Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | pmontra's commentslogin

> I can use my bank on some linux distro,

Yes, I've been doing that since 2009 on Ubuntu and Debian but there are several caveats.

One of those banks has its own TOTP device and they won't replace it when the battery dies. It's almost 20 years old now. Then it's the fingerprint sensor on my phone.

The other banks authenticate accesses and many operations with either their app + fingerprint (all of them) or SMS (some of them). So basically I would still need a phone with a blessed OS. I could buy the cheapest one and store it in a drawer, but it's still a dependency on Google or Apple.

GrapheneOS requirement of Pixel devices is a dependency on Google too.


GrapheneOS requirement of Pixel devices is a dependency on Google too.

They are currently working with an OEM to release a non-Pixel GrapheneOS phone in the future.


I hope and pray that is a Samsung S Ultra device. The built-in stylus transforms the whole user experience, I would not go back to a device that I must swipe my dirty fingers across.

I’m just imagining myself pulling out the stylus on the train/plane, dropping it, and watching it roll away forever.

Millions of owners of Samsung devices somehow manage to not do that every day.

They thought of that! The cutaway of the stylus is a rounded rectangle, comfortable in the fingers but does not roll.

In any case, replacement stylii are very cheap online. Less than a screen protector.


The Palm Pilot experience. But that stylus was required for operation. Fortunately, just a plastic stick, so 3-pack replacement were cheap.

as long as it is not fairphone. I am out. I don't want to have to choose between privacy and sustainability.

Some conditions depend strictly on inputs and the compiler can't reason much about them, and the developers can't be sure about what their users will do. So that pattern is common. It's a sibling of assertions.

There are even languages with mandatory else branch.


Scapegoats are scapegoats but in every organization the problems are ultimately caused by their leaders. It's what they request or what they fail to request and what they lack to control.

I knew first hand about a couple of news in my life. Both were reported quite incorrectly. That was well before LLMs. I assume that every news is quite inaccurate, so I read/hear them to get the general gist of what happened, then I research the details if I care about them.

This is correct. Everybody has green bubbles in Europe even on iOS, because everybody is using WhatsApp. But mean people are still mean.

I think that the only windows hotkey I know is Windows key to open the start menu. But I've been using Windows only 1994-2008, then Linux. I still connect to some Windows 10 / 11 machines of a customer to check processes and log files, but that doesn't matter.

And I hate windows snapping. I disable it in GNOME at every new OS install. UIs must fit people preferences and any single person is different.

Edit: of course I know Alt Tab too.


If a business like that doesn't get its emails delivered, it will slowly go out of business. Merchants will find another processor that is able to deliver emails to every inbox. That is, Google could be less picky, but the company with a problem at hand is Viva.

Resource consumption often goes up. It's a time vs energy tradeoff and it's not free.

Your question is a variant of what do we do with all those humans now that they don't have to walk miles to the well every day because we invented aqueducts? The point is that they didn't want to walk to the well but they had to (and in some places they still have to) and very few people want to work, even now and even us, but they have to.

We will see what happens this time when we won't have to walk to that well.


100 W is only the start. Let's say that I consume 100 W all along the day. I use an LLM for coding assistance in the old way of asking questions and copy pasting code. It's much faster than me at writing that code. I don't think it ever works 1 hour for me per day. It's probably 10 cumulative minutes, probably much less. Round it up to 12 minutes to make it 1/5 of a hour or round it down to 6 minutes for a 1/10. So instead of 24 it's 0.1 hours, 240 times less. Those 100 W could be 24000 W and the total power per day would be the same. Is that LLM consuming 24 kW when working for me? No idea but I hope it's less than that.

Of course I could do all of my coding alone again, but I would be slower. It's like walking to the mall several times per week, several hours per time, instead of once or twice per week with a car, three cumulative hours. I trade a higher energy consumption for more time to do other things and the ability to live far away from shops.


If you as a human are coding for 24 hours a day as the benchmark for LLM efficiency we have other problems.

I believe that we consume 100 W on average no matter what we do, except intense physical activities, which consume more.

Right, but you do stuff other than work 24 hours a day, right? You have fun, relax, etc.

Counting the 100w for 24 hours for a human doesn’t match up with counting the power usage from “AI” for only the 10 minutes it’s doing a task.

Also - units issue: 100 watts for a day is 2400 watt-hours. It’s a moot point anyway because the power draw for the frontier models is an order of magnitude off that the division by 24 is basically meaningless.


Cash flow and fraud, yes. Credit, not much in most of Europe. AFAIK nobody has had something close to real credit cards until recently. They were called credit cards but it was a debit card with payment and deferred to the end of the month and backed only by the cash in the bank account linked to the card. I guess that no financial institution did like to risk any money on the behavior of European customers.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: