Hacker News: TonyStr

New comment by TonyStr in "Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM"

TonyStr — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:22:45 +0000

I'm not so annoyed by it except that I liked the old design (smaller text) better. What puzzles me more is why it takes >1000ms to open a simple right click menu? And even after it opening, it often has to "Load" some options? In what world does it take over a second to open a simple popup on modern hardware?

New comment by TonyStr in "Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots"

TonyStr — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:20:22 +0000

>they did bomb them. you don't do that to friends

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

Does this mean that USA and Israel aren't friends?

New comment by TonyStr in "Mushroom behind 'tiny people' hallucinations identified"

TonyStr — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 07:13:06 +0000

Remember when stable diffusion would create image soups full of horrifying humanoid faces and figures? I imagine something similar happens when you dull the brain in the right way.

New comment by TonyStr in "Nvidia's Risky Business"

TonyStr — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 07:37:14 +0000

Is the human brain capable of doing real simulations of light and physics in realtime? Or does it hallucinate the details and represent some low-resolution mental image? You may be overestimating the capabilities of flesh-based neural networks and underestimating the capabilities of silicon-based neural networks.

New comment by TonyStr in "Microsoft Responds to Outcry After Quiet Enterprise Install of Beta 'Photos' App"

TonyStr — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:13:37 +0000

To be fair, a lot of programs rely on those standard directories from the "Known Folders" specification - it would be hard to rip them out without breaking a lot of software. Even on linux it's hard to get away from these directories, as virtually every distro ships with xdg-user-dirs. Even if you use Arch, you'll probably install xdg-user-dirs with Gnome or KDE which creates those directories on login.

New comment by TonyStr in "New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health"

TonyStr — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:17:58 +0000

All popular social media platforms today (snapchat, instagram, facebook) have endless streams of unfiltered short-form media which is designed to addict. I think few people are actually criticizing online communication for kids (though there are concerns about what communities and people they may interact with). The major problem is addicting media which promotes asocial behavior and sucks away the joy and creativity of going through life.

New comment by TonyStr in "New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health"

TonyStr — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:12:30 +0000

Following this logic in context of GP's hypothetical, your son would end up taking heroin with his classmates covertly because he knows his father doesn't approve of it...

The point that (I think) GP was making is that it's impossible to raise kids in a different world than their peers. If their peers all have phones, your kid gets left out if he doesn't have a phone. If society bans smart-phones for kids under 15, there's nothing to be left out of since none of them have it.

New comment by TonyStr in "LLMs reward expertise"

TonyStr — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:12:10 +0000

You misunderstand the meaning of static web pages. Here's a short explanation of the terms: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

New comment by TonyStr in "Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork"

TonyStr — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:12:20 +0000

IQ4 qwen 122b-a10b would mean 61GB total size and 5GB active, so about 5GB of the model loaded into GPURAM plus any generated context, and 61GB of weights loaded into system RAM? I don't know if that math is correct, but does that run well? Wouldn't that only leave 3GB of system RAM?

New comment by TonyStr in "My personal AI benchmark: “Generate an SVG of a frog with a Habsburg jaw”"

TonyStr — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:52:58 +0000

Nathan is right though. It specifies a Habsburg jaw, not that the frog is a Habsburg king/prince. It's understandable that the LLM will hallucinate a king from this, but it isn't what's being asked of it.

New comment by TonyStr in "The Productivity Mirage"

TonyStr — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:36:05 +0000

My experience with CRUD backends is that you get bogged down in really convoluted business logic and abstraction layers, and most of your time is neither spent writing or thinking, but debugging. (Of course debugging involves thinking, but it requires you to step around, print, inspect, and explore how data flows, rather than exclusively thinking up new solutions). And in my opinion, debugging is easier if you can faster navigate your code and more quickly type or edit small changes.

New comment by TonyStr in "Beyond Greece and Rome"

TonyStr — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:48:11 +0000

Could you expand on why you think Christianity made Hebrew/Judean culture less monotheistic?

Also, surely you would concede that scholars who sought to rediscover ancient greek/roman literature through a Christian lens in the 15th/16th centuries played a big role in making it accessible to the Christian world?

New comment by TonyStr in "Design is compromise"

TonyStr — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:38:42 +0000

I don't think the blogger uses compromise to refer to conflicting personal opinions. Consider a complex UI like photoshop. If you have too many buttons available on the screen at all times, the UI becomes bloated and hard to navigate (cough, GIMP). If you cut out too many features, you'll loose users who rely on those tools. If you move items to sub menus, or sub sub menus, you make the UI cleaner, but risk users never finding those features, or you risk introducing too much friction for anyone to want to use them. So the compromise here is what features to present the user for quick access, and what features to hide behind indirection. This is a difficult problem, and requires deep understanding of your users and their needs/habits.

New comment by TonyStr in "The last Romans are still around"

TonyStr — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 11:01:54 +0000

The Roman Empire lives on today. Turkey is the legitimate continuation of the Roman Empire

New comment by TonyStr in "I taught a bucket to speak Git"

TonyStr — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:41:06 +0000

I've seen a few people on HackerNews swear by Fossil ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_(software) ) which uses SQLite as the backend instead of the filesystem. There are a few other approaches as well

New comment by TonyStr in "I am a person who will look at the Steam Machine and cry"

TonyStr — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:03:16 +0000

Let's hope Valorant, Call of Duty, Battlefield, EA Sports FC and others who explicitly deny their anti cheat from working on Linux react to the increasing demand for gaming on Linux, and begin supporting anti cheat on Linux.

Also, if his friends play Halo, CS2, Ark, War Thunder, Arma, Hell let Loose, Splitgate, TF2, DOTA, Overwatch, or The Finals, he'll be fine.

New comment by TonyStr in "In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words"

TonyStr — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:54:58 +0000

You can do this in vim with a simple mapping: nmap mm[s1z=`m

New comment by TonyStr in "Steam Machine launches today"

TonyStr — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 08:09:03 +0000

I'm curious which ones you had trouble with? I switched last week, and have been testing all the games in my library. I'm quite impressed with how all of them just work with zero or little tinkering. The only games I haven't been able to play are the ones with anti cheat that explicitly deny Linux.

New comment by TonyStr in "Steam Machine launches today"

TonyStr — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 07:52:26 +0000

That is confusing. The Nintendo switch is half the price, and plays all of those games. Why would someone want to buy the more expensive Steam machine just to play 2d pixel art games?

New comment by TonyStr in "Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way"

TonyStr — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:36:15 +0000

I didn't criticize either your article or your comment :). I enjoyed reading the article and finally learning why it's called godan and ichidan, and it was fun to learn that kau was originally kawu.

Any mention of Japanese learning always brings out negativity and criticism (and the effect is probably doubled by being on HackerNews) so I understand that you're on defense.

My comment was really just an objection to "You still have to learn that and understand that", as I don't think studying grammar is a mandatory step in learning a language (I'm a subscriber to the Input Hypothesis by Stephen Krashen). Though it could very well be that grammar study is an effective shortcut to internalizing grammar. At the end of the day, the amount of hours spent learning from context matters way more than the specific steps taken along the way.