Hacker News: Catloafdev

New comment by Catloafdev in "AI Coding at Home Without Going Broke"

Catloafdev — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:25:16 +0000

If you want frontier-level, the economically reasonable option is OpenRouter or a direct sub to frontier-of-your-choice.

The reality is that they do not offer configurations that would allow a consumer to run that much VRAM on a single setup to protect datacenter margins. Apple used to, and they stopped, those devices are going for ~$20k+ each on ebay now.

You can get very, very capable models on a 3090/4090/5090/6000 series card. But if you want 'frontier level' you are investing ~22k at a bare minimum if you go new. Used you can probably build your own server for much cheaper up-front cost but it's likely going to be 4-6x+ electricity usage.

New comment by Catloafdev in "Open source AI must win"

Catloafdev — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 04:17:19 +0000

Ya that'd be an awesome project, the only issue is how do you verify it's not being poisoned? To actually validate it would require more analysis than the training took to run. It would require a trusted network, not an open one, unless that can get solved somehow.

New comment by Catloafdev in "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension"

Catloafdev — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:34:19 +0000

Firefox thankfully offers sync and imports your Chrome data.

Makes switching easy.

New comment by Catloafdev in "If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know"

Catloafdev — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:30:50 +0000

And how exactly do you propose making it "difficult enough"?

New comment by Catloafdev in "Claude Fable 5"

Catloafdev — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:29:04 +0000

It's a relatively new benchmark but from what I can tell it has serious cred behind it. I assume it will be picked up as part of the standard suite of CS-related benchmarks soon enough.

New comment by Catloafdev in "The 29th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) 2025 Winners"

Catloafdev — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 23:59:16 +0000

If you're talking about frontier AI, they have no issue de-obfuscating any of these accurately.

New comment by Catloafdev in "Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other Middle East countries"

Catloafdev — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:50:25 +0000

Your hostility isn't helping things either. "You've been here long enough to understand" followed by an incorrect usage of "goal post moving" makes you look like an agitator.

New comment by Catloafdev in "Gemma 4 QAT models: Optimizing compression for mobile and laptop efficiency"

Catloafdev — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:28:10 +0000

Being able to run the 12B on 8gb VRAM is huge. It's crazy to see how fast these small local models have evolved.

New comment by Catloafdev in "Hackers Used Meta's AI Support Bot to Seize Instagram Accounts"

Catloafdev — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:51:04 +0000

Did the security engineers leave the building?

New comment by Catloafdev in "Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC"

Catloafdev — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:14:16 +0000

It's a legal notice, what are you talking about?

New comment by Catloafdev in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

Catloafdev — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:10:13 +0000

Then every normal user has to take 10 seconds as well, which is an awful experience.

New comment by Catloafdev in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

Catloafdev — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:08:14 +0000

It actually is. And to think it's not, means you don't understand what the benefit is.

Just because you've never been in a situation to care about the benefit they are offering, does not mean it's not valuable.

And the position "you need a good excuse to have overly specific software" is extremely strange.

New comment by Catloafdev in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

Catloafdev — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:13:03 +0000

Taking you at face value, the first step is to address the framing here:

  'redirecting funding from sucky schools towards ones that deliver results'

This is not quite the reality of how this works. What you have to recognize here is that being pro-Charter school legislation means that you are in favor of spending less on public education, and giving that money to private education companies who already charge and make profit.

You are advocating for draining public education. That's the position this takes. And you believe it's better to give it to private education, all for-profit entities. So you have to recognize that the position here isn't "give more money to better schools" it's "give money to private for-profit companies and take it directly away from public education"

  'allowing school choice for students'

This is a talking point that doesn't hold any water. They claim that by giving parents some tiny affordance, that somehow enables them to enroll their children in expensive Charter schools. That's not how that works. What they're doing is giving a very tiny % of the money they are taking from public education, and giving it to the families as direct cash. Why is this a problem? Because the amount doesn't cover tuition. It's not enough. Families in poverty can't afford multi-thousand-dollar tuition just because they got a $1k check in the mail. The math doesn't math. It only helps families that were already capable of affording it, or on the borderline.

But the bigger problem is that it directly harms public education. So then what happens is that public education gets _worse_ at the expense of the people who can afford private schooling.

So all this to say, defunding public schools is not a good position, and they are doing everything they can to try to dress it up and muddy the conversation.

New comment by Catloafdev in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

Catloafdev — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:02:19 +0000

I'm not saying it isn't in your personal best interest to consider switching your kids out of public schooling. The problem is that the public schools need to be fixed, not abandoned.

There's a difference between "I choose to send my family to Charter schools because the public schools are in bad condition" and "we should close down public schools rather than fix them to make room for more profit in the child education industry"

Fixing public education is the boring, slow, difficult, real-world answer. Privatizing education further is just adding fuel to the fire.

New comment by Catloafdev in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

Catloafdev — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:38:31 +0000

This is absurdly problematic. Your solution is basically handicapping the schools with kids that perform worse and then potentially closing them? That doesn't solve the problem, this is just pro-Charter School propaganda that ignores the real-world effects of these positions. You've identified a real issue with the 'equality' vs 'equity' concept, that doesn't lead to 'Close public schools and switch everything to Charter schools', that's an absurd conclusion.