Hacker News: quickthoughts

New comment by quickthoughts in "AI Coding at Home Without Going Broke"

quickthoughts — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:13:11 +0000

Ha just wrote a post[1] about a sort of 4th option - max out cheap compute to create more tangible things that can be used/run locally.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48519181

New comment by quickthoughts in "Vercel Drop"

quickthoughts — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:08:19 +0000

what does this actually do? claude output -> drop -> app that you can't really change?

A case for AI-pragmatism – leverage cheap compute while it's here

quickthoughts — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:06:24 +0000

Article URL: https://quickthoughts.ca/posts/a-case-for-pragmatism-in-ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48519181

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by quickthoughts in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

quickthoughts — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:26:04 +0000

Are most corporations preformative? (yes)

New comment by quickthoughts in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

quickthoughts — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 18:32:22 +0000

I use small models like Gemma to improve transcriptions from ASR models amongst other micro-tasks. I actually built out a fine-tuning whisper pipeline with all local (smaller) models meaning no cloud/big-tech co is able to train/sell my (private) data.

Repo is https://github.com/Rebreda/listenr - mainly geared toward Whisper fine-tuning, AMD hardware and local inference

New comment by quickthoughts in "Apple's privacy invading tech is likely going mainstream"

quickthoughts — Mon, 11 May 2026 11:45:00 +0000

I don't think this will be the case, image and video processing typically is more computation hungry, especially in realtime contexts. Apple already pegged Google as their cloud-provider of choice when it comes to LLMs/AI compute.

https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/apple...

Apple's privacy invading tech is likely going mainstream

quickthoughts — Mon, 11 May 2026 02:12:31 +0000

Article URL: https://quickthoughts.ca/posts/self-owning-ai-tech/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48090317

Points: 6

# Comments: 6

New comment by quickthoughts in "FBI is buying location data to track US citizens, director confirms"

quickthoughts — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:58:22 +0000

It's everyone. Especially google, but all the big tech companies play in the same pool. Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta etc make money selling ads, which ultimate enables the tools that result data harvesting from everyone across the internet. I wrote a little data investigation [1] (mostly finished) that show cases how every major news organization across the globe I scanned had some level of data collection integrated. This is just one industry, but its important (as it connects back to the incentives these media organizations have, which is to make money by selling ads at any cost). The eff also released an angle in how the bidding process to buy ads is itself a massive privacy nightmare[2]

[1] https://quickthoughts.ca/autotracko/ [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/targeted-advertising-g...

New comment by quickthoughts in "My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)"

quickthoughts — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:32:06 +0000

I've been working on the flip side of this with ASR models, but the problem space is the same, conversational/real-world data is needed. Whisper often mistook actual words I say and hallucinate all the time when speaking technical jargon. The solution is to fine-tuning whisper with my own data. Hardest part imo was getting the actual data, which in turn got me to build listenr (https://github.com/rebreda/listenr).It's an always-on VAD-based audio dataset builder. Could be used for building conversational/real-world voice datasets for TTS models too?

After getting it working i was get motivation to actually able to build out the full fine-tuning pipeline. I wrote a little post about it all https://quickthoughts.ca/posts/listenr-asr-training-data-pro...

New comment by quickthoughts in "Coffee for people who don't like coffee"

quickthoughts — Wed, 14 May 2025 04:22:08 +0000

Plus one for the IKEA pour over. Its cheap and functional, perfect for travel too.

New comment by quickthoughts in "Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?"

quickthoughts — Mon, 12 May 2025 11:33:44 +0000

VSCode with auto complete and Gemini 2.5 Pro in a standalone chat (pick any interface that works for you, eg librechat, vertex etc). The agents-in-a-IDE experience is hella slow in my opinion.

Plus its less about the actual code generation and more about how to use it effectively. I wrote a simple piece on how I use it to automate the boring parts of dev work to great effect https://quickthoughts.ca/posts/automate-smarter-maximizing-r...)