HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

carlio

503 karma · joined August 5, 2008

https://carlcrowder.com
submissionscomments
carlio··on Building from zero after addiction, prison, and a felony
I still cling on to the quaint idea that "upvote" means "adds meaningfully and coherently to the discussion", while "downvote" means the opposite. So not "I agree with this" or "that made me chuckle" but rather "this enhances the conversation" - and especially if it's a well written argument I disagree with because that might make me learn or rethink my position. Humour in a well argued point is very welcome, of course.

Wish and reality aren't in alignment here but some places like HN or /r/AskHistorians are my refuges.

carlio··on Building from zero after addiction, prison, and a felony
There's always been a general pushback on HN against turning threads into a series of quippy oneliners. It tends toward having a serious discussion about a topic, rather than farming low-effort humour for upvotes. I consider this a good thing, as there are plenty of other places where that is rewarded.
carlio··on Qwen3.5 122B and 35B models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers
An AMD AI max+ 395 - I use the one from frame.work (https://frame.work/de/en/desktop) with 128GB unified RAM and it can run a 120b model (gpt-oss:120b) just fine.

See Wendel's review here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-xgMQ-7lW0

There are other mini-pc manufacturers, the mainboard is the important part.

carlio··on Show HN: S3mini – Tiny and fast S3-compatible client, no-deps, edge-ready
minio is an S3-compatable object store, the linked s3mini is just a client for s3-compatable stores.
carlio··on X changes its terms to bar training of AI models using its content
It'd look like this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/copyright
carlio··on Don't just check errors, handle them gracefully (2016)
"Something went wrong. Please try again".
carlio··on Germany is unlocking billions to supercharge its military at a seismic moment
Do you suggest not doing it then?
carlio··on AI is stifling new tech adoption?
While you might be able to continuously update the model, are you able to continuously update the moderation of it? As the article says, it takes time to tune it and filter it; if you allow any content in without some filtering of outputs you might end up with another Tay. You'd have to think the liability would slow down the ability to simply update on the fly.

Also, if the proportion of training data available is larger for more established frameworks, then the ability of the model to answer usefully are necessarily dictated by the volume of content which is biased towards older frameworks.

It might be possible with live updating to get something about NewLibX but it probably would be a less useful answer compared to asking about 10YearOldLibY

carlio··on AWS data center latencies, visualized
That reminds me of the story of the 500 mile email (https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)
carlio··on Launch HN: Eggnog (YC W24) – AI videos with consistent characters
It takes too long to iterate on a character design.

For more explanation: I've been playing around with stable diffusion on my laptop recently; I have a gtx 4070 with 8GB dedicated VRAM so it's not nothing.

The main problem I have is that it takes a lot of iteration on a prompt to get what I want, at lower resolution and sampling steps, before I know that I'll get roughly what I want.

I tried making a character in Eggnog, and before I could be sure what I was getting, it told me it'd take 15-20 minutes to be ready. I worry that this will just make me wait a long time for a character that isn't what I want, and starting again too many times will put me off.

The iteration and feedback loop needs to be tighter in my opinion, or people will get unsatisfactory results and be unwilling to go back and fine tune.

carlio··on Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
I think you're talking about spinning up a temporary environment running the code and connecting via a local IDE to inspect it, whereas OP is talking about hosting the IDE remotely.
carlio··on Show HN: HyperDX – open-source dev-friendly Datadog alternative
I use InfluxDB for this, it comes with a frontend UI and you can configure Telefraf as a statsd listener, so the same metric ingestion as datadog pretty much. There are docker containers for these, which I have added to my docker-compose for local dev.

I think it does log ingestion too, I haven't ever used that, I mostly use it just for the metrics and graphing.

carlio··on Kafka is dead, long live Kafka
I work as a contractor so I move between places. I have found a few companies trying to introduce kafka, and every time it has been a solution in search of a problem.

I don't doubt that it has a good use case but I have so far only encountered the zealots who crowbar it into any situation and that has left a residual bad taste in my mouth. So I fall into the "hate it" side.

carlio··on Ask HN: What is the most memorable game you played?
Final Fantasy 7. It was the first story-driven game I played as a teenager and it changed how I thought about games.
carlio··on PrivateGPT
You can by setting an environment variable - https://github.com/imartinez/privateGPT/blob/main/ingest.py#...
carlio··on Joe Rogan Issues Warning After AI-Generated Version of His Podcast Surfaces
The AI Joe Rogan might deny it. Also waffles are space aliens and the moon is flat.
carlio··on Civilization II
I don't think so. I played the original Civ on my Amiga, I love #6 but my favourite was probably #4. I'm not sure where that'd put my estimated age but likely lower than it is.
carlio··on Poisoning web-scale training datasets is practical
SMBC comics had one about this recently - https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/artificial-incompetence - poison the internet training data to prevent AI becoming too advanced.
carlio··on Midnight Trains – A Hotel on Rails
Snälltåget started a Berlin / Malmo / Stockholm route last year too

https://www.snalltaget.se/en

carlio··on James Webb telescope's coldest instrument reaches operating temperature
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
carlio··on Their secret for workplace Zen: Landlines and ethernet cords
I'm not sure "I refuse to adapt or change" is a desirable trait in a new employee anyway so probably the relationship would be mutually suspicious.
carlio··on Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter
Isn't the corollary that there are other companies who train up people who you can hire for a 20% raise from them? Or even just give your existing staff a pay rise once they reach a more senior level?

If you can't afford to do that, then that's saying you can't afford to hire people who know a lot about the technology you're using, and then that's a whole different issue.

carlio··on Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying
If all you need from GSuite is email, then hosting yourself with https://mailinabox.email/ is an alternative that worked for me, until I realised that https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ on a yearly plan was cheaper than the cheapest hetzner VM I could get for hosting it myself.
carlio··on Ask HN: What kind of online tools are you using, missing or can be improved?
https://duckduckgo.com/ ?
carlio··on Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
I didn't do it on purpose, but I read "You look like a thing and I love you"[0] followed by "I, Robot"[1] and that combination was really fun.

The ideas Isaac Asimov put forward in I, Robot (written in the 1940/50s!) juxtaposed with a factual description of the current use of AI and the unusual side effects was really cool.

0: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44286534-you-look-like-a...

1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41804.I_Robot

carlio··on This website has 81% battery power remaining
Significantly, shifting the image calculations from the server to the client means the work is duplicated for every client. While it saves energy for the server, it increases the overall energy consumption required to deliver the content.
carlio··on The Framework Laptop is now shipping
+1 for AMD for me, I'd absolutely buy this today if I could get a 5000 series HS in it too.
carlio··on Microsoft Irish subsidiary paid zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year
In Estonia you pay taxes on distributed profit. If profit stays in the company it's not taxed.
carlio··on There’s no place for expensive laptops with 8GB of RAM anymore
This comes partly from the cloud-centric approach of "just scale up" instead of trying to optimise code. Lots of developers just want to throw more CPU/RAM at their inefficient code because "it's cheaper than the developer time to fix it" which is sort of true up to a point, until you have to hire a contractor to come in and reduce your AWS/GCP bill so you don't go out of business.
carlio··on PHP's Git server compromised, moving to GitHub
It does beg the question if this was only the first time they were noticed.
Page 1 of 5Next →