kristopolous

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
18,612
Submissions
5,554
Member since
May 27
https://getpostdelete.com https://siliconfolklore.com https://day50.dev

also

kristopolous@yahoo/gmail.com

I live in California...use the goog address for faster responses.

Currently working on day50. day50.dev

Contact me for more information

View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 2 days ago
It's cartel price fixing.

Other datacenter prices aren't up 500%. CPUs, tape storage, mainboards, racks, cases, PSU, infiniband hardware, HVACs, all price stable.

But consumer grade RAM? Up 500%. USB disks? They're hundreds of dollars.

Also low density platter is up 2-300% as well. Don't tell me people are building out datacenters with 16tb spinning disks, I don't believe you.

It's companies that have price fixed doing it again.

Their EPS are up like 60x. Their stock is up like 10x and we're supposedly like "well I guess this thing you could sell for profit at $20 is now $960, cool"

And what's micron doing with it? $35 billion stock buy back. Alright. Asshole prices it is.

Prices of cheap 10 year old tech continues going up at crypto asshole speeds. Everyone should be insanely angry.

These prices aren't going to stop until either a non cartel player enters the market or there's a DOJ that's not just a bunch of kalshi and crypto scam bros.

We'll see what happens when everyone hears "black Friday? Nah, bro, prices are up another 20%, lol"

Comment · 3 days ago
I've personally stopped believing we will ever return to a world where anything computer isn't at extortionist nosebleed prices as if they're made by Patek Philippe.
Comment · 7 days ago
Comment · 7 days ago
I've consistently heard the opposite from Chinese programmers. Maybe the performance is better in some tasks or maybe the sample size of San Francisco is just skewed.
Comment · 8 days ago
They have so much accountability. Everything is in public for inspection, they're subject to elections happening whether they like it or not, they have to follow strict laws and can be sued or even imprisoned, there's oversights and review boards. Depending on the position there's even television cameras broadcasting their work live. You can just walk in and sit down on them. In the federal government everything you do becomes public property and enters the public domain immediately upon creation. There's way more accountability...

In practice what the "small government" ideology actually does is get rid of these accountability mechanisms and put scammers and corrupt people in charge instead or relabels corruption as the policy through public-private partnerships.

Comment · 8 days ago
The automobile key pool used to be small. Some Eastern European car manufacturers had only a few, the joke was they wouldn't get stolen: once you've been inside one you've had enough
Comment · 8 days ago
Sure this happened in the physical space in 2004

https://jeffwerner.ca/kryptonite_lock/

People swapped out their bike locks en masse, it was a pain.

Comment · 8 days ago
https://localwiki.org/

Been around over 20 years

Comment · 8 days ago
Testing products, getting a feel for them, thinking about them, talking and exploring, I mean this is still there and it's long been the actual time-consuming part of making great software; where the soft skills intersect with the hard.

Maybe the technical stuff is more accessible then it was beforehand but the thousands of hours of the other stuff that leads to good software is still thousands of hours.

Quality has become less work, but only by a little.

But this doesn't mean people value the craftsmanship because they never did before...

It's always been simply a popularity contest and now it's that more than ever.

The question is, why are you spending your time building things? Is it to make things that are finely crafted? Is it the road to wealth? As a tool to get other work done? Just make sure you have an answer.

It's your time after all...

Comment · 8 days ago
it's always been like that. how far back do we want to go? mootools versus jquery? flash? foxpro and vb? cp/m and dos?

software has always been a popularity contest

Comment · 8 days ago
Comment · 9 days ago
I've been working on something in a similar class for about a year called llcat

It was born out of the lack of LLM-native unix-friendly tools that work like cURL, awk and sed.

I couldn't find any so I wrote one myself.

I knew I wanted a reference that is stateless, explicit, low-level, and composable without modal settings.

For instance, instead of config files, llcat can index into files with built-in jq-syntax and line numbers. Then it can the save invocations for later:

    llcat --save invocation.json \
      -k "@~/credentials.txt:12" \
      -u "@settings.json:.[3].host" \
      -s "@system_prompts:8" \
      -m "@settings.json:.[3].model" \
         "@query.txt:12" > output.txt
and then

   llcat --load invocation.json { ... parameters you want to override ... }
It's easy to send to colleagues over chat or keep them invocations in a shared network folder.

Conversations are also just JSON files. You can have a different input and output one. This means you can do stuff like

   for i in *; do 
     # use a non-mutable conversation
     # apply it over a group of files with standard unix pipes
     cat "$i" | llcat --load settings.json -cr context.json  > ../results/"${i}.output"

     # or use attachments 
     llcat --load settings.json -a "$i" -cr context.json > ../results/"${i}.output"

     # or save the whole context
     llcat --load settings.json -a "$i" -cr context.json -c ../results/"${i}.output" > /dev/null

   done
One of my favorite patterns is this one:

   llcat -k @~/secrets.json:.anthropic -u api.anthropic.com 
   llcat -k @~/secrets.json:.openrouter -u openrouter.ai/api
Since there's no hidden state you can use llcat in shell scripts and get operational guarantees.

I've put a lot of effort into it and use it daily. If you can give it a go and give me feedback and file bugs, I'd love it.

https://github.com/day50-dev/llcat

Comment · 10 days ago
This is news? Didn't we all just presume that was what was happening? I mean they're a data mining company.
Comment · 12 days ago
well no of course not ... but they do this for qwen 3.8 27b, and decision models like this https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/artificial-analysis-d...

this one is especially annoying ... i can run these on lots of hardware but there's vast differences in many aspects.

Whether I'm getting a good deal isn't what I'm thinking about if I'm getting garbage results. It's more about why am I wasting my time on the wrong tool.

I mean what I really want is a more reliable classic eval benchmark for the decision models that I can easily deploy, like the official ollama ones: https://ollama.com/library?sort=newest

perplexity has a 27b decision then there's a 3b from liquidai and another 600M one. Then there's one called kev and bespoke has nimble-v3. clef from cloudflare is there along with strands-decider from aws. Then there's laya and tev1 ... I mean the AA page seems to be the only real third party doing benchmark and evals on it but most of these are missing from it. It has a lot to be desired.

And you go over to HF and it's even more mysterious https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=text-classificati...

Maybe an agentic eval framework that tests anything that hits 100 downloads would be a decent weekend project...

Also there's like wildly different tasks. choices versus noul have way different performances and also if you are doing things like text classification such as using it for theme extraction, I mean this does work with nimble-v3 but d1 gives mostly noise and pplx-decider is in between and their performance degradation curves are dramatically different depending on the input-token length.

This is all going to be bitter lessoned eventually but I can't just sit on my hands and wait around 12 months.

So now I have a proxy that looks at the input size and do dynamic routing and sometimes fire off both and do ensemble weightings ... I mean why do I have to be clever here, this is a generic problem.

I had to discover all this myself and I really shouldn't have to do that...I guess I'm just expecting some quant results from AA that they aren't in the business of providing.

Comment · 12 days ago
AA prices are always kind of hand wavy for open models. I mean if you rent a cheap gpu and run inference yourself...or heck, what about a cpu instance with a bunch of ram, you can do that with llama.cpp for under a $1/hour. Ok not that, so are we talking about the median spot price per token from a basket of inference providers? Which ones? They actually vary quite a bit, even on openrouter, for this particular deepseek checkpoint it's between $0.15 and $1.20 ... that's like 8x spread...

They have some math here https://artificialanalysis.ai/methodology but ok how are the prices weighted among the providers... and even if you do that 7:2:1 math it doesn't match the providers. Specifically the model in question: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/deepseek-v4-1-flash-101... doesn't match the first listed provider https://deepinfra.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017

Do the math yourself, it's actually $0.08 not the AA claimed $0.10 (and that's the more expensive of the two pricing tiers). That's a pretty large error bar.

Also many of the providers are now doing "peak" and "offpeak" pricing (deepseek.com itself for instance) so it can differ dramatically. These "peak" times depend on where the service is most popular. You can basically ride "off-peak" pricing by cascading from global provider to global provider.

The majority of the time taken in an inference call is doing the inference so the extra latency of traveling across an ocean is actually a fairly small wall-clock tax here. People still seem to be partial to nearby servers for ai-related workloads but really, try some decent ones 10,000 km away, you probably won't notice.

I know AA thinks highly of the price metric (I've been to their events, even have their hat, they brag about it) but I have learned to ignore it as noise.

It's an especially strange metric with open-weights decision models. I mean I can run those on my laptop ... cost is very abstract there.

But for closed-source models with only a handful of providers (sometimes just 1) great, the price is a very reasonable number.

For the open models a more useful thing would be like "100 tok/s spot price build" and then it's using pcpartpicker or something in some kind of partnership and can query a build for buying a machine right now that can achieve a certain benchmark number and maybe something for less interactive workloads like "5 tok/s". Of course getting some base unit of power cost in there might be important as well since the power bill is the majority of what you pay for when you rent a commodity gpu.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton