HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

zcbenz

686 karma · joined February 27, 2014

https://zcbenz.com
submissionscomments
zcbenz··on My iPhone 16 Pro Max produces garbage output when running MLX LLMs
It is a bug in MLX that has been fixed a few days ago: https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx/pull/3083
zcbenz··on Apple's MLX adding CUDA support
In the absence of hardware unified memory, CUDA will automatically copy data between CPU/GPU when there are page faults.
zcbenz··on PyTorch Internals: Ezyang's Blog
Most features are already supported on x86 CPUs, you can pip install mlx on Linux , and you can even use it on Windows (no official binary release yet but it is building and tests are passing).
zcbenz··on PyTorch Internals: Ezyang's Blog
For learning internals of ML frameworks I recommend reading the source code of MLX: https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx .

It is a modern and clean codebase without legacies, and I could understand most things without seeking external articles.

zcbenz··on Show HN: You need a few lines of JS, not a vector database
You can use any serialization that supports numbers, in the repo I used BSER (a binary format of JSON), you can even use raw JSON but it would be very inefficient for float numbers though.
zcbenz··on Show HN: Sisi – Semantic Image Search CLI tool, locally without third party APIs
No it is not normal, I only tested x64/arm64 macs, I will try on linux.
zcbenz··on Show HN: Sisi – Semantic Image Search CLI tool, locally without third party APIs
That is sad, the name sisi comes from the sisi empress: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Elisabeth_of_Austria
zcbenz··on Converting Codebases with LLMs
A few months ago I ported ~15k lines of python code (10k are tests) to typescript, using GPT4. It cost me ~$70.

The python project is https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx and the converted project is https://github.com/frost-beta/node-mlx

I wrote a long prompt: https://github.com/frost-beta/node-mlx/blob/main/tests/promp...

The first result was almost always bad, but after manually modifying the assistant's answer, following generation usually went much better.

zcbenz··on Sudo for Windows
I wrote a Node.js module that implemented similar feature years ago. https://github.com/atom-archive/node-runas (An updated fork can be found at https://www.npmjs.com/package/runas-redux)
zcbenz··on Show HN: Dumbar, a not so smart menubar app
Shameless to insert my app here, also open source and provides quick access from menu bar.

https://chie.app/posts/minimalist-approach-to-using-chatgpt/

zcbenz··on Show HN: Chie – a cross-platform, native, and extensible desktop client for LLMs
I would argue it is not a large part a webview. The webview related code is 900 lines vs the whole project 10k lines.
zcbenz··on Show HN: Chie – a cross-platform, native, and extensible desktop client for LLMs
I actually asked ChatGPT what chie might mean in other languages, for multiple times, but it did not tell me this :(
zcbenz··on What is a Vector Database? (2021)
Suppose one is writing a desktop app doing searches of embeddings, is there a lightweight vector database that runs on all major desktop platforms? I'm aware of redis and sqlite-vss, but none runs natively on Windows.
zcbenz··on Plain C API design, the real world Kobayashi Maru test
Adding fields to context will break ABI compatibility.

To work around the problem, some libraries add padding fields, and some require passing the size of struct to determine ABI version.

zcbenz··on Show HN: GPT-4-powered web searches for developers
Will you provide APIs for this service? I'm writing an extensive desktop app for all ChatGPT alike services, and this service is definitely a thing I want to include.
zcbenz··on Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)
Since several years ago I was starting to have health issues that if I sat still for too long my eyes/arms/legs/waist would feel pain, sometimes fiercely. So I set a timer to remind me to stop staring at the monitor and stand up to do some light exercise, at first the timer was 40 minutes and in recent years it became 20 minutes as my body wears.

So now my work is interrupted every 20 minutes, at first the timer was annoying but after several months I got used to it completely and I don’t think it affects my productivity. And actually I wish I could do it from the begining so I wouldn’t have the health issues at all.

However my interruption is short and during it I was uaually just thinking about my work while stretching my body, so it is no compare to hard context switches like being dragged to a conversation.

zcbenz··on I went through a period where I loaned money to anyone that asked me
When I was teen I lent some high value items in online game, and of course they never got back.

I’m still thankful that I learnt the lesson online instead of in real life.

zcbenz··on An M1 for Curl
I have no relationship with Apple, but from my experience, the usual way big corp contributes to open source is to have their engineers sending patches, instead of sponsoring money/hardware directly.

For example Apple sent patches to some open source projects to add support for Apple Silicon: https://twitter.com/markvillacampa/status/127520044676491264...

zcbenz··on Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened
From my memory GNOME 3 and Unity were created because there was a trend to make all interfaces both desktop and mobile friendly, Ubuntu tried to ship a phone using Unity, and GNOME 3 was advertised for its tablet friendly interface.

For Windows world there was Metro UI of Windows 8, Apple insisted on using different UIs for desktop and mobile and was laughed at.

zcbenz··on Toyota unveils 8.7 kWh battery for residential applications
In Japan, Powerwall is also significantly cheaper than all Japanese maker batteries, last time I checked Powerwall's per-kWh price is only 1/5 of a Panasonic one. How could this happen?
zcbenz··on How to stop a robot vacuum from getting stuck on the laundry rack
When I ordered my home 3 years ago, I chose furnitures that have bottom high enough to let a Dyson 360 pass, and carefully designed their layout so the robot can easily go from one room to the other without circling around or running into wires.

The robot still got stuck from time to time, but the efforts were quite worth it. :)

zcbenz··on Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster
I have both Pi Hole and browser ad blocker plugin, the biggest problem is, sometimes a website does not function well or everything just loads extremely slow, I then have to spend some time debugging my network to know what is going wrong.
zcbenz··on My students cheated... a lot
I really admire the author of this post, He is very responsible of his students and takes his course seriously, how lucky his students are.

When I was in college I was attending a course teaching to build C++ project, the professor checks plagiarism by checking the creation date of source code files, since the project was built step by step with new files being added progressively.

I was being perfectionism about my code and did a lot of refactoring before submitting the project, and got a very low score because the professor saw the dates of my files were new and all the same and thought I copied my homework from someone else. While the ones who actually did plagiarize the homework got high scores, because they copied other students' source code lesson by lesson.

My professor obviously did not even read the source code of our homework, otherwise he would easily know who was writing original code and who was just copying.

zcbenz··on Many software companies are a joke
I feel really sorry for the author, what he said does not deserve such mean comments.
zcbenz··on Deno Deploy Demo: a multi-datacenter chat, client+server in 23 lines of TS
I'm a bit confused when people say "native TypeScript" and "no transpiling" about Deno, does Deno now execute TypeScript without translating it to JavaScript first?
zcbenz··on Tech salaries fall in Bay Area, New York City, rise in Austin, San Diego
I also read in Hacker News a few months ago that past year had been a great time to get a raise of salary.

"Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029344

zcbenz··on The Buffett Indicator
Is Buffett indicator still relevant today with deep globalization? It does not take account of at least following factors:

* Companies like BABA or SE that contribute little to US GDP.

* Tech giants shift profits to low-tax countries.

* Income from US only makes part of global giants' income.

(I know almost nothing about economy so this is novice question, instead of a statement against the effectiveness of Buffett indicator.)

zcbenz··on Fun and dystopia with AI-based code generation using GPT-J-6B
SF idea:

Someone asked AI to generate code for

  def terminate_humankind():
    """Terminate the humankind"""
And it created Skynet.
zcbenz··on Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
In the "Examples" section of README, you can find links to examples with screenshots.
zcbenz··on Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
In the "Examples" section of README, you can find links to examples with screenshots.
Page 1 of 2Next →