Hacker News: vardalab

New comment by vardalab in "Claude Opus 4.7"

vardalab — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 23:21:33 +0000

What culture are those? Scandinavian? Those often just say nothing.

New comment by vardalab in "UK intelligence censored report on global warming and homeland security"

vardalab — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:19:18 +0000

Farming might feel rewarding while watching someone else do the hard work. I watched and had to help my grandparents do it and went through my own decade of "farming" and it never gets easier and you only get older.

New comment by vardalab in "Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message"

vardalab — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:47:23 +0000

What makes you think that progress has stopped? Anecdotally I personally seem to think that it's accelerated, I am having conversations with ambitious non tech people and they now seem to be excited and are staying up late learning about cli and github. They seem to have moved beyond lovable and are actually trying to embed some agents in their small businesses, etc.

New comment by vardalab in "April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini"

vardalab — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:52:20 +0000

just use openrouter or google ai playground for the first week till bugs are ironed out. You still learn the nuances of the model and then yuu can switch to local. In addition you might pickup enough nuance to see if quantization is having any effect

New comment by vardalab in "Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide"

vardalab — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:48:47 +0000

Yes, exactly. I like this analogy. I am surprised the level of pearl clutching in these discussions on Hacker News. Everybody wants to be an attention sharecropper, lol.

New comment by vardalab in "Go hard on agents, not on your filesystem"

vardalab — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 02:25:09 +0000

unconstrained AI agents are what makes it so useful though. I have been using claude for almost a year now and the biggest unlock was to stop being a worrywart early on and just literally giving it ssh keys and telling it to fix something. ofc I have backups and do run it in VM but in that VM it helps me manage by infra and i have a decent size homelab that would be no fun but a chore without this assistant.

New comment by vardalab in "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down"

vardalab — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:50:21 +0000

It's not really malware, but it's a mess. It installed so much shit and it interfered with your git hooks and stuff. It was kind of messy. I kind of gave up on it. I just went back to using built-in claude code todowrite tasks.

New comment by vardalab in "You can run a DNS server (2025)"

vardalab — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:16:38 +0000

I have run technitium for 4 or so years now, in a recursive mode, handles all my homelab needs and it is faster as well. Now that it has clustering support I have three instances in my proxmox cluster.

New comment by vardalab in "OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream"

vardalab — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 20:25:09 +0000

Do you need the simcard for WhatsApp?

New comment by vardalab in "Mouser: An open source alternative to Logi-Plus mouse software"

vardalab — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 17:17:01 +0000

Great job. I had to disable that logi sw software on my Macbook because it was taking up a lot of cycles.

New comment by vardalab in "Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar"

vardalab — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:53:59 +0000

Exactly. Look at just the most recent conflict in Middle East. You think they would have freaking gamed out potential scenarios using AI or whatnot? Looks like nobody gamed out anything. It's all just seat of the pants.

New comment by vardalab in "Agents that run while I sleep"

vardalab — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:11:02 +0000

I was building awesome things with Access 20 years ago. I loved that thing. I wasn't even a software engineer. I was in the EE, but I needed a way to track process and it definitely outperformed. And the best thing, it didn't cost us anything. Everybody already had access, lol. I had 40 people use it in production, manufacturing cutting edge stuff. Definitely beat spreadsheets because Access gave you gui for operators.

New comment by vardalab in "How to run Qwen 3.5 locally"

vardalab — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:53:07 +0000

Q4 quants on 32G VRAM gives you 131K context for 35BA3B and 27B models who are pretty capable. On 5090 one gets 175 tg and ~7K pp with 35BA3B, 27B isaround 90 tg. So speed is awesome. Even Strix 395 gives 40 tk/s and 256K context. Pretty amazing, there is a reason people are excited about qwen 3.5

New comment by vardalab in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

vardalab — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:01:20 +0000

yup, I have to cutback now, started to get palpitations from too many all nighters.

New comment by vardalab in "Something is afoot in the land of Qwen"

vardalab — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:11:13 +0000

Have frontier lab do the plan which is the most time consuming part anyways and then local llm do the implementation. Frontier model can orchestrate your tickets, write a plan for them and dispatch local llm agents to implement at about 180 tokens/s, vllm can probably ,manage something like 25 concurrent sessions on RTX 6000 Do it all in a worktrees and then have frontier model do the review and merge. I am just a retired hobbyist but that's my approach, I run everything through gitea issues, each issue gets launched by orchestrator in a new tmux window and two main agents (implementer and reviewer get their own panes so I can see what's going on). I think claude code now has this aspect also somewhat streamlined but I have seen no need to change up my approach yet since I am just a retired hobbyist tinkering on my personal projects. Also right now I just use claude code subagents but have been thinking of trying to replace them with some of these Qwen 3.5 models because they do seem cpable and I have the hardware to run them.

New comment by vardalab in "Something is afoot in the land of Qwen"

vardalab — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:56:07 +0000

q4 quant gives you 175 tg and 7K pp, beats most cloud providers

New comment by vardalab in "New iPad Air, powered by M4"

vardalab — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:31:58 +0000

I bought M1 pro ipad that ended up being on a windowsill in kitchen as a youtube tv or a again a youtube viewport while rowing, lol. What a waste, but I cannot find a better use for it. User interface also sucks, half the time i have to ask chatgpt to extricate me from some accidental split screen or what not. Kicker is that it needs to be charged almost daily while it is really only used about 30-45 min a day in the morning while my kids m4 air can go for a week.

New comment by vardalab in "Tech people keep falling for the same scam"

vardalab — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:04:28 +0000

no doubt something like this is coming

New comment by vardalab in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

vardalab — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:27:58 +0000

My STT is cleaned up using llm and it often likes those dashes. I let it be because I could not care less.

New comment by vardalab in "Claude Code Remote Control"

vardalab — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:21:39 +0000

If its running a background process then one escape is not enough, need two for message in que to be picked up and adressed.