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ryan_glass

107 karma · joined October 7, 2019

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ryan_glass··on BYD sold more EVs last month than the US did all quarter
BYD is on a different level. For example the motor, gear box (i.e. gear reducing mechanism), controller etc are all part of a single component.
ryan_glass··on BYD sold more EVs last month than the US did all quarter
It will be interesting to see how these cars perform over years and decades. One of the major cost saving mechanisms BYD uses is lumping components together. An issue with one part of the drive train means the whole drive train may need to be replaced. The battery pack being part of the chassis means a small accident could become a write-off. Initial cost savings at manufacture will be passed on to the owner in maintenance.
ryan_glass··on Agentic backdoors via pretraining poisoning
Is this only an issue if you are using agents? Or are there any theoretical risks of serving a model over say llama server (llama.cpp) and accessing it for chat in browser on machines on your local network?
ryan_glass··on Show HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN
Excellent work!
ryan_glass··on R/open source bans all solo projects and projects using LLMs
I like the analogy. Interesting to note that a lot of the really high end furniture is still made using hand tools. But it is not affordable for most, who will buy mass produced furniture made by machines.
ryan_glass··on Tell HN: I unknowingly broke the PHP RCE embargo. I am sorry
Thanks to reading your post on HN, I was able to put mitigations in place before the patches came out. So for me, your original intention of: "alert others in a similar position to be aware of the importance/urgency of the updates" held up.
ryan_glass··on Investing in the public benefit
The greatest public benefit you could provide would be to open source your models.
ryan_glass··on DeepSeek search and fetch – $0.75 per 1000 successful requests
Can you explain how this would help protect a company's secrets? I would think that if you want to keep your IP secret surely using something like Deepseek's API directly is not ideal and hosting something locally is best practice.
ryan_glass··on Tesla Roadster
I have a friend who drives a Tesla (hates it but signed a lease). On several occasions he has been unable to get into his car when his phone had no battery and he uses it as a key. I'm sure he could use a real car key but that would probably be incredibly inconvenient to carry around.
ryan_glass··on Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran
In the mid 90s I used Fortran to model a distillation column in a chemical engineering plant. Here I read that it is still the go to language for nuclear engineering. I am amazed but for some reason happy about this.
ryan_glass··on The Gold-Bug: Edgar Allan Poe's story that taught me about cryptography (2024)
I just tried that and it went down a rabbit hole for about 20 minutes before using "the exact method from Poe's story". So basically cheated :)
ryan_glass··on The Gold-Bug: Edgar Allan Poe's story that taught me about cryptography (2024)
I thought it would be interesting to see if the local AI I use for quick question and answer stuff could crack the code.

I use Deepseek V4 flash 0731 Q8 quantisation from unsolth with reasoning turned off on a local server for quick easy tasks. Note I use another model locally for harder tasks that need reasoning.

I was a bit dissappointed that it knew it was Poe's cypher so didn't need to even try to crack the code.

ryan_glass··on Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors
This would also prevent the issue of having to age verify.
ryan_glass··on Citroen revives the 2CV for an electric age
If it is truly retro - ie ships without a sim card, tracking and crap tech then they would get my money. I don't hold out much hope though.
ryan_glass··on NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect
I looked at the page you linked and could not see any reference to cookie banners.
ryan_glass··on Run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (125B) on consumer hardware (RTX 4090) at 100T/s
Anyone know how it compares to GLM 5.3 for real world use?
ryan_glass··on Why don't more developers “use the platform”?
Friends don't let friends use npm
ryan_glass··on Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics
I think it was intended to illustrate the kind of people who frequent the festival.
ryan_glass··on Things That Annoy Me About Cars
A sim card which connects the car to the internet.
ryan_glass··on “Tweet” and the bird logo apparently enter the public domain
This reminds me of a certain Southpark episode...
ryan_glass··on The car industry A/B tested selling a car with and without CarPlay
I would not buy a car with carplay. I don't want any tech in my car.
ryan_glass··on O&O ShutUp10 – The antispy tool for Windows 10 and 11
Any recommendations for a FOSS alternative?
ryan_glass··on Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown
It seems very expensive. I built a 5m x 3m 'log cabin' garden office (in Scotland in 2018), with electricity and cat6 cabled internet for £5k (approx $6800). The shed itself was a kit-build so easy and for foundations I used stakes (concreted in).
ryan_glass··on uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
I'm amazed that people are still on Facebook in 2026. Deleted my account after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. There really is nothing I miss.
ryan_glass··on llama.cpp
Ollama uses the llama.cpp backend for inference. I find Ollama noticably slower. Llama.cpp has had a built-in webui (used as llama-server) for a long time now so have owned the user experience too.
ryan_glass··on IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology
I'm sure this is a wonderful breaktheough but I'd rather have the current, or a recent, generation of semiconductor technology available at a reasonable price.
ryan_glass··on Running local models is good now
For a fraction of the price of 96GB vram, I built a desktop based on a supermicro server mobo and EPYC 9 series CPU, with just under 400GB rdimm ram (approx $4500 all in but this was before the ram price hike). Works really well for serving larger local modals at a decent enough speed (I consider anything more than 10 tokens/second usable and value accuracy over speed).
ryan_glass··on Don't trust large context windows
"Make the button red" probably doesn't need an LLM at all.
ryan_glass··on Why DeepSeek is cheap at scale but expensive to run locally
Coding, my own proprietary code hence my desire for local hosting, a decent amount of legacy code. General troubleshooting of anything and everything from running Linux servers to fixing my car. Summarizing and translation of large documents occasionally. Also, image generation and other automations but obviously not LLMs for this.
ryan_glass··on Why DeepSeek is cheap at scale but expensive to run locally
Basically it comes down to memory bandwidth of server CPUs being decent. A bit of oversimplification here but... The model and context have to be pulled through RAM (or VRAM) every time a new token is generated. CPUs that are designed for servers with lots of cores have decent bandwidth - up to 480GB/s with the EPYC 9 series and they can use 16 channels simultaneously to process memory. So, in theory they can pull 480GB through the system every second. GPUs are faster but you also have to fit the entire model and context into RAM (or VRAM) so for larger models they are extremely expensive because a decent consumer GPU only has 24GB of VRAM and costs silly money, if you need 20 of them. Whereas you get a lot of RDIMM RAM for a couple thousand bucks so you can run bigger models and 480GB/s gives output faster than most people can read.
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