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nilsbunger

2,900 karma · joined November 15, 2011

Find me on twitter: https://twitter.com/NilsBunger
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nilsbunger··on Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
TSMC doesn’t make DRAM though. Their biz model is manufacturing complex logic chips (eg cpus and asics), which doesn’t have the same commodity cycle.
nilsbunger··on DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis
Is artificial analysis using the 80% reduction in Luna pricing that was announced yesterday in these charts?
nilsbunger··on How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
Those weird phrasings are useful as a tell for ai-generated content!
nilsbunger··on Why Can't Walnut Creek Build 3 Bedroom Apartments with a Playground?
This is why we can't have nice things. Huge additional costs and design constraints because of

* 2-exit-stairwell requirement

* elevator laws

* parking laws

Article contrasts with an apartment building in Denmark to show what could be possible.

nilsbunger··on A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform
I thought the same. Normal people don’t write that way.
nilsbunger··on No right to relicense this project
We’re going to be in a very weird place:

* LLMs make it trivial to recreate almost any software using its test suite (maybe not a derivative work)

* LLM generated code has no copyright (according to current court interpretations)

Soon we will be able to make an unlicensed copy of anything if we have its test suite and a little money for tokens.

nilsbunger··on Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
The maintainer used the original test suite in the rewrite.

Does that make the new code a derivative of the original test suite (also lpgl)?

nilsbunger··on MacBook Neo
It was my son’s laptop , he’s in high school. General Google Classroom / Google Docs / Gmail / web research stuff. He’s not technical at all. I bought him the 8GB machine thinking it would be fine, but it became a big problem for him.

I do think part of the problem was number of tabs open. It was a little better when I taught him how to manage tabs and I also turned up all the memory saving features in chrome.

But even with all of that, it would still slow down with what looked like a pretty minimal workload.

I spent a few hours with him on it, but he still had these kinds of issues.

It just seems like it requires a decent level of sophistication to work with a small RAM budget if you’re using Google software.

nilsbunger··on No right to relicense this project
Does using the old version’s tests to create a new version make it a derivative work? That’s certainly some pretty tight coupling.
nilsbunger··on MacBook Neo
I found Google Chrome makes an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM almost unusable, unless you're really careful to keep only a few tabs only. I'm curious what browser you were using and if you had any similar experience.
nilsbunger··on Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
We recently got a tire at the dealer. My wife got a flat while she was trying to get to work. The car comes with roadside assistance, and the "easy path" was to let them tow it to the dealer.

We could've done the work to find a private shop to change the tire and redirect the tow truck there, but it takes effort, my wife gets intimidated by car stuff, and she was busy with some work meetings (which she took at the roadside).

In the end it cost us an extra $100, but probably saved us $1000 of marriage counseling :) That's ROI !

nilsbunger··on Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
The dynamics in the US are different for a reason: Car dealerships are independently owned due to laws preventing car manufacturers from directly selling cars to consumers.

This means multiple dealers (of the same car brand) compete with each other to sell you a car, thus driving their margin down. They try to make it back by selling you add-on packages and financing at the time of sale, ongoing service relationships, and handling warranty/recall issues (paid by the corporate brand).

nilsbunger··on Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
Yes I think there's a real innovators' dilemma here for traditional automakers with dealer networks. Dealers make most of their money on servicing vehicles, not selling them. And EVs require almost no servicing.
nilsbunger··on OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
I think the biggest risk to ChatGPT as a consumer brand is that they don’t own the device surface. Google / Microsoft / Apple could make great AI that’s infused in the OS / browser, eliminating the need to go to ChatGPT.
nilsbunger··on California lawmakers pass SB 79, housing bill that brings dense housing
A lot of the California bills had various poison pills in them that reduced their effectiveness.

For example, SB684 allowed building and subdividing up to 10 units on a multifamily lot. BUT, the lot wasn’t eligible if you had to knock down a building that had tenants in the past N years to avoid displacement of people.

You can probably guess how many multifamily lots are out there where you don’t have to tear down an existing building with tenants.

There are other issues too. Interest rates and tariffs make a lot of projects not viable financially.

nilsbunger··on California lawmakers pass SB 79, housing bill that brings dense housing
The economics of 3BR family units are typically hard for developers to make money on. Bobby Fijan (https://x.com/bobbyfijan) is an example of a developer who is a vocal advocate of family-centric apartments and townhomes. His projects look amazing. He also talks about the challenges creating family housing.
nilsbunger··on California lawmakers pass SB 79, housing bill that brings dense housing
A Redditor created a great interactive map showing where SB 79 applies in California here: https://www.reddit.com/r/yimby/comments/1ne2q87/sb_79_intera...
nilsbunger··on California lawmakers pass SB 79, housing bill that brings dense housing
I don't think we're going to see much of that:

* The projects won't be profitable in smaller towns, because rents aren't high enough to recoup the cost.

* Tall buildings cost MORE per square foot than short buildings, so tall buildings only get built where land costs are very high.

* This law's top density (7-8 floors I think?) only applies in a narrow window (0.25 to 0.5 miles) around major transit stops with LOTS of service, like < 15 minute bus intervals with dedicated BRT lanes, or trains with > 48 arrivals per day each way. Small towns don't have that kind of infrastructure.

* The law only applies in cities with > 35,000 people.

nilsbunger··on California lawmakers pass SB 79, housing bill that brings dense housing
This law (and other recent CA YIMBY laws) don't create much surface area to sue or slow a project:

* The approvals are designed to be "ministerial", meaning there is no discretion on whether to approve or not. If the project meets the objective criteria spelled out in the law, it must be approved.

* If the city doesn't approve in a limited time window, it's deemed "approved" by default.

* Ministerial approval protects the project from CEQA lawsuits. CEQA requires the government to consider the environment when making decisions. When the approval is ministerial, the government doesn't make any decisions, so there is no CEQA process to sue against.

nilsbunger··on A computer upgrade shut down BART
Seems like BART should do these upgrades only at low traffic times, like overnight Saturday night.
nilsbunger··on Open Source Maintenance Fee
Interestingly, they've made only the source code open-source. They require a license agreement to download releases. See for example: https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix/releases/tag/v6.0.1
nilsbunger··on Apple Headquarters is visible from Space
I mean, my license plate is visible from space too.
nilsbunger··on Show HN: When is the next Caltrain? (minimal webapp)
Very cool. Would be good if it also shows whether it's a local train or limited or express, and/or which stations it stops at.
nilsbunger··on Show HN: A “Course” as an MCP Server
While we are talking about workflows, can you show an example of workflow integration with copilotkit?
nilsbunger··on Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI
There’s something called a substantive transformation test in copyright law. When you write a summary of a book, you don’t infringe on copyright because it’s a “substantial transformation”. This goes along with the idea that you can copyright the text but not the ideas it expresses.

When model training reads the text and creates weights internally, is that a substantial transformation? I think there’s a pretty strong argument that it is.

nilsbunger··on Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Stephen Colbert
nilsbunger··on The Great Vowel Shift
Here’s why English vowels sound different from all the other European languages.
nilsbunger··on Microsoft’s original source code
Yeah, some of the Apple pages are pretty bad too, and I feel Jobs would've kept it more minimal. But to me, this blog is worse because it's supposed to showcase a whole article, and it's hard to read (and not even compatible with browser reader-mode).
nilsbunger··on Microsoft’s original source code
Steve Jobs used to say the problem with Microsoft is they don’t have taste.

The font-shimmering effect on scroll immediately reminded me of that, it is really distracting. And you can’t use reader mode to disable it.

(FWIW, I’m a fan of Bill Gates and all he’s done for the world)

nilsbunger··on U.K. demand for a back door to Apple data threatens Americans, lawmakers say
For a long time, the US wanted such back doors too. When did that change?
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