Hacker News: TobTobXX

New comment by TobTobXX in "Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model"

TobTobXX — Wed, 13 May 2026 12:25:57 +0000

Wait what? I've used DeepSeek V4 flash a lot and compsred to Gemma 4 E2B (ie. the smallest, event at q4), it consistently underperforms. In contrast to DS flash, I've found Gemma 4 to be incredibly precise and consistent with tool use.

New comment by TobTobXX in "Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model"

TobTobXX — Wed, 13 May 2026 12:20:12 +0000

https://asciinema.org/ in case anyome is searching it.

New comment by TobTobXX in "Muse Spark: Scaling towards personal superintelligence"

TobTobXX — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:15:11 +0000

> Muse Spark is a natively multimodal reasoning model with support for [...] visual chain of thought [...].

Do they mean "the chain of thought is visible to the user" (ie. not hidden like ChatGPT), or "the medium of the chain of thought is not text, but visuals" (ie. thinking in images).

I'd guess the former, since it wouldn't be economical to generate transient images, just for thinking. But I'm not sure why they'd highight that in that case. If it were the second thing, that'd be extremely interesting. The first model not to think in text.

New comment by TobTobXX in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

TobTobXX — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:31:48 +0000

Somewhat. To fill out my taxes online, I could sign up with either the AGOV app (needs Google Android) or a USB security key. I happened to have a yubikey, but I needed to mess with the firefox about:config (security.webauth.u2f=true IIRC). It did work in the end though.

New comment by TobTobXX in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

TobTobXX — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 06:47:41 +0000

Same in Switzerland. The app needed to sign in to fill out my taxes doesn't work on ungoogled Android.

New comment by TobTobXX in "Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

TobTobXX — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:49:07 +0000

330 cubic feet =~ 9.3m²

New comment by TobTobXX in "Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies"

TobTobXX — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:19:57 +0000

wealth and access that is merely fathomable

New comment by TobTobXX in "Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'"

TobTobXX — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 10:24:15 +0000

No, there's a misunderstanding.

You can extract the message the user entered/received BEFORE/AFTER the en-/decryption. eg. a keylogger, a screencapture, extracting memory from the processes, just recording the screen from behind the user, ...

New comment by TobTobXX in "An update on Steam / GOG changes for OpenTTD"

TobTobXX — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:24:17 +0000

Well IF Microsoft would also collaborate with Wine...

I think I'd pay for a Windows License if it means I get official support for Windows apps on Linux (provided the support is indeed good).

New comment by TobTobXX in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

TobTobXX — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:09:31 +0000

I think it is different for some people because they are passionate and interested in tech.

I'd imagine someone who is passionate about cooking wouldn't be delighted if you cloudn't buy any ingredients in a store.

I see the value in precooked food and black-box working technology. But for me myself, as an enthusiast: I like being able to tinker and control my technology.

New comment by TobTobXX in "Show HN: Browser grand strategy game for hundreds of players on huge maps"

TobTobXX — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:37:34 +0000

There was Golden Age of Civilisations (or sth) a while ago. It ran Freeciv (FOSS Civ 2/3 clone) and made each turn take 4 hours and added advanced queuing tooling.

Was quite fun, maybe it still exists, haven't checked.

New comment by TobTobXX in "SSH has no Host header"

TobTobXX — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 11:06:02 +0000

Yes and it's ANNOYING. In Switzerland there is literally not one cellular network that issues IPv6 addresses. Also my workplace network (a school using some sort of Microslop solution) doesn't issue IPv6es.

I have a IPv6-only VPN with some personal services. Theoretically, the data can be transported via IPv4, but Android doesn't even query AAAA records if it doesn't have a route for [::]/0. So when I'm not home, I can't reach my VPN servers, because there is supposedly no address.

(I fix it by routing all IPv6 traffic through my VPN. Just routing connectivitycheck may suffice though).

New comment by TobTobXX in "Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'"

TobTobXX — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:23:51 +0000

You don't need to attack the math, if you can attack the sender or thr receiver ['s hardware].

New comment by TobTobXX in "F-Droid Board of Directors nominations 2026"

TobTobXX — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:28:53 +0000

The outlook webapp is quite decent. I've never used their native app, but I've manahed to get by fine with their webapp, even though notifications don't work (I just check it regularily). IIRC K9/Thunderbird also has support for exchange now.

New comment by TobTobXX in "LLM=True"

TobTobXX — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:30:11 +0000

Many unix tools already print less logging when used im a script, ie. non-interactively. (I don't know how they detect that.) For example, `ls` has formatting/coloring and `ls | cat` does not. This solution seems like it would fit the problem from the article?

New comment by TobTobXX in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

TobTobXX — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 08:45:59 +0000

Wouldn't it make more sense to state the assumptions first? Because then the model has this critical check in its context and can react appropriately. Otherwise, it will just write this step, but what's written before is already written.

New comment by TobTobXX in "Pretty soon, heat pumps will be able to store and distribute heat as needed"

TobTobXX — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 10:50:17 +0000

The name of the YT channel is NightHawkInLight[0] btw. Absolutely worth checking out. He creates materials with extremely useful properties from household materials (eg. PCM (high heat capacity), highly reflective paintings, Aerocrete (high insulation/fire resistance), ...)

[0]: https://youtube.com/@Nighthawkinlight

New comment by TobTobXX in "Qwen3-Max-Thinking"

TobTobXX — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:17:11 +0000

Doesn't ClosedAI do the same? Thinking models bill tokens, but the thinking steps are encrypted.

New comment by TobTobXX in "How the cochlea computes (2024)"

TobTobXX — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 17:38:52 +0000

3Blue1Brown has a really good explanation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY

It gave me a much better intuition than my math course.

New comment by TobTobXX in "Ghrc.io appears to be malicious"

TobTobXX — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 11:13:32 +0000

One reason why you should never think or say [or write] FLA, but always Four Letter Acronym (probably?), even if that is longer.