Hacker News: duffyjp

New comment by duffyjp in "Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview"

duffyjp — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:56:33 +0000

I still don't think I understand it. I saw those nvfp4 models up by chance yesterday and tried them on my Linux PC with a 5060TI 16gb. Ollama refused to pull them saying they were macOS only.

I assumed it was a meta-data bug and posted an issue, but apparently nvfp4 doesn't necessarily mean nvidia-fp4.

https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/15149

New comment by duffyjp in "Steam Survey for January 2026 shows a small drop for Linux and macOS"

duffyjp — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 20:35:33 +0000

I'd really like to be a drop in that bucket, but as an nvidia owner it's rough. You take a sizable performance hit and general stability is awful. In Linux I can't turn off my monitor on nvidia, or there's a ~80% chance I'll never get it to come back on. If it does, I don't have sound 100% of the time. It's ridiculous.

My next GPU will be a Radeon, but they don't have anything to offer that can beat my 4080 from 2022...

New comment by duffyjp in "GeForce Now Brings GeForce RTX Gaming to Linux PCs"

duffyjp — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 18:52:22 +0000

I don't know if it's me, but right now nvidia on Linux is the least stable it's ever been. I have two desktops, one dedicated Linux box and one I dual boot. On the Linux only one I bought a dirt cheap ($30) Radeon Pro WX 3200 so my system won't crash constantly. I still have the nvidia card for CUDA stuff. It's working great for what I do.

I have a second used Radeon on the way for the other system. It's insane, but this is the only solution. If my monitor turns off or I switch inputs, I can't get it back when connected to the nvidia cards. I've done every troubleshooting step I can find, it's just a broken ecosystem.

New comment by duffyjp in "Android’s desktop interface leaks"

duffyjp — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 22:53:41 +0000

My Moto Edge 2024 has "Ready For" which is basically this still today. I plug in the USB-C cable normally connected to my work MacBook and I instantly get a full desktop experience; mouse, keyboard and sound included.

It's how I play Minecraft with my kids when they get the itch. Sometimes if I know I'm only gonna be zoning out on Youtube at night I'll use to to save a few watts too.

It can do 1440p at 120hz, all on a really affordable phone. It's nice.

New comment by duffyjp in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"

duffyjp — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 18:38:27 +0000

I would also love to hear any success stories here. I converted my wife's Macbook over to Linux Mint somewhat recently and the best I could do was setup a shortcut to the Web version of her iCloud.

New comment by duffyjp in "200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop"

duffyjp — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 16:23:45 +0000

Thanks, yep I do have zram installed, but I'm working with mostly incompressible AI models so it really didn't help. I set it to cap at 8GB so random stuff can take advantage and I guess it helps a tiny bit, but not much.

I have a free m.2 slot and may get a cheap optane drive and use that as SWAP. I've read they're not as fast as marketed for this, but at least I wouldn't have to worry about about wearing out my SSD.

New comment by duffyjp in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"

duffyjp — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 16:18:29 +0000

Thank you for your service. :D Windows 2000 will always be my favorite version. I got a free copy as a university student and it was just awesome. XP was the era where things changed for the sake of change. In Windows 2000 you could learn where absolutely everything was and it was always there for you.

I still have my install CD, though it has suffered from bit-rot and can't be read properly. :(

New comment by duffyjp in "Qwen3-Max-Thinking"

duffyjp — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:18:58 +0000

Nothing. This summer I set up a dual 16GB GPU / 64GB RAM system and nothing I could run was even remotely close. Big models that didn't fit on 32gb VRAM had marginally better results but were at least of magnitude slower than what you'd pay for and still much worse in quality.

I gave one of the GPUs to my kid to play games on.

New comment by duffyjp in "200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop"

duffyjp — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 18:43:45 +0000

I have 64gb in my linux machine and have managed to hardlock it a bunch of times exhausting the ram. Couldn't even REISUB a couple of times. The OOM killer stuff in Linux just doesn't work anymore by what I can gather.

Buying more ram is no longer an option, so I added a 128gb swap partition on nvme. I incorrectly assumed with 64gb I didn't even need swap. No crashes since.

If you don't want to move partitions around, you can add a swap file. ChatGPT or whatever can give instructions.

New comment by duffyjp in "Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoing hardware shortage"

duffyjp — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 20:36:31 +0000

Absolutely.

I've declined the refresh I've overdue for. My 2021 model MBP has 32gb and a 1TB SSD. They're currently giving out the base model Air: 16gb and 256gb. No thanks.

We used to get whatever was most appropriate for our role, now we get whatever is cheapest.

New comment by duffyjp in "AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D sells for more than 9800X3D, enthusiasts flock to AM4 DDR4"

duffyjp — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 19:07:10 +0000

Everybody says this is because OpenAI bought up 40% of the world's supply of DRAM. Certainly that has hugely tilted the supply and demand teeter-totter, but to me this just feels like another "because we can" by the market.

When beef is expensive, you buy chicken. There's no alternative to RAM. If you need it, you've gotta pony up.

New comment by duffyjp in "AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D sells for more than 9800X3D, enthusiasts flock to AM4 DDR4"

duffyjp — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 22:33:20 +0000

I browsed thru my comment history to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. Just over a year ago I had priced out a used Xeon and 256GB kit on eBay for my old X99 board (DDR4) for under $300.

I did not pull the trigger. I did thankfully get it up to 64gb for ~ $50.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41100502

New comment by duffyjp in "Chafa: Terminal Graphics for the 21st Century"

duffyjp — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:10:53 +0000

I threw together a utility for this with just the half character in 2018, I don't even remember why.

https://rubygems.org/gems/barf

The name does imply the image quality, fyi.

My solution is also multithreaded, in Ruby. :D

New comment by duffyjp in "Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options"

duffyjp — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 04:39:44 +0000

We have two Hisense TVs that both allow this. One is Roku based and the other Google TV. Neither is connected to wifi. I’d recommend the Google flavor, it has a lot more control over the settings and will auto suspend in a reasonable period if no input is being sent. The Roku’s minimum auto suspend is 4 HOURS.

They were cheap and the picture quality is great. Not OLED level, but jeeze I had to share a 27” CRT for my SNES as a kid—

New comment by duffyjp in "DRAM prices are spiking, but I don't trust the industry's why"

duffyjp — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 15:20:09 +0000

I looked at sold listings on eBay recently, very little was actually going for the crazy market rate. Plenty had sold at the old prices from sellers who hadn't gotten the memo though.

I have some ram I could live without if it's worth its weight in gold, but if you're going to get ripped off I think people want to avoid the used market and its extra risk.

New comment by duffyjp in "Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world"

duffyjp — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 22:49:34 +0000

I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears...

I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.

New comment by duffyjp in "Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world"

duffyjp — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 19:59:38 +0000

I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time.

The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.

Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.

New comment by duffyjp in "BCacheFS is being disabled in the openSUSE kernels 6.17+"

duffyjp — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 23:03:28 +0000

Very recently I setup a mergerfs mount for this. It’s very crude for my use case but works perfectly and I could use the existing volume as is.

I got partway thru setting up a script to copy recently accessed files from the HDD to the read-prioritized SSD.

My LLMs load up way faster, and I still have a source of truth volume in the huge HDD. It’s not something I’d use professionally though, way too janky.

New comment by duffyjp in "iPhone Air"

duffyjp — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 23:11:36 +0000

I’ve had a bunch of Moto G phones, I love them. This round I decided to try their upper midrange Edge line.

I found a deal on a Moto Edge 2024 and it’s fantastic. It’s so light and compact vs the Moto G Power, and still can go two full days no problem. The camera is excellent as well, which was my only real gripe with the G phones.

It can plug into my USB-C monitor and act like a Chromebook (more or less). I play Minecraft with my kids this way.

New comment by duffyjp in "QNX: The Incredible 1.44M Demo"

duffyjp — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 23:40:43 +0000

I don't have the floppy anymore, but I do have the old system I used to run it on. QNX even supported my network card out of the box, the demo blew my mind.

Was this really 25 years ago???