Hacker News: mattstir

New comment by mattstir in "Upload Your RAM"

mattstir — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 13:50:11 +0000

The quote assumes that all of humanity has the same goals as a corporation does: that every individual person desires maximum utilization of components for the sake of company shareholders. Individual people want a computer and just can't buy them because the entire world's memory chip supply, flash storage supply, and increasingly hard drive supply is being swallowed into the maws of corporations who would love nothing more than to sell you tiny bits of that compute through a monthly subscription in perpetuity.

Not everyone subscribes to the "cloud compute is more important than everything else" outlook, but everyone is affected by it nonetheless.

New comment by mattstir in "Upload Your RAM"

mattstir — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 13:40:07 +0000

I get that I'm falling for low quality bait here, but what about him saying that it's terrible for people to have RAM is "fake propaganda"? The entire exact quote is:

> From a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time. You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment.

That's a ghoulish point of view that puts real living humans on a lower hung than the poor poor corporations who just want RAM to be so expensive that everyone needs to buy compute from them. Convenient for the corporations!

New comment by mattstir in "Upload Your RAM"

mattstir — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 13:31:06 +0000

Sam Altman's argument was that people tend to not run their consumer electronics at 100% 24/7, and so views the time that's not happening as wasted potential for RAM that could be sitting in a data center. I sincerely reject that notion, but from that... utilitarian perspective it's hard to argue that spreading out the world's limited RAM supply across thousands of personal machines would fix any issues

New comment by mattstir in "MS Paint Remote Code Execution Vulnerability"

mattstir — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 13:47:28 +0000

Presumably as part of the generative AI stuff they crammed into it? They've been hilariously cagey about the details here which makes me think it has to be AI-feature related

New comment by mattstir in "ChatGPT and Codex usage limits merging"

mattstir — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 04:14:27 +0000

Are they likely to be feeling generous and improve usage limits? I think it's easy to see what they're hoping to achieve with this.

New comment by mattstir in "Gemini Code vs. Claude Code – A cautionary post-mortem ($800 in 12h)"

mattstir — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 15:22:24 +0000

Getting this in Canada lol, did the site die?

New comment by mattstir in "Cloudflare Turnstile solver library (no headless browser required)"

mattstir — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 13:54:29 +0000

I doubt there is any legal issues with it, but Cloudflare probably reserves the right to completely block your IP forever if they catch you doing it (by for example updating Turnstile to fingerprint this publicly accessible solver library)

New comment by mattstir in "Apple's git still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates"

mattstir — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:05:31 +0000

Yes, there would be crowds of angry people, furious that Apple... released a critical security patch? Framing removing compromised certs as "changing peoples systems deeply" seems intentionally in bad faith.

New comment by mattstir in "Ten days later, Git on macOS still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates"

mattstir — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:56:07 +0000

Besides singling out a single bug from a single distro two decades ago, Linux offers maintainers who actually care to push security fixes within a few hours of globe-spanning vulnerabilities being disclosed? Not sure how that's confusing or controversial.

New comment by mattstir in "About the compromised eMudhra intermediate CAs"

mattstir — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:44:40 +0000

It's wild to see people supporting this bizarre anti-security response. Not only are they dragging their feet in fixing the security issue, they're actively reverting any manual fixes silently with each new update. That's legitimately worse than doing nothing at all! It's also disconcerting to see folks advocate for the "let's wait to fix this critical security issue because we want to make it slightly easier in the future" approach, as if Apple is incapable of deleting ~12 lines from a file as part of the normal patch release? If they can revert your manual fixes, they obviously ship that file and so could have shipped a fix with that file. Genuinely disturbing to support any of this.

New comment by mattstir in "WorldTUI: I trained a 360M model to pretend to be a terminal"

mattstir — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 03:55:46 +0000

This is such a fun project! It seems that the model is a bit confused about $_, which I find pretty interesting:

  simedw@laptop:~$ pwd
  /home/simedw
  simedw@laptop:~$ mkdir -p foo/bar/baz
  simedw@laptop:~$ cd $_  
  cd foo  
  simedw@laptop:~/foo$ cd baz
  simedw@laptop:~/foo/bar$ pwd  
  /home/simedw/foo/bar
  simedw@laptop:~/foo/bar$ cd baz 
  simedw@laptop:~/foo/bar/baz$

New comment by mattstir in "Compromised LiteLLM 1.107.0 on PyPI Installs a Credential Stealer and Backdoor"

mattstir — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 16:10:29 +0000

But then an attacker marks their malicious release as a critical security update. It's really messy unfortunately.

New comment by mattstir in "Bot traffic from Yandex"

mattstir — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 13:24:21 +0000

Not to get sidetracked, and not to argue against anything you've said, but how do you figure that out? For people you disagree with, do you open their profile's comments and start keyword-searching "russia" "china" "moscow" etc in hopes of finding a hit? They mentioned that city once in Jan 2024, halfway down the page and in passing. I'm just curious about how others use this site.

New comment by mattstir in "Strands Decider 2B: a small, open-source, decision model"

mattstir — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 08:23:22 +0000

A use case I have in mind is creating a relatively simple home assistant app that would let me control smart home things like lightbulbs and playing music on some kitchen speakers. I can also imagine having it differentiate between commands like "set lights to 30% brightness" and more general questions like "what's the weather today" and piping the latter over to a cheap LLM to handle. It could probably all be handled by an LLM, but I like how fast these decision models end up being.

New comment by mattstir in "Gemini 4 Argon"

mattstir — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:50:28 +0000

Frontier LLMs that Google doesn't control are existential threats to Google's business model. If no one is using Google search or browsing websites themselves because they're asking LLMs, Google doesn't make ad revenue. Gemini at least has a path to monetization for Google (subscriptions, ads baked into responses).

New comment by mattstir in "Gemini 4 Argon"

mattstir — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:44:11 +0000

The statement appears to be referencing Astra's supposed recurrent depth and how that causes reduced visibility into chain-of-thought reasoning. Astra's own system card describes tests where it's asked to solve challenging math problems while internally thinking about something entirely unrelated, which it's significantly more capable of than previous models (~60% vs ~16% of the time for Sol). That seems to point to reduced efficacy of chain-of-thought monitoring, but OpenAI's public statements basically boil down to "yeah but we haven't been able to catch it doing that" which isn't exactly reassuring if CoT monitoring is one of your main safety guardrails.

New comment by mattstir in "Gemini 4 Argon"

mattstir — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:31:58 +0000

A concern with these LLM-driven rewrites is that the Rust code isn't really idiomatic, it ends up being C++ code in a trench coat (raw pointers everywhere, manual validation of thousands of unsafe blocks). So far every publicized rewrite I'm aware of has had an "oh and we'll definitely spend the thousands of hours needed to fundamentally rework the code to properly utilize lifetimes later" admission tacked on at the end. Has there been progress in improving that aspect during the LLM phase of the rewrite? If so that would be an incredible win for the industry!

New comment by mattstir in "Ollaya – Ollama for open-source, Jev-style decision models"

mattstir — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 16:31:38 +0000

> I'm not sure what this means for AI startups if their innovations can be copied by OSS so quickly

This particular "innovative" concept already has a rich, open research background. What Jev appears to have done is scale that up a bit and isolate good training data, which results in a great product but not really something impossible to imitate. The only major difference currently is that the open source decision models need to be fine-tuned as they're not trained off of the entire internet yet.

New comment by mattstir in "Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM"

mattstir — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 19:05:56 +0000

Part of the implication is that factories that could be producing consumer-facing DRAM like DDR5 would be retooled to produce HBM instead, leading to even less total consumer RAM production.

New comment by mattstir in "Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program"

mattstir — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 18:59:42 +0000

Honestly I think the only significant difference is in branding: Flock isn't consumer-facing and is explicitly marketed for tracking people's movements. The major tech companies that make your phone, browser, maybe a few smart home devices with always-on microphones or cameras, all have more data about you and your habits than Flock could ever obtain, and with us paying for the privilege no less. I get that the average person doesn't care when the product works as advertised, but I don't think that's healthy. People should care as much about privacy when it's Google or Meta as when it's Flock.