Hacker News: spockz

New comment by spockz in "The Orange Pi 6 Plus"

spockz — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:09:01 +0000

I can run my N100 nuc at 4W wall socket power draw idle. If I keep turbo boost off, it also stays there under normal load up to 6W full power. Then it is also terribly slow. With turbo boost enabled power draw can go to 8-10W on full load.

Not sure how this compares to the OrangePI in terms of performance per watt but it is already pretty far into the area of marginal gains for me at the cost of having to deal with ARM, custom housing, adapters to ensure the wall socket draw to be efficient etc. Having an efficient pico psu power a pi or orange pi is also not cheap.

New comment by spockz in "GitHub Stacked PRs"

spockz — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 04:59:33 +0000

Git-lfs exists for a while now. Does that fix your issue? Or do you mean that it doesn’t support binary diffs?

New comment by spockz in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

spockz — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 04:53:57 +0000

Yes. And the license only allows you to run macOS guests on macOS hosts. So using esxi means you don’t have any license for whatever macOS guests you run.

New comment by spockz in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

spockz — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:40:38 +0000

I’m really flummoxed at why the MacBooks continue to be spicy. When using then laptop with a charger using the grounded cable on the socket side there used to be no spice. Now that adapters are mostly only used with two prong connectors the spicyness is ubiquitous.

I recall audio equipment also not being grounded because the industry prefers not being grounded over being accidentally grounded to two different grounds causing voltage transients. Maybe the same reason now also applies to MacBooks? Or does someone know another reason why the outer shell of a MacBook is still spicy.

New comment by spockz in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

spockz — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:35:54 +0000

Also the two corner points next to the air slits underneath the screen when folded open. When I wipe away dust there it can feel slightly uncomfortable.

The pci extension slot edges in most PC cases or the IO are way sharper. I’ve cut myself regularly on those when I was a little kid tweaking cases.

New comment by spockz in "DRAM has a design flaw from 1966. I bypassed it [video]"

spockz — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 18:33:35 +0000

Request hedging or backup requests are indeed the terms I know for requests where you give the first request a bit of a headstart. I didn’t know about the term happy eyeball to signify that all requests fire at the same time.

New comment by spockz in "Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview"

spockz — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:47:37 +0000

Ive always wondered where the inflection point lies between on the one hand trying to train the model on all kinds of data such as Wikipedia/encyclopedia, versus in the system prompt pointing to your local versions of those data sources, perhaps even through a search like api/tool.

Is there already some research or experimentation done into this area?

New comment by spockz in "Scientific audio equipment analysis with analyzer shows no difference in quality"

spockz — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 17:46:27 +0000

Here you are comparing a decent bluetooth speaker to a pretty good wireless active speaker to a hifi setup. I think the original comment about audiophiles is them wasting money on upgrading the hifi setup with all kinds of audio cabling, bi-wiring, etc.

That would be similar to upgrading to that one tiny bit sharper lens which otherwise has the same aperture etc.

New comment by spockz in "Scientific audio equipment analysis with analyzer shows no difference in quality"

spockz — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 17:31:22 +0000

Is it a waste if it makes you happy?

New comment by spockz in "The road to electric in charts and data"

spockz — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 10:30:33 +0000

Because newer batteries are not degrading as fast due to better thermal and load management. Because newer cars use newer chemistries that are less prone to degradation.

Moreover, just like some cars are good enough for people now, the cars with some degraded batteries will be good enough for some second hand buyers.

New comment by spockz in "AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip"

spockz — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 11:26:43 +0000

I hoping that phoronix will be able to redo the benchmark of the 9950x3D with this new X3D2 variant.

I might even shell out for an upgrade to AM5 and DDR5. On the other hand, my 5900X is still blazing fast.

New comment by spockz in "AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip"

spockz — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 07:25:13 +0000

I think GP was saying that the additional 3D cache on this chip compared to the standard x3d isn’t going to do much.

I’m curious to see whether the same benchmarks benefit again so greatly.

New comment by spockz in "Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance"

spockz — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:08:45 +0000

Here in the Netherlands ford sales seem to have completely consumed by Kia sales. Around me houses that typically had Fords now have Kia’s, Toyota, Tesla or small Volvo like EX30/40.

After the huge hits of the focus and to some extend Mondeo, the Kuga has sold subpar. There were only a few new ones around here. Now you see some new EV Ford Explorer SUV and just a tiny account of the big old Explorer. (Yes, the traditional Explorer suv counts as big here.)

In the mean time there is an explosion of BYD, Volvo, Skoda Enyaq, etc happening. Mostly driven by which model has the most beneficial tax package for lease.

New comment by spockz in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

spockz — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 09:58:25 +0000

IIRC from some discord threads, some games already perform better on Linux than on Windows. We are getting there. The only moat left is kernel anti cheat for games like Battlefield. I’m just fine if those stay on windows actually.

New comment by spockz in "The Ugliest Airplane: An Appreciation"

spockz — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:57:38 +0000

I also like the Optica! It somehow has a lot of space vibes from Freelancer and FireFly. Shame of the large toy like duct indeed. But I suspect it works!

New comment by spockz in "Java 26 is here"

spockz — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:19:01 +0000

I would love to have a Java compiler with the capabilities of the .net compiler. To make incremental builds to aid code completion including type information, looking past simple syntactical errors, fixing them, and continuing compilation.

Currently, this is “magic” embedded in eclipse, IntelliJ, and maybe a bit in the vscode plugin. Imagine having a Java LSP running that can provide all this information while typing.

.net has had this for ages. From a language design I think that is wonderful.

New comment by spockz in "Kona EV Hacking"

spockz — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:41:17 +0000

In Italy there are enough chargers that charge for both kWh and time connected. kWh for what you use and connected to discourage being connected all the time.

New comment by spockz in "Fedora 44 on the Raspberry Pi 5"

spockz — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:46:37 +0000

I get 3-5W, mostly 4W on my N100 nuc. WiFi disabled through bios. And I ran powertop and made the suggested changes. 1 stick of 16gib lpDDR5, 1 nvme ssd, 1 4TB SATA ssd. Under full cpu load usage goes up to 8-12W. When also the gpu is busy with encoding the consumption grows to 20-24W. This is with turbo clock enabled. With it disabled power draw stays around 4W, but it is annoyingly slow I enabled turbo again and just content with the odd power peak.

New comment by spockz in "How kernel anti-cheats work"

spockz — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:33:00 +0000

To do real time analysis and interception probably not. But for after the fact analysis, if a player is moving on knowledge he couldn’t have had because it shouldn’t have been rendered yet or something, then you can assume cheating.

New comment by spockz in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

spockz — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:19:51 +0000

Indeed, it doesn’t matter too much, as long as it is consistent.

People running their own formatting or changes re-adding spaces, sorting attributes in xml tags, etc. All leading to churn. By codifying the formatting rules the formatting will always be the same and diffs will contain only the essence.