Hacker News: xzjis

New comment by xzjis in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

xzjis — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 16:12:36 +0000

Gemini 3 Flash is clearly a generation ahead of other LLMs, and as a result, it gave me the correct answer:

> Since your goal is to wash the car, you should drive.

> While 50 meters is a very short walking distance (roughly a 30-45 second walk), you cannot wash the car if it remains parked at your current location. To utilize the car wash facilities, the vehicle must be physically present at the site.

New comment by xzjis in "xAI joins SpaceX"

xzjis — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 10:10:00 +0000

It's a scam. I don't understand how EVERYONE falls for Elon Musk's obvious scams, when every year his claims are more fantastical and exaggerated than the last.

This is obviously about propping up a shaky business (SpaceX) by making people believe that data centers in space are a solution. It's just riding the AI hype wave.

It's impossible to cool servers effectively in space, and, even though I'm skeptical, I'm more inclined to believe in a project to put them in the ocean than in space, simply because water conducts heat, unlike a vacuum.

Sure, there's a lot of room in space, but: - it will always take more energy to get into orbit than to install servers on Earth - the distance between the data center and us adds latency, which is not desirable for an LLM - the distance between the satellites themselves adds a huge amount of latency, making the data center less efficient

In a nutshell, there are physical problems that can never, ever be solved by science or technology, and even science fiction doesn't dare to invent scenarios this implausible. But then, coming from a pedophile who lied about his ties to Epstein, is it really surprising that he's lying and trying to divert attention right now.

New comment by xzjis in "ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data"

xzjis — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 22:39:01 +0000

German pastor Martin Niemöller:

"First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

New comment by xzjis in "ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data"

xzjis — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 22:33:40 +0000

Imagine what they could do with mental health data if they ever decide to start deporting people with mental "problems", just like the Nazis did in their time. The same goes for people with physical disabilities.

New comment by xzjis in "Indifference is a power (2015)"

xzjis — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 15:30:54 +0000

You really have to already be privileged, and not directly affected by these so-called “external causes” the author talks about, to be able to take comfort in ignoring them. But is that even desirable? Do we actually want to live in a society where the privileged ignore other people’s problems simply because they can? Is it even acceptable to say: “A fascist militia (ICE) kills a lesbian woman for no reason other than the fact that she is lesbian, but since I’m not the one targeted by ICE, I should disconnect from social media, turn off the TV, and ignore this injustice”?

Not only can external problems that affect our mental health serve as a driving force for action—because it is possible to organize and fight against the causes of these injustices—but in addition, inaction in the face of what is initially “external” inevitably leads to a point where we ourselves become affected by those same injustices.

I want to quote a sermon by the German pastor Martin Niemöller, who spoke precisely about this:

> First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out— > Because I was not a Communist. > > Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— > Because I was not a Socialist. > > Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— > Because I was not a Trade Unionist. > > Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— > Because I was not a Jew. > > Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

New comment by xzjis in "China DRAM Maker CXMT Targets $4.2B IPO as It Takes on Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron"

xzjis — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 11:16:05 +0000

As a free-software advocate, I believe competition should be based on investment in industrial machinery and labour, not on secretly guarded know-how. If Samsung, Micron, and SK-Electronics weren't an oligopoly trying to squeeze maximum profit out of consumers and instead offered good prices, China wouldn't be able to—and would have no interest in—subsidizing private companies to get them on the same level. It's only the greed of these three companies in their oligopoly that has put them in such a fragile position, where the slightest competition could be fatal to them.

New comment by xzjis in "Some Epstein file redactions are being undone"

xzjis — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 13:04:44 +0000

It wouldn't be malicious though. Well, it's malicious towards the Trump administration, but not towards the people. Quite the opposite.

New comment by xzjis in "Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed"

xzjis — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 15:53:38 +0000

Google already has dedicated hardware for running private LLMs: just look at what they're doing on the Google Pixel. The main limiting factor right now is access to hardware that's powerful enough, and especially has enough memory, to run a good LLM, which will happen eventually. Normally, by 2031 we should have devices with 400 GB of RAM, but the current RAM crisis could throw off my calculations...

New comment by xzjis in "If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?"

xzjis — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 11:20:24 +0000

What's crazy is that productivity per employee just keeps increasing year after year, but successive neoliberal governments continue to lower corporate taxes. They should be doing the exact opposite! Taxes should be raised as productivity increases! AI is just one more tool that gradually increases productivity, among others.

New comment by xzjis in "Ask HN: How many people got VPNs in response to laws like UK Online Safety Act?"

xzjis — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 11:56:06 +0000

VPNs can never be completely banned because they're a tool used by businesses (nothing is more important than a business in neoliberal capitalism).

New comment by xzjis in "UniFi 5G"

xzjis — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 13:34:06 +0000

Back in school, I had a teacher who was in charge of installing 3G, 4G, and 5G antennas for a carrier in France. The answer is that the 4G frequency bands are saturated, and they pushed 5G mainly to relieve congestion on the 4G network. Theoretically, 5G has just as much range (maybe even a little bit more with beamforming) on the 700 MHz and 800 MHz bands.

New comment by xzjis in "RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung"

xzjis — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 14:31:04 +0000

It's a political problem: do we, the people, have a choice in what gets prioritized? I think it's clear that the majority of people don't give a damn about minor improvements in AI and would rather have a better computer, smartphone, or something else for their daily lives than fuel the follies of OpenAI and its competitors. At worst, they can build more fabs simultaneously to have the necessary production for AI within a few years, but reallocating it right now is detrimental and nobody wants that, except for a few members of the crazy elite like Sam Altman or Elon Musk.

New comment by xzjis in "Ecosia: The greenest AI is here"

xzjis — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 23:12:43 +0000

I love Kagi's implementation: by default it's disabled, you either have to add a question mark to the search, or click in the interface after searching to generate the summary.

New comment by xzjis in "Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release"

xzjis — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 16:08:30 +0000

I don't like defending Russia which is a horrible country, but I find it hypocritical to only talk about their imperialism and pretend not to see that the most imperialist country in the world, the one that has started, financed, and participated in the most wars, is the United States, and yet the question of boycotting American companies is never brought up. Google has been intentionally sabotaged in terms of image search and reverse image search; Yandex is literally the best on the market, but Kagi should boycott them because their headquarters are in the wrong country?

New comment by xzjis in "Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?"

xzjis — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 16:00:30 +0000

Have you considered at Framework? In my opinion, the two best brands are ThinkPads (though it depends on the model) and Frameworks.

New comment by xzjis in "Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026"

xzjis — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 15:39:56 +0000

The reality is that middle managers are completely useless, but to justify their usefulness they have to force people to come to the office, to reprimand them if they don't strictly follow the schedule, to hold meetings to pretend they're useful by knowing what their team is doing, etc. They have to act as control agents: checking, monitoring, producing unnecessary reporting (a legacy of slavery) just to prove they exist in the organizational chart. The office is a theater where everyone pretends to be busy (especially them), but that's hard if the offices are empty. It's a system where we try to convince ourselves of their usefulness, which pushes them to fill the void in order to maintain a hierarchy that serves more to prevent people from working peacefully than to organize anything.

New comment by xzjis in "Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out"

xzjis — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 10:57:53 +0000

If I play devil's advocate, I'd say the productivity gain is so significant that even with the distraction of ads, you still save time by using LLMs :)

New comment by xzjis in "Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost"

xzjis — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 10:50:19 +0000

While Western countries are making education increasingly private, expensive, and accessible only to the elite, in China, free education accessible to all is training engineers who then go on to work for companies that outperform those of other countries.

New comment by xzjis in "Implementing Bluetooth LE Audio and Auracast on Linux Systems"

xzjis — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 10:47:24 +0000

I commend Collabora's tremendous work on Bluetooth LE audio on Linux and their work in general, but I can't help being frustrated that it's volunteer contributors handling the implementation, while the Bluetooth Special Interest Group makes a ton of profit by licensing Bluetooth yet contributes nothing to implementing the standard on Linux. It's really typical of the "open source" spirit: volunteers are exploited, and the fruits of their labor are harvested as profit.

New comment by xzjis in "Helping Valve to power up Steam devices"

xzjis — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 10:20:15 +0000

In reality, Valve is doing all this work on GNU+Linux because they've been afraid of Microsoft ever since Windows 8 and the introduction of the Windows Store. For now, Microsoft is remaining open and isn't restricting installations to its own store; we even see that with the full-screen gaming version of Windows for handhelds, they display games from other stores, including Steam. But Microsoft also has a history of abusing its dominant position and monopoly to push its own products (Internet Explorer, Edge, OneDrive, etc.). Gaben made the only possible decision to protect Valve from that: having their own OS.