Hacker News: xemdetia

New comment by xemdetia in "IBM Bob"

xemdetia — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 15:21:14 +0000

IBM is training their own models (for instance IBM granite) as well as watsonx as a platform. They are trying to build a products for enterprise as well as their specific AI modernization models.

New comment by xemdetia in "Linux latency measurements and compositor tuning"

xemdetia — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:58:19 +0000

I have been having great luck with waypipe (gitlab) as an X11 forwarding alternative (OS X to Ubuntu 24.04). The setup was relatively painless and it 'just worked.' while this might not suit your needs for other reasons I was pleasantly surprised.

New comment by xemdetia in "Are you expected to run five Python type-checkers now?"

xemdetia — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:28:58 +0000

I thought JavaScript language equality quirks was seen as problematic not a missing feature in Python.

New comment by xemdetia in "Amber Tree: A Middle Ground Between Rowan Red and Green Trees"

xemdetia — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:24:45 +0000

This article is pretty frustrating as it doesn't introduce rowan or green trees and I had to read a bit to know you were even talking about a rust lib. Beyond that I don't know if I ever encountered a modern syntax tree lib that didn't have at least a pointer to the beginning and end of the token lexed at the leaf node level. If you don't have this error reporting becomes either awkward or complicated for the developer or the end user.

New comment by xemdetia in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

xemdetia — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:00:46 +0000

The health insurance is the part that just is hard to relate to much of the world which is where the fear/sadness comes from. It is the undertone in any wealth discussion. So many people in the US see their family and friends get medically bankrupted for one reason or another and insurance being tied to employment makes everything awful.

The fact that you simply can't save enough to get medical care is foundationally depressing.

New comment by xemdetia in "Why do we tell ourselves scary stories about AI?"

xemdetia — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 11:40:23 +0000

The only thing I find scary about the current AI is how many AI companies became completely untethered from basic ethical controls openly. There is no facade of decency and it seems like a lot of them are running from their own shadow. I feel like there is a middle ground that could have been taken to bring content experts in instead of looting the web the world has built.

New comment by xemdetia in "Show HN: CommerceTXT – An open standard for AI shopping context (like llms.txt)"

xemdetia — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 15:19:18 +0000

I believe what the commenter is suggesting is that since this is supposed to be machine readable then why not start with a common format like JSON similar to how things like MCP serve what functions are available or an OpenAPI spec. Generate the JSON and serve that from the well known directory.

People serve plain JSON all the time. This proposed standard is essentially a structured file anyway.. why not YAML? Why not INI? Getting away from bespoke unicorn file formats has been good for everyone.

New comment by xemdetia in "Show HN: CommerceTXT – An open standard for AI shopping context (like llms.txt)"

xemdetia — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 15:08:59 +0000

How is using a standard path 'just for sysadmins' again? You are introducing something new today.

New comment by xemdetia in "DeepSeekMath-V2: Towards Self-Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning [pdf]"

xemdetia — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 21:17:36 +0000

Maths can be super deterministic but often difficult to compute because of concepts like inferring by induction. I had to personally unlearn and rebase my understanding of math based in computation to 'get' pure maths. Another example is set building. You often don't need to compute the existence of members of sets in pure math you just need to agree that there are some members of a set that meet the criteria. How many or how many things that aren't in the set aren't meaningful often times to accept something and move on with the proof. From the computing perspective this can be difficult to put together.

New comment by xemdetia in "GOP overhaul of broadband permit laws: Cities hate it, cable companies love it"

xemdetia — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 18:58:25 +0000

From my perspective depending on where they want to develop it might be trivial to add something time consuming to a proposal such as eminent domain or easement reviews that will run out the shot clock and drown out reasonable questions by local governments. Local governance often is complicated by local (town), regional (county), and state level roles. Additionally depending on the area not all of these roles are even staffed by people working on it full-time.

New comment by xemdetia in "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"

xemdetia — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 20:50:11 +0000

This really isn't an all or nothing sort of situation. Many of the AI players have a proven record of simply not following existing norms. Until there is a consumer oriented player who is not presuming that training on my private data and ideas is permitted it only makes sense to do some stuff things locally. Beyond that many of the companies providing AI have either weird limits or limitations that interrupt me. I just know as an individual or a fledgling company I am simply not big enough to fight some of these players and win, and the compliance around companies running AI transparently is too new for me to rely on so the rules of engagement are all over the place. Also don't forget in a few years when the dust settles that company with that policy you like is highly likely to be consumed by a company who may not share the same ethics but your data is still held by them.

Why take a chance?

New comment by xemdetia in "Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale"

xemdetia — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 21:33:13 +0000

This was also introduced in the same moment as a bunch of real name initiatives from multiple companies. People were rejecting it based on what it demanded compared to what was offered. It also killed or force reworked other Google products that were working fine to end users (e.g. Google Talk).

In my eyes it was one of the key moments that put them on a downward trajectory in public opinion. So while it might have had the right features the rest of the deal sucked, and people were already tiring of social media overall.

New comment by xemdetia in "Benchmark Framework Desktop Mainboard and 4-node cluster"

xemdetia — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 20:50:40 +0000

I was about to be annoyed until you said you got preprod units. I guess I'll have to build on this when my desktop shows up.

New comment by xemdetia in "Intel Announces It's Shutting Down Clear Linux"

xemdetia — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 08:37:07 +0000

I think the thing you missed is how aggressive their firings had been. It is quite possible that they no longer have capacity to maintain a distribution. Public reporting indicates 5,000 people let go... but probably more were guided to leave.

If that is the case then terminating Clear Linux as a distribution might be the responsible thing if they were the source of direction for the distro. This was also a PoC distro as opposed to seeking enterprise workloads so it also seems reasonable that after the innovations that were good were adopted by more mainstream distros they no longer served a purpose.

I still expect to see a steady stream of kernel patches for new chips and features. I just would place headcount loss and accomplishing everything they set out to do with the distro over FOSS malice. Unlike many of the ghosts of malicious corp open source this doesn't fit exactly in my view.

New comment by xemdetia in "Mercury: Ultra-fast language models based on diffusion"

xemdetia — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 16:16:08 +0000

While not at Google for myself a lot of the CI test failures just become knock on effects from complex interdependent CI components delivering the whole experience. Oops Artifactory or GitHub rate limited you. Oops the SAST checker from some new vendor just never finished. Even if your code passes locally the added complexity of CI can often be fraught with flaky and confusing errors that are intermittent or run afoul based on environmental problems that particular moment you tried.

New comment by xemdetia in "Avoiding skill atrophy in the age of AI"

xemdetia — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 17:22:55 +0000

I find this to be an interesting anecdote because at a certain level for a long time the most helpful advice you could give is what would be the best reference for the problem at hand which might have been a book or website or wiki or Google for stack overflow and now a particular AI model might be the most efficient way to give someone a 'good reference.' I could certainly see someone recommending a model the same way they may have recommended a book or tutorial.

On point of discussing code.. a lot of cloud frameworks are boring but good. It usually isn't the interesting bit and it is a relatively recent quirk that everyone seems to care more about the framework compared to the thing you actually wanted to achieve. It's not a fun algorithm optimization, it's not a fun object modeling exercise, it's not some nichey math thing of note or whatever got them into coding in the first place. While I can't speak for your father I haven't met a programmer who doesn't get excited to talk about at least one coding topic this cloud framework just might not have been it.

New comment by xemdetia in "AI agents: Less capability, more reliability, please"

xemdetia — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 12:54:42 +0000

I am worried about a more modest enshittification. I am already starting to encounter models that are just plain out of date in non obvious ways. It has the same feeling as trying to remember how to express someone on how to troubleshoot windows over the phone for two versions ago (e.g.: in vista this was slightly different).

New comment by xemdetia in "DOGE will use AI to assess the responses of federal workers"

xemdetia — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 13:28:12 +0000

As far as I can see it is just strawmanning the federal workforce as a boogeyman. Every federal person I heard of or talked to spent most of the weekend and Monday trying to understand how to respond and what was permitted to disclose. The email looks like a phishing email because it's not from existing org structure. Most fed employees never have interacted with OPM before because that's not how any of this worked. It also doesn't help that the email before this was 'if you respond to this email you resign.'

New comment by xemdetia in "Where is London's most central sheep?"

xemdetia — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 18:37:09 +0000

I find this fun because I always described this metric as 'time to cow.' I suppose a sheep is fine too.

New comment by xemdetia in "Blogs rot. Wikis wait"

xemdetia — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 15:31:36 +0000

I think in modern times because you don't see it the same way you forget that a newspaper, magazine, encyclopedia, academic paper, and a reference book are different for a reason and do not have to be unified, and there was no need to do so. Having a way to publish contemporary articles vs building an effective knowledge reference are different goals. The physical print production was part of the language of intent. A blog with a contemporary note of an obscure Ubuntu upgrade issue is often the best way to describe it whereas a wiki with a current reference of now the fundamental baseline of relevance. A wiki eschews the most relevant details the same way an encyclopedia focuses on the core points. As a writer I need many formats and as a reader I cherish many formats.