Hacker News: mat_epice

New comment by mat_epice in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

mat_epice — Tue, 05 May 2026 13:08:26 +0000

I don't think that adding the feature is the issue here, but instead Google deciding it needs to push an order of magnitude more data and store it on your device. I can understand wanting to at least re-evaluate your use of a tool when that happens.

If you were to install Chrome fresh, what if it was a 4GB+ download from their website? I would at least pause. For reference, a regular offline installer is 140MB.

New comment by mat_epice in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

mat_epice — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:56:27 +0000

Sounds like you've jumped to conclusions without reading the whole thing, or are making a disingenuous connection between two very different concepts. Climate impacts (really just energy waste) and "legal" arguments are different parts of this article. The legal part centers around whether they have permission to install this model along with Chrome, and whether they are using deceptive practices related to the model.

"Article 5(3) of Directive 2002/58/EC (the ePrivacy Directive) prohibits the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user, without the user's prior, freely-given, specific, informed, and unambiguous consent, except where strictly necessary for the provision of an information-society service explicitly requested by the user..."

That is not about climate.

The article goes on to say that there would not be a legal issue if Google simply asked, documented, not taken initial action without user approval, allow deletion, etc. Also not about climate.

What they do imply is that Google's being dishonest if they say that they are carbon neutral (as is often said in their Environmental, Social, and Governance reports) while imposing up to 250 GWh of power use on network providers and end users. I can see the concern.

New comment by mat_epice in "Books are not too expensive"

mat_epice — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:04:03 +0000

I would prefer my library not buy SICP (at least the Scheme edition) since it's available for free online.

https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...

New comment by mat_epice in "MaliciousCorgi: AI Extensions send your code to China"

mat_epice — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 13:31:31 +0000

Sure, AI tools can do this. However, VS Code is the platform. Why aren't more people worried about running arbitrary VS Code extension that can do the same thing, AI or not?

New comment by mat_epice in "Raspberry Pi and mini PC home lab prices hit parity as DRAM costs skyrocket"

mat_epice — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:44:42 +0000

The Steam Deck is an established product that was first released in February 2022. You may be thinking of the Steam Machine, which indeed does not have public pricing that I'm aware of.

New comment by mat_epice in "Linux is good now"

mat_epice — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 21:52:29 +0000

After a few months of testing the waters, I just moved my gaming PC over to full-time Linux this weekend. Proton has really been revolutionary, as I haven't yet encountered something in my Steam library that won't work.

New comment by mat_epice in "TernFS – an exabyte scale, multi-region distributed filesystem"

mat_epice — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 05:33:55 +0000

It's a serious requirements-gathering exercise. I would look inside your organization for HPC storage experts and ask them to sit down with you for an hour to walk through your users' typical workflows, expectations, and budget. If you need some names, send me an email.

Or just shell out for as much Weka as they can convince you that you need and call it a day.

New comment by mat_epice in "TernFS – an exabyte scale, multi-region distributed filesystem"

mat_epice — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:32:02 +0000

There are several other systems I would recommend before TernFS for your environment. If you're looking at Lustre versus this in particular, Lustre has been through the wringer, and ANL/DOE has plenty of people who understand it enough to run it well and fix it when it breaks.

However, you are right. Your bandwidth needs don't really require Lustre.

New comment by mat_epice in "Ask HN: How to stop an AWS bot sending 2B requests/month?"

mat_epice — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:42:24 +0000

> there's no legitimate (non-crawling) reason for someone to request your site from an AWS resource

I used to run an X instance in the cloud that I would sometimes browse websites from. It sucked but it was also legitimate.

New comment by mat_epice in "Beginner Guide to VPS Hetzner and Coolify"

mat_epice — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 19:48:35 +0000

My only issue with OVH is that they wouldn't let me rent a VPS ($30/month?) without sending a copy of my government identification. I'm not willing to distribute copies of that without a good reason, so I ended up paying more elsewhere.

New comment by mat_epice in "GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection 15.1 released"

mat_epice — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 15:09:57 +0000

Thanks, you’re right, I was mistaken.

New comment by mat_epice in "GCC 15.1"

mat_epice — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 14:25:07 +0000

EDIT: This comment is wrong, see fsmv’s comment below. Leaving for posterity because I’m no coward!

- - -

Undefined behavior only means that the spec leaves a particular situation undefined and that the compiler implementor can do whatever they want. Every compiler defines undefined behavior, whether it’s documented (or easy to qualify, or deterministic) or not.

It is in poor taste that gcc has had widely used, documented behaviors that are changing, especially in a point release.

New comment by mat_epice in "50 Years of Travel Tips"

mat_epice — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 23:19:10 +0000

What amenities would you recommend around that annual budget? Honest question, I’m finding the lounges to be less helpful these days.

New comment by mat_epice in "Ask HN: What's Your Morning Routine?"

mat_epice — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 20:01:56 +0000

From the toilet?

New comment by mat_epice in "OpenAI builds first chip with Broadcom and TSMC, scales back foundry ambition"

mat_epice — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 04:09:40 +0000

Time for this year’s play through!

New comment by mat_epice in "Hell Freezes Over as AMD and Intel Come Together for x86"

mat_epice — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 15:16:05 +0000

Arm has been in supercomputers for a while.

Astra at Sandia Labs was the first Arm peta-scale supercomputer, and the first on the Top500. It debuted in 2018.

Fugaku is the fastest Arm supercomputer, taking the #1 spot on the Top500 in 2020. It is currently #4.

All NVIDIA Grace-Hopper systems will be Arm. There is one in the top 10 already, Alps at the Swiss CSCS, at #6. There are four more in the top 100.

New comment by mat_epice in "Traveling with Apple Vision Pro"

mat_epice — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 14:44:12 +0000

Google’s AI tool says that 20-25% of the world’s population flies at least three times a year. Not a good source, but at least a surprising statistic if true.

Some hard data says that 12% of US flyers take 66% of flights [1]. Those are all likely very frequent fliers, and is much more than 1%.

1. https://www.businesstraveller.com/business-travel/2021/03/31...

New comment by mat_epice in "The U.S. Economy Reaches Superstar Status"

mat_epice — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 03:42:47 +0000

Just as a data point, I saw a $9 dozen of eggs next to a $2.19 dozen of eggs at the grocery store today.

New comment by mat_epice in "The U.S. Economy Reaches Superstar Status"

mat_epice — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 16:03:59 +0000

At the moment, yes. For a short while, it was very hard to find eggs for less than $5-6 a dozen due to a supply issue. Since then, some egg prices have fallen back to normal. Some egg producers, however, have decided that this new price is just fine for them, so you can still see that price on the shelf.

New comment by mat_epice in "Tmux is worse-is-better"

mat_epice — Sat, 25 May 2024 18:33:35 +0000

I have a system where I use a tmux-server config that has a different prefix (^O), status bar color (yellow), and location (top). I use that for my outer tmux session, then start default configs on other host systems. Works pretty well, I don’t have any complaints.