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Your Phone Is an Entire Computer (medhir.com)
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Wow everything computer
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Isn’t my Apple Watch faster than a Cray 1?
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There's nothing much special about phone silicon. They generally run a bit slower than their desktop/laptop counterparts because of power and heat limitations. At the top end on a desktop power usage doubles or triples for lower double-digit percentage gains. You can shave that off and not lose much. Laptops are a lot closer to phones than they are to desktops when it comes to power and thermal limitations*, so re-using a "phone" chip really isn't crazy. * 100W power usage on a laptop is entering silly territory, but on a desktop that's the bottom of entry-level rigs.
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Android now has a desktop mode (as Samsung has supported for years with Dex), and it also works on degoogled variants like GrapheneOS.
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It would be cool if iPhone could double as a laptop by just adding a monitor and keyboard/mouse and switch over to macOS.
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[delayed]
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Tim Apple wants you to pay thrice, once for a phone, once again for a tablet and finally one last time for a laptop.
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Some people insist there is no difference between a product and a capability and I honestly don't know to communicate to those people.
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I use the Pixel, but the point is the same. Recently Google added the "Dex" like feature where I can plug in the phone to a monitor and use it as my "entire computer" - at first I was excited, I can go to a coffee shop and leave my laptop behind, but then I looked at getting a bluetooth keyboard, mouse, monitor - with battery, and it's now a worse experience. There are monitor/battery/trackpad combination products for this exact scenario but they are nowhere near the quality of just buying a Macbook - doubly so the Neo. A laptop is more than the sum of its parts. Your phone overlaps with it on a technical level, but format is important.
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I seem to recall the Carriers having some pretty strict requirements on the devices that can connect to the mobile networks. Anyone know if that's (still) the case? I'm not trying to defend Apple here, I'm just curious if there would be some kind of carrier validation issues if you slapped a full desktop OS on a phone.
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iPhone users just now discovering Samsung Dex... cute
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Is this news to anyone? of course it is! The reason that they don't let you run MacOS is absolutely arbitrary, in support of you buying another device. It also allows them to avoid the cost of supporting MacOS in another form-factor. This feels more like a facebook post that would shock my mom then a HN article...
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Arbitrary is doing a lot of work. With MacOS you can use an iPad as a touchscreen external monitor. Try it and you’ll learn that it’s not a touchscreen OS. It’s not as simple as “not letting you”.
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Maybe it doesn't have a touchscreen interface, but i take issue with it being a touchscreen OS. I suspect most people who would want to run MacOS on an ipad would attach the appropriate user interface devices.
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I have long wished for a future when I could just plug my phone into a KVM and have a full desktop experience.
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I don't want the phone os on a screen but the phone is powerful enough to run a full linux VM and work well-enough as a good desktop.
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They're all supercomputers that would have ranked on the TOP500 in the 90s.
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It's very clear that the consumer is getting a worse experience than what is technically possible. There is no good phone-slash-laptop, purely because it's less profitable than locking down the devices and selling them separately.
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> There is no good phone-slash-laptop There is: https://puri.sm/posts/my-first-year-of-librem-5-convergence/
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I think the reason is pretty obvious; what really goes on inside of our mobile phones, is not for the faint of heart.
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A few days ago I cracked the edge of my smartphone's screen at just the right spot to shut its display off entirely, though it still works . Using the USB-C dongle meant for my laptop, the phone pops into a desktop view which basically is the same experience as a Chromebook (for better or worse). In the meantime before its repair, I shoved my SIM card into an old flipphone I had in the tech graveyard drawer. I've actually really liked the limited flipphone experience. It's a mental breath of fresh air to not have a time/focus black hole in my pocket at all times. It made me realize that I've had a pretty bad relationship with my smartphone in terms of how much time I wasted on it. I'm considering keeping the flipphone as my primary phone. Maybe smartphones do too much.
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The problem is Mac. They've always locked things down citing safety or user experience, but it is profit and walled garden. Samsung Dex has been doing this for years. In before someone explains it's not "exactly" the same. Dex has shown this phone/computer ability in practice long before.
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Isn’t Dex similar to connecting a monitor to an M-powered iPad? Perhaps that will one day come to iPhone.
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It's always funny to watch hackernews slam apple for user experience decisions based off what's best for their average customer as if every person purchasing an apple device is a hackernews. It seems like the viability of running a computer from an A16 really just came to fruition. There's heat, performance, battery life, etc implications that the average consumer can't quite articulate but it matters to them. Apple's goal seemed to be to decimate the Cheap Plastic Intel Laptop space, and I think they succeeded at catching the industry with their tails between their legs.
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I’ve been hoping Apple would allow this for years, although it doesn’t seem like something they would do. The fact that iPadOS now has windowing seems like it would only make it work better. iPads can already do everything necessary, so why not the iPhone? Unfortunately I suspect that if this was ever going to happen, which I would’ve bet against, it’s now let’s likely. I suspect current Apple would rather sell me a Neo then let me use my phone. In other words I think the existence of the product might rule it out under current leadership. Who knows. I could be wrong. Only time will tell.
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If the rumored folding phone with a close-to-iPad-mini UI handles USB monitor connections the same as the iPad, that would give the basic version right there, albeit at a huge base price.
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> I'm bothered, as I have been since the original iPad introduction 16 years ago, by the unnecessary restrictions placed by corporate powers to run third-party software and operating systems on devices we own. It's not unnecessary, they do it because they make money as gatekeeper.
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Just wanting to be a gatekeeper doesn't cover measures like SIP that don't make them anything and presumably took immense man-hours to implement. I think the more accurate view would be an intersection of some of the company wanting to make money off gatekeeping and some of the company wanting to make quality devices that stay functional and malware-free even after you give to a deeply gullible grandparent for a while, and the former using the latter as a transparent excuse much of the time.
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It's also because U.S. carriers don't like people hooking up arbitrary devices that can run arbitrary software to their network. In the civilized world, you have a device that talks GSM/LTE, you're golden as long as you don't violate any transmission laws. But in the USA carriers are still doing device allowlisting because I guess they want to bin QoS and don't want pro-grade traffic going over consumer accounts, nor the added expense of support for consumer accounts with exotic hardware that "might" break the network.
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There are other reasons. A big factor in the success of the iPad and maybe just some degree the iPhone, but especially the iPad, is that it’s “unbreakable”. All out restrictions mean it’s computer people don’t worry will suddenly stop working because they clicked to the wrong link. It won’t get a weird virus from their email. That is a serious upside for a lot of consumers.
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They could allow unlocking the phone by burying that option deep in the settings with scary warnings etc. Most people could use the device with the restrictions. The fact that this is not possible at all is greed.
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One of the first things help desk scammers do is convince people to turn off antivirus and/or Windows Defender on their computers.
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I feel like that same reason is why you see a lot of seriously tech-savvy people try to use iPads as laptop substitutes over and over even though they're obviously still not suitable for it for technical tasks. There's a lot of latent appeal in "okay, what if I just didn't have to worry about any of that ambient technical crap?".
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You can still have that. Make unbreakable the default, and add an "admin mode" toggle.
Anyone have a theory why Apple hasn't done this yet? They release an 'iBook' which is basically a wired or even wireless lapdock for your iPhone running OSX in a partition. Seems like that would decimate the entire Windows, laptop, even desktop market in short order. Everyone with an iPhone, no longer needs their laptop/desktop. Just buy a cheap iBook and there's a good chance it'll already be better than most consumer PCs.
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There isn't much demand for using phone as computer. If you are at home or work, you can buy a desktop computers for cheap. If you are traveling, you need to find a monitor and keyboard. You could carry small monitor and wireless keyboard, but then you are carrying as much as laptop. People who need to work on the road get a laptop. People who need to send email get iPad and keyboard. Good example of the economics is that Macbook Neo or iPad Air are cheaper than new iPhone. iPhone should export display, but more for showing videos or presentations. My Pixel 10 has USB-C display and I haven't used it, but I have computers for all purposes. Apple should spend more effort making the iPad usable for work. It would be good candidate for USB-C display, but with iPadOS.
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FWIW, you can plug your iPhone into an external monitor to do a Keynote presentation. You need a USB-C (or Lightning) to HDMI dongle in most cases, but it works fine. - https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote-iphone/present-on-a-separate-display-tana4da2681/ios
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How can there be demand for something that doesn't exist? If Apple releases a $300 lapdock tomorrow, basically a screen, keyboard, battery, that allows using your iPhone as a normal general purpose computer with OSX - why would anyone buy a laptop/desktop?
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Because people like TFA pay them not to. It doesn't matter how much you hope Apple changes course - you vote with your wallet.
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Other than UI and other surface differences, the fundamental distinction between a Mac and an iDevice is... what it is. A Mac is a real computer. I can run any code I want on it. I have root. An iDevice is like a game console. I can only run App Store apps (without jumping through a lot of hoops). I do not have root (without again jumping through many hoops or ugly hacks). If Apple wanted to unify the platform they have two choices. The first is to abandon the "real computer" market entirely. The second is to make iDevices real computers by unlocking them. I suspect they'd rather keep two platforms. Under the hood they both share a lot of code, so it's not two totally distinct platforms. It's more like two sets of defaults and two "skins."
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I think the friction of using a keyboard/pointing device with a touchscreen, or fingers with a desktop interface, is too high to unify them. I know it's been done, I'm unconvinced it's been done well.
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MacBook Neo has in a way unified the platforms. The only difference is essentially what OS is booted up with the chip.
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That was already the case with the M-series chips, which are shared between Macs and higher-end iPads. The Neo just extends it to the A-series as well.
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Why would it decimate the Windows market? From my experience, there's a strong correlation between iPhone and Mac usage. Looking at the stats, the Win:Mac ratio is 4:1 but Android:iPhone only 2:1 so it might hurt Windows. But if iPhone users are more likely to use Mac or don't use computers much already, then expanding iPhone capabilities would cannibalize Apple business.
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No, the iPhone has over 50% market share in the US, macOS is nowhere near that.
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Because then most people with an iPhone wouldn't need to buy a separate laptop/desktop. I'm sure Android as well would follow in short order. Sales would plummet. Windows decimated.
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Money. The general public thinks phones and computers are fundamentally different. Heck, I remember arguing this point even on HN back when smart phones were first coming out and being generally on the losing side as people got very excited about "app stores" and such. I see no practical path to getting to the point that enough of us realize that there is simply no reason for our phones to be locked down the way they are that the companies are forced to undo it, especially with our elites pushing with all they are worth to lock things down harder. The companies take that confusion to the bank. There have been numerous attempts at making phone/laptop crossovers, where you can plug your phone into a dock and get a computer, or slide your phone into a laptop case, etc. Some of them are even still around, but they're all definitely second-class citizens. There's a variety of problems that I think they've had in the market, not least of which is the fact that the average person still sees "phones" and "computers" as fundamentally different so the product makes no sense to them, but another issue that I think has held them back is that the product inevitably work by porting the limitations of the phone into the computer, rather than porting the freedom of the computer into the phone. In the USB-C era, there is no excuse for every phone not having a mode where you can plug it into any ol' USB-C hub/dock and be able to get a desktop environment, even down to the "middle-of-the-line" phones. It would require in most cases no extra hardware. They just don't.
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The form factor is a major difference. HNers being more technical than the median consumer are used to text and keyboards - a large portion of humanity isn't. You see this with Foundation Models as well - most have started to shift away from only concentrating on text to TTS and STT usecases. Also, DeX style monitor screen share with a Bluetooth keyboard has been supported since iOS 15. Additionally, a major portion of Apple's desktop revenue is coming from poweruser and specialist demand - IT departments bulk purchasing developer laptops, designers having their entire design workflow within the MacOS environment, and video editors heavily dependent on MacOS. Arguments about how Apple has an incentive not to cannibalize revenue is dumb, given how open Apple is to cannibalizing revenue where PMF exists (eg. the iPad Pro versus lower tier MacBooks).
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The entire Mac line is a teeny tiny slice of revenue compared to iPhone. Allowing OSX on iPhone would increase the utility of iPhone, leading to more sales.
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> Allowing OSX on iPhone would increase the utility of iPhone, leading to more sales That assumption is not necessarily true. What this implies is that there is a market of existing consumers that would not buy an iPhone because it lacks OSX support. The iPhone portion of Apple's business generates around $144B in YoY revenue in Q1FY27 [0]. Whenever an organization contemplates building a net new capability like the one you mentioned, a quick test is whether it would be able to generate and sustain at minimum the equivalent of 1% of yearly revenue. If this was a $1B revenue opportunity it would have been implemented, but it's not. Nor is it a feature that can actively or dramatically increase Apple's market share in most markets. [0] - https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/apple-reaches-all-time-revenue-record-driven-by-iphones
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That would also seriously hurt the sales of Macs. Even more so now that the Neo exists.
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It would explode sales of Mac. OSX on iPhone, people wouldn't need the separate Windows laptops they're used to. OSX on iPhone is the gateway for consumers into the OSX ecosystem. And when those consumers want more powerful hardware, instead of buying a more powerful Windows laptop/desktop - they buy a Mac instead. I feel like Apple knows this as well, so I can't figure out why they haven't pulled the trigger. Anti-trust risk? lol
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I think Apple is just really careful about how they segment their product line for each use case, and would never go for a "jack of all trades" solution like this.
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It would decimate their own business.
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This. The more locked down, the less in control we are, the higher margins they command. This is why app stores exist - it has nothing to do with safety or security, and everything to do with monopolizing the distribution supply chain from soup to nuts. Don’t like it? Too bad, it’s fully locked down and cracking it is a (potentially) criminal offense, so whaddayagonnadoaboutit?!
Why the militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink (newscientist.com)
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I think the next big war will involve a kessler syndrome, not because people start firing off anti-satellite weapons (since there's a strong component of MAD in doing that) but because the belligerents will have their own multi-thousand satellite constellations in orbit and they will quit coordinating with one another on collision avoidance.
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They have suddenly discovered what engineers have been telling them for about 80 years, and theoreticians have known for 100+ years is actually true: directional beams that cannot realistically be distrupted + satellites out of reach + even if you can you can only take ALL satellites out of orbit (ie. including your own, not just the enemy's). So on future battlefields, everyone will have livestreaming. Do governments and militaries even believe in the laws of physics? I mean that exactly this was going to happen (undisruptable radio comms + robots, on the battlefield) was perfectly predictable near ~about 1960, and it's an absolute miracle that it took so long to come to pass. And even that is assuming you're only willing to believe in demonstrations. For physicists it must have been a theoretical certainty that this was coming before WW1 was done.
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Starlink direct-connect LTE support is simply going to bury any telecom that ignores the technology. Essentially, anyone with a smart-phone will now be able to text home from anywhere without specialized equipment. Elon can take a victory lap on that product. Competitors naive enough to underestimate what it took to build Starlink are going to find spectrum auctions already well out of their league. =3
In Canada, the CF is working on rebuilding their expertise in HF radio, as they realized that in case of large scale conflict, satellite systems aren't going to be dependable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Forces_Affiliate_Radio_System
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Any serious journalist/aid work efforts should be doing the same. It's too easy for countries to disable terrestrial internet to suppress reporting. And it's too easy for AI to generate believable but false video evidence. But if you can afford to put a man on the ground, he can get information into the next hemisphere with just a sandwich sized radio and a spool of wire -- a fantastic backup against inevitable systemic disruptions.
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Canada has a lot of obscure technology that would normally fall under export restriction in the US. The problem I have with the Canadian business culture was there is zero protection on a global scale for your company, privacy, and or personal safety. =3
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Ever notice just how many countries seem to be pretty convinced war is coming? And don't tell me it's all Trump, at the very least they believe that whoever follows Trump isn't going to be very different. Plus it's mostly EU that's rearming, and surely they aren't afraid they'll be attacked ...
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EU had a reliable military and technological partner in the US until circa 2016, and maintaining that belief became untenable in 2024. The reason EU countries are all of the sudden investing in onshoring critical military capabilities is that until Trump it’s been the policy position of the US to prevent them from doing so by doing it for them, a policy we inaugurated after WW2 and expanded during the Cold War for various reasons that we seem very sure don’t apply anymore.
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I've worked in defense tech. This is true, but it should be described much more as "Europe believed US would save their ass - for free, and did nothing" (with exceptions, like France, and some token efforts within NATO) The US was not holding back much within NATO.
The story I like to tell is about the Manhattan Project. This caused a debate in US strategic circles that set policy for the entire post-1945 world. Debate included whether a preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR was necessary or even just a good idea. Anyway, many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. The hydrogen bomb? The USA tested theirs in 1952. The USSR? 1953. China now has decades of commitment to long-term projects, an interest in national security and creating an virtuous circle for various industries. The US banned the export of EUV lithography machiens to China but (IMHO) they made a huge mistake by also banning the best chips. Why was this a mistake? Because it created a captive market for Chinese-made chips. The Soviet atomic project was helped by espionage and ideology (ie some people believed in the communist project or simply thought it a bad idea that only the US had nuclear weapons). That's just not necessary today. You simply throw some money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked at ASML and you catch up to EUV real fast. I said a couple of years ago China would develop their own EUV processes because they don't want the US to have that control over them. It's a matter of national security. China seems to be 3-5 years away on conservative estimates. More evidence of this is China not wanting to import NVidia chips despite the ban being lifted [1]. China has the same attitude to having its own launch capability. They've already started testing their own reusable rockets [2]. China has the industrial ecosystem to make everything that goes into a rocket, a captive market for Chinese launches (particularly the Chinese government and military) and the track record to pull this off. And guess what? China can hire former SpaceX engineers too. I predict in 5 years these comments doubting China's space ambitions will be instead "well of course that was going to happen". [1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-want-buy-nvidia-chips [2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-explosive-zhuque-3-test-previews-the-global-race-for-reusable-rockets/
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> many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.
Cost, maybe? It is one thing to ship up a valuable satellite (which they all can do). But to ship up 1000s of satellites (and keep doing it in perpetuity, because IIRC they don't have a long lifetime[0]) gets expensive. 0: Looks like 5 years. https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
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Another major detail is that SpaceX is simply burning enormous amounts of money on this. Starlink's revenue is comparable to the ESA's entire 5 billion euro budget, and it still looks like starlink is not net-profitable as a service. (And kessler syndrome avoidance is already pushing up costs with the lower orbits) The chief problem "stopping" other countries from developing a starlink competitor is that starlink simply doesn't make all that much sense if your country is capable of basic infrastructure construction. Fiber runs are expensive but not that expensive.
Or at least they were while anti-trust still had some teeth. Trump's DOJ is highly unlikely to go after Starlink for refusing to launch for a competitor, let alone another nation's military.
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To be future proof for more administrations you don't want a monopoly at any step. you really want at least three competitors at minimum. Large companies in tech have realized this by now since the 90s. Recently TeraWave was launched by SpaceX due to the inherent risk (and this is a direct competitor to SpaceX. See https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/bezos-blue-origin-satellite-internet-spacex-amazon.html
Revealed: Face of 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal from cave (cam.ac.uk)
I'm skeptical. Is this kind of facial reconstruction from a skull legit? Or is it pseudoscience?
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I'm not sure what would be "pseudo-science" about it, but it is as legit as it can be. Reconstruction of a face from a skull is possible, but the goal is not to create an image that's indistinguishable from a hypothetical photograph of the subject. Rather, the intent is to form a general idea of what people of the time period would have looked like. Facial reconstruction is guided by current understanding of anatomy, musculature, aging processes, etc. Muscles and skin are attached to the skull based on modern human and primate anatomy, so what we get is a plausible representation of what someone with this exact skull shape may have looked like. Like with the dinosaurs, we cannot be 100% certain what the superficial exterior features looked like exactly. But, unlike with the dinosaurs, we know neanderthals are very closely related to modern humans, so we have a much more reasonable base to start from, as we can assume their facial muscles, skin, hair etc. would be similar to humans, but with different proportions. Plenty of real science goes into the process.
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> Is this kind of facial reconstruction from a skull legit? What did you search for when you tried to verify this yourself? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klxUyd3CgrE Aside, a similar approach was used in a MacGyver episode nearly 40 years ago ("The Secret of Parker House"): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0638792/mediaviewer/rm1193210369/?ref_=tt_ph_1_2
I'm not sure about how much we know of musculature and fat layers of neanderthals. Working from skeletons of non-humans can be really fraught.
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Neanderthals are humans.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Show HN: Channel Surfer – Watch YouTube like it’s cable TV (channelsurfer.tv)
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i want to be try this but I am unable to import my subscriptions like the directions you give, it just brigns me to the my feed when i follow your directions
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I'll plug a similar project that I found last week, its an emulated TV Tuner (HD Homerun) of your Plex/Jellyfin content. Its great having an easy option to throw something on for background noise. https://tunarr.com/
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This reminded me of Ersatz TV [1], which on checking appears to have gone into maintenance mode a few weeks ago. I had wanted to use something that lets me set up an EPG with all of the YouTube channels I watch, to see their live streams in a TV guide and see their upcoming streams in a nice grid format. It's probably harder to do this with live stuff than it is to have a set of videos like this site uses. [1]: https://github.com/ErsatzTV/ErsatzTV
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I really like this. Old formats are comforting.
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My initial reaction to the headline was, "cable TV is terrible, why would anyone want to watch YouTube like it's cable?!" But I actually love this!
Turn off your watch history. It disables the front page and shorts, but you can still watch any video you want and also follow your subscriptions. You still get recommendations next to each video but I find those much less problematic personally.
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Unfortunately, with watch history off, YouTube still pushes Shorts in the subscriptions page (at least on mobile web, which is where I primarily use YouTube).
Why would you want to do that? I'm so happy I can search exactly what I want among heaps of long tail stuff, I would never want to go back to a "live tv" interaction model.
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The (forced) decision fatigue and constant interruptions makes YouTube a miserable experience. Good: I choose to when and what to change the channel to. The channel never stops. Bad: YouTube video ends and I'm prompted to do something every 5 to 15 mins.
Not the author, but did a LOT of research on this during my time at Disney while working on Disney+ prior to its launch. This is, effectively, no different than a carousel of algorithm-recommended content. However, UX studies have found users reluctant to watch something recommended to them. It requires making an affirmative decision on time investment. Most people have the experience of a friend recommending a movie or book and still being reluctant to dive in. The problem is very similar to dating apps, if you think about it. This is why Tinder's innovation on "swipe left/right" took off the way it did. In UX terms it's better to drop users into something and make the cognitive effort be choosing to get out of it rather than choosing to get into it. It's a big part of why TikTok works. The reason this isn't more common in video apps has more to do with UX norms at this point. Another important thing I learned about streaming at Disney was that no one really cares how innovative the browsing experience is. They just want to watch Frozen. They're used to carousels now, and they're easy to program. This, I think, speaks more to your sensibilities.
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Tuning into a channel in channel surfing mode also lets you hop in mid story which is it's own experience.
OVH forgot they donated documentation hosting to Pandas (github.com/pandas-dev)
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we would love to offer you early access to our static hosting platform and a free Pro subscription PM if you are interested
Isn't Hetzner strongly associated with OVH? I thought they were under the same umbrella.
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OVH operates three hosting brands: OVH, SYS (So You Start), and KimSufi. It's a bit confusing! IIRC they bring the newest hardware into OVH and push it down the line to SYS and KS as it ages.
I think the OVH datacenter was also built of wood and right next to another "independent" datacenter which also burned down when the fire spread. OVH is about cheap, not quality. Like hetzner they come from the vps/hosting end of the market which is all about cutting corners, packing vms, overselling, etc. Very much the cowboy end of the market.
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And I will say again, we couldn’t get insurance without the halon system.
The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We'll Be "Stunned" by NSA Under Section 702 (techdirt.com)
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I’ve stayed private for most of my adult life. Network wide dns, vpns, alternative personas online for different purposes, etc. Nonetheless, my personal data has been exposed numerous times. Once in a while, I’d get into a conversation with a friend or a stranger I met at some random function, and they’d ask how to stay private online and protect their data. I used to go in depth about how to do it, with excitement. Now I just say: be normal, fit in with the crowd, freeze your credit.
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As someone that worked in an illegal industry (urban pharmaceuticals), you need to appear normal and hide your crimes. If you just hide your crimes, you stick out and become a target. Plausible deniability is harder than just total protection.
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The warnings are nice but he could just say what it is. Members of Congress have immunity for what they say on the floor of their chamber in session, classification or no.
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So glad to see my Oregon senator regularly on the money.
The interpretation of the law is classified? That’s stupid and everyone who protected that classification, regardless of whatever the interpretation is, is a traitor!
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Secret laws, secret courts... Jeez, man.
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This is why I'm never giving a penny to OpenAI again, now matter how much damage control Altman tries to do with "look, we reworded the contract to have redlines too!". Yeah, legal redlines that the administration can bypass with their secret memos and secret rubberstamp courts. This isn't even a Trump thing: the Bush DOJ wrote secret memos making torture legal, the Obama DOJ wrote secret memos making it legal to assassinate American citizens. Non-technical redlines which aren't under the vendor's control aren't worth a piss squirt.
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By using ChatGPT, OpenAI are losing money. So if you want them to die faster, use their services.
Wyden has been special, as long as I can remember. I feel like a lot of us early tech people had something of a libertarian bent. I think to some extent I've grown out of it in my less idealistic older age, but the whole idea of freedom from the government, living your own life, not being spied on, still resonates with me, and Wyden has always been a champion of it to some extent. You used to have Ron Paul, and these days now Rand Paul and Thomas Massie sometimes waving that flag, too. It was definitely swimming upstream in the post-9/11 days. I was hopeful for a while with Trump that we'd see more of a mainstream resurgence, but it's not looking like it to me anymore. Anyway, I can only imagine what he's alluding to here...
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I think he is a reflection of the broader libertarian streak of Oregonians. Source: am Oregonian.
Everyone who's not terribly worried about privacy always uses the line 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about', but my line of thinking is not 'do i trust the government' it's 'do I have faith in all future forms of government who will have access to this data' Given how fast and lose I've seen the DODGE folks play with the data they have, absolutely not . I still shudder over the fact that my OPM data was hacked years ago
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> it's 'do I have faith in all future forms of government who will have access to this data' And even this assumes that the government can and will protect the data from the various bad actors who want it, something they have absolutely failed to do on multiple occasions.
Does anyone ever actually use that line? Most people will argue that the trade off in privacy is worth it for security. That is, if you frame your argument such that you believe people don’t understand the trade off it allows you to not engage with the fact they just disagree with your conclusion.
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Constantly. Most people have a hard time dealing with tradeoffs and think in absolutes. It goes along with "if you're not a criminal, you have nothing to fear from police," another disturbingly common sentiment. Some prominent examples: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22832263 https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSVJmOajGDe/ https://thestandard.nz/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide-you-have-nothing-to-fear/
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The mistake would be reading Hacker News and walking away with the conclusion that because people don't post that reasoning here that it doesn't exist (and even then, you do find that does come up here on occasion). People with "nothing to hide" do actually believe that, and while they may not post it to HN for vigorous debate. The easy counterexample from history is the list of Jews kept by the Netherlands which was later used against them after they were conquered by Nazi Germany, but you'd have to interested in history to buy that reason. Some people simply shrug at the "if you don't have anything to hide then you won't mind me filming your bedroom" scenario as you being the creep in the equation. Some people just don't want the trouble and are fine with being surveiled because the powers that be are doing it.
I have seen what happens with garbage-in/garbage-out in databases, so this kind of stuff terrifies me. I often think of a case where we had a person listed twice in our database, with same address, birthday, etc, only thing different was gender, and last 2 digits of SSN were transposed.. After we 'fixed' the issue a few times, they BOTH showed up to our office. Both Named Leslie, born on same day, a few small towns apart, same last name and home phone since they had been married. Back then, SSN were handed out by region sequentially, so one had the last two digits 12 and the other 21.
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My uncle married a woman with the same first and middle name as one of his sisters. My new aunt chose to use her husband’s name as her married name, without hyphenation or anything. His sister, my aunt, never married. One was an RN and the other is an LPN. They were born in different years. Their SSNs were not close. For one of them the name was her maiden name. For the other, a married name. They went to different colleges and had different credentials. They did live in the same town. When my aunt died, all the credit companies and collections companies tried one of two recovery tactics. Some tried to make her brother pay the debts as her surviving spouse. The others tried to assert that the debts were incurred by his wife and that the mismatch of other data in their own databases was evidence of fraud.
That's funny as a human, amazing as a developer, and terrifying as a data processor. All at the same time. I'll bet that pair has stories to tell.
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I'm a man in my 40s. My eldest daughter is 17. We have the same first name (spelled differently, at least) and have had many cases where medical records have gotten confused. We always double-check dosages for medications before taking them.
Wyden is a national treasure. Thank you for your service, Ron. Also: Hello from Roseburg.
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Wyden is a vote I cast without issue. He is one of the few that is actually looking into Epstein bank accounts movements.
I wouldn't be surprised by it, but "they're actually using all of the above, laundered through some extra steps, to provide leads to state and local LEO" would probably get people pissed off.
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Soma ( social media ) keeps everyone comfortably sedated
Launch HN: Captain (YC W26) – Automated RAG for Files (runcaptain.com)
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Interesting to see still solutions being developed for RAG. We developed a solution similar to yours: Automatic indexing from GDrive, SharePoint etc. and then advanced hierarchical chunking, context header based markdown conversion etc... All the tricks that were published last year while RAG was still the "new" kid in town. We finally open sourced everything as the competition from the big players (Notion AI, Google etc.) was daunting. If anyone is interested, this blog post about all the techniques we tried and what actually works is still relevant and up2date: https://bytevagabond.com/post/how-to-build-enterprise-ai-rag/
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Are you writing the integrations listed there, or is are you using something that manages the data connections?
Just some unfiltered feedback after checking out the website: from what I understand this is an SaaS only? So basically I’m asked to upload ALL company docs to a company that existed for basically a minute with some questionable SOC2 report. Soc2 is basically dead as a security artefact and the data asked to upload is sensitive by nature. I don’t see that working.
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> Soc2 is basically dead as a security artefact can you expand on that?
Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine (macrumors.com)
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Now just needs to have that pre-installed by Apple, and macOS somehow hidden during boot time.
If Apple continues with the budget Neo brand into a 12 GB iteration, I can see this becoming more realistic (rather than a novelty). That being said, Parallels may need to review its licensing with a budget tier in mind. Few will buy a cheap computer and then pay what Parallels charges for a license (regardless if one-time or subscription). They need to introduce something below the Standard license targeting the Neo. What I'd personally consider is: - Standard gets 16 GB vRAM (to perfectly target the base MacBook Air). But leave it at 4-6 vCPUs to not compete with the Pro (still for general computing, not power-users) - New "Lite" tier with 8 GB vRAM max for the Neo (4 vCPUs). Increasing to 12 GB vRAM if the Neo does. Then you target a $89 price point one-time-purchase for the "Lite" tier. Essentially three plans, targeting your three major demographics: budget, standard, and pro/power-user.
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This isn't a novelty it will crush the low end of the PC market. No one cares if the next iteration will be better with 12GB of ram. The workloads that people say that 8GB can't handle will be ones that the actual users will either wait or tolerate. I've been noticing that people who review the Macbook Neo basically don't get the point [1] and just the headline of this article matters that VMs work and thats a big win. The most ridicuous thing about the laptop is that it appears to be reparable which sort of tells me this is a template similar to the M1 Air of the future laptop designs that Apple will come out with. [2] [1] https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer-for-you/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbPCGqoBB4Y
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> This isn't a novelty it will crush the low end of the PC market. You took what I said out of context and then replied to something else . Running Parallels on a Neo is a novelty. Parallels is both what the thread is about AND what my reply was expressly about. Nobody can reasonably read what I wrote, in context, and believe I was referring to the computer itself as a novelty.
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Apple already sells that, it’s called MacBook Air.
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The MacBook Air is a computer , you replied to a comment about virtualization software, and the licensing costs therein. What are you trying to say?
VMWare Fusion is free, even if it is a pain in the butt to download. It also has GPU paravirtualization for Linux/Windows which is the only reason I use a proprietary VMM on macOS these days.
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http://tart.run works great for running macOS (and Linux) VMs on macOS if you're technical. It's free for non-commercial uses too! (Don't think there's GPU acceleration tho).
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You can also use UTM to run Windows for free and it is open source. https://mac.getutm.app
If the A18 Pro has the same ISA as the M-series chips then this may not be so straightforward. I am still hanging on to my 2020 Intel MBP for dear life because it is the only Apple device I own that allows me to run Ubuntu and Windows 11 on a VirtualBox VM.
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Same Armv8 ISA. And it's the same ISA Android Linux has run on for over a decade.
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Would you elaborate what you mean by saying Linux on an M-series chip isn't straightforward? That's not been my experience, I (and lots of other devs) use it every day, Apple supports Linux via [0], and provides the ability to use Rosetta 2 within VMs to run legacy x86 binaries? 0: https://github.com/apple/container
Every thread about Windows on Hacker News includes claims about apps taking 30 seconds to launch, web pages taking 20 seconds to load, simple applications being unusable, and other extreme performance problems. These are puzzling for anyone (like me) who uses Windows at home without all of these extreme performance problems. That was until I realized how many reports are coming from people talking about their work laptops loaded with endpoint management and security software. Some of those endpoint control solutions are so heavy that the laptop feels like you've traveled back in time 15 years and you're using a mechanical hard drive.
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I've said for decades that from a user perspective, malware scanners and prevention tools are fundamentally indistinguishable from actual malware. They intercept file accesses, block you from doing what you want to do, pop things up all over the place, and make your machine slow aand unreliable.
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Outside corporate setting, it is also the fact that most windows systems you encounter are installed on cheap machines by people who just care that their word processor works a few times a month. And you were probably forced to fix it. At the same time, as someone with a well maintained Windows gaming rig, I don't like spending time in the OS these days. Something about transparently doing stuff that puts money in their pocket while inconveniencing me gives me the ick.
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No this is not just an enterprise issue. I waited 10 seconds (I counted.) for a Windows Explorer context menu to open the other day. This is on a fully decked out system with an Ultra 9 cpu and a 4090 and 32gb of memory, and basically no apps running. I think I had 2 tabs in Edge? Windows is a shitshow these days.
There's an unspoken rule in corporate America, colleges, etc. Laptops MUST be loaded down with terrible software, no exceptions. My last corporate laptop actually had the paid version of winzip in 2025, and it ran with a little tray icon that I couldn't disable or remove. That was in addition to all the other corporate crap I couldn't remove. Some of this is not _just_ a corporate problem. Why would Winzip have an auto run application and tray application in the first place? Every single app seems to think they need one, and it's a classical tragedy of the commons. Perhaps on a virgin Windows install, your app with autorun and a tray icon will be more responsive. But when 20 other apps pull that same trick, no one wins. This is actually one of the reasons I'm not excited at the idea of Linux defeating Windows. If it did, corporations would just start crapping up Linux the way they've crapped up Windows.
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The reason every developer makes their app open at startup, is because the Windows ecosystem doesn't have a good package manager. So every app needs to be its own package manager and check for updates on a timer. So they need to run all the time so they can run that timer.
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In theory the Windows Store will handle updates. In practice, I avoid the Windows Store version of applications. Also, you can't turn off app updating, only pause them for a time.
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Our corporate linux machines have exactly the same monitoring software as Windows - even the servers. The performance is still not even remotely comparable. Could be the hooks are more performant on linux, could be the filesystem, maybe the tools are written more sanely... But loading apps, filesystem operations... Everything is still far faster on the linux dev instance. And I have half the ram allocated to that one.
Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting (theregister.com)
"Software engineering" is one of the few large practices with 'engineering' in its name that has no mechanism for license granting and revocation for violation of professional standard. That's not what is happening here, but we might see that happen in our lifetimes. Hopefully before someone writes the software that kills enough people to necessitate licensing, not after (since generally, such outcomes are how licensing comes into being).
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You could argue that we have security licenses (eg SOC 2), however I don't think it actually succeeds in making software safe. I think software is hard because unlike a bridge, which is built with limited scope and the risk is known when it's designed, software grows to become load bearing without us really realizing it. Eg CrowdStrike, I never would have assumed that an outage could affect so much of the world.
I think we've reached a point where we're really turning our heads and squinting away from reality if we think that computing is a hobby that no longer poses danger to others. A person using their own machine can hack all manner of other people's machines without their consent. On the flipside, a person who is not even malicious, but negligent, can configure a machine on the open internet with open ports and become part of a botnet in a half-hour. Perhaps these behaviors imply a level of responsibility that suggests licensing to use the shared resource that is "The internet" is appropriate.
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And a person using their pen can hack other people's brains, yet free speech is more important. I think manufacturers being required to provide longer security update support against hacks etc would be more helpful than violating privacy and restricting access to "protect" people. The amazing protective walled garden of mobile devices has mostly caused people to even forget what filesystems are and normalized subscriptions for the most basic things. A license for internet access or whatever would be an incredibly bad idea for anyone but abusive governments and corporations.
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We do, in practice, impose all manner of limitation on free speech while still maintaining the sanctity of that right. Lying in a professional capacity is fraud and punishable even though it's "just words." Being wrong as an engineer or lawyer can cost you your license to practice (as an engineer, even if you never turned a wrench but your directions to build the thing were flawed beyond the reason of the standards of the profession). "Wire fraud" is an aggravation atop regular fraud. These protections could go further, but they haven't. Why is it just "okay" that someone can call you up on the phone and convince you that your loved one is in mortal peril and you have to wire money to them right now? Why is the party transiting that fraud or providing the wires connecting entire fraud offices to the global telephonic network not responsible for enabling that attack?
Slippery slope is famously a fallacious argument. My first exposure to it was people insisting that legalizing gay marriage would end up legalizing marriage to animals.
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"If this observable trend continues, it will eventually reach a point that is along this trajectory" is not a fallacy.
When we are installing docker repositories on my Rockylinux installation on 100 nodes at once, should we need to manually put an age of the person who is running the script somewhere in the process? Will docker be forced to prevent me from downloading its packages if I do not transmit the age in a header?
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None of it is enforcable, its basically meaningless. Great job politics! Like lots of laws that are being written nowadays by octogenarians, aimed at strong arming bigger tech companies into designing things differently at the expense of everyone smaller which ironically ends up curtailing our basic freedoms, privacy, etc... even when the intent was otherwise. Then again I have yet to meet a politician that actually cares as long as: "this looks good for my campaign". Regulating big platforms that affect billions of people is one thing but I really wish they would write laws actually discriminating between those platforms and everyone else.
Are there any other places this argument could apply or is it specifically this one? Like if I said "Yes, the university reserves the right to expel students who defecate on the teacher's desk. But we all know where this is going." that'd be pretty crazy, wouldn't it?
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If universities didn't have the right to expel students at all and that was proposed, and they had a history of turning small law into totally encompassing law, I would fairly confidently say that the university is on the path to obtain the ability to expel students for any reason it seems fit. So yes, we all know where this is going.
E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May (help.instagram.com)
This happened to my girlfriend and me twice on Messenger. On two consecutive nights, we heard a male voice with an American accent speaking as if he were talking to someone else, almost like they were conducting some kind of operation. It seemed as though he suddenly realized that we could hear him, after which the voice abruptly disappeared. The following night, it happened again, but this time the voice sounded like that of an African American woman. The situation was similar to the previous night. From that night, we have not used it to communicate and used Signal instead.
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What do you imagine was going on here?
A lot of our current privacy and liberty woes were exacerbated by 9/11. Can you imagine a Church Committee in 2026? Me neither. Three letter agencies have way too much power and they've shaped our culture+laws for the worse. Osama Bin Laden has done way more damage to American citizens' lives than he could've ever dreamed of.
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By design. Just like the KGB and Putin's minions, Bin Laden correctly saw fault lines and weaknesses in the US an exploited them. He did what he did with a long-range context in mind. The "three letter agencies" were neutered in the 90s as part of the peace dividend which is why he was successful. The Russians used "active measures" with intelligence in the US 2016 among other times and Bin Laden chose terrorist violence. The Russian misinformation strategy is tried and true and corporate actors now use it successfully as well. The whole thing sucks. This Iran adventure lays the vulnerability of the US military machine pretty bare. More, escalated conflict is probably in the world's future for decades to come.
Sure, but I think the point of this thread was (or should be) what can be done in the US to resist this. There's a lot of things the US resists doing because voters who never traveled outside of it can be convinced that what it is as implemented elsewhere is somehow flawed or worse than the status quo. You see this exact pattern with real health care, common sense gun laws, investment in mass transportation, probably more that I'm not thinking of.
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> Sure, but I think the point of this thread was (or should be) what can be done in the US to resist this. I read that as "we're not going to sit with the uncomfortable implication that the places being held up as policy exemplars are also the places criminalizing speech."
I hope so, but I just don't understand what exactly causes such massive price difference. Is it because this kind of phones are a very niche product so they can't benefit from the economy of scale? Maybe android phone manufacturers can get better deals from chip manufacturers because they buy chips in large quantities?
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Niche product, non-standard components, strict requirements of free drivers with GNU/Linux support: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/
I'm not sure people realize that HN is already at the most libertarian end, and all the discourse spaces which are much closer to actual power and legislation are much less pro-privacy.
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Reddit seems to have drifted back to more libertarian than HN on privacy issues. At least in technical subreddits. Not sure why that is, perhaps there are more users here whose salaries are tied to surveillance.
Weird... when I see something done by US-Based capitalist and attributed to communists half a world away, it makes me think of the Powell Memo.
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That is weird, the US didn't ask the CCP to invent social scoring.
Can I run AI locally? (canirun.ai)
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This (+ llmfit) are great attempts, but I've been generally frustrated by how it feels so hard to find any sort of guidance about what I would expect to be the most straightforward/common question: "What is the highest-quality model that I can run on my hardware, with tok/s greater than <x>, and context limit greater than <y>" (My personal approach has just devolved into guess-and-check, which is time consuming.) When using TFA/llmfit, I am immediately skeptical because I already know that Qwen 3.5 27B Q6 @ 100k context works great on my machine, but it's buried behind relatively obsolete suggestions like the Qwen 2.5 series. I'm assuming this is because the tok/s is much higher, but I don't really get much marginal utility out of tok/s speeds beyond ~50 t/s, and there's no way to sort results by quality.
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Missing laptop versions of all these chips.
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Missing 5060 Ti 16GB
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This does not seem accurate based on my recently received M5 Max 128GB MBP. I think there's some estimates/guesswork involved, and it's also discounting that you can move the memory divider on Unified Memory devices like Apple Silicon and AMD AI Max 395+.
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awesome, needed this
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This is kind of bogus since some of the S and A tier models are pretty useless for reasoning or tool calls and can’t run with any sizable system prompt… it seems to be solely based on tokens per second?
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The M4 Ultra doesn't exist and there is more credible rumors for an M5 Ultra. I wouldn't put a projection like that without highlighting that this processor doesn't exist yet.
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Literally made the same app, 2 weeks back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47171499
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Is it correct that there's zero improvement in performance between M4 (+Pro/Max) and M5 (+Pro/Max) the data looks identical. Also the memory does not seem to improve performance on larger models when I thought it would have? Love the idea though! EDIT: Okay the whole thing is nonsense and just some rough guesswork or asking an LLM to estimate the values. You should have real data (I'm sure people here can help) and put ESTIMATE next to any of the combinations you are guessing.
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> Is it correct that there's zero improvement in performance between M4 (+Pro/Max) and M5 (+Pro/Max) Preliminary testing did not come to that conclusion. > Apple’s New M5 Max Changes the Local AI Story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGe7ldwFLSE
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I have spent a HUGE amount of time the last two years experimenting with local models. A few lessons learned: 1. small models like the new qwen3.5:9b can be fantastic for local tool use, information extraction, and many other embedded applications. 2. For coding tools, just use Google Antigravity and gemini-cli, or, Anthropic Claude, or... Now to be clear, I have spent perhaps 100 hours in the last year configuring local models for coding using Emacs, Claude Code (configured for local), etc. However, I am retired and this time was a lot of fun for me: lot's of efforts trying to maximize local only results. I don't recommend it for others. I do recommend getting very good at using embedded local models in small practical applications. Sweet spot.
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What kind of hardware did you use? I suppose that a 8GB gaming GPU and a Mac Pro with 512 GB unified RAM give quite different results, both formally being local.
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Missing RTX A4000 20GB from the GPU list.
tbh i stopped caring about "can i run X locally" a while ago. for anything where quality matters (scripting, code, complex reasoning) the local models are just not there yet compared to API. where local shines is specific narrow tasks - TTS, embeddings, whisper for STT, stuff like that. trying to run a 70b model at 3 tok/s on your gaming GPU when you could just hit an API for like $0.002/req feels like a weird flex IMO
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The "local models aren't there yet" take was accurate 12 months ago, but things have moved fast. A frozen Qwen3-14B at Q4_K_M on a single 16GB consumer GPU can clear 70%+ on LiveCodeBench pass@1 if you wrap it in the right inference pipeline -- structured generation, best-of-k candidate sampling, self-verified iterative repair. That puts it in the ballpark of Claude 4 Sonnet's single-shot score. The insight most people miss is that "running locally" doesn't have to mean "single-shot raw inference and hope for the best." The model is the engine, not the car. You can build constraint extraction, budget-controlled thinking, and self-repair loops around a frozen model and get results that would have seemed impossible at that parameter count a year ago. Cost works out to fractions of a cent per task in electricity. For narrow tasks like embeddings and TTS, sure, local has always been fine. But for coding and reasoning, the gap has closed dramatically -- you just have to stop treating local inference as "discount API" and start treating it as a compute substrate you control.
This seems to be estimating based on memory bandwidth / size of model, which is a really good estimate for dense models, but MoE models like GPT-OSS-20b don't involve the entire model for every token, so they can produce more tokens/second on the same hardware. GPT-OSS-20B has 3.6B active parameters, so it should perform similarly to a 3-4B dense model, while requiring enough VRAM to fit the whole 20B model. (In terms of intelligence, they tend to score similarly to a dense model that's as big as the geometric mean of the full model size and the active parameters, i.e. for GPT-OSS-20B, it's roughly as smart as a sqrt(20b*3.6b) ≈ 8.5b dense model, but produces tokens 2x faster.)
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I'm guessing this is also calculating based on the full context size that the model supports but depending on your use case it will be misleading. Even on a small consumer card with Qwen 3 30B-A3B you probably don't need 128K context depending on what you're doing so a smaller context and some tensor overrides will help. llama.cpp's llama-fit-params is helpful in those cases.
Is there a reliable guide somewhere to setting up local AI for coding (please don’t say ‘just Google it’ - that just results in a morass of AI slop/SEO pages with out of date, non-self-consistent, incorrect or impossible instructions). I’d like to be able to use a local model (which one?) to power Copilot in vscode, and run coding agent(s) (not general purpose OpenClaw-like agents) on my M2 MacBook. I know it’ll be slow. I suspect this is actually fairly easy to set up - if you know how.
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Any time I google something on this topic, the results are useful but also out of date, because this space is moving so absurdly fast.
The RAM/VRAM cutoff matters more than the parameter count alone. A 13B model in Q4_K_M quantization fits in 8GB VRAM with reasonable throughput, but the same model in fp16 needs 26GB. Most calculators treat quantization as a footnote when it is actually the primary variable. The question is not "can I run 13B" but "what quantization level gives acceptable quality at my hardware ceiling".
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This is the right framing. I'd add that quantization is only the first dimension -- the second is what you build around the model. A Q4_K_M 14B model running raw inference vs. the same model with structured constraint extraction, diverse candidate sampling, and iterative self-repair are essentially different systems despite identical VRAM footprint. The real question isn't "what quantization gives acceptable quality at my hardware ceiling" -- it's "what inference pipeline gives acceptable quality at my hardware ceiling." A single-shot Q4_K_M 14B will disappoint you. The same model generating 3 candidates, scoring them with self-embeddings, and self-repairing failures will surprise you. Same GPU, same VRAM, just smarter infrastructure.
Honestly I was surprised about this. It accurately got my GPU and specs without asking for any permissions. I didnt realize I was exposing this info.
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Why were you surprised? You can check out here how it does that: https://github.com/AlexsJones/llmfit/blob/main/llmfit-core/src/hardware.rs#L1318 To detect NVIDIA GPUs, for example: https://github.com/AlexsJones/llmfit/blob/main/llmfit-core/src/hardware.rs#L258 In this case it just runs the command "nvidia-smi". Note: llmfit is not web-based.
At what quantization and with what size context window?
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Looks like it's a bit slower today. Running llama.cpp b8192 Vulkan. $ ./llama-cli unsloth_Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-GGUF_Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -c 65536 -p "Hello" [snip 73 lines] [ Prompt: 86,6 t/s | Generation: 34,8 t/s ] $ ./llama-cli unsloth_Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-GGUF_Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -c 262144 -p "Hello" [snip 128 lines] [ Prompt: 78,3 t/s | Generation: 30,9 t/s ] I suspect the ROCm build will be faster, but it doesn't work out of the box for me.
Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock (tomshardware.com)
I remember hearing somewhere on this site that medical imaging got pretty good at building systems that recycle helium. Does chip manufacturing not do this or are the losses at their scale are still large enough that you need a substantial constant supply?
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Some of the fabs do recycle as effectively as they can, but MRIs use it in a single process, in liquid form, in a relatively constrained container. Fabs use it for a variety of processes, ranging from wafer cooling to purging environments, to making ultra ultra clean chambers. The scale of what they use is higher, too, so even if an individual process is more efficiently recapturing helium, they might go through a few tons a day, with an MRI only using a few liters and losing 5% or less.
The goal is to keep the oil in the ground, to not be burned or to be made into plastics.
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Isn't the main source of helium from oil production? It's not like we have fusion reactors turning H into He.
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The main source of helium is natural gas production, not oil
So the RAM prices are going to skyrocket again?
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Of course, everything at the moment regardless of good or bad means higher RAM price.
Iran will make AI go pop.
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We can only hope.
Lindsay Graham has an easy solution to this unnecessary conflict: send your sons and daughters. This whole administration is such a fiasco.
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Lindsey Graham is a lying sack of shit. And I say that with his permission, since he’s on camera asking to be called out if he did exactly what they did with the Supreme Court not four years later.
However Qatar stopped production before the straits were officially closed and their stated reason is "due to military attacks", also Russian or Chinese ships can pass
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Are Russian or Chinese ships actually passing? Junior just released a decree saying not one liter of oil will pass. It didn't have an asterisk allowing Russian or Chinese ships. I also find it funny that we just decided to allow Russia to pad its coffers by temporarily lift sanctions on sale of Russian oil. Sorry Ukraine!
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The strait is now mined at least partially. Country of origin doesn't matter when there are mines in the water.
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This is going to be an environmental disaster.
Back then there were only two ships attacked in the straits, and one was an Iranian shadow fleet ship. I am not sure that is "closing the straits" in any shape or form
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I'm guessing you watched the Hegseth interview? --- Hegseth: “The only thing prohibiting transit in [Hormuz] right now is Iran shooting at shipping.” “It is open for transit should Iran not do that” --- Oh really? I thought it was because Mercury was in retrograde. I guess if even Mr. Hegseth is admitting that transit is effectively prohibited in the Strait, he must actually be lying and part of the deep state.
no, but if two ships were hit, while one clearly by mistake, it is very early to say the straits are going to be closed as opposed to incorrect targeting your analogies have went past me though, generally although a common misconception, countries are not people and wars are not comparable to crime
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Oh, well, if it was by mistake...
BLM was required (to sell it) by Congress in the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013, as the alternative was to not offer any H to the market due to the authorization to sell expiring. Sponsored by a Republican and passed basically unanimously with the proceeds used to pay of the debt (back when we cared about that)
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Wouldn't another alternative be to renew the authorization to sell? This doesn't seem much different from just deciding to sell it.
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Republicans believe that the federal government shouldn't be involved in it at all. So a reauth bill would effectively be DOA. But yeah, that would make more sense.
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The idea of selling things like our strategic helium supply for $460M to "pay off the debt" would be like me selling bricks from the foundation of my house for a penny to "pay off my mortgage".
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What if it's not actually your house, but some unspecified "somebody else's", and you only stand to profit from it? Starts to make sense why some unscrupulous people would go that way, shitty as it is.
Aren’t there huge stockpiles of helium in the US? I can buy party sized tanks at Target or big tanks at the usual places like welding supply places.
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Helium for party balloons is low grade and not pure enough for chip fab use, so stacking up birthday tanks won't keep TSMC running. Industrial grade helium has a restricted and oddly international supply chain thanks to regulation and a few weirdly-placed depots. The US 'helium stockpile' isn't really a menu you can just order from when a factory across the planet runs dry, especially if offtakes and logistics are tied up by decade-old government contracts. If you want to see supply chain fragility, try pricing MRI-grade helium after a shutdown and watch everyone in medical procurement panic quitely.
A lot of the balloon use has switched to nitrogen (helium became much, much more expensive after the strategic helium reserve was sold off)
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> balloon use ... helium became much, much more expensive More than just from inflation? (sorry, not sorry!)
well it was signed into law by obama, so there's that.
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yes the president is the law giver, he who conceives, imposes, and bears in perpetuity all responsibilities for all laws passed during his term
It's incredibly distressing, but I think the issue here lies with 'we'. Those at the very top are a very, shall we say, unique group. Those who seek power at such a level are not like the rest of us. There's established research showing that psychopathic and sociopathic traits are vastly more common among the "CEO class". It's not that wealth and power _makes_ them so, it's that relatively few are willing to be completely amoral or malicious in order to obtain as much power as possible. I believe that this effect is greatly magnified at the very top. It's a tale as old as Plato: those most likely to WANT to rule are exactly the 'candidates' who absolutely should not.
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Are they unique? What would happen to an ordinary person if you gave them a billion dollars? One of the things this does is gets you surrounded by supplicants and yes-men trying to tell you what you want to hear to get your money. It destroys social feedback. Nobody will tell you you're wrong. This is not good for mental health.
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