Hacker News: atwrk

New comment by atwrk in "Quirks of Human Anatomy"

atwrk — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 08:44:16 +0000

Clickety_clack propably wasn't referring to people with aphantasia not seeing the story unfolding while reading the book, but the book itself: We predict that the thing we hold in our hands is a book entity, and then we use our sensory perception to affirm or change that prediction. We don't continuously parse a 2D array of pixels and interpret that as as a book every frame.

New comment by atwrk in "3.4M Solar Panels"

atwrk — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:38:45 +0000

That's actually only cheap because of the free shipping - in Germany 450W panels are at about 55-60€ retail right now, for example. So a balcony set (2 panels for 1kW total, plus inverter) is about 150-200€, depending on the specific parts. Both exluding shipping, though.

Prices fell dramatically in the last few years, if I understood things correctly the high prices in the US are mostly due to tariffs.

New comment by atwrk in "The abandoned war: Why no one is stopping the genocide in Sudan"

atwrk — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:16:29 +0000

But Russia is doing exactly that systematically for years now, disguising as civilians. I'm also pretty sure Hamas isn't disguising themselves as children, who make up the largest share of the civilian victims.

New comment by atwrk in "The abandoned war: Why no one is stopping the genocide in Sudan"

atwrk — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:10:55 +0000

I mean the share of civilians killed in the war (by Israel) is over 80 percent of the total casualties. That is worse than the rate in WW2. In Ukraine it's under 5%.

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

New comment by atwrk in "The RAM shortage could last years"

atwrk — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 07:39:44 +0000

That would also be a pretty obvious admission of defeat for their original business model, though...

New comment by atwrk in "The Importance of Being Idle"

atwrk — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:02:01 +0000

Bad timing with that example - currently the US is the reason for an important part of the seas being closed :)

New comment by atwrk in "How the AI Bubble Bursts"

atwrk — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:01:59 +0000

But are they actually profitable, or do they employ creative accounting where only parts of overhead expenses are counted against all of inference revenue, similar to what Uber did?

OpenAI's numbers show that they definitely are not profitable on inference, and even worse, revenue growth scaled linearly with inference cost from 2024 to 2025, which means they can't outgrow this problem. See https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

New comment by atwrk in "Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching"

atwrk — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:31:38 +0000

Obviously scientists have thought about that and therefore administer age-adjusted IQ tests for different cohorts, precisely with the aim of IQ staying constant during aging of an individual. And yet here we are.

You really don't need a censorship conspiracy to explain these things. I'd recommend you try to challenge your assumptions about IQ and heritability by downloading a few textbooks about the topics. Many many papers are freely available, and the textbooks are let's say easy to find. You could try textbooks about a more accessible area like developmental psychology as it is more easily accessible and still covers these topics quite well.

New comment by atwrk in "Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching"

atwrk — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:53:25 +0000

Well I happen to have a phd in that broader domain. It's not censorship, as you imply, but IQ is just way fuzzier a concept than people outside of this area of research think. The popular view is IQ is an objective thing, exactly measurable and so on (the metaphor of brains being computers, essentially). In reality you can put a 14 year old from a bad environment into an optimal environment and their IQ increases by up to 20 points over a view years.

New comment by atwrk in "Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching"

atwrk — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:31:45 +0000

And have you tried to find out why IQ associations are "taboo" in academia?

New comment by atwrk in "Tinybox – A powerful computer for deep learning"

atwrk — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:50:01 +0000

For reference, 12k gets you at least 4 Strix Halo boxes each running GPT-OSS-120B at ~50tok/s.

New comment by atwrk in "CVE-2026-3888: Important Snap Flaw Enables Local Privilege Escalation to Root"

atwrk — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:10:46 +0000

Have you tried Debian with the XCFE desktop? Should be pretty similar to Xubuntu (but without Snap, of course)

New comment by atwrk in "US- and Greek-owned tankers ablaze after Iran claims 'underwater drone' strike"

atwrk — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:00:58 +0000

Well and Russia. Trump essentially crippled the impact of 4 years of sanctions against Russia with these new oil prices he created.

New comment by atwrk in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

atwrk — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:40:17 +0000

Local LLM inference is all about memory bandwidth, and an M4 pro only has about the same as a Strix Halo or DGX Spark. That's why the older ultras are popular with the local LLM crowd.

New comment by atwrk in "Arm's Cortex X925: Reaching Desktop Performance"

atwrk — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 10:20:54 +0000

Those are of almost zero use for people wishing to run Linux etc.

Yes, Asahi exists, and props to the developers, but I don't think I'm alone in being unwilling to buy hardware from a manufacturer who obviously is not interested in supporting open operating systems

New comment by atwrk in "How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription?"

atwrk — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:03:39 +0000

Yeah I'm pretty happy with the M5 (beside the look). It's most probably the same SixUnited board most Strix Halo devices use (including the ones from HP and Lenovo).

New comment by atwrk in "How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription?"

atwrk — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 11:34:45 +0000

I'm not really using them for coding (only played a little bit with minimax2.1), which is probably the most common use case here.

I mainly use them for deep work with texts and deep research. My main criterion is privacy, both for legal reasons (I'm in the EU and can't and don't want to expose customer's data to non-gdpr-compliant services) and wouldn't use US services personally either, e.g. I would never explore health related topics chatgpt or gemini for obvious reasons.

Technically I've set it up in my office with llama.cpp and have exposed that (both chat interface and openai compatible api) with a simple wireguard tunnel behind nginx and http auth. Now I can use it everywhere. It's a small, quiet and pretty fast machine (compiling llama.cpp is around 20 seconds?), I quite like it.

New comment by atwrk in "How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription?"

atwrk — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 11:28:39 +0000

Well a mac isn't really an alternative to a mac, or is it? ;)

Personally I'm not interested in having a mac as I work with linux. And yes, they outperform them, but only if you ignore the price. When comparing what you get for ~$2k, a Strix Halo is miles ahead.

New comment by atwrk in "How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription?"

atwrk — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 11:24:14 +0000

Directly from Bosgame.com, for ~1.7k€ in December. I see it's at $2.2k / 1.9k€ now.

New comment by atwrk in "How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription?"

atwrk — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 08:37:53 +0000

A Strix Halo with 128GB unified memory is less than $2k and the more suitable alternative to a mac. I'm pretty happy with my device (Bosgame M5).