mrandish (u/mrandish)

mrandish commented on VHS-C: When a lazy idea stumbles towards perfection [video] youtube.com/watch?v=HFYWH... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

bsimpson · 2 days ago

YT recently recommended his explanation of how pre-computer pinball machines worked to me - a series of 3, hour-long videos. Gave me something to look forward to on my commute. I shared it with everyone I know, and now I'm sharing it with you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg

Fascinating (and insanely impressive) to see how a bunch of switches and stepper motors implement complex logic.

mrandish · a day ago

I've been a huge fan of these videos. They explain electro-mechanical pinball machines incredibly well plus they're beautifully photographed. A remarkable amount of effort, thought and care went into creating them.

mrandish commented on Does MHz Still Matter? ubicloud.com/blog/does-mh... · Posted by u/furkansahin

mrandish · a day ago

As a consumer who nursed an overclocked 1080ti along for 2.5 gens longer than I would've liked thanks to crypto and then AI, I was reading this fearing a positive conclusion - thinking "Oh great, just when it's time to upgrade my 5600x CPU data centers will start driving up already over-priced consumer CPUs too."

Although said somewhat tongue in cheek, it has been a rough several years for tech hobbyist consumers. At least the end of Moore's law scaling and the bite of Dennard scaling combined to nerf generational improvements enough that getting by on existing hardware wasn't as nearly as bad as it would've been 20 yrs ago.

Now that maybe the AI bubble is just starting to burst, we've got tariffs to ensure tech consumers still won't see undistorted prices. The silver lining in all this is that it got me into retro gaming and computing which, frankly, is really great.

mrandish commented on FFmpeg 8.0 ffmpeg.org/index.html#pr8... · Posted by u/gyan

Culonavirus · 2 days ago

> incantation

FFmpeg arguments, the original prompt engineering

mrandish · 2 days ago

I'd also include Regex in the list of dark arts incantations.

mrandish commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera

foxylad · 2 days ago

Cory Doctorow has a compelling theory that the megatech companies have to appear to be startups, or else their share price reverts to normal multiples. Hence the continuous string of increasingly over-hyped "game-changing technologies" they all (not just Meta) keep rolling out.

VR, blockchain and LLMs have their value, but it's a tiny fraction of the insane amounts of money being pumped into these bubbles. There will be tears before bedtime.

mrandish · 2 days ago

Indeed, for big valley tech companies it's crucial to have a new business developing in the wings which has plausible potential to be the "next big thing." They're desperate to keep their stock price from being evaluated solely on trailing twelve month revenue, so having a shiny, ephemeral hype-magnet to attract inflated growth expectations is essential.

So far, it appears the psychology of investors allows the new thing to fail to deliver big revenue and be tacitly dropped - as long as there's a new new thing to replace it as the aspirational vehicle. Like any good mark in a con game, tech investors want to believe.

mrandish commented on Microsoft no longer allows turning off app updates in the Microsoft Store neowin.net/news/microsoft... · Posted by u/AdmiralAsshat

DaSHacka · 6 days ago

No offense, but so long as that remains "evaluating moving off Windows", they don't give a shit.

The middle-managers making these decisions don't care how displeased the consumers are with the product; only that they continue consuming it (or in this case, using it)

mrandish · 6 days ago

Well, this most recent regression of functionality has caused me to finally uninstall and fully disable Microsoft Store. So at least the middle-managers of MS-Store will see that in their stats.

mrandish commented on 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report fortune.com/2025/08/18/mi... · Posted by u/amirkabbara

agloe_dreams · 6 days ago

Thats super reasonable - I'm a person with ADHD so if I'm asking questions in a grocery store context - I might fully forget things or take way too long to get things done - Going for a walk in nature is absolutely a much better place for questions like that to me though. I think I would prefer to not have tech in the moment to take me out of the space.

mrandish · 6 days ago

As a fellow ADHDer, can confirm. I must aggressively mono-task to ensure things get done. I have to consciously manage which mode I'm in, "Goal" or "Explore". A simple heuristic I sometimes share with others is: "I can either 'think deeply' or 'do/talk/listen'. Doing both modes at once is possible but at reduced throughput and quality of each. Switching modes is laggy." It's not precisely accurate and there are exceptions but it gets the general idea across.

mrandish commented on Microsoft no longer allows turning off app updates in the Microsoft Store neowin.net/news/microsoft... · Posted by u/AdmiralAsshat

mrandish · 6 days ago

Microsoft continues to enshittify Windows and it's accelerating. It's forcing me to seriously evaluate moving off Windows after three decades.

mrandish commented on Ask HN: Do you still bookmark websites? · Posted by u/indus

yukieliot · 7 days ago

Yeah, I bookmark stuff, but just in my browser. No apps or extensions — keeping it simple.

mrandish · 7 days ago

I do the same with Firefox native bookmarks because they auto+sync across devices. But to find/organize I use the add-on Bookmark Search 2 Plus which is great.

mrandish commented on OpenAI Progress progress.openai.com... · Posted by u/vinhnx

rich_sasha · 7 days ago

I disagree. Some things are hard to Google, because you can't frame the question right. For example you know context and a poor explanation of what you are after. Googling will take you nowhere, LLMs will give you the right answer 95% of the time.

Once you get an answer, it is easy enough to verify it.

mrandish · 7 days ago

I agree. Since I'm recently retired and no longer code much, I don't have much need for LLMs but refining a complex, niche web search is the one thing where they're uniquely useful to me. It's usually when targeting the specific topic involves several keywords which have multiple plain English meanings that return a flood of erroneous results. Because LLMs abstract keywords to tokens based on underlying meaning, you can specify the domain in the prompt it'll usually select the relevant meanings of multi-meaning terms - which isn't possible in general purpose web search engines. So it helps narrow down closer to the specific needle I want in the haystack.

As other posters said, relying on LLMs for factual answers to challenging questions is error prone. I just want the LLM to give me the links and I'll then assess veracity like a normal web search. I think a web search interface allowed disambiguating multi-meaning keywords might be even better.

mrandish commented on Thai Air Force seals deal for Swedish Gripen jets scmp.com/news/asia/southe... · Posted by u/belter

mcmcmc · 8 days ago

There is no such thing as a tariff on exports. Tariffs are specifically an import tax intended to increase domestic demand for domestically produced goods by shifting it away from imported goods

mrandish · 8 days ago

> There is no such thing as a tariff on exports.

That's correct, or at least it was until this week. Did you happen to see the recent announcement where NVidia and AMD are now apparently required to pay 15% of the revenue from GPUs exported to China to the U.S. government? This is apparently GPUs which were, prior to this new 15% payment, "too harmful to our national security" to export to China.

Frankly, I only saw the headlines and haven't looked into it myself yet - mostly because it makes my head hurt trying to even tally the laws, policies and trade agreements doing this would probably violate. So, I'm admittedly unclear on the details but it sure sounds like an "export tariff".