Hacker News: rjh29

New comment by rjh29 in "AI is now capable of developing its own inference hardware"

rjh29 — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:38:18 +0000

I guess that's why they work in particular niche spaces like a synthesizer where you have a max of 8 voices and every voice goes through the same pipeline (osc / filter / env / amp) and everything is necessarily running all the time. In that sense I suppose they're very good for modelling any kind of analog circuitry?

Even then, while there are some amazing FPGA-based synths available, companies like Korg just put their code on a raspberry pi and call it a day. The same is true for emulators (SNES Mini etc. are also just raspberry pis under the hood iirc)

New comment by rjh29 in "Gemini ending free use of Flash and Pro models"

rjh29 — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 13:17:23 +0000

Flash-Lite is unusable for anything other than search summarisation, imo. The interesting part is other providers are still offering Flash-level models for free. Now that Google have paywalled it, how will they respond?

New comment by rjh29 in "Barcodes are about to go extinct"

rjh29 — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 09:53:27 +0000

The 2020s equivalent of using clip-art. Fine for most people but looks too generic for a b2b site.

New comment by rjh29 in "Gemini ending free use of Flash and Pro models"

rjh29 — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 09:13:19 +0000

Flash and Pro models are moving to paid plans, free users will only get Flash-Lite. Flash-Lite is the same model used by the Android phone Gemini app and AI Overviews in Google Search, which is very poor at reasoning and makes many errors.

Personally, I've been using the free plan quite a lot and never hit a rate limit, but noticed the quality dropping. Pro was almost never available. Perhaps they aren't able to deliver a good quality Flash model to free users.

Gemini ending free use of Flash and Pro models

rjh29 — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 09:13:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1wwalmc/wtf_google_getting_rid_of_free_gemini_flash_and/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49942592

Points: 59

# Comments: 53

New comment by rjh29 in "Apple Pass Designer"

rjh29 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:05:21 +0000

Starbucks on Google can be added to Google Wallet. But then I went to use it and they told me to close wallet and open the app. Shrug.

I've had patchy success with adding boarding passes to the wallet too. Support seems half baked.

New comment by rjh29 in "Redditor buys used CPU, turns out it was banned on Valorant and they are SoL"

rjh29 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:44:28 +0000

The Denuvo hack uses Windows Hypervisor to intercept cpuid, maybe that would work?

New comment by rjh29 in "Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?"

rjh29 — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 12:02:55 +0000

Not recently but when I was a teenager (2001-ish) my supermarket was using a DOS computer to handle stock, print new labels when prices updated each day, etc.

New comment by rjh29 in "Disney+ and Hulu raise prices by up to 13 percent after doubling profits"

rjh29 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 15:55:40 +0000

It's funny because everyone predicted this would happen back when Netflix had everything and was $5. "Eventually other companies are going to make their own apps, put in ads, increase prices and we'll be back to $80 a month"

New comment by rjh29 in "Enjoy Every Sandwich"

rjh29 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 15:54:25 +0000

Ever since I did the "The Science of Well-Being" coursera course way back when, and got into mindfulness, I always try to saviour my daily sandwich! And also mix it up a bit (cutting it differently, using new ingredients). Both of these are tiny things in isolation but if you do stuff like this throughout the day it makes a measurable difference to happiness.

New comment by rjh29 in "Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton"

rjh29 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 15:50:32 +0000

Good memories of visiting used bookshops near Kyoto University with stacks upon stacks of obscure literary works and research material. Lots of interesting books about the Japanese language that were never digitized and I always left with 2-3 new books. So I'm not super happy about AI companies hoovering this all up and not making the scans available.

New comment by rjh29 in "Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy"

rjh29 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:51:17 +0000

That's not a new thing. I bought my first apple product (an iPad) last year and the free trials and nagging to set up iCloud cause the Settings app to have a red dot all of the time.

New comment by rjh29 in "A Tokyo school counts the mornings it can see Mt. Fuji: 22 in 1965, 170 in 2023"

rjh29 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:50:17 +0000

^ Yeah I mentioned the OP had created a ton of different AI projects (based on history) but I deleted it because I have no proof OP is the author. It does seem likely though!

New comment by rjh29 in "A Tokyo school counts the mornings it can see Mt. Fuji: 22 in 1965, 170 in 2023"

rjh29 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:27:24 +0000

Mostly an advert for JIVX language learning tools. The entire site seems to be AI generated and there is no real trace of a human involved in the writing or curation.

New comment by rjh29 in "Dropbox's Jan 1st 2027 terms of service"

rjh29 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 10:00:46 +0000

Dropbox is 2TB for the same price as your 40GB. Cool idea though.

New comment by rjh29 in "Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries"

rjh29 — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:46:40 +0000

It's true. But I'm just happy it's not another AI post

New comment by rjh29 in "Steam Frame starts at $1059"

rjh29 — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 21:13:58 +0000

I know that feeling. I had it with Resident Evil 4 and other full games in VR. It's almost too immersive and I can't play more than an hour or so.

New comment by rjh29 in "Steam Frame starts at $1059"

rjh29 — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 20:34:51 +0000

There are two use-cases. Already sitting at a PC and you just pop your headset on - your idea makes sense. But traditional VR means standing up in a dedicated space (2m x 2m) and demands uninterrupted time. That's a high friction activity, and adding setting up a PC and Oculus Link and Steam VR before you start playing makes that friction even higher to the point where it's a niche hobby. Most casual players are doing stuff like VRChat and Beat Saber which can run on low powered hardware, so having a basic game-playing ability is a good idea.

New comment by rjh29 in "This Month in Ladybird – August 2026"

rjh29 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:06:11 +0000

It is a nightmare scenario: you have a long tail of thousands of websites that are broken, a large complex codebase and you need hours of time per bug for a human to investigate and fix it. Some trickier bugs could take days to diagnose. It's not sustainable for a small team. Luckily, I think this is one of the cases where AI can be leveraged appropriately, and give them a fighting chance of catching up.

New comment by rjh29 in "Can AI design circuit boards yet?"

rjh29 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 18:06:46 +0000

I agree with you, high frequency is a totally different domain. But for the majority of projects, you don't need to buy special equipment. It's very accessible and PCBs are super cheap to print nowadays.

I am definitely bitter (and biased) because I frequent a PCB review subreddit and increasingly people show up with zero knowledge expecting people to review their AI-generated projects for free.