ethan_smith

4 ms·

1.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
Your skepticism is well placed. Every time a new quantization or compression technique drops, the immediate response is to just scale up context length or run a bigger model to fill whatever headroom was freed up. It's Jevons paradox a
2.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
A small blocking `<script>` in the `<head>` that reads the saved preference from localStorage and sets a class on `<html>` before any rendering happens is the standard approach. You can also set `<meta name="color-
3.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
This is kind of the exact thing the article is about though. They're not "failing to understand" costs - they just have different context. Your job is to help them make informed tradeoffs, not to expect them to already know w
4.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
The ads are honestly one of the best parts to read now. You can trace the entire trajectory of the PC industry through them - watching prices drop, new categories emerge, companies appear and vanish. It's like an economic fossil record
5.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
This is essentially ULP (units in the last place) comparison, and it's a solid approach. One gotcha: IEEE 754 floats have separate representations for +0 and -0, so values straddling zero (like 1e-45 and -1e-45) will look maximally far
6.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
Yes, exactly - same Germanic root. "Fast" in Scandinavian languages means firm/fixed/stuck, which is also the original meaning in English (as in "hold fast", "steadfast", "fasten"). The &quo
7.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
The app was already built against the S3 API when it used cloud storage. Keeping that interface means the code doesn't change - you just point it at a local S3-compatible gateway instead of AWS/DO. Makes it trivial to switch back
8.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
The OCP CAD Viewer extension for VS Code (works with both CadQuery and build123d) gets partway there - you can click on faces/edges in the 3D view and it shows you the selection info you'd need for your code. It's not full &q
9.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
The mainframe/PC analogy is spot on. And the hardware floor keeps dropping - you can grab a mini PC with 32-64GB RAM for a few hundred bucks and run surprisingly capable quantized models locally. Something like https://termi
10.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
This matches what I've seen too. Mobile carriers have been way ahead on IPv6 - T-Mobile in the US has been IPv6-only with NAT64 for years. The weekend pattern is pretty much a smoking gun for mobile being the driver. It also explains w
11.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
The $200/month plan throttles you when you hit limits - you just wait in a queue. API usage at $1400/week means unthrottled, parallel execution with no waiting. These are very different use cases, and for teams or heavy automation
12.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
In PHP, closures defined inside a class method automatically capture `$this`, which means the closure holds a reference to the entire object even if it never uses it. This prevents the object from being garbage collected and adds overhead.
13.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
This is a pretty important issue given that the new update adds "computer use" capabilities. If it was already reading sensitive files in the CLI version, giving it full desktop control seems like it needs a much more robust permi
14.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
This is the part that worries me most. It's not really about individual discipline - it's that anyone who chooses to struggle through problems the hard way is now at a measurable disadvantage against peers who don't. The ince
15.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
This is almost certainly subscription bombing / email bombing. The goal is to flood someone's inbox with hundreds of legitimate-looking automated emails so they miss a real one - typically a password reset confirmation, a purchase
16.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
Interactive ads are actually huge in mobile gaming - they're called "playable ads" and companies like ironSource and Unity Ads have been pushing them for years. They consistently outperform static/video ads on engagement
17.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
This is the key detail everyone is glossing over. NSLs and subpoenas with non-disclosure orders are extremely common in these cases - Google literally cannot notify you without being in contempt. The EFF article frames this as Google "
18.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
You'd more likely want to emit LLVM IR rather than try to match clang's internal AST. That's essentially what most new language projects do now (Rust, Swift, Zig all use LLVM as their backend). You get optimization passes and
19.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
The SQLite "faster than filesystem" page is specifically about reading small blobs where the overhead of individual filesystem calls (open/read/close per blob) exceeds SQLite reading from a single already-open file. Once
20.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
If the stock UI/UX is already a dealbreaker for you, the risk calculus is pretty different - you're basically bricking something you weren't using anyway. jcs is usually thorough about documenting the process, and OpenBSD on
21.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
They do, but that's kind of the article's point - someone still has to write and maintain the per-model chat template and tool call parsing inside vllm/sglang. Every time a new model ships with a slightly different format, th
22.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
The centrifugal gravity approach requires a massive structure - you need something like 200+ meter radius to keep rotation rates low enough that Coriolis effects don't make people nauseous (which would create a whole different toilet p
23.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
The big ones: dot-com bust (2001-2003) saw ~560k tech jobs lost per BLS, took until roughly 2007 to recover. 2008 financial crisis hit tech less hard but still significant layoffs. Then 2022-2023 saw ~260k+ layoffs tracked by layoffs.fyi, m
24.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
Good point. One way to handle this might be to show the same event from multiple character perspectives - like how Karna's story looks completely different depending on whether you enter it from Kunti's node vs Duryodhana's.
25.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
Good catch on the 52→50→52 "growth." The actual Stanford report has more interesting data than TechCrunch pulled out - the gap between industry practitioners and academic researchers on safety concerns is arguably the more strikin
26.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
The TinyGrad approach of going straight to the hardware is telling. Between that, Vulkan compute getting faster for inference (llama.cpp Vulkan backend is competitive now), and SYCL/oneAPI, it feels like the real threat to CUDA might n
27.
by ethan_smith 5mo ago
The Nordic grid was designed to work as an interconnected system though - Danish wind exports and Norwegian/Swedish hydro imports balance each other out. Calling it a "dirty secret" makes it sound like a failure when it'
28.
by ethan_smith 11mo ago
Can someone please make me understand why does searching for "Accessibility" in settings doesn't return any results? In fact, none of the search accessibility search terms work, like: "reduce", "transparency&qu
29.
by ethan_smith 1y ago
Yes, it caches compiled crates in the Nix store which significantly speeds up builds, especially for projects with large dependency trees.
30.
by ethan_smith 1y ago
Waymo has been testing in snow conditions since 2017 in Michigan and more recently in Chicago, using specialized sensors and machine learning models that can detect road edges and lane markings even when covered with snow.

More ›