Hacker News: blackle

New comment by blackle in "Flipper One Tech Specs"

blackle — Thu, 21 May 2026 07:34:01 +0000

I have a flipper zero which I use monthly to provision keyfobs for new members of the hackerspace I run. Great little device! This new one doesn't have an nfc/rfid reader/writer so the use-case is a bit befuddling. I'd love to hear how people would use this and how it might beat out, say, a used thinkpad.

New comment by blackle in "WriteUp: 16 Bytes of x86 that turn Matrix rain into sound"

blackle — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:10:33 +0000

There's lots of cool details like this which you share in this thread but aren't present in the writeup, which is a bit of a shame! I'd love to hear more about how you arrived at this sequence of bytes. Was it the same kind of process as Memories or did you have a different approach this time? How do you mean by "unfolded what's left?" Were you generating these experiments manually or automatically?

New comment by blackle in "WriteUp: 16 Bytes of x86 that turn Matrix rain into sound"

blackle — Mon, 18 May 2026 06:48:47 +0000

The same author wrote a long writeup a number of years back on their other demo "Memories." It is a great read! http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Memories

New comment by blackle in "1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long"

blackle — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 13:48:13 +0000

this is gorgeous! really illustrates the fundemental rules in a very aesthetically pleasing way

Interactive Puzzle Box Implemented in CSS

blackle — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 09:53:27 +0000

Article URL: https://suricrasia.online/puzzlebox/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43157678

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by blackle in "Don't "optimize" conditional moves in shaders with mix()+step()"

blackle — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 19:50:08 +0000

For AMD you can use the Radeon GPU Analyzer: https://gpuopen.com/rga/

New comment by blackle in "Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed"

blackle — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 01:56:28 +0000

Any percentage of people being de-personed is bad. If the state is permitted to withhold travel documents of people indefinitely (and the supporting documents they sent in to get their passport renewed[1]), do you really live in a free state?

Also, and I know people knee-jerk at the comparison, but historically speaking Jews comprised less than 1% of the population of Weimar Germany.[2] The smallness of the percentage shouldn't be cause to dismiss the harm of their discrimination as "no big deal." It's been shown where that leads.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2025/01/28/state-... [2] https://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/JEW_RELIGIONZUG...

New comment by blackle in "GnuCash 5.9"

blackle — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 09:15:36 +0000

Sure: https://github.com/blackle/GnuCashAutoInvoice/tree/main

It's kinda a mess tbh, and it actually also requires some non-exposed symbols to work properly, so it needs access to the GnuCash source code. I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you're ok with maintaining your own unsupported GnuCash feature.

New comment by blackle in "GnuCash 5.9"

blackle — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 08:20:47 +0000

I use GnuCash for the accounting of my hackerspace. It was either this or a site called "wave" which the treasurer of a nearby makerspace recommended. After signing up for wave and playing around, I still wasn't sure. A few weeks later I decided I would use wave, but then I found they had locked my account for no reason. GnuCash it is!

It's good software! I eventually wrote code that dynamically links with the libgnucash library so I can auto-generate monthly invoices for the member's dues.

New comment by blackle in "85% of People Want Global Ban on Single-Use Plastics"

blackle — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 19:20:28 +0000

I fully agree, however if you're the kind of person who orders groceries, then what ends up happening is that you start collecting reusable bags that you have no way of reusing. I hope that someone starts some kind of "reusable bag recycling" system so I can give the scores of bags I have to a good home

New comment by blackle in "Show HN: Allocate poker chips optimally with mixed-integer nonlinear programming"

blackle — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 17:06:56 +0000

I've noticed that adding a colour can make it go from having a solution to not having a solution. Maybe it should try to come up with a solution using fewer colours in that case, since it's not obvious that manually removing a colour will lead to a solution.

New comment by blackle in "A breakthrough towards the Riemann hypothesis"

blackle — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 16:40:34 +0000

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2595/

New comment by blackle in "LLMs are not suitable for brainstorming"

blackle — Thu, 16 May 2024 01:26:45 +0000

Increasing temperature just makes more uncommon tokens more likely to appear. This can include both uncommon ideas and uncommon spelling and grammatical mistakes. It also won't make ideas that the LLM isn't capable of thinking appear, unless you crank the temperature way up and get lucky (like monkeys on typewriters lucky)

New comment by blackle in "Farewell, Chuck E. Cheese Animatronic Band"

blackle — Sun, 12 May 2024 06:24:42 +0000

Godspeed, Charles Entertainment Cheese. We will meet again in Valhalla.

New comment by blackle in "Using a LLM to compress text"

blackle — Mon, 06 May 2024 06:27:09 +0000

My understanding is that minimizing perplexity (what LLMs are generally optimized for) is equivalent to finding a good probably distribution over the next token.

New comment by blackle in "Using a LLM to compress text"

blackle — Sun, 05 May 2024 00:58:50 +0000

There is a way to do this same compression by utilizing the raw probability distributions that the LLM produces as output. Fabrice Bellard has some experiments with doing this with transformers: https://bellard.org/nncp/

The idea is that if you can produce an accurate probably distribution over the next bit/byte/token, then you can compress things with an entropy compressor (huffman encoding, range encoding, asymmetric numeral systems, etc). This comment is too small of a space to explain fully how they work, but it suffices to say that pretty much every good compression algorithm models probability distributions in some way.

New comment by blackle in "The Moon brings a wild but precarious fish orgy to California's beaches"

blackle — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 09:29:06 +0000

I love grunions. Such funny little creatures. I'd recommend finding a video of them in action where they bury themselves in the sand, only to wiggle around and "pop" out of the sand again.

New comment by blackle in "Blocklist that contain AI generated content for uBlock Origin and uBlacklist"

blackle — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 02:02:31 +0000

I assume you'd go to the library and find photo catalogues, but this is inconvenient and before my time. Nobody is suggesting everyone use this blocklist, but it's here for the hobbyists who want to use it.

New comment by blackle in "Blocklist that contain AI generated content for uBlock Origin and uBlacklist"

blackle — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 22:23:04 +0000

I see the utility of this as removing AI image results from google images. Many artists need to search for real life photo reference in order to improve their drawing or painting skill. If you've never heard "photo reference" before, you may assume this is like tracing, but that is not the case. What you do is "study" a reference then paint on your canvas separately. This is to improve your ability to render particular subjects and materials.

Although AI generated art is fairly adept at rendering materials at the small scale, they often have issues of large scale consistency (e.g. clothing wrinkles turning into seams in an unrealistic way) or being inaccurate (e.g. a certain type of wild cat having ear tufts when it shouldn't). These are real examples that I have seen.

Needing to sift through AI art in order to find true photographs for reference is frustrating. A blocklist helps with that.

New comment by blackle in "Money bubble"

blackle — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 21:05:59 +0000

Consider a situation where the human operators only get the problems the LLMs can't solve. If LLMs are good but still limited, then the leftover cases will be those that are unusual, difficult, or downright impossible. Think of things like complicated fraud resolution, or the customer needing to change a piece of data on their profile that the engineers never considered could be changed.

If the switch to LLMs is largely a cost-cutting measure for organizations, I could see that the human operators—though downsized—would continue to receive the same compensation as before. In short, they will be paid the same to do more and harder work. If their performance metrics are based on how quickly they can close a case, these cases will never receive the amount of effort they need to get properly resolved. That is bad for the customer, who can't get a strange but pressing problem solved, and it is bad for the employee, who has to work harder at the same rate as before. The only person who comes out ahead is the capital owners.

I've sat with help-line operators for a medium-sized consumer tech company. It seems like 80% of their time is spent troubleshooting very niche issues, with the simple ones sprinkled in for levity. People need wins in order to feel good about their jobs. If it's all difficult problems—at bad pay, then that's just torture.