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te0006

195 karma · joined April 26, 2010

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te0006··on How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
I was there three days ago, can comfirm. And if you want to stay overnight, you _of course_ sleep in the neighbouring IKEA Hotel! And if you check-in to the hotel first, you‘ll get a voucher for free entrance to the museum. Did I mention that an absolutely excellent breakfast is included in the very reasonable room rate? And in case you visit the museum in the near future, they currently have a special (temporary) exhibition about IKEA's founder, Ingvar Kamprad, who was a very creative but also exceptionally socially and environmentally responsible entrepreneur. Nice contrast to today's appalling tech billionaires.
te0006··on Local Qwen isn't a worse Opus, it's a different tool
Interesting setup. What GPU(s)/VRAM, CPU and RAM are you using for the 122B model, with which quantization, and what token rates do you achieve for prefill and generation?
te0006··on Show HN: Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep
Related: https://github.com/jahala/tilth Edit: recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46952321
te0006··on MicroPythonOS graphical operating system delivers Android-like user experience
Thx. Perhaps have another try with https://pypi.org/project/esptool/ .
te0006··on MicroPythonOS graphical operating system delivers Android-like user experience
"it says" - where did you find info on HW support? Or did you try to build and flash the thing yourself?
te0006··on MicroPythonOS graphical operating system delivers Android-like user experience
Does it run on the CYD? https://github.com/witnessmenow/ESP32-Cheap-Yellow-Display
te0006··on Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro
Yes, same for the case where the technology would have been found embodied in machinery aboard a crashed UFO.
te0006··on Google's new 'Aluminium OS' project brings Android to PC
Does anybody think Aluminium as a brand name is a good choice? Especially considering the intended expansion towards the premium market. To me it sounds cheap, second-rate, ersatz. What you use if you cannot afford a better metal. Chrome is shiny, aluminium surfaces soon get dim again after any polishing attempt.
te0006··on Efficient LLMs: how active is this research area today?
Perhaps you are looking for larger savings but I would count the RWKV line of LLM architectures in this category: https://wiki.rwkv.com/basic/architecture.html
te0006··on Vertical Solar Panels Are Out Standing
If you have a south (or SE or SW) facing wall without much shadowing from nearby buildings or trees, vertikal mounting does work OK. Do not expect to reach the panel's nominal Wp rating though, output will peak at 50-70% of that. But panels are cheap - if there's enough room, just overprovision twofold. Just take care to buy an inverter that is OK with such a bigger configuration. And vertically mounted panels will generate more power off-season than tilted ones.
te0006··on Qwen3-VL
Loooking closely, the shop does not seem to be located within the EU. And the 50€ discount does not apply to the 128GB config. Also, if you are interested, it might help to have a look into the user forum: https://de.gmktec.com/community/xenforum
te0006··on Qwen3-VL
Note that the small print on the GMKtec site says that prices do not include customs and VAT. Which seem to amount to 19% in the EU. So, almost 2,4K€.
te0006··on Qwen3-VL
Interesting - do you need to take any special measures to get OSS genAI models to work on this architecture? Can you use inference engines like Ollama and vLLM off-the-shelf (as Docker containers) there, with just the Radeon 8060S GPU? What token rates do you achieve?

(edit: corrected mistake w.r.t. the system's GPU)

te0006··on Two Slice, a font that's only 2px tall
This brings back fond memories from the 8-bit era. Tasword II was a text processor for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum where the developers resorted to extra-narrow fonts to cope with the Speccy's very limited (256x192) screen resolution. The lower screenshot in [1] provides a glimpse of what seems to be a 3px wide font.

OP's 2px width are a bit too extreme for my taste though.

[1] https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/4000080/Timex/Tasword_...

te0006··on Building ultra cheap energy storage for solar PV
Another country with highly developed district heating system is Denmark. They heavily invested in this technology since the 1970s, and currently around 2/3 of all households have district heating, in the capital, Copenhagen, 98%. Moreover, more than 60% of the energy used for these systems comes from renewables. No nuclear power involved (which hast been banned in the country since 1985). A few sources: - https://dbdh.org/all-about-district-energy/district-heating-... - https://stateofgreen.com/en/news/new-plans-to-expand-the-dan... - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...
te0006··on Wendelstein 7-X sets new fusion record
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674
te0006··on DIY experimental reactor harnesses the Birkeland-Eyde process
This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the feasabilty of this idea: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/ee/d0ee0...

"Due to the emergence of low cost renewable electricity from solar and wind, there is renewed interest in decentralized opportunities for electricity-driven nitrogen fixation."

"This analysis shows that the energy consumption for NOX synthesis with plasma technology is almost competitive with the commercial process with its current best value of 2.4 MJ mol N−1, which is required to decrease further to about 0.7 MJ mol N−1 in order to become fully competitive"

Note that this measure of competitivity is based on energy, not cost. So the (intermittently) ultra-low cost of electrical energy generated by modern PV installations (where substantial overprovisioning is becoming normal) has not been taken into account.

An Agri-PV installation that produces all the fertilizer it needs from its own surplus electricity would be cool indeed.

te0006··on AI 2027
You might find Stanislav Lem's Golem XIV worth a read, in which a what we now call an AGI shares, amongst other things, its knowledge and speculations about long-term evolution of superintelligences, in a lecture to humans, before entering the next stage itself. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10208493 It seems difficult to obtain an English edition these days but there is a reddit thread you might want to look into.
te0006··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
or of a CERN experiment in ~2015 having had ...side effects
te0006··on Balcony solar is taking off
Interestingly, owning even a small PV setup like these "balcony solar" devices, and monitoring its output, causes many people to think more about their grid power consumption, and to reduce it or adapt their usage pattern to solar energy availability to some extent. There is something like gamification going on.
te0006··on Tell HN: 2FA code for Google account gone after Google Authenticator update
Good job indeed.Started happening some time in Novenber, and they merrily keep rolling out this buggy Google Authenticator update after people reported the lock-out behaviour you encountered. Apart from corrupting the TOTP seeds for some users, this update also introduced the splendid new feature of backing up those secrets in, of all places, the Google cloud, opening up new vistas for hackers to take over your Google account completely. Which apart from being a rather catastrophic issue in general for many people is a very good starting point for emptying your online bank or crypto exchange account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42450221 So farewell, Google Authenticator, won't miss you.
te0006··on How to lose a fortune with one bad click
My first impulse after ruling out Google Authenticator was to simply switch to Microsoft's Authenticator app (which I already had to use for a work-related thing anyway), thinking "of course MS would not make the same stupid mistake". Turns out they would, and they did. So alternatives from smaller vendors were the only option. In evaluating them, I focused on popular open-source solutions that had the features I deemed important (notably, local backup), and looked into the history, provenance and reputation of their vendors. Nevertheless, some risk will always remain.
te0006··on How to lose a fortune with one bad click
Google rolled out that hare-brained "improvement" in an update to Google Authenticator a few months ago, with the nice extra that for some users, when you dared unselecting the new cloud backup checkbox, the secrets stored in the app were instantly corrupted in some way, so you were locked out of your Google accounts immediately as a bonus <chef's kiss>. Happened to a family member, luckily they had a working emergency access method. We will never use Google Authenticator again.

Recommended alternative: 2FAS (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twofasapp) which allows you to import the secrets from Google Authenticator via QR codes, and has a local backup feature (e.g. to a USB drive).

te0006··on MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
I wish this had come up on HN (or I had had that idea myself) some years ago when my mother suffered from that same cruel condition, for the last four years of her life. With her body, all her older memories and her considerable intelligence largely intact, she had multiple moments of clarity every single day, in which she fully realized the terrible and hopeless situation she was in. But of course, within seconds this thought and any decisions she might have derived from it dissolved in the black hole of her defective short-term memory. So she would not even have had the ability to take her own life to end this if she wished so. My brother and I tried many things to improve her life somewhat, only very few of those were actually a bit succesful. Two of them were digital gadgets, which we selected to provide some benefit without or at least with just very simple interactions: The best one was an LCD "picture frame" the only feature of which was to show an infinite loop of family photos stored on its SD card - she came to really like it and have it switched on quite consistently. The second one was an MP3 speaker which had a few hours of her favorite music on an SD card as well, and which could be used largely like a radio, just by pressing its play/stop button and volume buttons. This latter one she managed to enjoy at least from time to time. Best wishes to the author and his mom, and everyone in a similar situation.
te0006··on Roman Women and the Oppian Law
This seems to be the Feynman episode in question: https://thinkingwiththings.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/richard-...

If you are a fan, be prepared for quite some unpleasantness. Turns out, the story isn't even about topology. No, Feynman was, in his own words, "flabbergasted" that women were able to grasp and explain to each other rather basic matters of analytical geometry.

te0006··on Quieting the Global Growl
Try a modern electric motor. There are some really quiet ones now.
te0006··on Tasmota: Open-source firmware for ESP devices
I tried micropython, liked it, and developed and operated a few home automation devices with it. But changing anything after a few months was a pain - what flashing tool did I use, how did that detail work, etc. Now I run around 15 Tasmota devices in my household and would never look back. The initial flash, depending on the device at hand, can be trivial (e.g. using https://github.com/tasmota/tasmotizer on a device with builtin USB connectivity or with a USB-serial cable) or a bit less so (like the somewhat involved OTA reflashing process https://github.com/yaourdt/mgos-to- for the very handy and inexpensive Shelly devices). In any case, after that it all becomes easy, with web-based configuration, OTA updates, "fleet managament" software like https://github.com/danmed/TasmoBackup, and plug&play integratiom with Home Assistant. If somebody integrated micropython into Tasmota for cases where the countless configuration options and libraries integrated into Tasmota don't suffice, it would be perfect. But meanwhile there is a similar scripting language available within Tasmota for ESP32 devices so I can live with that.
te0006··on Tasmota: Open-source firmware for ESP devices
Is there a Tasmota version now that includes a MicroPython interpreter?
te0006··on GPT-4.5 or GPT-5 being tested on LMSYS?
Agreed. I had it solve a little programming problem in a really obscure programming language and after some prompt tuning got results strongly superior to GPT4, Claude, Llama3 and Mixtral. As the language (which I won't name here) is acceptably documented but there are _really_ few examples available online, this seems to indicate very good generalization and reasoning capabilities.
te0006··on Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on?
Based on your TLD, I would not have been surprised if the service is working for Germany only. But it is Bavaria-only - bummer. Any chance to extend the coverage?
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