Hacker News: mechagodzilla

New comment by mechagodzilla in "Americans Are Falling Behind on Their $1.25T Credit-Card Bill"

mechagodzilla — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:16:00 +0000

"Household Debt Service Payments as a Percent of Disposable Personal Income": https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP

New comment by mechagodzilla in "US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI"

mechagodzilla — Sat, 16 May 2026 21:09:25 +0000

Relatively accurate (I think they're pretty close like 70%+ of the time). Significantly better than just projecting that the next five years will be like the last 5 years.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "Google's year in review: areas with research breakthroughs in 2025"

mechagodzilla — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 16:26:55 +0000

You haven't really been getting 'human written and thoughtful content' for a vast swath of search topics for probably 15-20 years now. You get SEO-hyper-optimized (probably LLM-generated for anything in the last 3 years) blog spam. In terms of searching for information and getting that information, there are a lot of topics where an LLM-generated result is vastly better just by virtue of not being buried inside blog spam. The slop ship sailed years ago.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding Capability"

mechagodzilla — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:23:13 +0000

It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison - I enjoy playing around with LLMs, running different models, etc, and I place a relatively high premium on privacy. The computer itself was $2k about two years ago (and my employer reimbursed me for it), and 99% of my usage is for research questions which have relatively high output per input token. Using one for a coding assistant seems like it can run through a very high number of tokens with relatively few of them actually being used for anything. If I wanted a real-time coding assistant, I would probably be using something that fit in the 24GB of VRAM and would have very different cost/performance tradeoffs.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding Capability"

mechagodzilla — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 23:54:00 +0000

I've been running the 'frontier' open-weight LLMs (mainly deepseek r1/v3) at home, and I find that they're best for asynchronous interactions. Give it a prompt and come back in 30-45 minutes to read the response. I've been running on a dual-socket 36-core Xeon with 768GB of RAM and it typically gets 1-2 tokens/sec. Great for research questions or coding prompts, not great for text auto-complete while programming.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt"

mechagodzilla — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 13:37:21 +0000

1-2 tokens/sec is perfectly fine for 'asynchronous' queries, and the open-weight models are pretty close to frontier-quality (maybe a few months behind?). I frequently use it for a variety of research topics, doing feasibility studies for wacky ideas, some prototypy coding tasks. I usually give it a prompt and come back half an hour later to see the results (although the thinking traces are sufficiently entertaining that sometimes it's fun to just read as it comes out). Being able to see the full thinking traces (and pause and alter/correct them if needed) is one of my favorite aspects of being able to run these models locally. The thinking traces are frequently just as or more useful than the final outputs.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt"

mechagodzilla — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 22:59:29 +0000

You can keep scaling down! I spent $2k on an old dual-socket xeon workstation with 768GB of RAM - I can run Deepseek-R1 at ~1-2 tokens/sec.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "Electric vehicle sales are booming in South America – without Tesla"

mechagodzilla — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 01:23:23 +0000

Kodak didn't really have the option to compete. Their business was largely film, which just disappeared completely, and even digital cameras got replaced pretty quickly with phones. There was nothing to pivot too for Kodak.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4"

mechagodzilla — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 18:19:56 +0000

Did you have to do anything special to get the SSD to play nice with OS9? I tried adding one to a 300MHz G3 iMac and it took forever to initialize on boot and would randomly stall a lot.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "AI is ushering in a 'tiny team' era"

mechagodzilla — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 19:38:33 +0000

If anyone can pay-as-you-go use a fully automated factory, and the factories are interchangeable, it seems like the value of capital is nearly zero in your envisioned future. Anyone with an idea for soup can start producing it with world class efficiency, prices for consumers should be low and variety should be sky-high.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "Workhorse LLMs: Why Open Source Models Dominate Closed Source for Batch Tasks"

mechagodzilla — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 11:40:34 +0000

Buy a used workstation with 512GB of DDR4 RAM. It will probably cost like $1-1.5k, and be able to run a Q4 version of the full deepseek 671B models. I have a similar setup with dual-socket 18 core Xeons (and 768GB of RAM, so it cost about $2k), and can get about 1.5 tokens/sec on those models. Being able to see the full thinking trace on the R1 models is awesome compared to the OpenAI models.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "Why DeepSeek is cheap at scale but expensive to run locally"

mechagodzilla — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 23:32:40 +0000

Yeah, it was just a giant HP workstation - I currently have 3 graphics cards in it (but only 40GB total of VRAM, so not very useful for deepseek models).

New comment by mechagodzilla in "Why DeepSeek is cheap at scale but expensive to run locally"

mechagodzilla — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 23:02:04 +0000

I use a dual-socket 18-core (so 36 total) xeon with 768GB of DDR4, and get about 1.5-2 tokens/sec with a 4-bit quantized version of the full deepseek models. It really is wild to be able to run a model like that at home.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine"

mechagodzilla — Fri, 30 May 2025 21:13:39 +0000

Interns and new grads have always been a net-negative productivity-wise in my experience, it's just that eventually (after a small number of months/years) they turn into extremely productive more-senior employees. And interns and new grads can use AI too. This feels like asking "Why hire junior programmers now that we have compilers? We don't need people to write boring assembly anymore." If AI was genuinely a big productivity enhancer, we would just convert that into more software/features/optimizations/etc, just like people have been doing with productivity improvements in computers and software for the last 75 years.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "Deepseek R1-0528"

mechagodzilla — Wed, 28 May 2025 19:53:32 +0000

I have a $2k used dual-socket xeon with 768GB of DDR4 - It runs at about 1.5 tokens/sec for the 4-bit quantized version.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "How University Students Use Claude"

mechagodzilla — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:19:13 +0000

I've done all of those except tend livestock and build a house, but I could probably figure those out with some effort.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)"

mechagodzilla — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 23:38:56 +0000

So applying this to China and the USA - the USA has a median household income of ~$80k, and China, in terms of purchasing power parity, has a median household income of $32k. China has a workforce of ~775M people vs 163M people in the USA. The USA has ~7M unemployed people. For the USA to stop importing goods from China, we would need to 1) stop consuming those goods altogether (even if they're intermediate goods that go into things we do manufacture), or 2) employ US workers to make those goods instead of whatever they're currently doing (either employed or unemployed).

Employed Americans largely earn a lot more than employed chinese people, and there just aren't very many unemployed Americans. Based on the value of imports to the US from China vs Chinese GDP($440B vs $17.8T), we import about 2.5% of their output, or the equivalent of ~20M people's output if we naively scale. I don't think there is any way around the fact that significantly reducing imports from other countries means we significantly reduce our consumption in absolute terms (i.e. we have a poorer standard of living), just out of spite for other countries.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "Show HN: Monkeys.zip – 3000 Monkeys on Typewriters"

mechagodzilla — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 21:30:48 +0000

Ha! When I was first learning to program in high school, I wrote a 'distributed monkeys-on-typewriters' simulator. I somehow acquired a stack of surplus Pentium 100s that I had running in an unused closet at the school, communicating with each other over IPX. I remember the server had a fun 'Guess-operations-per-second' (GOPS) realtime display.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

mechagodzilla — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 11:05:15 +0000

I think we can already get open-weight frontier class models today. I've run Deepseek R1 at home, and it's every bit as good as any of the ChatGPT models I can use at work.

New comment by mechagodzilla in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

mechagodzilla — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 11:02:25 +0000

That's been the 'endgame' of technology improvements since the industrial revolution - there are many industries that mechanized, replaced nearly their entire human workforce, and were never terribly profitable. Consider farming - in developed countries, they really did replace like 98% of the workforce with machines. For every farm that did so, so did all of their competitors, and the increased productivity caused the price of their crops to fall. Cheap food for everyone, but no windfall for farmers.

If machines can easily replace all of your workers, that means other people's machines can also replace your workers.