Hacker News: niek_pas

New comment by niek_pas in "Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions"

niek_pas — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:09:02 +0000

I'm with you on this. I think this could actually be really useful but the effect is way too extreme. Additionally, the animation is quite stuttery on turns --- might just be my machine though.

New comment by niek_pas in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

niek_pas — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:03:06 +0000

'Cultures' have never been units of 'insiders' isolated from 'outsiders'. Cultural change is inevitable and there is no reason assume 'changing significantly' is inherently bad. That's what history _is_.

New comment by niek_pas in "I'm becoming AI-blind"

niek_pas — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 15:52:58 +0000

There's gotta be nicer ways of saying that.

New comment by niek_pas in "I used to be excited about new tech, but I rarely am anymore"

niek_pas — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:01:30 +0000

> Of course nowadays days I see the downsides of these devices and we're getting to a point where the cons outweigh the pros, but back when I bought the first smart phone (I guess in 2012 or so, I was relatively late to the party) it felt like a leap into the future compared to what I had before.

I know a lot of people have a troubled relationship to their phone, but this is really surprising to me. Would I want to go back to a world where I can't conveniently contact people, navigate the world, look up anything I want to know in an second, and set timers by yelling at the air rather than getting sticky foccacia dough in the cracks of my egg timer? Not even a little bit.

The last time I personally felt the excitement the author describes was probably with the announcement of Apple Vision Pro, but unfortunately that product went nowhere.

New comment by niek_pas in "Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to overthinking things"

niek_pas — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:54:54 +0000

What does ‘latent’ mean in this context?

New comment by niek_pas in "Qwen 3.8 27B"

niek_pas — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:37:16 +0000

A wise man once said, "not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts".

New comment by niek_pas in "Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo"

niek_pas — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:54:12 +0000

That is a fantastic name.

New comment by niek_pas in "2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out"

niek_pas — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 17:22:13 +0000

Prioritizing art over machines that generate mediocre code is not cynical

New comment by niek_pas in "Don't use your phone while you poop"

niek_pas — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:58:27 +0000

For those interested in some of the science behind the idea of “being bored is good”: the google-phrase you are looking for is “default mode network”.

New comment by niek_pas in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

niek_pas — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:48:37 +0000

Probably a lot: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC526278/

New comment by niek_pas in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

niek_pas — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:46:43 +0000

As well as all the other species.

New comment by niek_pas in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

niek_pas — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:43:32 +0000

Unfortunately, "more capable / faster models that use less power" will likely mean those models will be used in more places than ever before. LLMs on laptops, on tablets, on phones, on fridges, in your web browser. See the Jevons paradox.

New comment by niek_pas in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

niek_pas — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:02:15 +0000

There’s lots of use cases where the current models do fine though. A chip that can run a current cheap model at 100x would be amazing for things like detecting prohibited content on Facebook. You don’t need the 2030 equivalent of Fable for that, you need something that can cheaply process insane numbers of posts per day.

New comment by niek_pas in "Kenji/Serious Eats – 30-Min Pressure Cooker Pho Ga"

niek_pas — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 09:51:13 +0000

I consider eating meat completely morally reprehensible but a ‘trigger warning’? What do you do when you enter a supermarket?

As for making the recipe vegetarian, the chicken you could replace with any protein of your choosing. There are vegetarian fish sauces but I’ve not found a good one. You might be able to use miso or marmite.

New comment by niek_pas in "Muse Spark 1.1"

niek_pas — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:47:07 +0000

Me neither, though LLMs also provide services that don’t involve personal or sensitive data

New comment by niek_pas in "Grok 4.5"

niek_pas — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:33:56 +0000

> This site supposedly attracts the brightest of us

What gave you that impression?

New comment by niek_pas in "Show HN: Chess-Inspired Roguelike"

niek_pas — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 09:11:48 +0000

This is cool! I personally really dislike having AI on the leaderboard as it feels completely antithetical to human play.

New comment by niek_pas in "Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability"

niek_pas — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:46:23 +0000

Just today as I pushed some changes to Github, I was thinking how user-unfriendly Git's UI is:

    Enumerating objects: 5, done.
    Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
    Delta compression using up to 10 threads
    Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
    Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 290 bytes | 290.00 KiB/s, done.
    Total 3 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
    remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (2/2), completed with 2 local objects.

I know all of these things communicate something to the die-hard Git user, but for most people (even most people using Git, I bet) this is just complete gobbledegook. What the hell is "delta compression"? Why do I care how many threads it's using? What is an 'object' and what does it mean when it's 'local'? What does 'pack-reused' mean?

From the documentation, it looks like Lore does a bit better in this regard:

    Pushing 1 fragment(s)
    Pushed 1 fragment(s), 124.00 bytes
    Pushing a3f8c2d1... to branch main
    Pushed revision 1 -> a3f8c2d1... to branch main

New comment by niek_pas in "macOS Container Machines"

niek_pas — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:35:18 +0000

It seems macOS Golden Gate (the upcoming version) fixes quite a few of the problems with Tahoe, so you might consider skipping Tahoe entirely.

New comment by niek_pas in "Apple Core AI Framework"

niek_pas — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 10:18:31 +0000

This is definitely a good point. I imagine the max capacity for video models is significantly lower than for text models (there just aren't as many professionals in video as there are people who write text or code) but I could be wrong.