I submitted it, as it gives a better picture of what Microsoft is trying to do: both the hardware, and the software.

Phi is small, not just for shows, but also to be able to run locally on the hardware they are planning for it to run on the copilot branded devices.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43854283

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

The phi models often punch above their weight, and I got curious about the vision models after reading https://unsloth.ai/blog/phi4 stories of finetuning

Since lmarena.ai only has the phi-4 text model, I've tried "phi-4 multimodal instruct" from openrouter.ai.

However, the results I get are far below what I would have expected.

Is there any "Microsoft validated" source (like https://chat.qwen.ai/c/guest for qwen) to easily try phi4 vision?

When in doubt, don't use the mean: prefer more robust estimates, as even with degenerate statistical distributions, there are still some "good numbers to report" like the mode or the median.

And if you don't know statistics, just use a plot!

That's a bad analogy: if a given deterministic service ordering is needed for a service to correctly start (say because it doesn't start with the systemd unit), it means the non-deterministic systemd service units are not properly encoding the dependencies tree in the Before= and After=

When done properly, both solutions should work the same. However, the solution properly encoding the dependency graph (instead of just projecting it on a 1-dimensional sequence of numbers) will be more flexible: it's the better solution, because it will give you more speed but also more flexibility: you can see the branches any leaf depends on, remove leaves as needed, then cull the useless branches. You could add determinism if you want, but why bother?

It's like using the dependencies of linux packages, and leaving the job of resolving them to package managers (apt, pacman...): you can then remove the useless packages which are no longer required.

Compare that to doing a `make install` of everything to /usr/local in a specific order, as specified by a script: when done properly, both solutions will work, but one solution is clearly better than the other as it encodes more finely the existing dependencies instead of projecting them to a sequence.

You can add determinism if you want to follow a sequence (ex: `apt-get install make` before adding gcc, then add cuda...), or you can use meta package like build-essentials, but being restricted to a sequence gains you nothing.

> Military authorities in California requested census data to identify the Japanese-American population. Then in 1942, president Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order to authorise their removal.

Submitted!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43754224

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

zfs in mirror mode offers redundancy at the block level but scrub requires plugging the device

> All error correction has a limit. If too many errors build up, it becomes unrecoverable errors

There are software solutions. You can specify the redundancy you want.

For long term storage, if using a single media that you can't plug and scrub, I recommend par2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive?useskin=vector) over NTFS: there are many NTFS file recovery tools, and it shouldn't be too hard to roll your own solution to use the redundancy when a given sector can't be read

If you have specific random IO high performance needs, you can either

- get a SLC drive like https://news.solidigm.com/en-WW/230095-introducing-the-solid...

- make one yourself by hacking the firmware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40405578

Be careful when you use something "exotic", and do not trust drives that are too recent to be fully tested: I learned my lesson for M2 2230 drives https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/17pztue/warning_you_ma... which seems validated by the large numbers of similar experiences like https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793

It's the best we have to ensure programs will be kept running. The multiple payloads are like a rosetta stone.

If I had 1 wish, I would make wine support sixel output + VNC to a localhost port + webgl or equivalent to extend this redundancy to GUIs

> Something like WASM + WASI seems much more likely to fulfill this function in the future.

Time will tell, but given 2 binaries (Sun Java vs Windows i386) from the same time period, the one that was "much more likely to fulfill this function in the future" is much harder to use

p-code is a neat technology, but failing at what it was supposed to achieve

There's no reason we couldn't have a cross-platform minimal set of common utilities.

I was doing something similar for the entire OS a few years ago: cosmopolinux, a distribution of cosmopolitan binaries: https://github.com/csdvrx/cosmopolinux

My idea was to replace the WSL binaries to have a Linux distribution living on C:\, but that could also be booted baremetal if you didn't want to use Windows

I had to put together a multi stage init system for that: if you get the ISO, you can put in on a thumbdrive and boot it: https://gitlab.com/csdvrx/cosmopolinux

The only difference between them is the kernel and the filesystem: the github NTFS has a firecracker linux kernel, the gitlab ISO has a regular kernel with many modules.

I wanted to do a full NTFS solution but I couldn't find a bootloader I liked that would support booting from a NTFS partition.

Booting from an ISO was simpler and faster.

The present day situation is fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period#Present-d... : there is an ongoing "greening" which seems caused by global warming and CO2 increases!

However, a 2003 study estimated only 45% of the Sahara could be covered by vegetation, and a 2022 study found that it may not be sufficient to start another AHP: it just "lowers the threshold for orbital changes to induce Sahara greening"

They are very practical, as they accept any plug

The "randomization" seems to be a pseudo-randomization: with the seed and the timestamp, you should be able to deduce the future "randomized" addresses.

Secondhand stores offer in general "better" products because of the double curation:

- someone found the good interesting enough to buy it in the first place (1st curation)

- the store found it good enough to buy it again from the first owner (2nd curation)

> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?

No, it's even better because of the limited space they have to display the goods they want to sell: while online stores can show their full inventory, brick-and-mortar need to select what's most likely to sell.

This adds yet another level of curation: the store found the good valuable enough to be exposed to buyers, instead of keeping it in the back (3rd curation)

I find great music by randomly buying second-hand CDs from brick-and-mortar secondhand stores, thanks to this triple-curation,