Hacker News: blihp

New comment by blihp in "Btop: A better modern alternative of htop with a gamified interface"

blihp — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 19:17:56 +0000

I gave up on heavily customizing the UI after a couple of top variants (where I would lose said customizations for a variety of reasons) over the years so I run a fairly vanilla config: I like both the look and the information density of btop over htop out of the box.

New comment by blihp in "Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line"

blihp — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 14:54:35 +0000

Not necessarily as even the factory produced optical discs have had issues with de-lamination, oxidation etc. Of course a lot of that had to do with companies cheaping out on manufacturing in order to make that last tenth of a cent of profit as they tend to do.

New comment by blihp in "Apple M5 chip"

blihp — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 16:39:03 +0000

Not possible given the anemic memory bandwidth [1]... you can scale up the compute all you want but if the memory doesn't scale up as well you're not going to see anywhere near those numbers.

[1] The memory bandwidth is fine for CPU workloads, but not for GPU / NN workloads.

New comment by blihp in "AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline"

blihp — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 16:09:21 +0000

When I bought a PS 1 around 1998-99 I paid $150 and I think that included a game or two. It's the later in the lifecycle price that has really changed (didn't the last iteration of it get down to either $99 or $49?)

New comment by blihp in "AMD signs AI chip-supply deal with OpenAI, gives it option to take a 10% stake"

blihp — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 02:20:07 +0000

By the time that could feasibly come to fruition, I suspect the AI bubble will have long since popped. Despite making decent GPUs for graphics, AMD can't seem to get its act together on the GPU compute front.

New comment by blihp in "AMD signs AI chip-supply deal with OpenAI, gives it option to take a 10% stake"

blihp — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 18:43:38 +0000

Try to use AMD GPU's for AI and you'll understand. Unless you have lots of your own engineers to throw at making their stuff work, it's easier for most companies just to keep throwing money nVidia's way.

New comment by blihp in "Ollama Web Search"

blihp — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 02:31:34 +0000

There are very few recently launched pure open source projects these days (most are at least running donation-ware models or funded by corporate backers), none in the AI space that I'm aware of.

New comment by blihp in "Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis"

blihp — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 06:55:39 +0000

Take a closer look at the history of how they've been running things pretty much since the beginning. Even though they give away a lot of code under open source licenses (most of it they have to), to me it's always looked like they have run the project as if building a business out of it was the priority. I'm sure their recent IPO will result in much more openness... that's usually how things go, right? Nothing wrong with that, just don't be fooled into thinking they're something they're not.

New comment by blihp in "Andrej Karpathy: "I was given early access to Grok 3 earlier today""

blihp — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 19:16:45 +0000

I didn't down vote but I'll take a shot: A valid reason to consider the question is to determine to what degree the model was steered or filtered during training. This goes to can you trust its output beyond the obvious other limitations of the model such as hallucinations etc. It's useful to know if you are getting responses based just on the training data or if you have injected opinions to contend with.

New comment by blihp in "Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone"

blihp — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 19:42:07 +0000

I don't think your take is incorrect. I give it a try from time to time and it's always been inferior to other offerings for me every time I've tested it. Which I find a bit strange as NotebookLM (until recently) had been great to use. Whatever... there are plenty of other good options out there.

New comment by blihp in "ROCm Device Support Wishlist"

blihp — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 01:31:26 +0000

Having watched some of his streams on the topic, I think you've captured it well. He's basically saying he's done wasting time on AMD unless/until they get serious. It's not so much that he wants free hardware from them, rather he wants to see them put some skin in the game as they basically blew him off the last time he tried to engage with them.

New comment by blihp in "Apple squandered the Holy Grail"

blihp — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 19:13:21 +0000

It was implied by the phrase 'transformed the ways everyone used computers'. True, to younger computer users MacWrite would be the most familiar of the three. However, in terms of total unit sales and percentage of users for their day, MacWrite was practically rounding error in the word processor market. It was WordStar and then WordPerfect that dominated (and therefore 'transformed...') until the early/mid-90's when MS Word took over.

New comment by blihp in "Nvidia bets on robotics to drive future growth"

blihp — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 16:31:27 +0000

Maybe you've had a different experience with GPU drivers on ARM for Linux than most of the rest of us? (i.e. it's the fact that nVidia actually has Linux support on ARM that is the real appeal)

New comment by blihp in "Intel Inside, Gelsinger Outside"

blihp — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 18:48:35 +0000

I tend to agree. Pat seemed to be trying to take a middle ground approach: split the company in two, but not really giving up hope that Intel would regain x86 leadership and that somehow things were still going to be OK on that front. The reality is that even if Intel retakes x86 leadership, x86 isn't what it once was and is unlikely to command the premium it once did except in niche legacy applications. If you give up hope for a return to the glory days, there's some radical restructuring left to do which includes cutting most of the middle, and some vertical layers, out of Intel.

New comment by blihp in "Using Guile for Emacs"

blihp — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:49:11 +0000

What's your rush, sonny? You say 'not anytime soon' but then you say 'next 10 years'. In the world of GNU software, to say 'glacial pace' is basically asking 'what's your hurry?' Fine wine, fine wine... give it at least 30-40 years...

New comment by blihp in "Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? (2022)"

blihp — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:16:39 +0000

I think it absolutely was. Even 50+ years ago there was far more competition in any number of industries and investors looking at a particular widget maker could compare numerous companies and analyze the operations and strategy of each before picking which one(s) to invest in. Today we assume EMH when competition has become increasingly rare... so everyone from consumers to investors have fewer options yet somehow efficiency is supposed to exist.

Today most just pile into the megacaps and generally assume 'these guys are the biggest... they must be the best.' Sure, there's a small window of competition in the VC world where money piles into non-public companies for a few years before a winner is selected (often having nothing to do with having the best product/service or even being the most efficient or profitable... it's all about who scaled to the finish line the fastest) and either becomes the 800lb gorilla or gets gobbled up by one.

New comment by blihp in "Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine"

blihp — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 17:02:16 +0000

I ran it through Perplexity Pro which gave a very different and detailed answer with this closing note: "It's worth noting that not all places named "Hamilton" are necessarily named after Alexander Hamilton. For example, Hamilton, Ontario in Canada is named after George Hamilton, a Canadian merchant. Similarly, Hamilton in Scotland and New Zealand are named after different individuals."

New comment by blihp in "Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine"

blihp — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 16:58:03 +0000

Many of the LLM powered engines seem to be requiring a login these days. Just set up a burner gmail account to sign up for them (see, Google's still good for something ;-)

New comment by blihp in "Opinion: Perplexity offers several advantages over Google as a search engine"

blihp — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 16:55:24 +0000

Did you try any of your queries using Perplexity Pro? (even at the free tier they give you a few 'Pro' queries a day) While it's still far from perfect, the Pro answers are generally higher quality than the free ones.

I'm finding several of the LLM's that can cite sources, including Perplexity, are more useful to me than Google for search these days. The notable exception is Gemini which has been quite bad in my experience compared to the other options.

New comment by blihp in "Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far"

blihp — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 16:37:12 +0000

The thinking is that the trajectory of LLM's will get them an AI flywheel where they can pump money in and get unlimited amounts of intelligence either augmenting or replacing human labor for pennies on the dollar. The business 'thought leaders' on this view it as a largely zero-sum game: get there first or watch your business die as someone else beats you to it.

This has a very late-90's vibe and is quite entertaining to watch.