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reidrac

2,526 karma · joined June 6, 2011

http://www.usebox.net/jjm/
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reidrac··on Minecraft Java raises recommended memory to 16GB ahead of Vulkan transition
> [...] and give you a clearer target for a smoother experience.

Actually, this means you're better running and older version. Is not that Minecraft makes huge improvements with each release. IMHO not enough to justify 16GB of RAM and a GPU with at least 6GB of VRAM.

Especially these days with memory being so expensive.

reidrac··on Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU
> on a decent speed

But you said 7-9 tokens/second, that's not a decent speed. I'm not an expert by all means but in my local experiments, less than 12 to 16 tps is too slow.

reidrac··on Podman v6.0.0
The biggest differences for me were related to non trivial network setups. Is just that you find docs and how tos for docker, but less so for podman.

Other than that, I haven't found anything that makes me consider using docker again.

reidrac··on OpenBSD 7.9
How many upgrades have you done so far? And how many kernel fixes?

Long time ago I maintained a couple of obsd servers, and the cost in time of upgrades and the (occasional) security fixes was substantial.

I still maintain a couple of servers, but if it wasn't because Debian makes it easier by automating most of it, I don't think I could do it.

Yet I miss my time with obsd. I'm very interested in your experience.

Edit: it was 3.6-STABLE. Things have changed since then.

reidrac··on Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis
I hate this. Like the ticket is not expensive already, they also feel like feeding you ads.

And then wonder why people don't go to the cinema and wonder if they can increase the amount of ads to compensate...

reidrac··on I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
Very useful because the information is almost distribution agnostic as Arch will stick to upstream as much as possible; or at least that's my impression as Debian user reading their wiki.

Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!

reidrac··on OpenClaw is changing my life
> A manager shouldn’t get bogged down in the specifics—they should focus on the higher-level, abstract work. That’s what management really is.

I don't know about this; or at least, in my experience, is not a what happens with good managers.

reidrac··on Automatic Programming
I continued reading, but you're right. Why did the author feel that it was necessary to include that?
reidrac··on Automatic Programming
> Pre-training is, actually, our collective gift that allows many individuals to do things they could otherwise never do, like if we are now linked in a collective mind, in a certain way.

Is not a gift if it was stolen.

Anyway, in my opinion the code that was generated by the LLM is yours as long as you're responsible for it. When I look at a PR I'm reading the output of a person, independently of the tools that person used.

There's conflict perhaps when the submitter doesn't take full ownership of the code. So I agree with Antirez on that part

reidrac··on Ask HN: DDD was a great debugger – what would a modern equivalent look like?
I assume is this one https://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/

I used it back in Uni, in 98, and it really helped me to understand debuggers. After it, even using gdb made sense.

reidrac··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
Mine: https://www.usebox.net/jjm/

Established in 2002.

Went full circle: static, PHP+mysql, python+tornado+redis (I had a nosql phase), python+Django+sqlite, and now static again (but this time with a generator, so it is all md).

reidrac··on Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
> unburdened by how things were before.

What burden are you talking about? Using LLMs isn't that hard, we have done harder things before.

Sure, there will be people that refuses to "let go" and want to keep doing things the way the like them, but hey! I've been productive with vim (now neovim) for 25 years and I work with engineers that haven't mastered their IDEs at the same level. Not even close!

Sure, they have have never been "burdened" by knowing other editors before those IDEs existed, but claiming that I would have it harder to use any of those because I've mastered other tools before is ridiculous.

reidrac··on AI Slop Report: The Global Rise of Low-Quality AI Videos
It has been years now that I only care about my subscriptions. I also installed an extension to remove anything else (especially shorts!), and that works great for me.

The downside is perhaps that I rarely discover new content, but YT can't be trusted to give me that organically.

Every time I access YT without being logged to my account and this extension, I'm surprised by the amount of garbage that YT feeds me based on my IP and/or location they infer from it. I worry what effect that is having in the population that consume it without safeguarding.

Sure, there's always been garbage TV, but this is the next level, and on demand.

reidrac··on Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
Give Miles Cameron a go. Artifact Space is a good starting point.
reidrac··on Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
I find very difficult deciding about my all time favourites on anything, but the Hyperion books are pretty close to it.

Not sure about the Endymion ones.

reidrac··on Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
I couldn't get past the awful sex scenes of "Altered Carbon". OK, after having watched the TV series I should have known, but reading it is completely different. Also, the main character is so dislikeable.

It has been a while since my last Heinlein, you reminded me I should read more.

reidrac··on Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
I read 14 books this year and my favourite was Eversion by Alastair Reynolds, followed closely by Pushing Ice by the same author. I "discovered" Cory Doctorow this year, reading 4 books (and I have another in my queue), being "Attack Surface" the one I liked most.

The only technical book I read was Programming in Lua (4th edition), and still didn't work for me. I guess I don't like Lua, and that's OK.

reidrac··on Making a game on a custom bytecode VM in 7 days and 3kB
Dungeon-Specific Language (DSL)

Cheff kiss!

reidrac··on Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
The chatbot can provide sponsored responses. Not sure how evident those will be, but I think it will happen. Surely is in Google's mind.
reidrac··on Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
Vivaldi is not open source. Not quite an option.
reidrac··on Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
so that the tiny but vocal anti-AI minority will be happy

[citation needed]

reidrac··on APT Rust requirement raises questions
> As an end user, it doesn't concern me too much ...

It doesn't concern me neither, but there's some attitude here that makes me uneasy.

This could have been managed better. I see a similar change in the future that could affect me, and there will be precedent. Canonical paying Devs and all, it isn't a great way of influencing a community.

reidrac··on Ticker: Don't die of heart disease
There are some points on this post that confuse me.

> In early 2023 during a routine skin check at my dermatologist [...]

Are routine skin checks a thing?

> [...] I’ve spoken with several of the world’s leading cardiologists and lipidologists [...]

How come?

reidrac··on Gnome Mutter Now "Completely Drops the Whole X11 Back End"
I've never believed on that dichotomy: either you are happy with everything a project does, or you are a hater. Why?

That was precisely what drove me away from the project after many years.

I don't use the software anymore and, for the most part, no changes they make affect me, but Gonome 3 should be treated as an example of an awful way of driving change by burning bridges and hurting the community.

I haven't thought about this for many years now, but I would have expected RH to do better.

reidrac··on Doctorow: American tech cartels use apps to break the law
I read what I think is his newest book and I liked it. It takes an special author to write a thriller that makes spreadsheets exciting.
reidrac··on Font Comparison: Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono vs. JetBrains Mono and Fira Code
Also, how is not having support for font ligatures a feature? Can't you just not use them if they are available?

May be worded differently, like: it doesn't support ligatures, but it doesn't affect me because I don't use them.

reidrac··on Let me pay for Firefox
It can be done; an example is Igalia: https://www.igalia.com/jobs/

> We are a worker-owned, employee-run company with more than 20 years of experience building open source software in a wide range of exciting fields.

If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable, I think a lot of people would get on board with that and would pay for FF.

reidrac··on I Ported SAP to a 1976 CPU. It Wasn't That Slow
The Z80 example in https://github.com/oisee/zvdb-z80/blob/master/ZVDB-Z80-ABAP.... doesn't look correct.

That:

    ld ix, 0 ; accumulator
Is bugging me because 1. ix is not used in the function and 2. operations on ix are limited (and slow), can't be used as "accumulator". It is a 16-bit register to access memory as an index (and as extra two 8-bit limited registers if you use undocumented Z80 opcodes).

Besides, why use b register as counter in the loop and use dec and jr when there's djnz for that?

I haven't checked anything else, but that has a bad smell.

reidrac··on Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin
If the cgi bin needs DB access, every time the process starts it needs to open a connection. Having the code in memory, for example using fastcgi, is not only to avoid the startup time penalty; you can also have a DB connection pool or at least a persistent DB connection per thread.
reidrac··on Palette lighting tricks on the Nintendo 64
I love how the post, about N64 graphic tricks, ends with the question: "Is this the future?"
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