Hacker News: david_draco

New comment by david_draco in "Turning GLM-5.3-Flash into a Jev-like decision model"

david_draco — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 12:02:45 +0000

You are talking about the content of the response, while krial is talking about deviations in the structure of the response. The point is the number of possible states an output can take, so the next step can ingest it and it can be part of a robust pipeline.

New comment by david_draco in "A/I shuts down"

david_draco — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 18:45:09 +0000

The US pressured Europe last time, in 2019, into aligning with their sanctions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_in_Support_of_Trade... The Iran situation could have gone better if trade and JCPOA nuclear oversight had continued.

New comment by david_draco in "Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”"

david_draco — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:07:31 +0000

Unfortunately patent offices are using loopholes that reintroduce software patents. Patent law says that a pure software patent is not possible, it has to be combined with a specific hardware application to make it an invention. So they fill in a patent for "XX implemented on a hardware operating on land, in the air, in space, on, or under water.". That's essentially a software patent.

New comment by david_draco in "Ditching Zotero for a Text File"

david_draco — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 13:57:10 +0000

JabRef before version 3 was pretty compact and snappy. It's essentially editing a text file for taking notes, except you can search through, download arxiv and journal articles (with LocalCopy extension), launch the associated PDFs.

New comment by david_draco in "Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro"

david_draco — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 22:06:05 +0000

It's interesting that the male voices are all so much worse than the female voices (several are quite good). There is bias in machine learning, but I wonder whether there is also systematically more training data of female speech?

New comment by david_draco in "Dumb ways for an open source project to die"

david_draco — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:31:09 +0000

I'd be interesting to quantify the cost of inconsistent funding to the supply chain.

New comment by david_draco in "Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing"

david_draco — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:55:12 +0000

That there were 0 equivalent products to the first iPhone is just a blatent lie. But repeated often enough, it overrides memory and becomes true, I guess.

New comment by david_draco in "Neurons outside the brain"

david_draco — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:38:23 +0000

> What does it mean that that I feel my anxiety in my gut? And that I clearly feel when I’m speaking from my head or my heart (or both)? [...] What does it mean that that I feel my anxiety in my gut? And that I clearly feel when I’m speaking from my head or my heart (or both)?

An unjustified logical jump here seems to be that where you feel your thoughts and feelings are coming from is where the responsible neurons are. The assignment of the feeling of origin may be a separate mechanism.

New comment by david_draco in "In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels"

david_draco — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 20:15:14 +0000

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visted Europe and openly said to Kaja Kallas, the European Union's foreign-policy chief and other EU ministers: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does not want to see Russia defeated in Ukraine, fearing that the U.S. would then shift its full attention toward Beijing.

https://www.economist.com/international/2025/10/28/china-is-... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyxk4ywppzo

New comment by david_draco in "Why Wikipedia cannot claim the Earth is not flat"

david_draco — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 12:04:51 +0000

Now apply to each topic at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_characterized_a...

New comment by david_draco in "The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe"

david_draco — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 15:38:34 +0000

A browser using 32 GB for 8 tab isn't necessarily wasteful, there is a lot of caching one can do to make back/forward buttons extremely fast. It would be wasteful to not allocate that memory if it is otherwise free and unused. Usually browsers use up what is available. The more interesting metric would be whether starting another high-RAM application will lead the browser to give up most of the 32 GB.

New comment by david_draco in "If all the world were a monorepo"

david_draco — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 03:19:24 +0000

And if I don't know, can I know?

New comment by david_draco in "Hardening Firefox – a checklist for improved browser privacy"

david_draco — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 14:57:41 +0000

I'm surprised Firefox Multi-Account Containers isn't mentioned. Seems ideal to me to keep Web Universes separate.

New comment by david_draco in "Cognitive load is what matters"

david_draco — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 17:31:08 +0000

Unit and Integration testing is great for decreasing cognitive load too. When you are staring at an error stack trace of a complex code base, and go through mentally what could have played out to cause this, it's great to have confidence in components due to testing. Hypothesis/QuickCheck is allows dropping entire classes of worries.

New comment by david_draco in "Lab-grown salmon hits the menu"

david_draco — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 02:56:16 +0000

The words "good" and "very bad" indicate that the world is less important to that person than themselves. I'd be okay with a bit of personal harm if it helps against climate change.

Ultra-processed food does not have an agreed-upon definition, and is the new "junk food" with the pretense of being more scientific. Is bread and pizza ultra-processed food? Studies do not agree on their definitions, sometimes including ingredient lists, sometimes not, sometimes it is required that the product is made in small shops with love and not in large factories. The mechanism of how ultra-processed food are supposed to cause harm remains undefined.

New comment by david_draco in "Llama-Scan: Convert PDFs to Text W Local LLMs"

david_draco — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 22:53:15 +0000

Looking at the code, this converts PDF pages to images, then transcribes each image. I might have expected a pdftotext post-processor. The complexity of PDF I guess ...

New comment by david_draco in "Planetfall"

david_draco — Thu, 22 May 2025 19:38:30 +0000

> there’s also an official, built-in map of the planet, carefully crafted

Is there a mathematical framework for how to optimize a map for gameplay to be most enjoyable?

New comment by david_draco in "Show HN: LocalScore – Local LLM Benchmark"

david_draco — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 20:58:05 +0000

I don't know if I should trust and run this code. If it was associated to Mozilla I would. It says it is a Mozilla Builders project, but https://builders.mozilla.org/projects/ does not list it. I don't see a way to verify that localscore.ai is associated with Mozilla.

New comment by david_draco in "Put a data center on the moon?"

david_draco — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 21:20:24 +0000

Yes. Meteorites are being systematically collected to get impact statistics in areas that are tectonically undisturbed. They seem equally good places: Antarctica, Atacama desert, Greenland. In terms of bandwidth and maintainance they seem preferable to the moon. See the Arctic Code Vault in Svalbard.

New comment by david_draco in "LINUX is obsolete (1992)"

david_draco — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 06:22:21 +0000

and MINIX is the most common operating system, thanks to Intel https://www.networkworld.com/article/964650/minix-the-most-p... :)