Hacker News: thangalin

New comment by thangalin in "Zed DeltaDB"

thangalin — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 22:10:04 +0000

From 1996:

https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~kchang/comp6710/readings/They%20...

"There is the software. And then there are the databases beneath the software, two enormous databases, encyclopedic in their comprehensiveness. One is the history of the code itself -- with every line annotated, showing every time it was changed, why it was changed, when it was changed, what the purpose of the change was, what specifications documents detail the change. Everything that happens to the program is recorded in its master history. The genealogy of every line of code -- the reason it is the way it is -- is instantly available to everyone."

New comment by thangalin in "Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines for a Pretextual Weed Search"

thangalin — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:26:04 +0000

https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png

;-)

New comment by thangalin in "All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen"

thangalin — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:32:14 +0000

https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png

;-)

New comment by thangalin in "How to Train a Gen AI Kick Drum Model on Your Old Linux Desktop with 6GB VRAM"

thangalin — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 09:04:53 +0000

Some examples:

The Mooche

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPJ5vNmVL3I (The Duke, 1928)

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLdCq2PKM4o (John Barry, 1984)

Sugar Foot Stomp

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEdIWVsfPXs (Henderson, 1925)

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35foefTrdLo (Nighthawks, 1993)

Doctor Jazz

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTYAaX7lqjQ (Morton, 1926)

* https://www.shazam.com/song/1687138286/doctor-jazz (Asaro & Fat Babies, 2016)

I was wondering if anyone was working on this (i.e., using pure software). Period equipment, real musicians, and such would be time consuming, arduous, and cost prohibitive.

New comment by thangalin in "First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star"

thangalin — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:29:50 +0000

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

New comment by thangalin in "How to Train a Gen AI Kick Drum Model on Your Old Linux Desktop with 6GB VRAM"

thangalin — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:41:10 +0000

Slightly off-topic. Now that 1920s jazz music is falling into public domain, has anyone tried to reinvigorate the music using AI and generative adversarial approaches? Pre-1940s music didn't have high-fidelity sound, so the strong bass lines weren't captured. In theory, we could "downgrade" modern recordings to sound like 1920s recordings, then use adversarial techniques to train the machine on how to restore the antique recordings. Anyone know of any work being done in this area?

New comment by thangalin in "Show HN: Free Mermaid Diagram Editor"

thangalin — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:41:47 +0000

https://kroki.io/#try

Shout out to Kroki, which offers Mermaid and many other text-based diagramming formats.

New comment by thangalin in "StreetComplete: Fixing OpenStreetMap, one tiny quest at a time"

thangalin — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:21:35 +0000

Thanks! The location page was a map image, it's now an interactive map with the clickable (i)nformation icon.

New comment by thangalin in "StreetComplete: Fixing OpenStreetMap, one tiny quest at a time"

thangalin — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:12:25 +0000

https://shufflenblues.com/location/

OSM is fantastic. I wanted a free, unencumbered map that matches the site's theme for ride sharing, billeting, and the venue location. The solution wasn't trivial, but at least it was possible. Couldn't imagine doing that with Google Maps.

New comment by thangalin in "How to ask for help from people who don't know you"

thangalin — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 23:56:50 +0000

> 100 notes, not a single response.

Similar story. Sent out 900+ emails to scientific illustrators; about 25 accepted. Here's the result:

* https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf

* https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf

New comment by thangalin in "Windows 10 quietly gets one more year of support and updates"

thangalin — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:44:58 +0000

It works well, though its messages could use some TLC:

    libEGL warning: pci id for fd 31: 10de:1ff0, driver (null)

    pci id for fd 33: 10de:1ff0, driver (null)
    pci id for fd 34: 10de:1ff0, driver (null)
    libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen
    libEGL warning: pci id for fd 31: 10de:1ff0, driver (null)

    pci id for fd 33: 10de:1ff0, driver (null)
    pci id for fd 34: 10de:1ff0, driver (null)
    libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen
    libEGL warning: pci id for fd 31: 10de:1ff0, driver (null)

    0124:fixme:nls:RtlGetThreadPreferredUILanguages 00000034, 0313F66C, 0313F6DC 0313F674
    0124:fixme:nls:get_dummy_preferred_ui_language (0x34 0x1009 0313F66C 0313F6DC 0313F674) returning a dummy value (current locale)
    0124:fixme:heap:RtlSetHeapInformation HEAP_INFORMATION_CLASS 1 not implemented!
    0124:fixme:nls:RtlGetThreadPreferredUILanguages 00000034, 0313F9D4, 0313FA44 0313F9DC
    0124:fixme:nls:get_dummy_preferred_ui_language (0x34 0x1009 0313F9D4 0313FA44 0313F9DC) returning a dummy value (current locale)
    0124:fixme:shell:InitNetworkAddressControl stub
    0124:fixme:richedit:editor_handle_message EM_GETLANGOPTIONS: stub
    0124:fixme:richedit:editor_handle_message EM_SETLANGOPTIONS: stub
    0124:fixme:ntdll:NtQuerySystemInformation info_class SYSTEM_PERFORMANCE_INFORMATION
    0124:fixme:win:RegisterTouchWindow hwnd 000100E0, flags 0 stub!
    0124:fixme:msvcrt:__clean_type_info_names_internal (7853A300) stub
    0124:fixme:msvcrt:__clean_type_info_names_internal (7B4F6BE4) stub
    0124:fixme:msvcrt:__clean_type_info_names_internal (79410E54) stub

New comment by thangalin in "I taught a bucket to speak Git"

thangalin — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:51:16 +0000

Similar story. A PHP implementation of the Git protocol for self-hosted repositories:

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/tree/HEAD/git

New comment by thangalin in "Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself"

thangalin — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:09:41 +0000

My Impacts project depicts a scene from the prolonged bombardment, a time when Earth was cratered by asteroids and comets:

* https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf#page=9

* https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf

New comment by thangalin in "Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time"

thangalin — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:41:38 +0000

How would this work for an identical twin civilian?

New comment by thangalin in "πFS"

thangalin — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:37:38 +0000

https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/53737/1704

> Matches that occur early enough in π to attain significant compression will not be varied. That is, it isn't possible to use π to compress interesting, real-world data because real-word strings are unlikely to arise early.

New comment by thangalin in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

thangalin — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 02:17:26 +0000

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek

The wow moment came when it wrote syntax highlighting rules for 40 languages and file formats in ~10 minutes:

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/tree/HEAD/render/rule...

New comment by thangalin in "Gemma 4 QAT models: Optimizing compression for mobile and laptop efficiency"

thangalin — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:06:07 +0000

Did you see this?

https://point.free/blog/gemma-4-on-a-2016-xeon/

Xeon, but could be useful for MTP on Mac.

New comment by thangalin in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

thangalin — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 22:35:55 +0000

Yes. I'm using Gemma-4 31B (gemma-4-31B-it-assistant.Q4_K_M.gguf) with llama.cpp to attribute quotations throughout chapters of my sci-fi novel. I started with Qwen3, but couldn't get it to work. Qwen3 TTS Voice Design, on the other hand, is incredible (Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-VoiceDesign). I'm using both for an audiobook generator that produces a variety of voices.

Screens:

* https://i.ibb.co/TBBV5nJk/kl-01.png (voice design)

* https://i.ibb.co/nNvvKDyV/kl-02.png (quotation attributions)

New comment by thangalin in "On Rendering Diffs"

thangalin — Fri, 29 May 2026 23:54:12 +0000

When producing TreeTrek, I went with rudimentary diffs that account for colourblind developers:

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/commit/3fe9360599ae23...

The diffs rendering library looks amazing: https://diffs.com/

Presumably the red-green issue is a simple CSS update?

New comment by thangalin in "I built a Git-tracked book production pipeline"

thangalin — Wed, 27 May 2026 16:59:31 +0000

I developed https://keenwrite.com for my hard sci-fi novel. I started with OpenOffice and a spreadsheet and then realized I could combine a character sheet with a Markdown editor. The character sheet became a YAML file with interpolated strings. The editor calls out to ConTeXt for typesetting to PDF. To create an audiobook, the same character sheet identifies the characters for gemma4:31b, which excels at quotation attributions when given a cast of characters and curated list of emotions. Next, I feed the chapters coupled with JSON-formatted attributions, pronunciation guides, and voice descriptions into qwen3 (VoiceDesign, Base, and 32b) to produce an audiobook with a full cast of characters.

Here's some output (to console, not JSON for brevity here) from gemma:

    Unknown (chanting): "Free the food, free the people."
    Unknown (chanting): "Border walls trap us all."
    Chloé Angelos (focused): "Let's see,"
    Yūna Futaba (serious): "The push draws ever nearer,"
    Chloé Angelos (commanding): "Yūna, buzz the CDC,"
    Unknown (formal): "CDC Emergency Operations Centre. What's your emergency?"
    Chloé Angelos (urgent): "Pandora's brew. Populated areas. Releasing soon. Loop in Beale Air Force Base."

I haven't listed all the minor characters, yet, which is why the LLM attributed "unknown" to some quotations.

I'm in the process of containerizing the solution. If interested, email me.