Hacker News: robmccoll

New comment by robmccoll in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

robmccoll — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 13:57:43 +0000

Musk sold Twitter into xAI which he then sold into SpaceX as a financial engineering effort to lessen the impact of massive debts and cash burn. The IPO and some clever structuring is the final step in the process.

New comment by robmccoll in "EV Stupidity Checklist"

robmccoll — Fri, 29 May 2026 22:11:59 +0000

My Nissan Ariya checks nearly every box. The controls for the AC have dedicated buttons, but they are capacitive, not tactile. Anyway, love the car. It's a real shame that they aren't selling them in the US anymore.

New comment by robmccoll in "Real-time LLM Inference on Standard GPUs: 3k tokens/s per request"

robmccoll — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:01:07 +0000

Making these claims on a 2B parameter model seems a bit like seeing linear scalability from 1 to 4 cores and then assuming 256 cores will give you a 256x speedup. Or demonstrating massive improvement on datasets that fit in cache and then assuming the same improvements will be present on problem sizes that span the memory of multiple machines. Something tells me that scaling to larger models will be more difficult than assumed.

New comment by robmccoll in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

robmccoll — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:48:05 +0000

* * *

New comment by robmccoll in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

robmccoll — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:38:55 +0000

Maybe - let's assume that we could simulate a human brain to a high level of fidelity starting from a known good state and emulate its input and output. Do you think we could poke at it enough and ask the simulated person about their experience enough to discover the mechanisms behind what we experience as a soul? It's logistically and computationally insanely complex to pull off, but if we could build such a system, I don't see why we couldn't eventually figure it out in another thousand years' time (assuming we don't destroy ourselves or do something that sets back the evolution of technology massively between now and then).

New comment by robmccoll in "Async Rust never left the MVP state"

robmccoll — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:46:49 +0000

Any solution that involves having to use a keyword to get the value returned from a function is such a poor design choice to me. Nearly every time I call a function I don't want to have to care if it is synchronous or not. I want the syntax and grammar (and illusion?) of one continuous thread of execution. The few times where I explicitly want to not wait are the places that should be special. This is why new languages should build in green threading from the start.

New comment by robmccoll in "Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0"

robmccoll — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 14:40:50 +0000

Being the least bad doesn't make something good. macOS is the least bad choice for the majority of people that just want a machine to mostly browse the Internet, look at their photos, do some light productivity work, and participate in their ecosystem. It also arguably hosts has the best software options for creative work (although that's reaping the fruits of seeds planted long ago - not sure there's much about macOS that makes it inherently better for those tasks these days). For development, its advantage is the hardware it's running on. To achieve any level of customization or to define my own workflow that isn't what Apple wants me to do or to work across multiple systems, I have to fight macOS rather than work with it. Linux on the other hand does what I tell it to do.

New comment by robmccoll in "Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0"

robmccoll — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 14:28:36 +0000

If they think macOS is one great idea, that's a terrible misjudgment.

New comment by robmccoll in "Google Gemma 4 Runs Natively on iPhone with Full Offline AI Inference"

robmccoll — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:53:16 +0000

Edge Gallery by Research at Google

New comment by robmccoll in "Claude mixes up who said what and that's not OK"

robmccoll — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:46:57 +0000

It seems like Halo's rampancy take on the breakdown of an AI is not a bad metaphor for the behavior of an LLM at the limits of its context window.

New comment by robmccoll in "Spring Boot Done Right: Lessons from a 400-Module Codebase"

robmccoll — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:08:42 +0000

Totally! But it doesn't have to be this way.

New comment by robmccoll in "Spring Boot Done Right: Lessons from a 400-Module Codebase"

robmccoll — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:07:30 +0000

I care because every second of that startup time is lost productivity and focus. For me and any developer on my team. Hot reload only works if no class or method has changed so that's not a solution. I've worked on codebases of similar size and complexity in many languages, and the developer experience of a compile and restart that takes less than five seconds is game changing.

New comment by robmccoll in "Spring Boot Done Right: Lessons from a 400-Module Codebase"

robmccoll — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:41:38 +0000

Does this app take 5 minutes to start? That's so much dynamic Spring magic. Also, how do you keep track of control flow when anything at anytime could have been overridden by something else? It seems like tracing and debugging this thing would be like exploring someone else's codebase every time.

New comment by robmccoll in "ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state"

robmccoll — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:59:47 +0000

Probably training data. The largest number of public repos are built on that stack. We recently picked React for new projects because LLMs seemed to be the most reliable when writing React code.

New comment by robmccoll in "A Faster Alternative to Jq"

robmccoll — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:32:11 +0000

jq is probably faster than storage, the network, compression, or something else in your stack and not your bottleneck.

New comment by robmccoll in "Swift 6.3"

robmccoll — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:41:34 +0000

Until you start using frameworks like Spring and then everything is so painfully magic that no one knows how the program actually runs.

New comment by robmccoll in "Why I forked httpx"

robmccoll — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:01:24 +0000

Since modshim isn't money patching and appears to only be wrapping the external API of a package, if the change is deep enough inside the package, wouldn't you end up reimplementing most of the package from the outside?

New comment by robmccoll in "BIO – The Bao I/O Co-Processor"

robmccoll — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:40:12 +0000

How did we go from ho-hum status quo to burn it all down in the US? Especially when the ho-hum status quo was pretty great for the people in power?

New comment by robmccoll in "Meta will shut down VR Horizon Worlds access June 15"

robmccoll — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:48:17 +0000

Yes! And now Meta is chasing that too and failing. It's not clear to me what advantage developing its own LLMs affords Meta. Google and the other platform companies, I get it, but it's not like Meta is using what's unique about their social data to train something interesting.

New comment by robmccoll in "What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable"

robmccoll — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:50:25 +0000

Helping the catastrophes along is Fallout.