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I restarted a 10 year old Xeon 174 times to delete 12 flags and gain 4 tps

https://point.free/blog/delete-12-flags/
43•zdw•1d ago

Comments

baq•2h ago
Interesting results, but the piece is written in an almost repulsive claudglish (or geepeeteeglish). Can’t force myself to read more than a couple sentences.
einsteinx2•1h ago
As soon as I saw the phrase “belt-and-suspenders” I immediately thought Claude, as it uses it constantly, but maybe so does ChatGPT.
barrkel•2h ago
I never want to read the phrase "heavy lifting" again.
einsteinx2•1h ago
Or “belt-and-suspenders”.

Was already getting lots of AI generated vibes from the article before that, but I’ve seen Claude constantly use that phrase and no real person ever in my life (though I guess some people must have or LLMs wouldn’t have learned it).

It’s the most annoying thing about reading anything LLM related. I genuinely (ugh that’s a term I’ve picked up from using Opus 4.8 every day for work as it constantly says it and now so do I and I can’t stop) want to learn more about the topic but it’s painful to read most posts about it.

The people really into LLMs, surprise!, have a tendency to also LLM generate their writing about LLMs. This would be fine if they used that as a starting point then edited it for brevity (LLMs are consistently overly verbose for some reason, this post was like twice as long as it needed to be, though I guess you could argue the same about my comment haha), correctness, and tone…but they usually don’t.

Then I make it halfway through the article and wonder if I can trust any of it at all.

carterschonwald•2h ago
“worth sitting with ” is in the way to overused scale :(
isoprophlex•2h ago
Maybe the author had something interesting to say! Maybe they don't!

But I won't be the one to tell you, because I sure as fuck am not going to wade through overly verbose, tired linkedin-tier slopisms to find out.

subscribed•1h ago
The "author" being distinctly LLM.
myself248•2h ago
Seems like this process itself should be incredibly amenable to automation. Here's 25 parameters, permute over them, perform this test on each loop.

But it sounds like there were other gremlins (like ulimit reverting itself) that would've thwarted automated testing.

Do you feel like there's a point where it would've made sense to automate?

NooneAtAll3•2h ago
I think he did employ automation?

it's just that each run takes a long long time

hedgehog•1h ago
I'm not really sure about that exactly, and the stream-of-Claude text doesn't lend a lot of confidence in the results, but running this with the command line driver wrapped in a scipy.optimize script seems like a faster and cleaner route to an accurate result.
einsteinx2•1h ago
That and I’m not sure why they rebooted the server every time instead of just changing the flags…
q3k•2h ago
but why would you restart the whole machine?

(otherwise, congrats for discovering the scientific method!)

ComputerGuru•2h ago
Post is at least semi AI-generated and contains conflicting or misleading bits. It could (and should) have been expressed differently. It conflates changing one flag with permuting a flag at a time in different places, leaving me unable to understand what was actually tried. It has warnings on interpreting the results that make no sense. If flags were permuted, it isn’t possible to list their impact one-dimensionally, then also mixes up addition/removal of flags with permuting its individual value.

I regret giving this article a chance and wasting my time trying to figure out why the “author” was saying what they were saying. Flagged.

alecco•2h ago
AI detector 96%
subscribed•1h ago
100%

Im not a native English speaker so it took me a while longer but once I noticed? Hell no, if it's not worth the time to write or at least edit it, it's not worth the time to read.

And that's even before taking the contradictiona into account.

I think the submission doesn't belong to HN.

Alien1Being•2h ago
Can HN please ban AI generated slop ?

Please...

ProllyInfamous•2h ago
If you're still running a MacPro4,1->MacPro"5,1" conversion, be really careful attempting this: one of the few differences is that its bootrom only has a single VS_Cache (i.e. the real MacPro5,1 , manufactured 2010+, has two VS_Cache).

This can lead to a VS_Store corruption == noBOOT sadMAC

It turns out that the essentially no difference thing wasn't true... but fortunately these things are such antiquated beasts that just two people can fix this, via email, by custom "rebuilding your VS_Store firmware" – you'd have to search the forums.

One sad day soon... the "5,1"s won't boot (without pre-emptive maintenance, or an onboard reflow of the many-pinned bootROM chip). Every bootup... one step closer to its eWaste fate.

----

Yes, it uses a lot of power, but my VEGA64 is about as fast as an RTX 5060Ti(8gb) for using Ollama, locally (eight year old design, but it used HBM2 !!).

In wintertimes, this thing has reliably acted as a monero-mining space-heater, albeit quite inefficiently (no: I do NOT have a reversible heatpump; spaceheaters, only == no net-cost).

sofayam•1h ago
Truly this is the autoexec.bat/xf86config tuning of our modern age. But how long will it take this time until all this painfully accumulated knowledge is obsolete?
badlibrarian•1h ago
Much Claude, very 4.7: "Heavy lifting... single most useful thing... the careful claim is narrow... there are three outcomes, not two... honest caveat... honest oddity... honest verdict... honest shape."

It's the weekend on HN, prime time for lost souls, so I'll dare to post that.

If you're going to prompt out an essay, at least take a minute to set up the prompt so that a hint of your personality, or even an invented one, comes through.

DOS Game "F-15 Strike Eagle II" reversing project needs DOS test pilots

https://neuviemeporte.github.io/f15-se2/2026/06/20/needyou.html
68•LowLevelMahn•2h ago•15 comments

CSSQuake

https://cssquake.com/
321•msalsas•6h ago•68 comments

SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

https://www.smpte.org/blog/smpte-makes-its-standards-freely-accessible-openingstandards-library-t...
13•zdw•25m ago•1 comments

VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/vpn-ban-update-uk-households-34141063
152•iamnothere•3h ago•143 comments

Show HN: Microcrad – Micrograd Reimplemented in C

https://github.com/oraziorillo/microcrad
19•oraziorillo•3d ago•2 comments

The European Social Stack

https://european.social
75•doener•3h ago•57 comments

Ember, a native iOS Hacker News reader I built around accessibility

https://github.com/DatanoiseTV/ember-hackernews
6•sylwester•26m ago•1 comments

Mencius (2016)

https://scholarworks.iu.edu/iuswrrest/api/core/bitstreams/265d73a0-6bfa-45df-92ff-4e7d3f8be4b1/co...
12•jruohonen•2d ago•1 comments

Web Browsers on PDAS

https://vale.rocks/posts/pda-browsers
22•robin_reala•3h ago•6 comments

Bootimus – A Self-Contained PXE and HTTP Boot Server

https://bootimus.com
71•car•6h ago•24 comments

Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/where-to-find-the-colors-your-screen-cant-show-you/
348•moultano•13h ago•86 comments

Vacation With An Artist – Mini-Apprenticeships with Artists in Their Studios

https://vawaa.com/
14•karakoram•2h ago•2 comments

From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/19/encryption-spyware-and-now-mythos-history-shows-why-cyber-expor...
98•Brajeshwar•3h ago•40 comments

Cargo-Geiger

https://github.com/geiger-rs/cargo-geiger
16•tosh•2h ago•4 comments

I Stored a Website in a Favicon

https://www.timwehrle.de/blog/i-stored-a-website-in-a-favicon/
255•theanonymousone•11h ago•87 comments

Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI Agents

https://blog.cloudflare.com/temporary-accounts/
55•farhadhf•6h ago•34 comments

Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/windows-11s-new-media-player-uses-35x-more-ram-charges-for-...
81•tcp_handshaker•3h ago•37 comments

Ubisoft co-founder Claude Guillemot has died in a plane crash

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-20/ubisoft-co-founder-claude-guillemot-dies-in-ai...
80•drayfield•3h ago•36 comments

Can you see three trees?

https://www.not-ship.com/can-you-see-three-trees/
262•Pamar•2d ago•123 comments

Computed goto for efficient dispatch tables (2012)

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2012/07/12/computed-goto-for-efficient-dispatch-tables
31•firephox•3d ago•14 comments

Show HN: StartupWiki – A Free Alternative to Crunchbase

https://startupwiki.tech/
6•shpran•1h ago•0 comments

US Scientist John Jumper to Leave Google DeepMind for Anthropic

https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-scientist-john-jumper-leave-google-deepmind-anthropic-2026-...
44•karakoram•2h ago•4 comments

GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2

https://arrowtsx.dev/bigger-models/
413•oshrimpton•1d ago•195 comments

Human Judgment as a Specification

https://blog.brownplt.org/2026/06/09/pick.html
33•surprisetalk•3d ago•13 comments

There are no instances in ATProto

https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/
499•danabramov•1d ago•279 comments

Pong in S Favicon

https://pong-in-a-favicon.franzai.com/
20•theanonymousone•5h ago•4 comments

Data Compression Explained (2012)

https://mattmahoney.net/dc/dce.html
174•mtdewcmu•3d ago•29 comments

The Cold War's Accidental Whale Observatory

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-cold-wars-accidental-whale-observatory/
51•pseudolus•3d ago•22 comments

LLMs Are Complicated Now

https://ianbarber.blog/2026/06/19/llms-are-complicated-now/
125•matt_d•16h ago•51 comments

The discovery that changed how scientists think about memory

https://www.ibm.com/think/news/discovery-changed-how-scientists-think-about-memory-kavli-prize
105•rbanffy•3d ago•42 comments