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sbrother

950 karma · joined February 19, 2012

Email me at sam@cairnlabs.com. Currently working on https://trebel.la
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sbrother··on Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
Ooo, does everywhere in Sugarhouse have access to this now? We've been up in Park City relying on wireless point-to-point but are about to move back down to the valley and that is very exciting.
sbrother··on Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
My version of fizzbuzz (I'm in backend/ML/NLP) is counting how many times each word appears in a string. Literally `return Counter(text.lower().split())` but it's totally fine if you want to do it in a for loop or whatever, as long as you can fluently write an incredibly simple function.

Half of the people I screen fail it. It's crazy.

sbrother··on MacBook Neo
Does that include VAT? Also the USD has been getting weaker quickly so I wouldn’t be surprised if the differential there is even larger than when they settled on pricing.
sbrother··on Apple Studio Display and Studio Display XDR
> you can get very nice displays for less than half the price that are 98% the same on specs.

Can you recommend any displays with PPI and brightness equivalent to the studio display, with 120Hz+ refresh rates? I was waiting for this announcement to buy a studio display because I thought they might bring 120Hz to the base model, but $3300 is a lot to spend on a single display. I have an original studio display and a high refresh rate 4K OLED monitor, and they are both compromises unfortunately.

sbrother··on Instant AI Response
Do we understand how to scale up the hardware to the point it can run a frontier model? Because this is insane. It will be a game changer for agent systems making 10-100+ calls.
sbrother··on Facebook is cooked
Similar experience for me and at this point it's just a collection of private chats. Different groups use different platforms (mine are on iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal, Slack, and.. actually Messenger although apparently Facebook is taking that away soon). It kind of feels like real-name social media is a failed experiment at this point.
sbrother··on Voxtral Transcribe 2
Amazing. Thank you.
sbrother··on Voxtral Transcribe 2
Do you have experience with that model for diarization? Does it feel accurate, and what's its realtime factor on a typical GPU? Diarization has been the biggest thorn in my side for a long time..
sbrother··on Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?
Seriously. I didn't even realize this was a wide issue, but I couldn't find a school enrolment email I was looking for this morning, and found it in the spam folder. The fact that I basically never have to do this is actually amazing.
sbrother··on Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
I've heard this, and I've even seen it in plenty of poorly performing businesses, but I've never actually seen it in a highly performing, profitable tech company. Other than at the new grad level but it's treated as net-negative training while they learn how to build consensus and scope out work.

Not coincidentally, the places I've seen this approach to work are the same places that have hired me as a consultant to bring an effective team to build something high priority or fix a dumpster fire.

sbrother··on The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]
1. Uh, isn't 2000 like extremely fucking good?

2. I played a chess bot on Delta on easy and it was really bad, felt like random moves. I beat it trivially and I am actually bad at chess, ~1000 on chess.com. I wonder if this one is different?

sbrother··on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
Can you independently set desktop wallpapers on the two screens? I know this seems nitpicky but it's literally impossible with Ubuntu/Gnome as far as I know; I have one vertical and one horizontal and have to just go with a solid color background to make that work.
sbrother··on How Google got its groove back and edged ahead of OpenAI
Funny enough this sounds like my experience with ex-Amazon SWEs
sbrother··on In Defense of Matlab Code
> People usually use C++ or Julia. All of the fastest answers are in Julia

That's surprising to me and piques my interest. What sort of pipeline is this that's faster in Julia than C++? Does Julia automatically use something like SIMD or other array magic that C++ doesn't?

sbrother··on An SVG is all you need
I once built a music game that basically ran entirely on SVG. We hacked Musescore to attach the same UUID to both the note head in SVG and the MusicXML object in two different output modes, and then used that to synchronise the sheet music scrolling with a MIDI stream. If you're interested you can see it in action in our failed Kickstarter video from like eight years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgbB5Q4-dgY
sbrother··on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
How is their managed Kubernetes product nowadays? I've realized all I really use on GCP and AWS is managed Kubernetes and Postgres, and I feel like I must be overpaying particularly for GPU instances.
sbrother··on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?
Fair, but then that functionality should be built into the flagging system. Obvious AI comments (worse, ones that are commercially driven) are a cancer that's breaking online discussion forums.
sbrother··on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?
I strongly agree with this sentiment and I feel the same way.

The one exception for me though is when non-native English speakers want to participate in an English language discussion. LLMs produce by far the most natural sounding translations nowadays, but they imbue that "AI style" onto their output. I'm not sure what the solution here is because it's great for non-native speakers to be able to participate, but I find myself discarding any POV that was obviously expressed with AI.

sbrother··on Editing Code in Emacs
Honestly being able to use emacs movements everywhere is one of the reasons I stay on MacOS.
sbrother··on Two recently found works of J.S. Bach presented in Leipzig [video]
I think that's true about Bach's instrumental music, but his big sacred works like his Passions and the Mass in B minor are as "romantic" as the Baroque period gets. Like OP, I think of these works as basically the pinnacle of human artistic achievement. They somehow have all the nuance and complexity you're referring to -- while also telling a deeply emotional story, and just being heart-wrenchingly beautiful even if you don't know the story.
sbrother··on Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable
Nvidia's Linux software is first rate -- actually a large amount of the software that would merit buying an Nvidia graphics card is Linux-only anyway. I actually briefly had an AMD card but ended up giving it away since it didn't support ~any of the projects I needed to work on. But YMMV, my anecdata is from a ML engineering perspective.
sbrother··on We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
It's a reasonable question! I'm past the baby monitor stage now, but when we used our Nanit from a different network it was for things like:

* Doing garage or yard work where Wifi coverage was spotty. May seem like an edge case but remember that when baby is sleeping is exactly when you want to be doing things like yard work.

* Hanging out across the street cooking out with the neighbors while baby sleeps

* Having a couple drinks at the hotel bar on vacation after baby goes to sleep. You're only ~30 seconds from your room if baby wakes up, but it's nice to not have to sit in a dark room for the whole evening after 7pm.

sbrother··on We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
Ok that’s really cool; I didn’t know you could set up Apple’s smart home thingy to forward a live feed to the cloud.
sbrother··on We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
I tried a high end Philips one and a Nest camera. Both were way less reliable than the Nanit. Possibly because they didn’t play nicely with my mesh WiFi at home. But regardless I just wanted to vouch for Nanit’s software, whatever they are doing with their networking and UX is really good.
sbrother··on We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
Yeah that’s fair, we had one of those too which absolutely did everything it advertised. The nanit is a different product that doubles as a home camera that lets you monitor your home while you’re away. Its software/networking is impressively reliable.
sbrother··on We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
As a happy customer, I picked nanit because it actually worked. We didn’t even use the “smart” features, but “you can turn on the app from anywhere you happen to be and expect the video feed to work” is unfortunately a bar that no competitor I tried could meet. The others were mostly made by non-software companies with outsourced apps that worked maybe 50% of the time.

I wish we could have local-first and e2ee consumer software for this sort of thing, but given the choice of that or actually usable software, I am going to pick the latter.

sbrother··on Neural audio codecs: how to get audio into LLMs
right, but either whatever audio tokenization it's doing doesn't seem to encode pitch, or there's ~nothing where pitch is relevant in the training set.
sbrother··on Neural audio codecs: how to get audio into LLMs
I don't think it's just safeguards; they really don't seem to understand pitch at all. I tried asking ChatGPT's advanced voice mode to recognize a tune I was humming, and it insisted it was Beethoven's 5th -- multiple times. I think it must have basically tokenized my humming to "dun dun dun duuun".
sbrother··on Postman which I thought worked locally on my computer, is down
Hey thanks, this looks great. I'm still on Paw but I've been looking for something new since it's been languishing as "RapidAPI" for years.
sbrother··on Novo Nordisk's Canadian Mistake
Is that process that can happen online? Or does it require the patient being physically present in Canada?
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