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radicality

1,500 karma · joined September 1, 2011

https://rafal.io email: hn (at) rafal.io backend engineer / distributed systems
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radicality··on Gemini 4 Argon (High): Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis
On my paid personal Workspace account I’m even more behind. I see 3.1 Pro, 3.6 Flash (New). Can’t not laugh at that ‘New’.
radicality··on F-Droid 2.0
Right yeah, I saw this announcement, opened my Fdroid app and clicked around very confused on how to get it to update :S
radicality··on So you want to use OpenRouter?
Oh, interesting, I feel like a year so ago I read something posted from openrouter team that they write that credits expire, but that they in actuality don’t expire them. But maybe I’m misremembering, or perhaps that’s changed for the worse in last few months :S
radicality··on Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms
It has been at least a few months since I did some testing on my MacBook Pro m4, where I converted a bunch of camera jpegs to jxl losslessly, and yeah the jxl files were smaller, but the decoding/viewing experience on macOS was worse than with jpegs. Thumbnails were missing, and just browsing through a folder of them with QuickLook was unbearably slow compared to jpeg, perhaps at least few hundred milliseconds or even longer than a second, when the JPEGs were instant. Idk if that’s just Apples implementation not good yet, but that’s why I at the time abandoned converting all my JPEGs to lossless jxl
radicality··on OpenRouter is joining Stripe
That’s great for the team. Though as a user of openrouter, I am worried that the much larger company will soon find ways to enshittify it :S
radicality··on Why your Amazon order confirmation emails have become so unhelpful
I’m not sure if it’s been redacted from there, but try to do a request for a full data export, it might have the detailed data. I overall try to do that for all online services I use around once every six months or so, lots of interesting data in them.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/privacycentral/dsar/preview.html

Scroll down on that page to “request all data”

radicality··on The Amazon tax
Aliexpress is also surprisingly impossible to search, you gotta use external search engines, I guess it increases there sales :S More than half the time for me on AliExpress a very specific search term will just return completely unrelated things which are either trending or related to my past purchases.
radicality··on The Amazon Tax
Is the Costco shipping good / good inventory / similar or same as in store prices? Should I consider it if living in a city like ny?

I live in central nyc, been only a few times to a Costco, and had no idea they even do any shipping! I assumed that part of all those good prices is the smaller selection, large minimum quantities, and that you have to get yourself there with a car to get it in person.

radicality··on I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
Which black mirror episode are you talking about? White Christmas? S02E07 afaik does not exist - Series 2 had 3 episodes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes
radicality··on Seedance 2.5
Openrouter has video generation also. They do have Seedance which afaik routes via something called ‚atlas cloud’, but it did work.
radicality··on The coolest use for the Vision Pro
Thanks, I’ll try Polycam too.
radicality··on Scope of Hacks on U.S. Water Supply Widens as Evidence Points to Iran
Did they literally just leave the water supply plant management software out available on the open internet? Hard to even call this a hack!
radicality··on Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers
Ha, for a brief moment I thought VM=virtual machine and not voice mail and was scratching my head how you set that up and what the VM is doing with the call
radicality··on Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub
At Facebook (i left >4 years ago) we used Phabricator where shipping stacked changes like this was table stakes. I still miss it. Some few random points, not really organized, i'm sure i'm forgetting bunch more benefits:

* I often used it as a way to make reviews significantly easier for the reviewer. If I split something more complex into smaller units where the small change seems obviously correct, it's much more likely i'll get a faster accept than with a very large change.

* Critically, once a unit of the stack has been approved, the approval will still stay with rebases of the whole stack.

* You can keep building up a stacs and once you think you have enough for whatever you are doing, ship the whole stack.

* Suppose you have a 'hole' in the reviews and you're missing a review for a middle part of the stack. You can still merge the bottom part up to where all are reviewed.

* Let's assume you're the reviewer: smaller changes is much easier to review. Also, each part of the stack builds incrementally on the previous one. With your example, suppose you're reviewing 'api changes' part of the stack, but it has failing tests because something is broken with the lower 'db schema changes' change - but otherwise, the 'api changes' diff looks fine - you can then accept it and this part of the stack is already reviewed. The author can now whenever fix their bottom-most change (db schema change) to have tests passing, and get someone to review that (perhaps someone completely different more familiar with db), and then rebase the 'api changes' diff, and _it will not_ require review because you haven't changed anything, just updated the diff underneath it. In this way you parallelized your approvals. Right now at work, using github, I have to serialize my PRs and can't effectively get things reviewed until the previous PR is approved.

radicality··on Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub
It's been >4 years since I've been out of Facebook and now have to use Github, and to this day I miss phabricator and landing stacked changes. When I first left and had to work with github I hadn't realized that this, to me, very basic, workflow is _not_ a feature!
radicality··on The coolest use for the Vision Pro
How did you actually end up doing it, like the full pipeline ? For example what app did you use to scan your apartment and orocesss it into a 3d model (which kind?) and then how do you actually do the planning (like which tools/software to plan your new space?)

And I ask for details because I have attempted something similar but wasn’t getting the best results. I was using ‘3d scanner app’ (which was good but was sold and is not recommended now), and that created pretty decent models, but like, they were still I think based on lidar and not super precise. I also wasn’t sure how to reconcile my actual floor plan with that 3d model the right way - like if the 3d model got some error built-up, the wall which I know to be 100 inches has to be that, and not 101 or 99, since for furniture planing an inch definitely matters. So I kind of got stuck here on how to actually generate some useful and as correct dimensionally as possible 3d model, into which I can later put furniture 3d models into. Thanks for any info!

radicality··on It's not empowering to hand off the details
True, I didn’t do those in detail. I vaguely looked at the output and thought “let’s see if that works at all”.

I do such more careful planning and AI handholding at work where it’s important the thing doesn’t break in prod, or doesn’t forget about some important use case.

But this was just purely for “fun” / homelab style type of vibe coding where I don’t want it to feel like work and write intricate specs and handhold the agent - point being the current SotA models still currently do need a bunch of guidance to not devolve into a code spaghetti, and it does end up feeling like ‘work’.

radicality··on Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
Now after reading the OPs responses and how defensive they are of some high quality constructive criticism, I don’t even want to go back and play more with the visualization.
radicality··on What's Under Your Feet in New York City?
Next up, they could build a low-earth-orbit eruv and call it a day
radicality··on It's not empowering to hand off the details
Similarly for me. I have a recent example too. I run a bunch of eps32 devices at home, using esphome. Pre-AI I wrote all the yaml myself and understood what’s happening and didn’t have any very bespoke hacks.

Recently I asked an agent for a feature where the screen will get dimmer after some time, and eventually after a day the screen will turn off and then turn back on if I tap, which should be pretty easy in esphome.

But: some past agent decided what it wanted wasn’t in esphome, so it made its own custom module in c++ for the display, spelunking in pdf datasheets; then the weeds were so deep the new agent decided to add on to that, and to read the power controller and display controller spec sheets and somehow implement my dimming feature by writing raw values to some nondescript registers.

The contraption worked until it didn’t and once every so often my esp32 would just completely hang with black screen and no connnectivity and needed a power cycle, presumably because whatever low level register writing the agent implemented eventually breaks something. I told the agent to get rid of all custom stuff and wherever possible just use default esphome yaml, now it’s been working fine. I don’t really have a point with the anecdote, just that I’m also getting tired of such scenarios like the OP.

radicality··on What's Under Your Feet in New York City?
This is quite informative and useful as I live in NYC. I think in the video he mentioned that the city is collecting all that data on what’s underground to collect all in a database and make repairs easier - anyone know if such data is or will be public, like on data.ny.gov ? And what I’m getting at, is it would be really cool to have this kind of 3d visualization like in the video, but based on actual real data so I could view what’s actually underneath the streets I walk every day.
radicality··on What's Under Your Feet in New York City?
I live in nyc, when I first heard of the eruv couldn’t believe they would come up with such elaborate hacks just to ‘technically’ still be following their religious laws! Now if I remember I try and spot it when out.

It also has a status page! https://eruv.nyc/

radicality··on As of JDK 27, Oracle engineers will thus stop maintaining the macOS/x64 port
I think it’s clear from the “Motivation” section, as it’s actually preceded by another sentence there.

> Apple has transitioned its hardware products to the AArch64 processor architecture and is phasing out support for x64. Oracle engineers will thus stop maintaining the macOS/x64 port as of JDK 27.

radicality··on Ask HN: Is there a website that tracks excessive writes to SSDs in OS/app betas?
On my personal computers I keep track of this and ensure nothing goes write-crazy.

On my work laptop though (M3 Pro, 1TB), I’m at ~70% health. Iirc the lifetime writes are at >700TB. I do develop on it, but a lot of it is due to the various endpoint security software that’s always there logging every single possible thing but I can’t do much about it. I expect the ssd to die first in this laptop at this rate, so best I can do is ensure everything always synced/backed up from my local work laptop.

radicality··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
Ah damn I just bought their new Mission One a few weeks ago (upgrading from a Hero 10). Already quite angry though since it seems the batteries are basically the same shape for both, except the connector is in a different location, so the 3 existing batteries I have for the Hero 10 are not compatible, which is a shitty move from GoPro. Well I guess either way I won’t be buying gopros anymore in the future.
radicality··on LM Studio Bionic: the AI agent for open models
For Mac, I see this link on the page: https://lmstudio.ai/download/bionic/latest/darwin/arm64
radicality··on Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
That’s actually what got me to switch and use Codex sometime beginning this year, the compaction via these encrypted blobs was just waaaay better than Claude. I had short convos with Claude where it would forget something very obvious and important few million tokens into a task, whereas I reached ~1B tokens in some local codex sessions and it was recalling and paying attention to things I mentioned way back at the beginning of the session (and not persisted anywhere else in the repo/md files etc)
radicality··on QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall
Product looks cool, not sure what I’ll use it for but did just purchase it on crowdsupply :) How did you settle on that frequency range btw? It’s 4.9 - 6ghz, so it will visualize the higher freq WiFi, but I guess it will not work for the 2.4ghz WiFi, or Bluetooth which is also around that frequency? And I don’t know tooo much about RF, but would including support for that range also, have necessitated much more complex/expensive hardware/antennas ?
radicality··on Amazon seller reveals glimpse of shadow bribery market
> leave a product review in exchange for a free bed scrunchie accessory

I wonder what the exact language was. If it included something like “5 star review” on that card, then the guy deserves getting kicked out from Amazon and getting his business shut down (it’s federally illegal to do that per ftc regulation). If it was just very neutral language asking for reviews, then that sucks, and hope he can get it resolved with Amazon eventually.

radicality··on Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model
Though with open models you have a lot of choice where to get it from. I see like ~15 providers here with various logging/ZDR policies, so pick whatever mix of price to features you want:

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash

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