Hacker News: bpye

New comment by bpye in "Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months"

bpye — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:07:43 +0000

Not just SSDs, HDDs are also way more expensive. End of 2024 I bought 4 14TB drives for ~$250 CAD each, $400+ for even a refurb drive now.

The possibility that these fail does concern me.

New comment by bpye in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold"

bpye — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:26:58 +0000

I have a Z Flip 7. The Z Flip 8 is practically indistinguishable except for the SoC where they've gone from an Exynos to a Snapdragon.

New comment by bpye in "Canada adds 75,000 new jobs in July, unemployment rate lowest in 2 years"

bpye — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:11:36 +0000

Most provinces and territories have a minimum wage above $16/hr, so this cannot be true.

New comment by bpye in "NetBSD 11.0"

bpye — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:03:16 +0000

NetBSD supposedly supports 486, I don't think you're going to have much luck with USB there.

New comment by bpye in "Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified"

bpye — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:05:22 +0000

You've seen RAM slots go bad? DIMMs can also fail!

I'd much rather replace a bad stick than a whole motherboard/device.

New comment by bpye in "Teardown: A Generic 7-Port USB 3.0 Hub That Wasn't"

bpye — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 08:38:25 +0000

The linked article on the same blog on building a tower of optical drives is also quite interesting: https://goughlui.com/2026/03/15/project-building-an-optical-...

New comment by bpye in "I also filed the corners off my MacBook"

bpye — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 06:29:45 +0000

They don't document the hardware, but it is possible to run unsigned code on the SoC - that's how the Asahi Linux project is able to exist.

New comment by bpye in "Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k"

bpye — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 19:01:39 +0000

Is there evidence that it is actually a better agent though?

New comment by bpye in "How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)"

bpye — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 05:30:08 +0000

I guess you can try Windows next - https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs

New comment by bpye in "How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)"

bpye — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 05:29:03 +0000

If you run ZFS with an LTS kernel you're pretty much fine. Yes new Linux releases will break existing ZFS releases - but the LTS tree is in support for long enough that this is never an issue.

New comment by bpye in "How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)"

bpye — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 05:27:03 +0000

I'm still running an old Gen 8 MicroServer. Modern drives can actually saturate the SATA controller, and because it only has a single PCIe slot I can't add both a 10Gb NIC and a storage controller - I went with the 10Gb NIC.

It works well enough though and has lasted me over a decade at this point. 16GB DDR3 ECC, an old 4 core/8 thread Xeon, 4x14TB drives and the Mellanox NIC.

New comment by bpye in "How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)"

bpye — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 05:24:45 +0000

> and while this made sense when drives were expensive

I don't have the answer to the latency question, but HDDs have shot up in $/TB over the last couple years too. They are once again kind of expensive.

New comment by bpye in "FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder"

bpye — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 19:56:33 +0000

Pipewire will quite happily pipe through audio without resampling if it is the only source on a system. You can see this by running pw-top and using speaker-test with various sample rates.

New comment by bpye in "The end of the AArch64 desktop experiment"

bpye — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 10:00:38 +0000

When I looked at this before I found https://github.com/kuruczgy/x1e-nixos-config - reasonable though not 100% support.

I believe Ubuntu also has semi official X1 elite support, no idea if they're working on the latest generation.

New comment by bpye in "The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment"

bpye — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:56:21 +0000

ACPI does exist for Aarch64, but is only really used for Windows client devices, and server hardware - though I think the Ampere hardware in the article would use ACPI not DT.

If you want to run Linux on one of the modern Qualcomm Windows laptops, you still generally end up needing to use device tree.

New comment by bpye in "Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development"

bpye — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 06:08:31 +0000

> The maths there is pretty undeniable, but it is not where I'd make the split. Having a machine that can run some modest local LLMs, like the Gemma 4 12B, is really worth it.

Seems like a GPU with 12GB+ VRAM is going to be a much more affordable way to achieve that? Even a B580 should get reasonable perf there.

New comment by bpye in "Historical memory prices 1960-2026"

bpye — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 23:21:55 +0000

Will they..? It seems equally (or perhaps more) likely that we'll increasingly see vibe coded browser or Electron based applications as the bar is now lower to build such a thing.

New comment by bpye in "Half-Life 2 in a Browser"

bpye — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:28:09 +0000

That's just the SDK - which does include the game code but not the engine. Xash3D is the reverse engineered engine alluded to above.

New comment by bpye in "AMD will reinstate memory encryption on Ryzen 9000 CPUs via BIOS update in July"

bpye — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 01:07:31 +0000

> and also recently broke and fixed setting manual speed on DDR5 memory with ECC enabled (basically any setting higher or lower than 5200mhz or something was ignored).

Do you know when this was fixed? I recently updated my B650D4U and ended up stuck at 5200MHz instead of 5600MHz. Asrock Rack don't seem to take every update, but I have had luck getting beta releases in the past when I've asked about specific versions.

New comment by bpye in "The AirPods Effect"

bpye — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:18:40 +0000

My wired Etymotics work 100% of the time without issue.

It still feels (to me) that in many cases Bluetooth earbuds are solving an issue that doesn't exist.