Hacker News: z2

New comment by z2 in "32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building"

z2 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:31:03 +0000

This is textbook negative externalities, of the AI buildout on everyone who isn't using RAM/GPUs for AI, of the use of electricity and water on anyone who isn't using it for AI. The cynic in me thinks this will go down in history alongside asbestos, leaded gasoline/paint, and the opioid crisis.

New comment by z2 in "32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building"

z2 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:19:31 +0000

I remember both, the former is positive but suffers from short-term memory loss. the latter is always afraid of things, and also seems to never learn.

New comment by z2 in "Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs"

z2 — Tue, 26 May 2026 14:59:18 +0000

And the direction is definitely towards removing that subsidy really soon. We can see it with OpenAI's shift to API-equivalent pricing for enterprise customers last month. Anecdotally my company saw OpenAI credit usage grow 2x with stable use across the ChatGPT platform, which is pretty terrifying considering just 2% of the company uses Codex.

For context, ChatGPT business subscriptions give you a fixed pool of credits to use, after which you get billed a la carte at inflated 1.75x rates vs API, or if you don't want to pay, you get access to anything but the non-reasoning models turned off for the month.

We also tried Claude Enterprise, which was unusable as people blew through their monthly limits in a matter of hours.

New comment by z2 in "Indexing a year of video locally on a 2021 MacBook with Gemma4-31B (50GB swap)"

z2 — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:49:01 +0000

I've been getting this weekly from colleagues. It's very much an epidemic right now! And the port number is indeed almost always a random number between 8000 and 8100.

New comment by z2 in "Flipper One – we need your help"

z2 — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:53:09 +0000

What happens when everyone learns they need to use something like https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md and emerge on the other side of the valley?

New comment by z2 in "Travelers on Air Force One ordered to throw away gifts, phones after China trip"

z2 — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:07:18 +0000

Actually throw away as in discard and leave behind in China? I thought the logical thing to do would be to put them into a faraday cage and inspect them later in a lab.

New comment by z2 in "RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?"

z2 — Thu, 14 May 2026 18:21:10 +0000

OpenAI being more aware of the implications would help too--last year I also struggled with using Codex to write scripts to run Codex headless, because it kept insisting that Codex was a retired model from the GPT-3 days and not a program that could be called by a script.

New comment by z2 in "Claude for Small Business"

z2 — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:12:20 +0000

Sadly I feel the Excel analogy holds still, where maybe 80% of its users can't write a SUMIF() formula or make a pivot table to save their lives, yet they will happily use Excel every day as digital grid paper. Meanwhile Microsoft made a lot of money selling Excel licenses.

New comment by z2 in "BYD overtakes Tesla and Kia as the best-selling EV brand in key overseas markets"

z2 — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:13:50 +0000

Unfortunately, I looked, so let me add to this game, starting with the fact you omitted Europe:

Company 1: Europe ~0% (trucks & SUVs just don't sell well there it seems) Company 2: Europe 7%

Company 1: Manufactures in 8 countries, 2/3 of its factories are in North America. Company 2: Local production of cars in 25-30 countries depending on partnerships.

Company 1 data: 2025. Company 2 data: 2020 (?!)

New comment by z2 in "BYD overtakes Tesla and Kia as the best-selling EV brand in key overseas markets"

z2 — Wed, 06 May 2026 20:49:10 +0000

See Doron Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power. Concern for IP tends to come _after_ a country develops.

New comment by z2 in "Ti-84 Evo"

z2 — Sat, 02 May 2026 02:08:33 +0000

Ah yes, I had a 89 Titanium (bought with the funds from a math prize) that felt like sanctioned cheating for College Board exams. The year I took the AP physics test, there was a surreally difficult integral or differential equation that I owed completely to the calculator. I never did as well in math competitions since getting that thing, but no regrets.

New comment by z2 in "DeepSeek v4"

z2 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:57:01 +0000

You might be omitting the foreigners that are not in the United States that are being treated rather badly by the United States. I suspect that's what GP was referring to.

New comment by z2 in "The Onion to Take over InfoWars"

z2 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:57:59 +0000

No joke, I use Facebook every year or so to access the marketplace and at the time my feed was roughly half rage-bait, and the other half being what I can only describe as AI-generated almost-pornography. Both had thousands of what looked like genuinely real interactions per post, mostly from developing country users.

New comment by z2 in "5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens"

z2 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:54:25 +0000

The 3x2 is fascinating, it's the same resolution as braille, albeit rotated 90 degrees. I wonder if this could become a braille-like system that's both visually and finger-readable.

Note: there are repeat glyphs here like c and o, though the example actually uses a different c somehow. But perhaps repeats are ok given context.

New comment by z2 in "Why Japan has such good railways"

z2 — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:14:38 +0000

The Hong Kong Metro is also very well planned, architected, and generally well run operationally. So much that the MTR corporation actually offers international consulting services. And for two decades, they have consulted with many mainland Chinese metro systems, hence it's no coincidence that the Shanghai and Shenzhen metros both look and feel very similar to HK's.

New comment by z2 in "Schools Never Taught Critical Thinking: AI Exposed the Lie"

z2 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:14:23 +0000

Even through college I've found that it's hard to optimize for grades vs learning. I've had teachers spite me for disagreeing with them.

Then I developed a formula that essentially went, "While {common sense assertion is true}, we need to consider the nuanced implications of {regurgitated pros/cons}." Combined with the smooth fluff and flow from using speech recognition with minimal edits, suddenly the A's started rolling in. I later found this of course works wonderfully with standardized testing essays in the GRE and GMAT.

Edit: I realize now why I get (even if I don't fully agree with) the 'stochastic parrot' dismissal of language transformer models, I basically lived it.

New comment by z2 in "Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout"

z2 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:31:39 +0000

There are non-battery buffers available too--I recently got rooftop residential solar installed, and learned that my area is covered by a grid profile requiring that the solar system stay online through something like 60 +/- 2Hz before shutting down completely, and ramping down production linearly beyond a 1Hz deviation or so. The point is to avoid cascading shutdowns by riding through over/undersupply situations, whereas an older standard for my area would have the all solar systems cut off the moment frequency exceeded 60.5Hz (which would indicate oversupply from power plant generators spinning faster via lower resistance).

In my system's case, switching to this grid profile was just a software toggle.

New comment by z2 in "Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?"

z2 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:44:01 +0000

You put this well, now that you mention it, I sometimes find myself trying to defend my earlier work as "Pre-ChatGPT," as if that even matters. Relegating future such work to some sort of romanticized "artisanal craftsmanship" feels hollow. That being said, I'm more productive than ever and finally got projects that have stalled out going again, and these projects have made my own life easier as a result. More utility from the result than from having walked the journey perhaps.

New comment by z2 in "Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers"

z2 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:00:02 +0000

Neural networks most certainly go through a process to transform input into output (even to mimic the results of another process) but it's a very different one from human neutral networks. But I think this is the crucial point of the debate, essentially unchanged from Searle's "Chinese Room" argument from decades ago.

The person in that room, looking up a dictionary with Chinese phrases and patterns, certainly follows a process, but it's easy to dismiss the notion that the person understands Chinese. But the question is if you zoom out, is the room itself intelligent because it is following a process, even if it's just a bunch of pattern recognition?

New comment by z2 in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

z2 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:38:09 +0000

Ah, I thought you were just referring to the decades-long use of the most massive supercomputers to simulate nuclear arsenal maintenance and explosions (maybe literally at the molecular/atomic/sub-atomic level).