Recent submissions

Comment · 15 days ago
Waymo experience in San Francisco has always been awesome for me as a passenger.
Comment · 18 days ago
indeed, i've had an 'old ipad' mounted to the underside of my kitchen cabinets for over a decade (I think we're on our third one) and the old ipad is pretty damn good as an airplay compatible music player, recipe lookup machine, screen for watching shows while cooking etc. Mounting it on arm is much better than having it sit on a counter.

Note amazon has a competitor to this that I tried out, the echo show. It's horrible as it just shovels advertisements at you all the time.

Comment · 26 days ago
Spoiler alert: no US department under RFK Jr is closely monitoring anything.
Comment · 26 days ago
I met Paul Atkins, around this time last year. One of his biggest problems (like anyone running a federal department) was that he's not allowed to hire or increase his budget, yet the demand for work that needs SEC attention is not going down. And that's after his dept, and all others, were required to perform layoffs under DOGE.
Comment · 1 month ago
Except that, and this I find slightly amusing, is a situation where they definitely don't want to publicly blame the ai model when there are mistakes.
Comment · 1 month ago
The other way to do this, which I literally did n that era, was to just go buy an extra stick of ram out of pocket (Ram used to not be expensive!) and just guerrilla upgrade my work pc myself, IT none the wiser, and just a lot easier and faster than all the BS time and bureaucracy it would have taken otherwise.

I remember even trying this with a cheap HDD->SSD upgrade as well, but by that point they had implemented drive encryption so that foiled that effort.

Comment · 2 months ago
Literally the best possible kind of psy-op. Same with translating Sesame Street and distributing it to 100s of countries. Same with countries like Thailand exporting Thai food. It's a psy op based on what if we took nice things from our country and subsidized distributing them to the rest of the world, our country would grow in prestige and soft power. And these strategies are usually pretty effective, not to mention usually net-positive for all sides ... compared with so many other horibble harms US and other countries foreign offices have done around the world out of self interest.
Comment · 2 months ago
Where is this being fabbed TSMC? How advanced a process node CPU maker has access to is usually all you need to predict relative performance.

(as long as you take similar assumptions in die size, advanced packaging and power envelope).

Comment · 3 months ago
This thing has 50% more memory than GTX PRO 6000, which fetch 18k-25k+ each right now on newegg, and generally sold out. If nvdia can still sell out 96GB PCI cards (on a 2 year old architecture) at those prices, how is an AMD equivalent with better specs dead on arrival?
Comment · 3 months ago
Okay this tidbit is interesting to me "5–6 tok/s M2 -> 31–35 tok/s on an M5 Pro". So where will be in just another gen or two?

my impression right now is that M5 gen is on the cusp of practicality for local inference.

If techniques like OPs here, start to make the RAM situation more amenable, by the time we get to M6 or M7 (or AMD's equiv next gen APUs on TSMC N2 nodes), local AI could be ready to go much more mainstream.

Comment · 3 months ago
Well that's a relief, glad I am a turtle then and so are most of my friends, and that our whole world economy and food system runs on turtles. So we should be fine.
Comment · 3 months ago
You are assuming there are not naked shorts out there.
Comment · 3 months ago
"Latent space representation" I have been waiting for this moment in the evolution of AI. Well, waiting with some trepidation. It seems inevitable that frontier AI's will, at some point, leave behind human-comprehensible representations of language. Purely for functional reasons, it's going to start making sense for AI agents to communicate amongst themselves in much more efficient ways than borrowing the languages of flesh-bag humans as an interface medium.

I Imagine next that programming languages, interfaces and API design starts going this direction next. Being written, expressed and optimized as blobs of high dimensional vector space. As humans we might still be able to understand some abstractions of what our AI's are talking about to each other, but maybe not more so then we understand how different regions of our own brain communicate with each other.

Comment · 3 months ago
this strategy worked to keep Ukraine alive, by enabling them to throw literally anything and everything they could obtain into the fight. And the system enabled rapid experimentation and evolution of what works. Also they didn't have enough of anything to equip all units equally or fully, so a market-like system of was also a way to triage short supply.

However the logistics costs of fragmentation are very real (relevant to the supply chain theme of this story). And now that Ukraine is producing the better part of 10 millions(!) of drones per year, they are shifting towards more standardized drone models to simplify logistics, achieve more economies of scale and also now to have the capacity to keep units equipped more evenly and reliably.

Comment · 4 months ago
An unfortunate series of events that this thing ended up with these specs at 1,049.00. It was supposed to be cheap and cheerful. At first Steam took an opportunistic deal to buy up a bunch of near-obsolete-already chips from AMD to build a low-cost box around. Then years of delays and an explosion in DRAM and SSD prices and here we are.

4 year old chip design on an equivalently old process node, not that unlike nvidia selling 2-3 year old chips as the spark. Thanks to AI boom, consumer market really just getting the warmed-over leftovers here from AMD and NVDIA.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton