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volkercraig

202 karma · joined December 27, 2025

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volkercraig··on Show HN: Fig – Experimenting with long horizon prediction for personhood
I put in my resume and my youtube history. I'm not really sure how applicable it is. I've been at the same job for 7 years, last year I moved to Senior. Fig seems to think that I'm a shoe in for a CTO position after 2 years, which is a bit out there for a "Stable path"

The "risky path" is just: found a business, sell it and then work at tesla, openAI and google.

I'm also not too sure what the YT history and chat actually do, the suggestions could have been pretty easily guessed from my resume alone.

volkercraig··on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
Up until last week I was running a 960 on mint and had absolutely no problems, nor did I even have to think about drivers. I also have a server running Tesla M10s and they're great too, little more fiddly getting the right driver, but that's moreso on the cards being weird.

Post last week I put in an Arc B580 and I had some issues at the start, but that's more to do with the fact that my workstation has a Haswell Xeon v3... Otherwise it was just turning CSM off.

volkercraig··on There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him
Without the gnu projects, software would have remained in the domain of universities and industry. Distributing it for free and encapsulating it with an actual legal license was radical in and of itself, but the notion of being required to distribute source was even more radical. Without that, people don't learn to code outside of industry, people don't share ideas and software remains in corporate silos with no/low interoptability unless a business decides to form a strategic partnership.
volkercraig··on Qwen3-Max-Thinking
Your boss tells you to choose a vendor for your AI integration. Your options:

Company A - First to the market, Reasonable Cost, Most well known name. Very easy integration.

Company B - Well regarded tools, Higher cost, Better performance and reviews from team. More difficult to integrate

Company C - Reasonably Priced, Performance is reasonable, Has a connection to an extremely controversial individual, Currently being lambasted for being an CP/Revenge Porn generator

Ok, now pretend you're talking to a guy who signs your paycheques. Which one are you NOT gonna pick?

volkercraig··on Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone
If thats youre definition of learning, my casio FX has an "ans" feature that "learns" from earlier calculations!!
volkercraig··on Qwen3-Max-Thinking
Because corporate aint gonna approve the vendor that lets their dumbass employees generate child porn when the other vendors do not.
volkercraig··on Qwen3-Max-Thinking
I'm lazy
volkercraig··on Qwen3-Max-Thinking
You conversely get the same issue if you have no guardrails. Ie: Grok generating CP makes it completely unusable in a professional setting. I don't think this is a solvable problem.
volkercraig··on Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone
I mean semantically language evolved as an interpretation for the material world, so assuming that you can describe a problem in language, and considering that there exists a solution to said problem that is describable in language, then I'm sure a big enough LLM could do it... but you can also calculate highly detailed orbital maps with epicycles if you just keep adding more... you just don't because it's a waste of time and there's a simpler way.

The latter part is interesting. I'm not sure how the performance of one of those would be once they are working well, but my naive gut feeling is that splitting the language part and the driving part into two delegates is cleaner, safer, faster and more predictable.

volkercraig··on Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone
They are text generators, and yes they are pretty good, but that really is all they are, they don't actually learn, they don't actually think. Every "intelligence" feature by every major AI company relies on semantic trickery and managing context windows. It even says it right on the tin; Large LANGUAGE Model.

Let me put it this way: What OP built is an airplane in which a pilot doesn't have a control stick, but they have a keyboard, and they type commands into the airplane to run it. It's a silly unnecessary step to involve language.

Now what you're describing is a language problem, which is orchestration, and that is more suited to an LLM.

volkercraig··on Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone
What you're describing is still ultimately the "view" layer of a larger autopilot system, that's not what OP is doing. He's getting the text generator to drive the drone. An LLM can handle parsing input, but the wayfinding and driving would (in the real world) be delegated to modern autopilot.
volkercraig··on Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone
I don't think you understand what an "LLM" is. They're text generators. We've had autopilot since the 1930s that relies on measurable things... like PID loops, direct sensor input. You don't need the "language model" part to run an autopilot, that's just silly.
volkercraig··on Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone
I don't understand. Surely training an LSTM with sensor input is more practical and reasonable way than trying to get a text generator to speak commands to a drone.
volkercraig··on Vibe coding kills open source
Yeah the level of depraved code I've had contractors ask me to review... I don't think people realize how low the bar is.
volkercraig··on Vibe coding kills open source
> This is largely about extending that thesis to the entire ecosystem. No GH issues, no PRs, no interaction. No kudos on HN, no stars on github, no "cheers mate" as you pass them at a conference after they give a great talk.

Oh... so nothing's gonna change for me then...

volkercraig··on Qwen3-TTS family is now open sourced: Voice design, clone, and generation
Is it though? Think about being a musician 200 years ago. In 1826 you needed to essentially be nobility or nobility-adjacent just to be able to touch an instrument let alone make a living from it. 100 years later, 1926 the barrier to entry was still sky high, nobody could make and distribute recordings without extensive investment. Nowadays it's not uncommon for a 17 year old to download some free composer software, sign up for a few accounts and distribute their music to an audience of millions. It's not easy to do, sure, but there is still opportunity that never existed. If you were to take at random a 20 year old from the general population in 1826, 1923, 1943, 1953, 1973, 83, etc, would you REALLY say that any of them have a BETTER opportunity than today?
volkercraig··on Qwen3-TTS family is now open sourced: Voice design, clone, and generation
This feels like one of those tropes that keeps showing up whenever new tech comes out. At the advent of recorded music, im sure buskers and performers were complaing that live music is dead forever. Stage actors were probably complaining that film killed plays. Heck, I bet someome even complained that video itself killed the radio star. Yet here we are, hundreds of years later, live music is still desirable, plays still happen, and faceless voices are still around, theyre just called v-tubers and podcasters.
volkercraig··on Show HN: ChartGPU – WebGPU-powered charting library (1M points at 60fps)
> I kept hitting the same wall: charting libraries that claim to be "fast" but choke past 100K data points

Haha, Highcharts is a running joke around my office because of this. Every few years the business will bring in consultants to build some interface for us, and every time we will have to explain to them that highcharts, even with it's turbo mode enabled chokes on our data streams almost immediately.

volkercraig··on Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11
Don't get me wrong, If hating Microslop was an Olympic sport I'd be on the podium every 4 years, but Win 95, XP, and 7 were functional, usable and stable OS's. 8 got a lot of flak for it's horrible UI changes, but under the hood it was actually a big improvement to 7.

It's been steadily downhill since 7 though. Integration of spyware got it's foothold in 8 and now that we are at 11, you've got a completely spyware ridden OS, and then on top of that, basic things like context menus, audio drivers, screenshot tools, and connecting monitors to laptops is broken.

Many of these issues were ironically the same issues that stopped me from running Ubuntu Dapper Drake when I first installed it. It's just an unacceptably bad product from Microsoft, and if businesses weren't vendor locked (specifically the business I work for) I'd never even look at it, much like I don't look at Lotus or Corel products.

volkercraig··on I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too
I think you are thinking about it way too hard. Windows 11 is a dog. Constant hardware problems, slow, and frustrating UX. Is any desktop linux perfect? No, but its better than w11 right now.
volkercraig··on Ozempic Melted Away Weight–and the Idea of 'Body Positivity'
Youre right about croatia and romania, they are not near 20%, because they are at 35% and 38% respectively.

Italy is 21%

volkercraig··on Ozempic Melted Away Weight–and the Idea of 'Body Positivity'
Yeah, just like telling a heroin addict that getting clean is easy, just stop doing heroin.

Oh except the heroin is available literally everywhere and you need to do just a little bit every day to stay alive

volkercraig··on Ozempic Melted Away Weight–and the Idea of 'Body Positivity'
Its faster to type "the west" than "the developed world except france, bennelux, and nordics" everywhere else has obesity rates approaching or above 20%, which is a systemic catastrophe
volkercraig··on Ozempic Melted Away Weight–and the Idea of 'Body Positivity'
In happyland im sure everyone would eat lean high protein meals and squat their bodyweight 3x a week, but that isnt reality.

The amount of mental and physical effort required to lose and maintain weighloss is absolutely not commensurate with what the average non-obese person needs to feel and do. Anyone that has lost considerable amount of weight will tell you this. In addition to that, the long term efficacy of lifestyle adjustments w.r.t weight loss hovers around 20%. Once you have had the fat in your body, your hormonal profile is forever changed. Those fat cells sit and make "FEED ME" hormones until they are lysed, which can take between 2 and 10 years.

volkercraig··on Ozempic Melted Away Weight–and the Idea of 'Body Positivity'
Personal experience: the first time i took buproprion/naltrexone it became clear to me why people that arent and have never been overweight think "just eat less move more" is the only advice you need.
volkercraig··on Ozempic Melted Away Weight–and the Idea of 'Body Positivity'
Why are you writing off eliminating obesity as something purely cosmetic? Obesity itself is the most costly affliction by far in the west. It increases all cause mortality, increases healthcare cost, and reduces outcomes for surgeries and rehabilitation after accidents. It reduces work efficiency, reduces lifespan, increases public infrastructure cost by requiring design for things like seatbelt extenders, large corridors for parking mobility scooters etc etc. It promotes food waste, increases energy usage... I could go on and on, but the general idea is that bigger people = bigger costs for everything.

Im not sure why theres such a diataste for just letting fat people take a pill/injection to lose weight. The current advice of telling them "lose weight fatty" is clearly not working on a societal level. When GLPs and naltrexone therapies become ubiquitous we are looking at vastly reduced healthcare costs.

There is also a good possibility that GLPs will kill the fast food industry, which means less fat kids, which means less fat adults.

volkercraig··on Ask HN: How can I stop worrying about my future in CS?
Fads like AI come and go. Any argument that AI is going to replace all programmers is based on the notion of indefinite exponential growth,which is something very rare in nature.

Once you get your foot into the door and get put on your first project with consultants and outsourced workers youll start to realise how low the bar actually is.

Any advantages AI gives programmers will be eaten up by jevons paradox.

volkercraig··on Publishing your work increases your luck
I publish into an open sea and hear nothing in reply. The constant reassurance from every platform that i use that i am merely "one more post" away from all my wildest dreams has to be true eventually, right?
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