Hacker News: tpurves

New comment by tpurves in "Waymo in Toronto"

tpurves — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:19:00 +0000

Waymo experience in San Francisco has always been awesome for me as a passenger.

New comment by tpurves in "Apple HomeView"

tpurves — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 22:50:03 +0000

indeed, i've had an 'old ipad' mounted to the underside of my kitchen cabinets for over a decade (I think we're on our third one) and the old ipad is pretty damn good as an airplay compatible music player, recipe lookup machine, screen for watching shows while cooking etc. Mounting it on arm is much better than having it sit on a counter.

Note amazon has a competitor to this that I tried out, the echo show. It's horrible as it just shovels advertisements at you all the time.

New comment by tpurves in "US closely monitoring case of lab worker who possibly died of plague in Siberia"

tpurves — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:15:15 +0000

Spoiler alert: no US department under RFK Jr is closely monitoring anything.

New comment by tpurves in "One person can now be a quorum at the SEC"

tpurves — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:11:51 +0000

I met Paul Atkins, around this time last year. One of his biggest problems (like anyone running a federal department) was that he's not allowed to hire or increase his budget, yet the demand for work that needs SEC attention is not going down. And that's after his dept, and all others, were required to perform layoffs under DOGE.

New comment by tpurves in "Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]"

tpurves — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:15:49 +0000

Except that, and this I find slightly amusing, is a situation where they definitely don't want to publicly blame the ai model when there are mistakes.

New comment by tpurves in "US Customs supervisor busted for stealing hardware from Homeland Security PCs"

tpurves — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 02:06:12 +0000

The other way to do this, which I literally did n that era, was to just go buy an extra stick of ram out of pocket (Ram used to not be expensive!) and just guerrilla upgrade my work pc myself, IT none the wiser, and just a lot easier and faster than all the BS time and bureaucracy it would have taken otherwise.

I remember even trying this with a cheap HDD->SSD upgrade as well, but by that point they had implemented drive encryption so that foiled that effort.

New comment by tpurves in "Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)"

tpurves — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:38:16 +0000

Literally the best possible kind of psy-op. Same with translating Sesame Street and distributing it to 100s of countries. Same with countries like Thailand exporting Thai food. It's a psy op based on what if we took nice things from our country and subsidized distributing them to the rest of the world, our country would grow in prestige and soft power. And these strategies are usually pretty effective, not to mention usually net-positive for all sides ... compared with so many other horibble harms US and other countries foreign offices have done around the world out of self interest.

New comment by tpurves in "Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded"

tpurves — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:13:15 +0000

Where is this being fabbed TSMC? How advanced a process node CPU maker has access to is usually all you need to predict relative performance.

(as long as you take similar assumptions in die size, advanced packaging and power envelope).

New comment by tpurves in "Attention Decode on AMD MI450 GPUs: A Gluon Kernel Optimization Guide"

tpurves — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 16:20:46 +0000

This thing has 50% more memory than GTX PRO 6000, which fetch 18k-25k+ each right now on newegg, and generally sold out. If nvdia can still sell out 96GB PCI cards (on a 2 year old architecture) at those prices, how is an AMD equivalent with better specs dead on arrival?

New comment by tpurves in "Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Mac"

tpurves — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:53:24 +0000

Okay this tidbit is interesting to me "5–6 tok/s M2 -> 31–35 tok/s on an M5 Pro". So where will be in just another gen or two?

my impression right now is that M5 gen is on the cusp of practicality for local inference.

If techniques like OPs here, start to make the RAM situation more amenable, by the time we get to M6 or M7 (or AMD's equiv next gen APUs on TSMC N2 nodes), local AI could be ready to go much more mainstream.

New comment by tpurves in "The Strongest El Niño Ever"

tpurves — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:47:09 +0000

Well that's a relief, glad I am a turtle then and so are most of my friends, and that our whole world economy and food system runs on turtles. So we should be fine.

New comment by tpurves in "SPCX is now Wall Street's most shorted new stock"

tpurves — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:28:13 +0000

You are assuming there are not naked shorts out there.

New comment by tpurves in "Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts"

tpurves — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:48:50 +0000

"Latent space representation" I have been waiting for this moment in the evolution of AI. Well, waiting with some trepidation. It seems inevitable that frontier AI's will, at some point, leave behind human-comprehensible representations of language. Purely for functional reasons, it's going to start making sense for AI agents to communicate amongst themselves in much more efficient ways than borrowing the languages of flesh-bag humans as an interface medium.

I Imagine next that programming languages, interfaces and API design starts going this direction next. Being written, expressed and optimized as blobs of high dimensional vector space. As humans we might still be able to understand some abstractions of what our AI's are talking about to each other, but maybe not more so then we understand how different regions of our own brain communicate with each other.

New comment by tpurves in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

tpurves — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:13:58 +0000

this strategy worked to keep Ukraine alive, by enabling them to throw literally anything and everything they could obtain into the fight. And the system enabled rapid experimentation and evolution of what works. Also they didn't have enough of anything to equip all units equally or fully, so a market-like system of was also a way to triage short supply.

However the logistics costs of fragmentation are very real (relevant to the supply chain theme of this story). And now that Ukraine is producing the better part of 10 millions(!) of drones per year, they are shifting towards more standardized drone models to simplify logistics, achieve more economies of scale and also now to have the capacity to keep units equipped more evenly and reliably.

New comment by tpurves in "Steam Machine launches today"

tpurves — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:29:32 +0000

An unfortunate series of events that this thing ended up with these specs at 1,049.00. It was supposed to be cheap and cheerful. At first Steam took an opportunistic deal to buy up a bunch of near-obsolete-already chips from AMD to build a low-cost box around. Then years of delays and an explosion in DRAM and SSD prices and here we are.

4 year old chip design on an equivalently old process node, not that unlike nvidia selling 2-3 year old chips as the spark. Thanks to AI boom, consumer market really just getting the warmed-over leftovers here from AMD and NVDIA.

New comment by tpurves in "Running local models is good now"

tpurves — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 02:23:15 +0000

I do think local models are huge pending market opportunity for Apple. An M5 Ultra Mac Studio (if that exists) could be decent local AI machine, though so expensive as to stay niche. But by the M6/M7 generations and a recovery in DRAM affordability, the future could be interesting moment for them to deliver a compelling local AI platform that 'just works'. But I do think that a mini-pc that is easy to configure, can be always plugged-in, always on, higher power envelope than a laptop, but not obnoxiously loud and hot, is the right form-factor

New comment by tpurves in "Trump signs downsized AI order after weeks of reversals"

tpurves — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:01:48 +0000

Not to mention quitting in droves because very many don't want to take these cases or otherwise to stand in court and explain why current admin is not bound by existing laws, court orders, the US constitution in general, or internationally recognized human rights etc.

New comment by tpurves in "Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs"

tpurves — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:31:16 +0000

This has already happened. Home PC market is practically dead already due to memory, ssd and graphics card price inflation. Makers of components like PC cases and power supplies etc. are seeing demand down 30-40% year over year and this is going to put many suppliers out of business. NVDIA has stopped even listing gaming revenue on their earnings reports. Both NVDIA and AMD are not seriously interested in supplying the consumer GPU market anymore either.

The only hope left is really Apple, but even apple has conspicuously delayed the launch of M5-gen mac minis and mac studio. Mostly because even Apple can't source enough DRAM to fully supply all their product lines.

New comment by tpurves in "Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs"

tpurves — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:26:00 +0000

China does not have sufficiently leading edge fab capabilities to fill DRAM demand.

New comment by tpurves in "Was my $48K GPU server worth it?"

tpurves — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:18:06 +0000

>> find a reliable place to sell it without getting ripped off by scammers.

This is a real problem and why I've just about given up on ebay or fb marketplace, esp for computers. If you are in Canada though sellit9.com is a great solution to having to deal with sketchy buyers.