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hkt

2,293 karma · joined September 25, 2016

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hkt··on Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company
True enough, but do you think the usual level of disparity is so vast that it ends up on the front page of international press outlets? I'm thinking the $100m pay offers etc
hkt··on Mozilla's new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox
The capital intensity of browsers is so high that there won't be any alternatives unless standards evolve to be simpler and easier to implement. That won't happen while Google and co are driving.
hkt··on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
Given the amounts being raised and spent, one imagines that the ROI will be appalling unless the pesky humans learn to live on cents a day, or the world economy grows by double digits every year for a few decades.
hkt··on Ecosia: The greenest AI is here
The greenest AI will be connected to district heat networks instead of being cooled with air or water. It isn't even faintly green when heat is treated as a byproduct instead of a co-benefit.
hkt··on Red Alert 2 in web browser
"I'm escaping to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism... SPAAACE!"

A more innocent time tbh

hkt··on SailfishOS: A Linux-based European alternative to dominant mobile OSes
It runs Android apps. Presumably, it has access to the Play store in some capacity, or a viable alternative.
hkt··on Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
Am I the only one who thought poetry was still the greatest available whizbang?
hkt··on Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division
Many companies will roll out to slices of production and monitor error rates. It is part of SRE and I would eat my hat if that wasn't the case here.
hkt··on Dutch spy services have restricted intelligence-sharing with the United States
Germany, where 80% of the population does not vote for the AfD :)
hkt··on Getting DeepSeek-OCR working on an Nvidia Spark via brute force with Claude Code
> There’s honestly so much material in the resulting notes created by Claude that I haven’t reviewed all of it

I've had the same "problem" and feel like this is the major hazard involved. It is tricky to validate the written work Claude (or any other LLM) produces due to high levels of verbosity, and the temptation to say "well, it works!"

As ever though, it is impressive what we can do with these things.

If I were Simon, I might have asked Claude (as a follow up) to create a minimal ansible playbook, or something of that nature. That might also be more concise and readable than the notes!

hkt··on Dutch spy services have restricted intelligence-sharing with the United States
The only actual hope is a common European defence policy (and industry) independent of NATO. The day Germany agrees to it, the dominos might fall, and the USA might realise what it has lost.
hkt··on Claude Skills
The same thing will happen: skilled people will do one thing well. I've zero interest in anything but Claude code in a dev container and, while mindful of the lethal trifecta, will give Claude as much access to a local dev environment and it's associated tooling as I would give to a junior developer.
hkt··on Why the push for Agentic when models can barely follow a simple instruction?
Honestly I've generated some big ISH codebases with AI and have said so and then backed off when asked.. because a) I still want to try to establish more confidence in the codebase and b) my employment contract gleefully states everything I write belongs to my employer. Both of those things make me nervous.

That said, I have no doubt there are also bots setting out to generate FOMO

hkt··on How hard do you have to hit a chicken to cook it? (2020)
Conspicuously, this is from June 2020
hkt··on Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available
That is absolutely delightful. Estonia is just _good_ at this stuff. Admirable.
hkt··on New antibiotic targets IBD and AI predicted how it would work
Interesting, what was the reasoning behind it?
hkt··on New antibiotic targets IBD and AI predicted how it would work
As someone with IBD who is on their fifth trip to the toilet since midnight (BST) I'd love to get the recipe. I've got a few months of steroids ahead and anything more long term and high impact is of enormous interest.
hkt··on Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips
Even just saying this applies downward pressure on pricing: NVIDIA has an enormous amount of market power (~"excess" profit) right now and there aren't enough near competitors to drive that down. The only thing that will work is their biggest _consumers_ investing, or threatening to invest, if their prices are too high.

Long term, I wonder if we're exiting the "platform compute" era, for want of a better term. By that I mean compute which can run more or less any operating system, software, etc. If everyone is siloed into their own vertically integrated hardware+operating system stack, the results will be awful for free software.

hkt··on Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance
Not everyone has a smartphone. A substantial number of especially older people don't. Plus poor people, and just.. well, offline people whose lives are much more communal than ours. The requirement for a hundreds-of-units-of-currency device to prove who you are is bonkers.
hkt··on EU funds are flowing into spyware companies and politicians demanding answers
In the UK's case, ID has been required to get a new job or rent a house for a decade.
hkt··on Codeberg Reaches 300k Projects
Network effects and a corporate offering, I'd think.
hkt··on Inflammation now predicts heart disease more strongly than cholesterol
I'd guess this is persistent, systemic inflammation. So I, as someone with IBD, have higher levels of CRP, so am probably a prime candidate for this kind of early death (despite having quite good cholesterol)
hkt··on F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree
I live for the day when regulators sat Android (and iOS) should not ship with a default store, and should allow users the choice. Break the platform monopoly.

In the meantime, I guess it is time to return to degoogled Android, for me at least.

Another good example of Google's worst instincts, though: backups. The backup API can only be implemented by things which are included at build time, so apart from e/OS/ I've never seen an option except Drive. (e/OS/ supports nextcloud as a target)

hkt··on Qwen3-Omni: Native Omni AI model for text, image and video
Correction: they couldn't enforce a ban
hkt··on New thermoelectric cooling breakthrough nearly doubles efficiency
> This >100% language is marketing for people who do not understand thermodynamics or who dont want to bother with specifics.

That is a little unfair: this is the language of economics rather than physics, so if you are paying for 100w and getting 300w, that is indeed over 100% efficient. SCOP is a more "correct" term but is less clear when communicating with the public and (IMO) is mostly for professionals or people with a technical understanding of heat pumps. Nobody thinks they defy the laws of physics though.

hkt··on Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
PSA: IRC has been around for decades. Longer than most HN readers. XMPP isn't far behind. Self host. Be in control of your data and your costs.
hkt··on Introducing Stargate UK
I expect they'll bypass our sickeningly broken energy market pricing mechanisms by just producing their own power.
hkt··on Pass: Unix Password Manager
Is bitwarden in some way able to protect passwords while still being unlocked?
hkt··on Pass: Unix Password Manager
There is an established convention for usernames, which is to put "user:" at the start of the line. It can't be the first line of the file but is otherwise not order dependent. The browser plugins and android app implement this and do autofill based on it. That is suggested on the main site.

If you blat your password with generate, it can be recovered because it is in git. A nice to have for pass might be a flag to autoinsert only on the first line, but in lieu of that, pwgen should do the job and is what pass uses under the hood.

hkt··on Claude now has access to a server-side container environment
It seems plausible enough that they're trying to squeeze as much out of their hardware as possible and getting the balance wrong. As prices for hardware capable of running local LLMs drop and local models improve, this will become less prevalent and the option of running your own will become more widespread, probably killing this kind of service outside of enterprise. Even if it doesn't kill that service, it'll be _considerably_ better to be operating your own as you have control over what is actually running.

On that note, I strongly recommend qwen3:4b. It is _bonkers_ how good it is, especially considering how relatively tiny it is.

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