Hacker News: layoric

New comment by layoric in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

layoric — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:30:14 +0000

Worked on the software side of increasing the rate of solar penetration in electricity networks between 2016-2020 via global solar radiation forecasting. The uptake of the software was slow the first year but then rapid once more electricity networks were struggling with knowing how much solar was in the network. Once it is easier to predict, the network becomes easier to manage, and more can be safely added, and make it economically profitable. Sucks this was a commercial operation, but excited to see all the hard work across various industries is solving problems to get more renewable energy into networks.

New comment by layoric in "Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom"

layoric — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:23:11 +0000

Building websites, I agree has little value, but using it as a way to explain basics of how the web works I think is pretty valuable. Web likely isn't going anywhere for a long time, having some basic knowledge of how it works I think very useful for a lot of people. I hate the idea of any more MS apps like Excel being regularly incorporated, but basic usage of something similar definitely can help know of how to use a useful tool/computer skill. Even in the early 90's we had computer labs for learning computer skills which I think there is value. But forcing tech everywhere into teaching is an issue IMO.

New comment by layoric in "Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'"

layoric — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 05:20:43 +0000

"side loading", I know this term is the one used but I think should be pushed back against with just using the standard "installing"/"install". It makes the control point clearer and (should be) unsettling when you can't "install" software on hardware you own.

New comment by layoric in "Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral"

layoric — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:56:01 +0000

Rugged individualism for the poor and vulnerable, won't someone think of the company and shareholders! /s

New comment by layoric in "Mercury 2: Fast reasoning LLM powered by diffusion"

layoric — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:27:41 +0000

I think it would assist in exploiting exploring multiple solution spaces in parallel, and can see with the right user in the loop + tools like compilers, static analysis, tests, etc wrapped harness, be able to iterate very quickly on multiple solutions. An example might be, "I need to optimize this SQL query" pointed to a locally running postgres. Multiple changes could be tested, combined, and explain plan to validate performance vs a test for correct results. Then only valid solutions could be presented to developer for review. I don't personally care about the models 'opinion' or recommendations, using them for architectural choices IMO is a flawed use as a coding tool.

It doesn't change the fact that the most important thing is verification/validation of their output either from tools, developer reviewing/making decisions. But even if don't want that approach, diffusion models are just a lot more efficient it seems. I'm interested to see if they are just a better match common developer tasks to assist with validation/verification systems, not just writing (likely wrong) code faster.

New comment by layoric in "Keeping 20k GPUs healthy"

layoric — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 21:23:47 +0000

I'm quite surprised the A100 is not much better since the power levels for the Ampere cards I believe is a lot lower.

Does this mean even for a model that fits on a single server that trains for a few weeks will absolutely need a recovery process? Interested in peoples experiences around this.

New comment by layoric in "Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling"

layoric — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 20:36:43 +0000

Right, a market is a small tool of larger systems. That’s fine, hard to get right but can make systems better. Type two just seems to be the cargo culted everywhere..

New comment by layoric in "Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling"

layoric — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 03:28:31 +0000

Exactly, these markets exist in the real world, so as their size and use increases, the more likely the odds will influence real world events. Look at sports betting for a much smaller example. Match fixing is known. Electricity markets are gamed for individual profits at the detriment to everyone and the stability of the system, even with regulators trying to keep things stable. Enough "Market for all the things" already..

New comment by layoric in "A 30B Qwen model walks into a Raspberry Pi and runs in real time"

layoric — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 23:47:17 +0000

Thanks for posting the performance numbers from your own validation. 6-7 tokens/sec is quite remarkable for the hardware.

New comment by layoric in "Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening"

layoric — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:17:30 +0000

This happens when you get worse and worse inequality when it comes to buying power. The most accurate prediction into how this all plays out I think is what Gary Stevenson calls "The Squeeze Out" -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUKaB4P5Qns

Currently we are still at the stage of extraction from the upper/middle class retail investors and pension funds being sucked up by all the major tech companies that are only focused on their stock price. They have no incentive to compete, because if they do, it will ruin the game for everyone. This gets worse, and the theory (and somewhat historically) says it can lead to war.

Agree with the analysis or not, I personally think it is quite compelling to what is happening with AI, worth a watch.

New comment by layoric in "650GB of Data (Delta Lake on S3). Polars vs. DuckDB vs. Daft vs. Spark"

layoric — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 05:20:32 +0000

Totally true. I have a trusty old (like 2016 era) X99 setup that I use for 1.2TB of time series data hosted in a timescaledb PostGIS database. I can fetch all the data I need quickly to crunch on another local machine, and max out my aging network gear to experiment with different model training scenarios. It cost me ~$500 to build the machine, and it stays off when I'm not using it.

Much easier obviously dealing with a dataset that doesn't change, but doing the same in the cloud would just be throwing money away.

New comment by layoric in "Vertical integration is the only thing that matters"

layoric — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:38:07 +0000

> The second you turn your head though, your fellow teammates will conspire to replatform onto Go or Rust or NodeJS or GitHub Actions and make everything miserable again.

Curious how would you use use Smalltalk in replace of GitHub Actions assuming you need a GitHub integrated CI runner?

New comment by layoric in "LLMs encode how difficult problems are"

layoric — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 21:56:38 +0000

I have a hard time trying to conceptualize lossy text compression, but I've recently started to think about the "reasoning"/output as just a by product of lossy compression, and weights tending towards an average of the information "around" the main topic of prompt. What I've found easier is thinking about it like lossy image compression, generating more output tokens via "reasoning" is like subdividing nearby pixels and filling in the gaps with values that they've seen there before. Taking the analogy a bit too far, you can also think of the vocabulary as the pixel bit depth.

I definitely agree replacing AI or LLMs with "X driven by compressed training data" starts to make a lot more sense, and a useful shortcut.

New comment by layoric in "AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS"

layoric — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:54:01 +0000

> In general once you start thinking about scaling data to larger capacities is when you start considering the cloud

What kind of capacities as a rule of thumb would you use? You can fit an awful lot of storage and compute on a single rack, and the cost for large DBs on AWS and others is extremely high, so savings are larger as well.

New comment by layoric in "Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux"

layoric — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 23:13:35 +0000

Same setup here, one game setup I've hit but this will be a rare problem, is StarCraft Remastered. Wine has an issue with audio processing which I can't seem to configure my way out of. It pegs all 32 threads and still stutters. Thankfully this game can likely run on an actual potato, so I have a separate mini PC running windows for this when I want to get my ass kicked on battle.net.

New comment by layoric in "Benchmarking Postgres 17 vs. 18"

layoric — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 10:27:27 +0000

Working at IT places in the late 2000s, it was still pretty common place for there to be a server rooms. Even for a large org with multiple sites 100s of kms a part, you could manage it with a pretty small team. And it is a lot easier to build resilient applications now than it was back then from what I remember.

Cloud costs are getting large enough that I know I’ve got one foot out the door and a long term plan to move back to having our own servers and spend the money we save on people. I can only see cloud getting even more expensive, not less.

New comment by layoric in "Kaitai Struct: declarative binary format parsing language"

layoric — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 20:46:58 +0000

I discovered this project recently and used it for Himawari Standard Data format and it made it so much easier. Definitely recommend using this if you need to create binary readers for uncommon formats.

New comment by layoric in "Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server"

layoric — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 10:07:04 +0000

I must be confused, my understanding was m7a was 4th generation Epyc (Genoa, Bergamo and Siena) which I believe all have 2 threads per core no?

New comment by layoric in "Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server"

layoric — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 23:02:19 +0000

Exactly, and the performance of consumer tech is wildly faster. Eg, a Ryzen 5825U mini pc with 16GB memory is ~$250USD with 512GB nvme. That thing will outperform of 14 core Xeon from ~2016 on multicore workloads and absolutely thrash it in single thread. Yes lack of ECC is not good for any serious workload, but great for lower environments/testing/prototyping, and it sips power at ~50W full tilt.

New comment by layoric in "Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server"

layoric — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 22:58:16 +0000

> $50 for a dyno with 1 GB of ram in 2025 is robbery

AWS isn't much better honestly.. $50/month gets you an m7a.medium which is 1 vCPU (not core) and 4GB of RAM. Yes that's more memory but any wonder why AWS is making money hand-over-fist..