Hacker News: mappu

New comment by mappu in "LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals"

mappu — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 02:05:17 +0000

Linus Torvalds said last week that LLMs were just a tool. Lorenzo Stoakes had the impeccable rebuttal that "it's a tool in the same way a nuclear bomb is just a tool" - of course it's useful but there is clearly more to it than that.

I'm happy for Debian to at least consider the other aspects of social impact, ethics, copyright, and maintainability.

New comment by mappu in "Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM"

mappu — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:16:34 +0000

This distinction is less a gotcha and more actually immediately obvious in the Windows task manager. It shows cached memory separately and in a different colour. The "in use" part is real in-use excluding the page cache.

On my current Windows 11 install i'm using 7 GB with just this Firefox tab open, and another 18GB of "Cached" RAM.

Same as how `free` on Linux shows it in a different column.

New comment by mappu in "The Kimi K3 Moment"

mappu — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 21:39:36 +0000

Steve Yegge calls this is the "discernment horizon" - https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-flat-curve-society-36c8b0...

New comment by mappu in "Build your own vulnerability harness"

mappu — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 02:14:40 +0000

The off-the-shelf player in this space (structured red-team search) is probably https://github.com/usestrix/strix (no affiliation). But any frontier model, if you tell it "here's how the authentication system works, go looking for bugs" will probably do a good job.

New comment by mappu in "Muse Spark 1.1"

mappu — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:45:35 +0000

- MiMo (Xiaomi)

We cannot wait for better post-quantum signature algorithms

mappu — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:11:38 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.cloudflare.com/ml-dsa-will-have-to-do/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48854191

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by mappu in "Curveball"

mappu — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 21:55:35 +0000

Blender has all these curve tools and more, it might be interesting to write an exporter to the Neverball file format if one doesn't exist yet.

New comment by mappu in "Better Models: Worse Tools"

mappu — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 21:21:01 +0000

In my harness i implemented apply_patch just taking unified diffs for patch -p1. I was shocked to see how bad models are at generating them. I started logging diff failures to analyse -

- All models are terrible at generating line numbers for a proper diff, give up on them

- Some models (Owl-alpha) must have been post-trained on Codex transcripts, because they occasionally push its V4A patch format into any diff tool available

- Codex puts a lot of info in its system prompt about the desired patch style, making larger hunks instead of granular ones, etc

New comment by mappu in "LongCat-2.0, a large-scale MoE model with 1.6T total and 48B Active"

mappu — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 06:39:28 +0000

There was some earlier speculation this is the model behind the stealth-released openrouter/owl-alpha model, that's been free for the last month.

New comment by mappu in "Enhancing x11 Application Security with LXC (2025)"

mappu — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:38:52 +0000

There's also this new one: https://github.com/joske/yserver

New comment by mappu in "Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory"

mappu — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 04:56:25 +0000

It was somewhat slow about a decade ago - you can see

- (2015, Go 1.5) Calls cost about 170ns https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/the-cost-and-complexity-o...

- (2017, Go 1.8) Cgo speedup by 50% https://go.dev/doc/go1.8#cgoperf

- (2023, Go 1.21) Calls cost about 40ns https://shane.ai/posts/cgo-performance-in-go1.21/

- (2026, Go 1.26) Cgo speedup by another 30% https://go.dev/doc/go1.26#faster-cgo-calls

A current benchmark shows a Cgo function call as costing about 25 ns. https://gist.github.com/DeedleFake/2f50b02c0708484c66d182533...

New comment by mappu in "Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory"

mappu — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:44:25 +0000

Cgo is cheap these days, don't worry about it.

It's barely more expensive than a direct function call but, not so you'd notice unless it's in a hot loop. At which point the lack of cross-language inlining is your real problem.

New comment by mappu in "Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory"

mappu — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:39:51 +0000

This is all true but is a somewhat Java-flavoured perspective i.e. generations ties you into a moving collector, which ties you into barriers and complicates FFI, which is not always the right tradeoff.

A non-fragmenting allocator goes a long way to alleviating the need for compactions too.

New comment by mappu in "Extreme Heat conference cancelled due to extreme heat warning"

mappu — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:27:33 +0000

Hold on - 15k GBP?

An ordinary heatpump for an ordinary house should cost something like 3000 NZD including labor for installation. What are we doing differently?

New comment by mappu in "AI coding at home without going broke"

mappu — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:19:10 +0000

Long time Ars reader, looking forward to your article (and have a few DOS games to reverse in mind already)!

Is this with a Ghidra MCP or some other technique? And why two models - did you try using Qwen3.6-35B-A3B for everything? (Or 27B or a bigger model since you have the RAM for it)

New comment by mappu in "RTX 5080 and RTX 3090 Setup: 80 Tok/s on Qwen 3.6 27B Q8"

mappu — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:33:30 +0000

I'm running Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on a very ordinary desktop PC (32GB DDR5, 8GB Radeon 6600XT) and getting a useful 15-20 tok/sec out of it. The MoE architecture and auto offloading from system to VRAM is just fantastic. Unsloth Q4_K_XL.

The Qwen3.6-27B is unbearably slow as it doesn't fit in VRAM, though, i think the MoE is very easy to run.

It is also extremely nice that you can just `apt install llama.cpp libggml0-backend-vulkan` now too.

New comment by mappu in "Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features"

mappu — Thu, 14 May 2026 06:03:23 +0000

I used to love Descent 2!

People say this a lot about Linux and it somewhat rubs me the wrong way - sure, the Windows binary works if you install its library dependencies (wine). Likewise (OK, ever since libc5/glibc2 changeover in 2001) the Linux binary should work if you have its library dependencies (SDLv1 it looks like?). So what's really the problem? Your distribution stopped distributing the dependencies, making them harder to find? "DLL Hell" was a thing too.

I didn't see any binary downloads for Linux on that website, only source code.

I gave it a try anyway, the dependencies were actually not a problem for me, Debian has libsdl-{net,image}1.2-dev, libglew-dev, and so on, and if your distro does not have SDLv1 there is libsdl1.2-compat. But after the dependencies, there was a problem with the source code doing something involving bitfield packing that does not compile on x86_64.

I do see the source code has lived on, i can `apt install d2x-rebirth` on Debian 13 which has a comment about https://www.dxx-rebirth.com/ ...is that helpful?

New comment by mappu in "Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning"

mappu — Sun, 10 May 2026 05:44:07 +0000

Syscalls on macOS aren't guaranteed to be stable - Go found out the hard way and in 1.12 they changed to call libSystem.dylib instead.

In general, stable syscall numbers are just a Linux thing. Everyone else uses blessed system libraries

New comment by mappu in "CPanel's Black Week: 3 New Vulnerabilities Patched After Attack on 44k Servers"

mappu — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:49:19 +0000

I was pleasantly surprised to learn the architecture for this - a minimal backend that does a PAM auth and gives you a shell over websocket, with only your own Linux user credentials - and then everything else (from managing files to apache to VMs) is done in frontend javascript.

Keeps the server-side backend minimal and auditable.

New comment by mappu in "Mojo 1.0 Beta"

mappu — Sat, 09 May 2026 05:38:35 +0000

Intel Ispc is a compiler for a C superset language that targets CPU SIMD and GPUs.