Hacker News: searealist

New comment by searealist in "Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers"

searealist — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 19:42:01 +0000

As someone who has played BAR, it's hard to read this as not being maximally sarcastic.

New comment by searealist in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

searealist — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 15:25:01 +0000

The cancer thing is just a contrived analogy. His real concern is having himself and his mathematician friends replaced by AI. Appealing to someone's health is an easier sell and then it can normalize the relationship of medical priests, and math priests, etc.

New comment by searealist in "Nitter: Update Oct 10th seeking funding and legal help"

searealist — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 11:50:09 +0000

Can we skip to the moat?

New comment by searealist in "What is Codemode"

searealist — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 07:32:31 +0000

It's more like this:

Right now when a model wants to call 1 or more tools, there is a fixed json schema to describe the tool calls.

Codemode is like: Why don't we just let the model write a program to call the tools and compose them however it wants? The key is that the programming language exposed to do this (usually javascript) will have APIs available to do some things internal to the harness (like call tools/mcp).

New comment by searealist in "What is Codemode"

searealist — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 05:32:35 +0000

That's one kind of MCP. Another is a local stdio server.

Also there are things like subagents, etc (which may be considered tools).

New comment by searealist in "What is Codemode"

searealist — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 05:03:15 +0000

Can do you make a tool or mcp call from bash?

New comment by searealist in "Couple was swatted 55 times in 2 years over a post about Norm Macdonald"

searealist — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 02:11:44 +0000

In Canada?

New comment by searealist in "DeepSeek Harness Desktop for macOS and Windows"

searealist — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 05:56:03 +0000

There are good reasons they have all converged on this model:

- The models can generate html/js as output instead of markdown. They all support something like "artifacts" that can displayed in the transcript or a tabbed panel.

- Many of them are able to have the model generate plugins to customize the harness. Typescript/V8 is really good for this.

- They all allow you to open web pages in a tabbed panel. Sure, you can do this with native be embedding a web browser, but with the previous points, you have to wonder if you should just use Electron / Tauri.

New comment by searealist in "Klassik Revives the KDE 3 Desktop on Modern Plasma 6"

searealist — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 22:12:33 +0000

I dunno. Windows 98 is very usable. What does Gnome 3 have that someone who never used Windows 98 would miss?

New comment by searealist in "Klassik Revives the KDE 3 Desktop on Modern Plasma 6"

searealist — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 08:38:17 +0000

What other desktop environment doesn't have a dock or taskbar?

Age has nothing to do with it. Gnome 3 is just bad.

New comment by searealist in "Klassik Revives the KDE 3 Desktop on Modern Plasma 6"

searealist — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 07:16:13 +0000

You can configure KDE Plasma to be nearly identical to Gnome 2 / Mate.

It's great.

New comment by searealist in "Klassik Revives the KDE 3 Desktop on Modern Plasma 6"

searealist — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 06:10:55 +0000

Unlike modern Gnome, KDE Plasma is _really_ good. In fact, you can configure it to almost perfectly mirror Gnome 2.

That being said, this is really cool, and brings back a lot of memories.

New comment by searealist in "The Great Crime Decline Is Happening All Across the Country"

searealist — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 03:22:31 +0000

On the one hand, you have a meta-analysis estimating 7–28% of the U.S. homicide decline, depending on the model, after correcting for publication bias. That’s 4–15 percentage points of a 54% decline.[1]

On the other hand, you have the Dunedin study, where lead exposure was uncorrelated with measured socioeconomic status, which found weak links with offending overall and no significant link to violent crime.[2]

In any case, people talk about this like lead was the dominant factor in the violent crime decline, when these results don’t establish that. Even the meta-analysis leaves most of the homicide decline unexplained by lead.

[1] https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/332830/1/332830.pdf

[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

New comment by searealist in "The great crime decline is happening all across the country"

searealist — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 01:39:30 +0000

I thought we were pretending it was lead?

New comment by searealist in "M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review"

searealist — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 05:37:16 +0000

How does this relate to 4500 vs 5090? I'm just pointing out that 5090 likely has twice the performance of the 4500 and likely maintains that at 2x watts if you want.

New comment by searealist in "M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review"

searealist — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:30:59 +0000

A 5090 has 2x tensor cores and 2x bandwidth and can be run at 400W (2x watts).

New comment by searealist in "M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review"

searealist — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 18:16:56 +0000

... or with llama.cpp with MTP.

New comment by searealist in "US troop deaths during Iran war exceed Pentagon count by at least four"

searealist — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 23:40:49 +0000

It depends who is president.

New comment by searealist in "The Inference Hardware Revolution of 2026"

searealist — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 08:17:53 +0000

2x is more typical, and only for dense models, not the sparse models all frontier labs use.

New comment by searealist in "EasyEffects can improve laptop speaker sound quality"

searealist — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 06:31:42 +0000

Also, even the best speakers in the world can benefit from room correction, because every room behaves differently. The difference is HUGE in the lower frequencies.