Hacker News: dirkg

New comment by dirkg in "OpenCode 2.0"

dirkg — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 08:10:07 +0000

can someone recommend what plugins/skills they use with opencode, esp with the free models in Zen, and your coding setup?

New comment by dirkg in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

dirkg — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:38:33 +0000

The RTX/DGX Spark, Mac Ultras with 128GB unified ram are all ~$5k. Its still an expensive toy for rich people, it might as well be an H100 for 99.9% of the population (not devs with high paying jobs, of course).

the value of local models is allowing normal people to access AI without needing to subscribe to cloud services. this is esp imp for the rest of the world where even a 12GB gpu is extremely expensive.

there is no real viable local option that will come even close to Sonnet/Gemini Flash or the cheaper chinese models. Even if your pc costs <$2k you are never going to recoup the hw costs, and the results will be far worse.

New comment by dirkg in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

dirkg — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:25:15 +0000

> For 16GB laptops, Qwen 3.5 9B is the undisputed champ.

you can run qwen 3.6 35BA3B on a 12-16GB vram gpu and ot works pretty well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F_5pdcD3HY&t=1s

even the 27B in some quants can fit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1tkmgwj/qwen27b...

qwen IMO is far better for coding, esp agentic coding when combined with something like Pi, it comes probably close enough to Sonnet for a lot of use cases.

Gemma family is better for almost all other tasks you'd use a local llm for.

New comment by dirkg in "I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left"

dirkg — Thu, 14 May 2026 03:17:12 +0000

I have no idea why people dont use GCP more. Its made by and for devs unlike the hideous complexity and stupid UI in every layer of AWS.

AWS has much bigger mindshare, thats it. Google has a well deserved reputation killing products, but their actual products/APIs are so much nicer.

Haven't used Azure but I bet its much better integrated as well.

New comment by dirkg in "Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team"

dirkg — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:42:06 +0000

Meta illegally scraped 80TB of data from Anna's archive, Libgen, Zlib etc. I'm sure other tech giants did too. Without paying them a cent, costing these projects $$$ in bandwidth/hosting etc.

when I hear people complain about these projects it just sounds like hypocrisy.

New comment by dirkg in "Starship: The minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell"

dirkg — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 22:09:34 +0000

I've always liked powerlevel10k, or its equivalent tide for fish shell, which I much prefer over bash/zsh. Its fast, async, has everything you need, and is much easier to configure.

I've always wondered why someone doesn't just bundle a nice looking shell prompt with common nerd fonts and make it the default in a single package you can install.

New comment by dirkg in "Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser"

dirkg — Sat, 20 May 2023 05:41:37 +0000

Vim style keybindings and navigation is massively overhyped as is vim itself.

Cue endless debates about how Vim is the best ever ...... I'm sick and tired of everyone telling me that their neovim setup with a tiling window manager with million customized rc files is somehow better than vscode with a mouse (which mind you still has plenty of keyboard shortcuts) with sane windows. /rant

New comment by dirkg in "GPT-4"

dirkg — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 01:01:29 +0000

the only part I question is the 'regardless of family wealth'. This is purely 1st world and even here for the middle class and above only. Sure, poor countries are improving, but there's no guarantee, not with increasing wealth inequality, climate change etc, that this kind of tech will ever reach most people.

New comment by dirkg in "GPT4 is up to 6 times more expensive than GPT3.5"

dirkg — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 23:10:17 +0000

If this is public I can only imagine what Google has internally. Does DeepMind compete in this space or is it fundamentally different than a llm like Bard?

With their massive codebase and already deep investment in AI/ML, I'm pretty sure Google and likely MS already have the ability to do massive refactoring, validate it using tests, reiterate, train, rinse and repeat.

New comment by dirkg in "Pip and cargo are not the same"

dirkg — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 05:57:53 +0000

Nodejs solved all this years ago, now we have super fast shared package managers like pnpm, yarn etc, not to mention deno etc, why can't other languages adopt the same system?

New comment by dirkg in "Liu Cixin's Technologies of the Future"

dirkg — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 17:22:02 +0000

Hyperion is literature and art, besides having just as many mind blowing scifi ideas. Its easily my favorite.

New comment by dirkg in "Liu Cixin's Technologies of the Future"

dirkg — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 17:20:36 +0000

the final book has the most infuriating, idiotic and worst character I've read in scifi. She repeatedly makes the worst possible choice, literally is responsible first for humanity being enslaved and then being wiped out, before making sure the entire bloody universe is wiped out, and at each stage is not only forgiven, but never questioned, celebrated by everyone else, and given even more power.

New comment by dirkg in "System76 AMD-Only Laptop Returns"

dirkg — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 06:00:37 +0000

There will never be a MacBook of Linux or Windows unless the OS is optimized as much as MacOS is to the underlying hardware. Windows is optimized to a high degree and still cannot match the standby/resume times or battery life of MacOS, and thats without M1.

Linux is not even in the same ballpark. System76 apply some tweaks but its still Ubuntu and as a desktop OS its lacking in many areas.

New comment by dirkg in "Twitter Now Asks Some Fired Workers to Please Come Back"

dirkg — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 21:52:36 +0000

Whatever happened to the WARN lawsuits against Musk? How is he allowed to layoff 40-50% of staff with zero notice?

New comment by dirkg in "Remix web framework aquired by Shopify"

dirkg — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 17:16:30 +0000

because JQ is already loaded, and it IS minimal. You could do querySelector(...).addEventListener etc but why would you?

New comment by dirkg in "Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far"

dirkg — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 23:36:59 +0000

Would be real funny, and fitting, if he demands Twitter switch all servers over to Windows.

New comment by dirkg in "Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far"

dirkg — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 23:16:05 +0000

there is no far left in the US. The 'left' here would be center/right in most other countries. The right/conservatives are the true evil who are responsible for basically every bad thing here and the real problem is that most of this country is conservative, and thinks this country is 'special'.

New comment by dirkg in "I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)"

dirkg — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 18:19:39 +0000

also at every level, where you are expected to file forms or deal with any officials, you will be asked to pay some bribe, and there will be 'agents' who offer to do it for you using whatever illegal means they can, for a 'fee', and in many cases they are the only feasible way of getting it done. This happens in every corrupt economy/country but in India its an art form and taken to its logical extreme.

New comment by dirkg in "Tesla faces U.S. criminal probe over self-driving claims"

dirkg — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 00:17:37 +0000

Musk/Tesla have been selling alpha quality at best and vaporware in reality FSD for a long time. Its never ever going to work as claimed. Its crap software that endangers other people on the road and routinely kills people and all they needed to do is add a stupid disclaimer and the magic 'beta'. Every few months Musk will lie that its 'done' and out at the end of the year, with outlandish nonsense claims like his robotaxi in 2016/17, his most recent one that you wont need a human driver.

Its a massive scam and fraud thats made them trillions, and its amazing they haven't been sued for it.

New comment by dirkg in "macOS Ventura is now available"

dirkg — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 19:58:42 +0000

sometimes I think MSFT should buy Everything and replace Windows search with it. There are some plugins that use it for other file managers.

But then again, they will almost certainly screw it up, given that Windows Search still can't search my start menu reliably without pauses. And their history with acquisitions and integrating tech isn't very good.