Hacker News: tacotime

New comment by tacotime in "Show HN: 1-Bit Bonsai, the First Commercially Viable 1-Bit LLMs"

tacotime — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 01:36:36 +0000

"Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated

New comment by tacotime in "Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue"

tacotime — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 02:34:07 +0000

I also use the right option key on Mac, never miss it.

New comment by tacotime in "Gemini-2.5-pro-preview-06-05"

tacotime — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 19:03:49 +0000

I wonder if using the character itself in the directions, instead of the name for the character, might help with this.

Something like, "Forbidden character list: [—, –]" or "Do NOT use the characters '—' or '–' in any of your output"

New comment by tacotime in "Don’t let an LLM make decisions or execute business logic"

tacotime — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 04:31:00 +0000

I could imagine a vision-enabled transformer model being useful to create a customizable “reading mode”, that adjusts page layout based on things like user prefs, monitor/window size, ad recognition, visual detail of images, information density of the text, etc.

Maybe in an alternate universe where every user-agent enabled browser had this type of thing enabled by default, most companies would skip site design all together and just publish raw ad copy, info, and images.

New comment by tacotime in "Hacker Typer"

tacotime — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 12:42:09 +0000

Triple shift pops up a red "Access Denied" message in the middle of the screen. Alt just shifts focus to the browser's toolbar, at least in Chrome.

New comment by tacotime in "Shadama: A particle simulation programming environment for everyone"

tacotime — Tue, 28 May 2024 23:50:23 +0000

How about a logo-inspired python-based library for making embroidery files to brighten your day? https://github.com/TurtleThread/TurtleThread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcuhrDIrblo

New comment by tacotime in "The $499 Google Pixel 8a is official, with 120 Hz display, 7 years of updates"

tacotime — Wed, 08 May 2024 19:04:12 +0000

Depending on the client device, you can often put it into pairing mode immediately upon turning it on to prevent auto-connect, then click connect from the desired host device. Still annoying but slightly less so than having to disable bluetooth on every other nearby host.

New comment by tacotime in "Abnormal brain structure seen in children with developmental language issues"

tacotime — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 11:14:07 +0000

Regular cannabis/THC use is pretty famous for reducing REM sleep and dreaming.

New comment by tacotime in "Debris Field Confirmed as Titan"

tacotime — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 19:39:11 +0000

I have been in a car accident that, in the instant of impact, felt indistinguishable from an explosion, too fast to process anything. I imagine the massive pressure change would cause near-instant incapacitation if not death.

New comment by tacotime in "HDR QR Code"

tacotime — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 01:59:34 +0000

On my macbook with vscode on the left and chrome on the right. When I click on this link with the right side of my screen covered up, I can visibly see vscode on the left get a couple of shades darker (animated over a second or so). So it looks like it's not only a question of hidden max brightness, it looks like the device adjusts the whole screen to enhance contrast for the HDR content as part of the strategy.

New comment by tacotime in "Amazon will require employees return to the office 3 days a week"

tacotime — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 19:52:13 +0000

Strictly work related ones probably still would, but maybe at a reduced rate.

What if there was the promise of a friendly AI used to filter out all non-work related discussions?

Then a chatGPT model fine tuned based on previous team discussions, that automatically replies in the team chat any time it has some especially high confidence that it's generated a good answer to a new question.

On my team, there is a lot of "tribal knowledge" that is known to part of the team, and buried in Microsoft Team's chat history somewhere, but having to use Team's search for anything is always the last resort. Maybe add a process where you have to wait for a team member to "like" the AI generated post before the person who posed the question uses the AI answer.

New comment by tacotime in "Browsers are essential and how operating systems are holding them back (2022) [pdf] (2022)"

tacotime — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 17:23:50 +0000

Firefox has deprecated support for FTP, RSS feeds. Web extensions using manifest version 2 are being deprecated in Chrome, removing substantial capabilities. Whether these features are "close to vital" is debatable but certainly some functionality that used to be ubiquitous are being removed.

New comment by tacotime in "All 1,400 Google Chrome CLI flags"

tacotime — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:14:58 +0000

At least on Windows, you should be able to modify the target property of the program’s shortcut to add any desired flags. Then use that shortcut to launch, or drop it in the startup folder. On Linux idk, maybe an alias?

New comment by tacotime in "Is forced treatment for the mentally ill ever humane?"

tacotime — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 21:54:13 +0000

Someone in my family, who is now in a memory care facility, has dementia. We tried to avoid it as long as possible, but when we got a call from the police saying that she was found wandering around barefoot in the snow next to a busy road in the middle of the night while hallucinating about “people coming to get her”, it felt like it was time to reconsider. She’s on meds that control the hallucinations now, but it would still be unsafe for her to leave unsupervised, no matter how much our culture changes. How do you help a stranger who doesn’t know where or who they are, and can’t hear too well to start with? She sure does still remember me and can dance to the Beatles, but I would not be comfortable trusting her welfare to a group of even the most compassionate strangers.

New comment by tacotime in "Stretch iPhone to its limit: 2GiB Stable Diffusion model runs locally on device"

tacotime — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 23:35:03 +0000

Hahah now I can use my phone as a hand warmer this winter. It's incredible that this is an app!

New comment by tacotime in "Spring Reverb Tanks Explained and Compared"

tacotime — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 16:51:37 +0000

I found your YouTube demo of the Electroduochord from about a year ago. All very cool, thanks for sharing this!

New comment by tacotime in "Spring Reverb Tanks Explained and Compared"

tacotime — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 00:19:30 +0000

Very cool. I’ve seen videos on reverb plates, and this diy well-based reverb chamber: https://youtube.com/shorts/UufK--iBbXQ

Had not heard of reverb tanks before today. I wonder what other interesting sources of reverb are out there.

New comment by tacotime in "Static torrent website with peer-to-peer queries over BitTorrent on 2M records"

tacotime — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 04:56:31 +0000

Not in this case. Visitors to this site are only pulling data from a torrent, not hosting any data for other visitors. If you want to help host the torrent then you'd be seeding the whole database by default. Torrents are split into blocks and there is no easy way to choose to only download/seed specific blocks of a single file.

New comment by tacotime in "Instagram Has Become SkyMall"

tacotime — Sun, 11 Jul 2021 03:54:44 +0000

Looks like it's called Carv, here's a link: https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=skiing+sensor+improve+techniq...

New comment by tacotime in "Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble"

tacotime — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 01:12:21 +0000

Maybe something like Chia (chia.net) that "farms" from pre-computed "plots" as proof of work? There is still an energy intensive cost to the initial plot creation phase, but it is soon amortized by the low cost farming phase, where the precomputed proofs begin to do their work. As SSD storage is expected to become less $/TB than HDD storage in about 5 years, this could make for a very energy efficient PoW scheme.

I don't understand enough to know if it's a design decision or a technological limitation but the barrier to entry for something like chia also seems much lower, hopefully democratizing the ability to participate in the creation/validation side of the network. Chia requires a single ~100GB plot file (and 332 GiB scratch space when creating the plot) to start farming, which is a pretty low bar. I don't have to buy an expensive special purpose bitcoin ASIC and I don't have to stake the equivalent of 68,416.96 United States Dollar (32 eth) to get started and start contributing.