Hacker News: botanrice

New comment by botanrice in "A Dynamic and Distributed Virtual GPU Cloud Built on Idle Apple Silicon Devices"

botanrice — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:30:23 +0000

until you get a teen obsessed with 3d rendering then they're up all night finding a way to convert manga into 3d scenes and your old laptop is running 100% cpu trying to keep up. xDD

New comment by botanrice in "Solar panels that plug into your wall"

botanrice — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:25:34 +0000

Were there any parts of the process you felt could be reasonably chipped away at through improved beaureaucratic processes or lightweight advocacy?

I've been doing some advocacy work related to balcony solar mostly from a conceptual standpoint but am a renter and don't know much about the actual costs and process behind installing roof panels. I'm curious to know whether there are any low-hanging fruit we could organize around to reduce the regulatory burden on the consumer.

New comment by botanrice in "America.gov"

botanrice — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:03:49 +0000

hey, really like your idea and have been brainstorming the same kind of tool! not as far along as you or the OP but I would love to hear about what your roadmap/plan is for a tool like this. all about helping the ppl. should i try the email on your site?

New comment by botanrice in "Moist-Electric Wallpaper for Indoor Energy Harvesting and Humidity Management"

botanrice — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 16:54:55 +0000

very solarpunk

New comment by botanrice in "MicroLLM Lab – Try 7 tiny LLM's in the browser"

botanrice — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:30:01 +0000

I tried the first four listed and came to comment as I was confused by what the expected output should be. Just tried the rest of them and none of them were able to answer the prompt: "Give me a breakfast recipe that I can make in less than 5 minutes"

The closest was SmoLM2 135M Instruct which gave me the milk and cheese piece, which was at least close to what a recipe looks like.

New comment by botanrice in "MicroLLM Lab – Try 7 tiny LLM's in the browser"

botanrice — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:37:56 +0000

Can someone help me understand whether these models are supposed to be good enough to be useful? I am asking these for a breakfast recipe and most of them are repeating text and giving me strange combinations of like chicken & parmesan or milk and like 8 cups of cheese. I really would love to use MicroLLMs and have been eagerly awaiting the day they could be useful, or at least run local LLMs for that matter, but these don't seem useful.

They don't even consistently pass the benchmarks included in the site, so what are they good for?

Edit: or is the purpose to just showcase that these small LLMs can run on WebGPU?

New comment by botanrice in "Attention is all you have"

botanrice — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:07:02 +0000

"intentional web surfing" is a phrase i've been exploring recently. hosting an event to turn it into an activity here in my city, should be interesting to see how people respond.

New comment by botanrice in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

botanrice — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:34:16 +0000

been thinking that for awhile now

New comment by botanrice in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

botanrice — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:14:34 +0000

I have either learned to tune it all out or have been worn down of all the terrible news. But of all the terriblew news to come from this administration, this kind of thing guts me the most :(

There is really no way around this, no silver lining. After years of working to get these programs implemented, to have the admin just willy-nilly spend money (what money!?!) to have them STOP. It hurts man.

New comment by botanrice in "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't"

botanrice — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:39:48 +0000

I believe I discovered him through that same video! I now tell everyone I know about guerilla gardening lol, haven't got the know-how to do it myself quite yet though. Soon enough.

New comment by botanrice in "Resetting Xbox"

botanrice — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:21:37 +0000

who is Asha?

not a part of Microsoft, I find it weird a company leader wouldn't sign their whole name even if an internal memo.

New comment by botanrice in "Resetting Xbox"

botanrice — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:19:40 +0000

Same boat as you. It's wild that I can turn on the xbox, wait 20-30min for mandatory updates, then need to re-sign in or occasionally reset my wireless mac address due to some bug, then re-sign into my Xbox account even if I am fine playing offline but of course I forgot my password so now I'm on my phone doing 2FA to remember which email I used to reset the password.

Then I will need to update the game I want to play (somehow FIFA 23 still requires updates?), then re-sign in to EA whose password of course I also forgot so now I'm on my phone resetting my password for EA.

Now it's been 45minutes and I'm frustrated and realize I could have loaded up Steam or Switch and been playing this whole time. Not to mention that once the Xbox itself is working it will be running slower than the Nintendo Switch I own which is only about 2yr newer than it. just a bad system!

I legit got my old PlayStation 2 back up and running so I wouldn't deal with this. (sorry been needing to vent all this lmao)

New comment by botanrice in "Resetting Xbox"

botanrice — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:11:19 +0000

I've had an Xbox I got from a friend and I legitimately don't know which Xbox it is lol

New comment by botanrice in "Bring back crappy forums"

botanrice — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:48:20 +0000

you make a good point on the discussion over time. I do miss that aspect of old forums, felt like you could have conversations as opposed to chats, in a way? It's unheard of for discussion to re-ignite on an old HN or Reddit post.

Also gotta love the long-term discussions that happen with 3-4 people saying serious things and then one complete rando coming in dropping an absurd conspiracy theory while the rest of the convo continues around them xDD

New comment by botanrice in "Jerry's Map"

botanrice — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:40:28 +0000

I actually had the same experience as you (own it, played it only a bit for similar reasons), but FWIW I believe there is a sandbox mode to just play around in.

Another chill medieval town building game is Manor Lords. It has some management but overal is laid back.

New comment by botanrice in "The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Letterboxd"

botanrice — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:16:15 +0000

cool, thx for the tip!

New comment by botanrice in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

botanrice — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:15:10 +0000

yea I do think you're right. Really dislike that they've truly stuffed it down as everything getting auto-uploaded to OneDrive. Would be happy to use it to store certain docs but can't control how work sets it up ya know? stuck suffering instead lmao

New comment by botanrice in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

botanrice — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:00:45 +0000

Literally was just googling yesterday about why Windows File Explorer genuinely takes longer to boot up than microsoft edge. Insane how fast they are enshittifying.

New comment by botanrice in "Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore"

botanrice — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:58:42 +0000

have you met a realtor?

They can be some great people but as a profession they are known more for their extroversion and soft skills than their high IQ understanding of economics lol

New comment by botanrice in "The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Letterboxd"

botanrice — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:36:28 +0000

why don't we kill off Goodreads instead! Bad UI, confusing, poor features, toxic users. Letterboxd is harmless, anyone could vibecode a replacement in a day and a half.