News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

jonahbenton

Re:The Most Dangerous Idea in Federal Reserve History on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:42PM (#50109918)
(2012)
I buy hardware from a us provider ( thinkpenguin), who have something like this, and from a european provider (turris) who also do. It is a potential business with discriminating customers. If the goal is dd-wrt, I would banish the thought of anything near mass market (Walmart/Best Buy)- you have to be doing millions of units to even get into that conversation and dd-wrt is not the vehicle to sell to millions. But if you are looking for opportunity, local llm friendly home device integration of which the edge router is a small part, and of which dd-wrt is irrelevant, is a big wide open space.
Sympathetic to other strategies but that writeup is wholly unconvincing. It comes across as astroturf.
Re:So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂ on Thursday July 30, 2026 @06:18PM (#49116596)
Long ago I ordered an indoor algae system from a couple of CMU PhDs. It is very cool, it looks cool and has a nice water flow backgroundy sound, the algae grows quickly, allegedly doing the co2 consumption equivalent of 20 houseplants. Space efficient! But immaterial relative to human co2 production.
Re:The Fed Is Working on a CBDC on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @03:19PM (#48751839)
Junk. The plain language of the executive order differs from what this piece claims. There is no conflict with BIS work.
The permanence and effectiveness of every policy Trump declares is mediated by his attention span, its inherent legality, and his opportunity to profit from gatekeeping. I would be very surprised if this particular whim impacts model development in practice at all.
Advise you to listen to a recent Odd Lots podcast with Anjney Midha. It will be educational. The compute will be commoditized. Nobody has a monopoly on data. There are a zillion specialities of knowledge work to differentiate.

https://pca.st/episode/11fe6a6f-e463-4163-9393-20376e88c0db

With what process, spec driven? Having AI produce all the code is pretty common. An agentic workflow operating at a higher level of abstraction especially for brown field is not.
OpenCode is a "harness" that manages conversations/interactions with LLMs. It does not run a model itself. An extended interaction can include- many turns of conversation, providing files for the LLM to process, having the LLM direct the running of programs called tools by the harness. The privacy aspect is determined by which LLM you configure OpenCode to use. If you configure it to use an LLM you host yourself, then you maintain your privacy. If you have it use an LLM provider you do not host yourself then your conversation and file and tool results and whatever else is sent to the provider and your privacy is dependent on the provider. There have been no reports of OpenCode communicating out of band with user data to any servers- it does do things like check for version updates and can download plugins and the like. But in that sense OpenCode is reasonably configurable for privacy. The default however is to use an external provider for LLM, not a local model, so you have to change that and not use it oob.

To have your own LLM provider, you have to run different software. Ollama is one option (though it also by default uses external provider) and llama.cpp is another. Jan and LMStudio are other options for actually running a model on your own hardware, to which you can direct OpenCode.

Run llama.cpp on your machine and point opencode to it
Way to put the work in!
Re:Tyler Cowen: AI Isn't Conscious. Neither Are We on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @02:46PM (#48480870)
Tyler is an academic economist. He is accustomed to thinking about the magic of the markets. No consciousness there. Sure.

But the "market" is a human invention around which there also exists governance / regulation / accountability / responsibility. That these structures exist- even when people try to evade them- is the existence proof of the thing that the word intent refers to, and that there is a feedback loop incorporating the modeling of intent in human behavior is what consciousness refers to.

The existence proofs are there no matter how poorly Tyler argues against them.

Re:Ask HN: Does consciousness itself require memory? on Monday June 08, 2026 @04:06PM (#48451078)
Any formulation of consciousness requires learned/stored distillations/compressions of reality, some form of object constancy, so, yes.
Re:Skills Are Rotting Inventory on Monday June 08, 2026 @08:27AM (#48444469)
I thought this reference was to skill files, which do rapidly become technical debt- so what was the rotting inventory metaphor? But no this is in reference to human skill acquisition around each of the different agentic platforms.
Re:Never Retire on Monday June 08, 2026 @08:22AM (#48444417)
(2024)
That does not sound like an accurate description. Sounds like Slack in a TUI.
Offered at its absolute peak of value.
Re:1971 on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @08:18PM (#48392009)
All (or most) of them are second order effects following ending of dollar convertibility to gold. Not an argument to go back on but the game changed.
Go Florida. Never thought I would say that.
Re:Ask HN: Why most of us programmers are men? on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @12:14AM (#48365975)
Social factors, not a skill issue.
Money is a lie. But money and credit lies are what every economy works on, even pre-human economies. Hard money has economically failed in every use.
This misunderstands the power of monetization, or mistakes "dollars" having some kind of fixed "value." They do not. Whether one agrees with that or not, thinking of this as a "debt" problem where a hypothetical move is to appropriate equity- setting aside the fact that equity ALSO is not in a fixed unit of measure- anyway, thinking of appropriating equity to solve a public debt problem is a category error. That is how accounting works for business structures that exist within a monetary system but NOT for government and currency printers that define the monetary system. The MMT people are right about this. Public debt is a measure of private sector wealth. That is how the machine works.
This is not an HN worthy post but since it is here I really hope he executes on this plan, thus ensuring the instantiation of the "Markwayne Mullin effect" in the chronicles of pop culture. What exactly that will be- can only speculate. But it will be something. Airport owners do not eff around.
This is like a one shot prompt to build a space station, using 2 or 3 generations old exemplars. No offense but this is not something you should promise someone you can build ("production-tested stacks only") on your own if this the level of question in your mental model.
Re: on Thursday May 28, 2026 @06:40PM (#48316552)
You have problems younggato. And JE did not know sht about fck.
Re:Ask HN: What made you lose faith in God/Religion? on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @11:09PM (#48303958)
Never had it, the concept of "God" always ridiculous and authoritarian to me. I really like the narrative in the book Sapiens, identifying the "Cognitive Revolution" as the main distinguishing characteristic of this particular collection of ape species, which then lead to the competition of narratives, of which religions are one kind, taking place within that cognitive capability.

That said, have really enjoyed most of the humanist aspects of the Pope Leo AI Encyclical and also enjoyed Francis' AI essay, and I am coming to understand the perspective of those who value religious-sourced narrative for its philosophical posture. These narratives are evolving as human understanding evolves, still with lots of ridiculous contradictions (prohibition of abortion among the most blatant), but there is depth of thought around valuing humans and human work and so forth that is a pleasant contrast to the predatory power hungry totalitarian selfish nihilism of most AI/tech and political leadership.

(Lenovo) Thinkpads, specifically many of the X, T and P products, are best in class. All the Linux things just work at this point, and have for the last 5-10 years. Some products ship with Fedora or Ubuntu. Those lines have the highest end individual products with the best build quality, and user-serviceable/replaceable components. Other Lenovo laptops are either less good or much less good/absolute crap.

I have several Framework laptops, to be supportive of alternative supply chains. They are great with Linux compatibility, all the things work, but in terms of build, they are much less mature from a long term maturity and tolerances perspective. The new 13 Pro is probably a pretty solid machine, though.

I occasionally have to work on Dells or HPs for clients, and just don't like the keyboards or the fit/finish. I had a couple of earlier system 76 machines, they did not last and the keyboards also were not comparable to a Thinkpad.

Yeah...pay opex to Anthropic or your capex to NVidia- whose Blackwell gen prices are now up 25% from launch, with more increases to come.
There are many markets. Qwen 3.6 27b at a high enough quant is good enough for many use cases. But enterprise-consumed tokens come with legal/data protection agreements. They have just gotten comfortable with BYOD- there is no BYOD equivalent set of practices and protections for local LLMs (BYOLLM). So some enterprises are getting back into prem GPU capacity.
The desperation is strong in this one

Older »