Hacker News: lossyalgo

New comment by lossyalgo in "Show HN: Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead"

lossyalgo — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:43:54 +0000

There are other less annoying alternatives such as WeTransfer.

New comment by lossyalgo in "Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide"

lossyalgo — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:51:59 +0000

Since when are tokens free?

New comment by lossyalgo in "What came after the 486?"

lossyalgo — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:01:43 +0000

Also any miner worth their salt knows to undervolt to save power (=money), run cooler, last longer, and run at very close to full speed or even in some cases 100% full-speed, depending on silicon "lottery".

New comment by lossyalgo in "Goodbye to Sora"

lossyalgo — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:58:36 +0000

I don't think anyone outside of Disney/ClosedAI knows what deal was actually made. Maybe they just shut down public use of Sora but Disney will still be able to use it internally? Maybe they never even signed anything, as is too often the case with AI deals, especially big ones, how we read about signed/inked deals but then it turns out it was all just words spoken. Maybe they took the cash, then shut Sora down to save money? Could be any number of things that happened which we might never know.

New comment by lossyalgo in "Goodbye to Sora"

lossyalgo — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:34:48 +0000

Such as? Where do we find these open weight model providers? Why is hardly anyone talking about them or sharing links (here or elsewhere) if they are so wonderful and profitable?

New comment by lossyalgo in "Goodbye to Sora"

lossyalgo — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:21:52 +0000

Is OpenAI still considered a startup? They were founded ~10 years ago in December 2015.

New comment by lossyalgo in "Goodbye to Sora"

lossyalgo — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:14:17 +0000

To nitpick a tiny bit, from Wikipedia[0]:

> In February 2024, OpenAI previewed examples of its output to the public,[1] with the first generation of Sora released publicly for ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro users in the US and Canada in December 2024[2][3] and the second generation, Sora 2, was released to select users in the US and Canada at the end of September 2025.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(text-to-video_model)

New comment by lossyalgo in "Goodbye to Sora"

lossyalgo — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:11:56 +0000

Imagine all the money they can save on Sora which surely cost them way more than regular LLM usage, that they can now invest into suave Superbowl ads trash-talking Claude.

I also wonder if they got the $1B from Disney? Was that even a paid for deal? Or just another "announced" deal? Every article I found doesn't mention anyone signing any paperwork - which seems to be typical of AI journalism these days. Every AI deal is supposedly inked but if you dig deeper, all you find are adjectives like proclaimed, announced, agreed upon.

New comment by lossyalgo in "Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11"

lossyalgo — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 22:48:19 +0000

My company doesn't OK basically any software requests, even cheap stuff :( We also don't make anywhere near $10k/mo (not USA). REcently got a new dev machine and it had 512GB m2 SSD and 16GB of RAM. I had to order 32GB but I had to explain why: to run docker images (and i'm hitting limits with 32GB constantly). I had to wait 2 weeks for the RAM upgrade. I wanted a bigger SSD but it would have taken longer and I needed to upgrade ASAP. It doesn't even have a USB-C plug (but a SD card slot, good grief).

New comment by lossyalgo in "Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website"

lossyalgo — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:22:43 +0000

Of course anecdotal but 2 months ago I tried to do that for a missing bolt in a popular scooter (roughly 7 years old, bought 2nd hand so didn't know exact specs). I fed it various images that I took + internet images. It found a bunch of local shops but always found the wrong part (but very similar looking). I double-checked everything multiple times, via multiple contexts, even different pre-prompts from various sources, and asking plenty of questions. We chatted in thinking mode for what felt like ages, and according to paragraphs explaining why it HAD to be the right one, multiple times, with evidence that it sometimes gladly generated in image form (often completely garbage imagery e.g. with half-drawn bolts extruding from multiple surfaces). Eventually it found something very plausible which I ordered. It was the wrong part.

I had to get someone on the phone to help me find and order the right part (which was on their website, for many years according to waybackmachien).

I love LLMs but it's still totally hit/miss what you get. I'd rather not give it write-access to my bank account just yet.

New comment by lossyalgo in "Nvidia greenboost: transparently extend GPU VRAM using system RAM/NVMe"

lossyalgo — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:58:37 +0000

I did that. It worked, until it didn't, and then I learned how to format my 340MB HDD and re-install DOS 6.22. Fun times!

New comment by lossyalgo in "Stop Sloppypasta"

lossyalgo — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:43:49 +0000

Sounds like a lot of work to ensure it's correct, without the guarantee that it's actually correct. Why not just do it oldschool? Is it really saving you that much time?

New comment by lossyalgo in "Treasure hunter freed from jail after refusing to turn over shipwreck gold"

lossyalgo — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:57:47 +0000

Define "way better shape". Mentally? Physically? Spiritually?

It's not prison, but I know people who spent time in various county jails for weeks to months, and all of them definitely came out worse, and did their best to stay as far away as possible from going back (at least as far as I could tell).

New comment by lossyalgo in "Treasure hunter freed from jail after refusing to turn over shipwreck gold"

lossyalgo — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:55:49 +0000

Yeah but it was voluntary. He was locked up on contempt for refusing to give the location of the remaining gold coins for 2 years and only stayed in jail for 10 years because he kept refusing. They let him out after 10 years because he was "unlikely to ever offer an answer". It sounds like his mental process was slightly different than what most people in this thread are arguing.

New comment by lossyalgo in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

lossyalgo — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:17:52 +0000

> Perhaps the unusual outcomes are just more memorable, and so seem more frequent?

That's a good point and could very well be true. I just know I've played plenty of games where I was mad that they didn't show the meaning. So let's say its 5% for native speakers, and up to 20% for non-native speakers - that's still a golden opportunity to expand vocabularies. And honestly it can't be a lot of work to add a couple lines of static text. At worst it would be ignored, and at most, help people learn more interesting words.

New comment by lossyalgo in "Asia rolls out 4-day weeks, WFH to solve fuel crisis caused by Iran war"

lossyalgo — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:18:20 +0000

So you're saying we should only put extroverted people in the office and introverted people get to WFH? ;)

New comment by lossyalgo in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

lossyalgo — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 09:56:04 +0000

Please write to the NY Times and suggest it! I still play and it still irks me when I have to go google a word.

New comment by lossyalgo in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

lossyalgo — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 09:55:32 +0000

How often have you played Wordle? I've played well over 1000 games, and at lesat 1/5th of those were words I had to look up. They seem to enjoy picking obscure words in order to make the game more challenging.

New comment by lossyalgo in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans."

lossyalgo — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:09:59 +0000

I look forward to reading studies in 10 years how we all became stupider thanks to this "feature". One step closer to the movie Idiocracy.

New comment by lossyalgo in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

lossyalgo — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:04:56 +0000

That reminds me of one of the biggest IMO missing feature of Wordle: They never give a definition of the word after the game is finished! I usually do end up googling words I don't know (which is quite often) but I'm guessing I'm one of the few who goes to the trouble. I've even written to The New York Times a couple times to suggest adding a short definition at the end as I honestly feel like a ton of people could totally up their vocabulary game and it surely could be added with minimum effort (considering they even added a Discord multiplayer mode).