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pbmonster

1,190 karma · joined January 19, 2010

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pbmonster··on I built an AI receptionist for a mechanic shop
Is RAG even necessary here? Minimal information like a couple of price list with job times and opening hours should easily fit into any context window, right? It's not like he's dumping entire service manuals into the vector database here...
pbmonster··on Show HN: Browser grand strategy game for hundreds of players on huge maps
But why? What would change compared to 12 players on a huge map? Do you just want to conquer a large number of your neighbors and then still get to compete against other mega-empires?

When playing civ on 12 player maps, I still mostly interact only with the 3-4 that I directly compete with at any given time. I imagine that wouldn't really change with 100 people.

pbmonster··on Honda is killing its EVs
> Take care - the Hybrid battery can be expensive to replace and they do eventually fail.

That is true, but median mileage at replacement for the old NiMH batteries is 150k miles (240k km), and the lithium cells have a median mileage at replacement of over 200k miles (320k km) - even though those cars are now 10 years old, not enough of them have reached that mileages, so exact data is still not available.

And don't get me wrong, those cars are bullet proof. Median total mileage of the car could be a bit higher than 150k miles, especially after the car was sold to a third world country. But for most intents and purposes, those batteries (especially the lithium cells) have about the same median lifetime than the car itself.

pbmonster··on Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock
If you want to make new helium, it's far easier to go the other way.

You just need quite a bit of Polonium, Thorium or Radon. Put it in a pool - and then wait a while. You just gotta collect what bubbles to the surface.

pbmonster··on The MacBook Neo
The snipping tool (with all features I'm using today) was added to PowerToys more than 20 years ago. It was integrated directly into Windows 10 pretty early in the update cycle. Not sure it qualifies for "the last decade".
pbmonster··on Urea prices
It's not automatically obvious. There could (theoretically) be domestic gas fields that are solely supplying pipeline "islands" (connected to domestic gas powerplants and fertilizer factories) under long-running contracts. Those should/would be more stable in price, since liquefying that gas and selling it elsewhere would not be trivial.

But in reality, that's not the case for any large US gas fields. They are all connected to the national pipeline "grid", and their gas can go wherever it is most expensive right now.

But it's the case for e.g. many Russian gas fields. They are much more segmented, and they have nowhere close to the liquefaction infrastructure necessary to export a significant fraction of their total output on LNG carriers.

pbmonster··on Urea prices
Very simplified: farming and distillation is so extremely energy intensive, it's not clear whether producing one ton of bio ethanol fuel consumes more or less than one ton of diesel (or equivalent).

So producing bio ethanol is not a sustainability/ecology thing, it mostly gives farmers something to do.

pbmonster··on How the Sriracha guys screwed over their supplier
The court awarded $10M in punitive damages in addition to the $13M in compensatory damages. So the options are basically "Huy Fong's lawyers are criminally incompetent" or "Huy Fong absolutely screwed over their supplier".
pbmonster··on MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
It's the greed. Apple only makes around 8% of revenue through hardware sales of all Macs combined. "Services" (App Store, iCloud, Music, TV+, ect.) make more than 3x more revenue. Then, profit margin on services is again 3x higher than on Mac hardware. So they really want all Mac users also use Services.

If your proposed change increases Mac sales by 1%, but only 0.1% of users install Asahi, they lose money.

I'm still watching out for Asahi progress, amazing project. USB-C displays and the M3 will come (and I don't care to much for the rest), that makes a refurbished macbook air an attractive proposition.

pbmonster··on MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
> my understanding is that Asahi has issues with: * USB-C Displays * Thunderbolt / USB4 * Touch ID

Valid. USB-C displays are on the horizon, the rest will take significant time (and might never materialize, it's difficult to reverse engineer).

> Because I don't like MacOS

Then spending thousands on modern MacBook will be a subpar experience, no matter how you do it. But yes, Linux will run OK inside a VM on a MacBook.

pbmonster··on I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project
> Gemini was also unable to find the .dev, even in "Research Mode."

Unsurprisingly, right? Gemini just uses the same back end as Google itself, which - according to OP - doesn't list his site on page 1, not page 2 and not page 5.

Depending on the prompt, it should have gotten the link from the github, but that's like an indirect hint from a secondary source, it probably ranks the Google index quite highly when it does research.

pbmonster··on MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
Why would you want to do that? Do you like the hardware that much, and also that much more than just an M2 (soon M3) running Asahi?

Linux in a VM would work with the usual caveats. Periphery like the built-in webcam most likely won't work. Getting codecs and DRM to run will be pain and you'll be back to use macOS for that quickly (but that's just standard pain of ARM Linux).

pbmonster··on Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns
Interesting article, but I wonder why the journalists didn't go all the way. Sure, Meta isn't going to comment when you ask them what data they have. But this is in the EU, just hit them with a Subject Access Request under GDPR.

Would be really interesting to create a completely new account, use the glasses with all upload settings off for a month, and then SAR request and see what they have...

pbmonster··on Jolla phone – a full-stack European alternative
> The apps don't just do that though; they call into and use an awful lot of the system APIs for user tracking / semi-native experience / biometrics and probably a whole host of other things. Its the incompatibility in these that drags compatibility.

Both can be true. Many (most?) online banking apps are just shitty wrapped javascript, that also uses an awful lot of system APIs.

I'm using a couple of different banks, and not a single one has anything close to a native app. Because how nice would that be? Responsive interface (since it doesn't need to load every single view from the server), instant search over your transactions (since the DB can be cached locally), instant access to all the PDFs in your inbox... but no.

pbmonster··on Jolla phone – a full-stack European alternative
And they don't want to, because that experiment ran for around 20 years and resoundingly failed. Turns out it's really hard to stop the bottom quintile of users from entering all their credentials into just about any website that looks similar to what they are used to - and then their identity/money is just gone.

Stopping those users without a trusted authority deciding which electron-wrapped websites are genuine is an unsolved problem, I think.

pbmonster··on Long Range E-Bike (2021)
That's the limit for continuous rated power. The motor's frequently have 600W-750W of peak power output, and can legally use this much for short amounts of time (usually seconds, like accelerating from a stop; but often also for going up a steep hill for several minutes).
pbmonster··on Long Range E-Bike (2021)
No, what the modders do is just disable the velocity dependent power limit on the standard e-bike power controllers. The easiest/hackiest way to do that is to install a pulse rate divider on the tachometer cables - bike goes 30mph, controller thinks it's going 10mph and delivers full power. This messes up the mileage counter and is trivially easy for the cops to spot, but it'll work.

> The power levels required to push a hybrid bicycle to 45mph is north of 3000W

Yeah, 45 mph is hyperbole. 45 kph is very easily doable on a standard 750W e-bike motor with <$1 of additional electronics. At that point it's all aero, so going even faster is mostly about rider position and bike geometry (those scooter looking things are going to be slower than a proper bike on 29" wheels).

pbmonster··on Long Range E-Bike (2021)
> Many e-bikes don't have torque sensors and instead use a cheap rotation sensor so the motor engages almost randomly at certain points in pedal rotation when moving at slow speed.

Today, those are mostly limited to Walmart-tier quality e-bikes. Even the very next step up (still big box store bikes) usually come with torque sensors.

pbmonster··on Long Range E-Bike (2021)
Those are legal, at least in the EU. It's called "push support" or "walk assist", my bike engages it when I long-press the down button. It's purpose is to help you push the heavy e-bike up ramps and hills, but I mainly use it as a throttle when I ride behind my toddler on his balance bike.

It's closer to 3mph than 5mph, and as such needs some slow-riding skills, but it works.

pbmonster··on Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics
If you want to compete with LIDAR, you need high resolution 4D (range, velocity, azimuth, and height) RADAR. Those are usually phased arrays with expensive phase sensitive electronics, and behind that a chip that can do a lot of Fourier transforms very quickly.

The cheap RADAR devices you're talking about usually only output range and velocity, sometimes for a handful of rather large azimuth slices. That doesn't compete with LIDAR at all.

pbmonster··on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
Pro/Enterprise Version?
pbmonster··on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
Your Windows 11 experience strongly, strongly depends on where you are. Are you inside the EU? 90% of the crap people complain about is simply illegal and you don't see any of it.
pbmonster··on Covering electricity price increases from our data centers
disposable e-cig cartridge batteries are a disgrace and should be illegal, but that's not hindering grid scale battery build out.

First of all, the resources those tiny batteries use are less than a drop in the bucket of what we ideally would like to add to the grid, and secondly, we're currently nowhere close to being limited by battery capacity. China alone had the industrial capacity to produce more than 2 TWh of new batteries last year, but they actually produced a bit less than 1 TWh because there was no market demand for this many batteries.

They just overbuilt production capacity by over 100%, per their industrial policy.

pbmonster··on Covering electricity price increases from our data centers
Yeah, absolutely no way to bring down power prices when compared to China. They installed over 400 GW (peak) of new renewable capacity in 2025 and show no signs of intending to stop.

But still, it's possible that a smaller, dirtier build-out in the US will significantly drop prices relative to today, and certainly relative to the rest of the world (which is failing spectacularly at building out power infrastructure).

But yes, the only way you're ever going to smelt Aluminum in the US again is if you have customers who can't/won't buy Chinese Aluminum. And even then, worth keeping an eye on the richer Arabs states. They're quickly roofing over their deserts, and certainly don't worry about local NIMBY opposition to power lines...

pbmonster··on Covering electricity price increases from our data centers
Batteries are an even bigger deal. You can completely stop building single stage peaker gas turbines when it gets economical to just drop a 2GW / 1 GWh battery pack next to every gas plant. When demand spikes, you just discharge the battery while you heat soak the steam turbine and the drum to prepare it for increased load.
pbmonster··on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
No, using another ID has a much higher barrier: more likely to get caught (it's the same ID, after all - tokens might (or should) be better anonymized so services don't build user profiles just using the age tokens), more likely to get punished (there's a real name attached to it), more likely to lead to a video verification request to compare ID picture with actual face.
pbmonster··on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
How difficult would it be to add further anonymization? Let's say I want to prevent the bike shop from building a usage profile on the basis of the age check (e.g. because I'm buying booze). Would I just need to get more chains from Alice, or is there an easy way to integrate e.g. group signatures into the scheme?
pbmonster··on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
What's stopping kids from all using the token of that one older brother?
pbmonster··on Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub
Just as an example: I learn languages using Anki, and I always do it the same way: I use decks that

* exclusively quiz entire sentences

* introduce around 500 new words (a nice mix of nouns, verbs and adjectives)

* use a wide variety of grammatical constructs (including all conjugations of the new verbs),

* and that have audio of a native speaker reading the entire sentence after I "flip" the card

Such a deck needs to be thoroughly designed, and while I could choose the new words and then write software to make sure they are all used equally in sentences and no conjugations are missing, I actually can't easily make sure they are correct and I can't record the audio of the text.

pbmonster··on We asked 15k European devs about jobs, salaries, and AI [pdf]
> Many of my colleagues cracked 100k€ this year without being AT and having crazy high position ratings.

And for each of those guys there's 2 people working for 48k and happy about it. They've been at the same shop for 15 years, in a team of the only 3 people doing software in the entire company. Probably somewhere a bit rural, and/or north of Frankfurt.

IGM is not the default.

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