Hacker News: snickmy

Xfra AI

snickmy — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:43:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.xfra.ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049359

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by snickmy in "Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server"

snickmy — Wed, 06 May 2026 09:08:31 +0000

sooo many memories.

got into it with Sphere (51 and 55) if my memory doesn't trick me.

was there ever a working port of the client for OSX ? would love to revamp it.

New comment by snickmy in "Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6"

snickmy — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:30:51 +0000

Agree. I'm unclear what's the highlight of this post. Is the multimodality of the model (that can replace computer vision), is it the reasoning part, is it the overall wrapper that makes it very easy to develop on top?

New comment by snickmy in "Gemini CLI tips and tricks for agentic coding"

snickmy — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 09:14:51 +0000

Addy delivers!

New comment by snickmy in "Solarpunk is happening in Africa"

snickmy — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 11:10:45 +0000

That is correct. When that will be available is the hard thing to guess.

There are currently enough production of electricity that is motor based (think about gas turbine, water turbines, etc), so there is a nice benefit of having AC at source and distribution.

The infrastructure needs to change. With an average lifetime of a substation in the 50-75years, it's hard to expect we'll overhaul completely the distribution system over night.

It's also hard for me to understand the power loss between the two scenarios (AC production, ac distribution, ac/dc conversion , dc consumption) and DC production, dc stepup to HVDC, dc distribution, DC stepdown and DC consumption). Even 1% at national scale means millions, so the entire business case might be anchored there. I'm sure there are smarter people than me here that can cast some light on this

New comment by snickmy in "Solarpunk is happening in Africa"

snickmy — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 12:01:06 +0000

I'm with you, and actually bullish on this to be a viable way forward.

48V DC has been eyed already for a potential standard to emerge. Doesn't need massive cables to deliver decent power (4A ~200W). There is enough hardware around coming from use cases like EV and Boats that could make it work. Many battery solutions already 'talk' 48v without lossy stepdown of voltage, etc.

Big plus is that the regulation is A LOT less strict for <48v DC compared to AC 110/220/240.

New comment by snickmy in "Solarpunk is happening in Africa"

snickmy — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 11:49:02 +0000

AC makes power distribution easier (because you can have modulated phases). So it's correct to say it's easier to move it over a long distance. Additionally, and i'm really simplifying, at parity of nominal voltage, you can move a lot more power, at a lower dissipation cost. This has resulted in few high power electronics to be AC native (ie.: no AC - DC - AC conversion). Think about motors in the various appliances, etc. It doesn't need to be like that, investment in DC car motors have pushed the industry to optimizes design, and get similar power output of the motor at lower energy consumption.

That said, if you are a manufacturer of an appliance and you have an addressable user base of billions with AC, and a 'potential new user base' with DC... you might just want to swallow the cost and add a DC / AC converter for the sake to not have to produce two variants of the most complex / costly item (the motor in this case).

New comment by snickmy in "USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)"

snickmy — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 11:11:03 +0000

Slightly off topic. Would you see any case where Ethernet(POE*) are replaced with native USB-c?

New comment by snickmy in "LLM Inevitabilism"

snickmy — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 08:20:21 +0000

An axiom of inevitabilism, especially among the highest echelons, is that you end up making it a reality. It’s the kind of belief that shapes reality itself. In simple terms: the fact that the Googles, Anthropics, and OpenAIs of the world have a strong interest in making LLMs the way AI pans out will most likely ensure that LLMs become the dominant paradigm — until someone else, with equal leverage, comes along to disrupt them.

New comment by snickmy in "LLM Inevitabilism"

snickmy — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 08:12:45 +0000

Just wanted to callout how well written is this blog post (not necessarily from a substance standpoint, which in my opinion is very good as well), but from a fluidity and narrative standpoint.

It's quite rare in this day and age. Thank you, OP

New comment by snickmy in "Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels"

snickmy — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 11:09:42 +0000

genuine, security newbie, question. What's the worst case scenario that can happen on using this type of solution from a security standpoint? I do get it the authentication would be compromised. Probably some internal ports would be exposed publicly too.. what else?

New comment by snickmy in "Huawei releases an open weight model trained on Huawei Ascend GPUs"

snickmy — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 17:25:51 +0000

thank you for conjugating correctly the 1st declension to the genitive, we all, that wasted many years studying latin, te salutant!

New comment by snickmy in "Huawei releases an open weight model trained on Huawei Ascend GPUs"

snickmy — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 14:10:26 +0000

that's already the case, and it's called model distillation. You use LLMs to generate labels but then you use a dedicated smaller model (usually NN) to run at 1000x cheaper cost of inference.

Uptime Industries wants to boost localized AI

snickmy — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 14:48:46 +0000

Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/11/uptime-industries-wants-to-boost-localized-ai-usage-with-an-ai-in-a-box-called-lemony-ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44248234

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by snickmy in "Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube"

snickmy — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 12:57:16 +0000

What does rhymes with "car"

New comment by snickmy in "Air Lab – A portable and open air quality measuring device"

snickmy — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 12:25:23 +0000

I really feel for the creators here. I was thinking exactly like that before trying to build an electronic device myself.

Later on I talked to people working in the hardware industry for small production scale, and pretty much told me that a fair pricing is usually 5x to 7x the total BOM (bill of materials).

After going through that experience myself, I couldn't agree more. This device in particular has some extra well thought design and style which might be worth a premium (on top of that 5x/7x multiplier).

New comment by snickmy in "Show HN: Air Lab – A portable and open air quality measuring device"

snickmy — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 12:13:10 +0000

different use cases. I don't expect you to go around with your air purifier attached to your neck :)

New comment by snickmy in "Why Bell Labs Worked"

snickmy — Mon, 12 May 2025 13:35:32 +0000

Shameless plug: I see few people in the comment that have been working there, or have had some first hand experience of that environment. I'd love the chance to interview them. This has been one of my main area of interest for a very long period. Anyone up for it ?

New comment by snickmy in "Norway's $1.7T Wealth Fund Reports $40B Tech-Driven Loss"

snickmy — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 10:57:52 +0000

that's not exactly how public companies work :)

New comment by snickmy in "Norway's $1.7T Wealth Fund Reports $40B Tech-Driven Loss"

snickmy — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 10:49:14 +0000

I mean ... 0.6% against a massive tech sell off, feels a very well managed fund to me :D