Hacker News: slacka

New comment by slacka in "Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act"

slacka — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:44:24 +0000

It was removed. Here is the archived version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260313125244/https://old.reddi...

New comment by slacka in "Reverse-engineering the UniFi inform protocol"

slacka — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:03:03 +0000

Sounds like a massive waste of your time for NextDNS admins and a poor UX for end users. If your security relies on trusting old domains, then you need to rethink your security. Also, I bet it's just as easy for you to accidentally whitelist a bad actors as to blacklist a good one. What am I missing here?

New comment by slacka in "If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?"

slacka — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 18:41:22 +0000

You're missing the point. The effective tax rate of many billionaires is lower than ours. "Musk with a fortune of $244 billion, paid an average effective tax rate of 24% from 2018 to 2020". In other years it was as low as 3%[2].

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/income-taxes-billionaire-tax-ra...

[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

New comment by slacka in "Experimenting with Local LLMs on macOS"

slacka — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 16:01:55 +0000

I too found that interesting that Apple's Neural Engine doesn't work with local LLMs. Seems like Apple, AMD, and Intel are missing the AI boat by not properly supporting their NPUs in llama.cpp. Any thoughts on why this is?

New comment by slacka in "Apple releases FastVLM and MobileCLIP2 on HF, real-time video captioning"

slacka — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 01:54:29 +0000

FastVLM: https://huggingface.co/collections/apple/fastvlm-68ac97b9cd5...

MobileCLIP2: https://huggingface.co/collections/apple/mobileclip2-68ac947...

Apple releases FastVLM and MobileCLIP2 on HF, real-time video captioning

slacka — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 01:54:29 +0000

Article URL: https://huggingface.co/spaces/apple/fastvlm-webgpu

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071268

Points: 6

# Comments: 2

New comment by slacka in "Nvidia Nemotron Nano v2"

slacka — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 23:36:53 +0000

Very interesting model. Some key points from the blog:

* NVIDIA is also releasing most of the data they used to create it, including the pretraining corpus

* The model uses a hybrid architecture consisting primarily of Mamba-2 and MLP layers combined with just four Attention layers. For the architecture, please refer to the Nemotron-H tech report. The model was trained using Megatron-LM and NeMo-RL.

At this size and with only 4 attention layers, it should run very fast locally on cheap 12GB GPUs.

New comment by slacka in "Version 2 of Higgs Audio Generation"

slacka — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 19:59:48 +0000

Higgs Audio V2 is an advanced, open-source audio generation model developed by Boson AI, designed to produce highly expressive and lifelike speech with robust multi-speaker dialogue capabilities.

Some Highlights:

* Trained on 10M hours of diverse audio — speech, music, sound events, and natural conversations

* Built on top of Llama 3.2 3B for deep language and acoustic understanding

* Runs in real-time and supports edge deployment — smallest versions run on Jetson Orin Nano

* Outperforms GPT-4o-mini-tts and ElevenLabs v2 in prosody, emotional expressiveness, and multi-speaker dialogue

* Zero-shot natural multi-speaker dialogues — voices adapt tone, energy, and emotion automatically

* Zero-shot voice cloning with melodic humming and expressive intonation — no fine-tuning needed

* Multilingual support with automatic prosody adaptation for narration and dialogue

* Simultaneous speech and background music generation — a first for open audio foundation models

* High-fidelity 24kHz audio output for studio-quality sound on any device

* Open source and commercially usable — no barriers to experimentation or deployment

Model on Huggingface: https://huggingface.co/bosonai/higgs-audio-v2-generation-3B-...

Version 2 of Higgs Audio Generation

slacka — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 19:59:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.boson.ai/blog/higgs-audio-v2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44704174

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by slacka in "Drug Development Failure: how GLP-1 development was abandoned in 1990"

slacka — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 21:32:18 +0000

How is this the trolley problem for someone with a terminal disease? I assume the sick population are the people in the trolley and the experimental patient is the person on the track? In this scenario, by not pulling the lever you just extend the life of the people on the trolley to the end of the ride for a dangerous drug. Where as, pulling the level could save the life of the person on the track and the people in the trolley if the drug is successful.

What am I missing? For non-terminal diseases, it's a bit murkier, but still I don't follow the analogy.

New comment by slacka in "Linux Crisis Tools"

slacka — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 02:30:54 +0000

Why don't recommend atop? When a system is unresponsive, I want a I want a high-level tool that immediately shows which subsystem is under heavy load. It should show CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network usage. The other tools you listed are great, once you know what the cause is.

New comment by slacka in "C23: A Slightly Better C"

slacka — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 21:27:07 +0000

All of the features descried in the article are supported by clang except maybe for the constexpr keyword. By your own list, neither one supports all the features. Also, gcc only supports about 4 or 5 features more than gcc, and clang supports a few gcc doesn't. Hardly "much better".

New comment by slacka in "Examples of AI rip-offs making their way into Google News"

slacka — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 15:57:21 +0000

For the Internet as a whole, yes, but not for this narrow case of legitimate news organizations. If Facebook could have building full of moderators to review flagged content on their site, Google could easily fix this issue with a team to handle reports of low quality AI content. Not to mention, how most of these sites sprung up out of nowhere. That should already be a red flag for the algorithm to de-rank until a human could review. And the example of reworded blog spam with identical photos, posted at a later date, again, should be trivial for a team that cared to catch manually(flagged) or through an algorithm.

It's not over, unless Google doesn't care enough about Google News to fix it.

New comment by slacka in "Doom Released Under GPLv2"

slacka — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 19:55:22 +0000

So you prefer, the DSL or GPL over GPLv2? The Doom Source License (or DSL) is the original source code license under which the Doom source code was released in late 1997.[1] I'll take this over the years and years the past licensing has caused any day.[2]

[1]https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Doom_Source_License#:~:text=The....

[2] https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/44358-doom-license-amp...

New comment by slacka in "Bluetooth keystroke-injection in Android, Linux, macOS and iOS"

slacka — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 14:48:18 +0000

This vulnerability is about injecting keystrokes into connected wireless keyboards and mice.[1] With the phone industry adoption of USB-C, they've made wired easier than ever before.

[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/bluetooth/bluez.git/commit/pr...

New comment by slacka in "YouTube is crippling Firefox on Asahi Linux?"

slacka — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 12:41:36 +0000

Did you even read the post before you commented? From the post:

> I believe this only triggers on software decoding, which is why it particularly affects us (and not, say, macOS which has hardware decoding).

It's completely sensible for YT to assume an ARM device without acceleration needs lower quality video.

New comment by slacka in "The first stable release of a memory safe sudo implementation"

slacka — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 13:37:18 +0000

Would be interesting to see a a Debian derivative that combines this with the Rust Implementation Of GNU Coreutils.[1] Could be a big win for memory safety and performance.

[1] https://github.com/uutils/coreutils

New comment by slacka in "Cats Are Perfect. An Evolutionary Biologist Explains Why"

slacka — Sun, 08 Oct 2023 20:52:37 +0000

Cat fluff piece. Owl’s are far more “evolved” to their predatory niche. In addition, every land animal of prey are on are on the menu for wolves. Cat’s lack of social evolution greatly limits their choice. So much for perfection.

Wolves have taking their social evolution one step further by allowing them to join forces, co-evolving with man. This cat biologist could use a lesson from a human evolutionary biologist.[1] There is a good chance we wouldn't be where we are today, if it weren’t for that perfect combination.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/dogs-humans-evolved-toge...

New comment by slacka in "Category Theory Illustrated – Sets"

slacka — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 02:36:23 +0000

The author said he is just starting on the book, so he's not claiming it's perfect. And the beauty of github, open source is you can fix them with a pull request. For example, the svg is here: https://github.com/abuseofnotation/category-theory-illustrat...

New comment by slacka in "Google no longer offers new domain registrations"

slacka — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 14:39:43 +0000

Counter point, I've been using a VoIP service called GrandCentral since college. Google purchased them. Nearly 20 years later, I'm still using that same number with far more feature. In this case, Squarespace acquired Google Domains. Assuming the transition as seamless as GrandCentral was for me, what's the issue here? From what I've heard of Squarespace and their support, they will be just as good a custodian as Google.