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NostraDavid

29 karma · joined September 14, 2019

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NostraDavid··on AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
> We're a clown industry.

I'll generally agree, and I include myself in this industry, but we've simply have been bound by compatibility. I don't think anyone chose intentionally to keep the crap around; it was simply never worth it to pay the "break compatibility" cost, until now.

NostraDavid··on Herdr has released native app
I love the "What we send" information - I looked that and figured "that's not too bad - fine, have it!". I think this is the first time I've seen this kind of transparency.
NostraDavid··on GPT-6.1 Terra
2026-09-03 is almost 2 months ago already - that's basically half a lifetime in LLM land!
NostraDavid··on Nix wrote half of my debugger
Methinks debugger devs are awful at marketing their software. I didn't even know such a debugger even existed, and I've debugged quite a few programs.
NostraDavid··on Improving site performance by shipping more CSS
Try zstandard instead of Brotli - a clearly superior format, IMO. Definitely better than gzip.
NostraDavid··on I said no and Apple said yes
Whenever "shit hits the fan" we say "Tuberculosis broke out" ("de pleuris brak uit/is uitgebroken").
NostraDavid··on Unreal Agent
To reduce the codex polling I slapped this into my ~/.codex/config.toml:

  [features.multi_agent_v2]
  enabled = true
  wait_agent_enabled = true
  min_wait_timeout_ms = 10000 # 10s
  default_wait_timeout_ms = 300000 # 5m
  max_wait_timeout_ms = 3600000 # 1h
Seems to do the job and reduce usage; I just ran Astra for ~5 hours (using a goal) and it used the last 30% of my usage. And now they released GPT-6 Sol and Luna (which is basically 5.6 Sol and Luna, but a bit better and also 50% cheaper) ;_;
NostraDavid··on Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs
>baked into hardware as custom silicon

Taalas (Acquired by AMD, back in August) created Jimmy[0], a little chat app that runs on a POC chip with ~14k tps. Yes, 14,000 tokens per second. Sure, it's just a 8B model or so (Llama 3.1 8B), but I can imagine that having a 1.58-bit model might be helpful for their next chip.

Heck, what would happen if you used a dLLM (d for diffusion)?

[0]: https://chatjimmy.ai/

NostraDavid··on ArchBench – Control Blender through chat
I used GPT-6 yesterday[1] to generate a paladin, based on a generated texture. The front looks impressive, but then you look from the side, and... well: https://imgur.com/a/VN2g34D

I'm hoping this will do better than my setup.

[1]: using the BlenderMCP + a bunch of skills I found online

NostraDavid··on CancerBench: The frontier model cancer cure benchmark
Absolutely scathing results, and rightfully so!

That being said: I can imagine that IF any of them generates the design of a new drug that cures _any_ cancer right now, it will still take several years before seeing results - creating the drug must be feasible, then it must be lab-tested on animals, then on humans, get approval, etc, etc.

So I'm crossing my fingers on this one, but I won't hold my breath because 5+ years is a long time.

NostraDavid··on A/I shuts down
> Hizballah

Is that Hezbollah's little brother?

NostraDavid··on A/I shuts down
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...

Check the <li> near the bottom. Some are named, such as Armed Proletarian Justice, Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, and Jane’s Revenge, but some unnamed ones as well (at least their actions have been described).

NostraDavid··on WeatherNext 3
In the energy world, this should be such a boon over the classic NWP (Numerical Weather Prediction; complex ML models), but I've not seen it implementated. Anyone with experience of these models over classic NWP?
NostraDavid··on We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora
> compression levels -1, 1 or 2

Are the available compression levels not 1-22? Though that might depend on the specific library used - the official lib at least uses 1-22: https://github.com/facebook/zstd/blob/dev/programs/zstd.1.md...

NostraDavid··on We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora
Speaking of pigz, I've run into pigzpp[1], or rather its paper: "pigzpp: Fast, Parallel, Portable Compression for the Whole Stack"[2].

Turns out we can squeeze quite a bit more compression performance out of DEFLATE - ~10x in certain instances, 2x as a base minimum (read the paper for details).

[1]: https://github.com/thammegowda/pigzpp

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24153

NostraDavid··on The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
Preventing potential version/feature issues?
NostraDavid··on Agnes Callard’s theory of the uni-context
> Yes a plumber can be more easily outed as anti-gay and fired

Why would I care if I don't notice? I'm paying them to fix my literal plumbing, not to proverbially suck my dick. If they do the job I pay them for, and they're not giving me shit for who I am, why would I want to get them fired?

This uni-context feels like a very silly idea in practice.

NostraDavid··on Agnes Callard’s theory of the uni-context
This doesn't seem very compatible with societies that have a Germanic majority as population. _Maybe_ the USA can be the pluriformity that adopts this, but I don't see this as an attractive idea for my society (Netherlands) at large. "Act normal, and you're already acting crazy enough", and all that.

I want to be able to discuss taboo ideas in private, without getting globally cancelled for something I that might be discussed out of my mind. No thanks to the uni-context.

context-bound > uni-context, for at least the Germanic-speaking world.

NostraDavid··on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again
> It seems the world is turning hostile to immigration in general

Not the concept itself, but the insane numbers. Even South Africa is having "anti-migrant" protests (by the _black_ population; important detail, due to history).

Having 1-2% of your population come in as migrants* is pretty nuts; no negative migration afterwards; number only goes up. I cannot see how this is going to end well in the long run.

*: This is for the Netherlands, for the last 5 years since 2024 (that's the latest numbers I got from our Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS)). That is _just_ economic migration. It's insane. I made some visualizations: https://tbataafschebroederschap.nl/projects/autochtoonse-ned...

NostraDavid··on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again
The genders have always been bi-modal, but the well has been poisoned by people calling it "a binary" (hence "non-binary" people). A sad state of affairs.
NostraDavid··on GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
What do you use as interface to OpenRouter? I, too, am looking into using an API to see if I can reduce costs (I use OpenAI + Github Copilot, currently). TensorX instead of OpenRouter (because it's in Europe, and EURouter wanted 15% more money from me :P), but I'm not sure if I want to change a configuration in vscode every time I want to switch the model in the Claude extension (and having an API key in my settings feels iffy too >_>)
NostraDavid··on Turn your site into a place people can bump into each other
Was it http://apestronauts.com (which redirects to https://apestronauts.herokuapp.com/)?

http://apestronauts.com exists since 2012, so that seems a decent potential.

Found it by throwing your comment into ChatGPT.

NostraDavid··on Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)
It's just Digital Sovereignty.
NostraDavid··on Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)
> I really dislike the term because it’s laden with all sorts of militaristic and anti-free movement and all sorts of other problematic baggage

Then call it "Digital Sovereignty" instead. That's what we call it in the Netherlands.

> but it’s the term the industry is using

OK, and? Sounds like it is time to push back. It's like talking about "lower" and "higher" education. Just call it practical and theoretical education instead. Much more descriptive; doesn't talk down to people we seriously need in the coming decades.

NostraDavid··on Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)
I presume nullorempty got a Kapsalon (fries with Doner Kebab - it's so fucking good) and entered heaven for a few minutes.
NostraDavid··on Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)
I know Cyso Cloud (previously Fuga Cloud - still Netherlands-hosted) lets you host K8S applications, and has S3-compatible storage. Is that what you mean with "cloud"?
NostraDavid··on The Gypsy Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
> Surprised to see a slur on the front page of HN.

Only if you're American.

NostraDavid··on The RSS feed reader landscape
I've found RSS Guard a few months ago, and it has finally replaced the gap that existed since Google Reader. It's cross-platform, which is a nice bonus, it works like a classic Windows program, which is a great plus because the modern RSS readers have a terrible UX because right click doesn't work, shortcuts don't work, etc.

The only thing I miss is that I want it to keep an OPML file up-to-date so I can autosync it to a repo, but it doesn't, so I have to export the OPML file sporadically. It's acceptable.

NostraDavid··on The Faroes
Note that "religious meat" can be cruel for certain animals as well. Chickens are still a quick stun, IIRC, but cows are brutalized - they basically slowly drown in their own blood, because of the way they are slaughtered to be Halal.

And then companies try to push for more Halal meat, because there are fewer rules to account for, when it comes to Halal (great way for them to skirt the law, legally). The chicken supposedly tastes better, though.

NostraDavid··on This map is not upside down
Pfff, wake me up when someone makes a sideways map, where either east or west is "up".
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