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fxtentacleon Linux is good now

The Quest 3 works offline with ALVR streaming over a private (non-Internet connected) WiFi network. Together with my 3090 I get 8k @ 120fps with 20ms latency over a WiFi6e dongle. I had to manually install the dkms for the dongle on PopOs, but apart from that it just works. ALVR starts SteamVR and then I use Steam to start the game. Proton seems to use Vulcan for rendering.

fxtentacleon The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

I don’t think they can.

NVIDIA, like everyone else on a bleeding edge node, has hardware defects. The chance goes up massively with large chips like modern GPUs. So you try to produce B200 cores but some compute units are faulty. You fuse them off and now the chip is a GP102 gaming GPU.

The gaming market allows NVIDIA to still sell partially defective chips. There’s no reason to stop doing that. It would only reduce revenue without reducing costs.

fxtentacleon US threatens EU digital services market access

LIDL the supermarket chain is German and is running a large cloud operation inside the EU. And OVH from France is also pretty big.

You’re correct that few EU companies get as large as US monopolies, but that’s kind of the goal when you want a functioning market.

fxtentacleon US threatens EU digital services market access

Yay, jackpot! We taunted the monkey in the glass box into throwing the first stone.

The EU is just itching for any opportunity to get rid of US tech firms because they’re increasingly seen as sovereignty risks. And while the GDPR fines (that this likely refers to) appear huge on absolute terms, they are still low enough that US firms voluntarily decide to violate those laws and just pay the fines.

The US sees TikTok as a risk. For the EU, it’s Microsoft Office.

fxtentacleon Australia's social media ban was pushed by ad agency focused on gambling ads

“it’s a form of regulatory capture hidden behind a silly moral panic” is a very nice summary of gambling operators pushing an under-16 ban to protect their gambling ads by shifting responsibility onto the kids not circumventing the silly ban.

fxtentacleon All it takes is for one to work out

Huang's family must have had interesting connections if you consider that the daughter of his cousin is running AMD. And both were born in Taiwan and then went to MIT, which seems unlikely to happen without family money.

fxtentacleon Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

I’m quite happy with my offline AI solution:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845049

fxtentacleon Image Diffusion Models Exhibit Emergent Temporal Propagation in Videos

I wouldn't call these properties "emergent".

If you train a system to memorize A-B pairs and then you normally use it to find B when given A, then it's not surprising that finding A when given B also works, because you trained it in an almost symmetrical fashion on A-B pairs, which are, obviously, also B-A pairs.

fxtentacleon AI has a deep understanding of how this code works

"This seems to be largely a copy of the work done in OxCaml by @mshinwell and @spiessimon"

"The webpage credits another author: Native binary debugging for OCaml (written by Claude!) @joelreymont, could you please explain where you obtained the code in this PR?"

That pretty much sums up the experience of coding with LLMs. They are really damn awesome at regurgitating someone else's source code. And they have memorized all of GitHub. But just like how you can get sued for using Mickey Mouse in your advertisements (yes, even if AI drew it), you can get sued for stealing someone else's source code (yes, even if AI wrote it).

fxtentacleon European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft

The EU is worried about Trump being unpredictable, so they are pushing hard for sovereignty. See their initiatives to leave US clouds. This decision is completely in line with that strategy and, probably, also what the US military expected to happen.

fxtentacleon Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

LLMs and Diffusion solve a completely different problem than world models.

If you want to predict future text, you use an LLM. If you want to predict future frames in a video, you go with Diffusion. But what both of them lack is object permanence. If a car isn't visible in the input frame, it won't be visible in the output. But in the real world, there are A LOT of things that are invisible (image) or not mentioned but only implied (text) that still strongly affect the future. Every kid knows that when you roll a marble behind your hand, it'll come out on the other side. But LLMs and Diffusion models routinely fail to predict that, as for them the object disappears when it stops being visible.

Based on what I heard from others, world models are considered the missing ingredient for useful robots and self-driving cars. If that's halfway accurate, it would make sense to pour A LOT of money into world models, because they will unlock high-value products.

fxtentacleon Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

Working under LeCun but outside of Zuckerberg's sphere of influence sure sounds like a dream job.

fxtentacleon iPhone Pocket

Yes, the point I was trying to make is that companies can get away with not being maximally profitable. There's nothing legally stopping Apple from accepting a slightly lower profit margin on the 5% of sales volume that might go to smaller iPhones if they would offer them. But it might brighten the day for millions of customers.

fxtentacleon iPhone Pocket

The iPhone Air was a turn in the wrong direction.

What people like me wanted was an iPhone 13 mini that's a bit thicker so it can have a bit more battery capacity. And with the 120 Hz PWM nausea fixed.

The iPhone Air has worse battery life. And it has a larger screen. And it's worse to handle one-handed. Coming from the 13 mini, it's not an improvement.

fxtentacleon iPhone Pocket

No camera => not a phone replacement for most of the market

fxtentacleon iPhone Pocket

That's why Tesla stock tanked as soon as the FT wrote that "$1.4bn appears to have gone astray." ;)

https://www.ft.com/content/62df8d8d-31f2-445e-bfa2-c171ac43d...

fxtentacleon iPhone Pocket

Good point. Thx.

fxtentacleon iPhone Pocket

My guess would be that all those people that wanted small phones had an iPhone SE and now all their data is locked into Apple's walled garden and that's why they will begrudgingly buy a larger phone, even though they would have preferred a smaller one.

In short: Apple can get away with ignoring what those customers want.

fxtentacleon iPhone Pocket

That must be why all those vacuum robots and smart TVs phone home to China. Because people really love appliances that spy on them. Good thing Samsung patched their fridges to add advertisements and spyware, because that's what their customers (in the US) were really waiting for.

fxtentacleon iPhone Pocket

And in Germany, the iPhone 16e 128GB in white currently sells for €537 at "Netto Marken-Discount", a supermarket chain famous for its low price. "Marken-Discount" = "brand name rebates"

fxtentacleon iPhone Pocket

Damn you! Can't unsee it now. ;)

fxtentacleon iPhone Pocket

"iPhone 16e Sales Lag Behind SE Models"

Ooops ?

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/03/iphone-16e-sales-lag-be...

Looks like the market did like the SE size.

fxtentacleon iPhone Pocket

I believe the issue is that with Jobs gone, Apple's design team is now apparently unable to continue their job. Instead of developing their own UI paradigm for small screens, they keep copying from Google Pixel both the UI ideas and the screen size. And now that they ran out of useful ideas, they turned everything transparent. Why make the iPhone look more like Apple Vision when people so obviously hate the latter? [1]

My prediction is that the age of AI and LLM assistance will make tiny devices the norm. Like those AI pins. Like Siri inside AirPods. Like Meta's AR glasses. But it seems that Apple is losing the race here. They lost their edge when it comes to developing new user interface paradigms.

EDIT: [1] Bloomberg claims 10-15% return rate, which would be massive: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-02-18/apple-... (for comparison, Galaxus reports 2% as normal for Smartphones and <5% for Meta's Quest)

fxtentacleon iPhone Pocket

opens cupboard

iPhone 3GS

Galaxy S3

Sony XZ1 Compact

iPhone SE 2016

iPhone SE 2020

iPhone SE 2022

Unihertz Atom

fxtentacleon iPhone Pocket

Awww... I was so much hoping for an iPhone that will fit into my pocket. The 1st iPhone SE was the perfect form factor. But no, Apple's phones just had to grow and grow and grow like cancer ...

In my opinion, the fact that Apple is now selling a bag to carry your oversized phone around in, is an admission that they failed to make phones that are convenient to carry.

fxtentacleon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

https://github.com/DeutscheKI/jetbrains-mini-agent

Fully offline LLM coding agent plug-in for JetBrains IDEs. Use with Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf on an RTX 3090 or up. The source code is pretty short to make sure it can be audited, if needed.

fxtentacleon Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break

Yeah, that CV could also use some colors, spacing, and typography to visually highlight key facts.

fxtentacleon Show HN: OfflineAI – tiny JetBrains LLM Agent – open-source

oops. fixed. thanks :)

fxtentacleon Show HN: OfflineAI – tiny JetBrains LLM Agent – open-source

Let me pre-empty the "why?" questions:

I work on A LOT of highly sensitive code, usually in manufacturing, automation, or robotics. It's basically impossible for a small company like mine to get a custom exemption from the company-wide NDAs that my clients usually require everyone to sign. These guys wouldn't touch a US cloud, so they surely would never approve US-based LLM agents.

But I also don't want to completely forfeit the convenience of using LLMs for boilerplate or simple refactorings. That's why this plugin is designed to also work in air-gapped environments. It only connects to http://127.0.0.1:8081 and the source code is few enough that you can audit this.

fxtentacleon ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk

I find it fascinating to see how much power Germany's "digital sovereignty" initiative has gained. In the beginning, it looked like yet another government thingy that nobody will use. But by now, they must be well above 100k government employees using it daily.

Also, in case you missed that: StackIt is the AWS / G Cloud competitor by LIDL: https://www.stackit.de/en/ It's the basebone for their app strategy with 100 mio+ client installs and about 500k employees.