Hacker News: smlacy

New comment by smlacy in "I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)"

smlacy — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:19:36 +0000

IMHO this article misses a couple really important points.

First, if the mesh can use Internet or other transports then it will, and it will be built out in a way where these become a necessity. If all you want is a silly new way to text your friends, then something like reticulum will be ok. But if you want a serious solution for emergency response and free communication -- free as in "no one can stop me or control what is said no matter what" then building something independent from scratch is critically important.

Second, the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works.

This is hugely important for emergency preparedness and disaster recovery. Especially in places prone to any form of natural disaster.

It's certainly the early days, and it's clear that there's a long way to go, but I really feel that these fully decentralized solar powered networks are hugely important as a simple alternative to the corporate behemoth the internet has become.

New comment by smlacy in "California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply"

smlacy — Thu, 07 May 2026 17:30:48 +0000

Yeah especially given that California is a leader in renewable energy sources.

New comment by smlacy in "California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply"

smlacy — Thu, 07 May 2026 17:30:19 +0000

How about just ditching this disgusting use of a finite resource and switch to an infinitely abundant resource?

New comment by smlacy in "Ti-84 Evo"

smlacy — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:55:44 +0000

IMHO surprisingly low. Still not clear to me why they don't just port these things to ARM or similar?

New comment by smlacy in "Ti-84 Evo"

smlacy — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:00:10 +0000

156 MHz!!!!

New comment by smlacy in "Copy Fail"

smlacy — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:30:49 +0000

The fetishism of "byte count" (here, as "732 byte python script") needs to stop, especially when in a context like this where they're trying to illustrate a real failure modality.

Looking at their source code [1] it starts with this simple line:

import os as g,zlib,socket as s

And already I'm perplexed. "os as g"? but we're not aliasing "zlib as z"? Clearly this is auto-generated by some kind of minimizer? Likely because zlib is called only once, and os multiple times. As a code author/reviewer, I would never write "os as g" and I would absolutely never approve review of any code that used this.

Anyway, I could go on. :) Let's just stop fetishizing byte count

[1] https://github.com/theori-io/copy-fail-CVE-2026-31431/blob/m...

New comment by smlacy in "Our principles"

smlacy — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:51:28 +0000

PRINCIPLES.md

New comment by smlacy in "A programmable watch you can actually wear"

smlacy — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:45:32 +0000

What would you suggest instead?

New comment by smlacy in "Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era"

smlacy — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:12:03 +0000

> TPU 8i pairs 288 GB of high-bandwidth memory with 384 MB of on-chip SRAM

Wow. Just Wow. I presume that's for each chip, and there are 1152 chips in a pod so that's 331TB HBM and 442TB SRAM per pod. Just wow.

New comment by smlacy in "Filing the Corners Off MacBooks"

smlacy — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:36:14 +0000

Is it me or is that aluminum already developing some stress cracking?

New comment by smlacy in "Muse Spark: Scaling towards personal superintelligence"

smlacy — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:40:53 +0000

Post actual results, make a blog post. Don't just say "this sucks" without tangible evidence.

Otherwise you're doomed to "sample size of one" level of relevance.

New comment by smlacy in "Teenage Engineering's PO-32 acoustic modem and synth implementation"

smlacy — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:40:33 +0000

The synth engine is an implementation of https://soniccharge.com/microtonic Not sure what "accurate" means in your context though?

New comment by smlacy in "Run a 1T parameter model on a 32gb Mac by streaming tensors from NVMe"

smlacy — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:59:51 +0000

Yes, and with virtually zero context, which makes an enormous difference for TTFT on the MoE models.

New comment by smlacy in "iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM"

smlacy — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:04:51 +0000

Total gimmick. I guess we're "making progress", but this is will never lead to any useful application other than "Yes, you're absulotely right" bots. What's needed for real applications is 10000× the input token context and 10× the output token speed, so we're off by a factor of ... 100,000×?

New comment by smlacy in "iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM"

smlacy — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:02:16 +0000

This should be the top comment

New comment by smlacy in "iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM"

smlacy — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:01:11 +0000

And with only like a dozen tokens of context. What happens when this thing gets the ~100k tokens of context needed to actually make it useful?

New comment by smlacy in "AI coding is gambling"

smlacy — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:23:16 +0000

I like the analogy but which 2 is AI coding?

Fast & Cheap (but not Good?) - I wouldn't really say that AI coding is "cheap"

Cheap & Good (but not Fast) - Again, not really "cheap"

Fast & Good (but not Cheap) - This seems like maybe where we're at? Is this a bad place?

New comment by smlacy in "Google Engineers Launch "Sashiko" for Agentic AI Code Review of the Linux Kernel"

smlacy — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:28:28 +0000

What's your concern?

New comment by smlacy in "DARPA’s new X-76"

smlacy — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 22:33:10 +0000

That background looks like AI for sure though?

New comment by smlacy in "A ternary plot of citrus geneology"

smlacy — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 22:46:27 +0000

Seems to be missing the Etrog? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_taxonomy#Citrons

Also, the "click to show search results" is cool but fails for "Arizona Citron" in obvious ways.