and got 4.2x Sonnet 3.5 accuracy for code generation

2023: Our tiny model blah blah blah beats GPT4!

2024: Our tiny model blah blah blah beats Claude!

2025: Our tiny model blah blah blah beats ???

mrfinnon How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

We are not in control either of the nukeclear power which is available for quite a few nations, since a lot of decades now, as well. Soo... c'mon cheer up most probably is some kind of simulation anyway.

mrfinnon 1/0 = 0 (2018)

Disagreed. 1/0 should be infinity, and computers should be able to handle these concepts. Just look into what is 1/0.00000000000[etc]1. And no is not an error, you find out with a very real and tangible example, when you are developing a 3D engine and you want to make the camera to look at vector [ 0, 0, 0 ]. Quick resume: You can't, you need to force add a slight displacement so you can skip this silly error.

mrfinnon Ryujinx (Nintendo Switch emulator) has been removed from GitHub

Yet another chapter of Nintendo's wrath against the people? How long the world is going to be dominated by absurd copy(made up)right laws?

PS. Even if that wouldn't be the case here, my POV stands. Current copy(made up)right laws don't even make tiny-little sense nowadays. FREEDOM NOW FOR HUMAN KNOWLEDGE once for all FGS.

mrfinnon Web components are okay

How can it be possible that we are in 2024 a no one seems to be proposing the most obvious improvement to the web, which is to create a new standard designed for web applications and let the HTML alone serving it's original purpose, which was to serve documents? (H*T*ML the T goes for "TEXT"!). Instead of that, and make things complex and unmanageable to the extreme, to "improve" things now we dropped out completely the MVC philosophy and went completely ahead with an spaghetti mess of Javascript, HTML, CSS, and create-your-desired-tags-at-will everywhere, aka Components.

PS. And not even mentioning Madnesscript which deserves another chapter in this story of horror.

mrfinnon Llama 3.2: Revolutionizing edge AI and vision with open, customizable models

Pity, it's over. We'll never ever be able to download those ten gigabytes files, at the other side of the fence.

mrfinnon Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops

It's kinda funny how nowadays an AI with 8 billion parameters is something "small". Specially when just two years back entire racks were needed to run something giving way worst performance.

mrfinnon g1: Using Llama-3.1 70B on Groq to create o1-like reasoning chains

I did something similar and to my surprise effectively made the LLM in my tests admit when they don't know something. Not always but worked sometimes. I don't prompt "don't hallucinate" but "admit when you don't know something". It's a logical thing in the other hand, many prompts just transmit the idea of being "helpful" or "powerful" to the LLMs without any counterweight idea. So the LLM tries to say something "helpful" in any case.

mrfinnon Installing Arch Linux on a Laptop

I followed a very similar process a couple of years ago (time flies!) and I'm very happy with the results. I'm not even using Arch but Artix Linux but the system runs very smoothly, almost not a single problem updating in years, using all kinds of cutting edge software which is amazing.

On top of what the article mentioned a few tips:

- To achieve really good battery duration I installed powertop (which I run on every boot for auto-adjustment) and thermald which does a great job with Intel CPUs.

- Suspension issues are common, in many cases often was about different part of the system overlapping. I ended up disabling hibernation which I never use anyway, but suspending after closing the lid for me is a must in a laptop.

- Fusuma or something similar is also a must to take advantage of the touchpad.

- Yet another gem, fprintd was a GREAT discovery. First time I autorized a sudo with my finger I couldn't help it but have a big laugh.

PS. Bonus point: This is the second NVidia Optimus laptop that I own and even if Optimus support has gone a long way and now it almost works perfectly out of the box to achieve a really good performance eg in videogames, I use a script to switch between an Nvidia only mode or an Optimus mixed mode.

mrfinnon Porting systemd to musl Libc-powered Linux

If you are trying to convince me that systemd happened out of the creativity of Mr. Poettering and Red Hat just followed him... well I have to say I don't believe that. But anyway, for me it really doesn't matter. It's the beauty of free software.

mrfinnon Porting systemd to musl Libc-powered Linux

Yes, it's massively sponsored as well. So it went heavily imposed almost everywhere even when a quite big chunk of the Linux community deeply disagreed about the imposition.

mrfinnon Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick

Last time I checked a GPT is not something simple at all... I'm not the weakest person understanding maths (coded a kinda advanced 3D engine from scratch myself a long time ago) and still it looks to me something really complex. And we keep adding features on top of that I'm hardly able to follow...

mrfinnon Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick

they’re simply statistical systems predicting the likeliest next words in a sentence

They are far from "simply", as for that "miracle" to happen (we still don't understand why this approach works so well I think as we don't really understand the model data) they have a HUGE amount relationships processed in their data, and AFAIK for each token ALL the available relationships need to be processed, so the importance of a huge memory speed and bandwidth.

And I fail to see why our human brains couldn't be doing something very, very similar with our language capability.

So beware of what we are calling a "simple" phenomenon...

mrfinnon Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

Well then I guess you won't have a thing for political parties

mrfinnon Open source AI is the path forward

You guys really need to get over your bellicose POV of the world. Actually, before it destroys you. Really, is not necessary. Most people in the world just want to leave in peace, and see their children grow happily. For each data center NK would create there will be a thousand of peaceful, kind, and well-intentioned AI projects going on. Or maybe more.

mrfinnon Ode to a world-saving idea: attribution error and cognitive empathy (2021)

Please explain me how meritocracy works for some orphan kid born in some nameless random village, in a country devastated by war and hunger vs a rich kid born in an extremely wealthy family. I agree that both of them deserve a worthy life and enough opportunities to develop their full potential and show their value. Unfortunately the possibilities of the first one are extremely low, and the possibilities of the second one are extremely high, both cases, no matter what possible merits or lack of merits are involved.

mrfinnon Developer Takes 'Retro' Concept to New Level by Creating Physical Winamp Player

Disappointed for the same reason. A device with physical buttons and even led based panels would be the real deal.

mrfinnon Do not try to be the smartest in the room; try to be the kindest

To be kind is one of my specialties. I firmly believe that it's a requirement of any human group so people collaborate at heart. Yes people can be productive anyway without any kindness, but if people really collaborate then they actually multiply their forces and the result is incredibly powerful. If people fight each other that energy is terribly wasted.

mrfinnon Do not try to be the smartest in the room; try to be the kindest

Honesty doesn't conflict in any way with kindness, but with being "nice". Actually I think is a requirement of being genuinely kind.

mrfinnon Desktop Linux is an Untapped Gold Mine

I agree with his description of the Arch forums, I've been using them for years as a source of info for solving problems along those provided by Gentoo, and never felt in the mood to write anything there because the community seems pretty hostile towards any kind of ignorance while asking for help or even worst, in the very strongly enforced forum rules. Pity because Arch is really a great distro and provides a solid base for other distros as well. Maybe is not always like that but... Arch forums feel to me like highly elitist and unwelcoming with newcomers. Not even bugzilla.kernel.org feels like that.

mrfinnon Brain Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds [video]

Am I the only one automatically thinking about LLMs here? Very wild speculation, but what if we accidentally tapped on a phenomena we actually didn't know before, some kind of "event horizon", related with the arise of consciousness and that's the underline reason about why LLMs work so well?