Hacker News: fgfarben

New comment by fgfarben in "Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server"

fgfarben — Sun, 17 May 2026 22:05:08 +0000

evil-olive's comment includes citations for fake information like the "nanometer" feature size of the chips. everyone knows those numbers are meaningless! they have no relation to the chips' ability to survive radiation in any configuration! but evil-olive adds the citation chaff knowing HN will upvote to avoid feeling bad about having to disagree with a strident "absolutely never going to happen" claim.

New comment by fgfarben in "Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)"

fgfarben — Sat, 16 May 2026 20:12:03 +0000

What's the incidence of autism in country towns without functioning septic systems?

New comment by fgfarben in "RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?"

fgfarben — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:38:02 +0000

What even is an industry grade machine?

Would you own a computer if the smallest computer you were allowed to buy was a $27,000 Supermicro rack that draws 900 watts all the time?

New comment by fgfarben in "Naturally Occurring Quasicrystals"

fgfarben — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:36:11 +0000

There are also "natural" paracrystalline viruses that turn isopods blue and then kill them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invertebrate_iridescent_virus_...

New comment by fgfarben in "Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust""

fgfarben — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:57:44 +0000

The issue author is most likely quite literally a child.

New comment by fgfarben in "RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?"

fgfarben — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:33:35 +0000

> Nvidia didn't ship a 256gb system at sub-500gb/s transfer rate

DGX Spark has 128 GB and only 273 GB/s BW. Are we lucky that NVIDIA did ship something even worse than what you specified? I'm confused.

People have been complaining [1] about how little VRAM NVIDIA ships with their GPUs for decades. Their whole game has been "oh, you want more VRAM? Buy more or pay us 50x for server grade with 10x as much VRAM. The more you buy, the more you save."

Apple did everyone a solid by shipping something way out of that distribution. We now know more than we did before! We know that a 284B parameter model with 13B active params (or 35B with 3B active, or 671B with 37B active) can outperform a 2T model and draw a fraction as much power. How can you think that's a bad thing?

You could point out that Apple didn't invent the idea of MoE. Everyone knows that. But other than Macs, there simply were no machines with >100GB VRAM directly coupled to ~50 TFLOP/s of compute until the DGX Spark last Dec. If you wanted to run a model with more than 32 GB of weights, you had to either pay up for dozens of GPUs idling at hundreds of watts or really pay up for some $50,000 server GPUs idling at... also 100-200W each.

I feel lucky to have a $3k machine on my shelf that can run DS4-Flash with 1M context at 20t/s while drawing ~150W and making very little noise. The best part? It idles at 30W with DS4 loaded, dropping to 6W after a reboot. There isn't a single GPU on the market that can match that in the same shoebox volume.

[1] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRlOW0N...

New comment by fgfarben in "High dimensional geometry is transforming the MRI industry (2017) [pdf]"

fgfarben — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:16:16 +0000

Have you heard of time-domain reflectometry? A $20,000 multimeter could have the "impossible" feature you describe all but built in.

New comment by fgfarben in "RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?"

fgfarben — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:19:24 +0000

Please show me on the 2016-era $400 Pascal GPU where you can install the 256 GB of VRAM.

New comment by fgfarben in "LLM Policy for Rust Compiler"

fgfarben — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:19:59 +0000

It doesn't really read like a Luddite policy.

Rust is already well past 1.0. At best an LLM could discover a vulnerability (and the human using it can file a patch) or can help a human improve ergonomics.

New comment by fgfarben in "A few words on DS4"

fgfarben — Fri, 15 May 2026 01:10:38 +0000

Nope.

New comment by fgfarben in "A few words on DS4"

fgfarben — Fri, 15 May 2026 01:00:32 +0000

That prefill number isn't right. M4 Max hits 200-300: https://github.com/antirez/ds4/blob/main/speed-bench/m4_max_...

New comment by fgfarben in "A few words on DS4"

fgfarben — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:58:00 +0000

At a certain point the level of abstraction / genericization necessary for a big flexible project (like llama.cpp or Linux) blows things up into a huge number of files. Something newer and smaller can move faster.

New comment by fgfarben in "Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract"

fgfarben — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:50:46 +0000

Straight propaganda. Printers have burned down apartments in the last five years.

https://www.reddit.com/r/anycubic/comments/1j4kfsr/guys_just...

New comment by fgfarben in "DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal"

fgfarben — Sat, 09 May 2026 01:24:10 +0000

On both the llama.cpp based version and the custom Metal version, the model forgets how to use tools somewhere around the 50,000 token mark.

New comment by fgfarben in "DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal"

fgfarben — Fri, 08 May 2026 02:55:02 +0000

It is still available for the M5 Max Macbook Pro, but yes, the Mac Studio is now only offered with up to 96 GB.

New comment by fgfarben in "DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal"

fgfarben — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:17:09 +0000

The world is not China.

New comment by fgfarben in "Chevrolet Performance eCrate package (400v/200hp)"

fgfarben — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:16:02 +0000

Let's be realistic. GM is not interested in burning R&D money to make a good 800V electric crate kit. They only want to burn R&D money to make new profitable trucks.

They are doing this because they have a billion dollars of refurbished batteries sitting in warehouses that they need to dump.

New comment by fgfarben in "Chevrolet Performance eCrate package (400v/200hp)"

fgfarben — Thu, 07 May 2026 17:31:29 +0000

You can buy head unit parts on eBay. It sounds like you have rodent harness damage.

New comment by fgfarben in "A network smuggling Starlink tech into Iran to beat internet blackout"

fgfarben — Thu, 07 May 2026 17:30:20 +0000

Thanks

New comment by fgfarben in "Chevrolet Performance eCrate package (400v/200hp)"

fgfarben — Thu, 07 May 2026 09:39:43 +0000

It includes a 66 kWh battery. This might be a strategy for offloading all the Bolt EV batteries they had to refurbish.