Hacker News: bbatha

New comment by bbatha in "Samsung accidentally freezes its smart fridges with a software update"

bbatha — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:57:51 +0000

Funnily sub-zero fridges are considered the samsung of the semi-commercial brands. They prioritize things like customizable doors and easy to break but consumer loved features like ice makers and water dispensers. You will never see sub-zero in actual commercial kitchens.

New comment by bbatha in "I don't want to read what you didn't write"

bbatha — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:34:28 +0000

> say "new semantic information". It should be communicated, and you can't trust an LLM to choose the correct database, you need to specify that yourself.

But I can most of the time, and correct it if it chooses the wrong thing. That's the whole reason LLMs are faster. Its the reason we can give a paragraph prompt and get a kLOC PR back but only need to correct about 5% of it.

New comment by bbatha in "I don't want to read what you didn't write"

bbatha — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:48:42 +0000

The value of writing isn’t always to communicate new information. It’s often to align everyone’s assumptions. For instance, when I say casually to a colleague or an agent “this change will require a db migration” they understand it’s to my teams primary application database. If I submit a design doc to a company wide review which database is changing is critical information. If the 300 bits were truly enough your agent or junior engineer would implement the wrong thing correctly as they often do.

New comment by bbatha in "My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini"

bbatha — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:29:58 +0000

Unified memory is the answer, it’s one of the cheapest ways to get >64GB of gpu addressable memory.

New comment by bbatha in "The efficient frontier of LLM inference"

bbatha — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:12:31 +0000

Don’t worry, vllm is also buggy on high end hardware

New comment by bbatha in "The AI Demand Bubble"

bbatha — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:08:50 +0000

> The actual risk that the author does not even broach upon for investors... the thing that will actually torpedo this massive investment are the open source open weight chinese models that commoditize the entire endeavor.

OpenAI and Anthropic investors yes, however open weight models are good for cloud providers. They can turn the two large customers into direct ai services that can be spread across many customers and reduce the cloud providers overhead on ai services.

New comment by bbatha in "Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%"

bbatha — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 13:56:41 +0000

> future models can be trained to be even more aware of external knowledge

Then you need longer contexts, which is proving to a much more stubborn problem than general knowledge compression.

New comment by bbatha in "Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)"

bbatha — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:54:18 +0000

Exactly cd players in cars didn’t become common until the 2000s when anti skip became common place.

New comment by bbatha in "iOS 27 features we didn't see onstage"

bbatha — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:03:45 +0000

I’ve been asking for the volume feature since I switched from a blackberry in like 2009!

New comment by bbatha in "DaVinci Resolve 21"

bbatha — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:54:22 +0000

Resolve unfortunately only supports a few brands of raw. Om systems is not supported for instance.

New comment by bbatha in "DaVinci Resolve 21"

bbatha — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:52:12 +0000

You can. Davinci is more powerful for this too because you can copy the parts of the node tree. So you can have a base edit for exposure, white balance etc then apply your look as a copy paste on top of the clean part. In Lightroom and most photocentric workflows you get one prebaked pipeline.

New comment by bbatha in "DaVinci Resolve 21"

bbatha — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:50:07 +0000

It is. That was for the beta

New comment by bbatha in "DaVinci Resolve 21"

bbatha — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:06:21 +0000

For all the potshots about AI, this update is huge even if you take away the AI features. They basically added lightroom to this release. There's some polish before you'd want to change your subscription, but its really tempting. It may be the best photo management/editor on linux. Yes, I know about darktable and rawtherapee and I stand by what I said. They also added a ton of motion graphics stuff which from the beta seem to be enough to undercut a lot of basic uses of after effects out. The later two features are in the free release as well!

New comment by bbatha in "Sysadmining Like It's 2009"

bbatha — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:07:46 +0000

Imo vistas biggest problem was they underspecced the minimum system requirements. Most peoples experience with vista was on sub 1gb of ram machines with a single core, no gpu and 32 bits. Vista was an os for modern architectures first. Windows 7 had the luxury of those features being the default at launch.

New comment by bbatha in "A 10 year old Xeon is all you need"

bbatha — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:33:06 +0000

What's time to first token? Raw throughput is usually not the problem in local setups in my experience.

New comment by bbatha in "SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket"

bbatha — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:47:57 +0000

Moreover the two lost shuttles included human lives. Better to blow stuff up with demo payloads now before sending up large contracted payloads or worse human beings!

New comment by bbatha in "What makes a good smartphone camera?"

bbatha — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:35:12 +0000

Games will typically un at 4k or less which is about 8mp on the other hand it’s difficult to buy a stills camera with less than 20 mp, and >40mp is common. Most algorithms are n^2 in graphics as well so we wouldn’t expect a linear speed up. I’ve tried dxo, Lightroom, and topaz they all perform about the same so I don’t think it’s particularly unoptimized.

New comment by bbatha in "IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields"

bbatha — Wed, 06 May 2026 11:39:38 +0000

Interesting, IBM sales and consulting were infamous for sending in an army of blue suits in

New comment by bbatha in "Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)"

bbatha — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 10:42:27 +0000

I remain convinced we won’t look at project estimates as time based in software engineering as our primary cost estimate. And this is transition will happen rapidly. We’re going to shift to a capex/token spend model for project estimates where the business will say “ok I do want that feature for $1000 in tokens”.

New comment by bbatha in "Are LLM merge rates not getting better?"

bbatha — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 04:46:05 +0000

A lot of enhancements came on the model side which in many ways enabled context engineering.

200k and now 1M contexts. Better context management was enabled by improvements in structured outputs/tool calling at the model level. Also reasoning models really upped the game “plan” mode wouldn’t work well without them.