Hacker News Reader

pshcon YouTube embeds are heavy and it’s fixable

PSA: Try not to chuck 'unsafe-inline' into your Content-Security-Policy thoughtlessly--it disables the anti-injection protections of CSP. There are safe ways to permit inline scripts, if you even need them.

https://content-security-policy.com/

pshcon Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

Like the sibling commenter I use Safari for almost everything. It just works and saves more battery than Chrome, plus there's Handoff between phone and laptop.

pshcon Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024

Yup, it's been super convenient to have iCloud sync all the keychain entries including wifi passwords, and quite secure and private.

I also enable keychain sync on my Mac so I can create passwords there too.

pshcon Ask HN: Which LLMs can run locally on most consumer computers

Quantized 4/5-bit 8b models with medium-short context might be shippable. Still, it’s going to require a nice GPU for all that RAM. Plus you would have to support AMD—I would experiment with llama.cpp as it runs on many architectures.

Hope your game doesn’t have a big texture budget.

pshcon Llama3 implemented from scratch

My wild guess is that adjusting the shape before each step is not worth the speed hit. Uniform structures make GPUs go brrrrr

pshcon Apple introduces M4 chip

It is kind of crazy to look back on. In the future we might look forward to path tracing and more physically accurate renderers. (Or perhaps all the lighting will be hallucinated by AI...?)

pshcon CO2 removal 'gap' shows countries 'lack progress' for 1.5C warming limit

If anything the West needs to to be a model and driver for a carbon neutral or negative lifestyle. We burned all the carbon in the first place, and developing countries will suffer the consequences disproportionately.

pshcon Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

Yeah, that bifurcation makes practical sense. Have you considered WebAssembly for the game script layer?

pshcon CoreNet: A library for training deep neural networks

"MLX examples demonstrate how to run CoreNet models efficiently on Apple Silicon. Please find further information in the README.md file within the corresponding example directory."

> mlx_example/clip: ... an example to convert CoreNet's CLIP model implementation to MLX's CLIP example with some customized modification.

  - FP16 Base variant: 60% speedup over PyTorch
  - FP16 Huge variant: 12% speedup

> mlx_example/open_elm: ... an MLX port of OpenELM model trained with CoreNet. MLX is an Apple deep learning framework similar in spirit to PyTorch, which is optimized for Apple Silicon based hardware.

Seems like an advantage is extra speedups thanks to specialization for Apple Silicon. This might be the most power-efficient DNN training framework (for small models) out there. But we won't really know until someone benchmarks it.

pshcon When was the last time we built a new city?

Yeah. When you build a new city you should really start by laying a high speed train line starting at the city center, going directly to a reserved land plot for a new airport exactly 30 minutes away.

pshcon When was the last time we built a new city?

If they actually do build Barcelona-style superblocks full of young families, then tech companies will be chomping at the bit for office space in those same blocks.

pshcon The Curse of Monkey Island

> It nails that mixture of whimsy, cleverness, and sweetness that has made The Secret of Monkey Island arguably the most beloved point-and-click adventure game of all time.

> During the latter 1990s, when most computers games were still made by and for a fairly homogeneous cohort of young men, too much ludic humor tried to get by on transgression rather than wit; this was a time of in-groups punching — usually punching down — on out-groups. I’m happy to say that The Curse of Monkey Island‘s humor is nothing like that.

Well said. Game has aged beautifully.

pshcon Redis re-implemented with SQLite

I feel like one could implement most Redis commands as functions or PL/SQL using native Postgres hstore and json. Could be an interesting translation layer.

pshcon Building the first highway segment in the U.S. that can charge electric vehicles

> Heavy-duty trucks are one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions for the U.S. transportation sector because they make up a large portion of interstate traffic.

The solution to this is to build trains. Heavy trucks destroy asphalt, which is expensive and carbon-intensive to replace. EV trucks emit pollution in the form of tire dust—microplastics that pollute the air and water.

pshcon Meta's new LLM-based test generator

One gig I worked had web component tests where they committed a snapshot of the expected DOM and asserted that the component spat it out... so for every subsequent change the dev would naturally hit the re-generate button and commit it all. Plentiful deltas, questionable signal.

pshcon Is something bugging you?

I feel like business logic bugs live on a separate layer, the application layer, and it's not fair to count those against the database itself.

I agree that suboptimal query planning would be a database-layer bug, a defect which could easily be missed by the bug-testing framework.

pshcon Vision Pro Teardown – Why those fake eyes look so weird

Wireless streaming VR seems like a non-starter, just an optional bullet point for marketing material. Shorter latency is always better in VR.

pshcon Dart/Flutter now has macros/metaprogramming

> TypeScript is a better typed JavaScript than Dart will probably ever be

At the same time, thank goodness Dart doesn't have all the warts of Javascript and a standard sane build system. Dart doesn't have to be the best Javascript to be good at what it does, especially now with algebraic data types and pattern matching.

I'm hopeful they'll make Wasm production-ready soon to move away from JS transpilation.

pshcon Yann LeCun: Human-level artificial intelligence is going to take a long time

If the loss keeps decreasing forever, then that conclusion seems to follow. But it's likely there will be plateaus and ceilings that current neural net architectures cannot surpass. We likely need more breakthroughs to achieve enough generalized reasoning, reliable predictions, alignment, and scalability within hardware constraints.

pshcon Implementation of Mamba in one file of PyTorch

Perhaps the community at r/localllama could train an LLM that knows about the latest developments and explains jargon and papers, updated weekly. Free idea for karma.

pshcon Australia to ban engineered stone

If done properly, probably.

> In February 2021, a WorkSafe Inspector attended the workplace and observed an employee using a powered abrasive polishing tool to abrasively polish a slab of white coloured stone which was from the brand Stone Ambassador. The tool was being used without the required control measures in place. Instead, the employee was applying water to the stone from a bottle with a small hole in the lid when the tool was in use.

pshcon Large language models lack deep insights or a theory of mind

Yes, in normal conversation and written correspondence. Sure, humans have deeper wells of reason, emotion, and recall to draw from, but much of small talk is pure reflex.

I'm wary of what happens when AIs can interface directly with the real world. LLMs only read about the world second-hand. An embodied neural net that could observe cause and effect, push pokers into fires and witness the metal glowing red, then learn from the experience. Spooky.

pshcon Large language models lack deep insights or a theory of mind

I think people who seldom engage in direct socialization repurpose their social machinery, diverting it toward internal dialogues with themselves, and toward artifacts that were generated by other minds. An indirect, conscious channel into the world, a simulacra theory of mind.

pshcon Large language models lack deep insights or a theory of mind

It tends to boil down to semantics, but as I interpret it, a threshold for AGI has to involve some breakthrough in generalizable, adaptable intelligence. So, yeah, I would invoke the "that's not AGI" move.

An AGI should be able to solve any creative problem a human could, with drive and knowing purpose and coherent vision. The LLMs are still narrowly focused and require human supervision.

We might well get there with chained AIs automatically training new reward models for each new problem, or by some other paradigm, but I don't feel like we're past the threshold yet.

pshcon Death by AI – a free Jackbox style party game. AI judges your plans to survive

I bet removing “attempt to” would give a successful outcome

pshcon I need more USB power

If only LK-99 had panned out...

pshcon In Defense of RAM

I use Safari on my Macbook Air 16GB. Fast, saves RAM, energy efficient, just works.

pshcon Sidechannel pixel-stealing attack works in Chromium on all modern GPUs

Could we, like, do away with iframes?

pshcon KSP2 is spamming the Windows Registry until the game stops working

Except the part where whenever you install anything on Windows the whole OS grinds to a halt... I assume writing to the registry takes an exclusive lock. Or has to contend with decades of backwards compatibility layers and triggers, or both...