Hacker News: daemonologist

New comment by daemonologist in "Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model"

daemonologist — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:18:30 +0000

The allegation here is that it's not actually a fine-tune of Qwen, but instead an undisclosed mashup (merge) of someone else's fine-tune of Qwen and the original model. Rio subsequently said that the model was in fact a merge, that they did additional fine-tuning after the merge, and that they accidentally uploaded the base merge instead of the version with additional fine-tuning. But this seems like quite an oversight...

New comment by daemonologist in "AI coding at home without going broke"

daemonologist — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:32:47 +0000

There are also significant economies of scale (namely: utilization and batching), which tend to make inference on a shared server more economical even after the operator takes a cut.

New comment by daemonologist in "Show HN: Putt.day a daily mini golf game"

daemonologist — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 23:40:53 +0000

You can bounce the ball up slightly (presumably the spin from rolling is modeled or approximated, and gives lift when hitting a bumper), which might be enough to skip from the tee to near the end of the course. Not sure that should be considered for "par" though. Took me 14.

New comment by daemonologist in "AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42"

daemonologist — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 14:27:55 +0000

Opus 4.7 and 4.8 are also rather "proactive" - several times I've seen them try to inspect compiled binaries before there's even a problem, just to check that their changes are included (and if I let them do so they often get stuck down that rabbithole).

New comment by daemonologist in "Travel locally, where you are"

daemonologist — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:35:19 +0000

I admit I snorted when that was mentioned. It's frequently ranked as the most desirable place to live on earth.

Not to say the message of the article is completely without merit - there are things to see and do almost everywhere. But if I just get in the car and start driving I will 95% of the time find only strip malls and cornfields. Perhaps a suburban park with some trees.

New comment by daemonologist in "Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM"

daemonologist — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:43:42 +0000

Unfortunately Radxa and Milk-V are almost completely out of stock and not much cheaper. If you need more than a microcontroller there's no circumventing the memory shortage at this point.

Kicking myself for not buying the Q6A at the beginning of the year (I wanted three and arace would only sell one per customer, but one would've been better than none).

New comment by daemonologist in "The dead economy theory"

daemonologist — Sat, 30 May 2026 07:08:46 +0000

In the US, 99th percentile household wealth is ~$14M, which at historical rates of return is enough to live opulently indefinitely. (Of course although we're discussing a scenario where capital holds most of the cards, who knows if those returns would be dependable.)

New comment by daemonologist in "Minimax M3"

daemonologist — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:51:36 +0000

lol

New comment by daemonologist in "Eagle 3.1: Collaboration Between the EAGLE Team, vLLM Team, and TorchSpec Team"

daemonologist — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:48:50 +0000

    > can it be slower than without speculative decoding in worst case then?

Yes - running the draft model costs compute and memory bandwidth, and running the drafted futures through the main model costs compute. If the draft model were really inaccurate or you're already compute-limited (usually: running large batches) you would expect some slowdown.

In practice, for single-user (non-batched) inference with a working configuration, you pretty much always get some speedup. For non-coding tasks I've seen it be nearly a wash for some people, in which case you might want to avoid it due to the extra memory usage (you'd rather use that memory to run a bigger quant/model, even at a slightly lower speed).

New comment by daemonologist in "Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers"

daemonologist — Sat, 23 May 2026 23:09:49 +0000

The "library" UI has also gotten radically worse over time (in my family there is a 3G, an early Paperwhite, and a relatively recent base model, and each has a worse and sparser UI than the last). The pages turn faster though, due to improved display/display driver tech.

New comment by daemonologist in "SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket"

daemonologist — Sat, 23 May 2026 20:04:50 +0000

The tiles are not supposed to ablate - they're supposed to be ~fully reusable. That said I think it's plausible that the much higher iteration speed and lack of a need for human-rating (at least during reentry, for now) will allow for more success than the space shuttle saw with its similar approach.

New comment by daemonologist in "Uv is fantastic, but its package management UX is a mess"

daemonologist — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:14:16 +0000

uv has a lot of great features, but the dependency resolution is why I'm a fanboy. It can resolve trees that pip gives up on, and it does it 20x faster than poetry (100x faster than pip) - saves me half an hour on some big projects. All the python resolution and environment management and stuff is just gravy.

New comment by daemonologist in "Was my $48K GPU server worth it?"

daemonologist — Thu, 21 May 2026 18:14:34 +0000

They have a subsequent post (from Monday) about what they've been working on: https://rosmine.ai/2026/05/18/fixing-llm-writing-with-distri...

(I would assume they haven't made a lot of $ off of this, if nothing else because they've only just put out that post and demo. They do seem to have produced a model that doesn't sound very LLM-y to my ear, though it also seems rather weak for its size.)

New comment by daemonologist in "Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers"

daemonologist — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:47:03 +0000

I wonder about this when I see someone post their own work without the Show HN prefix - is it always supposed to be a Show? (Enforcement/community objection to the lack thereof doesn't seem to be very strenuous, if so. Or, maybe it gets fixed after a little while and I haven't noticed.)

New comment by daemonologist in "Gemini 3.5 Flash"

daemonologist — Wed, 20 May 2026 03:06:31 +0000

If this is accurate it raises the question: why is this model so expensive? DeepSeek v4 Flash is 284B total/13B active, FP4/FP8 mixed, and only costs $0.14/$0.28 - even less from OpenRouter. Of course Gemini 3.5 Flash is most likely a better product, and therefore it can command a higher price from an economics perspective, but does this imply Google is taking roughly a 90% profit margin on inference? If so they're either very compute-limited or confident in the model and wanting to recoup training/fixed costs (or both).

New comment by daemonologist in "Google I/O"

daemonologist — Tue, 19 May 2026 17:58:45 +0000

Looks like Flash 3.5 is GA ("stable"): https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/models/gemini-3.5-flas...

New comment by daemonologist in "Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise"

daemonologist — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:06:57 +0000

This is a problem with all of devops imo - everything is a magic yaml config file and they're very difficult to debug or reason about unless you _just know things_.

New comment by daemonologist in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% workforce"

daemonologist — Fri, 08 May 2026 07:36:26 +0000

Yes - I was thinking about starting my own business but am staying put instead and saving as much as possible.

New comment by daemonologist in "I want to live like Costco people"

daemonologist — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:03:22 +0000

And in my experience this means you usually have to go to both the DMV and then across town to the tag agent.

New comment by daemonologist in "I want to live like Costco people"

daemonologist — Thu, 07 May 2026 22:56:26 +0000

The consumption aspect is perhaps similar, but the crowds at Costco are much, much worse (in quantity mainly) than any other grocery or big-box store I've ever been to.

I also refuse to go to Costco these days. Every once in a while my memory fades and I agree to accompany a family member or friend, and am quickly reminded why I should stick to Aldi.