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neutrinobro | 2 days ago | on: FFmpeg at Meta: Media Processing at Scale

> At the same time, new versions of FFmpeg brought support for new codecs and file formats, and reliability improvements, all of which allowed us to ingest more diverse video content from users without disruptions.

While it is good they worked to get their internal improvements into upstream, and this is certainly better behavior than some other unmentioned tech giants. It makes one wonder (since they are presumably running it tens of billions of times per day), if they were involved in supporting these improvements all along. If not, why not?

neutrinobro | 28 days ago | on: We rendered and embedded one million CAD files

Neat, but also hilarious! Searching for "mug" gives results where the first item listed (ABC-00008297) is a mug model with a hole not only in the top to pour in your drink, but also in the side and bottom (just in case you wanted more access to your liquid).

neutrinobro | 5 months ago | on: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

My comment was directed at your statement "that at no point in history was the US dollar 100% backed by gold (or silver, originally). Never." which is entirely false. The US dollar (the currency unit), was at one point quite literally an exact weight of silver. This is no longer the case, but it was true in the past. This has nothing to do with the nation debt, or what is backing it. Obviously, the national debt isn't collateralized by precious metals or anything else except the military and power to raise taxes.

neutrinobro | 6 months ago | on: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

Yeah, I was equally surprised. I am using a patched version of ollama to run the models: https://github.com/austinksmith/ollama37 which has a trivial change to allow it to run with old versions of cuda (3.5, 3.7). Obviously this was before tensor cores were a thing, so you're not going to be blown away by the performance, but it was cheap. I got 3x k40s for $75 on ebay, they are passively cooled, so they do need to be in a server chassis.

neutrinobro | 6 months ago | on: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

I have a old system with 3 ancient Tesla K40s which can easily run inference on ~30B parameter models (e.g. qwen3-coder:30b). I mostly use it as a compute box for other workloads, but its not completely incapable for some AI assisted coding. It is power hungry though, and the recent spike in local electricity rates is enough of an excuse to keep it off most of the time.

neutrinobro | 7 months ago | on: From XML to JSON to CBOR

These days you don't have to worry about endianness much (unless you dealing with raw network packets). However, you do need to worry about byte-padding. Different compilers/systems will place byte padding between items in your struct differently (depending on the contents and ordering of items), and if you are not careful the in-memory or on-disk placement of struct data elements can be misaligned on different systems. Most systems align to a 8-byte boundary, but that isn't guaranteed.

neutrinobro | 7 months ago | on: Claude Code weekly rate limits

This was bound to happen at some point, but probably net-on-net won't affect most users. I think it's pretty useful for a variety of tasks, but those tend to fall into a rather narrow category (boilerplate, simple UI change requests, simple doc-strings/summaries), and there is only so much of that work which is required in a month. I certainly won't be cancelling my plan over this change, but so far I also haven't seen a reason to increase it over the hobbyist-style $20/mo plan. When I do run into usage limits, its usually already at the end of the day, or I just pivot to another task where it isn't helpful.

neutrinobro | 9 months ago | on: Cheap yet ultrapure titanium might enable widespread use in industry (2024)

Buried at the end of the article:

> A limitation of this work is that the resulting de-oxygenated titanium contains yttrium, up to 1% by mass; > After solving the yttrium contamination problem, applications to industrial manufacturing will be straightforward.

One wonders how much of a problem this is for most applications, and how easy it will be to solve...

neutrinobro | 1 year ago | on: The Curious Similarity Between LLMs and Quantum Mechanics

I was half expecting a discussion of the eigenvalues of a random matrix, or something at least halfway plausible, but no, this is useless mumbo jumbo, a la Deepak Chopra. People with zero understanding of quantum mechanics should stop making analogies to everything else.

neutrinobro | 1 year ago | on: Ask HN: Fast data structures for disjoint intervals?

In the past for this sort of thing I've used an interval tree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_tree

However, that was mainly for the case where I needed to detect overlapping intervals. Depending on your application perhaps a K-d tree, in this case, K=2 (one dimension for start-time the other for the end-time)? If you know that all you intervals are entirely disjoint (no overlap at all) I don't think you'll be able to do better than just an ordered map or list.

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