Hacker News: bgirard

New comment by bgirard in "The browser's main thread is expensive"

bgirard — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:41:58 +0000

It's a good nitpick. A hypothetical 1000Hz display will still look smooth to the human eye at 60/120Hz. A 1Hz display will never look smooth.

But it's more about honoring the user's preference. I personally would rather 60Hz, then 120Hz heating up my room unnecessarily. If someone has a display set to 1000Hz for whatever reason, then you should try your best to honor that.

New comment by bgirard in "Run Kimi K3 using 29 GB of RAM at 0.50 tok/s"

bgirard — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 20:05:14 +0000

Approximate calculation is putting the cost at ~$5 per million tokens (assuming 42W sustained, 20¢/kWh), and that's excluding hardware and other costs.

New comment by bgirard in "Firefox Merges Support for Vulkan Video Decoding"

bgirard — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:07:39 +0000

What makes you think the unaccelerated path would use the accelerated iGPU path? Typically hardware decoding is disabled because of driver/reliability issues and thus would switch to software decoding to sidestep these concerns.

New comment by bgirard in "Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price"

bgirard — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:08:44 +0000

It's not created out of no where. It's traders saying that the stock is over priced and putting their money where their mouth is and taking on a big risk if they're wrong. They're extracting this money from folks that are putting upwards pressure on the stock saying it should be worth more. They're helping price the stock more efficiency and reducing index trader's expose to an overpriced stock e.g. retirement funds.

New comment by bgirard in "GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]"

bgirard — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:14:10 +0000

It's really neat that the prompt was released!

I'm curious how many unsolved problems are tried against frontier models when they come out. Are we trying every problems against every release? What is the solve success rate? Is there a sub-community within Mathematics that is coordinating this effort? How much untapped opportunity is there here?

New comment by bgirard in "Should DayQuil Be Legal?"

bgirard — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:21:30 +0000

> As the person holding the money, it's my job to look at what is effective and what the active ingredients are in any given product.

But I don't have time to do that. I would rather have a retailer do that curation for me and provide me with effective high value products, and stand behind returns when they miss the mark. Then as a customer I can reward them for that value added work.

That's why Costco is great most of the time. Although they sometimes miss the mark with certain products they stock.

New comment by bgirard in "Steam Machine launches today"

bgirard — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:59:43 +0000

I don't recognized the CPU/GPU and PC building isn't my field so I could way off. But here's my honest attempt at it without paying a premium for the form factor which isn't an important feature for me:

PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/3WkCdq

Price: $1021

New comment by bgirard in "Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn"

bgirard — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 04:49:58 +0000

SpaceX was said to be subsidized by gov contracts. Look at where that got it...

New comment by bgirard in "Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn"

bgirard — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 04:48:49 +0000

You're missing the point. There was a lot of debate around if inference was subsidized or not. And that's a huge point to confirm in the public discourse.

New comment by bgirard in "Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day"

bgirard — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:51:26 +0000

Similarly my friend swaps electric cars every couple of years (Volt -> Bolt -> Equinox) bragging about all the discounts and subsidies he's gotten. Maybe it's still beneficial through the used car market but it doesn't feel like an effective subsidy for the government to be handing out.

New comment by bgirard in "Several injured in Boeing 787 nose-gear collapse in Frankfurt"

bgirard — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:15:31 +0000

A ground level fall can be fatal for a senior. Throw in freak accident factors and other vulnerable demographics it's not very surprising to me.

New comment by bgirard in "MAI-Code-1-Flash"

bgirard — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 20:54:01 +0000

> It’s about bang for buck.

Hard to know when they don't give the price per token. Presumably it will be comparable to a low-mid range model in terms of price. But otherwise their 'Ideal Zone' is meaningless without factoring in the price per token. I don't how much tokens are being used, that's an implementation detail to me. I care about price / performance / latency.

New comment by bgirard in "The real cost of owning a home"

bgirard — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:49:47 +0000

Which ones? Mortgage, real estate costs, repairs, maintenance are all still there with a condo.

My gut feeling is that repairs and maintenance cost more with condos than if you own a home and you're handy to fix minor stuff and know how to find good contractors for bigger jobs. I imagine condo jobs becomes more difficult and contractors charge more for those jobs. But I don't have data to back my hunch. Condo has extra issues in dealing with neighbor problems (issues with garbage, pets, unpaid fees, noise, etc...) and you have to maintain shared spaces (hallways, elevators, etc...) and you end up paying for that via your condo fees.

New comment by bgirard in "Maladaptive Frugality"

bgirard — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:51:42 +0000

I struggle with this too. But I remind myself that I'm buying myself one of the most expensive and valuable gift: freedom and independence.

I also continue to work because I enjoy it. And that will let me pass on this gift to my children.

New comment by bgirard in "The AI revolution in math has arrived"

bgirard — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 04:24:37 +0000

Last week I got together with my math alumni friend. We cracked some beers, we chatted with voice mode ChatGPT and toyed around with Collatz Conjecture and we sent some prompt to a coding agent to build visualizations and simulation. It was a lot of fun directing these agents while we bounced off ideas and the models could explore them.

I think with the right problem and the right agentic loop it’s clear to me improvements will speed up.

New comment by bgirard in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

bgirard — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:59:18 +0000

I've been using Codex to build a repo that pulls down astronomical datasets and runs simulation to try to find explanation for the hubble tension. Having an agent to do the tedious bits and also having an LLM to bounce ideas has tough me so much about astronomy. I don't have serious hopes of finding anything new and novel but it's still a lot of fun.

New comment by bgirard in "Binary obfuscation used in AAA Games"

bgirard — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:22:02 +0000

I’ve noticed that LLMs can effortlessly read minified JS. How does it do with obfuscated binary code? I wonder if the days of obfuscation are numbered when the tedious job of de-obfuscation can be automated.

New comment by bgirard in "Colorado House passes bill to limit surveillance pricing and wage setting"

bgirard — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 06:28:56 +0000

Subpoenas and whistleblowing are pretty good tools.

New comment by bgirard in "Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website"

bgirard — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:09:33 +0000

I think they're thinking about this wrong.

I get all my groceries deliver to my doorstep via Walmart delivery pass. The thing I'm really missing is having AI curate meal planning to my family's preferences. I already feed ChatGPT my family' preferences (e.g. Kid A doesn't eat X Y Z and liked meal A B C, kid B likes ...) and ChatGPT is helping me build meal plans. With my preferences we can quickly nail down a meal plan for the week.

The slowest part of my meal planning is going through Walmart's slow site where each page load is 2-3 seconds and it takes several page load per item. Once it can translate my meal plan into a grocery checkout from Walmart I'm all set.

New comment by bgirard in "Show HN: Claude Code skills that build complete Godot games"

bgirard — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 22:13:53 +0000

I'd love to see the results of that. I think calling a single prompt iteration lifeless misses the point. It's like looking at a game that has had a few hours of development and saying it's bad. Games need iterations. Seeing your results as the first iteration is impressive. I can see follow-up prompts and custom tweaking get really good results!

Last summer I built a factorio-like automation game with older models and over time the game really started to take life.