Hacker News: janekm

New comment by janekm in "The Sikh Practice of Langar, a Free Meal Where Everyone Is Equal"

janekm — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 14:03:18 +0000

I often see charitable groups from the Sikh community in central London serving the homeless. Interesting to hear the background around that! https://asiasamachar.com/2023/10/10/meet-the-sikh-community-...

New comment by janekm in "Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative"

janekm — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 12:31:44 +0000

Well the code is there: https://github.com/voideditor/void/tree/main/extensions/void But it's super basic right now... Like literally just the bare minimum to make an LLM call in a side window and a view to apply/reject diffs. Pretty much a weekend project at this point.

New comment by janekm in "Reverse-Engineering an IP Camera (2019)"

janekm — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 14:06:28 +0000

Regarding hosting, it's a big pain point for companies building these systems out of China as the "great firewall" makes it really hard to have reliable connectivity between the Chinese Internet (and datacenters) and outside. The ap-east-1 zone of AWS, based in Hong Kong, is very popular in that context as it tends to be accessible from both sides (so cost is fairly typical of AWS costs in that case). Alternatively Alibaba also have cloud datacenters in Hong Kong with similar properties.

New comment by janekm in "Reverse-Engineering an IP Camera (2019)"

janekm — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 14:12:04 +0000

Something worth keeping in mind is that Chinese factories that makes things like IP cameras don't typically have their own (significant) R&D departments and instead work from examples provided by the makers of the chipsets. Sometimes there will be another company involved that provide an "IoT ecosystem" (Tuya is a major player here: https://www.tuya.com/solution/hardware/ip-camera ). So it's not necessarily surprising that the backend still works even if the manufacturer (Amazon brands are not typically the factory themselves, for practical reasons frequently changing "brand names" are used) is no longer present.

New comment by janekm in "He secretly changed this freeway sign, helped millions of drivers [video]"

janekm — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 08:46:38 +0000

A club is one of the few places where this strategy won't work, unless there's an emergency (which the bouncers would obviously know about) the only people who would show up are from the sound and light company whom the bouncers already know.

New comment by janekm in "Alphabet Winds Down Mineral, Licenses Ag Technology to Berry Producer Driscoll's"

janekm — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 16:52:35 +0000

It's the curse of being a company with a $xxxB main product line. It becomes really hard to justify projects that could at best contribute a few million to your bottom line...

New comment by janekm in "Show HN: ESP32S3 ZXSpectrum"

janekm — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 15:33:03 +0000

You might be interested in knowing that LCSC (same company as JLCPCB) are about to offer proper panel / membrane keypad prototyping: https://www.lcsc.com/panel-printing

New comment by janekm in "Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models"

janekm — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 08:28:26 +0000

That's going to be something similar to IPAdapter FaceID: https://ipadapterfaceid.com Basically you use a facial structure representation that you'd use for face recognition (which of course Apple already compute on all your photos) together with some additional feature representations to guide the image generation. No need for additional fine-tuning. A similar approach could likely be used for handwriting generation.

New comment by janekm in "Canada's parliament rocked by allegations of treason and foreign interference"

janekm — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 15:12:37 +0000

It's almost as if politicians are less motivated to enact legislation that is inconvenient to politicians.

New comment by janekm in "PSA: If you're a fan of ATmega, try AVR Dx"

janekm — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 10:54:29 +0000

Pick the ones that give a delivery deadline (5/7 days). No problems at all (at least from UK), always arrives ahead of schedule.

New comment by janekm in "PSA: If you're a fan of ATmega, try AVR Dx"

janekm — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 10:52:15 +0000

Came to say this too... I was really pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get a full dev & build & test environment set up with Visual Studio Code, and how well their little WCH-LinkE debugger works (both SWD and UART in one, Segger could learn from that...). Now I'm experimenting with their BLE variant, which is a lot more complex, but still simpler than what I'm used to.

New comment by janekm in "Ultrasonic Coffee"

janekm — Thu, 30 May 2024 11:41:14 +0000

Well, here's "Not James Hoffman" having a go: https://youtu.be/-yB6Fb05QRo?si=PqhwiRsRnz39LOYJ

New comment by janekm in "Kino: Pro Video Camera"

janekm — Thu, 30 May 2024 08:21:08 +0000

The Kino introductory blog post makes quite clear that all they do is apply one of a set of LUTs that ship with their app. Personally I'd be interested in one that tried to apply colouring more "intelligently", e.g. detecting faces etc and applying appropriate settings.

New comment by janekm in "Show HN: Route your prompts to the best LLM"

janekm — Thu, 23 May 2024 14:37:13 +0000

It's tough in this case, because if you incentivise just to save cost, it could always route you to the cheapest LLM but the quality would suffer...

New comment by janekm in "DB-19: Resurrecting an Obsolete Connector (2016)"

janekm — Mon, 20 May 2024 09:33:54 +0000

Yes, but this scenario is a bit different. If you ask a connector factory to custom-make you a connector it's common that they are allowed to add it to their catalogue, though you can of course stipulate something else in the contract. You'll see this in the electronics markets in Shenzhen for example... they still have a lot of the connectors and switches from MP3 players, which I believe was one of the early boom industries in the region.

New comment by janekm in "UK becomes first G20 country to halve its carbon emissions"

janekm — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 13:05:08 +0000

There's over 182 domestic routes flown in the UK (Heathrow - Edinburgh is the most popular one): https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/domestic-flights-in-the...

New comment by janekm in "Barcelona Supercomputing Center presents Sargantana: new open-source RISC-V chip"

janekm — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 14:07:17 +0000

But you can only really make those profitably for a few industries (military, medical, seismic come to mind). The EU does have the chip fabs for those industries, of course...

New comment by janekm in "EU proposes 10-year renewal for glyphosate herbicide"

janekm — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 09:16:49 +0000

60g/l acetic acid ... that's literally just slightly strong household vinegar. (safety precautions, especially not breathing it in, are definitely advisable though, it's a fairly strong acid)

New comment by janekm in "Signal: The Pqxdh Key Agreement Protocol"

janekm — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 13:44:10 +0000

It seems we'll have convincing AI video impersonation before practical quantum cryptanalysis, unfortunately...

New comment by janekm in "Exllamav2: Inference library for running LLMs locally on consumer-class GPUs"

janekm — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 10:46:28 +0000

It's more that the LLM non-local hosting (and training) community (on A100/H100) is big enough that it's more profitable for Nvidia to not release such prosumer GPUs ;)