Hacker News: citrin_ru

New comment by citrin_ru in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"

citrin_ru — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:09:52 +0000

If LLMs is just another technology then low end will eventually win. The bet which I guess many AI investors are making is that LLM will allow recursive self improvement which will lead to development of super-human AGI. The company which will get there first will rule the world thanks to an immense power enabled by AGI. There will be no 2nd or 3rd AI company, the 1st one will wipe the rest out.

New comment by citrin_ru in "Making 768 servers look like 1"

citrin_ru — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:02:51 +0000

> The example shows an auto-incrementing user ID. How’s that possible without contention between all shards?

Why not divide ID range (63bit?) by the maximum planned number of shards and then set on each shard it's min/max value so ranges will not overlap?

New comment by citrin_ru in "Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip"

citrin_ru — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:21:42 +0000

Old generation DIMMs are not that much cheaper and supply is limited as old generation are taken out of production to free capacity for newer chips. DDR2 is already more expensive than DDR3, likely because it is no longer produced but there is still demand (to replace/upgrade memory in older hardware).

New comment by citrin_ru in "Learning to code is still worthwhile"

citrin_ru — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:54:06 +0000

Outsourcing never ended but it did happen in waves. Right after ZIRR ended but before the AI panic multiple companies started to layoff in developers in western countries and double down on outsourcing to India. During ZIRP they employed more people in the US/EU and less work was outsourced.

New comment by citrin_ru in "HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88"

citrin_ru — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:00:17 +0000

May be LLM resume screening is a symptom of a bigger problem - with tens of candidates per vacancy employers can screen resume badly and even throw half of the resumes away and still hire someone qualified.

New comment by citrin_ru in "In praise of memcached"

citrin_ru — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:40:11 +0000

Threads are not free - they allow to use more CPU cores but if you load is not too high than with a single thread memcached uses less CPU than with multiple.

New comment by citrin_ru in "DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships"

citrin_ru — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:14:26 +0000

What we see in quotes is not the price of oil being shipped right now; it is usually a one-month futures contract. Traders expect that by this time, Hormuz will reopen. If it does not, they will lose money, but the actual price could be much higher.

New comment by citrin_ru in "Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?"

citrin_ru — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 06:47:04 +0000

If memory shortages were not caused by AI then may be (but still unlikely). In the current situation even cautious in the past companies are switching to “move fast and break things” mode to not fall behind vibe coding competitors. When the velocity is the top priority there is no time fo efficiency.

New comment by citrin_ru in "Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs"

citrin_ru — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:43:03 +0000

Web browsing is the most resource intensive task given how bloated modern websites are. It’s easer to imagine a cheap phone with a set of optimised native apps but the problem is tech giants are not interested in reducing footprint of their apps at the same time actively hostile to 3rd party clients.

New comment by citrin_ru in "Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society"

citrin_ru — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:00:53 +0000

Surprisingly high number given that people are being told by tech CEO that AI will replace all white collar jobs soon and a few years later AI guided robots will replace all blue collar jobs too.

New comment by citrin_ru in "After AI takes everything"

citrin_ru — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:38:26 +0000

Many managers are more bullish on AI and less able to recognize slop, they are unlikely to recognize quality crisis. And they are the people who decide who belong to the industry and who is not. As a result we will get an escalation of enshittification and people will start to forget that slop is not the only option.

New comment by citrin_ru in "Hetzner Price Adjustment"

citrin_ru — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:19:46 +0000

AI investors bet on the high return in the next 10-15 years, they have no reasons to care if everything which require semiconductors will become much more expensive in the process.

New comment by citrin_ru in "Mercedes‑Benz starts large‑scale production of electric axial flux motor"

citrin_ru — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 10:39:02 +0000

A typical modern car is already hideously complicated and a different type of motor would not change this.

What is the current market sentiment? Share of EVs is slowly rising so having a good motor as important as ever.

New comment by citrin_ru in "Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026"

citrin_ru — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:52:18 +0000

Gas prices vary across the world, mostly depending on if it's only LNG imports (high prices) or local sources (much cheaper, e. g. the US) or a mix (e. g. Europe but since 2022 it's heavy reliant on LNG which pushes prices up). Coal prices also vary. Guess we cannot compare gas and coal prices globally, only withing a specific region.

New comment by citrin_ru in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

citrin_ru — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 07:48:46 +0000

A big threat for illustrators is not LLMs per se but slop acceptance. We've seen the same with machine translation - it was (and to some extent still is) worse than human translation but people accepted it because it's free. I recently seen and ad on a street which caught my attention - it was a photorealistic image of a taking off plane. It looked off and when I looked at details it's become clear it's AI generated - the 1st giveaway - stationary turbines on a flying plane, an angle relative to the runway is wrong, small details, especially in the background are off. Someone prompted LLM, seen the result and decided it's OK to print this advert. IMHO they would be better off with buying a stock image.

New comment by citrin_ru in "Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026"

citrin_ru — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:29:49 +0000

In regions where winters are dark windy places tent to be not too far away. If both solar and wind both overbuild to the extent it makes sense (say 5x for solar and 2x for wind) and batteries cover a normal daily cycle you probably will need to burn gas on 10-20% of days which is not net zero but way way better than the current situation.

New comment by citrin_ru in "Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026"

citrin_ru — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:22:17 +0000

Gas allows to use combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT) which is more efficient and it makes gas cheaper for electricity generation.

New comment by citrin_ru in "Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026"

citrin_ru — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:47:50 +0000

It's a good news but I didn't expect that coal is still on the 1st place and not really trending down. I though coal was largely replaced by gas years ago...

New comment by citrin_ru in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

citrin_ru — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:33:15 +0000

I'm noticing some decline of skills I don't practice regularly and LLM is just one of reasons why one stops practicing. Switching to another area of work gives a comparable decline. If you want sharp skills you have to use them.

New comment by citrin_ru in "Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance"

citrin_ru — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:10:51 +0000

IMHO peak GUI was in 2000s - on Windows most app used Win32 API and apps which followed "Microsoft Windows User Experience" guide had consistent UI/UX. Since then Microsoft introduced many competing frameworks to create GUI all look slightly different and UX is less consistent too. And then Electron come which brought inconsistency of web to the desktop apps.