Hacker News: kanemcgrath

New comment by kanemcgrath in "Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork"

kanemcgrath — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 04:30:01 +0000

I tried it for a bit, and It was not really worth its size. It got swept up in all the other AI news recently, but laguna s 2.1 I think is the best ~100B moe model right now

New comment by kanemcgrath in "Libsm64: Mario 64 as a library for use in external game engines"

kanemcgrath — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:05:13 +0000

My favorite one was the blender addon https://github.com/libsm64/libsm64-blender

New comment by kanemcgrath in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

kanemcgrath — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:47:00 +0000

Also the steam DRM on a lot of single player games can be removed very easily. https://github.com/atom0s/Steamless

and is a recommended step for engine modding games like skyrim.

New comment by kanemcgrath in "I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys"

kanemcgrath — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:47:23 +0000

One of my favorite things about my custom mechanical keyboard, is being able to remap the entire key set in the firmware with VIA. I have fn+arrow keys for media, fn+space for play/pause fn+end for calculator, and a bunch of random others. It is so useful I could never get another keyboard that doesn’t have a similar functionality.

New comment by kanemcgrath in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

kanemcgrath — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:33:14 +0000

Something about qwen models hold up really well even at low quants. for most other models anything under q5 is cooked, but on 35B-A3B I can get a lot of things done even at q3_xl. It is definitely better than full precision 9B

New comment by kanemcgrath in "Hackers breach JDownloader's website to serve malware-laced downloads"

kanemcgrath — Fri, 08 May 2026 20:49:15 +0000

I am always worried that popular software like this is getting compromised. But what about all the smaller stuff? I download and run a bunch of small programs, especially for game modding. Do the small tools not have the same risk because of their smaller scale invites less dedicated attacks? or do they get compromised and fly completely under the radar?

New comment by kanemcgrath in "“Kitten Space Agency”, a Spiritual Successor to “Kerbal Space Program” (2025)"

kanemcgrath — Tue, 05 May 2026 00:28:56 +0000

Mechjeb does a lot of automation for complex maneuvers like planetary transfers, ascent autopilot, target interception, etc.. You can even do a porkchop plot for interplanetary transfer. but lagrange points are not possible in KSP because of the Sphere of Influence Model. and orbital slingshots are not included, I assume because they require an intense bruteforce calculation.

New comment by kanemcgrath in "“Kitten Space Agency”, a Spiritual Successor to “Kerbal Space Program” (2025)"

kanemcgrath — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:17:24 +0000

I relied on Mechjeb too much in my game, so I did a run using KRPC and built my own autopilot features with it. It was a lot of fun, and I would recommend it.

New comment by kanemcgrath in "GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing"

kanemcgrath — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 06:39:11 +0000

So far I have done coding projects only, but I have some ideas for some non-coding agent projects in the future, so I'll give Gemma another shot

New comment by kanemcgrath in "GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing"

kanemcgrath — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:16:29 +0000

I did, but in almost everything I tried even qwen3.5 was better, and 3.6 was a huge step up.

New comment by kanemcgrath in "GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing"

kanemcgrath — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:24:57 +0000

I do love using local models when I can, but qwen-35B is the best model I can run, and while its an insanely good local model, it does not compare to the big ones.

New comment by kanemcgrath in "GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing"

kanemcgrath — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:14:35 +0000

I liked copilot because I didn't have to think about tokens. I get hung up when having to think about the price of things, and its hard to think about the project at the same time I got to think about token usage like a gas bill. The usage system had its own issues, but having a set amount of requests was a very comfortable way to use a paid AI service.

New comment by kanemcgrath in "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all"

kanemcgrath — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:12:08 +0000

I haven't ran 27b that much because it only runs at like 2 tokens/sec on my computer.

New comment by kanemcgrath in "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all"

kanemcgrath — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:24:49 +0000

I would say byteshape is smaller and faster, I can’t really notice a quality difference. But I haven’t used it as much as I only started using it a few days ago.

New comment by kanemcgrath in "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all"

kanemcgrath — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 23:42:18 +0000

Now that I have tried out on a few tasks, Qwen3.6 is a huge jump in capability. It can make improvements to a project that qwen3.5 always struggled with.

New comment by kanemcgrath in "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all"

kanemcgrath — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:07:09 +0000

I have been using Qwen3.5-35B-A3B a lot in local testing, and it is by far the most capable model that could fit on my machine. I think quantization technology has really upped its game around these models, and there were two quants that blew me away

Mudler APEX-I-Quality. then later I tried Byteshape Q3_K_S-3.40bpw

Both made claims that seemed too good to be true, but I couldn't find any traces of lobotomization doing long agent coding loops. with the byteshape quant I am up to 40+ t/s which is a speed that makes agents much more pleasant. On an rtx 3060 12GB and 32GB of system ram, I went from slamming all my available memory to having like 14GB to spare.

New comment by kanemcgrath in "Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive"

kanemcgrath — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:22:46 +0000

since they have been doing orchestral performances, getting to hear the orchestral versions of their old songs has been amazing.

New comment by kanemcgrath in "Nvidia's DLSS 5 uses generative AI to boost photorealism in video games"

kanemcgrath — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:49:15 +0000

I don't like the Netflix CGI slop movie style filter look it gives everything. But that is a more general trend in tv and movies that I just can't stand.

I do think this will eventually be a major part of the graphics pipeline, but I hope it will be limited and masked to things like hair, which is almost impossible to get right in real-time rendering.

New comment by kanemcgrath in "Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft"

kanemcgrath — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:25:15 +0000

without discussing copyright, I don't believe any of this is copied. Which I think should be the argument that actually matters.

I downloaded both 6.0 and 7.0 and based on only a light comparison of a few key files, nothing would suggest to me that 7.0 was copied from 6.0, especially for a 41x faster implementation. It is a lot more organized and readable in my armature opinion, and the code is about 1/10th the size.

New comment by kanemcgrath in "Phi-4-reasoning-vision and the lessons of training a multimodal reasoning model"

kanemcgrath — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:30:03 +0000

Small local models are the only thing that still have that magic feeling to me. While large models are still useful and impressive, it makes more sense that they are happening on a giant super computer in a datacenter somewhere. But all the intelligence and capability that can run on my mid level gaming PC is astonishing to me.