Hacker News: hadlock

New comment by hadlock in "AI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons"

hadlock — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 20:56:22 +0000

Only for about five more years. In 7-10 years the price of memory and compute should drop by 80-90%. In ten years the bleeding edge 14,000 token/s machines and 4TB memory is going to look quaint, "that stuff can't even bootstrap a kernel and entire (usable) posix-compliant OS in less than a week" vs the future of "the computer updates it's firmware in real time to meet the needs of the current task"

New comment by hadlock in "Airbnb bans making guests do dishes and take out the trash"

hadlock — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 20:44:07 +0000

We had an airbnb cancel on us for Thanksgiving back in september, because it was "double-booked" it was the last AirBNB in the area. We have (had, rather) people flying in from out of country to meet for Thanksgiving at the AirBNB (it's one of those big 7 room things designed for that sort of thing) and it's completely up-ended our holiday plans. I couldn't be more disappointed in the platform.

New comment by hadlock in "Airbnb bans making guests do dishes and take out the trash"

hadlock — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 20:42:12 +0000

Doing dishes and trash is largely why we stopped using AirBNB about five years ago. I am not going to pay a premium over a hotel and do the house cleaning. Plus finding the rules and then interpreting them and attempting to comply. I can't recall the last time we even considered an AirBNB, honestly.

New comment by hadlock in "No more icons in every menu by default"

hadlock — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 18:47:49 +0000

I would believe this, "single menu bar at the top, just update the values" is absolutely the solution you reach for when you're writing assembly by hand on an Apple II. It's hard to imagine but that UI element has been around since it started showing up in preview articles in ~1981

New comment by hadlock in "Oregon lawmakers approve money to buy an iconic waterfall listed on Redfin"

hadlock — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 16:25:28 +0000

Probably they had been trying to sell it to the state for months/years/decades, and nothing had happened, so they escalated. Here in California in east bay there are thousands of acres of land around Mt. Diablo that are held by a non profit trust because the state/parks department is too lazy to aquire it/don't have funds to manage it. The privately owned/managed land around Mt. Diablo is roughly equal in size to the state park it surrounds.

New comment by hadlock in "Starcraft: Ashfall"

hadlock — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 23:40:15 +0000

The game they're advertising for has absolutely no relation/bearing to the ads. At all. The actual game is more like an Advanced Wars-meets-Civilization/Risk boardgame type microtransaction-bleed-you-dry type game, you have to build a base and if you don't login every ~6 hours then people can take over your base and you lose/die, unless you pay ~$45/mo (or whatever). There is no scrolling arcade element of any kind in the actual game. This guy's game is brilliant tho.

New comment by hadlock in "Muse Spark Open"

hadlock — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:13:39 +0000

OG Deepseek Flash was pretty mediocre and then got a lot better with post training. The other thing they are fighting is most/all of the chinese labs are free to use/train on the 10B+ SOTA reasoning tokens they "stole" over the summer March-July 2026, if meta is playing by the rules, they are building this from the ground up. Getting anywhere near Deepseek Flash without that free training data is pretty impressive feat.

New comment by hadlock in "Muse Spark Open"

hadlock — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:05:42 +0000

I agree, however It's too easy to game arbitrary limits like "medium". There is no olympics for "just rolled out of bed and slightly hungover"

New comment by hadlock in "The Genealogy of Eliza"

hadlock — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:57:02 +0000

Thanks! Very interesting, I can dig into this further now.

New comment by hadlock in "Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke"

hadlock — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:55:46 +0000

PBS had a documentary back in the 1990s about the history of the PC that ran seemingly like once a month where they showed (compaq I guess video tape documented it it since they knew they would get sued) how Compaq reverse engineered... I forget now probably the IBM AT PC to produce the first true AT Compatable PC, and promptly got sued by IBM. They described the process in detail. This was growing up in Microsoft's back yard in the 1990s so practically every kid on the playground knew what reverse engineering was growing up. It makes me feel especially old watching people discover reverse engineering in 2026. /old man shouting at clouds

New comment by hadlock in "Things to know when you get cancer – 2026 Edition"

hadlock — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 21:28:29 +0000

There are a number of startups (and some that already got aqui-hired) working on the problem of "how do i connect with a medical provider who specializes (or at least has seen before) what i have/think i have?" what I've taken away from this is the medical industry is a lot more fragmented than engineers would prefer. It's been a while since I checked but there seem to be at least 30+ startups at least past the series A stage of "fixing" this problem.

New comment by hadlock in "How Tabasco Became the World's Hot Sauce"

hadlock — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 18:37:49 +0000

Tabasco has a lot of acid and salt in it; in addition to (very minor/mild) flavor the big additions Tabasco brings to the party are Acid, Salt, and some heat. Cholula is more like a taco sauce, Tabasco does a lot to the food it is on. If you have a poor sense of smell, you'll probably enjoy Tabasco more than Cholula because it's adding a lot of chemical process, not just the minor flavor.

New comment by hadlock in "The Genealogy of Eliza"

hadlock — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 18:26:07 +0000

My first (and only firsthand experience) with Eliza was running it on a Mac 512 on probably System 6 in a 7th grade classroom (one of the teachers collected the old antique Macs the school was going to throw out and ran them in the back of her classroom). It got stuck in loops and frequently asked the same questions over and over, even at that age it was pretty obvious what it was doing, but pretty neat. Hopefully this genealogy gets updated to include some of the earlier versions

New comment by hadlock in "Apple HomeView"

hadlock — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 01:05:05 +0000

Getting wakeword stuff to work 1. reliably and 2. very low latency has been what has held back local fixed point hardware assistants. I've taken a couple stabs at this myself but custom wakeword is a weirdly hard nut to crack for the open source community.

New comment by hadlock in "Solar panels that plug into your wall"

hadlock — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:17:32 +0000

California just passed "balcony solar" but requires G99 certification, which is, of course, slightly different than the G98 that everyone else on the planet uses.

New comment by hadlock in "Beam: Reflection's 501B open-weight model"

hadlock — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 01:03:52 +0000

I still don't get why, after 25 years of slashdot, still ask why people DRTFA and complain about it as meta commentary.

InB4: kids these days :shakes-fist-at-cloud:

New comment by hadlock in "Run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (125B) on consumer hardware (RTX 4090) at 100T/s"

hadlock — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 22:23:12 +0000

A 64GB RTX 5095 GPU @ $2500 would pretty much collapse the cloud hosted AI market. Being able to run Qwen Flash Next/Qwen 4 Flash on my local workstation would eliminate the need to pay for cloud hosted AI for the average person/developer. But still API out periodically for architecture level decisions/layout.

Periodically I run into problems that I need Sol for, but I suspect Qwen Flash will meet most of my needs

New comment by hadlock in "Run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (125B) on consumer hardware (RTX 4090) at 100T/s"

hadlock — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 17:02:27 +0000

It's pretty interesting to see people still parroting talking points from ~2023 when there is plenty of data to the contrary.

New comment by hadlock in "Jeff – Jev-compatible 0.8B decision models, trained at home, ~30 ms"

hadlock — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 06:46:10 +0000

It's not just shooting at static monsters in an empty room, this will go after monsters, make decisions about prioritizing health, changing goals, and finish the level, etc. It's not unique, it's just more impressive than the demo they're using.

New comment by hadlock in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

hadlock — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 03:55:56 +0000

I noticed Trader Joes was selling champagne grapes the other day. Things must be really, exceptionally grim. France has been stockpiling wine in state owned warehouses (to keep it off the market) and paying farmers to tear up their vineyards.