Hacker News: jandrese

New comment by jandrese in "Veracrypt project update"

jandrese — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:11:49 +0000

Maybe some bot signed up using your email and then did bot things on it. I've had that happen a lot over the years. My Microsoft account is still stuck in German because that's the language the bot used when creating the account (to spam X-Box apparently).

New comment by jandrese in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

jandrese — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:06:12 +0000

Or from the side or oncoming and he's just behind the crowd of pedestrians ahead of you.

New comment by jandrese in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

jandrese — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:48:53 +0000

The problem with bells is that they aren't very directional. It's hard for my brain to figure out from which direction the sound is coming from. Someone speaking "on your left" is much more directional, and it includes important context as to what the warning is about.

New comment by jandrese in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

jandrese — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:47:07 +0000

On the bike trail it is crucial to do a shoulder check when changing lanes. Some people get "in the zone" and ignore all other traffic in the singular pursuit of the shortest times. They will get very very angry if you get in front of them, if they spot you at all instead of just slamming into your rear tire at full speed.

New comment by jandrese in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

jandrese — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:43:55 +0000

> When I was commuting 60k/day on my bike in shitty suburban conditions

Here I thought my 4.5 mile (7.25 km) bike commute was a bit long...

New comment by jandrese in "MegaTrain: Full Precision Training of 100B+ Parameter LLMs on a Single GPU"

jandrese — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:06:15 +0000

Because there is a new model that is better, faster, more refined, etc...

If your training time is measured in years or decades it probably won't be practical.

New comment by jandrese in "MegaTrain: Full Precision Training of 100B+ Parameter LLMs on a Single GPU"

jandrese — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:43:30 +0000

If it would take so long to train that the model will be obsolete before the training is finished that might be considered too long. With ML you can definitely hit a point where it is too slow for any practical purpose.

New comment by jandrese in "Every GPU That Mattered"

jandrese — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:13:08 +0000

My current machine is an i5-3570k with a 1070Ti...

The old CPU is actually more of an issue. I couldn't run Civ 7 because the game (probably the DRM) uses some instructions that aren't implemented on that CPU. Other than that I bet it would run just fine.

I was just about to upgrade before hardware prices went through the roof. Now I'm just holding on until some semblance of sanity returns, hoping every day that the bubble pops and loads of gently loved hardware starts appearing on the secondary market. Also, the way nVidia has been skimping on memory for all but the most outrageously expensive chips has grated on me. I was really hoping they would buck the trend with the 5xxx generation, but nope, and with RAM prices the way they are I have little hope for the 6xxx generation. My current card is close to a decade old and has 8GB of VRAM. I'm not upgrading to a card with 8GB of VRAM, or ever 12GB. That 8GB was crucial in future proofing the original card, none of its 4GB contemporaries are of much use today.

New comment by jandrese in "Every GPU That Mattered"

jandrese — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:08:07 +0000

They were probably forced to update when they dropped older busses. Without a PCI or AGP bus on there they have to find something that can hang off of a PCIe lane.

New comment by jandrese in "Every GPU That Mattered"

jandrese — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:06:29 +0000

I remember having a ton of servers with cut down Mach64 chips. They were so bad that you would get horizontal lines flickering across the screen while text was scrolling in an 80x25 text console. I don't know why server manufacturers go to so much effort to make the console as terrible as possible. Are they nostalgic for the 8 bit ISA graphics from the original 5150? They seem offended at the idea that someone might hook a crash cart directly up to their precious hardware.

New comment by jandrese in "Every GPU That Mattered"

jandrese — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:43:26 +0000

Matrox was really halfhearted with game support. They seemed far more interested in corporate customers, advertising heavily stuff like "VR" conference calls that nobody wants. They were early with multi-monitor support back when monitors were big, heavy, and expensive. I had a G200 that was the last video card I've ever seen where you could expand the VRAM by slotting in a SODIMM. It also had composite out so you could hook it to a TV. I played a lot of games on it up until Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which was almost playable but the low res textures looked real bad and the framerate would precipitously drop at critical times like when a bunch of Nazis rushed into the room and started shooting.

Last time I saw a Matrox chip it was on a server, and somehow they had cut it down even more than the one I had used over a decade earlier. As I recall it couldn't handle a framebuffer larger than 800x600, which was sometimes a problem when people wanted to install and configure Windows Server.

New comment by jandrese in "12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)"

jandrese — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:06:16 +0000

I mean it makes sense if you were just forced to implement an expensive waste management system and your competitor gets to just dump the stuff on the ground in a National Park. I would complain too.

New comment by jandrese in "We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code"

jandrese — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:00:21 +0000

AI tends to write like it is getting paid by the word. This article wasn't too egregious but an editor could have improved it.

New comment by jandrese in "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder"

jandrese — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 01:19:12 +0000

Is that including a Jupiter/Saturn assist?

New comment by jandrese in "EMachines never obsolete PCs: More than a meme"

jandrese — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:26:41 +0000

Those shitty modems were infamous. IIRC they were also the sound card on the box and had serious issues with interrupt conflicts. It took three wizards and a dead chicken to get Doom to run stably in an online deathmatch.

New comment by jandrese in "‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms"

jandrese — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:03:04 +0000

Historically panels are generally considered to be exhausted after 30 years of service, although even that means they're down to 80% of their original capacity.

The more failure prone component is the inverter, by a huge margin.

New comment by jandrese in "‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms"

jandrese — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:01:20 +0000

That is a problem. The only way it could be worse is if your technology required a constant supply of input from a foreign country...

From a geopolitical standpoint running a country on locally produced renewable power is obviously the least risky approach, even if you get cut off from further expansion of your renewable production.

New comment by jandrese in "‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms"

jandrese — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:53:32 +0000

Depends on your locality. The Fossil fuel industry is lobbying hard against this and is successful in some places.

New comment by jandrese in "‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms"

jandrese — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:51:41 +0000

Buildings get torn down. Roof needs a replacement and the owner doesn't feel like it is worthwhile to redo the solar install for panels that only have 5 years of warranty left, or maybe they want to replace them with higher power models with a fresh warranty. There are any number of reasons why someone might need to offload otherwise functional solar panels.

New comment by jandrese in "Sand from Different Beaches in the World"

jandrese — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:45:43 +0000

I mean it makes sense that the sand is made of the same stuff as your local rocks, that's where it came from. Sure it washes around a bit in the surf but it's not like it's floating around the world on the ocean currents, at least not in massive quantities. I'm sure there are bits stuck in driftwood or whatnot but the vast majority should sink to the bottom.