Hacker News: amarant

New comment by amarant in "Minecraft Java raises recommended memory to 16GB ahead of Vulkan transition"

amarant — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:47:03 +0000

As one of the Devs responsible for the technical part of that transition: thank you. We tried real hard to give users the best possible experience, but I think it has nevertheless been the least appreciated piece of code I have ever written. So it's nice to finally hear some positive accounts from users!

So, again, just thanks for saying this.

New comment by amarant in "Magnolias are so old that they're pollinated by beetles, not bees (2025)"

amarant — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:57:38 +0000

Or perhaps all of your thousands of children being in peril, having found themselves on a murderous human, with no obvious path to escape as the gigantic scary human swaths hundreds at a time?

New comment by amarant in "Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment"

amarant — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 20:48:36 +0000

But that's just the thing with open weights: you're not doing any business with company that made the model. They might publish the weights to a, say, European host, and then you download the model from Europe and and run it on your servers in America, and suddenly it's very hard to tell where the model was originally created.

New comment by amarant in "I think you might be fooling yourself with AI"

amarant — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:42:55 +0000

Oh... Then...I don't think I understood what your point was..

How is running a inference business similar to sports betting, but specifically placing bets, not running a successful sports betting business?

New comment by amarant in "I Think You Might Be Fooling Yourself with AI"

amarant — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:02:10 +0000

And it is? Look at kindred group for example, they made >700 million GBP last year. seems viable enough to me!

New comment by amarant in "I think you might be fooling yourself with AI"

amarant — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:55:43 +0000

Citing a study published in '25, and thus conducted before that, basically before AI got good.

Yeah this article is safe to ignore

New comment by amarant in "Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop"

amarant — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 13:38:01 +0000

Agreed! I find AI to be pretty decent at documenting and explaining technical stuff, which is a subgenre of non-fiction.

I once tried telling it to write a fantasy novel for me because I didn't know what to read next. Gave it some examples of books I have enjoyed in the past so it would have an idea of my taste...God was that awful. Absolutely terrible idea.

AI is not coming for fantasy authors jobs any time soon!

New comment by amarant in "Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?"

amarant — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:32:10 +0000

Vibecoding a SVG based metroidvania as we speak! This is gonna be lit!

New comment by amarant in "Advertise in ChatGPT"

amarant — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 10:02:40 +0000

Building the indexer is the easy part.

The hard part is indexing the vast seas of the web. You need a large pile of cash to do that. One of those cases where running the software is harder than making it.

And once you've spent your large pile of cash, you're probably gonna want to earn it back somehow. Your competition doesn't charge for search, and your whole raison d'etre is to not serve ads.

Good luck!

New comment by amarant in "Advertise in ChatGPT"

amarant — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:48:03 +0000

Welp, that's one less competitor in the AI race I guess!

New comment by amarant in "The Great Steam Deck Crash of 2026: How the New Pricing Decreased Demand by 80%"

amarant — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:57:17 +0000

Are we really complaining that good people make money now? Is poverty a requirement for being a good person?

Sounds like thinly veiled self-righteous jealousy to me...

New comment by amarant in "Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database"

amarant — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:40:26 +0000

I'm good with starting from 0 if the bank is (my mortgage is a lot bigger than my balance)

New comment by amarant in "Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years"

amarant — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 22:32:23 +0000

Wait would that work? My understanding was that the pollen had to come from a different genome of pawpaw for it to work... But perhaps I'm mistaken?

New comment by amarant in "Heavy TV watching associated with smaller brain structures, study finds"

amarant — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:58:33 +0000

Seems that the direction of causation is still an open question. Is TV watching causing smaller brains, or is it the other way around?

Intuitively both seem plausible. More research needed!

New comment by amarant in "NYC may require landlords and realtors to disclose the use of AI in listings"

amarant — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 14:43:42 +0000

Well, no, but it prevents fraud, which seems to be the bigger problem. A honest dominant force is better than a fraudulent dominant force.

New comment by amarant in "NYC may require landlords and realtors to disclose the use of AI in listings"

amarant — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 08:14:18 +0000

In Europe we've used regulations. There's standardised ways to measure area of an apartment/house, and it has to be included in any ads and contract of sale/rent. If the actual area doesn't match what's in the ads/contract the landlord/seller will be in trouble. I saw a news article once where the landlord,iirc, had to return all rent money to the tenant. The tenant had lived there for a while(memory is fuzzy, I think it was years, but don't quote me on that) and in the end only paid for electricity.

I hear you guys like suing eachother in the states, seems like this kind of regulation would suit you just fine!

New comment by amarant in "Typing Speed Test, but for Developers"

amarant — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:02:06 +0000

I like how our very own Bobby Tables is ranking near the top in several categories!

Go Bobby!

New comment by amarant in "I'm Making Strandfall, a Solarpunk Orienteering Larp"

amarant — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 21:07:15 +0000

Today I learned the Nordic larp style is not the global default. As a Swede who's only ever participated in 2 larps,I hadn't realised people do it differently elsewhere!

I really don't see how leveling and experience points would work in a larp, but then I'm not exactly a experienced larper!

New comment by amarant in "EU ban on destruction of unsold clothes and shoes enters into application"

amarant — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:41:27 +0000

Is fast fashion not a thing in the US? I was under the impression it was, but perhaps I was wrong...

New comment by amarant in "Steam Machine: Between 12k and 15k Units Sold per week"

amarant — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:30:03 +0000

The steam machine handily beats apple in terms of dollar per TFLOP and dollar per GB memory. It's also easier to upgrade, making it likely to last longer.

Unified memory puts Apple in it's own category for certain workloads however, but since we're talking about gaming here, and not local LLMs, Apple simply cannot compete on any kind of value comparison