Hacker News: drdirk

New comment by drdirk in "My MacBook Keyboard Is Broken and It's Insanely Expensive to Fix"

drdirk — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:07:05 +0000

My MacBook Pro M1 keyboard repair costed >700€, this is not a butterfly keyboard. So also new models have an expensive keyboard replacement.

My previous MacBook Pro keyboard was a butterfly keyboard and also broke, but got replaced for free. I don’t feel I am a heavy user as the MacBook Pro is mostly connected to an external keyboard and am pretty annoyed by apples keyboard quality (based on my sample size of 2).

New comment by drdirk in "High-speed train collision in Spain kills at least 39"

drdirk — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 05:09:44 +0000

Spanish article from LaVanguardia states that the train was rather new and the track recently maintained.

New comment by drdirk in "Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video"

drdirk — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 18:39:18 +0000

Can somebody explain to me what was actually scanned? Only the actors doing movements like push ups, or whole scenes / rooms?

New comment by drdirk in "Nvidia Tilus: A Tile-Level GPU Kernel Programming Language"

drdirk — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 04:12:21 +0000

The linked paper in the GitHub repository doesn’t contain an NVIDIA email. There is an Amazon email and a bunch of university emails.

How come that this paper has become an NVIDIA project?

Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12984

New comment by drdirk in "Should you take creatine?"

drdirk — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 13:42:01 +0000

When I first took creatine from an Amazon dealer I had gut problems. I later bought a "micronized" creatine (similar to https://bulevip.com/es/3418-optimum-nutrition-creatina-powde...) and did not experience any gut problems. Taking the same product now for 3 years. Inbetween I used some other variant from time to time and have the theory that some vendors sell a not clean product that interferes with your gut.

New comment by drdirk in "YouTube: Robotic translation annoys users and cannot be turned off"

drdirk — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 14:45:02 +0000

In the web version it is unavoidable only in the native app you can change to the original audio.

P.S. I uninstalled the YouTube app because of YouTube Shorts and had to reinstall the app to listen to videos in the original audio.

New comment by drdirk in "Google will let companies run Gemini models in their own data centers"

drdirk — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 11:02:16 +0000

Gemini models are written in Jax which through the XLA compiler can be compiled either to TPU or GPU hardware.

Performance may differ but Google (and Nvidia) are very interested in having good performance on both platforms.

New comment by drdirk in "Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?"

drdirk — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 19:39:31 +0000

Here in Barcelona Spain they are electric!

New comment by drdirk in "Ask HN: Programmers who aren't front/back end/web developers, what is your job?"

drdirk — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 19:55:09 +0000

I am a GPU compiler engineer working on the OpenXLA compiler.

New comment by drdirk in "Mixxx: GPL DJ Software"

drdirk — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:05:34 +0000

What does GPL stand for?

New comment by drdirk in "How do I get started with Jax on TPU VMs"

drdirk — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 16:43:44 +0000

Jax uses the XLA compiler which is compatible with GPU and CPU.

New comment by drdirk in "Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location"

drdirk — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 20:10:35 +0000

I have the same experience right now.

New comment by drdirk in "LLMs Unleashed: The Power of Fine-Tuning"

drdirk — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 09:10:23 +0000

Both can be done. Fine-Tuning the prompt is cheaper and can be done on consumer hardware. Fine-tuning the LLM model weights is expensive and needs cloud support.

New comment by drdirk in "Saving Lebanon’s streets: the engineer with a sustainable fix"

drdirk — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 07:16:27 +0000

You would expect this kind of theft to be happening only in Lebanon, but here in Barcelona (Europe) I see the metal covers missing regularly too.