Hacker News: nullsmack

New comment by nullsmack in "Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline"

nullsmack — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:08:44 +0000

Qwen2.5 is quite old at this point. The new Qwen3.5 series is good, and it has a 27b dense model too. I have to watch it but I've gotten surprising results out of the 4b model even. They're also vision enabled and pretty good at ocr. These were released in just the last few weeks.

New comment by nullsmack in "Meta to retire messenger desktop app and messenger.com in April 2026"

nullsmack — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:34:08 +0000

This sucks so much. I exclusively use messenger.com because it gives me a nice big window to view the chats in. Pictures and video work better there too. I don't want a tiny chat in the corner of the main website that I never use.

New comment by nullsmack in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

nullsmack — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:40:35 +0000

Depends on how long the hose is.

New comment by nullsmack in "The Rise of AI Denialism"

nullsmack — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 15:25:23 +0000

People act like AI is going to go away when an "AI bubble" pops.

What happened to the web when the dotcom bubble popped?

New comment by nullsmack in "1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises"

nullsmack — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 15:19:27 +0000

I know one area of computing that has dramatically risen in price in the past 10-15 years or so is GPUs. Cards that fit into midrange today sell for prices that would've been considered ultra-highend just a few gpu generations ago. Today's highend prices for just a graphics card are higher than I've paid for entire computers in the past. It's ridiculous.

New comment by nullsmack in "PicoIDE – An open IDE/ATAPI drive emulator"

nullsmack — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 16:20:37 +0000

I've been waiting on something like this for years, I'm surprised it took so long for someone to do it since there's been those gotek floppy drive emulators and things like bluescsi for forever.

This seriously just made my day.

New comment by nullsmack in "Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM"

nullsmack — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 14:37:55 +0000

They better watch the price because you can get a 128GB AMD Strix Halo mini pc for ~1700-2000 today, and those will be even cheaper a year from now. If they're trying to be competitive then it really needs to be more in that ballpark than the massively overpriced Nvidia range.

New comment by nullsmack in "Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM"

nullsmack — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 14:32:40 +0000

whoa, shoot this directly into my veins

New comment by nullsmack in "Qwen3 30B A3B Hits 13 token/s on 4xRaspberry Pi 5"

nullsmack — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 14:58:05 +0000

The mini pcs based on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Strix Halo) are probably pretty competitive with those. Depending on which one you buy it's $1700-2000 for one with 128GB RAM that is shared with the integrated Radeon 8060S graphics. There's videos on youtube talking about using this with the bigger LLM models.

New comment by nullsmack in "The No-CPU Amiga Demo Challenge"

nullsmack — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 20:56:34 +0000

That gave me a nightmare vision of Doom clones where you pay money to appear as a different sprite and it's inflicted with last man standing type game modes and all kinds of other bad things modern games do.

New comment by nullsmack in "Walkie-Textie Wireless Communicator"

nullsmack — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:20:44 +0000

I'm lowkey shocked it's not a esp32 or something. I haven't seen a ATTINY used for a long time.

New comment by nullsmack in "Walkie-Textie Wireless Communicator"

nullsmack — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 15:51:19 +0000

It uses the slow method where you push the same key until you get the letter you want to show up? Does anybody remember T9? You push the keys for the letters you want and it figures out what you're typing from a dictionary.

New comment by nullsmack in "I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself"

nullsmack — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 17:43:15 +0000

wasn't there an xkcd like this once?

New comment by nullsmack in "Holographic ribbon aims to oust magnetic tape with 50-year life span and 200TB"

nullsmack — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 18:50:39 +0000

New storage tech like this never ever comes out.. I remember 300gb or 500gb holographic discs touted 20 years ago.. every other storage tech like that since then has been announced and never made. IBM had a millipede project that used MEMS probes to read/write data at a density of 1 terabit per square inch.. never came out. Countless other examples that I'll never remember exist. Never came out.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.

New comment by nullsmack in "AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings"

nullsmack — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 13:09:11 +0000

Reminds me of the scene in Real Genius.. where more and more students were leaving tape recorders on their desks to record a lecture and then eventually their professor left one playing a recorded lecture to a room full of tape recorders.

New comment by nullsmack in "Battery-electric "Infinity Train" will charge itself using gravity"

nullsmack — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 15:29:18 +0000

I've read about this same thing happening with electric dump trucks. There's articles from 2019 about one: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1124478_world-s-largest...

There are more articles about it, but this is one that didn't need a login to read.

New comment by nullsmack in "There should be no Computer Art (1971)"

nullsmack — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 17:35:33 +0000

idk, what did stubbing your toe make you feel. what did it say to you. what did the universe put into it?

New comment by nullsmack in "Nuclear power is officially a clean energy source in Colorado"

nullsmack — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 21:11:36 +0000

Great, how my trailers per year is that given existing plants. How many will it be if they start building more plants. How many hundreds of thousands of years will that need to be safely stored and guarded before it is safe? How many trailers will need to be stored by then?

New comment by nullsmack in "Pocket386 Retro DOS Computer 386SX-40Mhz"

nullsmack — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 19:55:21 +0000

I wish they'd make one of these with the Vortex86EX SOM-128-EX inside it. It'd be like a modern Toshiba Libretto 110.

New comment by nullsmack in "Man who threw away $750M in Bitcoin wants to buy the dump where it's buried"

nullsmack — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:59:15 +0000

This is kinda silly. I bet if this guy ever ends up finding his hard drive, it's probably not going to be readable anymore.