Hacker News: drrotmos

New comment by drrotmos in "He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice"

drrotmos — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:42:16 +0000

It is and it isn't. If you ask a human how many calories (or carbs) are in that sandwich, they can give you a qualified guess based on how a sandwich like that is typically constructed. They may not know the calories for a slice of bread or a slice of cheese by heart, but if you give them a food database, they can look it up.

They absolutely won't be 100% correct (bread sizes e.g. are going to be an estimate), but unless it's a trick sandwich drenched in olive oil or with hollow cheese, they're probably going to be in the right ballpark.

I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility for an LLM to be in the right ballpark as well, but that doesn't seem to be where we're at now.

New comment by drrotmos in "Luce: First Electric Ferrari"

drrotmos — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 12:08:54 +0000

Plastic isn't a single material. Some plastic materials (e.g PE, polyethylene or PVC, polyvinyl chlorine, but also others that use ethylene derivatives as intermediates) require ethylene, but there certainly are plastic materials which are produced without any involvement of ethylene or other petrolium derivatives.

New comment by drrotmos in "Cloudflare claimed they implemented Matrix on Cloudflare workers. They didn't"

drrotmos — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 17:19:57 +0000

But according to the README, it is production grade! Presumably "production" in this case is an isolated proof of concept?

New comment by drrotmos in "Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?"

drrotmos — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 15:50:20 +0000

True. I do however like the process of working with an AI more in a language like Rust. It's a lot less prone to use ugly hacks to make something that compiles but fail spectacularly at runtime - usually because it can't get the ugly hacks to compile :D

Makes it easier to intercede to steer the AI in the right direction.

New comment by drrotmos in "Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?"

drrotmos — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 15:14:19 +0000

In my experience AI and Rust is a mixed bag. The strong compile-time checks mean an agent can verify its work to a much larger extent than many other languages, but the understanding of lifetimes is somewhat weak (although better in Opus 4.5 than earlier models!), and the ecosystem moves fast and fairly often makes breaking changes, meaning that a lot of the training data is obsolete.

New comment by drrotmos in "Heroku Is Down"

drrotmos — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 09:04:02 +0000

We have multiple apps across both Common Runtime (EU) and Private Spaces (eu-west-1). It's a mixed bag. Some are up, some are down.

New comment by drrotmos in "Heroku Outage"

drrotmos — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 07:35:15 +0000

We're seeing mixed results with our apps, both in the Common Runtime (EU) and Private Spaces. A few apps are up, most are down.

Ask HN: Unexplainable Copilot Premium Requests

drrotmos — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 14:30:23 +0000

I'm on a Copilot Pro+ plan, in order to give Copilot Agent a try. GitHub's new Copilot Premium Request pricing has taken effect today, and when I'm looking at my usage, I'm seeing a lot of inexplicable Copilot Premium Requests - we're talking about 2 per minut, specifically to the Padawan model - without me actually doing anything with Copilot, much less with Copilot Agent. I've even gone so far as to revoke access to the Github SWE Agent application, and still the requests keep rolling in.

For some reason, the requests also aren't showing up in the web interface under Metered usage, I have to download the "Copilot premium requests usage report" to even see them.

Considering Github charges 4 cents per request for overages, this adds up fast, especially considering it's doing nothing. It's especially troublesome that (at least with a Pro+ account), there's no way of enforcing a Budget on Copilot Premium Requests - it's just not available in the Budget section.

Am I the only one seeing this, or is this affecting other people with Copilot Agent as well?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44181097

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by drrotmos in "Rust on the RP2350 (2024)"

drrotmos — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 14:54:54 +0000

The ESP32-S3 has 512 KB of SRAM, and the RP2350 has 520 KB of SRAM. The ESP32-S3-WROOM does indeed come in configurations with additional PSRAM, but that would be comparing apples and pears. The WROOM is an entire module complete with program flash, PSRAM, crystal oscillator etc. It comes in a much larger footprint than the actual ESP32-S3, and it is entirely conceivable that one could create a similar module with the same amount of PSRAM using the RP2350.

Furthermore, the added RAM in both cases is indeed PSRAM. That being said, the ESP32-S3 supports octal PSRAM, not just quad PSRAM, which does make a difference for the throughput.

New comment by drrotmos in "Rust on the RP2350 (2024)"

drrotmos — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 07:49:19 +0000

I'm very much looking forward to giving Embassy on the RP2350 a go. I've been using it for a while with the RP2040, and it's a joy to use.

New comment by drrotmos in "Rust on the RP2350 (2024)"

drrotmos — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 15:54:30 +0000

Note that this was written 2024-08-08. While I haven't kept up to date with exactly what's been happening in rp-rs, I do know that probe-rs has since been updated with support for the RP2350. Other things may be outdated as well.

New comment by drrotmos in "Build It Yourself"

drrotmos — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 14:14:11 +0000

Which may or may not be fine in a Go binary that runs on a modern desktop CPU, but what if your code is supposed to run on say an ESP32-C3 with a whopping 160 MHz RISC-V core, 400 KB of RAM and maybe 2 MB of XIP flash storage?

You could of course argue that that's why no-std exists in Rust, or that your compiler might optimize out the animated GIF routines, but personally, I'd argue that in this context, it is bloat, that - while it could occasionally be useful - it could just as easily be a third party library.

New comment by drrotmos in "Piccolo OS, a Small Multitasking OS for the Raspberry Pi Pico"

drrotmos — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 09:58:50 +0000

The Pico 1 (i.e. the RP2040) doesn't. The Pico 2 (RP2350) does, albeit a fair bit slower (since it's QSPI PSRAM) than the internal SRAM.

New comment by drrotmos in "Switch 2 will be backwards compatible with Switch"

drrotmos — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 19:50:49 +0000

The SNES and the Gamecube did have the Super Game Boy and Game Boy Player respectively though, but I'd probably count that as sideward compatibility rather than backward compatibility.

New comment by drrotmos in "Is the Q source the origin of the Gospels?"

drrotmos — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 14:44:06 +0000

> You're assuming the odds that there was even the structure in place, that natural selection can work its magic.

I'm not assuming anything, I'm merely claiming that the situations aren't analogous.

New comment by drrotmos in "Is the Q source the origin of the Gospels?"

drrotmos — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 14:40:02 +0000

> All of those single celled organisms didn't come from nowhere, overnight. There was, at least at some point, the first single celled organism. Not only the first one, but the first one that was able to reproduce. There could have been millions, billions of single celled organisms incapable of reproduction that died. The odds of just getting one single celled organism, by itself, without the ability to reproduce, is already ludicrous.

The general thinking among researchers is that single-celled organisms were preceded by self-replicating and self-catalyzing molecules, like RNA. Abiogenesis is a fascinating area of research.

New comment by drrotmos in "Is the Q source the origin of the Gospels?"

drrotmos — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 14:35:48 +0000

> Now weigh the odds that, if the entire world population of monkeys hitting random letters can't even make Shakespeare within the amount of time from the Big Bang until the Heat Death, that we reached the level of human intelligence. Until such questions are answered, a God is still quite reasonable.

That's only an apt analogy if genetic mutations didn't include any kind of feedback mechanism. Natural selection makes them very different scenarios.

New comment by drrotmos in "Sitina1 Open-Source Camera"

drrotmos — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 07:08:59 +0000

> Exactly. And this market has a really unfulfilled niche: cameras with a decent optical system and changeable lenses. I have a Sony Alpha camera and it's plenty enough for me in image quality, but I now leave it home most of the time because I just don't want to fiddle with it.

When I leave my MILC at home, it's because the optics are large and heavy, not because the body is. When I do take my camera, I usually opt for the Sony Zeiss 35 mm Sonnar T*, because it's so small. From an optical point of view, it's a good lens, but it's not the best 35 mm lens I have.

For capturing memories, the best camera really is the one you have with you at all times. For creating photographs, the bulk of the camera body really doesn't matter that much.

New comment by drrotmos in "DiyPresso: DIY Espresso Machine"

drrotmos — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 09:38:48 +0000

My go-to recommendation for single boiler vibratory pump machines has been Gaggiuino. I’m not sure I can still recommend it after their latest source-closing move, but it is absolutely still the best bang-for-the-buck upgrade for single boiler vibratory pump machines.

New comment by drrotmos in "DiyPresso: DIY Espresso Machine"

drrotmos — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 09:36:48 +0000

It is, and you’re welcome.

I’m actually taking a very componentized approach with my new Rust based firmware. Wherever it makes sense, I’m spinning things off into separate crates and will be publishing them (e.g. crates for the ADS124S08 and FDC1004 used in the All-Purpose Espresso Controller.

Also, everything is permissively licensed, so feel free to use whatever you want.