Hacker News: willis936

New comment by willis936 in "A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands"

willis936 — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:01:56 +0000

Yes, that's good. It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor. Projects I work on have seen prices soar. I don't consider building the things everyone hates because they promise concentration of wealth and an attack on labor at the expense of building literally anything else to be somehow a big W for labor because a few people get a slightly higher temporary paycheck. Ask the Wagyu cows how they feel about the hand they are dealt.

New comment by willis936 in "Hannah Fry Wins the Leelavati Prize in 2026 for Mathematics Outreach"

willis936 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:16:44 +0000

Wait until you watch the 2011 movie Contagion.

New comment by willis936 in "Hannah Fry Wins the Leelavati Prize in 2026 for Mathematics Outreach"

willis936 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:26:22 +0000

Which episode? I subscribe but I don't have the attention surplus to listen to them all.

New comment by willis936 in "Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models"

willis936 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:02:22 +0000

CRTs are a stronger example. The R&D Sony has lost to the sands of time means we would need decades of sustained effort to reach the same quality of shadow mask that we used to have. It wouldn't be picking up where we left off, it would be picking up at the idea of where we left off with none of the supply chain that enabled it.

New comment by willis936 in "Claude Cookbook"

willis936 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 09:57:04 +0000

Same. I was hoping for a digital meal planner.

New comment by willis936 in "Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver"

willis936 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:24:20 +0000

A good instinct. There are a lot of things a $500 AMD GPU can do in linux that a $5000 DGX cannot.

New comment by willis936 in "So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe"

willis936 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:18:42 +0000

Any plans for reddit to compensate their contributors?

New comment by willis936 in "ECC and DDR5"

willis936 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:00:30 +0000

I am disputing that cosmic ray showers are the obvious dominant source of terrestrial DRAM bit flips.

New comment by willis936 in "ECC and DDR5"

willis936 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:26:03 +0000

That's a much weaker statement than "the primary source of uncorrelated bit flips is cosmic radiation".

New comment by willis936 in "ECC and DDR5"

willis936 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:34:48 +0000

The ECC on the GTX 1080 let me figure out the optimal overclock with the only feedback mechanism being benchmarked throughout.

New comment by willis936 in "ECC and DDR5"

willis936 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:27:13 +0000

>The primary source of uncorrelated bit-flips is, effectively, cosmic radiation.

This gets said a lot but with little evidence. The mario speedrun bit flip has been replicated with marginal connector insertion.

https://youtu.be/vj8DzA9y8ls

New comment by willis936 in "I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens"

willis936 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 03:38:16 +0000

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F9...

New comment by willis936 in "I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens"

willis936 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 03:33:36 +0000

If you are only using chatbots for code gen then for sure this is a reasonable approach. If you're trying to learn something then your best bet is to not have the lowest jpg quality version of human knowledge be your teacher.

New comment by willis936 in "I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens"

willis936 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 03:31:10 +0000

We could probably get the same results by offloading 20% of obviously smaller / simpler / well defined tasks to smaller models and keep the 80% for ones that benefit from the big iron. Not the 80/20 they were referring to, but still it's something.

I find myself wasting time on smaller models or wasting money on frontier models. I only have so much of either.

New comment by willis936 in "Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3"

willis936 — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 19:45:46 +0000

Docker compose + systemd, automated backups (bonus points for coordinating with restic/borg + rsync cronjob), and ram disks. Ram disks in particular are a game changer for game feel. For the backups you'll need to leverage a feature that exports the world. This used to need to be a mod, but it's possible it's been folded into vanilla.

New comment by willis936 in "I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets"

willis936 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:35:28 +0000

There is an easy solution: don't log into facebook. Anyone you want to talk to on there has a phone.

New comment by willis936 in "Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt [pdf]"

willis936 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 02:32:01 +0000

Flatten would mean there is a profitable business model. It's been years since people have been too tired of repeatedly asking "where will the profit come from?" with no answer. This shit has exactly one direction it will end and it's not flat or up.

New comment by willis936 in "Designing and assembling my first PCB"

willis936 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:01:40 +0000

OSHPark is bare board fab only but JLC does turnkey. I've enjoyed working with CircuitHub for turnkey prototypes. I'm not in love with the web interface (source files must be uploaded so if you have silkscreen that has dynamic parameters you need to make a ticket and the BOM parser misses stuff very often so every project needs an audit).

New comment by willis936 in "USAA closed 51% of home insurance claims without making a payment in 2025"

willis936 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 15:10:56 +0000

USAA doesn't operate its own mortgages anymore. They sell them day one which usually results in another sale or company acquisition within a year. The cure? Take your business elsewhere. FCUs don't have this same reputation and generally open with less predatory rates.

USAA had a great run of building trust and is speedrunning torching it.

New comment by willis936 in "Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software"

willis936 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:45:19 +0000

Valve is a similar size to id tech. They have two tricks: be in a business other than games and be privately owned. The former gives them the ability to weather storms and the latter keeps the dagger away. This would not have happened if id were privately owned.

Notably MS is in a business other than games, so another way to frame this is "MS is losing and Valve is winning".