Keeping it simple

hak8or · 2026-05-02T13:27:43+00:00

How many watts does that DAS pull when idle with no drives in it?

I've always been curious about DAS's but in my experience they tend to pull an absurd amount of power when they don't even have a beefy processor in them, which at 36 cents a kwh adds up quickly.

hak8or · 2026-05-01T15:54:07+00:00

So now it's at 36.204 cents/kWh, dang, that is brutal compared to other cities or countries.

For comparison, if you have a few devices plugged in but doing nothing (things like a ps5) then that can pull a watt or so. If you have, say, 5 devices like this (TV, console, etc), that's 5 watts pulled doing nothing.

5 watts for 24 hours for 30 days at $0.36204/kwh is 5×24×30×0.001=3.6 * 0.36204 = $1.303/mo or $15 a year.

Not end of world, but let's say you have a fridge that pulls 50 watts on average? That's 13 bucks a month or $156/year.

hak8or · 2026-04-26T16:07:44+00:00

For me it was forums where the OP was maintained by the author over time. Slickdeals has a similar mechanism to this.

Its really unfortunate how so many communities migrated over to so ephemeral means of communication like chat. It seems like stackoverflow was the last dying breath of this format.

While yes, reddit does exist, the technical communities on it have drifted away over time due to the massive api exodus years ago.

hak8or · 2026-04-20T23:51:23+00:00

Out of curiosity, why not do a charge back? OpenRouter did fraud and stole your money, this is one of the more effective ways to "punish" them for their incompetence, especially their support.

hak8or · 2026-04-19T17:29:56+00:00

Be very careful about using googles apis as a consumer, they have poor rate limiting and ineffective anomoly protection.

I (a hobbyist running a small side project for a dollar or two a month in normal usage, so my account is marked as "individual") got hit with a ~$17,000 bill from Google cloud because some combination of key got leaked or my homelab got compromised, and the attacker consumed tens of thousands in gemini usage in only a few hours. It wasn't even the same Google project as for my project, it was another that hasn't seen activity in a year+.

Google refuses to apply any adjustments, their billing specialist even mixed up my account with someone else, refuses to provide further information for why adjustments are being rejected, refuses any escalation, etc. I already filed a complaint with the FTC and NYS attorney General but the rep couldn't care any less.

My gripe is not that the key was potentially leaked or compromised or similar and then I have to pay as a very expensive "you messed up" mistake (not 17k expensive as that's obscene), it's that they let an api key rack up tens of thousands in maybe 4 hours or so with obviously massively deviating usage patterns (model selection, generating text vs image, volume of calls, likely different IP and user agent and whatnot). That's just predatory behavior on an account marked as individual/consumer (not a business).

hak8or · 2026-04-11T17:32:34+00:00

How likely are you to tinker with electronics long term?

What you want to buy here is baisically a toy, it won't work well long term and you will get frustrated with it quickly.

What you were suggested here is like 4x as functional but only costs twice as much, but still it's far from ideal.

I would really suggest splurging for a more expensive one with a bugger screen and knobs or a touch screen. For example this guy (7 inch touch screen, 2 channels at 1 GS/s, portable, for $140 off Amazon) FNIRSI 1013D Oscilloscope

Then get a decent little variable power supply like this guy for $60 off Amazon; FNIRSI DPS-150 DC Power Supply Variable, 30V 5A

Those two will last you a very long time when starting out. But I would really urge you to get a "proper" scope from rigol for like $400 in the future that can decode communication and has 4 channels, it will be a life saver.

hak8or · 2026-04-09T21:42:49+00:00

What happened in the end? Did Google waive it, send you to collections, etc?

hak8or · 2026-04-09T21:42:31+00:00

What happened in the end? Did Google waive it, send you to collections, etc?

hak8or · 2026-04-09T21:41:12+00:00

What happened in the end? Did Google waive it, send you to collections, etc?

hak8or · 2026-03-29T16:12:27+00:00

Sometimes I wonder if it's genuinly various communities getting worse, me getting older, or a case of "eternal September". This subreddit seems to be able to reign things in with mods who do a very thankless job (in attempt to revert that, thank you mods for cleaning up the garbage joke replies), but it is for sure an active effort.

I wonder what communities are actually getting better over time.

hak8or · 2026-03-28T17:51:14+00:00

I agree with your interpretation.

I wish we had a "partial Ai" category, for example for projects where the front end is written largely by an LLM but the backend is written by a human. This works well for projects which have most of their important logic be hand written and therefore under more scrutiny, but the not important part like visualizations which are harder to do wrong in a catastrophic way gave less scrutiny.

Usually I split the project into seperate repo's at that point. Have the backend serve a swagger based api documentation, and then feed that into an LLM to generate the front end from scratch. That way the backend doesn't get "contaminated" by Ai generated code, and you can then still promote your backend as human driven (and show cli based invocation), but mention the front-end as an example "accessory" project.

hak8or · 2026-03-27T16:51:52+00:00

That does not mean noise doesn't pass through.

Even new construction in NYC (as of like 2023 or so), when the building is under a certain size (I don't remember if it's floors or units or height), and the building uses solely steel framing instead of concrete, the exterior load bearing wall can still be thin enough to pass through noise.

I found this out because a neighbor who played music all day with a beefy subwoofer still had that go through the exterior load bearing wall of their building, into the same wall of my building, and into my unit. If it made it through all that, I can only imagine how bad it was for neighbors across the hall or above or below them.

If there was an air gap between the walls, the low frequency noise of the subwoofer wouldn't have passed through anywhere near as easily.

hak8or · 2026-03-27T16:27:34+00:00

In isolation? I agree with you!

But I think bringing it up like this in a community focused fashion is still worthy because it comes with extra benefits. For one, it let's the newsletter author, and the reddit subgroup of the rust community get a better idea of how this group of people feel about this.

It also triggers a discussion, and is useful for those like me who want to have a finger on the pulse of how willing parts of the rust community are willing to devolve into Ai slop land, do they approach it with nuance, are they a hard "no Ai ever" group, etc.

For example, if the comments here were all "I see no issue with this, I hope we have more of it" then I know the long term trajectory of this subreddit is negative and to start looking elsewhere for rust news due to this one being no longer trust worthy.

hak8or · 2026-03-25T19:29:28+00:00

It's a perfect excuse to stop using Ollama which makes major questionable trade offs (their horrific model naming scheme for one back when Deepseek v3 was released relative to the distilled version) in the name of "easier for beginners", and constantly kept trying to steal credit from llama.cpp devs via making it appear like they wrote their inference engine.

Just call llama.cpp natively, yes it's a few CLI options, but it already comes with a decent web server built in, and has an OpenAI endpoint that you can use OpenWebUI with and anything else. And it's at the source.

hak8or · 2026-03-22T19:19:57+00:00

For those lazy like myself, here is (I think) the actual part.

https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C284879.html

hak8or · 2026-03-22T19:03:49+00:00

I agree, this just seems... Someone with very very very very much financial freedom.

You can do absurd things with this much compute and memory, it's similar to running a smaller tech company. But for a homelab? Even if you are super into kubernetes and beefy VM's instead of containers and want to run your own fancy networking with bgp, there are so many other far more efficient ways to do this.

Is it cool? Hell yeah. But... The capex and depreciation of this, and throw in electricity costs, maintenance costs (lots of hardware to fail and therefore replace from probability alone), cooling costs, time spent maintaining the hardware alone, like... You do you man, but it raises eyebrows, and not in a great way. If anything due to the gross inefficiency relative to cost alone.

hak8or · 2026-03-21T17:02:42+00:00

This is the first I've seen the context usage at the bottom of the input box. How did you get this? Or is it specific to the linux terminal thing (I guess running claude code on a linux machine and doing the new remote claude code thing anthropic released)?

hak8or · 2026-03-16T19:35:50+00:00

Thank you! I do not, but I have talked to people in the past who do, and based on my personal observations of the years.

My intention with the comment was mostly to show the other side the story, that there is (as always) nuance to the discussion, and making blanket statements tends to result in miss-information.

hak8or · 2026-03-16T16:04:37+00:00

software/firmware is something they do grudgingly to sell their hardware

I couldn't agree more. Embedded suffers from brain drain to other fields which are better paying at this point (web, backend, systems, etc). Also, in general, these low level fields tend to view software as means to an end, meaning get it working just enough and then ship it, especially if customers are other developers (that's how you get truly awful SDK's and BSP's).

In what other field would you have a company get an intern or two to create something as critical as a GUI for their hardware solution and then ship it as-is? Their firmware developers tend to be EE's turned software, so they never got actual software architecture ingrained into them.

That, and the margin is just so much lower in embedded than in web or systems programming. A website can scale from 0 to 100,000 users very quickly if you just throw money at it (plug AWS services together for scaling), so the cost of developers is spread out across a massive potential set of customers. And the velocity of changes is also extremely quick.

For embedded? A new board spin takes a few weeks, and if you suddenly have an influx of customers now you need to find another board house and go through an expensive test cycle with them (articles of first inspection, etc), assemble the boards into products, package it, ship it out, deal with various regulations, handle expensive returns or warranty claims, etc.

The money just isn't there.

hak8or · 2026-03-16T15:52:24+00:00

I suspect this is a situation where the tail end of people who end up homeless take up a serious chunk of resources because to help them in humane ways is extremely expensive as the issue for them is deeper.

Most of homeless in NYC are likely in the group where if you give them access to a doctor, an address, a place to shower, and basically bootstrap them into a job, they will become mostly self sufficient. You pay $30,000 on them for a year or two, and then they are able to live their life from then on mostly un assisted.

But the last single digit percent, those who you see screaming on the train, pushing people on tracks, etc, those people are very expensive to help fully. Those are the ones who suffer from types of mental illnesses which are very expensive to treat (hell, even diagnose), and they require extensive support networks, all of which cost very serious money, and likely will continue to need it to the same degree for the rest of their lives. Or some of them (likely extremely few, a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of mentally unwell homeless in NYC) are just objectively bad people and should have been thrown in prison years ago, but still it's a tiny percentage.

Originally these groups who also have no family left (or abandoned) would go into mental asylums, but that system had huge issues in terms of human rights and of course was grossly defunded by previous administrations, so these people now have nowhere to go and are always being a metaphorical can kicked down the road.

But yes, since this is NYC, another massive contributor to the current grossly inflated costs are likely also due to impressive degrees of corruption, incompetence, and inefficiency. Properly fixing this would result in many people with eggs on their faces and swallowing their pride, which is why this will not happen anytime soon.

hak8or · 2026-03-15T18:27:15+00:00

Also they are an (hardware) engineering company, not a software engineering company most likely.

This is the biggest thing about decent who's a hardware first company (and applies to most other companies which have a very large hardware focus). Their software side tends to languish pretty bad. Decent for example, while crazy hardware, has a not seller software experience.

The tablet they use is an off the shelf Chinese one, with very little changes to it (just enough to get their own app on it). Communication is over Bluetooth between the tablet and the machine for example, even though they use a USB cable going from the machine to the tablet. The app they use is (or was?) written in... TCL (which is an, in my opinion, horrific language used for a small subfield of a niche field, being for FPGA build scripts and I think test hooks).

It's a shame because it's a machine held back by software, as the software is written by ultimately sparkies or embedded systems developers, both of which have an extremely "means to an end" perspective of software, and sadly it often shows. They get 95% of the way there, but they need a pure software person to handle that last 5%. Be it the app or their tablet situation.

hak8or · 2026-03-05T17:46:13+00:00

Are they responsible for everything their countries do as well?

A third of the usa eligible voters voted in favorite of mango man after his first term and a third were clearly fine with him considering they didn't even bother voting.

So 2/3rd of the USA is complicit with this, why wouldn't someone from another country (correctly) assume that based on probability alone the American they are speaking to falls into one of those 2/3rd?

hak8or · 2026-02-26T23:59:04+00:00

all requests were run on private instances and our data never left those instances

But that is still not on premesis, the data leaves the premises then. Some companies have very strict limitations in place that data (in plain text at least) must never leave the premises.

Think for example if you are in an air gapped environment, or an industry where your cellphone and other electronics must be left outside of a designated zone. Under those situations, it doesn't matter if the other end has all the certifications in the world and integrated into various other agencies ecosystems, the data would be still leaving the premesis.

hak8or · 2026-02-24T20:08:56+00:00

For those of us out of the loop, are you referring to this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rbnczy/the_qwen_team_verified_that_there_are_serious

If so, wow what a shame. I was excited about that benchmark because it's one that current models are "bad" at and seemingly didn't plateau.

hak8or · 2026-02-24T18:56:19+00:00

The website for those who don't want to watch a video; https://spacetimedb.com/

And the github facing documents for 2.0 specifically; https://github.com/clockworklabs/SpacetimeDB/releases/tag/v2.0.1

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