paol (u/paol) - Readit News

paol commented on Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months pcpartpicker.com/trends/p... · Posted by u/zekrioca

atwrk · 14 days ago

I find it very telling that both Samsung and SK Hynix already stated that they don't plan to expand capacity - officially to prevent overcapacity in the future. It would also be plausable that both doubt OpenAI will follow through with the contract.

paol · 14 days ago

They don't need to expand capacity to fulfill this contract.

They would want to expand capacity if they believed this increase in demand is long lasting - the implication is therefore that they don't believe it, or not enough to risk major capital expenditures.

You saw the same with GPU makers not wanting to expand capacity during the Cryptocurrency boom. They don't want to be left holding the bag when the bubble pops.

paol commented on Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure rosalux.de/en/news/id/539... · Posted by u/robtherobber

jdietrich · a month ago

Nearly a third of Train Operating Companies are now under state ownership; LNER has been state-owned since 2018 and Northern since 2020. I don't know about LNER, but punctuality and reliability on Northern has significantly worsened since nationalisation.

Last year, we had the absurd spectacle of the Department for Transport notifying the Department for Transport that the Department for Transport had breached their contract with the Department for Transport, because the Department for Transport didn't meet the performance standards set by the Department for Transport.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgl2j364kxzo

paol · a month ago

Truly, the writers of Yes Minister were documentarians. That line could have been straight out of the show.

paol commented on Lessons from Growing a Piracy Streaming Site prison.josh.mn/lessons... · Posted by u/zuhayeer

FinnKuhn · a month ago

Shouldn't music streaming services be an example for a market where each service offers pretty much the same products and they compete on price and product alone.

paol · a month ago

They are, and that's exactly why music piracy fell off a cliff in the streaming era and movie/tv piracy didn't.

"Piracy is a service problem" -- Gabe Newell

paol commented on Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering? · Posted by u/NooneAtAll3

paol · 3 months ago

I've had something similar happen starting maybe a year ago, and varying in intensity from "no problem" up to "pegged CPU in the youtube tab and UI actions can lag up to several seconds". It doesn't affect video playback though.

This behavior comes and goes over time, for example it's been fine for several weeks in a row now. I assume it's punishment for running an ad-blocker.

paol commented on YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers 9to5google.com/2025/09/16... · Posted by u/iamflimflam1

paol · 3 months ago

I use uBo which uses easylist, and when I watch youtube videos they are marked as viewed, so this explanation does not seem likely?

paol commented on A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008) prog21.dadgum.com/29.html... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

athrowaway3z · 4 months ago

I've had a related idea for a while now.

Instead of how LLMs operate by taking the current text and taking the most likely next token, you take your full text and use an LLM to find the likeliness/rank of each token. I'd imagine this creates a heatmap that shows which parts are the most 'surprising'.

You wouldn't catch all misspelling, but it could be very useful information to find what flows and what doesn't - or perhaps explicitly go looking for something out of the norm to capture attention.

paol · 4 months ago

I would like this too. This approach would also fix the most common failure mode of spelling checkers: typos that are accidentally valid words.

I constantly type "form" instead of "from" for example and spelling checkers don't help at all. Even a simple LLM could easily notice out of place words like that. And LLMs also could easily go further and do grammar and style checking.

paol commented on Documenting what you're willing to support (and not) rachelbythebay.com/w/2025... · Posted by u/zdw

paol · 5 months ago

> a giant social network. You know, the one with all of the cat pictures

This really doesn't narrow it down.

> and later the whole genocide thing and enabling fascism.

Still not helping.

paol commented on Lenovo Legion Go S: Windows 11 vs. SteamOS Performance, and General Availability boilingsteam.com/lenovo-l... · Posted by u/ekianjo

usrusr · 5 months ago

When seeing numbers like that I always wonder about the probability of the engines truly running the same feature set: not because I doubt that an alternative implementation can be faster (I don't) and certainly not because I'd want to accuse anyone of trickery, but because those software stacks are just so very, very complex and adaptive and minor (but, perhaps, costly in fps) adaptions of the engine parametrization to the runtime environment can be very difficult to spot by looking at the output. I'd imagine the relationship between the code and what's actually happening must be almost as wild and unpredictable as what we see in epigenetics.

paol · 5 months ago

That would be plausible if the effect was only seen in one game, or a small handful. Instead it's happening across the board, with almost all games tested showing at least some gain, and many showing gains comparable to CP2077.

At that point it has to be a platform/stack difference.

paol commented on ZX Spectrum graphics magic zxonline.net/zx-spectrum-... · Posted by u/ibobev

utopcell · 6 months ago

We can probably trace a ton of greatly influential programmers back to Sinclair machines (Linus Torvalds used a Sinclair QL for example, I think Demis Hasabis had a Speccy.. maybe), but the original ZX Spectrum 48k stands separate from all the rest. The whole hardware architecture was a series of hacks to make the machine as cheap as possible. A few fascinating facts that come to mind:

(1) the 48k Speccy had a total of ..96KiB of memory: 16KiB of "proper" DRAM, 16KiB of ROM for its BASIC and ..64KiB of DRAM of which half of was non-functional! Sinclair was buying broken memory chips and binning them to get sets whose either the top or the bottom 32KiB worked. They could get these chips for way cheaper. Each machine would have a jumper to select either the top or the bottom 32KiB working region.

(2) Both the "graphics card" chip (the ULA, or Uncommitted Logic Array, an early form of an FPGA) and the Z80 CPU needed to read from memory. Instead of having multiplexers, the ZX Spectrum just connected the two address buses with resistors, such that the ULA would overpower the Z80 if both tried to set an address to read from. The CPU was completely unaware of this: the ULA would ..freeze its clock signal for a few clock cycles, do its thing, and then let the CPU continue with its read. It was actually slower to read from a specific region of RAM that contained the framebuffer because of this.

(3) the article describes the weird out-of-order memory layout for the screen. The reason it was done this way was because of the 4116 DRAM chips the machine was using. These were 16,384 (2^14) 1-bit memories, arranged in 2^7 rows and 2^7 columns. To address a random location, one would need to first clock in the 7-bit row, followed by clocking in the 7-bit column. If you wanted to access consecutive memory locations with the same row address, the chips had a "fast page mode", where you would only need to clock in the next 7-bit column address. The memory was laid out in such a way that would minimize row address settings.

Hacks, all the way down to the core.

paol · 6 months ago

The hacks paid off though. The cheapness made the Spectrum ubiquitous across whole swaths of europe. Not only was it the first computer of an entire generation, it was the first generation where many people had a computer.

paol commented on Zero-Downtime Kubernetes Deployments on AWS with EKS glasskube.dev/blog/kubern... · Posted by u/pmig

pmig · 9 months ago

Yes, that is what we thought as well, but it turns out that the there is still a delay between the load balancer controller registering a target as offline and the pod actually being already terminated. We did some benchmarks to highlight that gap.

paol · 9 months ago

You mean the problem you describe in "Part 3" of the article?

Damn it, now you've made me paranoid. I'll have to check the ELB logs for 502 errors during our deployment windows.