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fho

1,022 karma · joined May 4, 2015

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fho··on Tank Body Problem
Love the three body spin on the old scorched earth game!
fho··on Things That Annoy Me About Cars
I am not ruling out the GUI. I just should not be required to look at it. The GUI is a necessity for learning, but once you know a key sequence there must not be a delay before the second click can be made.

The menus should be shown on the dashboard (not on the central screen). I would argue that that would be even safer than trying to look at the symbols in the wheel/stalks while driving.

fho··on Things That Annoy Me About Cars
Re physical buttons: I always wonder why there are no "modal buttons" in cars. E.g. 4 buttons on the left, 4 on the right.

The ones on the left open "submenus" the ones on the right trigger an action from the submenu.

Can be visual, but should not depend in the GUI to keep up.

Examples: Left 1 puts you in the audio menu, Right 1 increases volume. Left 2 puts you in the cruise control menu, Right 1 activates.

Humans are actually pretty good at learning simple patterns like that.

4x4 gives you 16 functions on the wheel. Going one level deeper (left, right, left) would give you 64 possible results. That should be enough to cover all bases.

fho··on Spaceships (Reverse Asteroid)
Rogue Like Celebration is _now_. Great video coverage on YouTube
fho··on Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
Joke's (partly) on you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_injection_(engine)
fho··on Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
What? An opinion piece, written by a human, in 2026?

Don't want to go into the details of the article, but to me it becomes ever more apparent that there is a clear divide between LLM and human written text.

fho··on Show HN: I'm a 15 Year Old Wannabe Engineer, This Is a Cycloidal Gearbox I Built
Version 10-12 is 10-ish years ago. They switched to yearmonth (e.g. 2604) release names long ago.

Let's just say things changed since then.

There is also a difference between intuitive and familiar.

I learned to CAD on Fusion 360 with no formal education and it just worked. I can use FreeCAD sufficiently well to be productive (it really has become better over the years). I tried OnShape and just started working. I like using OpenSCAD and CadQuery...

... but I still struggle to get spline extrusions to work in NX because you just have to know which buttons to press in which order.

fho··on Show HN: I'm a 15 Year Old Wannabe Engineer, This Is a Cycloidal Gearbox I Built
Good luck with that. NX is such a pain to use compared to other alternatives (commercial and free/open source). NX Open being even more painful because it's basically 90% guesswork.
fho··on Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
I have some fond memories of getting into computers around 2000. Building PCs, installing Windows, re-installing Windows ever so often.

At some point Windows just crashed and couldn't be brought back to life, straight up refused to be installed on that disk again.

(Funfact: the crash happened while playing some opensource sci-fi game... Produced by Microsoft)

I had a Gentoo Linux partition back then thanks to a friend from school and used that for everything from that point on.

Interestingly I never really had major issues. Running Warcraft 3 on Gentoo, writing my thesis (theseses actually) on Ubuntu and later switching to Arch Linux just worked.

I still remember switching to Gnome 3 (from KDE) and being impressed by how fast the Shell felt.

...

Fast forward to two years ago and I am forced to use Windows for the first time in 20+ years, in a locked down corporate setting nonetheless.

... what a hot mess :-)

fho··on Various LLM Smells
> I'm using it to build an AI RPG site

I am trying something similar: basically a LLM managed MUD for people with too little time for roleplaying.

If you want to chat, hit me up at mail-from-ohsohumble@f12n.de

fho··on Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold
Actually yes. It's been a while, but now that you mention that, that probably was the reason for somebody (me) bringing the reels to the cinemas for a single showing in the first place.
fho··on Casio S100X Japanese Lacquer Edition (JP Page Only)
"buy twice" is one of those live advices I heard and adhere to since.

It's basically the optimistic interpretation of "buy cheap, buy twice":

When I consider getting into something I buy cheap first, the idea being that that is enough to get a feel ...

... then you buy the second time and don't cheap out. But this purchase is more informed and you really get to appreciate it more because you know the step up from the cheap thing.

And sometimes... maybe even most of the time... the cheap thing is just enough.

fho··on Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold
One of my student jobs was to transport film spools to theaters. They would arrive at my door in a box, I would walk them to the cinema on a small trolley and spend 2-3 hours in the projection rooms. The reels were spliced on site by a technician, projected, cut again and I transported them back home where they would be picked up again.

The job was less to transport the spools, but to supervise that there was no copying happening.

This was late 200x-ish, before digital protection became widespread iirc.

fho··on Show HN: Turning a Gaussian Splat into a videogame
Wouldn't be the first time that having nothing better to do (being in school) and dedication lead to amazing results.
fho··on Show HN: Turning a Gaussian Splat into a videogame
"Back in the day" people were afraid that pupils would create CS (beta 6.5) maps of their schools. Gaussian Splatting would have been very convenient for that :-)
fho··on Zero-Copy GPU Inference from WebAssembly on Apple Silicon
My last serious GPU programming was with OpenCL. And if my memory does not fail me the API was quite specific about copying and/or sharing memory on a shared memory system.

I am pretty sure that my old 10th gen CPU/GPU combo has the ability to use the "unified"/zero-copy access mode for the GPU.

fho··on College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
Yeah... We had those bulky TI Voyage 200 graphical calculators in school [1]. They could do everything the teachers could throw at us up to the point of having all but a few formulas build in.

I would say that definitely shaped me in a way where I rarely bother with the underlying details and tend to focus on how high level abstractions interact. [2]

[1] German "Mathe-LK", we could chose specializing in two things, for me it was math and computer science, the later being quite novel back in 2003. [2] I _do_ tend to specialize in things, but e.g. for LLMs or GLMMs, while I do have the capability to understand the technical details, I just don't bother.

fho··on Zero-Copy GPU Inference from WebAssembly on Apple Silicon
I am always a bit baffled why Apple gets credited with this. Unified memory has been a thing for decades. I can still load the biggest models on my 10th gen Intel Core CPU and the integrated GPU can run inference.

The difference being that modern integrated GPU are just that much faster and can run inference at tolerable speeds.

(Plus NPUs being a thing now, but that also started much earlier. Thr 10th gen Intel Core architecture already had instructions to deal with "AI" workloads... just very preliminary)

fho··on I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok
Can't confirm. We had students at university (18-20-ish) that had not used a mouse prior to our courses. That was at least 3-4 years ago now and not a single case.
fho··on How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
My "only" experience here is designing ASICs for Neuromorphic Chips. We used sub-threshold exclusively for linearity and energy reduction. No standard cells for us
fho··on How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
I think their "4-bit multiplier with a single transistor" bit is hinting at them using transistors in the sun-threshold regime.
fho··on Ardour 9.0
Just wanted to say thanks one note time!

We have been running Ardour 9 for a while now during band rehearsals. Currently 12 channels that we record and monitor in realtime with some effects on top.

fho··on Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
Then let me quickly say: thank you! I used that algorithm three times in different projects during my academic "career" :-)
fho··on Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB
You might be interested in RWKV: https://www.rwkv.com/

Not exactly "minimal viable", but a "what if RNNs where good for LLMs" case study.

-> insanely fast on CPUs

fho··on I program on the subway
Started a comment to write basically what you said. I've been commuting like that for five years. At the end I didn't bother trying anything productive anymore.

Losing 2-3h per day commuting is not something I am gone miss anytime soon.

fho··on Marble Fountain
Just nitpicking, but there is at least one ball next to his contraption in his video :-)

Doesn't make the whole thing less remarkable.

fho··on It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
Don't Github have emoji reactions? I would assume that those tie "PR" and "needs emojis" closely together.
fho··on Why the push for Agentic when models can barely follow a simple instruction?
> On the ground, we know that creating CLAUDE.md or cursorrules basically does nothing.

I don't agree with this. LLMs will go out of their way to follow any instruction they find in their context.

(E.g. i have "I love napkin math" in my kagi Agent Context, and every LLM will try to shoehorn some kind of napkin math into every answer.)

Cursor and Co do not follow these instructions because they:

(a) never make it into the context in the first place, or (b) fall out of the context window.

fho··on Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
I still remember when Google (and Facebook?) used XMPP for their chat functions. You could log into any XMPP client and chat with people using Google infrastructure.

Good times, I feel old now.

fho··on Learn to play Go
"two or three stones" sound huge. We are 20k vs 14k, iirc that does not justify a three stone handicap.

Our games feel relatively close, it's just evident that he is always ahead.

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