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unsigner

913 karma · joined January 16, 2011

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unsigner··on New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
In capitalism, incentive usually is aligned with price. The industry doesn’t have incentive - the incentive arrives with higher prices, which is what we’re discussing in the first place.
unsigner··on AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon
Their thing is improving the models; it would be extremely counter-company-culture to bet on models plateau-ing. Maybe wise in terms of hedging, but still difficult to pull of as a company decision.
unsigner··on Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
This is not strictly true.

I enjoy optimizing code to the point of obsession, but I can't find economic (daily-job) justification to spend time on this. Lately I've had several extremely productive and enjoyable sessions that go like this: - I run Claude on my desktop PC, explain the problem, and let it explore the code around the problem and build a test harness so it can run experiments - I ask it to run experiments and try things; at that point I can leave my PC and continue over my phone in brief stolen moments here and there, over the course of many hours - it comes back with results; I ask it to try new things based on those results - after multiple rounds of this, I have explored a vast search space I could have never had time to do myself - I ask it for an implementation of the most promising path; this is usually something simpl-ish (on the order of 50-100 LOC, not huge new systems) - I return to the PC and do something between polish the implementation and redo it fully manually - partly because I enjoy it

This is something I can see myself do for fun in areas I care about, not for money and reasonable business objectives for my day job.

unsigner··on Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards
This sounds like "government issue Revolut". Which would be... low-key nice? Not a nefarious scheme, not a revolutionary future of money, just something to replace a certain part of your financial life without tying it to a commercial entity. Which might be appealing to the anti-capitalism segment of Europeans.
unsigner··on CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
Of course they care about oil spills - this is why all the oil tankers in the last weeks were attacked when empty.
unsigner··on CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
Peacetime technology from people who ignore the shooting war next door. Do you really want to build your energy system on huge soft targets? This looks much more vulnerable than solar arrays or battery installations to small-to-medium warheads (i.e anything from $500 FPV drones with an RPG round to $100k middle strike drones with 100 kg of payload).
unsigner··on Wave of (Open Street Map) Vandalism in South Korea
Freely available and openly editable maps might be one of the things that we take for granted, but are simply an abberation of a brief period of peace and civility; now we'll return to the default hobbesian state of affairs.

See also: beautiful, detailed aerial photos of oil refineries posted by amateur drone photographers to public sites. Submarine cables and oil tankers, carrying the world economy on their shoulders without any protection out there at sea.

unsigner··on iPhone Pocket
An Apple Watch with a cellular connection, paired with Airpods, fulfills some of the role of a small iPhone - you can make calls, listen to music, and even do some light texting if Siri likes your accent.
unsigner··on The mad king's digital killswitch
The ICE has tanks - can you provide a link? Words have meaning. Maybe some armored cars, but tanks?
unsigner··on OpenZL: An open source format-aware compression framework
Congrats on the release. I was wondering what the zstd team is up to lately.

You mentioned something about grid structured data being in the plans - can you give more details?

Have you done experiments with compressing BCn GPU texture formats? They have a peculiar branched structure, with multiple sub formats packed tightly in bitfields of 64- or 128-bit blocks; due to the requirement of fixed ratio and random access by the GPU they still leave some potential compression on the table.

unsigner··on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down
how do you "take cash" over the Internet?
unsigner··on Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts
Dead business?

The Mac is something like 30 billion in revenue per year, and 10 billion in profit.

The entire "generative AI" "industry" is struggling to reach 30 billion in revenue even with their creative accounting (my free Perplexity that comes with Revolut is somehow counted at full price, even though I never paid anything, and I'm sure Revolut doesn't pay full price), and gross profit is deep in the negative.

unsigner··on Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts
they are not talking about perplexity; the endless rumor mill talks about perplexity. The same that has them buying everything from Disney to Porsche to Nike for decades.
unsigner··on Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts
I've heard the phrase "through Apple new technologies achieve their final form", possibly not official Apple but one of the Apple choir bloggers (Gruber?).

There were smartphones before iPhone, now all smartphones are black featureless rectangles. There were printers before LaserWriter, then for 20 years all printers became this. (And later disappeared.) There were wireless heaphones before Airpods, now the difference is in the shape of the stubs. There were laptops before the Macbook Air... etc

unsigner··on Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?
I prolonged the life of my terminally ill dog using EPO. It wasn't exotic or expensive. Probably that means it's already in wide use for humans, too.
unsigner··on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
The Bulgarian translation I read was a valiant effort by a guy who ran the Bulgarian "science fiction and fantasy BBS".

(Yes, that kind of BBS, with the dial-up modems, XMODEM/YMODEM/ZMODEM etc.)

(Yes, it was mostly for pirating books in the form of badly OCR-ed TXT files, and occasionally discussing them.)

Apparently at some point he decided he needs to bring Gibson to the non-English speaking part of the population and... I don't remember the translation as being "good", but it definitely was "bold".

unsigner··on Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?
I agree with the experience of assembling something from pieces is valuable.

But if you don't want that, there's no need for "online tutorials for beginners" and that shouldn't be counted as an additional appeal. It's just Windows.

unsigner··on Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
you're not wrong about most of this, but anti-semitic? he's very openly Jewish
unsigner··on Apple introduces iPad Air with powerful M3 chip and new Magic Keyboard
if( price sensitive ) return iPad; else if( know what you're doing and you know it needs a Pro ) return iPad Pro; else // I guess I'll be browsing and watching movies?? return iPad Air;
unsigner··on Leaking the email of any YouTube user for $10k
You have discovered the one real practical application of crypto.
unsigner··on Show HN: ESP32 RC Cars
Thanks for sharing this - this will be an inspiration.

Everybody knows about FPV quadrocopters used on the battlefield, but there is an increasing focus on terrestrial vehicles. They look nothing like the Boston Dynamics robodogs crossed with Terminators from the mvoies, but are extremely useful in lower-profile "boring" jobs, like laying landmines, exploding landmines, and carrying small amount of supplies to soldiers sheltering somewhere on the frontline.

unsigner··on Tech takes the Pareto principle too far
video games are guilty of this too, and the proliferation of Unity and Unreal is partly due to an overoptimization for prototypes
unsigner··on I am rich and have no idea what to do
Dude, you’re a bigwig at atlassian. Fix JIRA.
unsigner··on Party Squasher, the first guest occupancy counter for homes
Relatively sensible and privacy-preserving compared to what I first imagined - cameras and AI AI AI
unsigner··on Want to book a Ryanair flight? Prepare for a face scan
I don’t regularly take buses to the other side of Europe to eat some gelato and gawk at cathedrals for a weekend. A lot of people use cheap airlines as cheap entertainment.
unsigner··on Half of Russia's A320/A321neo Fleet Grounded Amid Engine Issues and Sanctions
Barely. The Sukhoi Superjet trickles out of the factories, and the other two projects have been delayed again and again.
unsigner··on Can humans say the largest prime number before we find the next one?
Nice try, AI trainers.
unsigner··on Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated
Quite contrary, people are gleefully machine translating Wikipedia to make more Wikipedia (in different languages). And arguing for it.
unsigner··on Experimental web browser optimized for rabbit-holing
This is also how search in IDEs should work.

Each new search term should open a new results panel, with space for the source code on top, and a list of hits at the bottom. Results panels are in an infinite horizontal row.

unsigner··on Do AI companies work?
Or, more drastically, another way of saying it’s useless.
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