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shadowpho

351 karma · joined July 7, 2020

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shadowpho··on Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
The big three :)

Qwen3.8-flash-next Deepseek4-0731-flash Glm5.3

The latest unsloth llama.cpp has a lot of nice features that runs them faster than before.

I’ll have to double check which one runs how fast, but it’s generally 20-40 t/s. (And infil is fast but not sure how that’s counted)

shadowpho··on Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
I like this calculator but it’s really wrong at least for dgx spark. I have one and I get 4x the tokens/s .
shadowpho··on The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
Jeez I checked eBay and they are up to $300+ now
shadowpho··on Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
I’d love to see a schematic.

I’d highly recommend to make sure you have plenty of esd diodes and protection resistors on all inputs. That’ll help the longevity of the system.

shadowpho··on Weathergotchi – an open-source climate Tamagotchi
I see the antenna points straight at ground and buttons. Is the wifi ok?
shadowpho··on Sodium-ion "salt" batteries will revolutionize electric-vehicle and grid storage
Cost is a reason. You need to dig out that dirt (which is expensive), it needs supports, your house needs support around it/through it…

Making things bulletproof and massive runs opposite of cheap

shadowpho··on What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis
Practically speaking any person cannot maintain that for significant length of time. Dieting has like a 99% fail rate by year 2. It’s hard to maintain that for many people — your body will keep you in starvation mode, keep you hungry and hang on to every calorie received.
shadowpho··on Apple Foundation Models
Well everyone would. How many would you buy if you could turn around and sell them for $30k easily lol?

It’s like saying “well if Subaru launches a nice hybrid suv for $1k it’ll sell like pancakes” and yeah.. but it costs more in steel/ram to build that lol

shadowpho··on Apple Foundation Models
Why can’t Apple launch a $50k product for $1k? Everyone would buy it!
shadowpho··on Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future
I have a g9 and cooling is fine, but not great. I ended up opening it up and placing heatsinks on hot chips
shadowpho··on Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs
I mean fast 128gb of ram is like $2k so it’ll be $3k after overhead for just the ram portion of device.
shadowpho··on The real cost of owning a home
> and having extremely predictable payments for years

I’d argue rental is more predictable. Housing has a huge amount of upkeep — $10k ac, $5k water heater, $20k roof…

shadowpho··on A programmable watch you can actually wear
I’ll need to check my notes on power consumption. I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying out different modes and configurations… it’s not great. I would not expect years at all. You gotta be very careful about what has to stay on and off.

Furthermore, bugs. To this time there’s random crashes that happen with sleep which limits their use

shadowpho··on Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?
The value of electricity is extremely time dependent. You can easily overproduce solar power for your house during the day fairly cheaply. However batteries + gas generators for cloudy day quickly make the cost significantly higher.

The grid gives you expensive guarantees about reliability. Just giving power does not do that.

shadowpho··on Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses
Citation needed.

Edit: it’s absolutely not true universally and it’s ridiculous to suggest it is. Comparing averages will be very tricky as well.

shadowpho··on ESP32-S31: Dual-Core RISC-V SoC with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and Advanced HMI
> cheap buck from 40~80V to e.g. 5V.

That’s not a cheap buck lol. Order of magnitude more expensive then 12v not even mentioning capacitors that can withstand 80v is $$$ and your derating goes to shit

shadowpho··on Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage
I thought x64 was better for perf per watt just because perf is so much better
shadowpho··on Every single board computer I tested in 2025
I’d go a step further and say get a mini pc unless you need gpio
shadowpho··on AMD will bring its “Ryzen AI” processors to standard desktop PCs for first time
China is coming online :(
shadowpho··on Topological Naming Problem
I keep making the same mistake. How do you make intermediary planes?
shadowpho··on Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
Isn’t that less efficient in power and can have different color?
shadowpho··on Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
It’s because building 500 units would be a non starter for many of them
shadowpho··on Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones
Some of devices automatically lock once used on a carrier network
shadowpho··on The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]
>If the goal is consistency, then wall-clock isn't the simple way to do it.

It’s simpler than doing a limit on number of states, and for some applications consistency isn’t super important.

Doing a time limit also enforces bot moving in a reasonable time. It puts a nice limit to set up a compromise between speed and difficulty.

Doing state limit with a time limit might be better way to do it, but is harder.

shadowpho··on A spider web unlike any seen before
Why?
shadowpho··on Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
Does X even support hdr yet? When I looked last time the answer was none
shadowpho··on OrangePi 6 Plus Review
You can get an n100 system for $110 on sale. Price went up but I still see $135 on eBay now. However YMMV because Europe prices are different

For power I don’t know about orange pi 5 but for many SBC power was a mixed bag. I had pretty bad luck with random SBC taking way more power for random reasons and not putting devices in idle mode. Even raspberry pi was pretty bad when it launched.

It’s frustrating because it’s hard to fix. With x64 you can often go into bios and enable power modes, but that’s not the case with arm. For example pcie4 can easily draw 2w+ when active. (The interface!)

See for example here:

https://github.com/Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip/issues/606

My n100 takes 6W and 8w (8 and 16gb). If pi5 takes 3w that’s not large enough to matter especially when it’s so inconsistent.

Now one place where I used to like rpi zero was gpio access. However I’m transitioning to rp2350 as it’s just better suited for that kind of work, easier to find and cheaper.

shadowpho··on OrangePi 6 Plus Review
Yeah but you can get a n100 on sale for about the same price, and it comes with a case, nvme storage (way better then sd card), power supply, proper cooling solution, and less maintanance…
shadowpho··on Asahi Linux with Sway on the MacBook Air M2 (2024)
What why?
shadowpho··on Weight loss jabs: What happens when you stop taking them
One of my friends ate two pounds of tomatoes every evening and would not feel full. I couldn’t believe it until I saw it with my eyes….
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