Hacker News: stoobs

New comment by stoobs in "221 Cannon is Not For Sale"

stoobs — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 17:00:40 +0000

You can also file a restriction registration to prevent anyone from registering a mortgage against the property: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/enter-a-restricti...

New comment by stoobs in "Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft"

stoobs — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 16:13:38 +0000

These days it could also be Most vaunted prompt

New comment by stoobs in "Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires"

stoobs — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:52:44 +0000

Weird, I've never needed to do that - Royal Mail or whichever courier is handling it will either put a note for customs payment through the door (Royal Mail/Parcelforce), or send me an invoice via post or email (any of the other couriers).

New comment by stoobs in "Steam Machine"

stoobs — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 11:39:07 +0000

"- No indication for whether the CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD are upgradable or all soldered together on the board."

SSD and RAM are user replaceable, CPU and GPU are soldered

New comment by stoobs in "NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy"

stoobs — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 10:34:21 +0000

Yeah, that's because cuda on a mac isn't a thing - it could be swapped to the normal torch package but you'd have to do some code patching to make sure it's running on mps, even then some of the code may need rewriting/patching if there's no mps version of the cuda kernals.

New comment by stoobs in "How big a solar battery do I need to store all my home's electricity?"

stoobs — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 13:20:58 +0000

Not all battery technology is as volatile as Lithium-Ion or Lithium Polymer, LiFePO4 for example isn't subject to thermal runaway, nor are some of the Sodium-Ion batteries (although it's dependent on the exact chemistry being used).

New comment by stoobs in "Grapevine canes can be converted into plastic-like material that will decompose"

stoobs — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 09:57:37 +0000

PLA doesn't actually biodegrade outside of specialist industrial facilities, it was much vaunted as an eco friendly thing when 3d printing started using it, but we rapidly found out it can last decades without breaking down much if at all.

New comment by stoobs in "Nano Banana image examples"

stoobs — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 22:50:47 +0000

I'm in AI Studio, and weirdly I get no safety settings.

I had them before when I was trying this and yes, I had them turned off.

New comment by stoobs in "Nano Banana image examples"

stoobs — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 22:34:47 +0000

I'm pretty sure these are cherry-picked out of many generation attempts, I tried a few basic things and it flat out refused to do many of them like turning a cartoon illustration into a real-world photographic portrait, it kept wanting to create a pixar style image, then when I used an ai generated portrait as an example, it refused with an error saying it wouldn't modify real world people...

I then tried to generate some multi-angle product shots from a single photo of an object, and it just refused to do the whole left, right, front, back thing, and kept doing things like a left, a front, another left, and weird half back/half side view combination.

Very frustrating.

New comment by stoobs in "UK government advises deleting emails to save water"

stoobs — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 15:39:47 +0000

Not anywhere near as much as the stereotypes/memes/etc would have you believe.

Most of the issue though is the water companies funnelling revenue to shareholders and not maintaining the network, so they lose an awful lot of water through leaking pipes.

The privatisation of critical utilities and infrastructure was such a stupid move.

That said, the recommendation is nonsense, emails and photos make up a tiny fraction of the cooling requirements for data centres.

New comment by stoobs in "It's a DE9, not a DB9 (but we know what you mean)"

stoobs — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 09:31:47 +0000

Yeah, the unformatted capacities of 3.5” floppy disks were:

SS-DD - 512KB

DS-DD - 1MB

HD - 2MB

ED - 4MB

LS (floptical) - 21MB

Technically you could format some of the lower density media in the high density drives and get the expanded capacity (although you may have needed to modify the media a little - holepunch to make an HD drive see a DS-DD disc as “HD”), although it wasn’t always very reliable and depended on the physical media and the capabilities of the individual drives.

Different file systems used the 2*80 tracks differently, hence the different formatted capacity, DOS usually had the lowest, Macintosh in the middle, Amiga had the most (although the Amiga HD floppies were a bit of a cludge - the drive spun at half speed due to a limitation of the Amiga floppy controller, which was also the reason you couldn’t just use a “PC” HD floppy in an Amiga without modification).

New comment by stoobs in "Tesla reports 14% decline in deliveries, marking second year-over-year drop"

stoobs — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 14:17:18 +0000

I'm expecting sales to drop even further at this point.

Elon is too toxic, and they got distracted with the whole cybertruck nonsense and kicked the model 1/smaller more euro-focused one into the long grass

New comment by stoobs in "UK to buy F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers"

stoobs — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 08:34:59 +0000

Yeah, with Japan joining, I'm at least a little hopeful that it will prompt a little more positive action from the government to loosen the purse-strings a bit to get things moving again...

New comment by stoobs in "I won't connect my dishwasher to your cloud"

stoobs — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 12:05:58 +0000

Place in the correct location and pot it correctly (conformal coating) and it won't be an issue.

New comment by stoobs in "In memoriam"

stoobs — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 20:53:04 +0000

The reviews/news side did, but the forums kept going until this.

New comment by stoobs in "Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row"

stoobs — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 20:29:37 +0000

Oh stop with "far left" nonsense, none of our main political parties are much further than slightly left or right of centrist.

New comment by stoobs in "ElevenReader"

stoobs — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 12:06:27 +0000

I think there's an issue somewhere in Kokoro though which means it doesn't actually take advantage of MPS, I did get a modified version up and running, but it was no faster than CPU, even though it passed all the internal tests using mps.

I might try using F5-TTS-MLX instead actually (https://github.com/lucasnewman/f5-tts-mlx) and see how that does.

New comment by stoobs in "Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting"

stoobs — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 16:33:39 +0000

The Ninja one and probably the Breville ones will be accurate - I have the same Ninja kettle here in the UK and its 3000Watts vs the US 1500Watts.

New comment by stoobs in "Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 costs as much as a whole gaming PC–but it sure is fast"

stoobs — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 13:37:21 +0000

and a 25% increase in cost

New comment by stoobs in "Apple iMac M4 review: who is this for, exactly?"

stoobs — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 13:25:53 +0000

It's not your definition of a workstation, but for many businesses/locations, it is.

They're deployed by the hundreds, in one or two configurations, then are replaced after 3/5/7 years. They never get repurposed, they just get recycled/refurbished when they reach end of life or the value has been depreciated to zero.