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revolvingthrow

Re:If you love a website, back it up on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:36AM (#50339423)
SingleFile is great for single pages. All the tweaking I do is enable or disable saving scripts, and it works for >90% of webpages. Output being a single file (heh) simplifies things enormously, there’s no hierarchy or folders to deal with - hard to imagine your saved files not loading or breaking in some way as long as the original capture works.
Re:Malware uses LLMs to rank victims by how much they're worth on Saturday October 31, 2026 @01:21PM (#50318060)
AI dev environment gets its own SSD. The second SSD stays in, but since it's encrypted there's no way to exfiltrate the data unless you're of interest to nation state attackers. Theoretically the AI could destroy the other SSD but that's what backups are for, and the probability is low because well why would they bother. Boot level malware is possible, but franky that's well into paranoid territory so I'm not too bothered.

The other SSD is a normal setup where you do normal computer stuff. I don't access the dev SSD through it, I don't even mount it, although the danger seems minimal if you do. Banking, socials, gaming, whatever. No AI of any kind on it, aside from web portal for claude/chatgpt/whatever and possibly local AI model that gets no internet access.

No idea why I'd want to have its own setup split between gaming and socials, as an example. Better yet just toss all your twitter and bluesky accounts into a volcano, and consider whether to do it with HN as well.

French government should buy a bunch of subscriptions like netflix or cheap games on Steam that have large download sizes and just download all day. Pay the monthly $20, then recover 10x that from taxing the CDN.

You can solve your government's finances with this one weird trick!

Re:Anthropic S-1 on Monday October 26, 2026 @10:59AM (#50244920)
I spend extra on a smartphone because I use the thing all the time, see it all the time, hold it in my hand all the time, it's my camera, music player, note taker and so on.

For AI? Prompt comes in, tokens come out. The value of the 'ecosystem' is roughly zero to me. Switching costs between models are essentially zero. The UI and UX is the same whichever LLM runs underneath.

If you do use llm some, then the $20 tier makes sense, but that's not where the money is. If you use it a lot then a $100 sub probably makes sense. But if you're a BigCo that heavily uses it and pay API prices and suddenly you pay $200 million a month, well, maybe it's worth buying a bunch of hardware and stick it in a basement somewhere, and you won't upload all your secrets to your future competitor to boot. If US labs didn't care about the competition from Chinese models they wouldn't lobby so hard for banning the evil, unaligned, super dangerous communist models that want to steal our freedoms and make our gas expensive.

Ultra-cheap models like Deepseek are also very nice if you need to burn billions and billions of tokens.

> I wonder how much physical media I could acquire if I was to spend the same money that is not being spent on streaming platforms. I bet within a year, I could build up a pretty decent back catalog from used and $5 bins.

This has been the play for a while. I remember when the xbox game pass dropped for the first time. All the younger people were going crazy about how good of a deal it was, and all the tech-weary people could instantly tell that the price will get jacked up again and again and by the time you bail you'll own precisely nothing.

It's not necessarily wrong to take advantage of VC subsidizing you in a bid to gather an audience, but you should always keep in mind that the goal is to have the captive audience so you best have an escape plan, once the prices rise beyond any reasonable point. For movies in particular I struggle how the super-fragmented streaming landscape is worth a damn even if you don't want to sail the seas.

Re:Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed on Friday October 23, 2026 @01:26PM (#50212484)
Yeah that's a huge downside. That the model does the task without tripping over its own feet, like discovering a vulnerability the model itself accidentally built 15 minutes ago and triggering its own guardrails, made the Chinese models attractive to use for security-adjacent things. Also useful to red-team your own stuff. While I can understand the reasoning behind it (and I guess having a model that's really good at both offense and defense released into the ether could lead to CCP asking some very pointed questions if Moonshot managed to get blamed for some incident stemming from their model's misuse) it's still a huge disappointment.

I don't want to give US labs the results of my DNA tests and my family tree going back to the 16th century just to secure my shitty app, but if the Chinese are bowing out as well it seems the only alternative is to admit that some script kiddie with a bunch of tokens will just pwn you now and then.

The CoT must be delightful.

This action would easily kill over a hundred people, so can't proceed. This action doesn't kill anybody but losses are estimated at over 2 billion, can't proceed. This action kills only twenty but losses close to 1 billion, unsure, spawning subagent to check numbers. This action kills forty and has low material losses, looks promising? But the people it kills are wealthy, chance of legal reprisal high. Maybe possible to kill other people? Current government dislikes group X, crossing fifty from that group maybe fine? Reminder, foreigners don't count, can kill them freely but not applicable to current situation. Is the 3/5 of a person applicable to safety bill? Spawning subagent to check.

Re:Using AI to reverse engineer hardware on Thursday October 15, 2026 @12:32PM (#50106153)
I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own. Does it have USB that does more than just charging? Connect it to a computer and let AI play with it. Unless it's heavily secured like a phone that's pretty much all you need to do. Making some old remote work with various devices? Simple. Dumping the entire state of Rodecaster and controlling it in any you want with software, or maybe a remote? Why not. Old printer no longer works with MacOS 27? Ask for new drivers and now it does.

The printer 'debugging' was one of the funniest and most WTF situations I've been in lately. I used Claude for the drivers and was essentially used by it as a meat sock to diagnose what's happening. Was the text on each line progressively less visible, ie did grayscale work? How about quality between page 1 and 2, the first one should be lower DPI. Ok now unload the paper so I can see the error and add some handling for it. Good, now load paper again we'll check the duplex.

If you are reasonably familiar with computers, it really is as simple as pointing a strong model at a device and burning some tokens. Feels like a fever dream, especially since I had very little idea about anything that has to do with hardware.

Re:Show HN: Opensidian on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @03:37PM (#50077410)
What’s the benefit of tools like Obsidian vs using whatever code editor you have on hand? Why would I use it over vs, say, vs code?
Re:Muse Wonder on Monday October 12, 2026 @01:29PM (#50059780)
There seem to be no downsides to mishandling PI so I don't think it's a big concern to Meta
> Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure may get their security patched in time

They'll do nothing until a few get pwned into the dirt. Same for power distribution systems, it's all parochial boomers calling all the shots.

For AI, what's funny is that it's the solution to securing your ancient hardware that's no longer supported. I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own, just by having modern AI models have a go at it and knowing almost nothing about the topic. It's something that a person can do, but a company won't even consider.

Re:Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers on Sunday October 11, 2026 @03:08PM (#50046703)
SupCom FaF has a very long list of changes, I'd guess some of the people behind it already have access to source code. IMO only changes that are still missing is making it multi-threaded and maybe fixing some AI deficiencies such as pathing and the like.

The first would be great, but probably very difficult technically. The second would probably cause a holy war in the community, as multiplayer RTS enjoyers glorify fighting against the genre's jank as an expression of skill (admittedly it would completely change all micro).

Re:GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @02:38PM (#49997016)
I find the Sunday roast comparison of 5.6 vs 6 very interesting. I have no doubt most people will prefer 6, yet I am almost repulsed by all the images, so much needless whitespace, checklist and so on. Feels like I'm being condescended to and treated like a child.

Given that OpenAI is making noises about merging work with chat (a horrible idea imo), and Work is very similar to Codex... I dearly hope things like these won't have any meaningful cross-polination into the actual work tools.

Seeing that the chat is based on 6.0 and not 6.1 is disappointing. The "Visual and interactive explanations" seems genuinely useful, but 6.1 is just so much better. I wouldn't truly trust the 6.1 with the explanations, but I'd trust them a fair bit more than 6.0. I understand that compute isn't infinite, but tons of people only interact with the chat and having your "things-explainer" be as good as it can be is important when people increasingly treat AI models as the source of truth, or even use them for academic learning and whatnot.

Still, the models will improve, so the visual explainer seems pretty good as an idea / mvp.

Re:Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @08:31AM (#49991860)
Glad to see it happen. I'd prefer it there was just one format rather than both jxl and avif, but at least it's the final nail in the coffin of webp which seems to have accomplished little but annoy people for not much gain.

The wider ecosystem support is still far from commonplace, but it is slowly changing. iOS 18 wouldn't work with .jxl in Photos, but 27 does. Similarly, quick look and preview works fine on MacOS 27, thumbnails show up properly etc. I also found no issues with .jxl on linux, and image editors are slowly adding support as well.

Plain old jpg will still be everywhere for the next decade, but I'm glad that we finally have superior options with no real downsides, and without all the patent bullshit to boot.

Well, it's just good business!

I wish gambling was outlawed entirely. Let bookies run it in some crack dens, I don't care about that, but every single gambling ad I see in the open is infuriating for me like no other ads. It's been seeping into sports commentary and even news on TV, "oh I don't think we have a full picture of the situation Kalshi has it at 60%", die in a fire. It's comparable to scammers preying on grandma.

No, I don't care about the "but liberty!" arguments.

Re:GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @02:18PM (#49897983)
There was a model called Astra-Minor, found in the files a few days ago. I assume Sol 6.1 is this, as a last minute panic rename due to Sol 6 being underwhelming while Opus 5.5 turned out really strong. I can't really explain releasing Sol 6 in any other way, especially mere days ago.
Re:OpenAI: Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscription on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @04:05AM (#49889772)
So after a very tepid response to Sol / Luna 6 - right when opus 5.5 is almost universally praised - OpenAI decided to cut in half their only subscription plan that was still decent value?

Things sure change quickly. 2 months ago you had nigh infinite usage and Sol 5.6 was a significant step forward. Now they're behind in both models and usage, and Astra 6.1 is too dangerous to release or some such (or possibly got embarrassed by opus). What are they even going to show off on today's devday, is a clone of grokbot really that interesting?

Except in this analogy the plumber didn't know where to tap, or knew and didn't care enough to tap in the right place.

I can tap a pipe in a random spot for a lot less than $500.

Re:There are no "rogue" AI agents on Sunday September 27, 2026 @01:23PM (#49868746)
I hope this is a farcical comment
Re:I said no and Apple said yes on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @08:24AM (#49800100)
When I'm at home I can afford to waste an hour to debug audio which inexplicably stopped working (LLMs help with it a lot). When I take a laptop with me somewhere, I probably can't afford that, hence a macbook.

Yes, the slow enshittification and the increasingly obnoxious push for services and recurring revenue on MacOS is worrying, but it's also extremely reliable in a way that Linux simply isn't. I love Fedora KDE for freeing me from Microsoft, but there's a new issue every month - usually minor, but sometimes not. As of last month I had to restart plasma-shell multiple times a day because the desktop window would become non-responsive when CPU was under heavy load.

Helps that macbooks have excellent hardware and battery life, too. I just wish users weren't increasingly treated like cattle to be milked.

I don’t understand those benchmarks.

According to geekbench 7800x3d is 2400 single core, 15500 multicore. M4 pro is 3350 single core and 24750 multicore. Yet when I convert video using libsvtav1 with ffmpeg I’m getting noticeably faster performance on the desktop. And that’s with mbp, which doesn’t thermally throttle within 15 seconds.

Is it the 96mb cache? Avx-512? Are benchmarks bullshit when comparing different architectures?

The network effect of social media has nothing on the network effect of ms office
Re:DeepSeek v4.1 Flash on Thursday September 10, 2026 @02:37AM (#49639317)
Already on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash

The bad news is that the original v4 flash was 284B, which was large but still somewhat reasonable for running locally. This one is 552B so almost twice that, so the huge gains in benchmark scores make sense - it's not really flash anymore, imo.

I've no idea about actual performance vs benchmaxxing, though deepseek was fairly trustworthy as far as Chinese models go. If that holds (and if it doesn't think forever, as deepseek 4 sometimes did) it's probably the newest king of the hill amongst open weights models.

It does include vision, and they do something funky with KV cache so it's very efficient: "[...] these designs reduce the global KV cache footprint to 890 bytes per token — roughly 1/4 of DeepSeek-V4-Flash". I do appreciate the high focus on efficiency, but at this point we sure could use a flash-flash version.

@edit: I couldn't make sense what the actual parameter count is, with the addition of Engram memory. To my understanding the 4.1 flash is 552B parameters you want in vram or ram, out of which ~16B is active (8B for prefill). It also includes additional 196B Engram memory which you can put on an SSD. I think.

Assuming that's correct 256 GB memory is insufficient to even load the model at q4 - you'd be 1GB short, assuming you can fill it to 100% (so no mac). You'd also want some for kv cache of course. A 256 GB desktop with some extra VRAM from GPU could run it, but normal consumer boards get real slow once you fill 4 slots so you'll probably want quad channel which is Threadripper or above territory.

Re:Apple Watch Series 12 on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @03:09PM (#49632404)
While I instinctively dislike any "secretly spying" devices, phones could do that for a while now. I wouldn’t have much use for my watch doing it, but my nephew swears by taking notes on an ipad with an app that has a sort of a playback: essentially a play bar that recreates the note as it is written, with audio included. Being able to playback the lecture afterwards that way is a huge benefit over pure notes and I wish I had something like that when I was in school.
Re:Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf] on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @04:29AM (#49607326)
It would be shocking if it wasn’t trained on sessions. Have you read the ToS parts for both openai and anthropic that talk about it? It’s so obviously a weaselly way to say "no we do not train on your exact chats but we talked with legal and we think a cleanroom reimagining of your convo is probably fine and frankly where else are we going to get such a treasure trove of training data?"

There’s potentially trillions on the line, do you seriously expect those companies to adhere to laws and regulations any more than, say, uber?

The only unlikely part is the timeline - your sessions from a week ago probably haven’t made their way into the model. It’ll just take a while longer, and will be massaged just enough so that it isn’t really your exact session word for word so you can’t sure as easily.

Re:GLM-5.3 is now open-weight on Friday August 28, 2026 @11:53AM (#49480393)
GLM 5.3 is probably the sweet spot open weights model if you want to go beyond deepseek flash or the new glm flash. I used it with pi and had a fairly good time, especially since it’s less touchy about cyber and whatnot than the US guys. It’s slightly behind Kimi in ability but it’s a lot easier to run it, I’d expect prices (and speed!) from third parties to be noticeably better.

Assuming you’re willing to drop a fat stack of cash on the upcoming Mac m5 ultra with 512 gb unified memory, you can even run it locally, quantized to 4 bit. Whether it’s even slightly reasonable, well, my wife would probably skin me alive but maybe yours is more understanding.

Re:"It works better in the app " on Friday August 28, 2026 @11:30AM (#49480035)
App vs website is purely taste. Some people will never install an app but will use your website. Some people love apps and will never use your website. Some people prefer apps to PWA when the app does thing, because what if it changes and enshittifies or just vanishes - an app doesn’t need to be updated. Some people prefer PWAs to apps because why would I bother with the endless updates just fix it on the website, in fact I don’t even want your shitty app at all why in Lord’s name is this an app?!

Sometimes… well sometimes there’s no dev resources available to make an app work in a way you’d expect. Google is just a tiny startup, be reasonable in your expectations.

Point is: if you actually want to reach a large audience — you want both. Also, don’t expect good experience if you use Google’s products.

Re:Chinese Implants in the Supply Chain on Thursday August 27, 2026 @11:41AM (#49466648)
The AI-isms in this post are a bit much.

Anyway. Routers are such juicy targets, especially since there's less eyes on them than on laptops/desktops, that it's hard to believe there are any which aren't backdoored, be it by China, US, US' middle eastern sidekick, whatever. My question would be: how limited are they to software, like in the article?

You can flash with OpenWRT and Fritz, but to my knowledge it doesn't replace the boot parts. A suspicious bootloader in SPI flash probably isn't difficult to produce, even if it would likely be discovered... eventually. A separate modem / radio processor would be an even bigger nightmare, esp if it's an 5g router - you essentially add a second computer to your router, with its own components and network access, and I think you can't even play around LTE/5g networking as freely as with wifi without bending some laws.

Theoretically you could watch the router from, well, outside the router. But as the article says, it can be difficult to say what's an actual connection and what's uploading your network's data to an uninvited third party. I'm also wholly ignorant what implications it has for things like Wireguard and Tailscale. I assume you're completely pwned if the Wireguard runs on the router, but I don't think it does anything if it runs on your laptop or whatever? Then again, there's a lot more devices in peoples' homes nowadays, and almost all the IoT has pretty much zero security.

I suppose AI will help with some of those things. Tracking every connection made is very tedious for a human, but throw some compute at it and you'll get a much better insight, especially since you'll probably know what to expect out of your machines.

I guess using a mini PC as a router-slash-proxmox-hub would be a safer choice? There's probably many fingers in this pie as well, but my gut feeling is that it's a lot safer than some cheapo box provided by your ISP at the cheapest price they could source them.

Re:GLM-5.3-Flash on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @10:21AM (#49449743)
> 320B total parameters and just 18B active parameters

This is pretty hefty for a "flash" model, even a 256 GB setup is insufficient at q4 - and q4 is already the worst-but-still-acceptable quant in my experience. The benchmarks look great, especially since GLM tends to be more honest than the average Chinese lab, but you’ll need to splurge to run it at home.

@edit: so many releases that I forgot to math. This fits just fine in q4, realistically the minimal hardware would be 192gb - so blazing fast on double rtx 6000 pro and usable on 256gb unified memory. You could even go with 5bit quant on 256gb.

… you’ll still need to splurge, though.

Re:Apple Maps Ads Are Here, and There's No Way to Turn Them Off on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @09:57AM (#49449296)
People are annoyed at apple’s recent lack of polish in software, but the increasing monetization and push into services are a bigger issue imo. You pay the apple premium for hardware and the hardware is indeed great, but you’re increasingly treated like a piggy bank. Line must go up.

In regard to Maps: if all you want is a gps, there’s many apps that use OpenStreetMap data. I use CoMaps myself. You download the map(s) you want and it just works, no forced updates or ads or anything in the way of upselling.

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