sobchak
@sobchak@programming.dev
- Comment on Is H9me Assistant recommended? 7 hours ago:
It’s been a while since I messed with home automation, but ESPHome was amazing to program ESP microcontrollers (i.e. you most likely wouldn’t have to write any code). You can use ESPHome devices with both Home Assistant and Openhab (using MQTT, IIRC). The last I checked, it was easier to program your own functionality in OpenHAB than Home Assistant.
- Comment on Should I be using Debian? 1 day ago:
For servers, I usually choose the distro with a version with the EOL scheduled furthest into the future. Usually that means Ubuntu (Server) LTS.
- Comment on Nvidia CEO pushes back against report that his company's $100B OpenAI investment has stalled 5 days ago:
I think it’s still got a lot of gas. Investors still seem to be hyped about AI (e.g. the game stock downturn after Genie was announced), and that’s all that matters. Tesla has held a nonsensical value pretty much for its entire existence. Furthermore a lot of the money going into the market is passive (401ks going straight into very top-heavy index funds), propping the largest companies up.
- Comment on Nvidia CEO pushes back against report that his company's $100B OpenAI investment has stalled 5 days ago:
They’re firing people living HCOL countries, and hiring in LCOL countries, using AI as cover.
- Comment on RAM Prices Got You Down? Try DDR3. Seriously! 1 week ago:
Every game I’ve tried works fine. Including resource hungry games like Cyberpunk 2077. It’s my understanding that games are typically light on the CPU because they typically also try to target consoles which don’t have very good CPUs. It is noticeably slower at some (highly parallelize-able) tasks, but is fine for any game I’ve tried. The CPU is probably roughly equivalent to the CPU in a Steam Deck.
- Comment on RAM Prices Got You Down? Try DDR3. Seriously! 1 week ago:
I’ve got a PC with an i7-4770k, 32GB of RAM, and RTX 3090 that plays games just fine (and does runs local LLMs just fine too).
- Comment on Gold tops $5,000 for first time ever, adding to historic rally 1 week ago:
Price of gold is increasing faster than the dollar is declining. E.g. look at gold price charts in euros.
- Comment on Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it 2 weeks ago:
Dunno if that’s true or not. Generally, much more compute is used in inference than training, since you only train once, then use that model for millions of queries or whatever. However, some of these AI companies may be training many models constantly to one-up each-other and pump their stock; dunno. The “thinking” model paradigm is also transferring a lot more compute to inference. IIRC OpenAI spent $300k of compute just for inference to complete a single benchmark a few months ago (and found that, like training, exponentially increasing amounts of compute are needed for small gains in performance).
- Comment on Data centers will consume 70 percent of memory chips made in 2026 - supply shortfall will cause the chip shortage to spread to other segments | Tom's Hardware 2 weeks ago:
It’s possible someone would make it usable. A long time ago, I bought a laptop CPU that was soldered onto a board so it would go into a normal desktop socket. Guessing there was a glut of laptop CPUs at the time.
- Comment on At this point, what should we do about the ICE raids? If an ICE agent breaks in without a warrant or holds you at gunpoint, what do you do? 3 weeks ago:
Honestly, I’d take my fate into my own hands, and hope I could take a couple out before they took me out. Assuming I could get to a gun before they had me in their sights. Oragnaized and committed community defense could stop it from getting to that point, but the people participating also have to be prepared to die for their community.
- Comment on What if the Internet Goes Down? - 15 Jan, 7PM CET 3 weeks ago:
In my area, some people put small solar nodes on top of high buildings (office, university, and apartment). The node on my roof can directly communicate with one of these nodes ~20km away. Pretty crazy tor something that can run indefinitely on a 18650 battery and small solar panel. I’ve heard some people just place “guerilla nodes” to extend coverage.
- Comment on Definitely the safest source for advice 3 weeks ago:
I always thought it was pleasant. Kinda like MXE. Have to be careful to get the ones with no other active ingredients though.
- Comment on Going to a Protest? Don't Bring Your Phone Without Doing This First 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, I’m guessing it’s so if you “hide” the network, it will still connect to it. Anyone can scan these advertisements, then go to wigle.net and likely get a good idea of where you live/work.
- Comment on Going to a Protest? Don't Bring Your Phone Without Doing This First 3 weeks ago:
Modern phones rotate random MAC addresses. For WiFi, capturing SSID probes can be enough to track somebody though (some phones also have some mitigation for that too, like not probing for an SSID after it hasn’t been seen for some amount of time). Even when turned off, many phones, including iPhones, turn into BLE beacons similar to AirTags, which can be used to track you.
- Comment on AI insiders seek to poison the data that feeds them 3 weeks ago:
I once saw an old lecture where the guy working on Yahoo spam filters noticed that spammers would create accounts to mark their own spam messages as not spam (in an attempt to trick the spam filters; I guess a kind of a Sybil attack), and because the way the SPAM filtering models were created and used, it made the SPAM filtering more effective. It’s possible that wider variety of “poisoned” data can actually help improve models.
- Comment on Stop using MySQL in 2026, it is not true open source 3 weeks ago:
Postgres is basically an open source version of Oracle DB. Much more featureful than MySQL. I believe Oracle bought MySQL just to kill it.
- Comment on China’s ‘artificial sun’ breaks nuclear fusion limit thought to be impossible 3 weeks ago:
China is now the world leader in science by most metrics (largest proportion of the top 1% most cited papers, most publications to prestigious journals, etc). It makes sense, with their high population and their government willing to fund research. I’m guessing their culture is much less anti-intellectual than the West too, especially the US.
- Comment on Will the government be able to put 2 & 2 together 4 weeks ago:
It’s possible to probabilistically determine when an SSH connection is being used like a VPN, then block that traffic. If they go full Great Firewall.
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 4 weeks ago:
The ultra-wealthy shooting for stuff like The Network State and corporation-governed city-states.
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 4 weeks ago:
I think the wealthy will get US/corporate-friendly far-right governments in place in many of these countries before countries are able to isolate the US without collapsing their own economy. Seems to be the way things are going at least (far-right politics gaining support nearly everywhere).
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 4 weeks ago:
At the moment, it looks less like a regime change, and more like puppetting the same regime. It looks like the Maduro opposition in Venezuela doesn’t have support of the generals, so we’re just bribing/coercing the rest of the Maduro regime.
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 4 weeks ago:
I’ve known people that have done that. They were very poor, and never stayed very long at their jobs, so nothing ever happened. As an mass organized thing, it could be an effective means of civil disobedience (Thoreau famously refused to pay taxes).
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Peertube, but requires taking care of monetization/donations themselves, and possibly needing to run their own instance(?). Discovery sucks (I think Peertube may be anti-algo similar to Mastodon) so they’ll have to take care of promoting themselves as well.
I think Nebula is a creator-owned platform, so very hard to get into. I’ve also seen that their privacy policy is not good.
- Comment on Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM 1 month ago:
Not enough room in the GPU machine for all the HDDs I needed.
Also who got millions of photos at home?
People working on biological datasets.
- Comment on Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams – and experts are worried 1 month ago:
If the corporate VPNs keep logs and allow government access, they will be allowed. That’s how it works in some (authoritarian) countries.
- Comment on Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams – and experts are worried 1 month ago:
I believe China does statistical analysis to do stuff like detecting and blocking VPNs, suspicious looking ssh traffic, etc from home Internet connections not going to an approved business. It’s my understanding it’s very hard to get around the GFW at the moment, and pretty complex stuff is needed to mask VPN traffic to make it look normal (Project X, Xray, Reality, etc).
- Comment on Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM 1 month ago:
Rsync, syncthing, backups, mp3s, photos, json files; idk, a lot of tasks involve large amounts of small files. I personally ran into this problem training models on millions of photos. My GPUs would only get up to 25% utilization with mirrored HDDs, so I had to switch to SSDs.
- Comment on Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM 1 month ago:
HDDs have horrible random access times, so if you need to process or just copy a lot of small files, say photos, there’s a significant penalty.
- Comment on Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price. 1 month ago:
Alibaba has released Qwen models under Apache licenses (and they are some of the best models that can reasonably be ran locally). Some argue that models aren’t really open source unless the training code and datasets are made available though.
- Comment on Is gold investing a scam? 1 month ago:
It pretty much is the same thing. In theory, shorting the ETF will drive the price of gold down (until the short needs to be covered; like all shorts), because all accounts must eventually be settled. The price of gold is literally set by the futures market, which people with the appropriate approval can also short. Gold dealers literally look up the price on the futures market and add/subtract a few percentage points to determine how much to buy/sell physical gold for.