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tharkun__

3,114 karma · joined November 28, 2020

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tharkun__··on How Delhi cut electricity loss from 50 to 5 percent
Agreed. Nothing actually typical at all for regular "just offices".

I do remember working ~25 years ago at a place that did have those two kinds of outlets. Our computers and monitors would be on the UPS+generator ones, while desk lamps, office lamps etc. were not. But it was specifically because the offices were on-site w/ the two data center complexes the company had and the building I was in happened to also be wired into that whole setup. Not every other one was either, only that one and the 24/7 NOC.

I only knew this was a thing because my office mate's computer was in the wrong kind of socket. One day his lamp stayed on while the computer turned off and for me the other way around. Soon after we heard the diesels starting and had to close the window coz of the fumes.

At full capacity of the data center, the absolutely huge UPSs could run the data center for all of 10 minutes. So that's how long the diesels had to actually start and take over.

tharkun__··on How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments
Case in point: If none of us have jobs any more, we also no longer need daycare. Problem solved!
tharkun__··on Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face
Especially when they cross into the physical realm as in not properly secured and air gapped control systems. SCADA is scary.
tharkun__··on Attention is all you have
That's not the problem of the concept of an index. It's bad implementation. If your index only indexes as if it were a static folder structure, then you have to think exactly like the guy that built the index. If you instead allow multiple indexes/index entries for the same underlying thing, then you have tagging.

Bookmarks are folder structure. Theoretically you can bookmark the same thing under a different part of the structure of course. I've never really seen people do that though, except accidentally because they found something the liked, bookmarked it in on place, later found it again, didn't remember they already bookmarked it and bookmarked it in a different part of their folder structure. In a way they also "tagged" except that the actual bookmark, the thing is not the same. It's a copy. If your bookmark goes to some address that might change while pointing to the same actual thing, you'd now have to update (and first find) a multitude of bookmarks in your folder structure. A file system that has hardlinks could implement "tagging" too :)

tharkun__··on Attention is all you have
But categorizing is fine if you can put multiple categories on things. That's the whole difference between flexible tagging and rigid folder, i.e. the one thing GMail got right vs. the real world analog of a folder.

The real world solves it too btw. in the same way a relational database did: Indexes ;) Tagging is nothing but different indexes of the same underlying thing. Be it a book or an email or whatever else.

And this top level comment is actually weird to me. Maybe I'm just a non-Chrome-user? I use Firefox. I never bookmark anything any longer. I literally just know what to type to get to what I need to from the history. Like HN. I literally just type n into a new tab and HN is the first suggestion based on how often/recently I went here. No manual bookmarking or anything non-local needed.

Similarly at work I just know how to find certain things by typing into the search bar. And it even learns from recency. Our app URLs recently changed and I had to start typing the new unique parts of the URL recently for a few tries until it went up in the recency bias calculation. Sure like I had to scroll down a few entries in the history search a few times. Now I just know what to type to get where I want to again.

I see others struggle with rigid bookmark structures that they can't find anything in like ever on the regular though (URL change or not) :( And (at least with firefox) those bookmarks would even get searched too! Of course, unlike history they would have to manually update bookmarks. I really don't get it how people even still use bookmarks any longer.

tharkun__··on Recreating Voodoo Graphics and a Late-1990s Gaming PC on an FPGA
Did we go to the same LAN parties?
tharkun__··on Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking
Really? I am in Android Auto and I try to even just ask it to get me to "Costco Near Me". I know where it is. I wanna know if the sometimes there traffic jam that blocks the right lane is gonna expect me or not without being distracted zooming out from current location and then back in to the highway exit I know is prone to that at times. You know, I wanna be a good citizen and not be distracted by looking even a second at the screen I'm zooming around in.

It tells me there's a Costco 10km from me and I'm like, yeah let's go there, that's the one I meant! And then it sends me to one that's like 40 minutes from me all across town and I'm like WTF?!

Never mind asking Android Auto any question that's not driving related. It just doesn't understand me at all. Or even some driving related ones. "Find Alternative route". "Sorry, I can't help you with that". WTF?

tharkun__··on Recreating Voodoo Graphics and a Late-1990s Gaming PC on an FPGA
Whoa, you took me back quite a few years there!

I really wanted a DX4@100 back then but it wasn't available in my area. I "had" to get a Pentium 60, which I was not happy about lol.

Upgraded to a Pentium 200 MMX. Whoa!

And then I also got a specific batch Celeron 300a to overclock.

"Stole" my dad's Matrox Mystique, coz what does he need a "3D" card for? Played "Destruction Derby" a lot, just coz 3D card: https://archive.org/details/dd2matrox_19961205

Wow, the times!

tharkun__··on Oracle’s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts
That's why I called it "reisserFS" and not reiserfs. I am well aware of the controversies because of what he did on the non-technical side. I am also of course for a very long time by now not using it any longer.

I was merely talking about the experience with XFS "back in the day" and yes I was on reiserfs and then XFS "came up" and I changed my home partition to that, coz I was looking to move off of reisserfs. Power outage. Boom, lost half my home dir. Suddenly lots of totally fine metadata wise files had null length. I did go back to reiserfs until ext4 was stable enough after that. I will never try XFS ever again, sorry. Loosing data is the thing that a file system can't do to me if they want to "retain my business" so to speak.

And yes, reiserfs I actually tested and had survive some power outages totally fine too. I believed the XFS hype too much without proper testing. My bad I guess in that sense. We were all young once. But also: Never again XFS ;)

tharkun__··on Oracle’s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts
XFS is a default filesystem in a production system? Really?

XFS was dead to me 20 years ago. The only time I ever actually verifiably lost data to a system crash was on XFS. I had actual zero length files with XFS after a crash. Lost actual data. But the file system was in totally happy consistent metadata state. Never ever would I ever consider that filesystem ever again.

The ominous "reisserfs" everyone complained about? Never lost a single byte of data to it even when I pulled the plug in the middle of a write operation to test it. No issues with ext4, no experience with btrfs.

tharkun__··on GPT-5.6 Luna vs. GPT-6 Astra: Is a $1.20 Model Good Enough for Code Review?
That sounds good. But it doesn't work in practice from my experience.

The exact same skill in the hands of one person will have vastly different outcomes in the hands of a different person. The review skill I built myself has been shared with folks. They (say they) use it before they put up a PR. I still catch things with the same skill. That is evolving as I catch the model(s) at BSing. Even if I would re-share it all the time, when I catch it, these other people using the same skill wouldn't catch it.

And that is exactly why building a general purpose review agent (or skill) is harder than me having my own evolving skill. If I have to "properly" release a skill/some automation, I will likely err on the side of not having too many false positives. That is harder than still relying on a human to review the AI reviewer. The same people that were really good actual human reviewers of a PR are probably the ones that are good doing the same thing while AI assisted. And the ones that really needed these other human reviewers and processes to help them be productive are probably going to produce a vibe coded mess if left to their own devices with nothing but some AI.

tharkun__··on Netherlands pulls gold out of the US
In a non-pedantic context, yes. Otherwise, no.

    A) "I stayed in England"
And you actually traveled in Scotland and Wales but England was synonymous with UK for you. Technically incorrect of course.

    B) "I travelled around Britain"
And in actuality you only traveled in England.

    C) "I went to Europe"
As an American (yes, a US-ian) and you start in Poland at the Baltic sea and then via some nice Eastern European countries with other attractions like Kroatia, all the way down to Greece. But without further explanation and context most people would've assumed you probably traveled Spain, France, Italy etc.
tharkun__··on US Military disables ad trackers on troops' phones
Really? Tell me again, what happened to that dude ... what was his name? I think they used to be on TV. Can't quite place them. Please help me out.
tharkun__··on Aging brains blend memories together instead of just forgetting them
Everquest looked sooooo good back then. Man! No more Meridian 59!

Why did you have to destroy my memories? :)

It's like looking at the first DivX encoded movie that was soooooo good vs. VideoCD/LaserDisc. And then you look at it today and it's so damn blocky and also in that tiny resolution. Ugh!

tharkun__··on Why your local LLM feels dumber than it is
Regarding the MTP, if you haven't found out why yet, the `--spec-draft-p-min 0.8`. Something to play with and of course it's non-deterministic and depends on both the model itself and whatever you're actually throwing at it.

This is what I read before I went to try it: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/25198

tharkun__··on Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
Well we also have an AI first code base, new product 160k "LoC" by the same measure. Not even a year old.

That 1.9m code base, within the same time frame as the 160k was created? <10k by the same measure.

10k I can comfortably throw at a local agent on my system (see recent posts in my history). Whether I can keep it that small is another question I suppose lol!

tharkun__··on Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
Really?

I just did the LoC measure that isn't "official" but actually closer to how AI would read it: I.e. simply actual lines. Never mind "context window".

Just in the actual source folder there are 1.9 million lines. That's not tokens. Lines. Not even LoC as per some official canonicalized definition. Various languages. ~15 year old code base.

We work with Claude just fine.

For variable measures of "fine" depending on how much devs just trust whatever Claude spits out ;)

tharkun__··on Why your local LLM feels dumber than it is
Haha, OK, so it processes input tokens at 55t/s if started like the 12B. That's so slow that I don't even have the patience to wait for the context of the session I aborted mid-processing to test this, to load. Heck loading the system prompt alone is not fun.

That said, after that it seems to run at the same ~35t/s speed but, I was able to start it up with a 128k context (and no KV quantization), humm humm. I am now playing more with all the parameters like I did to get the 12B going e.g. I'm already up to ~125t/s for inputs now and with an 8bit MTP it's running about 45-85t/s output when its coding.

I run with `--spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-p-min 0.8 --spec-draft-n-max 8` and when it was that fast (during actual code generation) got some `draft acceptance = 0.91801 ( 3482 accepted / 3793 generated), mean len = 7.92`. I also tried 16 with no real improvement for those phases but it seemed slower, wasting too much with low 50% acceptances during other phases like thinking.

    EDIT: Oh look, I can now use larger batch sizes again and that gets prompt_eval reads back to 700+
Regarding how good it is: Probably, maybe, better than the 12B? It immediately noticed an error the 12B made, where it hadn't followed a skill's format description. But it's also annoyingly not following instructions the other one was and instead just gives me its opinion lol! And it couldn't figure out how to read a simple pi SKILL.md and run an included script. It complained that it wasn't registered as a tool. But like all other model changes, will get used to it and adjust I suppose :)
tharkun__··on Why your local LLM feels dumber than it is
It was actually great. I have like a non-AI box so to speak 8GB VRAM, co-incidentally from a gaming PC ...

All the previous models that were "frontier level, just try it!" but wouldn't run at all in agentic mode, including previous Qwens, just disappointed, period.

Then I ran then Qwen 3.8 27b and while it was super slow (4t/s) it literally one-shotted creating a usable "web search/pull" skill for `pi.dev`. while any other model previously just entirely failed to create anything usable even with actual guidance.

Since then I have actually gotten a gemma-4 12B qat 4bit quantized with a ~250MB MTP from unsloth to work with a 32k context "working" on this setup at 80-120 t/s. That's usable for private stuff on a co-incidental box!

It's still only 32k context and it's entirely dumb vs. our API paid at-work Claude Opus. But for entirely private local stuff it's totally workable without breaking the bank even after all these AI price hikes!. I bought this rig literally just for gaming a month ago.

tharkun__··on I'm becoming AI-blind
I see what you did there with the —s!
tharkun__··on We've flown a radiation-blocking vest to the Moon and back, and it worked
Musk has 10+ years of history we can go by that says: Nobody has to follow anything closely to know that he will just say whatever he wants to say and you should give a rats ass about it timeline wise.

Now, do not get me wrong: I got frickin' goose bumps when I saw the first Falcon touchdown. Goose bumps again when they did the first landing out in the open ocean. Of course I still love you! The pincers catching a starship booster were super awesome. Did I mention goose bumps? I am getting them as I write this, thinking back to those moments and now I want to re-watch all of those on youtube after I finish typing this.

But believing a single timeline prediction by Musk? No, forget it.

EDIT: haha, and yeah I did go re-watch and this is so super awesome when I got reminded of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ&t=1s No this is not meant as a jab btw. I love that they have this up. This is what many of us do in software development. Just we don't blow up actual frickin' spaceships to do it "It's just a rapid unscheduled disassembly!" ;)

tharkun__··on We've flown a radiation-blocking vest to the Moon and back, and it worked
Can you tell me what the difference is between "technologically" and "safely" standpoint?

"Technologically we can do self-driving, we'll just be killing any person that happens to stand in our way" does not qualify even as "technologically" for me ;)

The technology has to take into consideration the safety part. Legal, sure I'll give leeway. If you've seen some of the stuff Teslas have done past that predicted timeline, then no, they really did not qualify.

tharkun__··on Where Human Sleep Went Wrong
Your feeling might be different. But for me, body temperature and feeling is way different from the air I'm breathing.

I can be, actually want to be toasty warm under the blanket. But I want the air I am breathing to be fresh and cold. That is when I feel comfortable and "at peace".

I will often stick out my feet from under the blanket because it's way too toasty but the rest of my body needs to be warm.

Sure, when it's 25C I'll essentially just lay there without anything but a sheet across the chest to "feel safe" but anything else will just make me way too warm and the air I'm breathing will feel restricting.

What is really great in 25C+ temps is to be outside in a hammock without an underquilt, which cools things down considerably. But I've also slept comfortably at 0F (-18C) in a hammock. With two underquilts and a 0F sleeping bag as well as a winter tarp with doors and snow cover all around, weighing down the tarp sides (wind does suck at that temp ;)).

tharkun__··on Where Human Sleep Went Wrong
18C is more like the maximum OK temperature. But then I also gotta sleep without PJs when its that hot. Still a blanket for comfort.

Best sleep from my experience? It's usually about 5C at the thermostat, which is farthest from the window, by the time I wake up. And that's likely because it's in the basement, which is a typical NA basement, so you have the uninsulated and below the frost line basement wall there. The cold air coming in will be 0C and colder and I sleep next to the window. Winter is my happy sleep time.

tharkun__··on We've flown a radiation-blocking vest to the Moon and back, and it worked
And "From a technology standpoint, Tesla will have a car that can do full autonomy in about three years, maybe a bit sooner.". Uttered by Musk in 2015. So ... yeeeeaaah.
tharkun__··on GPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost
"Most European cities" entered the room ;)
tharkun__··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
I'm not sure why you all have issues with CC commenting too much. My rules in the CLAUDE.md specify that comments are evil, never comment unless there is an actual need to explain a WHY and since I do read what CC writes, if I spot it still adding such WHY comments and they make no sense, I'll have it adjust, in many cases by removing them.

Given the code base has a minimal amount of such comments, it's also less likely to go "copy what the rest of the codebase does".

Of course I've now jinxed it and some update will cause it to ignore the instructions coz I didn't write them in the new model's style or something.

tharkun__··on Picking berries is my meditation
See I can totally understand the excavator story. Would love that too.

Picking currants? I dread that every year. Same with the raspberries and the cherries and ... It's a chore, I really don't like it at all. Especially having to make sure there's no little green stem left on the currants. That work drives me nuts. Only thing worse is puzzles.

tharkun__··on Why some people mow a lawn better than others
It's not enjoyable in 80+ with RH 60%+ either. Grass grows pretty well. Too well actually but mowing it stinks.

In the morning the grass is still wet and sticky. By the time you can mow it properly, the sun is blaring down on top of this. The afternoon time is worst as things have heated up considerably. When the sun is out of the way, the mosquitos come out and make it even more unenjoyable.

tharkun__··on Writing by hand is good for your brain
They didn't want me to highlight. They just wanted everyone to do highlighting and post-it-noting.

And it's not like there was some sort of actual objective or teaching. Who knows, maybe I would've "gotten it" :shrug:

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