Hacker News: Lwerewolf

New comment by Lwerewolf in "DeepSeek to Make Permanent 75% Discount on Flagship AI Model"

Lwerewolf — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:40:28 +0000

Given that you can run quantized flash on 128g ram, and there's a heavy focus around it (DS4)... I'd say that it's pretty feasible for a decent amount of devs. Never thought I'd buy an MBP but here we are.

n.b. I can't use nonlocal models for a big chunk of my work, so there's that as well.

New comment by Lwerewolf in "Tell HN: OpenAI silently removed Study Mode from ChatGPT"

Lwerewolf — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:35:37 +0000

Ehh... can't really hit "chatbot" limits on the $20 plan. Pretty sure the limits are not token based for that in the first place, and if it spews out a ton of stuff, it takes me longer to go through it and I end up asking it follow-up questions in a way where it replies... _relatively_ concisely. Still, gimme robot back. On a good note, it almost managed to call me stupid.

Codex has also been fine, but I'm guessing they know better than to tweak it like that, given their target users.

New comment by Lwerewolf in "Tell HN: OpenAI silently removed Study Mode from ChatGPT"

Lwerewolf — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:12:24 +0000

This.

They recently made "efficient" even more verbose, my custom instructions can't suppress it properly anymore.

These "little" changes are incredibly annoying.

New comment by Lwerewolf in "Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework"

Lwerewolf — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:12:00 +0000

Just dust and echoes.

New comment by Lwerewolf in "LLMs as the new high level language"

Lwerewolf — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 10:06:41 +0000

I wonder what ECC is for. So, unless you're Google and you're having to deal with "mercurial cores"...

Also, sorry, but what did I just actually attempt to read?

New comment by Lwerewolf in "Software factories and the agentic moment"

Lwerewolf — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 18:00:25 +0000

Re: $1k/day on tokens - you can also build a local rig, nothing "fancy". There was a recent thread here re: the utility of local models, even on not-so-fancy hardware. Agents were a big part of it - you just set a task and it's done at some point, while you sleep or you're off to somewhere or working on something else entirely or reading a book or whatever. Turn off notifications to avoid context switches.

Check it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46838946

New comment by Lwerewolf in "The Codex App"

Lwerewolf — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:01:00 +0000

On that note, I could also comfortably fit a couple of chat windows (skype) on a 17'' CRT (1024x768) back in those days. It's not just the "browser-based resource hog" bit that sucks - non-touch UIs have generally become way less space-efficient.

New comment by Lwerewolf in "Ask HN: DDD was a great debugger – what would a modern equivalent look like?"

Lwerewolf — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:14:54 +0000

FoundationDB's approach - look up their testing framework.

I've worked in a company that, for all intents and purposes, had the same thing - single thread & multi process everything (i.e. process per core), asserts in prod (like why tf would you not), absurdly detailed in-memory ring buffer binary logs & good tooling to access them plus normal logs (journalctl), telemetry, graphing, etc.

So basically - it's about making your software debuggable and resilient in the first place. These two kind of go hand-in-hand, and absolutely don't have to cost you performance. They might even add performance, actually :P

New comment by Lwerewolf in "Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking"

Lwerewolf — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:54:58 +0000

Re: "yes men" - critical thinking always helps. I kind of treat their responses like a random written down shower thought - malicious without scrutiny. Same with anything that you haven't gone over properly, really.

The advantages that you listed make them worth it.

New comment by Lwerewolf in "AI sycophancy panic"

Lwerewolf — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 16:12:27 +0000

This kind of works for me, GPT 5.2:

Base style & tone - Efficient

Characteristics - Defaults (they must've appeared recently, haven't played with them)

Custom instructions: "Be as brief and direct as possible. No warmth, no conversational tone. Use the least amount of words, don't explain unless asked.'

I basically tried to emulate the... old... "robot" tone, this works almost too well sometimes.

New comment by Lwerewolf in "What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?"

Lwerewolf — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 18:43:13 +0000

Same with doing things in RAM as well. Sequential writes and cache-friendly reads, which b-trees tend to achieve for any definition of cache. Some compaction/GC/whatever step at some point. Nothing's fundamentally changed, right?

New comment by Lwerewolf in "Japanese four-cylinder engine is so reliable still in production after 25 years"

Lwerewolf — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 18:41:45 +0000

Google "K-series Cam lobe pitting".

Anyways, nice engines, but you don't need something to be exceptionally reliable to keep it in production for 25 years.

New comment by Lwerewolf in "Myths Programmers Believe about CPU Caches (2018)"

Lwerewolf — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 12:44:35 +0000

I'm pretty sure that most cases of x86 reordering issues are a matter of the compiler reordering things, which isn't (afaik) solved with just "volatile". Caveat - haven't dealt with this for at least over a year (multicore sync without using OS primitives in general).

New comment by Lwerewolf in "The G in GPU is for Graphics damnit"

Lwerewolf — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 14:04:48 +0000

Would you mind linking some articles or hinting towards techniques used to "coerce" the choosing of ray sample directions so that noise is minimized even in very "specular" scenes? Sorry for the lack of proper terminology on my end, I've been out of the loop for a very long time, but I assume that's where the majority of the tricks are - I suppose the rest is mostly intersection check accelerations (i.e. BVH).

New comment by Lwerewolf in "Windows 7 marketshare jumps to nearly 10% as Windows 10 support is about to end"

Lwerewolf — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:46:29 +0000

I always move the taskbar to the right on any remotely wide setup that I have - including my 21:9 main. Had it at the top on my sp3. On my current portable (spectre 13.5) it's at the bottom, since I kind of have to use win11 due to the heterogeneous cpu arrangement (how "hard" could it be to port the scheduler to win10... yeah yeah we know), and while it annoys me when I dock it at work, the system (win11 pro, with MS account) absolutely does suck in a lot of other respects.

Right click latency in explorer is annoying.

Opening the settings "app" after first boot takes several seconds because who the hell knows - I personally blame it on moving everything to some thousand layers JS framework since I like being grumpy about that. This is a core part of the OS, FFS. Fairly certain that they have the talent to pull it off properly.

Search has been fine for me.

Language switching almost always breaks during updates - "ghost keyboard layouts" and such. Has been the case for a few years now.

General "we'll shove down whatever we feel like on you" BS.

Just let us pay for "ultimate" (a.k.a. end-user enterprise) and be rid of all the BS.

Getting WSA back (yes, I have the community version) and expanding on connected standby or however they call it now would've been neat, especially on a convertible, but it is what it is, I guess. WSL2 is also quite the improvement. Lots of other small little things like the task manager (not using procexp too often nowadays).

New comment by Lwerewolf in "Japan sets record of nearly 100k people aged over 100"

Lwerewolf — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 22:34:54 +0000

Stress hormones. Read up on cortisol's effects. XCM - cross country marathon (MTB race). 2700mD+ - 2.7km of vertical gain. A reduction of inflammation is a general effect of anti-inflammatory drugs, which tend to make you feel better. There's a LOT more than that (i.e. say, all the things that fall under the umbrella of "runner's high"), but the TL:DR is that significant physical activity / energy expenditure, combined with a lack of proper rest & nutrition leads to long-term undesirable effects that can definitely be masked and/or disregarded.

New comment by Lwerewolf in "Japan sets record of nearly 100k people aged over 100"

Lwerewolf — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 19:00:55 +0000

Be careful with that feeling and don't underfuel, or at least keep it at "sane" levels. I feel pretty amazing and full after 62km/2700mD+ XCMs as well, as an extreme example... which is at least partially due to the immune system (and resp. inflammation/etc) being suppressed. Long, light/moderate efforts without adequate food intake and rest can lead to the same thing.

New comment by Lwerewolf in "Many ransomware strains will abort if they detect a Russian keyboard installed (2021)"

Lwerewolf — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 21:27:31 +0000

Aren't most UAC bypasses relying on the fact that UAC by default isn't "full sudo"mode - i.e. it allows certain things without prompting?

New comment by Lwerewolf in "Systems Correctness Practices at Amazon Web Services"

Lwerewolf — Fri, 30 May 2025 20:07:36 +0000

I guess you meant to say "only the people working on the software coupled to the tooling will use it". It's not just FDB & Amazon that are using something like this, and it is a ridiculously powerful type of tool for debugging distributed systems.

New comment by Lwerewolf in "Bosch's brake-by-wire system may be the next big leap in automotive tech"

Lwerewolf — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 18:31:30 +0000

Brake torque is far higher than engine torque and can be applied at speeds where tire traction is far greater - at least at the front. The rear makes far more sense for this application - assuming a performance RWD or AWD vehicle, the rear driveshafts already handle most of the acceleration load, and max rear braking load is practically severely limited by the load transfer to the front.

Formula student cars and other open-wheelers have far greater packaging flexibility as well. A quick search doesn't bring up a whole lot of encouraging discussions on FSAE and related places re: inboard brakes, please share if you've seen such.