Hacker News: mrec

New comment by mrec in "Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose"

mrec — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:33:25 +0000

I'm still getting by mostly fine with a 4GB 1650 Super. (2020 vintage.)

New comment by mrec in "Mykhailo Fedorov reveals struggle to secure Patriot missiles and Western support"

mrec — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 11:26:14 +0000

You seem to be only applying this observation to one side, though. Russian arms manufacturing has come under attack too.

New comment by mrec in "Mykhailo Fedorov reveals struggle to secure Patriot missiles and Western support"

mrec — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:20:53 +0000

My point is that conventional strike can provide a meaningful deterrent, even without the NATO umbrella or a domestic nuclear capability. If Putin had known in 2022 what this utterly gratuitous war would end up costing Russia, there's no way he would have gone ahead with it.

New comment by mrec in "Mykhailo Fedorov reveals struggle to secure Patriot missiles and Western support"

mrec — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:21:50 +0000

Not the only way. Sending drones against Russia's oil industry and logistics centres is having a pretty spectacular effect too, and Russia's having no luck defending against those either.

New comment by mrec in "Branchless Rust: Making a Filter 4x Faster by Removing an If"

mrec — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:49:27 +0000

Hey, this beer glass is cold, lemme get my Handschuh.

New comment by mrec in "AI's debt binge can't last, hidden borrowing reaches $1.65T"

mrec — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:15:28 +0000

This is an interesting angle, and one I hadn't considered before. Would it be overly cynically to draw a line between it and the recent willingness [1] of many on the frontier to support some sort of coordinated pause or slowdown? I think that proposal has genuine value on its own merits, but it might also give a lot of overly-optimistic financing a chance to pay off before cheaper inference crashes the market.

[1] https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/

New comment by mrec in "So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe"

mrec — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 23:12:47 +0000

I've never had it require SMS either. Probably because I've never given it a portable telephone number. (Until a couple of years ago I didn't have one, and I still use it as little as possible.)

New comment by mrec in "European "age verification" "app" forcing everyone to use Android or iOS"

mrec — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:04:35 +0000

Two? Since the Franchise Wars, all restaurants are Taco Bell.

New comment by mrec in "Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)"

mrec — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:39:22 +0000

Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is probably a better-known example of that.

New comment by mrec in "Cargo-nextest: 3x faster than cargo test, per-test isolation, first-class CI"

mrec — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:52:46 +0000

Ah, I see. You're aiming to become the hashbrown of testing.

New comment by mrec in "Cargo-nextest: 3x faster than cargo test, per-test isolation, first-class CI"

mrec — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:48:49 +0000

Have there been any discussions about upstreaming this into cargo proper? Are there any significant downsides to nextest compared to its predecessor?

New comment by mrec in "How working memory could give rise to consciousness"

mrec — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 16:05:03 +0000

I've seen this bouncing around since the early 90s, with New Agey people like Danah Zohar, and probably predates even that. There never seemed to be a whole lot to it; not much more than "well, consciousness is weird, and quantum is weird, therefore consciousness is quantum". Or maybe "well, quantum is trendy, and I'd like to make a buck, therefore..."

New comment by mrec in "How working memory could give rise to consciousness"

mrec — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 16:02:01 +0000

Pretty sure it originated with the Wikipedia annotation. See e.g. https://xkcd.com/285/ from 2007.

New comment by mrec in "Show HN: DRM-Free Books"

mrec — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:03 +0000

Huh? The Honor Harrington books are published by Baen (who are all DRM-free).

New comment by mrec in "Steam Machine launches today"

mrec — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:48:42 +0000

I'm sure they were originally hoping for mass-market success, but given the RAM drought and ensuing pricing, I'm guessing the best possible outcome at this point would be to break roughly even and learn, so that they can put out a more competitive revision if and when prices ever return to Earth.

With Windows becoming increasingly hostile, I do think there's room for a hardware/software integrated "just works" offering in the Linux PC space. Plus software pricing is probably a lot more competitive than console (dunno, never had anything to do with consoles, but my impression has always been that hardware is a loss-leader there).

New comment by mrec in "Euro-Office: First version of the open-source web office is here"

mrec — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:37:15 +0000

Hard disagree. The war has been at least tacitly supported by the majority of the Russian public (via enlistment, taxation or just acquiescence) and it's very explicitly being waged against the Ukrainian public (via killing, occupation, expropriation etc).

"Define who we work with" is basically the point of sanctions. Unless you think they're too robust too, and we should limit ourselves to strongly worded postcards?

New comment by mrec in "Starfish by Peter Watts (1999)"

mrec — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:15:40 +0000

He's very proud of having been rejected by a Russian publisher for being "too dark".

New comment by mrec in "32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building"

mrec — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:56:45 +0000

Luxury. I'm still using a 1650 Super with 4GB VRAM and it's basically fine. Holding off on a few newer titles, but I'm old and my eyesight is going so 1080 resolution is plenty for me.

New comment by mrec in "DIY Bipedal Robot Used Pneumatic "Air-Muscles" Instead of Motors"

mrec — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:58:52 +0000

A noble principle, albeit not without its lamentable failures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspy_Engineer

New comment by mrec in "The Genius of the Barn Owl's Feathers"

mrec — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:58:06 +0000

But in that case this bit of TFA feels a bit out of place:

> To eliminate the possibility that the owl was [...] detecting heat from the body of the mouse (for instance, by sensing infrared light emitted by a warm body), the experiment is repeated with a mouse-sized wad of paper dragged through the leaves